I masturbate throughout the day, so much that I pull a muscle in my writing hand, which makes me feel like Robert Walser. The herbs I’ve started taking to try to shrink the cyst make me unbelievably horny. I know, I masturbated five times this morning, Anna writes me. The summer recreation of the middle-aged woman novelist. I jump on John when he gets home from work, even though Genet protests with yelps when we are affectionate. Perhaps I think this will take the edge off my loneliness, which is severe in the summer. Or maybe my loneliness somehow is what makes me horny.
My editor later reads this above passage, and wants to inquire exactly why the narrator is masturbating. Is it to relieve excess creative energy, or because she has the time, or . . . ? I don’t really know what to say. She masturbates because she masturbates.
No to everything, to all events, to all commissions, to requests, to living online, which leaves us with our novels. But when we look at what we’ve written, we hate it. Anna just looked at her notes for her novel and wants to throw up, she writes me. I think you have PMS, I write to her. I know, my cycle comes a week later.
Anna seems always to be traveling for weddings. We never go to weddings, and I feel smug about this. I don’t know anyone who would invite us to a wedding!
I think about how John and I became artists to try to live a life of the mind, of active contemplation. My desire to write a novel that contains the energy of thought. Is this why I felt such crisis moving here? That was not the conversation.
The ants swarm on the porch—how fast and slow at the same time.
The irritation, I write to Anna, of being asked only to do events with women writers, or about feminism. The irritation of appearing only on these lists of women writers. The irritation of being referenced only in the context of other women writers, including each other. The irritation of being expected to read only other women writers, or to be read as a woman writer. Dreading the conversation our next books will inevitably be forced into. Dreading the comparisons. I want this next book to be completely new, as if from a completely different writer, I write to her.
I write to Anna, Drifts is my fantasy of a memoir about nothing. I desire to be drained of the personal. To not give myself away.
I think about May Sarton writing in Journal of a Solitude about becoming depressed upon every trip to New York, every entrance into publishing culture. How eager she is to return alone to her New England farmhouse. What a balm that book was for me when I first moved here. That the real work is one of solitude. How seriously Sarton takes her moods, her wrestling in the dark. Her fears, her rages, her depressions. The paralysis of bad reviews. “My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there.”
So often now I just want to weep—what am I mourning?
In my photographs, my dog’s body becomes a landscape. I see him getting grayer with the years, scruffier and heavier in the winter. His grizzly face with his scraggly gray beard. As I write this, I look at him—we’ve just been in from a long walk in the snow, his paws in slushy puddles, and his hair is matted. When is the last time he’s had a bath?
When it is too hot to be outside, I take pictures of him as we roll around on the white bed. His black fur makes him a difficult subject. He curls around the glowing afternoon light coming in through the back window. We stare at each other. When I masturbate, folded over the bed on my stomach, he becomes concerned, begins to hump my leg, then lies next to me and stares stoically in the distance, as if he is protecting my space and privacy. The pile of wilted black clothes on my dresser that I never put away.
I am reminded of May Sarton feeding the outdoor cats but looking for animals to hug at night. How hard I have hugged Genet lately. My mind spinning and stupid.
“What prevents a book from being written becomes the book itself”—found in my notebook, citing the notebooks of Camus, who was himself quoting Marcus Aurelius.
What prevents me from writing the book? The heat, the dog, the day, air-conditioning, desiring to exist in the present tense, constant thinking, sickness, fucking, groceries, cooking, yoga, loneliness and sadness, the internet, political depression, my period, obsession with skin care, late capitalism, binge-watching television on my computer, competition and jealousy over the attention of other writers, confusion over the novel, circling around but not finishing anything, reading, researching, masturbating, time passing.
A fluorescent green Post-it note is on my laptop when I return from a walk: “How to fold time into a book?”
Constant real estate listings—another sickness that Anna and I share in these months, although we live in different cities. We look online for cabins or crumbly houses in rural areas. Anything to escape the heat and toxicity of the city. Anything to avoid working on our books. John is at war again with our landlord. Escalating rents we cannot afford. John insists we need to leave. He desperately wants his own studio. We constantly bicker over this. I need to stay, for the novel. Over the years, faint cracks have been spreading slowly across the walls. There are cracks at the corners of the moldings of the windows and the doors. There is a problem with the foundation. Yet we are still here.
The newlyweds live for a year in a solitary house on the moors, the wind circling the walls. It was a house they built so that they could work, a utopian project soon abandoned (a failure of Rilke’s theory of an ideal marriage as each partner appointing the other to be a guardian of their solitude). Rilke is at work on one of his first experiments with prose. He has occupied a bedroom for his office. Clara’s busts are scattered throughout the hallways, overflowing from her studio. On his desk of heavy mahogany a set of candlesticks, small notebooks. He can look out his window at the flowers, the fruit tree, the vegetable garden. His little black dog at his feet. Their daughter, Ruth, was born that December. The snowed-in cabin. The walls closing in. The crying baby. On a single day in January, when his daughter is five weeks old, he writes fourteen letters. Finally he receives a commission to write a monograph on the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris with whom Clara apprenticed. He had wanted his family to give him some solidity of self, mooring him to one place. He had longed for a monastic life. And yet he always needed to escape.
