From my Instagram
Dear Reader
I am still on that long path I mentioned last newsletter, but no feeling lasts forever, and I find myself feeling a little lighter this month.
Light and warmth, I guess.
Winter was cold enough to be satisfying this year, and because of that I am genuinely looking forward to the warmer months. I have had my first sea swim of the new summer already, too. I had it in winter. This is the benefit of living in the subtropics. Our garden is full of flowers appearing and the sounds of birds that have come to eat them, as well as the return of the egg laying song from our hens. In another couple of months, it will be the sound of cicadas. How I love seasonal change.
Life is good enough.
This month’s newsletter is about love and not the big, heavy expression of it, but just the small moments. The hundreds of small moments of it.
Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away. - Frida Kahlo1.
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August
Barefoot
and sun-dazed,
I bite into this ripe peach
of a month,
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gathering children
into my arms
in all their sandy splendour,
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heaping
my table each night
with nothing
but corn and tomatoes.
- Linda Pastan’s August.
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Sex and Motherhood
Jan Steen’s Interior (1661-65) reminding us that mothers are also sexual people. The erotic life in the domestic space.
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The first kiss was memento mori
the first kiss was memento mori the second one aspiration
the third audition the fourth a posture
the fifth a neurosis the sixth was submarine mining
deep grottos of coral the seventh atavistic the eighth kiss
a czar from a serialized novel the ninth kiss was a lagoon
warm as piano the tenth kiss was a month of travel abroad
we got into the furred edge of the horizon
the house was empty for the eleventh we were alone and aligned
our shoulders tattooed with scratches the twelfth
a drawn-out molting a virtual hammock
your partnership the thirteenth
- OLD MARRIED by Carmen Giménez
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Love Your Partner by Learning to Take Better Photos of Her
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From My Notebook
I am staying at Edgecliff. It is so metaphorical. Right to the edge of the cliff.
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I went away for a few days for a holiday. My requirements were twofold. A view of the ocean. And, for once, nothing to be rushed in order for something else to begin.
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Beaches are one of the few places where Australians routinely meditate. Walking alone or staring out to sea and completely silent.
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Husband: How do you know Andie? Did you work together?
Him: I was her boss.. but it never felt like that.
(My husband laughs and nods).
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She has called father, and he has answered. They have concert tickets for the two of them.
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Spring nights in the subtropics are not for the insomniacs. The middle of the night can be as loud as the day with the sounds of flying foxes, brushtail possums (which land out of trees on to our tin roof, and then march back and forth across the roof, sounding like chubby, demonic toddlers), and the curlews coming up the road to call all your ghosts.
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The Wisdom of Other Parents
He’s actually Dutch, but my husband calls him The Dane. Sometimes he tells us about his theories of the world ending and sometimes he dispenses parenting advice.
When I last saw him, he told me about the time he had almost lost his adult child to the wrong kind of romantic relationship. His son had finally freed himself from something dangerously destructive and he had called his parents to pick him up. I could feel the relief, the breath held and finally released, as he told me the story.
The Dane said he told his son, “we are only taking what can fit in the car and then we are never setting foot in here again”.
Leave once.
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She is making a lot of scary mistakes as a mother. I don’t mean to sound judgemental, but I spend quite a few nights awake worrying about her teenage son.
I hadn’t expected such a beautiful turn of phrase from her. She said to me, “It’s both sad and joyous on occasion, I’m just glad he’s home safe”.
Sad and joyous on occasion.
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Recently, a friend told me how while her father had sexually abused her as a child, following his death, she had been able to find peace with him. In death, she had seen in him this tiny kernel of goodness, somehow separate to his failings in life. She had been able to believe others, too, when they said he had somehow recovered himself and had lived as a good man.
It was connected to this insight she had had about family and generations. About trauma and destruction, and what it is that is inherited.
Watching her try to explain it to me was like witnessing something holy. It was so far beyond me. I was moved to be allowed to be present for it. I burst hopelessly into tears.
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Transformation
“A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom.”
- Vivian Gornick
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The Unstoried Self
In many ways my occupation is to narrate. I research, analyse and write. But in many ways, you could describe my day job as that of providing narrative. It is crafting the story that holds the analysis and authorises the decision, and it is a very old and honourable profession in the organisation of communities. But, providing narrative is also a kind of manipulation. This brilliant essay asks what do we lose in creating narrative?
This is what the writer Lorrie Moore refers to as “unsayable life,” when “narrative causality” feels like “a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time.” It is what I have experienced from time to time, following the birth of a child, when I feel myself, for months on end, more place than person. That snarl of time, thought, and sensation—uncombed experience—is what theorists call “the unstoried self,” what Annie Ernaux calls “the pure immanence of a moment.”
It is easy to dismiss the cotton wool as inarticulate and unprocessed, instead of acknowledging that it may have an authority of its own. The ethical project of Ernaux’s memoirs forbids the telling to supplant the living. It rejects the old saws about memoir—about its potential for reconciliation or restitution. Her approach is marked by a recoil from narrative; she allows herself nothing “gripping” or “moving.” Excavation, not imposition, is her mode. “Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it,” she writes. “Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.” Her objective is not to record but to restore the past. “I am not trying to remember,” she writes. “I am trying to be inside. . . . To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after.”
