About, About, About

I’ve had a few egg yolks in a pint container in the fridge for about a week now. Every time I open the fridge for something that’s not an egg yolk, which is most of the time, I am plunged into existential despair over my gripless swings at time, how time just keeps going, absent of ice cream and lemon curd and brioche dough. Instead of embarking on any of my baking projects on my Sunday off, I went running and tried to come up with a subject. There were people lining up for candied peanuts and pushing sunglasses onto the tops of their heads when clouds dimmed the warm day. I was wearing shorts I’d cut out of pants and hoping I’d run into someone I knew to momentarily alleviate the antsy pent-up feeling under which I’d been pinned for the last week, if not forever. I felt unsure what the difference was between waiting for something to happen and distracting oneself in the meantime.

I knew that establishing a subject in the initial stages of writing something, especially for this newsletter, was not really how it worked—that writing was more a process of uncovering, or something like moving alongside or moving with, I think, more akin to a conversation than an argument, maybe even more a kind of following than leading or directing or marching towards a certain subject. Did this imply some sort of flimsiness within me? That I so rarely seemed to have a point to make, that I was so focused on the texture of thought that I lost track of what it was I was actually thinking? It reminded me of Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists, in which the married couple at the center of the novel drink coffee together, view apartments for sale, sit in the park with friends, and try to figure out how to become certain and solid, surely fastened to their lives. They buy paintings at the flea market and hang them up in their home: “We liked the paintings, yes, but we also liked what they might mean about us—people with real paintings on their walls.” The more I’m alive the more I realize that living is an aesthetic project—you just make yourself up.

Home and showered, I put on the blue sweater I inherited from my grandfather with the hole in the armpit that matched the hole in the armpit of the green raincoat I inherited from my grandmother and was momentarily overwhelmed by the ugliness of the world. In the pale color scheme of my living room where I was always forgetting to light a candle and leaving the cupboards open, I was a participant in the demise of beauty in the world. I wondered if beauty was contingent on confidence, as I had increasingly begun to believe morality was. Was beauty contingent on morality? It was a warm Sunday evening, vaguely overcast, a celebratory tinge to the pinkish long weekend air, and it was impossible to decide even whether or not I should go to a movie. On the one hand I didn’t want to spend $40 on a ticket and popcorn; on the other hand I didn’t want to sit alone at home and sulk, but nor did I want to sit at a bar where so-and-so worked or the other bar where whoever else worked and let the night unravel and call it an accident tomorrow. But maybe I should have a little fun, but did I want to have fun, and what were this particular brand of fun’s terms? I could not live an aesthetic life for I could not choose a form, or really anything else.

I read Patricia Lockwood’s story in The New Yorker and had it blissfully stuck in my head for a while, its cadence and humor, as though my days could be swept under the strange umbrella of Lockwood’s prose, which was both irreverent and shaped, held together. The next day I wandered into a bookstore and stood in the woody yellow light staring at the latest issue of Frieze for a while, trying to decide if charging $15 to my credit card for an art magazine aligned with the life I wanted to lead. She wanted to value beauty and curiosity over most other things, especially money, and she wanted to open the glossy magazine outside in the sun and underline descriptions of art that reminded her of other art, but she also valued the relief of reaching the end of the week without frantically moving money around various accounts so the subway turnstile wouldn’t reject her. She valued feeling in control of her life, but such a statement could be variously applied, and wasn’t it impossible anyway? I remembered writing down everything over the course of a few difficult weeks last summer as though it was happening to someone else—walking through little forests of people crossing the street, how often she’d perform the awkward dance of not choosing a side on which to pass a stranger and end up just kind of standing there in the middle of the crosswalk letting everyone else decide how to maneuver around her—the desperate, obsessive notes I took as though trying to affix meaning to all these gestures and hours I feared were utterly emptied of it.

