Seamus Heaney: “It said, ‘Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain. Compose in darkness. Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light. Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure Your hands have known.”
Frenchness permeates everything, in a way.1 My friend Mark, an Irish professor of literature living in France, reckons that post-modernism makes sense in French but loses it in translation. When I was editing my flatmate’s thesis some dozen years ago, the chunks of Foucault in it gave me the same feeling I got trying to read A Brief History of Time: an Emperor’s New Clothes feeling— Come on. This is impenetrably incomprehensible, like a thicket of thorns.2 There’s no fucking way anyone understands it. But then, I’m just a jumped-up guttersnipe. It’s possible I’m wrong.
In Reality Hunger— but it wasn’t, it was in Jenny Odell’s Saving Time,3 a book I bought because it fell off the shelf in Unity Books, apropos of nothing, and landed at my feet, asking to be taken home— some French dude said… Who was it?…
Odell, (who is lying on her side on top of a journal stack, under a Moomintroll print4): “In a 1973 essay called Approaches to What? the French writer Georges Perec coined the term infraordinary. Media and the public perception of time, he wrote, focused on the extraordinary— things outside the ordinary, like cataclysmic events and upheavals. The infraordinary was, instead, that layer inside or just beneath the ordinary, and being able to see it involved the challenge of seeing through the habitual. This was no small task, given that invisibility is part of the very nature of habit. “This is no longer even conditioning, It’s anaesthesia,” Perec writes. “We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?”
Clearly a person intent on defamiliarizing the familiar, Perec once wrote a 300-page novel without using the letter e. For finding the infraordinary, too, he had his particular methods.”
The point is, when I messaged people to tell them I’d started this Substack, Thomas (a social media friend who I’ve never met in real life) replied “I have already read (via the husk) your substack posts on The Plague Year and the Ernauxian-Perecian-very-much-after-my-own-heart infraordinary observations, both of which posts I found interesting, thoughtful, and well-written (qualities increasingly hard to find these days for some reason (either reality or I has/have become jaded)).”5
Because of Odell I knew who Perec was, but I’d never read Annie Ernaux, mostly because I dislike reading in translation. (I think my reluctance is a type of purism: I like to read the exact words, straight from the horse’s mouth. Moomintroll doesn’t count, because I read it before I knew what translation was. Imagine my shock when I discovered that in Swedish, the characters have entirely different names! I became a man, I put away childish things.6 Not.)
Maybe it was this remark of Thomas’ that caused me to finally get Ernaux out from the library. Just by chance, the book I laid my hand on was Exteriors.7 (French title: Journal du dehors, which G**gle Translate renders as ‘Outside Newspaper’.) I had read my way through everything else before I came to it at last, at the bottom of the pile. Slender, blue-covered. Embarrassingly,8 as soon as I started it I realised Ernaux was doing in the 80s pretty much exactly what I’m doing now. (Ideas have lineages, even if one is ignorant of them.)
Ernaux (trans. Tania Leslie): “I felt the urge to transcribe the scenes, words and gestures of unknown people whom one meets once and whom one never sees again; graffiti hastily scribbled on walls and erased; sentences overheard on the radio and news items read in the paper. Anything that, in some way or another, moved me, upset me, or angered me… It is neither reportage nor a study of urban sociology, but an attempt to convey the reality of an epoch…
I have done my best not to express or exploit the emotions that triggered each text. On the contrary, I have sought to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.”9
The library book I’d finished just before Exteriors was Kāwai by Monty Soutar, a New Zealand historian. It’s a workmanlike novel set in the mid-1700s, that is, pre-colonisation. The plot mostly revolves around blood-feuds. The convention he uses in regard to translating is that when he writes a spoken sentence in Te Reo Māori, he then translates into English immediately afterwards— in italics— so there’s a side by side comparison. (Very useful for learning.)
Another super-interesting thing about Kāwai is that the characters often speak using whakataukī, proverbs.10 I told Kev about that, and he said that’s how people in the village speak (i.e. his village, in Sussex.) That people have a whole store of sayings ready to deploy, such as ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear… Many a true word spoken in jest… The apple never falls far from the tree…’ (—“When some dodgy person’s son gets arrested,” said Kev.) He said that proverbs are hard to think of off the top of your head, because they tend to arise from memory in response to an external scenario.11
In Kāwai, this mode of speech seems an elegant way of communicating multiple meanings at once. (Soutar also starts each chapter with an apt whakataukī.12)
Te Reo Māori, by virtue of exposure— eye and ear-learning— is the language I'm most familiar with after my linguistic inheritance, my mongrel-bastard-mothertongue, English.13 Reading Kāwai revived my longing to understand more.
To be denied language is to be denied understanding, to be kept in the half-dark. Being a monoglot is so provincial, so colonial. Kei te whakamā ahau.
Reading Ernaux, though, I see that I’m kind of right about things being untranslatable. The outskirts of Paris in the 80s. I can tell there are layers upon layers that I don’t get. Part of it is that daily speech is so culturally specific— slang, mash-ups, in-jokes. The is-ness of that doesn’t cross over.14 Slang is one of the quickest things to date— like haircuts— the cutting edge of linguistic evolution.
Here, now, I notice the Americanisation of New Zealand English. Shop becomes store. Biscuit becomes cookie. Jumper becomes sweater. Tramp becomes hike. etc. etc. Sticky Hollywood memes, brain-parasites.
