Tag: Annie Ernaux

Driving to pick Leo up from doggy daycare, listening to a conversation on the CBC with a playwright turned director. His latest movie is winning some prestigious award. As I’m turning into the strip mall where the daycare is the program plays a clip from the previous year’s New Yorker Festival: “When you sit down to write something,” a man’s voice says, a new man. “How do you know if it’s a movie or a play?” 

“If it has four characters, and it’s set indoors, it’s a play,” the director replies. And then, after a pause, “—If it doesn’t have any donkeys or dogs.”

His response seems so logistical that the crowd bursts out laughing, surprised at how obvious an answer to this great man’s creative process could be. Or maybe they thought he was really joking, which could also be the case. I’ve seen plays with dogs and movies set indoors, but something in the way he says it makes me believe him. Or maybe it’s that I want to believe him, that somebody has found such pragmatic solutions for their art. 

As a curtesy I always wait outside the glass door, knowing the sound of me opening it will send all the dogs barking. Eventually the woman who runs the daycare sees me and smiles, then goes to get Leo. I love watching them return. Leo sitting at each door, obeying her, following her command cues, her body language, which is so different from mine but still he knows it. He always looks like such a puppy to me in these moments. As I unclip the daycare leash, scratching behind his ears, noticing how matted his coat is with the other dogs’ slobber, she gives me the routine summary of the day—who he played with, how he should be tired tonight after all the play-play. I get the impression the other dogs are finding him annoying—again, he was too busy during the 8 hours to take a nap, playing with one dog until they got tired then moving on to the next, cycling through the entire daycare this way. The staff has told me he’s hilarious to watch, but I know it’s a lot. 

“Bye-bye baby Leo!” 

“Bye-bye!” My voice is little and squeaky, baby Leo saying bye to the nice lady, on his way to the grassy patch by the dumpsters before the drive home, since he won’t do his business at daycare. 

The entire drive home I’m thinking about space, its narrative potential and its implicit narrative; the spaces we find ourselves in and the ones we create. I figure since we’re driving and there’s a dog in the back seat that this would be a movie, not a play, but it would be the slow atmospheric kind, the kind that rarely wins awards or makes money. The ‘empty scenes’ in Chantel Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, where Delphine Seyrig leaves the camera’s steady frame to open the refrigerator or to check the time, giving her actions a reality outside the eye of the film, and the way this manipulation of space gives Seyrig’s actions a true-to-life pace. Sometimes there’s sound to indicate what she’s doing, the muffled tones of a conversation or the shutting off of lights, but not always. The scene, of course, is never actually ‘empty,’ it’s just not occupied by what the viewer’s expectations may assume to be the central action, i.e. what the protagonist is doing. This is unintentionally happening all the time in books, where the action passes just outside the frame. Narration, or sometimes the thoughts that furnish a character’s interior space, occluding the window that looks onto the lives they have out there, in the world.  

Annie Ernaux’s narrator walking for hours through Florence, going into churches, to Santa Croce to see the partly erased frescoes—their fragmentation moving her, for in them she sees the gradual erasure of her memory and his, her lover’s, of her own fading story. “I couldn’t understand why people looked up the date and the history of each painting in their guidebook. Such things had nothing to do with their own lives. My approach to works of art was purely emotional.” 

I’m realizing my approach to the crystals and her approach to art are the exact same. Besides the feelings they rouse in me, I’ve never tried learning anything about them—their healing powers or what zodiac signs they’re meant to pair with. People always already knew this stuff from articles they’d read on the internet anyway. I mainly sweep the corners, dust display shelves, and in the window I engineer the crystals into colourful arrangements to collide with the heart. Standing outside looking in at my displays, I like to imagine the person who arranged them the way a passer-by might—glancing past the artifact to the process that made it be, what must be alive in a person to desire to dress a window with beauty, if anything. Outside, looking in at the coloured crystals and their beauty, I believe there is. But then when I’m back inside I’m not so sure. 

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February 27, 2023 Add Comment

I quit the essay on Sophie Tauber which I’d spent most of last year writing. The document had become too porous, too much about me—it read hesitantly, quite unsure of itself; I would feel sorry any time I looked at it, recognizing fits of passion and the long periods of demurral I experienced while writing. It seemed accidentally paced to the changing rhythms of my own interiority. But what troubled me most was an insecurity that had developed early on around what authority I had in respect to the artist’s work, what right I had to write about it, to have a voice, which was an insecurity about writing in general. This ballooned into a dominating presence, forcing the writing into the margins as my doubts inflated and the essay died.

On my desk, paper-clipped to a page photocopied from German writer Hugo Ball’s diary is one of my favourite Dada photographs. It’s of Sophie dancing at the opening of ZĂŒrich’s Gallerie Dada, circa 1917. A passage of the diary is highlighted: “The lines of her body break, every gesture decomposes into a hundred precise, angular, incisive movements.”   

Photograph of Sophie Tauber dancing at Zurich's Gallerie Dada, 1917. The background is black; her outfit appears to be a crafted Dada piece, with tinfoil, long tubular arms, and a large rectangular head with crown.
Sophie Tauber dancing at ZĂŒrich’s Gallerie Dada in 1917.

Yesterday, washing jars in the kitchen sink, the end of my sleeve caught some soapy dishwater which made my sweater feel weighted around the wrists, cumbersome, because of its sudden wetness.

How the smallest things send my lines askew. 

From the Sophie Tauber essay:

Fathers of dictation speak of muses visiting their desks in moments of inspiration, which is kind of like the cosmic flare that lights up on your phone screen any time you press your finger to the tender spot where the glass is cracked. Glow of ethereal aura, you write down.

There is a version in my mind of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories in which a single line is all that exists, among the 627 otherwise blank pages: 

I said your name so many times until the name changed into a name I liked more: Hermendargdo


T.S. Elliot wrote “you are the music while the music lasts” while tripping to Viagra Boys.

When did life become falling through an elevator shaft of open windows? When was this what you started asking for?

On the edge of beatific imminence, you write down. 

What was I even doing?

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Thinking about Annie Ernaux’s Passion Simple, the unnamed narrator’s compulsive doubting, the elation she knows can’t last but wants so bad to trust, to just feel, fully, without the dread of its loss. There’s tragedy in this—not so much in the affair, or even in the well-lamented caprice of love, but in the fear, which gets in the way of ever really experiencing it. “I would count the number of times we had made love. I felt that each time something new had been added to our relationship but that somehow this very accumulation of touching and pleasure would eventually draw us apart. We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.”

How the accumulation of touching and pleasure comes so close to the amassing of words. Each fragmented interaction pulling the reader closer, closer. I’m not surprised, reading a collection of letters sent in to Annie after the book’s publication while I’m waiting in the atrium for R—— to arrive from work, by the anxieties her readers experienced after finishing it. Worried whether the author drinks coffee or tea; whether she’s at the table now, or if an errand required her to leave the house early; perhaps she’s in traffic—would she whistle? What does she play on the radio? The reader feels they are owed something, a destination; the book: a passage through an artery of the author’s life. 

February 13, 2023 Add Comment