As this benighted year comes to a close, here are ten of our most popular essays from 2020, covering vegetal collaboration and generative non-fertility, queer memoir and urban ennui, along with reportage from the British Virgin Islands, East Africa, Japan and the Chinese–Indian border.

 

Qualities of Earth | Rebecca May Johnson

‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel that makes a mockery of conservative ideas of the natural. If a hack to proliferate or hybridise is possible, plants will invent it.’

Rebecca May Johnson on negotiating the interspecies politics of allotment culture.

 

 

The Pandemic: Our Common Story | Anna Badkhen

‘Folklorists say oral tradition requires variation and interpretation, that we must alter the story to match the need of our times.’

Anna Badkhen was researching Eden – the origins of humanity in the Afar Triangle of East Africa – when coronavirus broke out across the world.

 

 

The Second Career of Michael Riegels | Oliver Bullough

‘The illogicality of shell companies is a result of the fact that they emerged from an illogical system in which globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’

Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested, confusing and consequential outposts: the British Virgin Islands.

 

 

An Education | Ariel Saramandi

‘You broke protocol, my mother mouths, rocking back and forth on the bed . . . She thinks that I have brought white wrath upon my family, and now I will be castigated wherever I go.’

Ariel Saramandi on race in Mauritius.

 

 

The Death of Distance | Samrat Choudhury

‘It might take only one soldier being shot across the Chinese–Indian border for war to begin. The howitzers, tanks, missiles and fighter jets are lined up, ready and waiting for action.’

Samrat Choudhury on India and China’s disputed Himalayan border.

 

 

Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness? | Kevin Brazil

‘Is there any way of writing about happiness, queer or otherwise, that isn’t just obnoxious? Or boring? Is there any way of speaking about happiness that isn’t just a way of saying: “I’ve survived, why couldn’t you?”’

Kevin Brazil on how queer people tell stories about themselves.

 

Seeing Things | Emily LaBarge

‘The City of the city is jagged and spiky, tangled, twisted – burned down, paved over, rebuilt, unruly with wealth and poverty side by side, as they have always been.’

Emily LaBarge on London, art and the plague.

 

 

Erotics of Rot | Elvia Wilk

‘Mushrooms sprout from the bathtub grout; disintegrating apples overflow from the trash can. Insects circle. The decomposition is lively and sensorially overwhelming.’

Elvia Wilk draws on Anne Carson, Sappho, Walt Whitman, Paul Preciado, Audrey Wollen and Jenny Hval to explore generative intoxication.

 

 

Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway | Rebekah Frumkin

‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’

Rebekah Frumkin on fame, queer identity and Ernest Hemingway. 

 

 

The Flowers Look More Beautiful Now Than Ever | Mieko Kawakami

‘It’s hard to imagine a country where a lockdown would function perfectly, but in the case of Japan, which lacks basic individualism, the current situation has bred insidious hatred and division.’

Mieko Kawakami on our capacity to forget amid disasters and social segregation. Translated from the Japanese by Hitomi Yoshio.

 

Image © virtually_supine

The post Top Reads 2020 | Essays appeared first on Granta.

It’s often in the morning that the want is biggest. The want is to wake up, lazy and horizontal, and have it. Currently I sleep in a big bed, next to a square window above a fig free, which looks out at the local high school, the 110 freeway, and the undeveloped hills in the park beyond. I used to wake up early, but lately – with the want – I sleep until the light is already bright. It doesn’t feel good waking up when the sun is already at work. I feel I’ve wasted something. I feel everybody has gotten going but me, that they are all up and living their lives.

The want that makes me sleep all the time is connected to a video I watch pretty often, of a young white man on his knees, in a nondescript hotel room with silver wallpaper and silver throw pillows.

The young man’s left hand is holding himself up and his right hand is cradling another young white man’s head. They both look like they’re about twenty-five. They both have brown crew cuts and hairless chests. The young man on his knees is thrusting his penis in and out of the other guy’s mouth. His dick is too big for him, in a way, and so are his hands. Like a puppy that trips over its own paws. The way he’s fucking the other guy’s face is sort of jerky. He’s doing it like he’s being watched, assessed, like he hasn’t done this much but he wants to seem like he knows what he’s doing. And he is being watched, originally by a camera, and now by me.

It looks like work. And it might be work, though the video is grainy, the camera never moves, and the young man on his knees turns the video on and off of himself. So it could be that these two guys just like recording themselves fucking and sharing it on YouPorn.  It could also be that part of the product, which is to say part of the labor, is the possibility of authenticity. So that I can forget there was a before and after the video, or an outside during the scene, and I can take this young man as the neutral screen of white masculinity I need him to be in order to envy him for having a penis. I envy his effort, which I imagine demands total presence, and this envy is what fuels my watching of the video, again and again, at all hours of the day. I get to drain my body of all feeling, send my consciousness into the reality I project onto this young man, so I forget I have a body at all.

Truthfully, in the moment of watching, there is little speculation about the young man, who he is, and why he came to be on his knees, fucking another white boy’s mouth in a hotel room with silver accent pillows. The speculation comes after the fact, retroactively trying to make sense of and find the trouble in my fixations. In the moment, I just want to be the young man. Without the before or after, without an outside during. The wanting is its own total form of being. In the moment, it’s not a wanting that can be corrected; it lives inside me, on its own terms, without a fix.

