Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

  Later in bed, after reading the New Orleans Review, I pulled over my laptop to Where Are They Now the contributors. A few of them had passed away, others were ungoogleable ghosts. Others still were late-career academics at universities I’d never heard of. Unease stirred in me; perhaps I shouldn’t have done that. The sense that I was just like any of these literary-journal people, brimming with a hunger outsized only by obscurity. The sense that This Is Your Life and it’s small and trivial and it’s going to stay that way.

  A scene in I Love Dick where the narrator describes seeing a photo exhibition, a photographic/oral history of the Lower East Side. All these artists, she writes, ‘living, drinking, working, in their habitat’. She writes that the ‘photos were meticulously captioned with the artists’ names and disciplines, but 98% of them were names I didn’t know.’

  Yet everything seems so important in the moment of its production. How else could anyone ever make anything? Did their work, all those hundreds of anonymous artists (in just one city in one time period alone) leave a trace on other memories, living still, curious or painful or rapturous?

  In my market copy of the New Orleans Review there is an interview with one John Gardner, who was, apparently, a novelist and critic of some acclaim in this era. I say apparently, because before turning my eyes to this page I’d never heard his name. The interview made oblique reference to some kind of scandal, which seemed like general knowledge for the readers of this literary journal in 1981. So I searched the internet until I learned that the scandal was that he’d put out a collection of literary essays in 1978 that pissed off his colleagues. That’s all. He was a bit of a conservative, maybe, or a bit up-himself. He’d said critical things about the writing of his peers. The scandal made it into the mainstream media, which led to this writer becoming a sort of pariah. If he were still alive and writing, I’d probably find it in my lesser rodent self to hate him too. But then I read that, in 1982, a year after giving this interview, Gardner died in a motorcycle accident a few miles from his home. And all I could feel for him was sadness. Who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever, when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath.

  Every body reaches into the future to touch someone there.

  …

  When I was twenty-three, I threw out all of the notebooks and letters that I had accumulated throughout high-school and university. Course notes, love letters, entire exercise books of intense political and emotional treatises I wrote and shared with my best friends in senior school. Partly, it was an issue of storage. I kept having to move house and didn’t have a car or long-term storage options. Partly, I wanted to grow up. Which meant breaking with my old addresses to the future. I, in the now-present, the past’s future, was not the person those documents addressed. Not anymore! I was smarter, colder, less sentimental than she had been. I was a grown woman, and I was a writer. I dumped everything in several bins on my street on garbage day, and once they were gone, I regretted it painfully.

  There was one notebook from that hoard that I kept for a while longer. It contained notes from a short phase during which I thought I had discovered the shortcut to creation: drinking glasses of wine I had not yet acquired a taste for, alone, on my back porch, frantically scribbling what I thought would be poems. I had heard the erroneous claim that lyric poets, like mathematicians, peaked at the age of twenty-one. I was nineteen and worried I’d miss out before I had a chance. Needless to say, the poems were bad. Needless to say, I never touch alcohol now when I write. Eventually, I chucked that notebook, too. By discarding these relics, I was able to turn away from the tussle between my current, past and imagined futures that together so embarrassed me.

  If anything of me lives on after I am dead, I hope it will not be what I failed to get done. When I die, when it happens, please throw my MacBook into the ocean.

  …

  Once a week I have a ‘comprehensive shower’. To set the record, my body, straight. Slather a mask on my face and, while it cracks, dry body brush my limbs. This is said to aid circulation, though I suspect diet and exercise and whether or not you’re breathing have more to do with that. Then shave legs, too-hot shower, exfoliate bodily form, shampoo hair twice. Taps off. Squeeze hair out and run palms across every plane of the body to remove the excess water. A touch of oil on the bleached parts of the hair and wrap it all in a little towel. Dry off limbs, torso, Q-tip ears. Moisturise all over. Some kind of acid on cheeks, forehead, followed by a fine layer of oil. Blow-dry hair and shape it with a flat iron. Spray. BB cream. Eyebrows on. Feel like I look good but no one can tell the difference. Feel guilty, too, for frivolity. Coming as I do from the no-nonsense, Aldi-shopping, carbohydrate-operated economic class, this devotion to grooming seems immoral. Like a vice. If you want luxury, I hear my superego crow, tie oatmeal in a sock and dunk it in the bathtub! Smash a raw egg in your hair. Rinse your locks in vinegar.

  Yet secretly I have started buying aspirational oils and serums. A sixty-dollar bottle of what is essentially sunflower oil and lavender. A tiny sticky-pink perfume with a sex-and-drugs name. Victim of the beauty craze lured by a marketing executive’s promise of glow eternal, divine. I keep the enchanted little things—blue glass bottle, silver on buttercup-yellow—in dark-corner places, so that visitors don’t see the labels, estimate how much they cost and feel invited to make assumptions about the decay of my soul. Other times I find myself wanting to out them; on a good day a visitor might use my bathroom and think, ‘decayed or not, this soul cares about the state of her exterior’.

