by andrebabyn

Reading Molly. The lies she told, at the end, her husband the brute, rude and lazy, the man out in Tucson that she would love. Telling him around the time she purchased her gun that she had to take care of certain things. The trail that Butler found in her journals and on her phone, reminding me of an appointment I discovered on January 10th, we were still talking, a date or a phone call I wasn’t sure, an appointment I discovered crossing the threshold from the single room where I was putting my life into cardboard, into her office where the planner lay open on her desk. This was February, after I’d seen the evidence of that day—or the evidence of another, later perhaps—in the open bathroom trash, and been blamed for it, I can’t believe you saw that, and after she’d reported having dreams where I was yelling at her, her own guilt speaking. What I’d been told: that in ever trying to initiate the man before me had committed assault. Over and over and over again. That is who the book of poetry is about, no true husband. That they had moved there, to the province, and never had sex again because for her the relationship was over, but that this man, who did not know this crucial fact, was an abuser because he clumsily played with his towel after showers. Because he tried to kiss the woman he was living with. And then for a month after it was done she could not be rid of him, she said, he would not leave, and I wonder sometimes how much that situation resembled mine, kept on the edge of hope, somewhere between hope and contempt, until the contempt ran like river water. Or what was said of me in her telling, though it doesn’t matter now, how I was represented to justify her strange whims, changing the locks, her conviction that I had threatened her when the only threat ever uttered between us was that all I owned belonged to her. Strange to be idealized and then discarded and to have the stories, fiction, in which you are idealized coming out still. On the fridge, a business card for me she’d once printed, the nicest man in the world, a reduction only replaced after I’d discovered her infidelity, by a birthday card from the other man. Strange, too, to be told that somewhere she has written that you were a condescending, or unsupportive husband, that you tutted to remind her that you, too, were a writer in the relationship, never mind that there might be cases in which saying that is itself evidence that it needed to be said, the time spent in consolation, and in support, the help you did not regret offering but which you thought, might, for months multiplied by months, sometime end, or lessen, so that there might be equilibrium, absence of catastrophe, time to sit and be together, not be tugged underwater, toward your own end. 

by andrebabyn

Someone left their jerky in the terminal, a full bag of Jack Links. There are three kinds of traveller I appreciate: quiet man or woman, congenial older couple who respect boundaries, and beef jerky, travelling alone. Three kinds of travellers I do not appreciate: haughty men, congenial couple (any age but usually above fifty) who do not respect boundaries, and anyone who does not understand how headphones work or the need for them. 

When I travel my body feels confused: am I tired or hungry? Nervous or bloated? Fearful or catatonic? I don’t eat meat, expect opportunistically, and what could be more opportunistic than this forgotten (and to all appearances, full) bag? But it is one thing to pick up a sealed bag of cayenne powder (naturally anti-septic) or a can before its best before date placed (in a tradition of such placements) in a box on a street and another to even only handle a bag of jerky left abandoned in an airport terminal. To even touch the bag with anything more than concerned disdain is equivalent to handling nuclear waste, and I don’t mean because (despite recent masking relaxations) the threat of Covid still lingers. 

I am not a proud man but I will not so much as eye this jerky. I will not give it even a once over to confirm that it is spelled “Jack Links.” But what else to do while waiting in an airport terminal for a flight that I worry—because of a shortage of baggage handlers—will be delayed? I can’t imagine a greater adventure, or a better way to focus my energy. Rather than muse about the positive and negative capability of travellers perhaps instead I will take my chances with meat left abandoned unopened(?), opened(?), tampered with(?), untampered with(?), left alone in a temperature controlled terminal after spending its whole life on display in Hudson’s(?), brought from home, having spent its life in fluctuating temperatures, purchased in bulk at the height of the pandemic, and left for months in a damp and sometimes flooded cold room(?). 

None of these options, honestly, is very appealing to me—instead it’s only the memory of jerky, its utility, a rare taste seemingly impossible to replicate synthetically that excites me, and not the possibility of opening the bag, or biting in. I won’t touch it. Except as a means of passing the time while I wait for my connecting flight. 

by andrebabyn

Reading while walking. A woman coming down the trail from Regent St has a library book held in the air in front of her. A familiar black cover, blue lettering (Moshfegh’s Lapvona). “Love that book,” I say, in passing. “It’s crazy—” she says, “I’m almost near the end.” I think of the end—I won’t spoil it, the high climb back to the mountain, the reader perched there, hanging, at its close…

Behind the Sobey’s a young man with too short pant legs skateboards slowly up the street. Something about him seems notable, but I can’t place it. He reminds me of a roommate I once had, who came from genteel country poverty. Perhaps it is only that everyone here seems notable, in a town of so few. I’ve already started to see the same people more than once, in vastly different contexts, across worlds. But I’m proven right when I see the man looking through the dumpster behind the grocery store.