 

///

 

At the beginning of the year, in New York, I met a handsome guy, my age, who I ended up kissing. We didn’t kiss for long, just while dancing. The small dance floor was packed – this was still in the time when strangers pressed their bodies together indoors – and we were surrounded by men. I tried to stay focused on him, but I kept looking around at all the other men, many of them shirtless, trying to understand them, imagining how they felt in their bodies while neglecting to feel my own. Later in the night, I went to get a drink and I saw him through the crowd, dancing while kissing another man, with biceps and a barrel chest. I felt disappointed, and it seemed embarrassing to be rejected by a man. Of course, he wasn’t rejecting me; it was the culture of the place, of this mode of gay masculinity, to kiss freely. My own feeling of being passed over proved, to me, my inability to participate authentically in this economy. To not just pass as but fully be a young man in the sea of men, like the young man on his knees. I often come back to what I do not have and, thus, what I cannot be.

What I thought about most after my night with the tall handsome guy, in addition to the rejection I manufactured to prove my lack, was something he’d said earlier in the night, when we’d first met. Before the club we’d been in a crowded bar, pressed in the back corner with friends. He and I drank cans of beer, which I rarely drink, but I wanted to show him something by mirroring him, or I wanted to feel like him, or alongside him, in some way. It seems to me that when I believe someone to be a man – my head knows you never know, and yet these imagined other manhoods do magnetize me – I either ignore him, befriend him or copy him. The latter two approaches motivated by the pursuit of data regarding what they are and what they have, in relation to what I may or may not be.

So we were sitting in the corner of the bar, and we started talking about how we each spend our mornings. ‘Well I have the house to myself right now,’ he said, ‘So lately I wake up, I lay in bed for a while, I jerk off, then finally I’ll go to the kitchen and heat up some old coffee in the microwave, then I’ll drink it.’

That’s all he said. He wakes up, he lies in bed, he jerks off, he heats up old coffee in the microwave, he drinks it. He wakes up, he lies in bed, he jerks off, he heats up old coffee in the microwave, he drinks it.

I hear him say it in my head, so quiet and casual and slow, barely audible because the bar is loud. I hear him say it for weeks, when I’m back in California, every morning when I awake in bed looking over the fig tree. I want to wake up, lie in bed, jerk off, heat up old coffee in the microwave, and drink it. Slow. Unproductive but delightful. I don’t need to look at pictures; I don’t need to think about much. It’s just a lazy relief. I come on my stomach, get up, wipe it off with toilet paper. I go to the kitchen, my dick not totally soft yet, and I take a mug off the counter, half full of yesterday’s coffee, put it in the microwave, heat it up, and then drink it. Without cream or sugar, even though it’s bitter. When I leave the house I leave the mug out on the counter and I don’t make the bed. My clothes are on the floor. The wad of toilet paper I used to wipe up my cum is in the trashcan next to the toilet.

In my fantasy of the other way of being alive – of having a cock I was born with, waking up alone, jerking off, wiping the cum off my stomach, drinking old coffee, lukewarm, and not making the bed – I feel only ease, sensation, and pleasure in the present.

But I always make the bed. And my coffee, I heat it up four, five, even six times, to keep on re-having the experience of the first, too-hot sip. I rarely leave the house without cleaning the mugs in the sink. If I leave in a rush and I come back to dirty mugs I notice myself feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, then I feel shame about the frustration passing through me, because it’s exactly the kind of thing my father gets frustrated about. In this life, so far, I am someone who turns the lights off before leaving. I get all the crumbs off the countertop after cooking, I push the chairs back into the table, and I make sure that books and papers are in symmetrical, square piles, instead of scattered around.

I miss the other version of me. How can a person miss someone they never were? How can a person miss something they never had? How can the other way seem so complete, as if it once was, as if it’s what I was, and then I lost it?

Approximations of the thing I want only aggravate me further. For a while I was trying to pack. I had a beige, flaccid penis and balls to put inside my underwear. It was squishy and it grew warm from my body heat. It was hard to keep it in, unless I wore tight underwear, because it popped out like a water balloon. I experimented with wearing it to coffee shops, to the post office, to Staples and Home Depot, to a party. When I felt no one was looking I brushed my hand over my groin.

In his diaries, Lou Sullivan[1] writes a lot about sucking men dry. As if their cocks are hoses and he wraps his mouth around them and sucks and sucks and sucks until they’re empty. He seems to have some immense pleasure and power in sucking other men empty. Every time he describes this – in a bed or on the street or in a movie theater or at a sex club – I read the line again, again, three or four or five times, watching the movie of the line in my head. I’d heard that phrase a lot in the past, in porn or in bawdy conversations, and it always disgusted me. But disgust is generally a marker of desire, at least for me, and so the more I read the phrase in Sullivan’s journals the more I could locate the envy underneath the disgust. Envy for his honest, extractive, bodily wish; envy for the men on the other end. After that, wearing the flaccid dick felt disappointing, painful even. Because nothing came out. Nothing from inside of me was ever going to come out.

Soon after I read Sullivan’s diaries, I drove up to Stanford to visit a friend who was there for a few weeks doing research while staying with an old professor. Reading Sullivan’s diaries, I’d learned that he underwent phalloplasty, or penile constructive surgery, through the clinic run by Stanford’s Gender Dysphoria Program. Founded in 1968, the clinic pioneered the technology behind modern gender-affirming phalloplasty, the first medical program to make the surgery widely available.[2] This connection gave my trip some thematic resonance, and I walked around the rainy campus my first day there looking at the wet colonial buildings and manicured gardens imagining that I was there not to learn, or study, or see a friend, but to gain a penis.

