robyn reads books

chasing resonance

the reading room

“My interior is one of the strangest and most beautiful things in the world.” -Lispector

  • Mitigative Measures

    What happens to interior freedom when you become conscious of being watched?

    You know what sucks?

    The whole books/Instagram thing.

    I hate even saying it like that because it sounds so fucking small. Instagram. Bookstagram. A social media account. Who cares? There are bigger things happening in the world. Real problems. Real life. 

    And yet I am genuinely sad that a place I loved feels contaminated.

    It was a place where I went to be myself. Honest as fuck. Reading experiences. Vulnerable posts. Raw thoughts. Real engagement. Real friendships. Intelligent conversations around books.

    I brought my books, my brain, my humour, my weird little observations. I brought the things I was thinking about while reading and put them somewhere other people could encounter them. Sometimes someone would recognize themselves in what I had written. Sometimes they would disagree. Sometimes they would say, YES, THAT.

    There was a healthy ecosystem there.

    And I don’t mean that metaphorically in the vague social media sense of “community ecosystem.” I mean ecosystem in the environmental sense, which is probably inevitable given that my degree is actually in Environmental Toxicology and I’ve worked for an agency that protects ecological integrity for over twenty years.

    Agency. Integrity. Remember those words as you read this. 

    So, yes. I know something about contaminated ecosystems.

    I know that contaminants can change the conditions of a place without becoming the whole place. I know that exposure matters. Concentration matters. Persistence matters. Pathways matter. I know that some contaminants break down and some persist. I know that remediation can be possible, but that it is rarely as simple as making something disappear.

    And I know that sometimes the most appropriate intervention is not pretending the contamination isn’t there.

    It is reducing exposure.

    That is what changed for me.

    The books are still there. My writing is still there. The people who genuinely connected with what I was doing are still there. (I love you guys so much.)

    But my relationship to the environment changed. Because I am not there.

    There is something uniquely unsettling about knowing that someone is watching you when you did not invite them into your space. Something changes when someone’s surveillance becomes part of the conditions under which you participate.

    You notice who is looking.

    You notice yourself being observed.

    You have to block fake accounts.

    You can’t let blog metrics and certain daily repeat state viewers affect your every move.

    Because suddenly the space that once allowed you to be expansive makes you smaller. You start thinking twice before posting something or sharing a story. I won’t say how many times I thought about publishing this… but goddammit… agency.

    You edit yourself before anyone else has even asked you to. You decide not to share, to post, because of someone else.

    That is the part I hate most.

    Not the drama. Not even the behaviour itself. Because that reveals character. Really immature, unintelligent, toxic character.

    It’s the cause and effect.

    The fact that I started feeling like I can’t move through that space freely.

    Reduce myself.

    Go private.

    Step away.

    It feels like I’m being cornered and that choice is taken away. Like there are now terms and conditions built into it. All because someone is monitoring me. And I feel I can’t stick up for myself.

    Well, maybe this is what they intended. To be that anthropogenic threat to the ecosystem.

    Well, fuck that. Nobody puts baby in a corner, amiright? I don’t want to spend my time thinking about spies and stalkers. And why they are doing it in the first place. I don’t want someone else’s attention to become a condition of my participation.

    And it pisses me off that I have allowed other people’s behaviour to make me question whether I am allowed to breathe in a space I helped build.

    That playground-mean-girl bullshit cuts off the oxygen.

    And yes, the ecosystem is much bigger than the pollutant, the contamination.

    There are good people there. Genuine friendships. Interesting conversations. Plenty of oxygen for everyone. There are still books. There is still that part of me that wants to show up and say, I read this, and this is what it did to me.

    That hasn’t disappeared. But neither has the reaction. I’m writing a blog post about it FFS. 

    On resilience and exposure

    I think what I’m struggling with is the dynamic between resilience and exposure.

    I keep treating my ability to tolerate situations like this as evidence that I am resilient. As though the goal were to absorb it, recover, and carry on as normal.

    But resilience isn’t an unlimited capacity to absorb pollutants without consequence. Exposure changes the system. Enough of it, over enough time, can change what the system is capable of tolerating. There are some things I am still capable of. And some things not.

    So yes, this affects me. I don’t need to pretend otherwise. I’m a sensitive person. I also don’t need to prove that I can tolerate it. Because it destabilizes my own nervous system too.

    Ugh. I don’t know what to do.

    But what about reclaiming the space? Posting anyway. Showing I am not affected? Well, that would be pretending. I’m just too honest for that.

    And really, that’s not reclamation. That’s just the exposure with better branding.

    Ya, I’m rambling. Almost done. 

    On mitigation measures

    Jesus Christ.

    Who would have thought I needed mitigative measures to survive Bookstagram?

    Oh, Robyn. Naïve woman.

    Reduce exposure. Control the severity of adverse impacts. Protect what matters. Give the system time to recover.

    I could add IDGAF and be done with it, but that’s not me either. I give all the fucks. I like that about myself. It is care. It is empathy. It is who I care about and why.

