M.E. Breen

I’m reading the book Summertime by J. M. Coetzee.  In the book John Coetzee has died and a biographer is interviewing people who knew him when he was alive. So far I’ve only read two of the interviews, about half the book, but one of the traits the women keep returning to is his coldness. He isn’t unkind, but he lacks electricity and he has bad teeth. I admire this book but I wouldn’t say I’m enjoying it, which isn’t dissimilar to what the women say about the dead Coetzee. In other words, I’m intrigued by the book, and I think about it when I’m not reading it, but I find it repellent and half the time when I could be reading it I do a crossword instead. I look at it on the bedside table like I look at the pile of kleenex from last night’s allergy attack. You have the author Coetzee, and the dead character Coetzee, and the women who catalog his faults (sometimes with relish, sometimes in spite of themselves) and the whole thing comes off so naturally, so believably, so very much in their voices, and yet is so self-consciously constructed, it seems it must be driven by either the most cynical and manipulative impulses or else by a self-loathing so sincere I want nothing to do with it. The title seems like a joke at everyone’s expense, because reading Summertime makes you feel as though you are holding the hand of someone whose skin is so cold they might as well be dead.

Now, I am a person who has cold hands all the time, and cold feet, and who is always drinking tea and wearing two undershirts. I take all this as evidence of nothing more significant than poor circulation, but then looking through the Anatomy of Melancholy I came across this:

Fracastorius will have cold to be cause of fear & sorrow; for such as are cold are indisposed to mirth, dull and heavy, by nature solitary, silent; & not for any inward darkness (as Physicians think), for many melancholy men dare boldly be, continue, and walk in the dark, and delight in it: only the cold are timid; if they be hot, they are merry, and the more hot, the more furious, and void of fear, as we see in madmen.

The timid part is what I find interesting. Pretty often when I fail in the get-up-and-go department at least some of the failure can be attributed to cold: feeling cold already and fearing getting colder, or feeling warm for once and being afraid of losing that comfort. We aren’t talking about the kind of cold that’s actually dangerous (I live in San Francisco, after all), but I spend more than half my life colder than I want to be and negotiating with myself about whether to accept or try to change that situation. It’s the kind of self-preoccupation that could certainly register to others as . . . coldness, or at least as an unwillingness to get involved, a preference for self-study and self-calibration. But it also means that when I’m not out doing things in public with other people, I’m doing secret and possibly brilliant things alone at home. Anyone’s secrets can be supposed to be remarkable, and what is more embarrassing than finding out someone you didn’t think much of has accomplished something impressive on their own time? Cold is essential to so many acts of invention.

And this returns us to dead Coetzee, whose preoccupation with vegetarianism and the political importance of manual labor and his own intellectual progress makes him disagreeable to others. There is some idea here that we owe it to one another to be hot and furious and void of fear. When we feel those things, we tend to act, and when we act, people know what we are about. They have the comfort of knowing who we are as we are, meaning they see our lives unfolding and can make reasonable judgments about them.  The women discussing dead Coetzee claim to be disappointed in him and a little sorry for him, but actually they are outraged. How could he keep so many secrets? How could he be so much more than he seemed? What does that mean about me? Is being merry a waste? Do we only have so much heat, and once it is all given away we are used up and can’t make anything? Do the cold know something the warm don’t? Do the dead know more than the living?

I signed the lease on an office today.  I’m the only one who calls it an office. Everyone else I met today calls it “space.” I share it with a woman who makes mosaics and a man I haven’t met yet who does something with photographs and paints behind a partition. It has a paint-spattered carpet and heat and a skylight and a desk-type object but no chair. I have three keys: one for the building and one for the giant warehouse floor and one for the floating square that is my office.

I was nervous about going to the studios. I only figured out two days ago that you can wear boots over your pants if you buy skinny-leg jeans. It occurred to me driving over there that the people who rent studio space probably mastered this trend in 2006. Usually I don’t mind being square but this seemed like the kind of place where I might wish I was more wavy. As usual I was worrying about the wrong thing.  The people wore pants in a variety of leg-widths and didn’t seem that interested in clothes. They were interested in art!