I decided I’d visit the clinic’s archives while I was there, and mentioned this plan to the professor we were staying with, over coffee in the parlor of his small stucco bungalow, part of the university’s faculty housing. The professor studied and taught the history of gay memoir, and was curious what questions drew me to the clinic’s archive.

I said that I was interested in the history of phalloplasty, more specifically, how the medicalization of trans identity – the invention and management of certain procedures – creates the bodies we long for. I also said that I was interested in how colonial science and eugenics shaped the evolution of phalloplasty, creating a prototypical constructed penis rooted in white supremacist ideals of the gender binary. Those stated interests were true, at least in the realm of thought. And, yet, they did not account for my basic and bodily wish to go deeper into the lives of people who had done something I was both scared of and wanted for myself. I wanted the gory details of the surgery, voyeuristic, clinical descriptions of their genitals before, during, and after. I wanted to imagine myself as one of the patients.

At the archive, a fluorescent-lit reading room in the basement of a brutalist medical school building, I shared a similar, historically motivated pitch with the archivist, who set me up in front of a thick folder of loose papers. I read documents from the clinic’s early days: letters from the founding doctors requesting funding from the university for their research, transcripts of lectures, local reporting on the clinic’s early patients. The early documents largely supported the account that the clinic was established to perform ‘corrective’ surgeries on transsexual patients, whose condition, doctors believed, could not be fixed or suppressed. Surgery, then, was a form of risk management; the best solution to the unsolvable psychopathology of the transsexual.[3]

A few years into the chronologically ordered stack of papers, I found documentation of a grading system, used to tabulate the degeneracy of clients before and after treatment. ‘A’ meant not degenerate, ‘D’ meant very degenerate. The intent was to prove that full sex transition – sex ‘reassignment’ surgery – and ultimately passing successfully, reduced the total degeneracy score across multiple categories, ranging from employment, to economic status, to education. ‘Prostitution’, ‘arrests’ and ‘orgasm’ were also categories. For example, in the economic category, ‘poverty level or below’ was graded with a ‘D’, and making $8,000 a year or more was graded an ‘A’. Under education, ‘Less than High School’ was a ‘D’, and ‘more than BA’ an ‘A’. Arrests were a simple binary: ‘D’ for yes, ‘A’ for no. The same went for orgasm (it was good to have had one). Participation in sex work garnered the lowest marks; ‘seldom’ got a ‘B’, and ‘never’ an ‘A’. Tables of data at the end of reports affirmed that nearly all patients’ grades had improved over the course of the clinical sexual reassignment process.

I tabulated my own grades on a piece of scrap paper I’d brought in for notes. My class status and related college degree, gave me an automatic ‘A’ in education, and while I had never scored an economic ‘D’, my annual income has declined since starting hormone replacement therapy. I did get better grades in certain categories in the aftermath of my medical transition: less drug use; a stable, largely monogamous relationship; better relations with family and friends. Under the category ‘Emotional’, where I chose ‘lost and confused’, I had a steady ‘C’. Not failing marks, but not necessarily passing either. Hormone replacement therapy and a double mastectomy had not improved my grade. My process, in the eyes of the Stanford grading system, was incomplete.

As much as modern phalloplasty had developed as a means for people to become themselves, these documents also indicated that it was also the doctors’ way of taking perverts, inverts, and degenerates and turning them into approximations of ‘real men’. The men, the doctors imagined, would hold steady jobs, would wear ties, would play football for fun and marry women as prototypically feminine as they were masculine. The doctors, if all went according to plan, would build cocks as upstanding as the men. Cocks not dissimilar from the long, straight, circumcised white one I imagine for myself.

Why do I want the cock I want? Where did the cock come from and why is it so big? Will it ever be satisfied? If not, will it ever go away?

 

///

 

When I’m in my bed, replaying what the man I kissed said, or watching the boy in the video’s effort, I’m imagining having a body I feel and, in turn, am present in my life, am in some way more alive, as if aliveness is a quality one can have more or less of. As if my current aliveness is deficient and diluted and the other life, the life of someone with the cock I imagine, is saturated with existence. And I know, in my thoughts if not in my heart, that some part of what keeps me feeling deficiently alive is the sense that someone else, out there, with a thing I don’t have, is alive in a way I’ll never be.

I used to want a flat chest. Then I had a flat chest and I wanted a low voice. Then I had a low voice and I wanted facial hair. Then I had some facial hair and I wanted more body hair. So now that I look like a man, I think if I had a cock I was born with I wouldn’t need to look so much like a man anymore. The want moves. It keeps moving. Procedures and treatments, they help me train the want, try to pin it down, but it travels into other parts of my body, creates imaginary futures based on projections of what other people have. It’s the want, so skillful at training itself on what I lack, that keeps me incomplete.

What, in the plainest, descriptive terms, do I want? A tube or a flap of skin, matched to the rest of my skin, which fills with blood when I’m turned on or excited, when I wake up, that I can hold in my hands, wrap two fists around, put inside the mouths or holes of others. An appendage that extends me, that’s soft and curled at times, rigid at others, which communicates something about my interior condition without my consent, to the world. Is this an accurate description of what I want? Don’t I know better than to think the thing I want is real, that it’s anything more than a symbol of something imaginary that I’ve absorbed from pornography and classical statues and starburst-colored plastic prosthetics sold in stores?