    I can’t simply restore some imaginary pristine version of the ecosystem. I can’t pretend it hasn’t affected me. But I just don’t want one contaminant determining the conditions of the entire system, friendships included. This blog included.

    Because there are still things there (and here) I value: the books, the writing, the conversations, the people who know how to show up, and the part of me that still gets excited enough about a sentence to need somewhere to put it. Above all, there are real people with real feelings involved.

    Those parts are worth protecting.

    And maybe that’s why the books I’ve been reading have been getting tangled up with this too. Ya… making a sad attempt to weave in the books here.

    I’ve read a lot about who gets to look; who gets to tell the story; who gets access to another person’s interiority; who is claiming territory over someone; who is controlling the pen. The Vegetarian, The Piano Teacher, Lolita, My Dark Vanessa, Notes on a Scandal, The Book of Evidence. They have all, in different ways, made me think about the power of observation and what happens when you become aware of the person doing the looking.

    So I don’t want to live inside someone else’s gaze.

    I don’t want to make choices according to who is watching. And the reasons why they are. And I don’t want someone else’s access to me to become the condition under which I think, write, or exist.

    So maybe that’s the thing I’m actually reclaiming. Trying to anyway.

    Not the account. Not the ecosystem.

    My agency.

    I get a say in who gets access to me. I get a say in what I do with the exposure. I get to decide what I can absorb without losing myself. And I get to decide what I do when the conditions change. That’s good environmental management, isn’t it?

    Idk. This all just feels shitty. Crazy how people want to and can make others feel this way in what should only be a beautiful, supportive environment.

    Anyway, I’m going to spend some time breathing the oxygen freely in my own life. Not in someone else’s territory they’ve marked as their own. Where they have staked their claim. And have implemented monitoring controls. That ain’t for me, or my heart.

    I have kids. A job. A plane ticket. Books. Friends. An enormous heart filled with people I love. And a world that is considerably larger than one particular bizarre little ecosystem.

    And its pollutants.

  • Jesus fuck, I’m crossing the pond

    I am going to Scotland.

    I keep saying it because I still don’t quite believe it.

    There is a plane ticket. There is an approved ETA thing in or on my passport, however that works. There is a date on the calendar and a route that, at least for now, includes Edinburgh, the Highlands, trains, side quests and most likely rain.

    But I am going.

    This feels like a surprisingly large thing to say. Rather simple for others, I suspect.

    Travel has never been simple for me. I’ve leveraged some really great work trips across Canada, but it has most definitely not been a fuck it, let’s go thing for me.

    For years I have been very good at postponing myself.

    Very fucking good at it.

    There were trips I almost took. Trips I planned and then talked myself out of. Potential trips with my sisters, my mother, friends. Places I wanted to see that could wait, because there was always something else that seemed more necessary.

    Obligations. Priorities. Practical reasons. Others before me.

    It’s easy to build a whole life out of putting everyone before yourself.

    So I bought the ticket.

    And then, because my nervous system can’t seem to deactivate these days, I panicked about the ticket. Then some travel authorization thing. Then luggage. Checked bag or not checked bag. And now accommodation, and all the other tiny logistical details that suddenly seemed capable of becoming evidence that I had made a mistake.

    But I want to go.

    And so I am.

    And that’s it.

    I don’t think I need a better reason.

    My dad didn’t make it to retirement when all his travel was planned for. It’ll be ten years this November since I last held his hand. That’s also my birthday month. And I guess that’s the little push, not reason, I needed.

    And I do think Clarice Lispector gave me a little boost too. She said to flow, and so I’m trying. Really doing the best I can with that. 

    Because I want that. But keep failing. Hurting myself, others in the trying. 

    Fuck, I’ve always wanted to be like the cool people out there and just… flow.

    So it’s not some trip to heal me or transform me or prove anything. Or find myself.

    I simply want to exist somewhere else.

    Feel alive.

    Breathe.

    Flow.

    And maybe keep building a life inside me. A home that includes a trip to Scotland.

    So I am going.

    I get to cross that massive fucking pond for the first time.

    And I like the idea of arriving in Edinburgh one morning, carrying the exhaustion of an overnight flight and knowing that for a little while, no one needs anything from me.

    I will have nowhere I absolutely have to be.

    I will walk outside and hear voices that aren’t familiar to me. I will look at buildings that have been standing there long before I arrived and will continue standing there after I leave.

    Gosh, I want to see old things.

    I’ve never really seen old.

    Not like this.

    It’s exciting to think I’ll get to see old stone darkened by weather. Castles. Ruins. Ancient places. A landscape that has held people for thousands of years.

    I need to see the evidence of that.

    And I want lochs.

    Forests turning colour.

    Cold air.

    Rain.

    Maybe the sea.

    Maybe mountains, although I am not sure I need them. Seen them lots. And I have those earmarked for the future.

    I want to find a pub and be warm.