What I should have been worrying about was cost per square foot. Also, somehow I imagined the whole floor would be set up with cubed partitions and desks and chairs. Like, you know, an office. But after recovering from that always-fresh shock of discovering that everyone else is not the same as me, I started to really like it. I had been in galleries, and I had seen what artist’s lofts look like on TV, but I had never seen a real working space with people doing video art and handmade t-shirts for sale and used tea bags in the kitchen and notes about the tricky toilet taped to the bathroom door and walls of windows and paint smells.

So now the problem was that I liked it, but it didn’t like me. The cheap studios were essentially standing room in a hallway. The private studios with windows were essentially a gazillion dollars. Enter Kate. Kate has been making mosaics for twelve years. She showed up at the open house the same minute I did.  We toured the standing-room only spaces together. We were shopping in the same price range.

The floating square was the last space they showed us. It had no windows but it did have a big skylight. The carpet was old but not gross. It was weirdly calm.  It was like a lake of a room in the middle of a bustling town. It cost almost twice what either of us had budgeted. We decided to share. We co-signed.

Kate gets the spot directly under the skylight and I get the desk-shaped thingy. Tomorrow I am going to bring a chair and an amaryllis and my laptop. I can’t wait. And here’s the thing: I committed to something. Quite specifically, I committed to my life as a writer, right now. I’m not a commitment-phobe in any generic sense. I don’t fly around the world like George Clooney and leave houseplants to die. I have a dog and two cats, for Pete’s sake. But I do spend a fair amount of my time thinking about my life as it will be rather than my life as it is. The future life isn’t so different from my present life — basically it is my present life, only with all the sources of anxiety and uncertainty removed. In that life, I know the things I only wonder about now. The good things have come to pass. The worries have resolved themselves. The pets all die quietly in their sleep at age 22.

So signing this lease with a woman I’d only just met felt like a big deal. It meant trusting my instincts, which is nerve-wracking despite the fact they’ve never given me any reason to doubt them (good fellows!). More significantly, it meant taking action in the face of uncertainty. I put things off because I think I can make a better decision when I know everything, in that certain future. But, duh, you never know everything. You can’t wait to know everything. You make a decision and then you know something, and then you get your plant and your computer and you get cracking. Tomorrow I’m going in even if I can’t find a chair. I’ll sit on the carpet. It’s my space.

It will come as a surprise to no one who knows me that I become very lame very fast without structure. Just now, for example, when I was supposed to be working on, oh, I don’t know, a novel? I decided to eat a pomegranate. First, how come I never noticed before how much the seeds look like roe? Second, is there any fruit that takes longer to eat? In a sort of reverse-Persephone I decided to eat the whole thing, every seed, standing over the sink, as though determined to remain stuck for good in this underworld of none-to-low-literary-output.

So why should freedom feel like such a trap? Why should the feeling, I can eat that fruit! mean I must eat that fruit? There’s the problem: when no one is watching you, there is no reason for self-restraint, and without self-restraint there can be no priorities, and without priorities, who are you? If one thing is just as possible to do as another it becomes just as worth doing. And that, I believe, is a disaster.

Let me start at the beginning. I was laid off from my dreamy part time job on November 30. The sensible part of me knew this was bad. I was facing not insignificant losses, among them income and health insurance and colleagues and a place to go that was not my apartment. (I live in the sort of apartment where you can see the bed from wherever you’re standing. You try to write a novel someplace where you can always see your bed.) Anyway, this was a good job. We’d been going steady for about four years. But I couldn’t help thinking it would be fun to hang out more with No Job. The wild times we’d have! The pages we’d write! As the end of November approached, I started to persuade myself that I was breaking up with Good Job instead of the other way around.

“It’s time,” I said kindly to my office desk with its smooth-tracking and capacious file drawers.

“We had a good run,” I said to my office printer of endless cartridges.

“Where’s the magic?” I asked my ergonomically-self-specific office chair.

“I need a challenge,”  I said to the prepaid office postage meter.