The feeling – the wanting, the missing, the mourning – it happens when I’m cleaning the dishes, sweeping the corners, brushing dead leaves off the front steps. When I experience the want as an intruder, something taking me over, the feeling is sharp and nauseating. I’ll lie in my bed, in the late afternoon, scrolling through clips on Pornhub, thirty seconds at a time, just looking for shots of men’s faces in the seconds before ejaculating. Clips that best capture what I imagine it’s like to be about to come, to be about to shoot your load, to be about to get what you want. And I, in my non-embodied longing for someone else’s desire, don’t want to see the dick or the hole, or the face of the one with the hole, or the desperate slobbering mouth on the dick, or the solitary hand on the dick, I want to see the Face of the One with the Dick, jaw clenched or eyes rolling back, mouth open or teeth on lips, shaking, a complete fucking baby. Then coming. Then getting the thing, the one thing, they want. I imagine if I could come like that I would get to be the kind of child I never was: one who demands things, screams and cries when the demands aren’t heeded, sleeps happy and peaceful when they are. Call that a child or a man. Either way, I’d like to know the feeling.

In glimpses, when I can honor the want for what it is, I acknowledge the fact that whatever I want lives nowhere but inside of me. But often, most often, this want exhausts me, with its chronic, searching unfulfillment.

Why do I want what I want? Where did my want come from and why is it so big? Will it ever be satisfied? If not, will it ever go away?

And then it is the morning, and it’s bright, and it’s hard to wake up, but I do. I make the bed, neatly fold my pajamas, slide into my underwear (which are all Hanes and either red, blue, black or grey), pull up my socks (which are all black with a yellow line at the bottom), step into one of my four pairs of jeans, pull on one of my six T-shirts, clean my glasses with a polka dot glasses cloth, and go downstairs to make coffee, which I reheat many times. I make the bed and I make coffee, and I go on with my want.

 

 

Image © Several Seconds

[1] Lou Sullivan was a white, gay-identified trans activist and writer. He died in San Francisco in 1991 after spending much of his life in pursuit of social and medical recognition for trans people, in particular trans people whose sexualities defied the norms of heterosexuality. His selected diaries, We Both Laughed in Pleasure, edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma, were published in 2019 to widespread acclaim.

[2] Sullivan’s phalloplasty application was originally rejected by the clinic due to his homosexuality, which doctors believed delegitimized his claims of manhood. He later successfully petitioned the clinic to perform the surgery, pushing them to expand their assessment processes to include gay-identified trans people.

[3] This is not to say that early patients of the clinic didn’t have agency in navigating and maneuvering their way through the clinic in order to gain the outcomes they wanted. This condensed interview with Sandy Stone and Jamison Green, both of whom were patients of the Stanford clinic, demonstrates as much.

The post The Want appeared first on Granta.

We love writing; we love cats; so why not enjoy nine lines of writing advice with cats? If you need some great writing advice and fun images of cats, you’ve found your online destination. Enjoy!

One thing I know about Writer’s Digest editors over the years is that we all love reading and writing. Another thing I know is that many of us love cats. So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this post of writing advice with cats has been an inevitability that’s time has finally come.

(25 plot twist ideas and prompts for writers.)

I’ve collected nine lines of great writing advice and paired them up with fun images of cats. I mean, what else do you need? Probably nothing, but I’ve included links to each of the original (super helpful) articles filled with writing advice under each image. So come for the cute cats and stay for the great writing advice. Enjoy!

*****

Enter Writer’s Digest’s 90th Annual Writing Competition!

There are many reasons to enter the Writer’s Digest annual writing competition, including more than 40 total cash prizes spread across nine different writing categories, including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. But the top reason is the Grand Prize of $5,000 cash, an interview in Writer’s Digest magazine, and more!

Click to continue.

*****

9 Lines of Writing Advice With Cats

From “10 Ways to Start Your Story Better,” by Jacob M. Appel

From “How to Make Your Setting a Character,” by Donald Maass

From “9 Tricks to Writing Suspense Fiction,” by Simon Wood

From “10 Ways to Launch Strong Scenes,” by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

From “How to Write Better Using Humor,” by Leigh Anne Jasheway

From “7 Ways to Add Great Subplots to Your Novel,” by Elizabeth Sims

From “Jennifer J. Chow: Sparking Optimism and Hope With Cozy Mystery Novels (and Sassy Cats),” by Robert Lee Brewer

From “10 Questions You Need to Ask Your Characters,” by Brenda Janowitz

From “11 Secrets to Writing an Effective Character Description,” by Rebecca McClanahan

Ramanujan

Mahesh would cycle or simply stride
to the Broad Street Wimpy’s
to get himself a beanburger.
With a wisdom not expected
of a Tamil Brahmin from Delhi
he claimed it would suffice.
In Balliol, the alternative
was jewelled Brussels sprouts and carrots
in remnants of lukewarm water.
On good days, they – the vegetarians –
might stumble upon sauerkraut
or steaming cauliflower au gratin.
You, Heeraman, chose
to forage weekly up the Cowley Road
for turmeric, rice, and chick peas
and potent jars of chana masala powder.
In the Co-op, you’d spotted ‘yoghurt’.
It was chick peas that kept you alive.
In hall, you scrutinised the mash.
Poor Ramanujan! Seventy years
before you he must have been
the first meat-abhorring Hindu
to conjure up from odds and ends
– no spices then in Oxbridge, no
curry leaves, hardly anything
even for ordinary Englishmen
in a time of conflict and rationing –
a semblance, at odd hours of night and day,
of an aroma that half-pacified
the voice that asked, Why are you here?

 

 

 

 

Cambridge

It took us a few days after we arrived
in the suburban flat
from which Churchill College was a glimpse away
– milk left in the fridge
by an invisible hand,
bread and jam placed recently on a kitchen shelf –
to realise Cambridge was not Oxford.
It felt more beautiful for a day.
On Madingley Road, the weather
was wet, the wind
cutting.
Unexpectedly, the fens
became an invisible presence for us.

