Just like an echo is a mirror of sound, February is a mirror of November. Lead-sky, writes Jan Zwicky in the Wittgenstein Elegies, as though God coloured the light with a pencil. And Anne Sexton: I have died once before in November.
In a dream writing workshop, I try to find a balance between immediacy and refinement. First I write the dream, then the prose poem, the dream, the poem. Like this I edit down my subconscious into a series of images and feelings. Iron belted tampons left on a shelf, the distorted appearance of legs through water, a fork in a river. Its so abstract. Someone dreams that they need a new mirror and we talk about this for an hour.
Later I dream about amputated bodies. A scalp grafted with honey comb and bones without skin. I’m apprehensive to bring these dreams to the workshop at risk of revealing how vulnerable I feel. Winter does this; kills the spirit with its dull light. I lay on my back reading about utopia, drifting off to poppy sleeps, arnica salve, hemp oil on the tongue.
Writing is a process of consumption and expulsion. Chew, swallow, digest, expel. For some writers, hunger induces a flow state and increases the urgency of tone. Other writers need to be fed, slept, and sexed in order just to think. Controlling the intake of the body is a form of controlling what is expelled.
My friend Libby and I speak often about our writing practice by way of routine. What time do you get up, what are you eating and when, how many coffees are you having, who are you reading, where are you walking, when was your period, are you meditating? We have, without speaking it, agreed that these aspects of our lives are just as important as the content of our writing.
A creative practice requires reigning in disorder through form, and thus reigning in the self can symptomatically follow. I think particularly of memoirists and auto-biographical writers, or any artist making work about their life: To excavate your life for art requires a certain discomfort that is easier to withstand when you control your body. There must be a limit to how much of yourself you give away. For writers who choose hunger or abstinence or hermitude, physical discipline creates that limit by abnegating some aspect of the self.
Like many women artists, Moyra Davey has fuelled her practice with unruly eating habits. In her essay Walking with Nandita (2017), Davey examines hunger as an appetite for creation, and considers writers who satiate their hunger with words. Among them, Virginia Woolf, whose anorexia was subdued with periods of forced binge eating during which she refused to read or write. Chantal Ackerman, who spoon-fed herself a bag of sugar to complete long stints of letter writing in the film Je / Tu / Il / Elle (1975). And more dangerously, women writers who equate starvation to thinness, and thinness to good writing. Alison Strayer: “to write, driven by inspiration, you have to be thin and fleet, and to be thin and fleet you have to write, driven by inspiration. A conundrum.” This, Davey notes, a more contemporary twist on Alejandra Pizarnik’s dilemma, “To not eat I must be happy. And I cannot be happy if I am fat.”
Adrian Piper’s Food for the spirit (1971), is similarly driven by deprivation of the physical body to reach a transcendental state. For the photographic performance, Piper read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and followed a strict routine of meditating and fasting. She photographed herself whenever she felt invisible. Piper exchanged food for language, receding further into the domestic sphere as she starved.
What strikes me about these works is the ambivalence towards the implication of starvation, both for women and for artists in general. Rather than question the cultural illogic that drives women to starve, or question the economy that keeps artists poor, these works instead aestheticize starvation. Can disordered eating be a ritual for creative fulfillment, or is the disorder symptomatic of anxiety and the desire to be thin? What about this: thinness is not a marker of goodness, and self-negation may not always be generative? Why are women giving up love, food, sex, or public life, in order to write?
The most turned on I’ve been while reading was last year when Annie Ernaux won the Nobel prize. I read Getting Lost (2001), a story that chronicles the French author’s adulterous encounters with a Russian diplomat during the Cold War. The story had previously been published as a work of fiction under a different name. Ernaux then published her diaries chronicling the affair, noting that the candid tone better conveys the urgency of her encounters. Urgent, yes, feverish and sadistic, Getting Lost portrays a woman relying on beautiful clothes, rough sex, and her diary, to survive.
Especially sexy were the passages in which Ernaux describes how thin she had become in her middle-age. Idle between encounters with the Russian, Ernaux bought herself lingerie, pencil skirts, silk slips, a sartorial closet waiting to be torn off. She devoured her image in the mirror, seeming to seduce herself with her own fantasies. It is Ernaux’s ability to witness her eroticism that is so seductive; her fascination with herself—her vanity—is moving.
Guilty of my own ambivalence, here I am, unable to forgo my own stake in the intoxicating qualities of womanhood. This much I know: Language always comes back to the body. The tongue presses on the lips, the fingers, stained with ink, grip onto consciousness, which wrestles the angel of meaning. The body writes a whole letter in this way. Words, hunger, flesh, are inextricably linked.
From Bluets: “Stop working against the world, I counselled myself. Love the one you’re with. Love the colour green. But I did not love the green nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it.” And: “I am writing this all down in blue ink.” And: “I admit I may have been lonely.” I read Maggie Nelson for the anal, not the philosophy. All the ekphratic sentimentalism between Wittgenstein and Sedgwick.
