Whole lotta lovely nothin’
I finished an online creative writing course recently and in the first lesson our instructor posed the question: “If you were stuck in a room for three months would you still have something to write about?”. Skeptically, I wondered what the incarcerated must think. Your own time - stretched out like elastic and re-compressed into a six square metre block - a burden. A room as a suitcase, a capsule, has to be habitable and comfortable and useful if you are confined within it. What words need to be added or taken away to make a room transition to a cell? I think about having, or needing my phone, the portal to the internet, to the everything that’s “out there” while I’m “in here”. I think it bothers me that connectivity comes to mind foremost before a basic need such as a toilet. How would I wash and where? What would I eat and who would be feeding me? How to dispose of rubbish if and when I created any, given my active menstrual cycle. Our instructor went on to give us various assignments, for example, describing something in our bin without saying what it is, or, writing about a room through an object we take little notice of. They were enjoyable exercises of perspective, making us look more closely at the words we chose and what in turn was left out, our own writing process subverting the dialogue with ourselves, the writing itself a collecting exercise, examining boredom. Suddenly, there was a lot to write about, write of, write with, the mundane and monotonous was the juicy material I could drain from the everyday.
(spoilers alert)
Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples (Tramp Press 2022), is about nothing, really. Out of some recent novels I’ve read, it was an indulgence in the pleasurable grotesque of a plain situation and pragmatic storyline. The book is a 254 page prose poem, which might seem like a far fetched conclusion given my poor knowledge in poetry and prose in general. I’m warmed to it because of Baume’s delicious intimate breaths with the reader, as if it escaped her lips and softly brushed over my face. My eyes consumed the pages like secretly placing chocolate buttons under my tongue and letting them melt. I felt telescopically close to the character’s lives, I could have been wearing their dirty socks, petting their timid dogs and picking up their used earbuds to put in the bin - or maybe I wanted to, and Sarah obliged. (Being single for the first time in several years may be the culprit of these feelings). She pulls you closer to the text, manoeuvring the visible body of the text like scrabble tiles, leaving space for you to slot in between them and fill out the missing didactics. Visually each page becomes a kind of homemade map that leads the eye here and there, searching for tidbits and crumbs in the cracks of printed paper that lead you into places no one looks at.
Isobel and Simon are coupled in their shared desire to be forgotten by the world. Bell and Sigh for short; their names in either end of your mouth as isolated mute objects - I would find my mind wandering to the thought of a cast iron dong exhaling - a heavy after-silence. They pursue their reclusive dreams and move to a derelict bungalow in an unknown location which presumably is on the west coast of Ireland. The specifics of their new lives are either extremely vague or entirely left out yet their new world is an oil painting, slowly building in layers for us to watch unfold. For all the fiction being written currently, I am now automatically inclined to love a story about millennial Irish lives that DON’T exist in Dublin. The next several chapters are an observation of this unfurling fern of solitary life with the looming presence of a mountain that stares back at them from across the landscape. Every gap in a hedge, pothole on the road, or circular warp in nature signifies the interior blackness of a pupil; an eye that is watching. This mountain becomes the fulcrum of their story, without them being aware of it, at the beginning of each annual vignette, it is declared how it has still yet to be climbed by them.
This need to conquer nature, take command of our surroundings, and have ownership over what is more permanent than ourselves, is a mumbling symptom of the capitalist and neoliberal oppressive need for growth and power. Nature is the first victim of our human desires; that it belongs to us to overcome, control and benefit from. A friend on a residency I just did, came down the stairs one morning with her iPad in hand and was showing everyone the images of the queue up Mount Everest. The lack of travel access due to Covid had obviously delayed many aspirational idiots who are now setting out like hordes of tourists to reach the top. Bell and Sigh are not faced with Everest, in fact the mountain is never described as something more than a rather big hill, contrasted and probably accentuated by the surrounding flatness of everything else. There is no real determination expressed by the couple to want to conquer this ever present neighbour. Their life walks around it, becoming daily rituals that stratify into weekly rituals that then become their seasonally adaptive activities of dog walking, swimming, and gardening with every unremarkable revolution around the sun. Their life reminded me of how small lives are and how, even when they eventually gain ascension over their 8 years there by reaching the top of the many eyed mountain, they see how their life has amalgamated into one existence, together in one place that is part of something sublime in how ordinary it is. Right down to the last yoghurt pot that has escaped the recycling bin and is trapped in the grass beneath a barbed wire fence.
I don’t want to finish talking about this book by recommending the story, it’s not what you’re there for. The artist Cornelius Browne described in his own review of the book that it should be considered an anti-novel, which I agree with. If you are a lover of language or poetry; this is a chocolate eclair full of cream. Using my HB pencil I collected in underlines the many figures of speech and phrases I fell in love with, for their seamlessness in connecting the unconnected, creating images so clear I was staring through the window of Bell and Sigh’s bungalow like a voyeur. One aspect of their shared life is that we learn next to nothing about their actual relationship except for its origins; a small leaf of privacy in this highly intimate novel. I appreciate their appreciation of the mysteriousness of cows most of all.
Baume’s writing inspired me to start seriously consider writing as a visual artist. Although I had the seed planted long before by dabbling in art criticism, when I read her book Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither (2015) I was inclined to branch out further, seeing that even art criticism doesn’t need to be confined to the lousy language dictated in the pages of the VAI or other publications. That yes, a novel, can be a visual artwork, self aware in its own ekphrastic dialogue with the form, in the tidy shape of a consumable story. Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither was far darker and fiercely disturbing, but had Baume’s signature approach, revealing the mortality of magic - or the magic of mortality perhaps?
Recovery and Revision
August always marks the countdown to the end of the sun, technically in our climate calendar, it is the first month of Autumn. After the residency, I then became grievously ill and spent a week in my mother’s holiday home in France on a camp bed unable to eat or shit - I am still not 100% yet. Living on a diet of bottled water and crackers and spending the majority of my time horizontal or doubled over in pain, I had no inclination nor energy to read or write, not even to distract myself. I whiled away my gastric disturbances with blindly watching French daytime tv or death scrolling Instagram reels to numb my mind to the constant discomfort. I slithered down a wormhole of k-pop fan pages and beauty comparisons; all hideously toxic and completely addictive. I am now binge watching cheesy Netflix Korean dramas as a result while my insides continue to mock me every time I have a meal.
It’s given me a bit of time to think about this newsletter and the unnecessarily strict deadlines I’ve been setting myself because of it. Writing the guts of 2000 - 3000 words every two weeks, which involves huge amounts of editing and drafting, is a compelling and exciting project but is also symptomatic of my own perfectionism or imposter syndrome in being a writer. As of today I am still slightly unwell and struggling with my energy, with work commitments creeping up from all the things I have said yes to that I now must follow through on. I’ve decided I’m going to push this back to a once monthly thing, where I can give more time and consideration to what I write about. I am forcing myself to follow through on a promise I made to myself that I always feel I must fulfil for some internalised reason, which I am now only learning to address. I can slowly and surely allow myself to change my mind without the crushing weight of disappointment and shame cloaking my path.
I’m truly enjoying writing this newsletter and hope that it will only grow and mature with me as I continue. It helps me to inform other writing I am producing, or gives me the space to let out a lot of the cultural commentary I mull over that takes up a lot of space in my overloaded brain that never had an outlet before. It thrills me the most that people are actually reading it and I’m grateful for that acknowledgement, even more grateful when people express that they actually like it too.
I’d also like to say that if anyone has any suggestions for exhibitions, films or other things happening in Ireland that might be worth writing about please DM me on the Insta: @brownstudiofloor.