    I want to read somewhere I didn’t expect to read.

    Performatively, of course.

    I want to walk and walk and walk.

    I want to have a day or two that isn’t particularly productive.

    I want to stand in front of something ancient and say, Jesus fuck.

    I predict I’ll say that a few times.

    I might even get a tattoo while I’m there.

    Ha.

    My first tattoo, in my forties, in Scotland. My one boy would love it, the other hate it. So it seems appropriate.

    There is something about travelling alone that I find both frightening and intoxicating.

    I can walk into a bookshop.

    God, the bookshops.

    I can stay.

    Leave.

    I don’t want to disappear from my life.

    Maybe this is a way to step more fully into it.

    Because there has been a lot of looking backward lately. A lot of trying to understand. A lot of trying to hold things I can’t. A lot of examining what happened and what it meant and what I should have known and what I could have done differently.

    Mistakes.

    Regrets.

    We all have them.

    Perhaps… what even is that word? I say it a lot. I need to think about that sometime.

    Perhaps I will sit in a café and read for an hour while rain taps against the window.

    Okay, I recognize that sounds a little romantic.

    Perhaps I will feel scared.

    Perhaps I will feel free.

    Perhaps these things will be the same feeling.

    I am trying not to make Scotland carry too much meaning.

    But alas, I am a meaning maker, so it naturally will.

    Maybe I’ll meet someone who wants to hear my rambles. Like this one. And the many others I have stuck in my head with no one to tell them to.

    And it’s okay if I don’t.

    Because maybe that’s part of what I am going to find out.

    That I can take myself somewhere.

    That I can want something and simply go after it.

    That I can be frightened and still get on the plane.

    That I can walk through unfamiliar countries, alone, with no one waiting for me to make myself useful.

    That I can stand somewhere ancient and feel very, very small.

    And very, very alive.

    There is something ahead of me.

    For once, I am not postponing it.

    I am going to Scotland.

  • Building a home inside myself

    I finished The Dog Stars by Peter Heller yesterday and my heart hurts.

    Nothing beautiful or literary about it. I don’t need to understand why, as I already know.

    It just hurts.

    Funny how some books seem to find a place inside you that was already tender and press on it.

    This one found me there.

    Peter Heller’s prose is stripped almost to the bone. There is no cushioning. Some of it is even unfinished thought, simply because the next thought comes so soon. The sentences move like someone who has learned there is no reason to waste breath. I was propelled forward through observation, action and memory, often before I had really finished absorbing the thing I had just read. There is so little excess in this consciousness and somehow that made everything heavier.

    Hig, with his big beautiful heart, thinks like someone who has lived through too much loss to narrate everything anymore. What matters gets noticed and said. What doesn’t gets left behind. His world has become very physical: weather, distance, food, shelter, a plane in the sky, movement outside, life underneath the stars. And underneath all of it is this enormous capacity to love, which I think is what got me most. I recognize that capacity in myself, and in other people too. Some stubborn human tendency to attach ourselves to things even after we have learned how easily we can lose them.

    Hig has lost almost everything and somehow isn’t detached from those things that matter. Or the things that cause him pain. He still attaches. To his dog. To a plane. To a place. To a friend. Even to possibility, I think. So even though he is deeply shaped by loss, he hasn’t disappeared inside it. Not yet anyway.

    He’s aware he needs to keep making choices, and so he does. Sometimes terrible ones. Sometimes brave ones. Sometimes ones made entirely out of fear. All of them have consequences.

    I understood that, perhaps more than I wanted to.

    Ugh. The strange violence of choice when every available option means losing something. I think we’ve all felt this in different ways: with life decisions, people we love, family, work, home. Sometimes there is no choice that leaves everything intact, and the decision becomes less about finding the right answer than deciding what you are willing to lose.

    Especially home.

    Because what is home when everything that made it home is gone?

    This is where Hig got to me too.

    He isn’t searching for some lost version of home. He is making one. Slowly and practically, through the things that need doing and the things he continues to care about. The routines, the work, the dog, the plane, the land. The daily business of keeping something alive.

    I felt this deeply here, and throughout The Odyssey. I keep coming back to this question of home in the books I read, although I think I used to imagine it very differently. I used to think of home as somewhere you eventually find, or return to, or recognize. Something outside yourself that provides the feeling of belonging.

    The Wall brought me into something similar through a completely different kind of solitude. There, too, so much of life became the necessary things that needed doing. Food. Animals. Work. The next day. The intimate, almost unremarkable business of continuing to live.

    And maybe that is part of what I am so interested in now.

    What does it mean to build a life rather than simply find one?

    I have spent more than enough time imagining what home really is or could be, and I think I’ve settled on it being something I construct inside myself. That feels very different to me from the idea of “finding yourself,” which has never really connected with me. I’m not sure I ever had a particularly solid sense of a self to find. This is me. These are my passions. This is my personality. This is who I am.

    I think I’m building it now.

