Jean soon learned that at Ewa's parties there was always a project on. Huge rolls of brown paper were unfurled and everyone painted a mural; a sheet was tacked to the wall and a film projected while the Dogs played, sewing together a melody out of silence and the whirring of the projector. Actors gathered in the middle of the living room and, with nothing more than a spoon or a dishtowel, transformed reality - having a Sunday row on a pond or floating in a lifeboat on the North Sea; suddenly they were lovers on a picnic blanket, or thieves, or children on a swing. Jean knew these actors had worked together for a long time, a bodily history among them. She had seen Avery perform loaves and fishes with objects, with stones on the beach, with rulers and wooden blocks, creating bridges, castles, entire cities. But his magic was solitary and intellectual compared with the instantly complex communication between these bodies, the moment continually changing, deepening into humour or sorrow. And sometimes this pathos was intense, and a hole opened, and everyone watching from the edges of the room found their own sorrow pouring into it. Crack! the earth of the scene split open and down everyone tumbled together into the wreckage of memory. And then the actors melted back into the party, and the food and the bottles were passed around again.
-- Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault
Some day, I would love to host gatherings like the one that Michaels describes in this passage.
I was fortunate enough to spend quite a bit of time over the long weekend at low-key gatherings with dear friends. It was a pretty delightful way to celebrate the start of summer, if you ask me.
I want to feel what my father felt, Avery repeated, sitting on the edge of the bed on the Nile, what the marmisti know, what the blind man knows when he's on Ramses' knee. What my mother calls 'flesh-knowledge.' It's not enough for your mind to believe in something, your body must believe it too. If I hadn't witnessed this particular pleasure in my father when I was a child perhaps I wouldn't feel the lack of it. But I do. I can imagine what a chemist feels when he looks in a microscope, how his mind can practically touch what he sees. Or a physicist who can feel an equation tearing molecules apart along the shear, like tearing a handful of bread from a loaf. Or the tension in a meniscus. The closest understanding I have of this is when I look at a building. I feel the consequences of each choice; how the volume works, how the building eats teh space it inhabits, even how it carries its ruins.-- Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault
I love it when authors articulate things for me in such an eloquent way. Because, honestly, despite being someone who adores language and has chosen it as her life's work, sometimes it refuses to do what I want it to or need it to. I love this description of the physicality of any sensation. It's something I know to be true for myself.
from "Lake of Two Rivers"
Anne Michaels
3
Sensate weather, we are your body,
your memory. Like a template,
branch defines sky, leaves
bleed their gritty boundaries,
corrosive with nostalgia.
Each year we go outside to pin it down,
light limited, light specific,
light like a name.
Like any good academic, I have moments where school just isn't my favourite thing in the world. This blog is certainly a record of that, if of nothing else. Right now I'm working on my thesis. I have to hand in a chapter by Saturday, which is incredibly daunting and stressful if I think about it too long, but is also thrilling and exciting. Right now I'm working on my chapter on Anne Michaels, which means that I've been spending my time immersed in her magnificent poetry. The particular little excerpt from "Lake of Two Rivers" is particularly relevant for my thesis topic. And it captures a little bit of how I feel about light and nature and photography. Plus it is just blindingly gorgeous. On top of this I've been reading essays by Anne Simpson and Jan Zwicky to use as critical material in the chapter. It is moments like this that I feel profoundly blessed to be doing what I am doing. It is moments like this that I seriously contemplate taking a PhD because I don't know what else I could possibly be doing with my life.
Phantom Limbs
Anne Michaels
"The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal
heart."
- CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.
Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.
Through the yellow hooves
of the ginkgo, parchment light;
in that apartment where I first
touched your shoulders under your sweater,
that October afternoon you left keys
in the fridge, milk on the table.
The yard - our moonlight motel -
where we slept summer's hottest nights,
on grass so cold it felt wet.
Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,
a steel banner, a noisy wall.
Now the hollow diad
floats behind glass
in office towers also haunted
by our voices.
Few buildings, few lives
are built so well
even their ruins are beautiful.
But we loved the abandoned distillery:
stone floors cracking under empty vats,
wooden floors half rotted into dirt,
stairs leading nowhere, high rooms
run through with swords of dusty light.
