(What follows was inspired by and is in dialogue with Anne Carson’s enigmatic story 1=1, available on The New Yorker website. All indented quotations are from that source).
A calm winter sunrise and a high tide. A good morning for a swim. I check the Surfers Against Sewage app. There’s been a sewage spill at Camber Sands. Again. I clamber across the dunes and walk on the beach instead.
Despite the calm, the sea is churning restlessly. A swim would have been challenging.
People think swimming is carefree and effortless. A bath! In fact, it is full of anxieties. Every water has its own rules and offering. … Every water has a right place to be, but that place is in motion. You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you.
Sometimes a walk on the beach offers words that ask to be written. I find them or they find me. Other times, the words elude my restless quest. Swimming is not about that. It resists the captivity of writing.
There is no renunciation in this (cf. meditation), no striving to detach all these things, all the things you can name, being simply gone. Meaning, gone.
But today, there is sewage in the sea, so I am walking not swimming and there is no rest from the restlessness. My mind prowls, looking for pastimes to pass the time as I walk. The quest for distractions that offer brief respite from the quest.
she walks to the lake, listening to Bach, the first clavichord exercise, which she plans to have played at her funeral some day.
There’s comfort in discovering that I’m not the only person who plans her own funeral. I’d like Dido’s Lament, but I worry in case it’s too self-centred, too attention-seeking. Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate. When I taught a first-year university course on “Personhood and Ethics”, I used to ask my students to write their own epitaphs. I doubt if I’d get away with that today.
They should be singing hymns at my funeral, but people are so busy talking about God these days. I’m dumbstruck. Shhhh. Can we not say that word for a little while? It doesn’t mean what it says. It doesn’t mean any thing.
Remember me, but what for? I would take Bach’s Liebster Gott to a desert island and dance to it on the beach at the end of every day, but you have to be remembered for something significant to be invited to take part in Desert Island Discs. Maybe they can play that at my funeral. Not the dirge-like passages. The chorus. This. The words are suitably funerary, though by then the question will have been answered. Dearest God, when shall I die? The forbidden word breaks free. Full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing. No thing. The signifier without signified. (Lacan, probably)
I could simply saunter to pass the time. That word comes from sainte terre. To walk on holy ground. The squelch of the seaweed, the spongy yielding of the sand, the crunch of the shells beneath my feet. Holy ground. According to Wiktionary, “In Walking, Henry David Thoreau derives it from Sainte Terre (“holy land”) or sans terre (“without land”); these are dismissed as far-fetched.” By whom? If we reach for meaning, should we not stretch far in order to fetch back words from the edges of meaning? Poetic language is always far-fetched. Fetched from afar.
Sans terre. A friend recently described me as a gypsy, then apologised. She thought I’d be offended, but she had given me a gift. Words are the greatest gifts when they’re the right fit. She gave me a well-fitting word. A word that is fitting. Marianne Faithful and Nick Cave collaborated on “The Gypsy Faerie Queen”, one of the tracks on her album Negative Capability.
I follow, follow, follow
The gypsy faerie queen
We exist, exist, exist
In the country in-between.
I exist in that in-between country. Postcolonial. Postbrexit. Postmodern. Postmenopausal. Post restante. “Poste Restante is a service designed for travellers who don’t have a permanent address in the location where they wish to receive mail,” explains the Royal Mail website. I am sans terre. Without land. My postcolonial soul refuses to settle. To be grounded. To land. To feel at home.
I used to belong to an evangelical group called Homemakers.
She is one of the most selfish people she has ever known, she thinks about this while swimming and after, on the beach, in her towel, shivering. It is an aspect of personality, hard to change.
For a woman to achieve anything other than homemaking, she must become selfish. She must learn to swim in the cold complicit sea, and to shiver in her own cold company. To stay afloat she must resist the irresistible riptide of maternal love dragging her down to the watery depths. I am one of the most selfish people I have ever known because I write, and my writing is an act of solitude and resistance.
no interaction with another person ever brought her a bolt of pure aliveness like entering the water on a still morning with the world empty in every direction to the sky.
The beach is sainte terre. Holy ground. Liminal. Neither land nor sea. Shifting. Restless. Resisting the fixity of form. A nowhere that is somewhere to saunter. Commune with the waves. Play with the incoming tide. Watch the little birds that scuttle along the water’s edge.
I could listen to music to pass the time. The genius that gathers together the rhythm of the waves, the cry of the gulls, the whisper of a breeze among the dunes, and orders them into a symphony.
Perhaps involved is that commonplace struggle to know beauty, to know beauty exactly, to put oneself right in its path …
I could find a poetry podcast. Listen to the latest Italian lesson. Do what I tell myself I like to do best, which is to do nothing. Be silent enough for words to come. Put myself right in their path. Let the world speak to me until it speaks through me. Shape the oceanic roaring of the void with language that makes it bearable if not meaningful. Language that keeps us afloat lest we drown in that roar rising from the other side of silence.
Sometimes, often, the void swallows the words before they can form. Sometimes, often, it scatters the words too fast to catch, so that I return home empty-headed. The yearning to write deprived of its object of desire, as yearning always is. (Lacan again, who was never short of words to say what cannot be said. Like the apophatic mystics.)
I put on my Musicozy. It’s a soft headband with built-in earphones, my comforter on long walks and long restless nights when dreams and soundtracks wind around each other and produce strange effects. The Desert Island Discs archive spools through my semi-sleep and lures me into other voices, other selves, lives swelling and shrinking on the tideline of consciousness.