    That sounds obvious when I write it down, but it doesn’t feel obvious to me. It feels like something I have only recently begun to understand.

    And that is what I see in Hig. He is not untouched by what happened to him. He isn’t pretending the past didn’t exist, and he certainly hasn’t somehow transcended it. He carries it everywhere, along with his grief. But he also keeps making a world around himself. Participating in it, not just surviving it. Choosing what matters… attaching… caring. Taking risks. Becoming someone in the middle of all that has already happened to him.

    I don’t really want to become the person I was before everything happened. I’m not particularly interested in “getting back to myself.” There may not even be a self back there that I want to return to.

    I think I want to become whoever I am now. Home is definitely part of that becoming, something I’ll keep constructing as I go. Might make it easier to survive change because it isn’t dependent on everything around me remaining the same.

    Maybe that is what I loved about Hig. He keeps choosing, knows that he must. He keeps loving and appreciating what is still here. He keeps moving through the world that remains, even though it isn’t the world he started with.

    And the stars are still there. Jasper too. 

    Even after everything.

    And then there is Cima.

    I connected with her too, in a way I’ll keep to myself. Her grief feels different from Hig’s, but it has shaped her just as completely.

    The loss of her twin brother, her partner, the complicated tenderness and damage of her relationship with her father, the years of not being touched or loved in the ways a body remembers wanting to be touched and loved. There is so much grief in her that has nowhere obvious to go, and yet she is still there, still capable of wanting, still capable of choosing and wanting, still capable of routines and carrying on, wherever that may lead her. 

    And how, because of that, the capacity for connection can remain.

  • I was looking too

    Would you rather: sit inside ethical discomfort or stand above the book and judge everyone else? 

    I finished The Vegetarian tonight. 

    And now I have a completely different problem.

    I spent the second part of this book absolutely fucking charged by the way the brother-in-law looked at Yeong-hye.

    Then I got to the end without ever really getting Yeong-hye herself. I never got to look through her eyes. I got everyone else’s Yeong-hye.

    But that wasn’t my realization.

    Did I want Yeong-hye’s consciousness?

    I think it’s Han Kang’s refusal to let me inside Yeong-hye’s consciousness is precisely what made this experience so strange. Everyone is looking at her. Everyone is trying to make something of her. And I’m right there with them, the reader, looking too. I’m given their lenses, their desire, their fear, their confusion. I’m allowed to get close to her body, her behaviour, the effects she has on everyone around her but never quite get to encounter her. She remains somewhere behind the glass.

    Was that frustrating? Or was that the point?

    I genuinely think I actually value being locked out.

    I don’t want Yeong-hye to explain herself to me.

    I don’t want another first-person psychological excavation. I don’t need to know what every thought feels like from the inside. I’ve read enough of those.

    I think I like what Han Kang did instead.

    She gave me the disturbance and let me watch it move through other people.

    Yeong-hye changes, and then everyone around her has to reckon with the fact that they can no longer make her fit inside the version of her they already knew.

    That’s what clicked. That’s what I’m interested in.

    Not Yeong-hye’s consciousness.

    Everyone else’s consciousness changing in response to hers. Forcing me to join the crowd of voyeurs looking at her body, her behaviour, her effects on others…

    That’s the fucking experiment.

    Watching each of them construct Yeong-hye according to their own desire, fear, resentment, fascination, sexuality, confusion, etc. has positioned me exactly where I want to be.

    Because suddenly I’m not behind the glass looking for her anymore.

    I’m looking at all of them.

  • The charge of looking

    this book’s strange erotic consciousness + physical reaction

    I just finished the second part of The Vegetarian this morning and I feel absolutely filled with desire.

    Could be simply sexual desire. But see quotes below. It’s different… it’s deep.

    The brother-in-law looking at Yeong-hye. Painting her body. (New fantasy side quest unlocked.) His obsession with the flowers on her skin. The filming. The fantasy of her body moving through the dark room. The fact that she doesn’t resist.

    I don’t know what Han Kang has done here, but I feel it physically.

    She has somehow made looking itself erotic. He is aroused not only by Yeong-hye’s body, but by the fact that she has become so radically herself… renounced, unavailable to ordinary social meaning… almost unbearably compelling.

    It’s like the renunciation makes her body more intensely present.

    More naked and more defended.

    “a body that said so much, and it was no more than itself.”

    “…armoured by the power of her own renunciation.”

    He sees nakedness and somehow perceives armour. Exposure and impenetrability at the same time. That’s an incredibly charged thing for me to read and think about.

    Being more available and completely unreachable.

    He wants to get closer to her, but every attempt to represent her seems to make her stranger. Distant.

    Is it limits or limitless? Boundaries or none? Just the uncomplicated ‘look but can’t touch’?

    Not sure. But I do know that it is not plot twist stuff. Or even the imagined scenes, the fantasy. It’s the prose, the language, these passages. And how, for me, they possess some weird, conductive frequency. It’s not even electric on the page. What he is seeing, what’s being described is done in such a muted, unobtrusive manner. The real voltage is happening in me. Han Kang, you have successfully ran a wire from your mind to mine, and turned the switch on.

