My own mind is a tenement
Instead of writing this essay, I went out. Anyone would do the same. I
went out after reading Renata Adler, ‘My own mind is a tenement. Some elevators
work. There are orange peels on the floor and muggings in the halls. Squatters
and double locks on some floors, a few flowered window boxes, half-dressed
bachelors cooling on the outside fire steps; plaster falls.’ Like those
bachelors, I wanted out, away from the idea of a mind like a room, or like a
building.[1]
Instead of writing letters, I write emails, maybe hundreds in any given week. Sometimes I think I got a degree in order to write emails to other people who have degrees. Later, when we’re older, we’ll stop bothering to reply. No one writes letters; I’d be writing to no one if I did, and anyway they’d have gone out by the time the letter arrived. I read them; sometimes we talk about them by email.[2] ‘It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things’, Vita Sackville-West writes to Virginia Woolf. No one emails that. It’s not a medium through which to easily articulate need; email teaches you to be wary of being taken at your word.
Instead of writing letters, I write emails, maybe hundreds in any given week. Sometimes I think I got a degree in order to write emails to other people who have degrees. Later, when we’re older, we’ll stop bothering to reply. No one writes letters; I’d be writing to no one if I did, and anyway they’d have gone out by the time the letter arrived. I read them; sometimes we talk about them by email.[2] ‘It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things’, Vita Sackville-West writes to Virginia Woolf. No one emails that. It’s not a medium through which to easily articulate need; email teaches you to be wary of being taken at your word.
Emails become longer the further the distance between the emailer and the recipient.
It’s harder to explain things accurately to someone who is far away, it requires
more words. And emails from far away arrive further apart, landing heavily, as
if from a height. ‘Anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into
words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of
it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I
find in the resounding vacancy which is my head’, Vita Sackville-West writes to
Virginia Woolf. No one emails that. Vacancy: a head like a hotel, habitable.
Vacancy: a job or a position to be filled. Vacancy: like oblivious, like
vacuous, dumb.[3]
To be clear: I didn’t go out because I minded being alone. I never have. Back in my room there’s a white poster with black writing which says, ‘build your altar’. Writing this I realise it’s about making sacrifices, choosing what you’ll give up, but I’ve always thought till now it was about building. The words are in the middle of the page, in a solid block like an altar; or like any building. I remember where I first saw the poster, in a solid block made up of posters just like it, on the floor at Enjoy Gallery in Wellington. I’m still not sure if you were meant to take the posters; but I often feel relieved that I did.
After dad died my sister went to bed and didn’t get up for five days. It wasn’t even her bedroom, but she didn’t care. During that time I lay on the bed a lot, not sleeping but wanting to be near another body, almost inert, a parallel line. I would have read, but the light was always off, and I didn’t know what to read or wasn’t sure I remembered how. When she did get up her pre-adolescent long hair was matted solid, darker than it had been before. ‘Don't mind being as miserable as you like with me’, writes Virginia, ‘I have a great turn that way myself’. It’s a different kind of ‘with’, when it’s written in a letter, but the sense of comfort offered remains intact.
To be clear: I didn’t go out because I minded being alone. I never have. Back in my room there’s a white poster with black writing which says, ‘build your altar’. Writing this I realise it’s about making sacrifices, choosing what you’ll give up, but I’ve always thought till now it was about building. The words are in the middle of the page, in a solid block like an altar; or like any building. I remember where I first saw the poster, in a solid block made up of posters just like it, on the floor at Enjoy Gallery in Wellington. I’m still not sure if you were meant to take the posters; but I often feel relieved that I did.
After dad died my sister went to bed and didn’t get up for five days. It wasn’t even her bedroom, but she didn’t care. During that time I lay on the bed a lot, not sleeping but wanting to be near another body, almost inert, a parallel line. I would have read, but the light was always off, and I didn’t know what to read or wasn’t sure I remembered how. When she did get up her pre-adolescent long hair was matted solid, darker than it had been before. ‘Don't mind being as miserable as you like with me’, writes Virginia, ‘I have a great turn that way myself’. It’s a different kind of ‘with’, when it’s written in a letter, but the sense of comfort offered remains intact.
