A Dyke A Broad #103 The Dawn Edition

In which you are suddenly on the outside of life staring in.

In Paris it’s still dark at six, six thirty, seven in the morning when the windows in the two nearly invisible towers across from me are beginning to light up, appearing as distant but imposing squares of yellow in front of my own bright window.

During the day, the giant cement rectangles dominate the horizon, blocking out enormous swathes of the sky. After dusk and before dawn, they are the sky, melting into it, and I’m entranced by the lights which disappear or appear one by one in the empty darkness of space. 

This morning I think of how each bright square means a hand has emerged tentatively from the bed covers to turn on the lamp, accompany its body into the kitchen and hold the kettle as it fills with water for coffee, or for tea. I think of all the life each yellow square contains. What courage it takes to turn on the light and face the day.

Sometimes it’s the sheer repetitiveness of it that overwhelms. My god, how many pieces of toast does one life require? How many dirty oatmeal bowls, how many tee shirts will need to be washed? How many bills paid? You are trapped in time. 

Sometimes, though, you are expelled from it. Like when you fall in love and giddily wander the city, creating a kind of weird stasis when the motion of your feet matches your racing heart. Though it also happens, for instance, when everyone you know is in the hospital. Or it feels like that. And you are suddenly on the outside of life staring in. Wondering at the sun which comes up like always, and how the world, under its eye, refuses to change, insists relentlessly on taking on the same watery grey form as yesterday. Those hills, those trees in the distance. The marigolds and squash in the strange garden crammed behind a square. The essence of the skillet remaining itself. Nothing pausing in its existence, nothing remaining blank as your brain as you refuse thought because remembering what was will push you to the verge of elegy, but anticipating the future will force you either into the camp of the stupidly hopeful or depressingly macabre.

I tried to write about it once, that moment out of time, when after sitting for hours at the bedside of a man gasping for breath at a hospice ward in the Bronx, I climbed onto a six train to return home, and gaped at how horribly bright and loud it was. And wondered why the shadow that I felt all around me didn’t mute by a decibel the students shouting at each other, the preacher ranting, the homeless guy muttering to himself. 

I couldn’t get it right. It’s almost impossible to recreate silence in the midst of sound just using words. It’s much easier to paint it. Rothko could have, if he wanted to, with his nearly monotone squares of blurry, graduated color that rest almost still in the frame.

Mark Rothko: Orange and Yellow 1956; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

Words, though, require motion, time, life. The act of reading drags you sideways or forward, like speech. Or sound. I remember standing on the roof of our East Village building watching the Twin Towers burn. Other neighbors were there, too, from nearby buildings. And one woman on the roof behind started screaming, signaling how shocked and afraid she was or should have been. But she just sounded tentative and fake. Like a bad actress auditioning for a disaster movie. Get the hook out. Next.

She should have just stared silently, stood silently staring for years like a dumb salt statue.

I took a course once from an anthology professor who specialized in the mourning practices in her small mountain region of Greece where women still ritually ripped into bits the silence imposed by death with the terror of their open mouths. Their eardrum-busting wails were codified, but nevertheless effective. As they should be. They’d practiced for millennia.

At the time, I wished I could apprentice with them. Learn to make some unmistakable gesture, sound, imagining that those open mouths surpassed in feeling the lips of my own relatives which pressed firmly against themselves to contain their emotions until the unexpressed thing would form a cold ball behind their teeth which they choked down with cold sweet tea, or coffee emerging scalding from a vending machine. Grief like love like joy buried deep as it would go.

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A couple weeks ago…

French writer Annie Ernaux won the Nobel prize for literature for her work blending fiction and memoir in something called autofiction by those who find the phrase autobiographical fiction insufficiently obscure, though all fiction betrays biography, and autobiography is, to a large extent, fiction, even when you get the facts lined up, and don’t embroider. Which is why, I think, it’s labelled nonfiction. Something not fiction. Not a made-up lie of a story. But also not the truth. Though not not the truth. In fact, it may be using elements of a life to search for it. Attempt to reveal it.

A couple of years ago when one interviewer asked Ernaux how she felt about writing now that she’d won the prestigious Marguerite Yourcenar prize given for a lifetime’s work, she started talking about prizes in general, and how the best thing about them was how they broadened your circle of readers. But that meant that she felt even more obligated than ever to push herself in her work. Her goal?

“To never again desire anything beyond using writing to give form to something which emerges both from the interior and exterior, from myself and from the world. Not to construct a being who is a writer, but dissolve a life in writing. That’s more or less how I would define my ideal, which is maybe less chosen than something that has chosen me, ripped out of what I was when I was young, by what it is handy to call a cultural divide, so that I experience writing as the endless fulfillment of a responsibility.”

Ne plus désirer rien d’autre que de donner forme par l’écriture à une matière surgie à la fois de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur, du moi et du monde. Ne pas construire un être d’écrivain mais dissoudre une vie dans l’écriture. C’est à peu près ainsi que je peux définir mon idéal, peut-être moins choisi qu’il ne m’a choisie, déchirée que j’ai été, tôt, par ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler la fracture culturelle, éprouvant ainsi l’écriture comme l’accomplissement sans fin d’un mandat. 

I wonder if any of her books are left at the library.

I hope so.

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