A place the rain still loved, its silver paint
on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.
Closed rooms open only to weather,
pungent with soot and molasses,
scent-stung. A place
where everything too big to take apart
had been left behind.
I'm moving across the country in three weeks. This is both exciting and terrifying. I'm excited because I'm headed to a province I dearly love and find exceptionally beautiful. I'm terrified because I am moving somewhere that I know no one and am leaving behind the people who are dearest to me in the world.
It's funny how places retain the people who inhabit them. How a location can bring back a flood of memories. How going somewhere can make you remember someone who is long gone or who you haven't thought about in a long time. We leave impressions on places it seems; sometimes they are visible and sometimes they are invisible. We literally leave our mark on places with buildings and possessions, the kinds of things that archeologist uncover, but we leave a less tangible mark on a place. And a place leaves a mark on us. It's such a strange thing to ponder, but it's something I think about often, and all the more often as I wrench myself out of the place I grew up in.
Skin Divers
Anne Michaels
Under the big-top
of stars, cows drift
from enclosures, bellies brushing
the high grass, ready for their heavy
festivities. Lowland gleams like mica
in the rain. Starlight
soaks our shoes.
The seaweed field begs, the same
burlap field that in winter cracks with frost,
is splashed by the black brush
of crows. Frozen sparklers of Queen Anne's lace.
Because the moon feels loved, she lets our eyes
follow her across the field, stepping
from her clothes, strewn silk
glinting in furrows. Feeling loved, the moon loves
to be looked at, swimming
all night across the river.
She calls through screens,
she fingers a white slip in the night hallway,
reaches across the table for a glass.
She holds the dream fort.
Like the moon, I want to touch places
just by looking. To tell
new things at three in the morning, when we're
awake with rain or any sadness, or slendering through
reeds of sleep, surfacing to skin. In this room
where so much has happened, where love
is the clink of buttons as your shirt slides
to the floor, the rolling sound of loose change;
a book half open, clothes
half open. Again we feel
how transparent the envelope
of the body, pushed through the door
of the world. To read what's inside
we hold each other
up to the light. We hold
the ones we love or long
to be free of, carry them
into every night field, sit with them
while cows slow as ships
barely move in the distance.
Rain dripping from the awning of stars.
Waterworn, the body remembers
like a floodplain, sentiment-laden,
reclaims itself with every tide.
Memory terraces, soft as green deltas.
Or reefs and cordilleras -
gathering the world to bone.
The moon touches everything
into meaning, under her blind fingers,
then returns us to cerulean
aluminum dawns. Night,
a road pointing east.
her sister, memory, browses the closet
for clothes carrying someone's shape.
She wipes her hands on an apron
stained with childhood, familiar smells
in her hair; rattles pots and pans
in the circadian kitchen.
While in the bedroom of a night field,
the moon undresses; her abandoned peignoir
floats forever down.
Memory drags possessions out on the lawn,
moves slowly through wet grass, weighed down
by moments caught in her night net, in the glistening
ether of her skirt. The air alive,
memory lifts her head and I nearly
disappear. You lift your head, a look I feel
everywhere, a tongue of a glance,
and love's this dark field, our shadow web
of voices, the carbon-papter purple
rainy dark. Memory's heavy with the jewellery
of rain, her skirt heavy with beads of mercury
congealing to ice on embroidered branches -
as she walks we hear the clacking surf
of those beautiful bones. Already love
so far beyond the body, reached only
by way of the body. Time is the alembic
that turns what we know
into mystery. Into air,
into the purple stain of sweetness.
Laburnum, wild iris, birch forest so thick
it glows at night, smells that reach us
everywhere; the alchemy that keeps us
happy on the ground, even if our arms embrace
nothing, nothing: the withdrawing
trochee of birds. We'll never achieve escape
velocity, might as well sink into wet
firmament, learn to stay under,
breathing through our skin.
In silver lamella, in rivers
the colour of rain. Under water, under sky;
with transparent ancient wings.
Tonight the moon traipses in bare feet,
silk stockings left behind
like pieces of river.
Our legs and arms, summer-steeped
slapped damp
with mud and weeds.