Then, to phrase it dramatically,
I was told I might die. I’d never felt
more well or alive (mentally,
I’d never been as out of place as in Cambridge).
From Addenbrooke’s, they sent me to Papworth.

How numb we were on the eve of departure!
The journey, twenty minutes by taxi,
seemed to go on into the narrow-laned
mordant hush of a Cambridgeshire
without industry or migration: just glum stillness.
Here, past a roundabout, in a verdant
nothing, a lease of life was enforced on me.

Papworth Everard! I’d forgotten
the second, almost Gallic, half of the name.
Nothing to define it as an English village
except one Cost-Cutter.
Papworth.

That was the inaugural tour. The name
would keep coming up. A few days to go,
our umbrellas drenched, heavy of foot
on Madingley Road – a taxi stopped
as if the oracle had spoken: ‘Do you know
the way to Papworth?’ It was too much.
Defeated, we asked him to turn the car around.

Ancient wide building, the catacombs
coursing through it like veins! You and my parents
hovering at doorways, or standing, summer’s ghosts,
by the curtain to my bed in the ward.
The imperial fixtures of bathtub and basin,
the unremarkable generosity of space,
and, outside, sunlight. It had stopped raining!
Despite my wakefulness that night
when I lay listening

to the woman with the smoker’s rasp
remonstrating with staff recurrently,
then fell asleep, urging the dawn
to come, so I could see you
and my parents
before they took me,
despite being paraded round on a wheelchair
like a middle-aged woman in a sari
in an airport
now to X-ray, now sonography,
despite the affection I developed
for the two transplant patients who bookended my stay,
I never felt I knew the place.

I thought of Ramanujan
and the men for whom this dour house was built,
a last stop, in which the chilly breeze
through the window was therapy.
Others would sit tinkering, or daydreaming vacantly –
but Ramanujan, your spirit left your body
many times in Cambridgeshire before you went home.

Now, eighteen years after
returning one tentative afternoon
to the flat in Benian’s Court,
I think of Ramanujan
where I left him in Papworth,
the war ebbing, my life beginning.
I think of you too, and my parents.

That building, unsmiling memorial
to men permanently at a loose end
among whom he was strange
misfit: what will happen to it now?

 

 

Notes: Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) was an Indian mathematician whose work came to the attention of the mathematician G.M. Hardy after Ramanujan wrote to him. Ramanujan was invited to Cambridge by Hardy, and lived in England from 1914-19. He then returned to India, where he lived until his death in 1920.

Papworth Hospital was founded in 1918 as a sanatorium for discharged soldiers with tuberculosis. Ramanujan spent some time there after he was diagnosed with TB. It later became a centre for heart disease.

Image: Ramanujan (centre) and his colleague G. H. Hardy (extreme right), with other scientists, outside the Senate House, Cambridge, c.1914–19

The post Two Poems appeared first on Granta.

I wasn’t in LA because of Joni Mitchell, but that was what I had told my Lyft driver and it felt good to have a story.

‘Joni Mitchell, Joni Mitchell,’ he said. ‘I’m just thinking if I know someone who knows Joni.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Hmm, wait I think I do. I’ve known Gillian Welch for like twenty years, I’ll give her a call. Maybe Gillian can hook you up, get you five minutes on the phone with her or something. Here, take my number.’

He told me he was a spokesperson for a car rental company. His hobbies were golf and doing extreme assault courses. I’m pretty sure his name was Robert Reagan, but he went by Reagan. I took his number.

Later that night, I searched eBay for Joni Mitchell ephemera. I found a cutting of a review of her album Blue, taken from a 1971 issue of Melody Maker. It was cheap, so I bought it. The review argued that Blue’s songs were ‘hard to relate to’, the ‘problem’ of the record ‘one of empathy’. The experiences cited were ‘the sweet dilemma of being stuck in Paris when she wants to be in California’, and were ‘divorced from our field of experience’.

The review felt bewilderingly off for me, for I relate to Blue on what now feels like a cellular level, before I’d even fallen in love; and many years before I had travelled outside of England for the first time.

I think back to 1992. My best friend had just started her periods. She was sleeping over on the pull-out bed that lived under my own. We called it ‘the surfboard’. My red and purple lava lamp was on, the rest of the lights were off. We listened – for the first time – to Joni Mitchell’s Blue on cassette, borrowed from my older sister.

In my memory of that night, the lava lamp was like the pain my friend was experiencing, the hot red pulse of it. Pain as a red energy, as hypnotic. Pain that moves as an octopus might in the unknown deep seas of womanhood and romantic grief. I was fourteen and I was yearning for both.

The first song on Blue is ‘All I Want’ and you join the song rather than waiting for it to enter. From in the dark cocoon of our sleepover, Joni sang ‘I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, looking for something what can it be?’ I remember having a queasy feeling, one that was not unpleasant, but the bodily sense that I would experience something transformative, and soon. I joined Joni on the road she was travelling, and I knew I would not sleep until the cassette had clicked onto the B side and I had heard the last note of the last song.

That night Blue ignited my project of romantic love, my idea of how I would press my heart against the world. The album laid it all out for me – I’d fall in love, it would be sweet and cosy, I’d be sad, I’d sometimes need to run away. I’d hurt someone. They would hurt me. The music’s harmonic cascades, in all their sprawling highs and lows mapped the course. Above all, I’d be prepared to bleed.