The memoirist’s binocular vision lets the reader experience the story from two points of view: the writer as character in the moment and as narrator after the fact. The narrating self, very often the adult self—who shapes story out of raw hunks of observation and partial understanding—is typically privileged, congratulated for its discernment and given all the good lines. But that unstoried self understands a great deal in its commotion, in its inability to keep anything compartmentalized, and it loses something when experience is squeezed to release trickles of insight.
This is the best essay I have read this year. Have I said that already in a past newsletter? I am not going back to look, because that would be.. to succumb to narrative.
From Parul Sehgal’s “The Tyranny of the Tale: We’re told that story will set us free, but what if narrative frame is also a cage?” in The New Yorker2.
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I’m a Cunt of a Mother
“Like, in order to get my memoir published there had to be transformation within the narrative arc. I don’t think I’ve ever felt transformation in real life. Sustained transformation, that is. Maybe for five or ten minutes at a time I’ve felt “wow, things have changed” or “I’m enlightened” or “I’ve resolved this issue!” or “I LOVE life” or “god is love” or “I am such a good mother” or “I’ll never act that way again, now I see the light.” Then the issue comes back, I’m miserable again, I’m a cunt of a mother, and I’m doing exactly what I said I’ll never do again, and god is dead. Cue: hello darkness my old friend. Well, that’s the writing of the self, I guess, that’s what I’m interested in— the failures of selfhood. Coming up short in between small windows of insight”.
“Alexandra Auder on Feminist Triads, Mining the Failures of Selfhood, and Maggie Nelson Impersonation” by Marin Kosut in Chill Subs.
I have been putting off buying Auder’s book because I am punishing myself for not getting through the stack of books beside my bed faster, and besides, also waiting for it to come out of hard cover. But, after reading this interview I thought, enough, buy the bloody book. I am now awaiting its arrival.
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Quick, Make Roasted Cabbage While the Last of Winter is Here
Recipe
Cut your cabbage into wedge slices, as in my photo.
Brush them with a good amount of olive oil.
Make a glaze with soy sauce, ginger, sesame oil, maple syrup, sriracha, garlic, rice wine vinegar and miso paste. I don’t want to tell you what amounts with this, because half the fun is deciding what ratios you like in your sauce. But, make it a big batch and keep the majority of the glaze aside after you brush a little over the cabbages.
Roast the cabbages.
Stir the remaining glaze into tahini sauce and a little water to make a thick sauce. Whisk to combine.
Serve the cabbage with the sauce over it and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
You will make this because you are using up cabbages of the season, but it will be so delicious that it will be the highlight of your meal.
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I Want to See This Film
In this spirit of this month’s newsletter, it is a film with minimal narrative. Go see it, too, and we can talk about our thoughts on it.
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Three Recent Favourite Films
Corsage
I thought this was going to be about an unconventional young woman. But, it’s far more interesting. It’s an unconventional middle-aged woman! She’s so angry. And it is so visually beautiful.
Showing Up
So gentle and funny.
Aftersun
It is hard to know where to start with this one. I was out to dinner recently and when I mentioned this film it turned out one of my friends there had also seen it, and we both had this simultaneous reaction of pleasure to that discovery, because now we had someone to share our reactions with.
It is extraordinary. It’s two films, at once. On one hand it is a perfectly ordinary parent and child holiday where nothing much happens. On the other, it is the story of being the child of a parent with depression.
And because the child is close to adolescence, there is all this forecasting of the separation that is coming (oh, the letting go), but more difficult than that, is the separation that comes with reaching an age where a parent can no longer hide depression and the ruptures it causes from their child. What a film.
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Lovely
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Everything Unnerved Me
“Puerto Escondido was a fishing village and surfing spot, but I did neither. The waves were so unnerving that I didn’t even go into the ocean. Everything unnerved me. On the beach, young boys sold roasted iguanas to eat. On the land next to our hut, two horses grazed, often with enormous erections, while I lay in the hammock smoking Mexican cigarettes, trying not to look.
Before I arrived, we had written letters, mine attempting to be literary, sexy and romantic, sent to the general-delivery mail list in towns he would be passing through; his a travelogue of meals he’d eaten, markets he’d visited, people he’d met, sketches of birds and a wooden box he was carving. I’d scan his words in a rush, hoping for something that would make my heart pound, and was always disappointed. On one of his prearranged calls from a pay phone, he’d said, “I like your letters a lot, but I can’t talk that way.”
I didn’t talk that way myself; I was just trying to poke something out of him, some sign that I held him in some thrall”.
From Deborah Way’s “Putting All My Eggs in the Boyfriend Basket” in The New York Times.
This is a gorgeous, gorgeous essay about intimacy and its dual experiences with self and with the lover.
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Recommend Live Performance
God, if you live anywhere near New Mexico in the United States then you must get a ticket to see Anna Yarrow’s multimedia performance, The World Beautiful. I have been following the creation of Yarrow’s work3 for the last couple of years and it is extraordinary! The work is about friendship, the radical politics of caretaking, and making sense of the world, and it is based on conversations and hikes she and her ninety something year old friend shared. I would love to be seeing this one, in person.
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Finally
If only I could tell someone.
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
- Franz Wright.
What if we thought of that excruciating form of anxiety - that repetitive revisiting of past regrets that we do, often in the middle of the night - as an act of grace instead?
My favourite Friday Kahlo work is The Suicide of Dorothy Hale. What’s yours?
If you can’t access this one and desperately want to, let me know. I want you to read it, too.
We have been online friends for a very long time.
Deeply thoughtful as always
Such a joy to read
Wonderful as always Andie!