Letter #31
Flints from an age unborn
Hmm. What shall I say to mark the final hours of 2021? What advice can I impart, besides that investing in dual humidifiers for the single-person home can radically improve hair, and thus mood, and thus — life?
When I think of this year I see this: a figure under the vanity bulbs of a faithful black and white bathroom. More specifically, a mass of bones wiggling in a sack of flesh, in flux, embryonic body horror. Its angles widening as they settle into their new planes, and two new determined grooves approximately where the forehead should be. Ever crooked-ing teeth, a loosened core from laying like an eel to do anything. The effects of witnessing change in the slow drip of real time, that trick where you think nothing’s happening and nothing’s happening, but suddenly everything did. When the ur-body looks in the mirror, there’s new glint to her eye now, a new knowing. (She also has a middle part for the first time in literal yearssssss.)
As much as I like to play Oracle-in-residence, my freshly shorn carapace is still in pieces on the tiled floor, and I, like the rest of you, can sometimes only manage to cope by spending half of my mortal paycheck on $260 statement pieces and $85 leggings while promising myself to Google “how to invest beginner ethical” next month.
The great paradox of this whole thingy is that time is both endless and fleeting; its value never more apparent and deciding what to do with it ever-more confusing. Is it even a decision? If productivity isn’t the answer, what is. And don’t say meditation ‘cause I’ll flip. If jobs don’t provide self-fulfillment, does it even matter if I get a new one? Why must I think about having a filthy little job when I have transformed into a moth-like cave-dwelling seal-dog who practices self-love and affirmations shit? Errrr. This is why I often spend segments of my one wild and precious life comparing the merits of several dozen midcentury dressers that I will never buy in lieu of enlightenment.
Growing up my mother would say, don’t operate on fear. You cannot make decisions based upon fear. We have have enough information to operate on caution, reason, perspective— despite those around us who insist in operating on ego, vanity, and destruction. These new bodies are the vessels for new wisdom. We can treat them lovingly and respectfully and bring them into the world without fear. I know that it’s important to try.
I’m enjoying making playlists for a beholden audience once again, so here’s another one for the last day of 2021, new days of 2022. To eclipsing fear with love (and delight).
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bell hooks, Eve Babitz, and Joan Didion
Only grouped together because of timing and their presence on a well-read woman’s bookshelf, taking a moment to say goodbye: bell, Eve, Joan, three new beads on the rosary. Each of them a different kind of teacher, each of them who made their mark in a different indelible ink.
And just like that … I don’t think I have anything else to say about And Just Like That! For I have been longform DMing, texting, and telegramming virtually every willing gal and gay I know to fervently rake through our thoughts: wtf is happening to Steve; yes to Miranda’s gayness but no to her everything else (the wedges, I simply can’t abide those espadrille wedges); major aversion to knowing anything about Brady’s sex life; Che's dreadful standup set and weed smoking etiquette; the blatant and distasteful “righting of the scales” in writing in essentially a POC savior for each of the women; why’d they do Stanny like that; I cried when Big died but I was also crying, of course, for Samantha. I couldn’t help but wonder: does Carrie Bradshaw exist for us to experience catharsis through envy, rage, recognition? Was it such a good idea to let those four shape our ideas of womanhood and sexuality? And who am I kidding? I would never not watch.
New year, new Tierra Whack, all’s well, innit?
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
A prism of language from this perfect novel:
No one could say these objects were ugly, even the crayon with the shiny red flower, for they were spread on the varnished table like flints from an age unborn.
Caroline observed that knowledge was for some a range of topics; for others, depth of perception. She yawned at her own lie, and at the orange television.
From the geometric flake of yellow light, a man was calling …
Green fell in every form, and was carried off in baskets. “They are cutting down the very color…”
Ted had for some time been studying a faint blue object, possibly a star.
…a big lilac coming out in purple pyramids
Those are the colors, which is not to speak of the form, the rhythm, the balance, the language, the intricately laid details and how they echo divinely throughout a novel about the grand and mortal scale of true love.
Here’s the story: Caroline and Grace Bell are two beautiful Australian sisters staying in an esteemed astronomer’s estate in post-war England. Grace is engaged to the astronomer’s son. Ted Tice, a visiting young scientist, arrives and is immediately taken by Caroline. Later that week a dashing young poet named Paul Ivory is also to stay at the castle; Caroline immediately sets her sights on him. We observe the transits of their love and lives over the course of the next few decades. The sepia desert at the bottom of the world gives way to the lush post-war estates at the precipice of modernity, which despite its sprawl remains beholden to the fates dictated by vigilant stars.
Alice Gregory in the New Yorker says she finished the book “always with the impression that something very real and a little beyond language has happened to me,” and I concur. I read it rapt, poised with a pencil like a good student, and walked around feeling altered, like I had unlocked a secret key to the universe.
Caro, observing Paul.
Caro wondered if he did this to women, made them talk in such a way in such a voice, with the double meanings that diminished meaning, stretching the tension-wire between man and woman to a taut, purposeless antagonism. His banter gave an unearthly feeling that you were not hearing his true voice, and that it might not even exist.
Ted, observing Caro.
Watching her, he was thinking how, in some great pictures, every particle of the light is usual, daily, and at the same time a miracle: which is no more than the precise truth […] he thought most men would hardly dare to touch her, or only with anger, because she would not pretend anything was casual. It was unflattering, what she was apparently willing to dispense with in consequence of this belief.
Observing them all, the totality of their orbit, from an object in the new millennium, I am humbled by the existence of love so sacred it takes on the scale of Earth itself — endures the opaque slaloms of circumstance, the effects of which are impossible to parse in the moment, but nevertheless yield exquisite symmetry; a perfect circle.
Like the SATC girls say, maybe we’re each other’s true loves. Maybe of course we are. Sometimes people are just perfect, and they make perfect things, it’s PEN15 and Shirley Hazzard, that’s just how it is, babydoll, read it and weep. Click here if you’ve watched it already and want to cry again!
Many dinners this year were concocted to the dulcet tones of Talk Easy’s Sam Fragoso in conversation with a variety of characters, including Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Brian De Palma, T.S. Madison, Julie Delpy… cool kids only. But I loved this interview with the poet Nikki Giovanni best, for reasons which will be made clear:
“I also want to go to space… I’ve been trying to figure out how to get champagne to space, because it bubbles. Once you get out of gravity, the champagne is gonna suffer. So if you can get your dog and champagne in space, you don’t need anything more — life is good. You’ll be able to look at that little blue ball, and say look at those fools. Because they’ll be in some kind of war, they’ll be doing something dumb. And so it‘ll be nice for you, and your dog, and your champagne to be sitting up there.”
Raising an overflowing goblet of pink champagne to you,
from my perch on Venus,
with a little dog named Heaven,
Delighter