In early crushes and relationships, I’d test my feelings against Blue’s sentiments, as though the album provided a scale of intensity that would reveal whether the love had substance. Was this a love so strong I couldn’t numb it out of myself with wine? Was it a love with the endurance of the northern star? Could it keep away my blues? Would it anchor me where I stood, or let me sail away? Looking back now, I think I tricked myself into believing almost all of the romantic attachments measured up against that scale.

But there’s something I’m not saying. It wants to escape, like a secret that’s too big to keep. I want to love; to put ‘you’ in a sentence, to put a ‘you’re’ in my blood, but I have somehow failed. This is the secret I find unbearable to admit: that I’ve let the pain of love ‘get me scared to feel’. And I yearn more than ever. For the wild rushing river of a love affair, the doom momentum of unrequited love, the touch of someone ‘so gentle and sweet’. I gave my up project of romance and now decades have passed. I don’t know how to find my way back to the road.

 

*

 

Sometimes I feel a kind of gratitude for my cat’s little hot tongue on my hand, when she occasionally includes me in her grooming. I notice what it activates in my body – a feeling of being tended to, like someone briefly stroking my hair. I know the action of a cat is not unnatural but I worry my experience of it is. The brief pleasure of the cat’s attempt to care for me is sharply replaced by shame. How is it that I lack physical intimacy to such a degree that this interaction is a ghostlet of bodily affection? I notice that the older I get, the less I talk about my cats to people who I’m not close to, such is my discomfort of performing the trope.

In ‘All I Want’ Joni sings, ‘I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some’. A manifesto of romantic ambivalence, of how the mind ‘see-saws’ when you love. Joni plays a stringed instrument I had always assumed to be a guitar, but now know is an Appalachian dulcimer, which she used for the first time on Blue. The dulcimer flits cleanly between chords, but is tonally nervy – a musical agitation, and Joni’s mezzo-soprano voice glides above it, making full use of its range. It wasn’t until recently that I paid attention to the line ‘I love you, when I forget about me’. In the loving I’ve done I’ve often obliterated my sense of self: I’ve not located my needs, let alone asked for them to be met. I have just doggedly pursued a kind of abstract reciprocation, and because I’ve not paid enough attention to what I want, the vast contrast between what I want and what I’ve received hasn’t been as visible to me.

My friend Roddy and I would call these people, these ones who made us grateful for their scraps of attention, our ‘givers of crumbs’. At the beginning of this year Roddy died after a long illness. A few years before, he spent some months in hospital and suffered from Hepatic encephalopathy, which gave him delusions, making conversations with him hard to follow and often very distressing. Because I was so frightened that every time I saw him might be the last, after each visit I would write down everything that I could remember him saying, and, in doing that, sift the Roddy I knew from the Roddy carried away by his illness. Most of the time he’d be animated by a fantasy that was gripping him at the time – that he was married to one of the nurses, or that the man in the neighbouring bed was a murderer, or that he’d booked us a table for dinner and could I order a taxi? One day, he was in a quiet mood. I was fussing with his lunch, trying to get him to eat. He looked at me and said, ‘Love hasn’t happened for you, has it?’ I was shocked, the acuity and cold blade of his observation.

On my flight back from LA there was a couple in the row in front who shared a pillow between their two head rests and watched a film together. It moved me, in the way that feeling can flood your body sometimes, in the way absence can pour in. I was being let into a private scene and witnessed its easy intimacy. I sat there thinking of what I wish I had. Someone to refold my blanket after I’d left my seat. Someone who set up the film for us to watch together. Someone to include me in their ‘we’.

When I am cooking, I sing a line from Joni’s ‘My Old Man’ to myself, ‘the bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide’. That’s what the couple sharing the pillow brought to mind: they seemed like the kind of couple who’d never spent a night apart. I love my empty bed; it never feels too big for me. And I’ve slept alone for so many years that I find it hard to share a bed these days. The frying pan on the other hand. The frying pan has an altogether different intimate energy. Perhaps it’s because people so often fry eggs for someone they love. And to eat eggs together suggests a synchronised hunger, suggests sleeping and waking together, and says please linger, please stay. Perhaps it’s the sweet balance of ‘you cook and I’ll wash up’, how the pan moves from one person’s job to another, and the ordinariness of that joint endeavour.

The friend with whom I had first listened to Blue, her surname was Green, and so ‘Little Green’ became a song for her. And her eyes were blue, like the child Joni sings to in this song – the child named Green for spring, for the aurora, for the children ‘who’ve made her’.

As I spent time in LA this confluence of blue and green revealed itself to me, and these colours filled my eyes everywhere I went, in that way noticing allows you to rapidly accrue. I went to a bar to read my book (Blue Ticket by Sophie Macintosh) and I ordered a ‘Garden Cocktail’ which was a shimmering, near-metallic green colour. Across from me were two women with blue/green tattoos on their faces and necks, and blue streaks in their curly brown hair. I walked through the streets to take photos of the abundant cacti and mutant succulents which seemed so casually growing in those scrappy little patches of earth between the street and the pavement. Every green thing had a halo of blue. I dreamt I was the curator of a museum called The House of Blue. The walls were painted the colour of Debbie Harry’s eye shadow. The perimeter of the floor had a dusting of the pigment, hazy but alive – a kind of neon blue glow seen through a steamed-up window. The House of Blue didn’t work without green. I made a pilgrimage to Joni’s old house in Laurel Canyon where she wrote many of the songs that would end up on Blue. Walking down Lookout Mountain Avenue, there were purple flashes of violas, the flowering rosemary and thyme. Every green thing had a bleed of blue.