So I felt pretty good on December 1st, and I felt pretty good on December 2nd. I was even feeling good on December 10 when I went to Walgreen’s to refill a prescription. I told the pharmacist what I wanted and wandered off to get cotton balls and read US Weekly. Ten seconds later my name sounded over the intercom.

“That was fast,” I said to the pharmacist.

“Your insurance has expired. You still want this?”

The “this” in question is not a life or death prescription. It’s what you might call a vanity prescription. It’s a cream. For the face.

“I’m getting COBRA,” I said. “Obama is paying for part of it.”

“Um,” she said. “You want this now?”

“How much is it?”

“Seventy-three ninety-nine.”

All of a sudden the skinny tube of skin stuff seemed not vain but insane. And I felt embarrassed, like I’d been spotted in the couture section of Saks by a saleswoman who knew I couldn’t afford one of the t-shirts two flights down in Juniors. What I mean is I felt pretentious and guilty for wanting to buy something that cost more than it should have in the first place, and, even weirder, I felt ashamed that I didn’t have insurance. Health insurance allows you access to medications you need, of course, but it also means you don’t have to differentiate between kinds of need. It makes things feel tidy, as though all your wants are normal and important, and everything is ok.

So now I find myself in a position of having to decide, at every moment of the day, what is necessary and what isn’t, what is more important than what, what is worth doing at all. It’s exhausting. I make mistakes all the time, and mostly they’re the kind of mistake that involves outlay and regret. I bought the cream. I ate the fruit. I lay on the bed.

I hope I get the hang of it. I hope one of these mornings it will feel more worth it to get up early than to sleep late. I wonder whether Persephone really ate those three seeds because she was hungry or thirsty. Maybe she just wanted to know where she had to be for three months of every year. Maybe she wanted to know what were the rules and what the limits, so she could plan her damn life.

I spent part of Thanksgiving weekend reading the first two books in a series of comics called Fables. The premise is that all the characters from the world of fairy tales and fantasy have been driven from their homelands by an evil being called the Adversary and forced into exile in the human world. Humans are called “mundys,” short for mundane. The fables who look human (Snow White, Blue Beard, Jack of beanstalk fame, etc.) live in Manhattan, holding various jobs in the fable government. The mice, pigs, foxes, giants, pusses-in-boots, animated playing cards, bespectacled Mr. Moles, etc., live on a farm upstate screened by enchantments.

As the series unfolds you meet different characters from different stories. The Wizard of Oz characters are there, and so is everyone from Lewis Carroll, the Just So Stories, Aesop, the Jungle Book, Grimm’s, Mother Goose, etc. Those last two get the most page time, since the stars of the series are Snow White, who runs the fable government (though merry King Cole is the figurehead), and Bigby Wolf, the chain-smoking big bad wolf who goes around in hairy and disheveled human form. He works as the sheriff for the fables in Manhattan and isn’t allowed on the farm because he’s tried at some point to eat almost everyone who lives there. (All the fables received amnesty for past crimes upon moving to the mundy world, but no one has forgotten or forgiven.)

The comics have their bawdy and violent scenes (they have a Mature rating, I think, or the equivalent of an R for movies), but mostly they’re concerned with the fables’ uneasy relationship to each other in a world much more morally nuanced than their own. They are used to solving their differences by eating each other or tricking each other or getting married and living happily ever after, so it’s fun to see them bumbling through modern life with their basic personalities intact. Prince Charming is a smarmy serial philanderer; Snow White is frosty and rule-bound; Rose Red is a rebel with a permanent chip on her shoulder because people have only ever heard of her sister. Blue Beard is a terrifying millionaire. None of them age, and they all have to support themselves and somehow get along for eternity.

I guess I find this series interesting for the same reason I find the comic Unwritten interesting: they both turn fictional worlds inside out, shaking the characters loose into the real world. I understand the impulse, because maybe it’s a way to see, and test, the strength of a fictional creation. Can your character adapt? Does she have legs of her own, or can she only survive buoyed by magic? Can you shore up someone else’s unsteady creation and make him or her do some different kind of work?