In a blue text message about the colour blue, I described the whales I saw from the kitchen window, and how the Salish sea looks on a clear day. There’s a thickness to that blue, like if you plunged your arm into the water, it would come out coated indigo. In that text, also: the sulphuric smell of hot springs and algae at the bottom of a creek. A mountain in the dark. The rotting femur that washed up on the shore one fall, a tangle of speckled skin still attached. A heron, a juniper berry, a cornflower. The india ink aging in my arm. Black, silver, grey, and purple, all shades of blue. And because opposites contain some part of each other, orange is also blue.
In art school, I failed colour theory. My mom said, Greta, how is that possible, don’t you just study blue? Well yes mom, and red, yellow, cyan, magenta, green, purple, grey, and brown. Colour theory is about math, not affect, even though its the affect of colour that resonates. Like, I don’t remember what Maggie Nelson said about anal in Bluets, but I know how it made me feel.
On the occasion of Living Another Year I present to you: An Archive of Greta Hamilton’s Past by greta hamilton by margaret (greta) hamilton. As my friend Clay always says: We will never be this young, we will never be this beautiful, and we will never be this happy again.
Manifesto for Masochists and Friends of Chronic Masturbators
Destroy all relics of your past self Manifest Plainness Never let anyone love you Never let anyone take your picture Never go home Eat so much at every meal that you can’t sleep Stay exactly where you are forever
Cilantro I pin a poem to my fridge between a receipt for tortillas and a New Yorker magnet. It says: Refried beans and guacamole on the porch. I’ve never been more depressed eating cilantro in my life.
Medieval Christian Recipe for Spaghetti
Saint Margaret was swallowed by a dragon with her sword in hand. After three days, she tore a hole through the dragon’s belly. This is an allegory for Jesus.
I make spaghetti. Suck the noodles one by one. When I’m finished, I watch my favourite porn, lesbian fucks brunette while boyfriend in other room. After twelve minutes, I fall asleep. This is an allegory for sex.
Saint Margaret wears the skin of the dragon. She wraps herself with flesh still heavy with blood. She may have been swallowed, but she turns that dragon inside out.
I make spaghetti sauce. A mouthful of beef, a pinch of salt, a mouthful of cream. It fills my belly like Jesus.
A non-exhaustive list of healing methods I’ve attempted
actually I didn’t appreciate the look of disgust I got at the hot yoga class from the guy with abs sitting next to me, because, yes, I know what I look like, I’ve been depressed my whole life. I spent the hour thinking about those photos of Lena Dunham on a run and whether I could afford a long-line sports bra. I can because I don’t pay rent at my boyfriend’s house. I pay off my credit card in full and think of the aisha sasha john line, “that’s right TD Visa.”
I ordered a bunch of perfume samples and all the descriptions are very detailed narratives about how the smell will make you feel. like a short story that is all setting, no plot. I read an interview with the perfumer where they describe the scents as “transcendental,” then they ad-lib imagery for each perfume and decide that “innocence is horny.” so the perfume induces a virgin fantasy?
I googled a woman whose husband I know. the reviews of her books were almost the same as the descriptions of the perfume—extremely sensual and specific. “The best stories are like translations of sensuality, as if sand or butter or seawater spoke a language not quite like ours.” also: “Whether they’re stepping into a warm bath recently abandoned by an elusive, imaginary lover, or stepping onto the pure whiteness of an isolated Mexican beach, the women in [this] fictional garden carry themselves forward in a glistening exquisite dance.”
in one of the stories a girl sprays perfume on the back of her knees to “leave a trail of scent.” when Sophia tried a fig leaf perfume I was wearing last winter, she said “it smells like my mom’s ancient Chanel,” which reminded me that, throughout my childhood, my dad saved up his drug store points all year to buy my mom No. 5. the relationship I have with my boyfriend is not Oedipal because the only points he can redeem are payed out in canadian tire money.
the smoke is gone after a long day of rain. my car was covered in ash and I couldn’t see the trees. I planted spinach in the garden then closed my eyes on the couch for several hours—what I can only imagine was my body shutting down to process the toxins. I felt helpless. W reminded me that there is nothing more important than planting a fall crop during a summer fire. We read the Richard Brautigan story with black soundless watermelon because the days were colourless and felt outside of time.
you brush where the words don’t work / you make the surface spiritual / knots of fisherman’s rope and forest / the surface is horse mane, linseed, baleen / you read moby dick and talk to me about the colour white for several hundred pages / I know about whales / I lived by the ocean where they sleep / got in the water and scraped my foot on barnacle / drank mottled blood / sewed up the mouth and heated the oil / after eight beers I forget where we are in the story / take you home and breathe on you until we pass out / paint because blindness of the mouth / pluck animal hair because the words don’t work
in a memory palace a plinth is like a hand / count on fingers to find where we are / in this architecture there is a memory of your painting / plunge through the surface to remember you / too many times I look away and forget
you do me and I like it / no shame in the wordless feeling / you paint and I watch / the wordlessness settles in me like a mouthful of sand / I swallow from the bottom of the ocean / and the sand that comes out of you / and the sand stuck on my skin
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