They were all writing letters. Not just writing about what they were actually writing – books, papers, essays
– but writing exclamations, or throwaway things or heart-breaking things, or
facts. Iris Murdoch was writing to the philosopher Philippa Foot; she was
writing, ‘My dear,
thank you so much for the exotic Olympian stockings! I love being given
stockings by you.’ She was writing, ‘Sometimes I feel I have to invent a
language to talk to you in, though my heart is very full of definite things to
say.’[4] This must be the way an architect feels – full of very definite things to say –
something like this, I think.[5]
Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy were writing, Germany to New York. ‘I am homesick for you’, they write to each other. They fall out at a party, the apocryphal story goes, they don’t write for four years, and then they reconcile on the Astor Place subway platform in the East Village; ‘We think too much alike’, Arendt is recorded as saying.[6] In another place, Arendt was writing a history of privacy, an argument that as individual thinking subjects we exist in a state of plurality, whether in public, in private, in solitude. ‘In solitude a dialogue always arises, because even in solitude there are always two.’[7] Privacy shares an etymological root with privative and deprived, as in not having access to the public domain. For Arendt, the private is a place of separateness that is the indispensable condition for thinking, in readiness for political action in public space.[8]
Reading is a kind of double act; you read alone and apart from others, even if they read the exact same text at the exact same time. It can be the most intimate or the loneliest thing, knowing someone is reading what you have before, a kind of deferred companionship. This might be something writers most acutely understand, writing a kind of letter to readers they’ll most likely never meet. ‘A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude’, A.S. Byatt says in an interview. Reading can be like arriving just as the person you came to see leaves the room.
Reading is also a way of deferring thought, of being alone and not-alone. In another place, Iris Murdoch writes through a fictional character, ‘The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.’ Reading is a constant, a kind of labour which is fundamentally independent. ‘What makes me feel strong?’, Susan Sontag writes in the quiet of her journal, ‘being in love and in work.’
I went out to find companionship, away from the aloneness of a room. Somewhere in conversation I reacquainted myself what I thought. I came back. I wrote this letter, to an exhibition.
Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy were writing, Germany to New York. ‘I am homesick for you’, they write to each other. They fall out at a party, the apocryphal story goes, they don’t write for four years, and then they reconcile on the Astor Place subway platform in the East Village; ‘We think too much alike’, Arendt is recorded as saying.[6] In another place, Arendt was writing a history of privacy, an argument that as individual thinking subjects we exist in a state of plurality, whether in public, in private, in solitude. ‘In solitude a dialogue always arises, because even in solitude there are always two.’[7] Privacy shares an etymological root with privative and deprived, as in not having access to the public domain. For Arendt, the private is a place of separateness that is the indispensable condition for thinking, in readiness for political action in public space.[8]
Reading is a kind of double act; you read alone and apart from others, even if they read the exact same text at the exact same time. It can be the most intimate or the loneliest thing, knowing someone is reading what you have before, a kind of deferred companionship. This might be something writers most acutely understand, writing a kind of letter to readers they’ll most likely never meet. ‘A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude’, A.S. Byatt says in an interview. Reading can be like arriving just as the person you came to see leaves the room.
Reading is also a way of deferring thought, of being alone and not-alone. In another place, Iris Murdoch writes through a fictional character, ‘The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.’ Reading is a constant, a kind of labour which is fundamentally independent. ‘What makes me feel strong?’, Susan Sontag writes in the quiet of her journal, ‘being in love and in work.’
I went out to find companionship, away from the aloneness of a room. Somewhere in conversation I reacquainted myself what I thought. I came back. I wrote this letter, to an exhibition.
In addition to published letters by
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, and
citations from letters between Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot, this text refers
to Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1977), Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition
(1958), and interviews with A.S. Byatt (Philip Hensher, Paris Review, 2001) and
Susan Sontag (Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone, 1979 and 2013).