    Whatever it is, I am sitting here absolutely fucking charged by it.

    Edit (one hour later): Did Han Kang just pull a Nabokov on me? Yes. I believe she did.

  • Left in the margin

    Lincoln asked:

    “Hey. Wanna sit in this weird liminal afterlife for 7 hours?”

    And I said, “Sure, why the hell not.” 

    Lincoln in the Bardo begins with the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son, Willie, and then promptly abandons anything resembling a conventional narrative structure. I had no idea I would end up in a cemetery with a whole crowd of dead people who haven’t quite moved on yet, and, apparently, have a lot to say.

    I finished it tonight and I’ll keep this short. 

    I loved its experimental form, especially the accumulation of voices. The audiobook made that even more pronounced. An entire ensemble of consciousnesses talking over, interrupting, contradicting, carrying their own histories (some really tough) into the same space.

    Grief is everywhere in the book, but Saunders makes it feel less like a single experience and more like a crowded, communal condition.

    On the volume of consciousness

    There was something happening with the pace here. Or perhaps it was a tightening. No. More like the weight. And the volume. 

    Whatever it was, by the end, I was holding a lot. A lot of attention and grief. It was heavy and loud.

    This was a very different encounter with consciousness for me. This growing collective mind, this shared web of human stories, was new. I haven’t read much that explores the idea of individual lives merging into something like a vast, living stream of memory and thought. Especially not of those existing in some purgatory-like state between life and death.

    It felt like hearing every past and present voice at once.

    More minds. More histories. More grief. More competing accounts of things that happened. 

    And writing this, I’m realizing that I wasn’t really following a plot at all. I was holding an enormous amount of human interiority.

    Did I like it?

    Yes. Absolutely.

    But I’ve been doing quite the heavy lift on consciousness lately, and I need to set this backpack down for a bit. 

    On the discomfort of suspension

    I’ve spent enough time suspended to know that discomfort can become its own kind of environment.

    Personally. Career. Reading life. You name it.

    Like notes scribbled in a margin, I am pushed outside the main narrative in some aspects of my life. Neither here nor there, where movement hasn’t happened yet but remaining in the borders is becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

    Sometimes I want out.

    Then I want to understand it.

    Then, eventually, I wonder whether accepting this suspension is the same or different from giving up. 

    My mind keeps looping:

    Do I want out because I know I’ve lost?

    Accept the defeat, Robyn. Move on.

    Ah. But I can’t.

    Because maybe there is a difference between being penned somewhere and staying somewhere long enough to become ready to leave.

    I don’t know.

    I’m still thinking about that.

    Always thinking. 

    Is it a choice to turn the page? To let go?

    How do you ready yourself for that?

    And… what about your heart?

  • One necessary thing at a time

    After the emotional density of The Piano Teacher, the woman behind The Wall gave me a little room to breathe.

    It is a quiet, strange little book, and I found an enormous tenderness living inside its solitude.

    Haushofer pens an intimate meditation on what happens to a person when the entire world, as they knew it, simply disappears.

    I love the almost absurdly simple premise. A woman waking to discover an invisible wall has sealed her off from the rest of humanity. Left on her side: nothing. Isolation. No people, society or explanation. Just an impenetrable boundary and a handful of animals left behind with her.

    There is so much beauty around companionship in this book. Simply a woman left to figure out life in a very unsentimental way. Just a calm, practical approach to sharing a life with other creatures. Feeding them, caring for them, and worrying about them. Even being needed by them. Loving them in a whole, intimate way without all the complicated machinery that seems to accompany loving other people.

    “I lay on the bench, and when I closed my eyes I saw snowy mountains on the horizon, white flakes dropping onto my face in a big, bright silence. I had no thoughts, no memories, there was only the big, silent, snowy light. I knew this feeling could be dangerous for a lonely person, but I couldn’t muster any strength to resist it.”

    It almost felt brutal in how unglamorous survival is here. There are no grand revelations or heroic transformations. Mostly, there is work. And more work. And the next day. And the next thing that needs doing.

    I wasn’t riveted every second. There were stretches where the deliberately mundane rhythm tested my attention. But I think that was also the point because the more I settled into its measured pace, the more I realized that the book was moving exactly as its woman was living: slowly, deliberately, one necessary thing at a time.

    “As I don’t like living day by day without a plan, feeling my way around in the dark, it was hard for me to stay calm. Impatience has always been one of my worst faults, but in the forest I have learned to control it to a certain extent.”

    It beautifully captured a profound feeling of womanhood. It provided a deeply private and honest look at thoughts, feelings and the female body when the outside world completely disappears.

    Some reflections on motherhood elicited an ache:

    “My children had gone away; hand in hand, their satchels on their backs, their hair blowing about, and I hadn’t known that that was the beginning of the end. Or perhaps I’d had an inkling. Later on I had never been happy again. Everything changed in a wretched way, and I stopped really living.”