Going bad. In some ways I wonder if I need to let loose, go bad, go further, in my writing. But in life I want to keep things close, want not to trip those feelings, want to get underneath the trigger, recognize what makes me vulnerable and what won’t let me feel that vulnerability. One seems related to the other. But at the moment I’m not sure how. 

by andrebabyn

God it’s so hot on the deck where we sit in the two chairs I found on the street, you in your new slip and me in my shorts and t-shirt and hat. The sun sears everything, paint is stripped and bleached and the Coleman cooler that R put under the table in 2017 has lost its blue skin. Two tables finally collapsed this spring, and the wood of the deck is so thin I could put my bare foot through the railing. We sit baking in the two new chairs which are the only things that feel as if they are vital, aside from ourselves. The two chairs, castoffs from some wealthy household, with the bright blue cushions which will themselves I know become bleached in time. Behind you a robin feeds its chick, whose little head peeks out of the nest and when it has eaten waits patiently for the father to return. I think briefly that we should put the chairs together, facing the same direction, since that is the way we sit most comfortably outside, but it is nice too to sit across from you and see you with your crossed legs and your golden hair and your tattoo on your left foot. I want to reach you to touch you but you are too far. On the old TV aerial there is another bird, perhaps the baby robin’s mother or perhaps another species entirely, and it is keeping watch, but when I point to it you say the sky is too bright for you to see. Oh to sit out on the deck and be beaten down by the light. Oh to be out there with you as the sun’s rays punch us to nothing. 

by andrebabyn

SOUNDING

At the park, it takes me a while to calm down. I wish I wasn’t upset at all. Nothing upsetting happened—or nothing that should be upsetting. At the picnic table the paper bag that once contained my sandwich almost blows away in the wind. Runners, like rumours and bad feelings, are going in circles around the track. On the street before the entrance the man seemed bashful, the dog looked backwards at me, over his shoulder. No one can explain anything to a dog in a way that will stick. Perhaps I was a dog, for a long time, believing—or trying to believe—in a lightness and a possibility that had long been foreclosed (which is why I alternated that belief with anger). Reading about aversion, I unconsciously diagnose the last person I came into conflict with—I mean, the last time I regularly came into conflict. In the book it is said that a pattern of aversion can lead to disengagement, rebelliousness, anger (which are strategies in themselves). I see my own methods. I see my failures. It’s hard to get through a chapter. 

What do the others know? I’m sick of asking the question, and I’d like to leave it in the park with the waste from my sandwich, though I sometimes console myself imagining that the ways I was misled are unknown (to all but one person) on that side. I think I must feel the need to justify that I was hurt—sadly, that’s obvious. What do I have to say to a dog, anyway? Even if his absence from language (or at least its more complicated forms) means I still want to ruffle the back of his neck. Perhaps it’s that I felt like a dog being told what to feel, and if that’s true I should find a way to scratch myself. Oh, I’m trying to—dreams of a binder clip that was passed lightly, as a gift. Fantasies of some final repair. And then an encounter which jerks me awake. I want some confirmation that I wasn’t alone in it. I want to know I wasn’t just a dog in a cage I didn’t see. But I can’t count on anyone else to tell me. 

by andrebabyn

I have been hungry for the language of Chaucer. Some interior gnawing, growing every day in strength. Perhaps I always desire Chaucer at this time of year—in May, when the leaves become thick and the air is redolent with flowers, which recalls Chaucer’s dreamers peacefully drifting off in the surprising new heat of spring. I have just read—I am unsure if for the first time—Borges’s “Translators of the Arabian Nights.” In that essay he praises the Burton translation, which he notes others find so successful because “Chaucer’s English” is so close to the thirteenth century Arabic original (Borges clarifies that he also sees, in the translation, the influence of Urquhart’s Rabelais). But it is the words themselves—Chaucer’s words—which I long for, now with an additional desire: that their vocabularly might work some deep interior change in me, perhaps something like the translation from winter to spring works on trees. So that later commentators will feel obligated to note that it is Chaucer’s English that I speak. 

by andrebabyn

For the Pennance that Man Taketh of Himselfe Was Not Shewid Me—

To Calais, I thought, to Calais
where I will eat chicken fricaseed
So much in France that if I died
my effects to the king and no one else—
From the bedroom to the kitchen
to the office and up stairs and down
And the doorframe of the bathroom 
and in the tall ship from Dover…
Oh how little I wanted to be there!
Dover, Calais, a chicken waiting 
Fricaseed in the little parlour
facing the king’s portrait, the king 
With his chickens, his tall men
with chicken legs, they call this 
Calais, Calais, Calais, this feeling,
these men, this steaming dinner
If only I could turn this ship around
scorn this scowling shore, forget Calais
Forget this feeling, if I could bow
before some one other than the king
The king and myself and his portrait—

by andrebabyn

FLIGHT HOME

Whenever I travel I draft an entire book, in pencil, in the back of whatever I’m reading. On Sunday it was a series of short stories based of A.L. Snijders’s “zkv’s,” or very short stories, ninety-nine of which have recently been translated into English by Lydia Davis. I want to document the whole trip, the flight to Fredericton and the return, in Snijders’s gnomic style (which doesn’t not share a resemblance, at least superficially, with what I sometimes try to write here). In the air I can see the drama of the trip, and of my life, in a way that interests me less on the ground. As you can see, I’m already giving them up. Maybe if I had started writing them then (we only had an hour and fifty minutes on the entire flight) I would have kept working once we returned home. But instead, for the last part of our trip I put on a basketball podcast and held F’s hand (she’s terrified of flying) while I looked out the window, watching the earth change below. I knew it would be more difficult than it seems on its surface to write an entire piece in fragments that maintain a duty to themselves even as they also build toward a larger narrative. 