On the other hand, part of me resists this porousness between fantasy and real worlds. I want the world of a fantasy novel or story, perhaps of any novel and story,  to feel complete and intact and, frankly, safe: safe from me as I am safe from it. I don’t want to be bringing my mundanity in with me like some kind of pox, and I also like to take breaks from these worlds which tend to be scarier and nuttier and more intense than daily life. When I set down a book to feed the dog or brush my teeth, I like that feeling of closing a door that I can open again when I want, or leave shut. (I shut the door on Lolita for eight months the first time I read it — I think the longest time I ever did that and eventually opened it again.)

I’m not in any fear of the three little pigs (turned bloody revolutionaries in Fables) showing up in my living room, so I’m not sure what I’m after here, except I think my attachment to reading is essentially that of a child: to run toward danger and yet be safe, to be lost but always feel it in my power to be found. In one scene in Fables Snow White races to Bigby’s assistance armed with the vorpal blade, and you laugh and also feel nervous seeing her carrying it around, because it seems it should never be used against any less (or less ridiculous, or less murkily defined) foe than the Jabberwock. It seems it can only be misused in the mundy world, which is probably one of the points of the comic: look how we misuse our fantasies, or look how they misuse us.

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

I’ve been wanting to write about my trip to San Quentin for a week now,  but the odds of striking the wrong note about visiting a prison — too sanctimonious, too nonchalantly un-sanctimonious, too cloying about how gracious the inmates were, too TV-stereotype-confirming about how creepy the walk across the yard was, too too too — were great enough to keep me away. So I decided I’d just blog about any old thing, and then I got hung up there, too, because I couldn’t think of what the title of the post should be. So then I decided to look at my bookshelf and give the post the title of the first book spine that grabbed my attention. And there you have it: Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, big gold block letters on a black background.

Full disclosure: I have not read this book. It’s my mom’s book. She has definitely read it. A lot of her books wound up at my house when she moved last year, and now I look at least 75% more erudite than I actually am. But I know the book is about prisons.

Fuller disclosure: My mom runs the program that invited me out to the prison to read. The invitation went something like this: “You’d better come and talk about your book on my show, young lady,” except I just put the ‘young lady’ in there for tone, since she doesn’t actually talk like a 1950’s schoolmarm.

The program is called the Video Literacy Project. Inmates collaborate with my mom on choosing books. They read everything: books on law, tales of terror, self-help, literary fiction, a biography of Janis Joplin.  Once they did a show on the history of rock and roll. After they’ve read the books they discuss them with my mom or with each other while the inmates who run the AV lab videotape the discussion. When possible, they read books by local authors and invite them on the show. Tobias Wolff, who has many fans at SQ, came out once. The show is broadcast on San Quentin TV, and, ideally, the inmates who watch will check out the book being discussed from the prison library.

It doesn’t always work like that, of course, because no organization I can think of is more baffling and changeable than a prison. Actions that are encouraged one week are verboten the next, which means you walk around the place feeling guilty when you haven’t done anything wrong, because maybe you have. I’ve been there three or four times now, and the mood strikes me as a mix of painful opposites: chaotic and subdued, courtly and sneering, hopeless and wildly cheerful.

Maybe those are the contradictions we all live with, only bigger.  You encounter something that gives you a feeling of freedom, a burst of imagination or connection or discovery, and then something else happens to remind you of all the ways you aren’t free. Bobby, the man who interviewed me, had read Darkwood with the kind of close attention that makes an author feel like a million bucks. He asked questions about sentence structure and the recurring motif of proof, and why I had given Serena a small person’s name. (We agreed to disagree on that.) Later, off camera, we talked about the ending and he told me he missed his mother’s touch, which was moving and surprising in a way that seems particular to people who cannot hide the trouble they are in. When any stranger can see the restrictions and humiliations of your life, when everything you can’t have and can’t do is so obvious, maybe then you are free to speak matter-of-factly about pain.

My mom wrote once that growing old was what made her want to work with prisoners. The restricted body, the amplified sense of time, the importance of memory, the troubling daily uncertainties, the worse certainty — it makes sense. There’s not one easy thing about prison. I’m glad I went. My mom runs a great show.