We roll over the edge into the deep field,
rise from under rain,
from our shapes in wet grass.
Night swimmers, skin divers.
I know it's a long poem (kudos to you if you read the whole thing), but I am struck deeply by the intimate connection she makes between rain and memory and love. It is so beautiful, and holds so much of how I feel about rain. It is supposed to be rather rainy for the next week or so, and I am hoping that despite the insanity of my life I will have some time to simply luxuriate in that nostalgic, beautiful, loving sensation.
Someone is watching from behind a tree. I stare from my hiding place without moving, until my eyeballs harden, until I'm not longer sure he's seen me. What's he waiting for? In the last possible moment before I have to run, light coming fast, I discover I've been held prisoner half the night by a tree, its dead, dense bole carved by moonlight.
(from Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels)
Here's today's confession: I am bad at waiting. I am incredibly impatient. I can't function when I'm waiting for something. For me, waiting is akin to the sensation of holding your breath for an extended period of time. I can't accomplish anything substantial because my focus keeps drifting to whatever it is I'm waiting for. It's like part of me is frozen, just standing there, completely useless. And then the other half of me is frantically scrambling around. That's why this quote from Fugitive Pieces came to mind. That complete stillness accompanied by frantic mental scrambling is exactly what I feel like when I'm waiting. Right now I'm waiting for something big and it's like I'm afraid that if I move it will evaporate into thin air. And so here I am, frozen in this, the most unpleasant state of being.
from What the Light Teaches
Anne Michaels
10
For years I've driven towards you in spring rain,
storm sky of green marble,
slow traffic a caravan of swinging lanterns,
windshield wipers like clock hands.
Poems by Tsvetaeva on the seat beside me,
flowers in wet paper.
As the hours pass, the hard seeds in my heart
soften and swell as I think of your kitchen
with its stone floor
like a summerhouse in Peredelkino,
and of Mandelstam, exiled to Yelabuga on the Kama:
"if you must leave the city,
it's best to live near a river."
You fly out of the darkness at me,
twisting open the tin sky.
The thunderstorm becomes other storms:
darkness steeping like tea above Burnside Drive,
with its slippery crease of rusted leaves;
or the night on High Street, rain
streaming like milk down the windshield
the moment the streetlights clicked on.
I think of young Akhmatova,
under a black umbrella with Modigliani,
reading Verlaine in the Luxembourg.
All the languages they spoke -
Russian, Italian, French -
and still, their lovemaking was with roses!
Language is not enough
for what they had to tell each other.
Never to lose this joy,
driving to one who awaits my arrival.
Soon I will be standing on your porch, dripping
with new memory, a thin dress soaked with May rain.
Rain that helps one past grow out of another.
Yes, Anne Michaels two days in a row. What can I say? I adore her writing. And the opening stanza of this poem is so well-suited to the weather lately.
Into Arrival
Anne Michaels
It will be in a station
with a glass roof
grimy with the soot
of every train and
they will embrace for every mile
of arrival. They will not
let go, not all the long way,
his arm in the curve
of her longing. Walking in a city
neither knows too well,
watching women with satchels
give coins to a priest for the war veterans;
finding the keyhole view of the church
from an old wall across the city, the dome
filling the keyhole precisely,
like an eye. In the home
of winter, under an earth
of blankets, he warms her skin
as she climbs in from the air.
There is a way our bodies
are not our own, and when he finds her
there is room at last
for everyone they love,
the place he finds,
she finds, each word of skin
a decision.
There is earth
that never leaves your hands,
rain that never leaves
your bones. Words so old they are broken
from us, because they can only be
broken. They will not
let go. Because some love
is broken from love,
like stones
from stone,
rain from rain,
like the sea
from the sea.
This poem is exceptionally beautiful. The sweetest love. The deepest connection to each other, to history, to our own personal worlds. I'm basking in this piece. Luxuriating.
Also, the kind of greeting described in the first stanza is something I hope to experience one day. Whether in a train station or airport, I've always wanted that. "They will embrace for every mile." Lovely.
Rain Makes Its Own Night
Anne Michaels
Rain makes its own night, long mornings with the lamps left on.
Lean beach grass sticks to the floor near your shoes,
last summer's pollen rises from damp metal screens.