I had a difficult feeling in my chest and throat, a tension, as though a rigid flower was attempting to open its petals in me, and I needed to give myself over to it. I stopped for a few minutes and watched young deer spring across the hillside opposite. I picked a violet and closed my hand over it. I was aware of my dramatising of this journey as it happened.

I reached Joni’s house and stood on the driveway outside, unsure of what to do. On my tiptoes I looked over the sage-green fence, and a golden dog appeared in a window on the second floor of the house. It noticed me and began to bark.

Absence of romantic love in my life has created its own awkward space in me. Like a corner of a room you cannot find a comfortable use for, a deficient space, grasping for its own utility. And I sense other people can see this and that it makes them uncomfortable. They seek to solve it (‘get on the dating apps!’) or to refute romance as goal (‘I wish I had your freedom’), and some people, the coupled ones who rarely use ‘I’, all their tastes, habits, opinions tethered into ‘we’, seem to panic about how to interact with me, like the barking dog sounding the alarm to its owner. I did not want to leave Joni’s house, having travelled from New Cross to Los Angeles to be there, having imagined the experience of seeing the house where she lived so many times and then experiencing that happening, anxious to make that experience count. I thought of ‘Carey’, Joni’s song about a love affair on Crete. She sings: ‘it sure is hard to leave here Carey, but it’s really not my home’. I walked down the steep road until the pavement ran out.

I did not call the Lyft driver who said he would try to connect me with Joni. I thought she’d see my deficiency too.

I listened to Joanna Newsom instead, beginning with her song ‘In California’ a kind of proxy for Joni’s ‘California’. Joanna sings that she’s not afraid of anything, ‘save the life that, here, awaits’. I caught myself remembering something I’d read earlier that day. Dipping in and out of phone reception I finally found it on Twitter. It was from Deborah Levy’s memoir The Cost of Living: ‘I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, “This fountain has been winterised.” I reckoned that is what had happened to me, too. To live without love is a waste of time.’

Joni knew about being winterised. One of the first of her songs that I loved was ‘The Gallery’ from her album Clouds. In ‘The Gallery’ she sings of how she gave a partner all her ‘pretty years’ but when their love began to fail, he left her to ‘winter’ alone. I hadn’t realised I’d winterised myself. I hadn’t realised I’d wasted so much time. I’ve been saving love for a special occasion, like a bottle of wine I’d hung onto, even though it would not age well. I’d given my pretty years to no one.

The desire for romantic love sometimes builds up behind my temples like a bad weather front. I want to be able to gorge on it, to live beyond the sufficiency of friendship. It feels like failure. I wonder if I have wrongfully positioned romantic love at the centre of experience, to which all other loves are subordinate. I wonder if I have convinced myself that it is weak to want it, that I’ve succumbed to lazy, heteronormative ideals of how life should be lived and what relationships and experiences are to be most valued. I scold myself for not simply valorising the platonic and familial loves I have. I tell myself it is due to a lack of imagination, intellect and gratitude that I can’t sustain myself on those loves alone. I tell myself I am deeply flawed else it would come to me as easy as I perceive it comes to others. When Joni repeats ‘Will you take me as I am’ with evolving emphasis and ascending pitch at the end of ‘California’ – each pushing at a different vulnerability, I wonder which of the variants is most persuasive. Which variant of me will succeed?

I’d been drinking wine on the train with ‘my headphones up high’ and realising that I still had three hours to go, I bought another half bottle and took it back to my seat, along with a cup full of ice. A lot of the time it’s someone to get quietly drunk with that I’m yearning for. A quiet abandon and unguardedness, that absolute giving way to being seen. I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it. I wanted to express it as Joni, Joanna and Deborah had. To summon the empathy, the relatability they generated, to see myself in the absence of a partner who could show me. The shore that the train had clung to disappeared then, and after the obscuring hills – which I resented – we passed through oil fields, crops, the scrub, until the sun went down and I felt dehydrated and bereft. The blue of the sea replaced by the blue of night.

The night my friend Roddy died, I was with my friends Amy and Bryony. We were watching videos of Canadian figure skaters Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. One in particular, their final (gold medal winning) Olympic performance, beguiled us. It led to a conversation – a game almost – about what music we would each skate to for our ‘short’ and ‘long’ programmes. My friend Amy knew immediately: she would skate to ‘Video Games’ by Lana Del Rey for her short programme, and then ‘Permafrost’ by Magazine for her long programme. We were drinking and got distracted by another line of conversation before Bryony and I gave thought to our own answers.

When I woke up the next day, I rewatched Virtue and Moir in bed, tears slinking down my face. It came to me that I would skate my long programme to ‘River’ by Joni – give myself a real river ‘to skate away on’. I played the song, visualising a routine. As the song ended, I went onto Facebook to send the ice-skating video to a friend who I thought would love it. It was at that moment I was told of Roddy’s death. I wish I had a river. I loved him.

At Roddy’s funeral I struggled to explain the nature of my relationship with him to his family. The best I could come up with was that it was not a romantic relationship, but it sometimes had a romantic dynamic. I ask myself what that dynamic consisted of – some of it was the ‘hate you some, hate you some, love you some’ feeling that I’d schooled myself to expect in my relationships with men. We really wound each other up; Roddy would often feel rejected by me, and I infuriated by him. But it was more the way we performed domestic intimacy. We did not spend the night together, but we’d cook simple meals for one another, the fanfareless meals I imagine exist in cohabitation (‘good omelettes and stews’), and we’d play each other favourite songs, songs that were then attached to one another. He once told me he’d listened to sixty-seven versions of ‘Both Sides Now’ and the Skeeter Davies version was the best.

