Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day Two

Three of the other writers here at Lavigny are poets. I almost never write poetry, but listening to them read their work I often feel a longing for the economy of their genre, the perfection of their lines.

Novels are full of clutter: closets, curtains, cupboards. Calendars. Clocks. Novelists are always worried about the clock: what day is it? how much time has passed? is it winter yet? Poems don't need clocks.

Novelists are hoarders. They never want to throw anything out in case they need it later. Poets throw most everything out. If the plastic iced tea jug with sunflowers from 1974 requires matching glasses and a backstory, they expect you to bring your own.  

Novelists are liars. They want to tell you things but they don't want to tell you why they are telling you because that would spoil the trick, the scene, the light, so they create elaborate deceptions and then hide behind the curtain. Poets just point. 

Novelists mostly add. Poets mostly subtract.

Novelists can afford to be reckless. Poets can afford to be brief. 

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day One

This is the start of my last week here at Lavigny. A glimpse of our days:

In the morning we walk alone in the cool air, in the evening, together, through vineyards and orchards, past shorn golden fields, inhaling the damp smell of earth and the light perfume of pesticides. In between, we work in our separate rooms in the deep quiet of the chateau.

At 7:00, we gather on the terrace for a glass of white wine from the very vineyards we have been walking through. (Try not to think of the pesticides.)

After dinner we work or read or talk. The night before our public reading, we spill over several tables, pruning translations, grooming our texts. It is quietly thrilling to be at work with people who will argue the merits of the word "gathering" over the word "collecting," and then change their minds and argue the reverse.  

Later we argue over an epigram by Goethe. Does the fact that it is (apparently, in German) beautifully phrased excuse the fact he says you can "use" a girl as you would a boy? (Our first night here, we discussed whether you could be an asshole and a good writer. There is ample evidence that these are not mutually exclusive occupations.) 

My goal for this last week is to write the last two chapters of my novel. Already I am pulling it apart in my head, preparing for the second draft. This has been a very good place to write and think. When I get stuck, I lift my head and listen: aside from the rhythmic cooing of doves and the wind in the sycamore tree, I can hear the other writers working.  They don't make any noise, but their silence hums. That's how I know they are writing.

Writers' Residence, Chateau de Lavigny

The chateau is deeply quiet. When I am not writing, I feel like I'm in a Jane Austen novel. We are always taking a turn in the garden (and the orchards and vineyards), even after the paths are drenched by rain (had I a petticoat, it would be "six inches deep in mud, I am certain"). We cut stalks of gladiolas and carry them back to the house to arrange in vases. We carry tea in on trays and dress for dinner. After dinner we read in the salon. One night a visitor played Beethoven sonatas on the piano. ("Do you play, Miss Bennett?"). There have been no balls or officers, however. And when we venture onto the narrow winding village streets, we have to be careful that the twenty-first century doesn't run us down.

Believers

Thunder ripples over Lake Geneva, but in the gazebo, we don't believe it, even when the mountains are erased by rain, because the sky is all awash in golden light.

Then suddenly it is pouring and wind is tearing flowers off the oleander trees and crushing them on flagstones as thunder cracks and rolls and hail hurls itself into the sodden grass and still we sit, because it is so bright, this liquid citrus summer night.

Finally lightning strikes the house, the burglar alarm goes off, and we rush inside and fight to close the windows against the wild wind and slanting rain. 

Locked Out

My novel is a house and it thinks it can lock me out.
I am the architect!


How does it know I have no key?

I bang on the front door.
Demand admittance.
Search for a window left unlatched.

What else to do now but
sit
on the
front steps
and wait, go
round
to the back and wheedle,

Why have you locked the door?
What did I do to offend you?

Let me in, I was only kidding
about the renovations.

Fine, I say, be that way,
I didn't love you anyway.

You'll be sorry.

I'm going now, good bye.
Maybe I'll drop in on that short story
I started before
I met you.

In the night I get up
to check on the house.

The doors are still closed,
the windows all dark

What are they doing in there without me?

Documenta 13

I am on my way to Documenta, the international art show in Kassel, Germany. Curated by a different person every five years, Documenta is a 100-day show of 200 works of contemporary art. The first Documenta, in 1955, was an attachment to a horticultural exhibit, and showed works deemed by the Nazis to be "degenerate." Today, hundreds of thousands of people come to see pieces hung in museums, performed in galleries, and installed in the open air in the middle of the city.

Kassel does not offer the cobblestone charm you might expect from the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm, but it is also not "the ugliest city west of Siberia," as one American art critic claimed. Not even close. (Clearly the critic has never been to northern Ontario.)

After two months of steady writing, I am weary of that half-and-half place of composition (half-way between images and words for the images, where no picture or sensation can be left on its own for more than half a moment before the phrases swarm in and overpower it and and alter it forever). In short, I am tired of words: I want to look.

Every article on Documenta 13 mentions the installation by Ryan Gander: a steady cold breeze blowing through an empty room. Title: I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull). The idea, apparently, is that the breeze gently moves us through the gallery.

I am unmoved.

But I love This Variation by Tino Sahgel, a performance piece that begins when you enter a very dark room. Twenty performers move among the viewers, singing, dancing, creating rhythms and instrumentation with their voices alone. It is disorienting, standing in the dark with strangers, feeling performers brush past, not knowing what to expect or what is expected of you. You feel strangely exposed even though no one can see you (because no one can see you?) Then the music catches you, and the discomfort fades. But not the strangeness.

It is thrilling.

I also love an installation by Ida Applebroog: fragments of journals blown up, hung along with images of the human form, poems, a found letter about the end of a friendship. ("To end this letter I would like to inform you in order to save time, please do not try to answer me any more, if by any chance Y receive a letter from you I will destroy it and I will not reed it.") The texts have been reproduced on posters which viewers can take with them.

I take the letter.

I also love the installation by Michael Rakowitz, What Dust Will Rise: books carved out of stone from the Bamiyan valley, surrounded by remains of the Taliban-destroyed Buddha sculptures. On one display case is a quote by Mullah Mohammad Omar, who ordered the destruction, claiming as his justification the fact that Westerners were more concerned about stone statues than living humans. "We are only breaking stones," he said. A lie and a prophecy: now there are only stones, broken into unrecognizability. Another note reminds us that stone books were carried by illiterate people as talismans: the silent power, not of the written word but of the idea of it. In another display case are charred, unreadable books from the Kassel museum after it was bombed in World War II: a reminder of the flimsiness of the written word, the defenselessness of paper. The law of conservation of mass applies neither to stone nor paper art: there is nothing humans can make that they cannot also destroy.

All the way home, I hold the letter and think about those stone books and try to find words for the music in the dark. We put things into words (and other shapes) even though they will eventually be erased. We cannot help ourselves.

Better than Fiction

http://crh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayl:Orchid_flower.jpg

Love this story about F. Scott Fitzgerald from Vanity Fair::

In the bar at The Ritz, Fitzgerald sends a young woman a box of orchids. She sends it back. He opens the box and glumly eats one orchid ('petal by petal"). She changes her mind.

How I wish I had made that up.

OK, back to the story I am making up.


To read more about Fitzgerald at The Ritz:
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2012/07/paris-ritz-history-france