This is order, this clutter that fills clearings between us,
clothes clinging to chairs, your shoes in a muddy grip.
The hard rain smells like it comes from the earth.
The human light in our windows, the orange stillness
of rooms seen from outside. The place we fall to alone,
falling to sleep. Surrounded by a forest's green assurance,
the iron gauze of sky and sea,
while night, the rain, pulls itself down through the trees.
The other night I stopped at Chapters with a couple of friends and discovered that their poetry section has expanded! I mean, it's still not huge, but it is certainly improved from the measly two shelves it usually is. Of course, I had to treat myself to some new books. Glorious. Simply glorious. It's been raining lately. There is something nice about weather like this. It's relaxing and contemplative. Life seems a bit slower when it's rainy; there's space to breathe and room to think. Rain and poetry are an excellent combination.
So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place. The words coming out meaningless, garbled...I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language. (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)
It's paper season. Specifically, I am currently working on a history paper about the Kirov murder. One thing I have learned: if someone has written a 700+ page book about the subject of your paper and you are someone who already tends to run over the word count, then you should probably pick a different subject. Just the research part of this paper killed me. Plus I am not comfortable writing history papers. English papers I know what I'm doing. I'm a whiz at MLA citation by now. History papers I always just feel like I am out of my depth. It doesn't help that inevitably when this time of the year rolls around my ability to form coherent sentences goes out the window. The thoughts are there in my head. In fact, in my head I am downright brilliant. Things break down when I try to communicate what is in my head. I feel like I'm speaking a foreign language, as if the words are just slightly out of my grasp. I'm forgetting things before I can write them down. The other day I was typing and wasn't looking at the screen and then when I looked up all there was was incoherent garble. It seemed like such a perfect embodiment of the way I have been feeling while trying to write. I immediately thought of this quote from Fugitive Pieces. So perfect. At least if I can't express things there are brilliant authors who can do it for me.
We had a tiny flat and our kitchen table - my father's huge wooden worktable where we ate all our meals - was in an alcove, surrounded by four walls of book. Without getting out of our chairs, we could simply reach behind us and, yes, pluck! the appropriate book off a shelf. That was my father's idea, so that there would always be active discussions at meals, and so that I or any guest could find a reference in a trice. My father loved to call out directions from his end of the table like a mad navigator on a small boat: 'A bit more to the right, nine o'clock please, forty-five degrees left...' Over the years, certain thick or oversized volumes became landmarks by which we steered: 'The grey cover two inches to the right of The Child's New Illustrated Encyclopedia ("new" about forty years previous), below One Thousand and One Wonderful Things; about ten inches above Engines and Power...' And when the book was retrieved successfully from the shelf, my father would let out a sigh, as if just the right unreachable itch had been scratched. (Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault)
As much as I love the idea of having a dedicated library in a house, there is also something infinitely appealing about having books simply surrounding you in the spaces you live in. I love the idea of a living room lined with bookshelves complete with rolling ladders (like the ones in Beauty and the Beast). In fact, when I opened the September 2010 issue of InStyle and found the pictures of Diane von Furstenberg's house I absolutely fell in love with her living room. Not the furniture and art so much, but the walls of books with rolling ladders. It is perfect. The other day I was reading The Winter Vault and came across this description of Avery's childhood dining room. I think I re-read this passage about ten times. And I read it out loud to at least three different people. Books in a dining room. How brilliant! Why have I never considered this possibility before? Perhaps one day my house will simply have books in every single room. How delightful would that be? I also love his father's relief when the proper book is pulled from the shelf. Selecting the perfect volume, finding the right book, can be such a wonderful feeling that it is almost healing.
Yesterday I told you about how much I love to be completely immersed in literature. Today I spent the whole day doing layout for Ballyhoo with my co-editor. It was probably one of the most delightful days I've had in a long time. I was actually so engrossed in it that I didn't even think about eating dinner until 8 o'clock. That hasn't happened in a long time. It feels good to be passionate about something. In light of my day and yesterday's reflections, I felt like this was an appropriate quote.
In case you haven't guessed...I adore Anne Michaels.