  I’ve heard it argued that the skincare trend is a detour of planetary insecurity: that in a time of impending non-future, consumers enjoy the promise of exercising control over the ravages of time (wrinkles). That, I think, is wishful bullshit. We skincare dupes are mostly women; we live, almost all, in developed, capitalist countries. We may be ‘broke’, but no one buying overpriced chemical serums is poor. In the absence of other obligations, or in spite of them, we spend what little money we earn on luxuriant bottles of hope against time. Because this is women’s consumption, it is invariably enacted in the context of patriarchy. Why smooth skin (aside from its smoothness)? Why, even, youth (aside from its youth)? Any answer to this is conjecture, but that’s okay. Women are, I suspect, valued for their proximity to fertility. Fertility is the stand-in for eternally reproducing futures. When women deviate from the appearance of youth, fuckability or fecundity (because of menopause, illness, or transition towards or away from femininity), they violate the social mandate of hetero-patriarchal society: to endlessly reproduce the species; to placate anxieties about environmental collapse. Dull and creased skin, women who grow old without intervention, women who refuse beauty, may well function as shocking reminders that futures, like bodies, are not manageable entities.

  …

  Skin is not just a marketing opportunity or a symbol of regeneration or the source of glow-eternal-divine. It’s the container of the past, too. Of all the genetic detours that lead to you.

  From my notebook, taken during a lecture given by Marianne Hirsch:

  the skin imprinted with actual memories

  skin as a media of production

  ‘epidermal memory’

  traumatic ‘after effects’

  sculptural dislocations

  childhood and the future - in the same memory

  (past futures)

  skin as a site of aloneness and connection

  ‘intercorporeality’

  mother as an enveloping skin

  ‘skin ego’

  skin contains psychic contents

  skin and touch as locations of trauma

  locked within skin are patterns of care

  I typed out these notes and sent them to a friend who had lost half her house—and then her skin-touch sensation—in a terrible cyclone. And then I left my notebook on a plane. With everything I needed to remember. Gone.

  That notebook, I kept thinking after I lost it, holds the key. To my
knowing. A couple of good months I don’t want to lose memory of. Notes from my reading, self-imposed deadlines never honoured, lists of hypothetical money never earned. Artefacts of good intentions.

  Notes, whose real addressee is time, are for a future to regard the past triumphantly. They insist that the future will care. A future self, looking back to a past me looking forward. My notebook, gone.

  Nothing, of course, like losing part of your house. What am I saying.

  Nothing like losing the sensation of skin-touch.

  How do you live a catastrophe without turning to cliché?

  (Shut your mouth and look sideways.)

  (Or open your mouth and say the wrong thing.)

  There are no catastrophes now, not in the middle of these German days I spend alone or with Dom, confined to the apartment while it blizzards out, working, or out walking with Tim, talking about every small thing we have thought of before, talking through the clichés the tongue is tied to.

  …

  What Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about memories: ‘If only one knew what to remember or what to pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps.’

  Portrait of the Writer as Worker (after Dieter Lesage)

  You are a writer and you know what that means: you don’t do it for the money. You don’t do it for the money, which is a great reason people have to not pay you for your writing. So it happens that you, a writer, invest your money in projects others will feature in their magazines, exhibitions, festivals, reading lists on the internet. You are an investor. You are building a diverse portfolio.

  You are living a double life, a friend says to you, a friend who is trying to live a double life of her own and has called you for tips on double-life living. You are living a double life, one where at two p.m. you are in the office of a colleague who is getting paid upwards of two hundred thousand dollars a year and by half-past five you are polishing cutlery before the dinner rush. The dress you are wearing is shapeless and black, a look intended for wealthy women twice your age, a look intended for women who did not just pump the shit up out of a clogged toilet in the student lodgings they are temporarily living in. You are a writer and you know what that means: you are investing your money in your work, which in turn provides employment for other people. You say you are living a double life when you should say you are investing in a diverse portfolio. You are an investor.

  Before you assume the title of investor you are a student, providing temporary employment for writer-teachers by enrolling in their creative writing units. You demonstrate almost no talent, which is not the same as no potential, or no future, but is often thought of in the same breath. Yet there you are, in a class of your peers, some with even less talent than you, and many with much more of it. You go to all the book events you can find out about. You go to these events hoping to catch a glimpse of the writers whose work you read before you knew they also had bodies, writers covered with a fine sheen. You blush when you meet them. You would like to be a literary citizen. You write them emails, sometimes, and sometimes they respond. You read The Red and the Black. You are disturbed by Julien Sorel’s megalomania but can see where he’s coming from. Within a handful of years, you will become the writer-teacher, because you are cheaper per hour than your older writer-teachers are; you will—tacitly, gratefully, occasionally—accept employment indirectly provided by the writer-students enrolled in your class, who yearn to be writer-investors themselves, or else to simply get okay grades in units widely deemed ‘a bludge’.

  You write some book reviews and columns for the student newspaper. You write an average op-ed for a magazine and get interviewed about it on the radio. Your parents seem impressed. You write more book reviews for magazines your friends are making, which surely no one reads, then you take it upon yourself to lead a workshop for other writers who have not yet written book reviews that will not be read, a workshop on writing book reviews. You are editing the student newspaper. You are an elected student politician. You attend student council meetings and roll your eyes when the various factions clash in highly emotive and largely perverse ways. You organise a conference for student writers. You write short speeches introducing the panellists and speakers emphasising their significance and the importance of collaboration. The speakers do not remember you the next time they see you.