When I sing ‘A Case of You’, there is no one I situate in it, but I do ask myself who and what might form part of what ‘pours out of me in these lines from time to time’. Absence of romantic love is part of how I manifest in the world whether I want that or not, and I realise I am at war with this idea. I can’t hold the lines that I am trying to sell myself, that the platonic love I have never lacked makes up for, or transcends, the lack of romantic love. If I look at the lyrics of this song on the page, rather than stitched into the formality of the music, I find their sentiment mildly hysterical. But if I sing it, I sing it with absolute solemnity. The austere guitar of ‘A Case of You’, its honest unadornment, balances with the rich blood of the lyrical meaning. So many songs are like this – the music, the notes we hang the words on, make us less self-conscious about the statements we are making. I say this as someone who once sang the whole of Jeff Buckley’s album ‘Grace’ to a man I’d brought home and didn’t become embarrassed about having done that until a decade or so later. I remember a line from Richard Scott’s poem ‘love version of’ where the speaker implores his lover to wake up and ‘tell me if the word soul still means anything’. Only a lover could use the word soul and get away with it. But it can’t be right that I need a lover to speak of having a soul.

An unavailable man I slept with over a number of years once said to me, ‘You’re not going to do anything stupid like fall in love with me, are you?’ We were sat at a beer garden table, an hour outside of London. I’d taken the afternoon off work to meet him where his barge was moored. He’d kept me waiting for him at the train station where he was due to pick me up. He’d texted me while I was on the train to ask me to take off my underwear. I’d been so compliant. His question-warning made me protest: how audacious to think I might love him! But it was no use, he’d already seen me. Seen how my eyes were moonstruck for him. Now I cannot locate a scrap of what I admired in him; I can no longer be certain which ancient romantic injury I am needling, and what losses have made me so scared to feel.

Joni’s voice on ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’ moves with such agility between syllables and notes, she’s like a mountain goat that scrambles up and down a rock face while you stand at the bottom, tense with disbelief and hope. Speaking about Blue in 1979 in Rolling Stone, Joni herself said, ‘there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals’. I’d go further – by the time we reach the closing song of the album, Joni seems sonically fearless.

A romantic dynamic is not enough. Being loved by friends is not enough. I am ready to face that, but unsure how to move out from the fear position. To say this is the sex I want. This is the communication I want. This is reciprocity I expect. To understand at forty-two years old that I’ve never had a relationship with these elements in place. The idea I have never felt safe in a romantic relationship feels painful, and that for half of my life I’ve existed on romantic scraps, that feels humiliating. As though I am utterly unloveable – the fear that rushes in, on ‘dark cafe days’.

The notion of romanticising pain is the trap I didn’t know I’d fallen into. On her album Ladies of the Canyon – the one that came before Blue – there is a song called ‘Willy’ which feels to me like the gateway to Blue’s sensibilities. She sings: You’re bound to lose if you let the blues get you scared to feel. I would apply that logic to the men I have desired. They were just too scared to feel for me and I was the brave woman who put her heart in harm’s way. What is biting at me now is the realisation that I’m the one who is scared to feel. I’ve kept myself away from love. I thought it was the responsible thing to do, to limit the harms I might inflict on myself, after all I’m not to be trusted. But in doing so I’ve enacted a different kind of harm. I’ve limited and denied myself. I’ve not met the romantic potential I assumed I had.

I know I can fully experience platonic love. And I have sustained myself this long with an emotional resourcefulness perhaps people with romantic partners don’t have the opportunity to develop. I’ve had the space to notice and celebrate loving actions and interactions – how floating in salt water gives me the bodily abandon of sex, a friend who reaches out to hold my hand because they are glad to be with me, my cat settling on my hip for mutual warmth, my cat seemingly sensing when I have a nervy heart, remembering an apricot sky seen alone is no less magic for being seen alone. A letting go of the givers of crumbs.

In my rational mind, I know that I don’t need to encounter my body through its interaction with another body in order to understand it. The body is always revealing itself to you. But there are always parts of yourself you can’t get a good angle on. I want someone else to notice things about me that I suspected but could not voice, and, in their perception, their noticing, to feel observed and understood. But I also remember around the same time I encountered Blue, I learned Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas for a school concert, and for the first time felt my voice sounded real and true – beautiful even – and felt the rosy swell of that in my body, and then the music teacher heard it too and asked me to sing it solo. As soon as my voice was noticed, I lost what had made it noticeable. At the school concert my performance was strained and sharp, my nerves pouring out of me in the sound my voice made. When I walked off the stage after it ended, a woman in the wings said to me, ‘Nevermind, love.’

I have never tired of Blue. Perhaps the reason I can listen to it with as much emotional candour as that first time back in my teenage bedroom with the lava lamp doing its mysterious work, is because I’ve no object to attach to the songs. That might be something to be grateful for – in the past I’ve had to give up whole musical genres because they were too closely aligned with a source of romantic pain.

I had always thought that in Blue Joni had taught me about love, about being in love and losing it. Now I think it’s more that Joni taught me about longing. About the gap between what you want and what you have, and what you have and what you had wanted.

In June of this year I saw some friends for the first time in a long time, to celebrate my birthday. We sat outside my flat and a thunderstorm came in. Recognising the romantic potential of a storm, I stood out in the rain and gave myself over to what heavy rain could activate in my body. Rain so heavy it felt like being touched. Later that evening, there were just three of us left. I asked if they wanted to sing Blue with me. And we sang.

 

Photograph courtesy of the author 

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