One morning with nothing to do but wait for lunch, we sat in the long grass and discussed Aunt Bett's brother, Uncle Victor. For some reason he held a morbid fascination for us, and it was usually Owen who started us off.
Avery imitated the haughty angle of Owen's head.
'They say he died when a book fell off his library shelf and knocked him senseless.'
'What book was it?' I asked him.
Owen sighed disdainfully.
'Who cares,' he said. 'That's not the point, is it?'
Owen, Avery explained, was disturbed that a man who had survived being a soldier in the Great War could die so unheroically.
'It certainly is the point,' I argued. 'What book would you choose to die by?'
There was a moment's silence while we all contemplated this question.
'The Bible, I suppose,' said Tom.
'Oh, don't be so melodramatic,' said Owen.
'I'd choose Browning's Portuguese Sonnets,' said Nina.
'Not thick enough,' I said.
Then we heard my mother calling and as usual Owen, being the eldest by almost eight years, had the last word.
'I'd choose Grey's Anatomy or a medical encyclopedia, just in case there was a slim chance of resuscitating me...'
(Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault)
So, what book would you choose to die by?
I know I must honour Athos's lessons, especially one: to make love necessary. -- Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in a casket or coffin of your own selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. -- C.S. Lewis
Every so often I find that there is a topic that comes up in my life over and over again. This semester one of the topics we discussed in Psyc-Lit was the connection between vulnerability and love. It came up in at least three of the texts we discussed, including Fugitive Pieces which I adore, and I wrote two papers on this idea. It's something that has been popping up in my personal life too. I've been doing some serious thinking about the state of my heart and how I treat it. Then awhile ago one of my friends posted some lyrics from The Frozen Ocean's "In the Garden" as his Facebook status. This reminded me how much I really like The Frozen Ocean and sent me searching through my iTunes for their music and then listening to it over and over again. One of their songs, "Lost at Sea", starts with a reading of this quote from C.S. Lewis. I've been having some deep conversations with a girl who is quickly becoming one of my dearest friends, the kind of conversations that require trust from both parties. One of the things that she pointed out to me not so long ago is that one of the themes that seems to be emerging in my life is "make love necessary". It's true too. If I had to choose some touchstone words for my life as I head into 2011 I think they would be "love", "balance", "vulnerability" and "beauty". I like to think that when something keeps popping up in your life over and over again it is something you should probably do some serious thinking about. So I am. Just thought I would let you know that.
Michaela forgets her body for hours at a time. I love to watch her while she's thinking or reading, her head leaning on her hand. On the floor or in a chair, her limbs abandoned to gravity. The more intense her concentration, the more abstract the problem she contemplates, the further her body roams. Down long roads, her legs swinging, or across open water, her hair wandering down her back. This is her body's truancy, its mischievousness. Freed from Michaela's disciplining mind, it runs away, goes outdoors. When she looks up and catches me watching her, or simply stops reading - "Jakob, Hawthorne actually pretended to be ill so he could stay home and read Carlyle's essay on heroes" - her body is there again, reappearing suddenly in the chair. And I feel deep appreciation for those heavy, sneaky limbs that have defied her mind's authority without knowing. She looks at me, all presence. While her body and I share our delicious secret. (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)
I just started Anne Michaels' second novel, The Winter Vault, today. I am not that far into it yet, but so far it is every bit as strikingly beautiful as Fugitive Pieces. I read Fugitive Pieces in one of my classes last semester and fell in love with Anne Michaels' writing. There were moments last semester where I profoundly struggled with the question of why I am doing what I'm doing with my life. It is writing like Anne Michaels' that reminds me of the answers to this question.
The above quote is one of many from Fugitive Pieces that float through my mind, haunting me, weighing on my very soul in the best way possible. So much of our class discussion of the novel centred around love; I even wrote my final paper on the connection between language and love in the novel. I find Jakob's description of Michaela as she reads incredibly beautiful. Perhaps this is partly because I too have a wandering body. I will stop reading only to find myself sitting in a chair at the coffee shop in one odd position or another and I always wonder if people have been looking at me. I think if someone watched me with Jakob's intensity, and with his deep affection, I would be won over. Now that I've written that I realize that it probably sounds weird. Oh well. What can I say? The way to my heart is through literature.