  You make dinner to introduce people to one another. You open bottles of wine. You serve variations on the theme of vegetable curry. You talk about what needs to happen. You finish bottles of wine. You are invited to dinner and you are introduced. You are younger than everyone you dine with. And then you are the same age as them. One day you will be older. You pretend you are for real.

  You say you are a freelancer. You apply for a receptionist job that pays better than your retail job, which has recently cut your shifts. The receptionist job comes through but the starting date is the same date you’re supposed to talk at a writers’ conference interstate and you’ve already paid for the train trip and the hostel, so you go to the conference instead of taking the receptionist job and at the closing party you get high and hand out your business card to everyone you talk to. Your card says that you are a writer. You have no idea why you have such a business card. That night you kiss the friend of the person you actually want to kiss. The person you kiss tells you he is a Deleuzian. He is a philosopher-DJ-conference organiser.

  You write some copy for a museum for more money than you’ve ever earned before and the boss invites you to apply for the job full-time. You ignore her email and with the money you buy a ticket overseas so you can stop diversifying your portfolio for just one second and also be away from people who identify as Deleuzians. You are an international artist. You are writing a play. You have no one overseas to hang out with. You are about to run out of money. You get a job at an English-language nightlife magazine, where you write wrap-ups of exhibition launches and brand launches and musical shows. Your editor, who employed you, she says, because she was drawn to your writing voice, is now highly critical of your writing voice. She says maybe you don’t find all this as cool as you should. You write her PR fluff in a downbeat ironic voice. You don’t know what her problem is. The people you are writing fluff pieces about are artists-photographers-DJs. Some of them, they tell you, are models. They have diverse portfolios. You are not a model. Sometimes you ride round with them on motorbikes and drink fifty-cent beers on their concrete roofs. They invite you to their launch. They tell you they are DJing at their launch. You tell them you’ll write about their launch.

  You return home with a finished play, which nobody asked you to write, which nobody will ever read let alone produce. You return home with less than a hundred dollars in your bank. Not enough money to go to a friend’s wedding. No dress, no present. You stay home and, like that, that friendship is over. You borrow five hundred dollars. You apply for a PhD. You hear the money is amazing. You ask an academic you admire to supervise you. She says yes, even though she knows it is pecuniary factors that have led you to her office.

  You are living a double life, you remind your ex-boyfriend after buying three identical black smock dresses that can be worn from a sleepover to a teaching gig to an artist talk to the bar. You forget to eat dinner, so you buy three potato cakes on the way home for two dollars fifty. You are dressed like a middle-aged curator, your ex-boyfriend tells you. You are dressed like a middle-aged curator riding a speedy road bike round the city with your backpack filled with everything you will need for a meeting with a DJ-editor-journalist about an essay you plan to co-author but never do, a trip to the library to check some references, a talk by an arts worker-poet, and then for pho afterwards with a curator-archivist who is not a DJ. You carry a stick of deodorant in your bag. You carry a small bottle of perfume. You have a hundred and twenty-two dollars in the bank.

  …

  You somehow get into the PhD. The money is amazing. Until it is jus
t normal. Until it is certainly not enough. A man you have been working for on and off for years offers to pay you to write part-time for his online magazine. The magazine is not entirely what you had in mind when you decided to become a writer, but he says he has the money. You go to work two days a week in an office that is part of a design studio. You publish essays on every topic you can muster, four or five a month, essays which have not been copyedited nor proofread, and every fortnight you fight the man to get your pay. The money eventually comes, in dribs and drabs, all of it. Every fortnight you commission and edit two or three stories written by other writers. You are a paid editor. You have a budget to pay other writers money for their writing. This work takes up more than the two days you are paid to work. But now you have your scholarship, too. You have diversified your portfolio. You are an investor.

  You write text for an artist friend’s video work. You’re a collaborator. You write lectures and booklets to hand out at workshops. You’re a teacher. You give a lecture in someone’s garage about male writing versus female writing. You’re a feminist. You pitch book reviews to publications you quietly believe are morally comprised. You’re a literary citizen. You present yourself a certain way, and all of a sudden that’s what you are. You attend the launch of an art magazine, where you ask an artist to look over your new essay. In return, she asks you to help make work for her upcoming installation. You’re a member of an artistic community. You write grants you don’t get, and some you do. You write references for younger writers applying for courses and jobs and grants of their own. You buy young poets’ chapbooks. Sometimes you even read them. You host literary journal parties. Everyone you know goes to the parties and other parties too. You have a strong feeling that no one at the parties reads the insides of the journal you edit. At these parties you invite people to contribute to the journal whose party you are hosting. Nobody has asked you to do this. Nobody is paying you for it. Your colleague is DJing at the party. Your future ex is at the party with his future ex. Your DJing colleague is diversifying her portfolio. Your future ex is diversifying his.