I check The New Yorker Fiction podcast, and find Teju Cole reading Anne Carson’s “1=1”. A strange composition of language that resists definition by genre. Resists conformity. Resists every thing. I listen as I saunter. Carson’s writing is far-fetched. Fetched from afar.
Water is as different from air as from stones, and you must find your way through its structures, its ancientness, the history of an entity without response to you and yet complicit in your obstinate intrusion.
It’s not a story. It’s not about anything. It stubbornly resists the futile attempts of Cole and Deborah Treisman to discuss its possible meanings. Words breaking on the shore and receding, vanishing before we can see the shapes they make. Yearning makes us persistent. We fervently hope that one day, these obstinate intrusions into the ancient mystery of language will yield a response.
1=1. There is no such thing as society. Well, no. Like God, society is not a thing. It’s a no thing. In order for it to exist we have to believe in it. We make society. We make homes. We make God. We make love. We are made by society. We are made by our homes. We are made by God. We are made by love. We are made in the making of love.
There is a strange non-presence in this 1=1 narrative that’s neither a poem nor a story, a mysterious character called Chandler who does chalk drawings on pavements and saw mushrooms through a prison window.
Cole and Treisman speculate about who Chandler might be. Self-deprecatingly, they acknowledge that they could ask questions about race and status, loading his identity “with our own conventional American prejudices”, which in resisting they also yield to. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one ought to be silent. “Silence from Chandler”, writes Carson, or observes the narrator. Which? Author. Narrator. Self. Other. Language saunters between the two.
You hardly ever see Chandler enter a room, he’s just there, or leave a room, he seeps away, small tide of person, noticed as a retraction.
I think Chandler would be a version of the not-God who is my God, if it had been me and not Carson writing this not-a-story not-a-poem. The artist who chalks living forms on pavements. Breathing life into them. Communicating silence. Source of creativity’s infinite possibilities beyond the capture of language.
Cole says of the narrator that “Chandler saves her somewhat from solipsism”, but “he’s also saved by her, because he has a witness”. Yes, agrees Treisman, “She cannot do anything about refugees, but she can show kindness or understanding to this one person.”
The swimming narrator thinks of refugees. Of “souls in despair” locked in crowded trains.
Across the level ocean of her mind come floating certain refugees in a makeshift plastic boat so crowded with passengers they are stacked in layers and dropping over the sides.
What a conceit to call myself sans terre. The water that is complicit in my self-absorbed swims resists my protests, refuses to ask for absolution, even as it sinks the small boats and swallows the bodies of those who are sans terre. The watery people who dissolve into silence, and will not let us rest. Those who are unmade by society’s rejection, God’s refusal, love’s resistance. Those whose homes have been unmade.
But we can show kindness to one another. That echoes a conversation I had with a beloved friend last week. We must commit ourselves to small acts of kindness, because we are impotent to stop these tides of darkness rising all around, in “our heartbroken little era” (Carson). Still, my friend doesn’t want to believe me when I say I am the most selfish person I know, for what then might happen to our history of care for one another, for spouses and children, for refugees and homeless people? But never for ourselves—or not that we would admit. Self-care. I don’t care much for myself. But then, I don’t care much for selfish people. And especially not those who are into self-care. Though I do like a deep hot bath after a cold winter swim.
I remember a priest saying that society is about multiplication, not addition. If one person counts for zero, then that person has no impact on a society produced by addition, but by multiplication, the zero person makes society zero. A refugee drowning unnamed and uncounted in the ocean makes a zero of us all. That’s the real meaning of this zero sum game we’re playing, if we use multiplication and division instead of addition and subtraction.
Cole seems reluctant to agree that the act of witnessing is an expression of kindness. It’s about really looking at the fox Chandler has drawn, the pears he has drawn, and understanding that “that is a gift to her”: “There is something in the world that says pay attention, and your role is to show up and pay attention.”
Ah yes. That is after all better than kindness. To show up and pay attention. If we did that, would we discover what it means to live in peace amidst the yearning? Simone Weil tells us that it is only in attentiveness to the abjected one, the zero person, the tortured body of the crucified, that we might discover how to look truthfully at the world.
The narrator looks at the fox, glowing under a streetlamp.
It has clearness, wetness, coolness, the deep-lit self-immersedness of water. You made a lake, she says turning to him, but he is gone, now it is night, off to wherever he goes when he is absolved.
I wonder if we can absolve God. Let him go off to wherever he goes when he’s had enough of us. Back into silence. Back into no thingness.
Anne Carson is writing about swimming. And selfishness. And refugees in small boats or crowded trains. But she’s not writing about any of those things, because these are not things. They are the no things, the undercurrents that tug at us and resist our explanations. Our excuses. Our exhalations. Our requests, in these quests of ours to stretch language out to the far side, to fetch something back of meaning beyond explaining. Her words drift down through the watery depths. Playing on the strings of my soul in search of the lost chord.
Imagine how many pools, ponds, lakes, bays, streams, stretches of swimmable shore there are in the world right now, probably half of them empty of swimmers, bvy reason of night or negligence. Empty, still, perfect. What a waste, what an extravagance—why not make oneself accountable to that? Why not swim in all of them?
Pay attention. The morning offers up its silent gifts. A shell reflecting the morning sun. A little bird chasing the waves. A plank of wood sculpted by the tides. Pay attention. A wave sweeps up higher than the rest and spills over the top of my boots. You made a world, I say. A beautiful world. But he is gone, without waiting for absolution. I yearn.
The sea looks innocent. There are no signs of sewage. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go swimming.
Astonishing! Thankyou Tina for dancing and swimming with words and ideas into the heart of all who read you x