At the end of August 1902, the poet arrives in Paris and takes a room at a run-down boardinghouse on the Left Bank, the same address he will give to his alter ego, in the partially autobiographical novel he will begin working on, or intend to work on, for almost a decade, a novel he originally titles The Journal of My Other Self. One year later, he writes of the oppressive heat of late summer as a time when one goes through smells as through many sad rooms, like the iodoform, pommes frites, and fear coming through his character’s window. In this same letter, he rehearses the opening of his novel, wandering through a series of interior and exterior spaces, the hotel room, the library, and especially the hospitals. How fascinated and repulsed Rilke was by the massive Hôtel-Dieu, the city’s oldest public hospital, by the long building with its gates wide open, this gesture of impatient and greedy compassion. When he passes the Hôtel-Dieu for the first time, an open carriage is just pulling in, from which a person hangs like a broken marionette, an oozing sore on his long, gray, dangling neck. He writes to Clara, You can see all the sick people in their sad, pale uniforms of illness, standing in the windows there. These masses haunt Rilke, the factory-like production of anonymous deaths add to his lifelong horror of sickrooms. He has his Danish nobleman go for shock treatments at La Salpêtrière, walking through the courtyard where people wearing white caps, which make them look like convicts, stand among the bare trees. The endless rows of people crowded shoulder to shoulder in the waiting room, all from the lower classes, he notes, the air stale with soiled clothing and breath. A contrast to the photographs that Eugène Atget took in 1909 of the empty outdoor spaces of the courtyard and front facade of Charcot’s famous hospital, where he treated late-nineteenth-century hy
sterics. Atget photographed his exterior spaces of Paris at dawn, because his old-fashioned equipment required a longer exposure time, giving the effect of a city emptied of its inhabitants.
In the apartment complex across the way there’s an assisted-living facility. When it’s hot, people in wheelchairs and their aides sit outside, sometimes smoking, seldom speaking. Sometimes the nonambulatory residents are wheeled outside on stretchers. Every Thursday and Friday I see the people come by with carts carrying large trash bags of cans, collecting them in the alleyway. The Japanese mother and daughter in the apartment building directly across from us who often ride by on a tandem bicycle. Sometimes the mother is dressed like she is going to a nineties rave, and other times she looks like she stepped out of the nineteenth century. There is the old hunched-over man, who wears socks with sandals, who carries a black plastic bag that I believe contains his other shoes, who sometimes sits on the tree trunk to the right of us, in front of the alley of the massive apartment building always littered with trash. He sits on the stoop and sometimes reads circulars of coupons he found on the street. Sometimes he leaves his bag of shoes there. He does this all so slowly.
When we moved here I would make lists of all the trash that surrounded the sidewalk near the alley, and the trash that blew into the yards of the large Victorian houses. How Genet would trot out to the same little bare patch of grass on the sidewalk, and with legs trembling pee over the mini Smirnoff bottle that must have been there for a year. How he would pee for a time over the same image of a naked woman from a faded magazine, or the pale blue tampon applicator. The garden has now grown, wild and green, no distinction between weeds and flowers. Sometimes I would write down lists of the trash scattered about: pink smashed Starburst candy, ketchup packets, Day-Glo straws, empty box of granola bars, tiny empty bottles of cheap hard alcohol, chicken bones, dirty diaper, dog shit. In the winter the way the trash and the cigarettes froze inside the blocks of ice, the dog shit remaining petrified and white after the thaw. I wonder if, by making lists of these ugly things, I was trying to make them somehow beautiful.
That summer, I meet Anna for dinner in the city while she is briefly in town. It’s unusual, as I almost never leave my neighborhood in the summer. It was the second time we had met in person. I look so much more New York than the last time, Anna says to me, as if critically. I had more New York shoes, it was true. How uncomfortable writers can get when they don’t live here, when they come to New York briefly, that crisis over what they are wearing. I felt it for the first two years I lived here, the panic of my body in public. Then I began to develop a uniform, a sort of armor. To meet Anna, I wore a white tank top and a slinky black jersey skirt and heeled sandals. How carefully I dress for other women. At dinner, Anna wants to talk about what I thought Elena Ferrante looked like. Surely she has the face of a novelist, the real face of a writer, Anna says. I had an interesting face too, she says, looking at me critically again. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how having a face has anything to do with being a writer.
Can you believe that we met at that cheesy photoshoot? Like Sylvia Plath in Seventeen, Anna writes me after we see each other. It was the first time I had been photographed for anything. Anna had borrowed the shirt I brought with me, as we were supposed to bring something black to wear. She still uses the image as one of her author photos—staring intently, such clarity in her gaze, wearing my shirt, which Anna always notes was too big on her and had to be pinned in back. For my photograph, they chose one with my eyes closed, because otherwise, they said, I looked too intense. How ashamed I felt—about all of it. That I looked so passive with my eyes closed, like it was a death mask rendered in black and white. That I had agreed to participate at all.