    I understand completely why this and I Who Have Never Known Men get compared. Both create these strange, stripped-down worlds in which the absence of society becomes a way of examining society itself. But The Wall felt more earthy and immediate to me. It concerns the human condition in such a simple manner, just placing a woman inside it and making her live.

    “My uncertainty sometimes made life exciting for me. Everywhere I sensed dangers that I couldn’t recognize in time. I had to be constantly prepared for unpleasant surprises, and all I could do was to bear them with equanimity.”

    So I finished feeling less like I’d read a dystopian novel and more like I’d spent some time alone with a consciousness that had learned to live alongside loneliness. And that felt freeing.

    Bleak but beautiful. Oddly comforting. 

    It resonated with me on a very personal level. As I expected it would. 

  • I took it willingly

    I spent a good portion of The Piano Teacher feeling like Jelinek had taken me by the throat and dragged me somewhere I hadn’t agreed to go.

    I agreed fucking quickly. 

    I understood Erika almost immediately. I could see what was happening inside her.

    I could see the repression. The desire. The control. The shame. The watching. The violence. I could recognize the machinery. The problem was that I couldn’t quite figure out where I was supposed to stand while watching it happen.

    And I didn’t want to just watch. 

    That was the strange pleasure of this book for me. I loved not knowing what it was “about.”

    I loved being subjected to an assault on interiority.

    An extremely audacious one.

    Somewhere in all that claustrophobia, I started noticing my own body. So I took. I took pleasure in her pleasure, I took pleasure in her pain, I took pleasure in her cravings… fantasy… shame. I took. 

    The prose is so compressed it barely feels like third person. It is almost third-person consciousness. It’s goddamn psychic surveillance. Jelinek kept me technically outside Erika, but shoved me so deeply into the machinery of her mind that the distinction started to feel pointless. Thought, observation, memory, illusion, desire. All there, arriving at the same time, pressed against each other, pressing me against a wall.

    I felt Erika so much. 

    When I finished the book, my first reaction was: what an astonishing, fucked-up piece of work.

    The next morning, I felt sad for her.

    Not pity. I don’t pity Erika.

    I feel her.

    And that is much worse.

    Because feeling her doesn’t mean I can explain her. Jelinek keeps refusing to let me stabilize my judgment. Every time I think I’ve found a category for Erika, she seems to slip sideways out of it. I want to call her repressed, and then she wants something. I want to call her cruel, and then I see the hunger underneath it. I want to understand her desire, and then the desire itself becomes almost impossible to separate from shame, control, fear, fantasy.

    I understand her. I just can’t contain her.

    There is nowhere for all of it to go.

    Let’s cut straight to the letter.

    Jesus fuck, the letter.

    Erika’s fantasy of what she wants from her student Klemmer stopped me cold. I recognized it.

    I think it was the architecture of the fantasy.

    Surrender. Punishment. Explicitness. Pain. Being overwhelmed. Having the feral thing inside you finally given somewhere to go.

    I know that fantasy.

    I know unfulfilled passion; I know the weight of blocked desire.

    And there was something shocking about encountering it here, written so plainly, and realizing that I didn’t have the luxury of standing safely outside Erika and thinking, How strange she is.

    No.

    I was in it.

    This is when Nabokov flashed through my body.

    And yes, it’s time to project. 

    Because what happens when desire has nowhere to go?

    I don’t mean Erika’s particular desire. I mean desire itself. What happens when something physical and insistent exists inside you with no outlet to become real?

    Does it disappear?

    Obviously not.

    It gets managed. It gets watched. It gets turned into fantasy. It gets made private enough to survive.

    Her entire relationship with her body feels like a negotiation she has been conducting for years, and she never quite gets the terms right.

    She wants to feel.

    She also wants to control what feeling means.

    She wants to be touched and cannot tolerate being truly known. She wants to surrender and needs to script the conditions of surrender. She wants to be seen and spends so much of her life watching from a distance.

    I kept thinking about how exhausting that must be. Well, I know how exhausting that is. 

    To be a the person who has to contain yourself.

    What the actual fuck is happening between Erika and her mother?

    I don’t even know what to call it. 

    It’s almost horror, maybe horror-adjacent. Love, possession, dependence, resentment, surveillance. These have become so entangled there is almost no clean distinction between caring for someone and controlling them. And so much need has accumulated that it all becomes physical and sexual; it even moves into identity.

    Because Erika cannot get outside her mother’s gaze. And yet she can’t seem to exist without it either.

    That scene made me feel physically uncomfortable in a way that had very little to do with the obvious transgression. It was the density of it. The feeling of two people who have been living inside the same emotional space for so long that neither of them seems to know where one person ends.

    And then I came back to the body.

    “Her body is one big refrigerator,
    where Art is well stored.”

    Because that is what I let Jelinek keep doing to me. 

    Even when Erika is thinking, she is bodily.