This essay was written for VH-16-22-7-12-3-22-5 Dreams of Machines, Amelia Bywater and Emma Fitts/Victor & Hester, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow in 2015.
This essay was written for VH-16-22-7-12-3-22-5 Dreams of Machines, Amelia Bywater and Emma Fitts/Victor & Hester, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow in 2015.
[1] This is just a start, but I wanted to send you guys something
before I had to head out. Amelia Bywater,
email conversation with the author, 21 January 2015.
[2] Emma forwarded me into the thread about skyping and swimming and I was thinking about how it would be so nice to be able to be in water, and also how great it is to be in water with friends. I thought I would send you both an email as a way of joining the conversation (across distance) that has already begun between you two, and maybe we can talk about this a bit more on skype. Ibid.
[3] Re-reading I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. There’s a great bit where she writes, ‘What happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world, because it’s least described.’ And perhaps relevant to that also - writing about Alice Notley - ‘Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language, people just assumed we were dumb.’ Email conversation with Victor & Hester, 2 February, 2015.
[4] Eileen Myles! Have you read her? The Importance of Being Iceland. Sorry, I’m not sure where this is heading. Something to do with expertise and knowledge, the place of implacable fact and forms of precision and rigor, in narrative, outside of professional/affirmative institutional structures. Renata Adler is maybe another good example of this kind of radically amateur yet intellectually oriented perspective. Email conversation with Victor & Hester, 2 February 2015.
[2] Emma forwarded me into the thread about skyping and swimming and I was thinking about how it would be so nice to be able to be in water, and also how great it is to be in water with friends. I thought I would send you both an email as a way of joining the conversation (across distance) that has already begun between you two, and maybe we can talk about this a bit more on skype. Ibid.
[3] Re-reading I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. There’s a great bit where she writes, ‘What happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world, because it’s least described.’ And perhaps relevant to that also - writing about Alice Notley - ‘Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language, people just assumed we were dumb.’ Email conversation with Victor & Hester, 2 February, 2015.
[4] Eileen Myles! Have you read her? The Importance of Being Iceland. Sorry, I’m not sure where this is heading. Something to do with expertise and knowledge, the place of implacable fact and forms of precision and rigor, in narrative, outside of professional/affirmative institutional structures. Renata Adler is maybe another good example of this kind of radically amateur yet intellectually oriented perspective. Email conversation with Victor & Hester, 2 February 2015.
[5] I’m sending you Frances Stark,
writing on housewives and architects, ‘Think of literature as an interior
event, the mind or the imagination being the place where the text unfolds. And
consider the interior of the head – the particular bodily limits of your own
perception yet the seeming limitlessness of thought.’ Ibid., 1 March 2015.
[6] I was thinking more about the idea of reproducing ourselves in others, and how this plunges you into new sorts of relationships with the world around you. I guess this emphasises a need of being together. Amelia Bywater, email conversation with the author, 25 January 2015.
[7] I remembered reading this article, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy’, in the New Yorker, which talks about private sociality - a kind of balancing of the need to be known and the need to have an inner self that is protected, but that we might also need to shield ourselves from our own scrutiny. Ibid.
[8] Adler writes, ‘There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.’ (The bit after this is also great, and explains this better, but it's too long! I'll scan and send to you, or better, send the book after I've finished.) Email conversation with Victor & Hester, 29 January 2015.
[6] I was thinking more about the idea of reproducing ourselves in others, and how this plunges you into new sorts of relationships with the world around you. I guess this emphasises a need of being together. Amelia Bywater, email conversation with the author, 25 January 2015.
[7] I remembered reading this article, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy’, in the New Yorker, which talks about private sociality - a kind of balancing of the need to be known and the need to have an inner self that is protected, but that we might also need to shield ourselves from our own scrutiny. Ibid.
[8] Adler writes, ‘There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.’ (The bit after this is also great, and explains this better, but it's too long! I'll scan and send to you, or better, send the book after I've finished.) Email conversation with Victor & Hester, 29 January 2015.