In an interview about the New Yorker story, Lockwood says her recent writing is of a category all its own; the “all-genre,” she calls it. “You’re trying to see every facet of something at once. It’s about the task of trying to put the writing mind back together.” I’m interested in this sort of writing too (the “all-genre” is blogging??), this mode which is a thinking through and also a telling, a subject which strays and bends and mostly ends up being the writing itself or the self writing it.

A few days ago I went to see The Human Situation, a show featuring paintings by Marcia Marcus, Sylvia Sleigh, and Alice Neel at the Levy Gorvy Dayan gallery. It was a rainy day and I left my umbrella on the floor with a pile of others near the door. I love the silence of art and the way one’s interior becomes voluptuous and a little eerie in a museum or gallery, this feeling of somehow both closing in on oneself, becoming quiet, turning inward, while simultaneously looking outward, receiving and responding to external stimuli, opening up to a world beyond the self. Sleigh’s self-portraits where her husband appeared in the background seemed to me to contain a similar quality of multi-faceted looking; looking at herself looking at him looking at her or looking at herself looking at him looking away from her.

How much of the experience of art, for me, is actually responding to it in writing? I often think this while reading—that the experience of reading is incomplete without also writing. In the first issue of Astra Magazine, Kate Zambreno writes that “a writing closer to reading” is “closer to the writing I wish to do.” It’s not necessarily an attempt to write about it—to describe or critique or even process it—just to trace the experience in some way. In a conversation between Maggie Nelson and Tala Madani on FUSE: A BOMB Podcast, Madani says that so often people assume you must understand certain historical contexts in order to properly appreciate art: “Because we’ve put the artwork in an administrative channel, we’ve lost connection with the actual object.” I’m less interested in writing about art (or about anything) than I am in writing about these connections, these conversations, the uncanny layered overwhelm of life’s incongruous loose ends. I shared the elevator with a cute guy on the way out, and as I opened my umbrella and began walking without any sense of where I was going, I regrettably began planning our future together.

I’m always rearranging my notes or trying to find new ways to organize them—notes for poems, to do lists, notes arranged by month, by week, notes for the blog, quotes from podcasts, quotes from books. But then I always find I like best a lack of organization. I think of The Golden Notebook and the separate notebooks the narrator keeps for different subjects or stories or genres in an attempt to keep various conflicting narratives contained within their specific and individual shapes, as though this could stave off madness, keep everything from “cracking up.” I tried buying several little notebooks; one for my to-do lists, one for my reading notes, one for my journaling, but everything was always bleeding together and I could never figure out how to properly categorize all the thoughts in my head, each one belonged to every category or none of them. I like Bernadette Mayer’s idea of time as an organizing constraint: “the day like the dream has everything in it.”

“For years, I had thought that to write you needed, at the very least, to master your subject,” writes Natalie Leger in Exposition, a book-length essay about, among other things (aboutness itself, for one), the Countess of Castiglione who was the most photographed woman in the world in the mid-1800s. “Many reviewers, famous writers, and critics have said that to write you have to know what you want to say. They repeat, hammering it home: you have to have something to say, about the world, about existence, about, about, about. I didn’t know then that the subject is precisely what masters you. Or that the littlest thing could swallow you up.”

But of course life is shapeless and any form into which we make ourselves is invention. I had been thinking about making yourself up as though it was a definitive choice, an either/or; as though to impart a form on something (a self, a life) would be to sever it from all the other possible forms. Wrong! As Lyn Hejinian writes in “The Rejection of Closure,” “It is form that provides an opening. … Form is not a fixture but an activity.” I ended up walking home after running errands that day instead of going to the movie. I was wearing a blue sweater and I pulled the sleeves up to my elbows while crossing 4th Avenue near the industrial buildings hiding strips of the pale sky near the Gowanus Canal. The dirtied yellow awning of the 99 cent store and how I tried in vain to find something funny in the words printed there: Gift, Toy, Hardware, Houseware.