If you look hard enough, a real life takes on the quality of fiction
- Janet Frame
Yesterday was the sort of day that makes a body shiver with warmth. A gift to be visited by sunlight on a damp winter’s day. Clean cold heart surprised to know fuzzy solar kindness. Human animal sitting outside the grocer with an espresso in a tiny baby glass, eyes closed, face upturned, paper eyelids glowing uterine origin red. Then rain back again just the next hour.
Laundry is a battle in winter. The patch of kykuyu grass beneath the washing line is a bog. The light might be there but the temperature isn’t. The air is a wet soup. A protective moisture barrier surrounds the lipid layer of things. No fat to spare in winter. I have never had a tumble dryer, and never been too bothered, but today it is a bother. The sheets take a fresh saturation when a cloud limps in off the sea and dumps its guts.
In these islands it is the season of Matariki. A new year approaches with the appearance of the Pleiades cluster. Cycles of harvest and decay hang together in morning mist droplets. Damp knowledge and acknowledgement are inhaled deep into the lungs of the living. Fires smoulder and subdued smoke sticks around the valleys. Palms still clap their waxed paper leaves, mānuka trees still glow green, but winter wants a black armband stop-the-clocks of us.
*
After June’s shortest day I did stop the clock. I thought about how there are probably only two stories: the hero’s journey and the story of community. Maybe the biggest grief of my current early thirties life is that I am still lodged in the hero’s journey, against my will, seeking the safety to be a whole self. Unceasing shocks provide such little reprieve. I need a small gap of a clear shore to enable the story that comes after getting to know your self and your weaknesses and your light. There are so many hurdles and new things to process that get in the way of becoming an okay enough self so as to become a non-self in service of a collective. But there I go binarising things. The only two stories constantly spiral about each other, the only way they know how.
In my classes we’ve talked about resistance poetry, and how it is both a worthwhile pursuit and a painful-parallel-universe use of our earthly energy. Political poetry is poetry. Resistance is a real existence. But what about an existence free from trauma and loss? Or not exactly free, but less fucked-from-the-outset? What about an even starting point, where every way of being is a-okay, where no one’s kaleidescope of existence is overwritten with straight lines, and where being not okay is worthy only of love rather than riddled with shame? Where the pain we face is of the inescapable human suffering variety, rather than the torture of whiteness/capital/patriarchy? These structures are not just words. They govern our lives.
Writing can come from a glinting place: spangles of joy, but also of anger. It makes me happy to connect with others — with you! Right here and now! I love joy. I am a disciple. I love that people scrounge for scraps of it, and exalt it, and share it and multiply it. I love the inheritance of joy — we’ve known it for a long time, and we’ll keep knowing it, until the end. But I am wary of people that find happiness in a vague okayness with the way things are under whiteness/capital/patriarchy.
It is a deep loneliness to know that it is possible for some people to be okay with their place in the way things are, and for that to not be the case or even possible for the rest of us. Especially impossible when the range of public expressions and resources and safety is increasingly enclosed and hoarded and policed. It is a dangerous time to be non-normative in any way. Even children, with their mental freedom from socialised boundaries and binaries, are figured as threatening. In this kind of world I love glinting anger as much as joy. Anger knows what’s what.
But what kind of life would be possible for all of us if it wasn’t a world where even the gentlest of pursuits — puny words on a page! — are animated by injuries sustained from the order of things. It might be generative if it was pure animation: a converted energy from trauma to expression, falling short of full justice but at the very least creating a clear airway, a place to breathe together. But trauma can disable. Sometimes I am not animated, I am stunted and muted. I know an exhaustion so big that on many days it pours into the spaces behind the eyes and down the throat, setting like concrete.
But I have more of a home inside myself than ever. I am learning that I can stop the clocks, stop being obedient, stop over-adapting and overriding limits. When we push past our personal and collective and earthly limits there are grave costs. Winter asks for remembrance, Matariki asks for belonging, surprise sun asks for upturned faces, glints of joy and anger ask for writing. Beyond these essential asks I can say no to unsustainable demands. We can refuse.
*
Lately I’ve been wondering why some books are books rather articles or talks or even just newsletters or TikToks or conversations. All these postures of exploration when the thesis is right there, graspable, a literary equivalent of this-could’ve-been-an-email. I’m not going to name and shame. I’d preferred to be paid for a pan, and to do it right. I have no shortage of candidates. But it’s not really their fault. That part about being paid is key.
To sell a book off the back of a proposal then earn it out in a fine-spun matrix of words? It’s a lot of pressure. Or it’s a lot of Koolaid. And why not. Ideas deserve iterative chapter treatments, and we deserve to spend an extended and focused time with them. It’s true that in burnout I must be projecting too many exhausted what’s-the-points. But it might be more that I have a nose for the difference between a for-profit (be that monetary or simply reputational profit) book concept and something that has a glinting animus that insists on being explored, and a book is the only technology that will do.
Three books I read this month that possessed an animus that couldn’t help but be a book, and for that I am glad:
Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen takes the theorising impulse of doctoral study and brings it out of the academy and into the rest of life, not least the life of the kitchen and the spattered story of a single recipe.
I struggle for several hours to get off the sofa before I can cook. I am only able to get off the sofa because a friend rings me and tells me to do so. A ball of sadness and anxiety burns in my torso, making it difficult to taste my food.
My uncle Robin lent me science writer Tim Higham’s Island Notes: Finding my place on Aotea Great Barrier Island — a book filled with slippery things like kelp and kingfish, but also the slipperiness of a longterm relationship, a house as a third intimate character, and a question of whether two people can still recognise each other after so many tide changes and cell renewals.
Sometimes you’re better to let go, to be released, briefly, from the job of keeping up defences. The island invites the same response. What are you doing with all that running around in the world?
At the time of the release of Zadie Smith’s Intimations I was feeling sick about all the looming lockdown lit. I feared that this was some kind of for-profit book. But I finally read it this month — three years later — and I loved it, not even a wince generated, all true as an entry into the archive of that time of new confinement:
I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time, aside from filling it.
I also loved Smith’s citation of Toni Cade Bambara, taking me to the 1979 essay “What I think It Is I’m Doing Anyway”: In whose name will the twenty-first century be claimed? Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths?
May we refuse psychopathic demands and turn our faces to the sun.
Until next month,
Hannah x
P.s. I did get that affogato on my birthday!
Just lovely writing.....so aware and gentle.
Thanks Hannah. Such a lovely meditation. I really relate to your point about two kinds of story, about heroes and community.
It reminds me of Ursula Le Guin’ carrier bag theory of storytelling. She identifies this dualism of hero and community as stories that are, and about, “Long, straight things” and those stories that are about “containers”.
In her narrative, she adds a time dimension to the dualism. It suggests that stories capture the impulse to be hero on a long, straight journey. But it also acknowledges how that journey creates the container who can support and sustain community.
I see this journey as the prelude - a time of growth, learning, experiencing, resolving - to our place stories. It adds in the becoming and being that comes before rebirth and renewal.
Xx Terri