    Even when she is watching someone else, she is bodily.

    Even when she is fantasizing, she is bodily.

    Even when she is numb, she is bodily.

    I couldn’t get away from it.

    And I started thinking about pain.

    Pain as punishment. But also pain as evidence.

    There is something terrifying about feeling so far away from yourself that sensation becomes evidence you’re still there.

    I don’t know. I just can’t leave pain and the body alone these days.

    Maybe because pain is so immediate. So physical. So difficult to intellectualize.

    Then Jelinek gives Erika the thing she has imagined.

    And it doesn’t work.

    Klemmer beats her.

    He rapes her.

    And Erika feels nothing.

    Nothing.

    Because the fantasy was never simply about violence. It contained agency. She had imagined the conditions. She had written the language. She had decided what would happen to her.

    She creates a language for what she wants. Then reality takes that language and weaponizes it against her.

    So her fantasy is not fulfilled.

    It is annihilated.

    And afterward there is no catharsis. No sexual awakening.

    Nothing.

    A body that was supposed to finally feel something goes numb.

    I lost my footing.

    Was her fantasy about pain?

    Was it about surrender?

    Was it about being wanted badly enough to be overwhelmed?

    Was it simply about feeling something?

    I don’t know.

    Who fucking knows. 

    I don’t really want to try to answer those questions. If I do, I feel like I’ve made Erika manageable.

    And she isn’t.

    That is one of the things Jelinek does so viciously. Again, she won’t let me put Erika somewhere comfortable.

    I think about my own body a lot. About desire. About what it’s like to have things inside that don’t have anywhere to go. About managing myself into being acceptable, even worthy, intelligible, contained.

    And about that feral part that doesn’t agree. Ever. 

    Okay. Sorry.

    We’ve gone somewhere weird again.

    But this is exactly why this digression doesn’t feel like a digression to me.

    The book made the body impossible to leave.

    Then comes the ending.

    Goddamn the ending.

    Erika stabs herself. And then she walks away.

    That’s it.

    No grand meaning imposed on the act. No beautiful literary redemption. No sudden psychological revelation.

    She hurts herself. And walks away.

    Brutal. A woman who spent the entire book trying, in one way or another, to get closer to sensation and release, reaches the end, injures herself, and simply keeps moving.

    This book left a disturbance in me.

    A horrible, pleasurable one.

    I took it willingly. Freely.

    Should I do something about that?

  • I surrender in words

    Back at the beach with Clarice.

    I underlined this entire passage almost immediately:

    Noticing. Reality. Not understanding.

    A sensation before thought.

    All things that challenge me and confuse me these days. 

    And it feels so connected to The Stranger I wrote about recently. 

    She’s exploring how much of consciousness happens before we have an explanation for it. Even before we have language for it.

    And on noticing:

    What we see.

    What we select.

    What we feel physically before we understand what it means.

    Clarice is so capable (or courageous) of staying inside an experience rather than explaining it. She’s comfortable here, maybe. I’m in such discomfort almost all of time.

    But am learning not to rush to understand.

    And as far as noticing, well, I notice too much. 

    I then turned the page and found this:

    “Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the instant.”

    Of course. Because she has impeccable timing. (Or could be because I’ve noticed I pick her up when life gifts me challenges.)

    I’ve been thinking so much about consciousness, about noticing, about the space between sensation and thought. And now she is talking about what happens when you stop fighting that space.

    She surrenders in words.

    Clarice, how do I just flow? I cannot crack the code. 

    I wish to surrender. 

    Wishes. 

  • Come for the Camus, stay for the existential digressions

    Meeting a Consciousness

    No notes on existentialism or absurdism. This is not Camus is brilliant or here’s what the book means. It’s not even Meursault’s resistance to the performance of the social arena. (Yes, even I’m surprised by my lack of interest in the latter, given my increasingly obsessive hatred for the performative out there.)

    I spent the first forty-five pages of The Stranger waiting for Meursault to become emotionally available to me. It wasn’t out of sympathy that I wanted this, or even because I needed to find a way into his heart and mind so I could connect with him as a character. I just wanted him to be… available. To give me something to work with. We couldn’t quite get there.

    What was available from Meursault was what he noticed. He kept telling me about:

    The weather.

    A meal.

    The light.

    A cigarette.

    A woman’s laughter.

    The sound of someone’s voice.

    The heat. (Always the heat.)

    Physical things. Sensation.

    At first, I mistook this for some kind of detachment. I felt quite detached from him myself. Maybe it was absence. Whatever it was, I went straight to wondering what had happened to him. My curiosity can be almost annoyingly persistent when I encounter someone who behaves in a way I can’t immediately place, on or off the page. And this man seemed only to feel ‘alive’ when there was something physical happening. Sensory, even painful. I started looking for the information underneath it. What happened? Where did this come from? What am I missing?

    Surely there had to be an origin story. Some wound. Some psychological key that would unlock the distance from which he narrated the world.