I want to say ‘We have our own words for these things.’ There’s no point— language policing is both petty and futile. A dick move. But erosion of language is erosion of culture, such as it is. I think about Peter Cape, Down the Hall on Saturday Night15— jokers, sheilas:16 people actually spoke that way, when my parents were young. Now they don't. Language is an ever-flowing river.
Ernaux says she wrote down anything that, in some way or another, moved me, upset me, or angered me.17 I realise that it’s the same for me: the only thing meaningful enough to induce me to do the labour of handwriting (which involves remembering sometimes a whole conversation verbatim, and holding it in my mind while I transcribe, a task I can only just do) is the feeling that particular little scavenged moment of time gives me. A sense that it’s a precious splinter of the zeitgeist, that it means something beyond what it says. Searching for the mythic inside the mundane— that which is specific and universal, funny and serious simultaneously. Kaleidoscopic origami moments.
At Moon, eavesdropping on the people at the next table. One of them has just got a divorce, and the others are listening to his tale of woe.
He says “At the end of my life I’m going to write a book. I’m going to call it ‘How I Fucked My Life Up’ … ‘Stupid Mistakes’, by Ted.”
It permeates a certain strand of intersectional thought, I guess.
WWOD— What Would Orwell Do?
George Orwell - Politics and the English Language
I referenced Saving Time in my previous post, The Dimension of the Infraordinary
I got the print from Pegasus a few days ago. It shows Moomintroll following Too-ticky through a snowy wood under a full moon. Moomintroll looks anxious and wide-eyed. Too-ticky is holding a candle. She knows the way. (It seemed a good metaphor for the anxious-self following the lead of the philosophical-self.) It’s from Moominland Midwinter (Swedish title: Trollvinter), one of my favourites, in which Moomintroll wakes up from hibernation and can’t go back to sleep.
(Rumi: “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.”)
The print, though, isn’t in Trollvinter: it’s a scene I’ve never seen before. An extra image. But it occurs right after my favourite scene in the book, the one I already had, scanned, somewhere in my computer:
(Finding this scan in my image-archives was needle / haystack. I had to come at the task five different ways. But along the way I found this, too:
When I was a child, we had this thing called television. So, we didn't get one until I was about 8 or 9, and then we were allowed to watch one show a week. And what TV was like, was it was a box with a button, and a show came on on a certain day of the week, at a certain time, and you had to be ready, sitting there, you'd push the button to turn it on, and then the show played straight through, except for ad breaks every ten minutes or so, when you just had time to do something like go get a drink or run to the toilet.
And one TV program I remember watching was called Our World, and it was all about animals mostly, and plants, in other parts of the world: say it was in a jungle, then you would see monkeys, and parrots, and a leopard. Or maybe it was in the Arctic, then you could see polar bears, and seals, and narwhal and so on. Or maybe it was in Africa, with giraffes and elephants and lions. And it was like- look how beautiful the world is, look how special these animals are. We have to look after them, they mustn't go extinct.
...I feel old, but I'm only 41 [43]...
Magick is a chancy thing, and so is writing. They have in common that sometimes they flow freely, like turning on a tap, and sometimes they won't flow at all, like when the water people are messing with the pipes in Happy Valley AGAIN, and you turn on the tap and within seconds it dwindles to a trickle and stops. Like that.)
It wasn’t until I got the print home that I realised it has exactly the same theme as the picture I have hanging on my wall already: trolls in a forest under a full moon.
Oh, has the world changed or have I changed?
Robert Louis Stevenson: “When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.”
E-x, Ex
Why embarrassing, though? I think it’s because it reveals my patchy literary knowledge. I only know what I chance upon, what smells I follow.
One thing I immediately noticed about Exteriors was the different flavour of life before smartphones: people-watching was about 100 times more interesting.
My understanding is that this sparring use of whakataukī is a convention of whaikorero— traditional oratory.
Like a kind of communal storehouse of language-forms.
My Mum offered me this one with regard to the Farmer: “Moea he tangata ringa raupā — Marry a man with calloused hands.”
Jackpot, though, don’t get me wrong! I love Te Reo Ingarihi.
What do you call an owl with one leg shorter than the other? Not even, owl!
= Men, women
Another thing I notice is that a lot of her moments feature homeless people. Homeless people’s lives are both more visible— played out on the streets— and more invisible, in that they are a class of people whom others often ignore.
Your footnotes bring me joy. Thank you for bringing me joy. Infraordinary is now in my lexicon. I've long wondered about saying, "She's really out there!" When I usually mean, "Wow, she's really in there!" Fascinated by the places our inners meet our outers.
Online friend Andreas Kornevall- who I've never met- made a post beginning thus:
"Wandering Into the Troll-Forest...
There is an emerging land-based contemplative practice coming from the Northern tradition called the "Utiseta". The old sources: Voluspa (Poetic Edda), The Story of Svipdag, The Islengingabok, the Law books, the Swedish Black Books are all filled with this sacred practice. An Utiseta can be a commitment to walk at night time in the woods for an entire year (called Årsgang), or its sitting on a lonely mound between dusk and dawn. The Utiseta practice was banned by Christian lawmakers during the Medieval centuries and it's through their laws that we know about this at all..."