AUTHOR VISIT

When I was in the first year of my undergraduate degree, the author of one of the books we had read that year came to visit the class. He spoke a little bit about writing, answered a few questions, and afterwards sat at the front of the class and signed our books. When it was my turn I told him that I thought the book was “perfectly constructed,” a compliment he took gracefully though I had meant it as an insult (I was an anxious little shit who couldn’t quite get it off). I didn’t like the TA for the course, who I thought wore herself as if her own body was a suit of armour, in a permanent defensive posture. She confirmed my dislike when she stood up and asked a question which seemed only to demonstrate that she’d paid attention, reading up on the author outside of the class. It was something like “How do you feel, now that you’ve been named one of Knopf Canada’s ‘New Faces of Fiction’?” Though I’ve heard very little about the book, or about the writer, in the almost two decades since the visit, at the time he was doing well, and he mentioned using the money from the book to buy a house on the Danforth. Now we’re friends on Facebook. Thinking about all of this now I have the sudden urge to ring him up, and ask him if he remembers the visit, as if we are old friends, though his author visit remains the only time I’ve ever spoken to him. 

by andrebabyn

Lydia Davis writes that the project of Michel Leiris’s long autobiographical essay collection The Rules of the Game is to “write himself into existence,” and that in doing so he is following Michel Foucault, who said in an interview that a writer is “not simply creating his work in his books, in what he publishes… his principal work is in the end himself writing his books.” (Essays II, 392.) I remember sitting across from the extremely cramped little card table in M’s apartment, where we worked on our laptops and ate mostly silent meals, and her saying, in response to some story I had told about growing up or about the years of writing and loneliness immediately preceding that it was like I had written myself into existence, which was true at the time especially because there was very little of me outside of that writing. One of us—I forget who—imagined it as pulling myself out of the muck. I thought of Fernando Pessoa and The Book of Disquiet, which I imagined as a similiar project, working so hard to build form out of what seemed impossibly various.In many ways this blog (over so many years) has been the most obvious example of that long effort, and my hiatuses—or times when I have substituted more confessional writing for something more difficult to parse—are examples of times where I have, for various reasons, put that project on hold. Or at least publicly done so.

Similarly, in Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint the speaker (who we can safely assume is Thomas) complains about what it is like to return to society after suffering a long mental illness, with few believing that he has regained his sound mind. He looks in a mirror, practicing appearing in control, and imagines that if people just saw him like that they would believe that he was alright again. In his poem Dialogue, which follows immediately afterwards, a friend—who may or may not be fictional—arrives and Thomas tells him about his desire to cleanse his body (of its “guilt… foul and unclene”) through translation of the consolatory Latin treatise Lerne for to Die. The friend is worried about this project, since he believes Hoccleve’s mental illness already to be the result of “overstudy” (which may be true). Perhaps the job of the writer is balancing the need for rest with the desire to transform oneself. Writing is magic, in that its concerted practice can effect change not only on the world which receives it (as in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius) but also on the body and the mind of the writer. (I have my own translation project that I imagined clarifying or cleansing me.)

Every so often—when I feel at my worst—I imagine that I don’t have time for the writing that I like to do, or that in order to do it I have to wait for circumstances to be perfect. This is never correct—more often I write myself back into sanity. Therefore I am writing this post in the middle of the night, on the eve of a short trip. Soon I will go to bed. I am nurturing the most urgent part of myself, one sentence at a time. 

by andrebabyn

A woman on the news is worried about being turned into a robot. I don’t want to be digitiled, she says. As I approach the building I am forced to consider which doors are entrances and which are eggresses, where we can exit and where we can enter. I have a sniffle on the subway—I always do in the winter—and an elderly woman in an n95 gives me a cold, hard look. I hope that I look innocent, reading Jenny Offill’s book Weather, which so far is like Renata Adler’s Speedboat but if the boat was careening towards a wall. The headline of the Innis College paper reports on “Visible Communities in the Academic World,” but we are all invisible, bundled into our masks. Every day I search for news about the professor who suddenly withdrew from his classes—no one I have asked is allowed to answer questions or emails. His wife retweets something cheery, and that is all. Underneath my new profile picture someone writes their congratulations, substituting Faith for Fawn. I worry about the flurry of photos that have come out of the happy event, because even though in every one we look happy all photos lie. Not about our relationship, because that reporting is correct. There are four taped over her desk, taken in a booth in the back of the Drake. In one, my face is entirely effaced by her hands. You look like me, she says.