After our dinner, I began to wonder whether Anna really felt close to me, or whether she keeps me close to make sure my work wasn’t going to surpass her own.
In June, while sitting outside on the porch, I noticed that a baby cardinal fell into our garden, because of the squawking of its father nearby. (The internet tells me that, among cardinals, fathers are the dominant parents.) I placed the baby bird on a higher branch, and Genet and I monitored the situation all day, from the window. At some point I looked and it was gone. I told myself it had been rescued or had figured out how to fly, but I knew most likely it was eaten by one of the neighborhood cats, maybe even my cat. In yoga class, led by the teacher who always asks us to share too much, we are supposed to go around the room and say what “father” means to us, as it was just after Father’s Day. Usually I pass, but that day I share the story about the cardinal. The teacher replies that a psychic recently told her that her deceased father’s spirit animal was a cardinal. When she says this, she looks into my eyes and I see that she is tearing up. I know I am supposed to feel a meaningful connection, and I smile back, holding her gaze, but inside I squirm.
Afterward, I think of the story of Wittgenstein at his hermitage in Ireland. Apparently, he fed the seabirds on his windowsill, eventually feeding them out of his hands. Like something out of a fable about St. Francis of Assisi. Wittgenstein even splinted an injured bird’s wing that fell into his garden. Once he left, the cats came by and ate the birds, for they had grown too domesticated. He was there at the cottage on the sea working on Philosophical Investigations, a text he wrote while restlessly wandering to various coastal and mountain landscapes, attempting a more monastic life. He writes to a friend that prior to coming to Ireland he felt so ill and depressed—a constant refrain for Wittgenstein—that he hadn’t gotten any writing done for six weeks. While working on these notes, I keep on rereading the introduction to Philosophical Investigations, where he writes, “The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and meandering journeys.”
“It’s mystical, my relationship to language. When I sit down to write I never know where I’m going.” George is in town to read from his new novel, a haunting work of prose from the point of view of a young woman, published on a small yet prestigious experimental press. The few reviews he receives compare him to Beckett, Calvino, Cortázar, and so on. The reading was an intimate gathering, which I always feel guilty about, as if I am expected to know people to bring to events in New York. We are talking at the bar across the street from the bookstore after the event. How I can cringe at language like this that feels received. At what point does the writing teacher begin to sound like a guru? At what point did we all begin to sound like writing teachers? Language is rife with contradictions, I say. I don’t think it’s mystical. It’s that knowing is impossible. I want to get to a space without words, I said to George, but what then? To get to a space without words, are you then cured of writing? Like Wittgenstein attempting to overcome philosophy. I am skeptical of the writer who thinks of language as sacred. But there must be some joy in this act of writing. That longing of Kafka’s for the force of his language to finally take place unshaped. That ecstatic feeling, once he wrote “The Judgment” in one sitting, from ten o’clock at night till six o’clock the next morning. Finally he had conquered time, staying up all night writing. His legs so stiff he couldn’t pull them out from the desk when he was finished. The fearful strain and joy he experienced then.
The hushed and mournful tones speaking of a male novelist who had died, whom I had never cared to read. Everyone is solemn, but I wonder whether any of them had read him, or just thought they were expected to mourn. None of them actually knew him in person. I wanted to joke to the group, But isn’t the author already dead?
Last summer a television set was dumped in the center of the sidewalk, and the sanitation workers refused to take it. Every day I would stop over it and stare into its broken face. There have been several television sets abandoned in the alley since then. I exchange the occasional email with a young writer in Idaho, another of my correspondents I have never met in person, about what we’ve been watching on TV. The previous spring I had emailed
him to ask whether I should binge-watch Taxi. He thought it was a good idea. There is something so deeply comforting, he wrote to me, about a formulaic series—you can almost remove yourself as a viewer and don’t have to be an active participant. The craving for a new show to binge, how it can be a way to structure the day, or become lost in it. I watched a couple episodes of Taxi and realized what I really wanted to do was watch the opening credits—Tony Danza driving over the Queensboro Bridge to that melancholy flute—over and over again, which is what I did. There was something so soothing about it, like it had the power to make me remember being a child. The night before, I told him, I’d gone with John to something called a drone mass at the Met’s Temple of Dendur, and that had conjured a similar feeling. How it punctured something in me, bringing me to the cusp of weeping. I wonder, writing this, if what I’m after in art is a series of moods or textures. Perhaps that’s all writing is now, my correspondent replies. A way to exist and process existence. It’s been years since I’ve been out to see music, I now realize. That concert at the Met must have been the last time.
Across the street lives the man in pain. In the early evening, when the windows are open, I can hear him cry out. It comes in heartbreaking waves, and sometimes continues throughout the night. Genet and I both listen to him when all else is quiet, like we are one body, moved and disturbed. I realize that it’s always warm outside when I hear him, because the windows are open. That summer, I began smoking again, after having quit for over a decade, and I would hear him when I sat outside on the porch at night. I think he’s in the unit where I can see the TV set on, usually the mute heads and running scroll of CNN. I stare at the blue glow of the window. I imagine he is in a hospital bed. I don’t know whether the crying out is automatic, or a result of being changed or moved.
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