    But then something happened that interested me far more than whatever answer Camus may or may not have intended here. I noticed a clear shift in myself. From wondering what he was about, to wondering why was I trying to understand him so much, (default wiring I guess that gets me in trouble sometimes), to attending to his consciousness and what it was doing.

    As always, that distinction matters to me.

    A year ago I wanted to know whether I was understanding a novel correctly. Now I’m desperate to know what it is like to inhabit another consciousness for two hundred pages.

    I don’t want to become that person.

    I want to know how a mind organizes reality.

    Kafka’s K. tried to impose order on a world that continually refused him in The Trial. Yozo, in No Longer Human, seemed to perform consciousness, always aware of the gap between himself and everyone around him, forever trying to disguise it.

    Meursault does something else entirely.

    He notices. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, he tells us what he notices.

    That became the question I couldn’t shake. Not even close. And yes, we’re going to project now, an obsession I excel at.

    “I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”

    Every first-person narrator is selecting.

    Not lying, necessarily.

    Selecting.

    Every sentence shared brings something into the frame and leaves something else outside it. And I think that selection becomes part of the reality we experience. What is noticed. What is described. What never enters the frame at all.

    Meursault wasn’t intentionally withholding something from me (I don’t think). He was giving me his field of attention. The heat. The light. The cigarette. The body. The sound of his own voice. This was the world available to me.

    That made me think about how I understand other people. I’m always working with what has been selected for me. Sometimes I’m trying to understand someone’s reality; sometimes I’m trying to understand the reality between us. Either way, I’m assembling some kind of working version of the whole from the pieces I’ve been given. All for the sake of understanding the position I occupy inside said reality, whether I’m reading a narrator or sitting across from another person.

    It’s never the whole thing. I know that.

    But I still have to live somewhere in the meantime.

    And that can be tough.

    So I select. I interpret. I make a provisional draft of reality and carry on as though, at some point, I’ll have enough information to revise it and land a final.

    Which, of course, is probably bullshit.

    Because when do we ever get the final version?

    If you’re still reading, you’re welcome for that existential digression.

    By the second half of the novel, I realized I was no longer really studying Meursault. I was studying the act of narration itself. I had become increasingly interested in the choices being made on the page. Why this detail? Why this moment? What is he unable to see? And, perhaps more interestingly, what does he see that everyone else seems to miss?

    That is part of why the trial fascinated me. Everyone in that courtroom seemed to be constructing a different version of the same man. The prosecution selected one set of facts. Meursault had given us another. Everyone was arranging the available evidence into some version of reality that made sense to them. None of those versions felt complete to me, and I’m not sure any version ever really is. We are all selecting, all the time, and then living inside what we have selected.

    I’ve been carrying this line with me for months, you’ve seen it in my posts: I want to meet a consciousness. Not just a character, but a consciousness. There is a difference to me. A character can serve a plot; a consciousness lets me experience a way of organizing reality that isn’t my own. That is one of the things I increasingly want from books. I don’t necessarily need to like the person I am spending two hundred pages with. I don’t even need to agree with them. Sometimes I don’t particularly want to understand them. I want to know what it feels like to stand inside their particular way of noticing (and selecting) things for a while.

    Meursault gave me that in his attention to physical sensation: the heat, the light, the body, pain. There were moments when I found myself responding to that physical immediacy in a way that had very little to do with Camus and quite a lot to do with my own experience. I’ve known conversations where the body becomes the last undeniable place of certainty, where a physical feeling can be easier to locate than an emotional one, especially when everything else feels murky. Meursault didn’t explain any of this to me. Nothing in the novel told me to make that connection. I just found myself there.

    This is one of the things I value most in literature. The author doesn’t have to hand me the connection. Sometimes it is enough for it to create the conditions in which my own mind makes one. In fact, to be clear and one hundred percent contradictory, for the love/hate relationship I have with ambiguity, when it comes to books, don’t interpret, don’t connect, don’t explain, but suspend me in some liminal space and let me enjoy my mental free fall.

    Wow, extra points for two digressions.

    So I find myself less interested now in asking whether Meursault is alienated, or whether he is absurd, or even whether his resistance to the social performance around him is somehow admirable. I’m more interested in what happens when an interior life and a social world seem to be speaking entirely different languages. The court wants to know what kind of person Meursault is. It wants to organize him into something legible, something that can be judged. And yet what I had spent the novel experiencing was something much stranger: a mind that simply kept registering the world in its own particular way, even when everyone around it was demanding a different explanation.

    That question has followed me through a lot of the books I’ve loved this year. I’ve already mentioned my delight in the minds of Kafka and Dazai. Nabokov takes consciousness somewhere far more dangerous and Dostoevsky seems almost incapable of letting anyone settle.

    And now Camus has left me with my own version of it.

    I used to ask, What kind of person is this?

    I think I’m increasingly asking, What kind of consciousness is this?

    And then, inevitably, the question turns back toward me.

    What happened to mine while I was here?