Dust and the Exhausted Body, the Injured Body
— This past week I have once again become obsessed with the line by Jane Austen (surprise!) from Northanger Abbey:
“Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.”
— I try and stop myself from going down the rabbit hole of the last 6 years, having dug myself out of whatever hole to whatever degree has been possible. I mean, I wrote a whole book which will be published all the way into the future of 2029 titled Repair Manual for the Soul. And it’s really stupid of me but I had in mind when writing it that when it was finally published that would be the closure. The repair of my soul would then be complete. lol. Of course that will be an ever ongoing thing. Of course it will be. But I didn’t anticipate the far off pub date. Which is the price you pay for being a late career writer with a body of work, and a successful publisher who is booked in advance, (in a world where AI is fucking up the world and writers and publishing etc). And it’s a price worth paying, it is. I can wait.
— Suffice to say that I began thinking about the injured body, collectively of we writers. Wondering what things will look like when the dust settles. Anyway, I then started to think about housekeeping and dust. I dusted our knick-knack table. (If you’re reading in the newsletter you’ll need to view in browser for the header photo).
— Then I started to think about all the books about cleaning and housekeeping written by women. Poems. This one:
Dust
by Dorianne Laux
Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.
(from What We Carry)
— I made a pile of books on my desk where there is a housekeeper, a cleaner, featured. And I know there are dozens more, but below is the start of a list with a few quotations.
— But first, there is an exhibition at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands titled “The Architect and the House: Cleaning the House, Building the Future.” Check out this post on instagram about Mierle Laderman Ukeles scrubbing the stairs of a museum, and a movie titled Maintenance Artist that might be of interest. More on her here.
— Let’s start with Riverwork by Lisa Robertson. I think it’s not going too far to say that LR is a literary genius. As a writer you read a book like this and are filled with the most glorious envy. Do you know what I mean? I think you do.
“This is about he exhausted body, time in the body, what writing once was to me and what it became, lateness, failure, dust, the disappeared river….”
On dust: “Dust’s plinth is earth. But earth itself is dust. Mortality is light. We’re all the fallen material of some dream or another. Rubblework and rhyme.”
“Dust makes pigments, poultices, mortar, bricks, ink, clay…”
— One of the novels I most admire is The Door by Magda Szabó. Once you meet the character Emerence, I don’t think you’ll be the same. A writer hires a cleaner, a “silent old woman.”
“…if someone didn’t take over the housekeeping there would be little chance of my publishing the work I’d produced in my years of silence, or finding a voice for anything new I might have to say.”
“She was responsible for clearing the snow from eleven different buildings.”
— From the titular story from Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women:
“Cleaning women do steal. Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about. It is the superfluity that finally gets to you. We don’t want the change in the little ashtrays.”
”Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumour that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.”
– I love Indelicacy by Amina Cain, about a cleaning woman at a museum.
“I had to mop the bathrooms. I had to scrub the toilets and the sinks. It was the worst part of my job and I didn’t know how to do it without wanting to throw my bucket of water on someone.”
— Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson is a transfiguration, a holy book, for many authors. Enuff said yah. And there isn’t a housecleaner per se. But this.
“Sylvie realized that her first scheme to keep us together had failed.”
“Still, she persisted in her housekeeping. She polished the windows, or those that still had panes, and others she covered neatly with tape and brown paper. I washed the china and put it back in the cupboard and burned the boxes in the orchard.”
— Sophie Calle leaves me in awe whenever I look through one of the many books I have on her. A particular treasure is The Hotel, where she (nonfiction) works as a chambermaid in a hotel in Venice In an interview with the Guardian she says, “Sometimes I do cruel things and it’s worth it.”
— Well, we are an exhausted body, an injured body, we writers, many, most? of us. We are dust, we dust, we are in a dust-up. Still, we persist. We will not be erased, though we have been pillaged. Though our work has been stolen. Though we be an injured body.
— Last post I talked about the years we might have left. (Is it ever too early to start thinking about your latter years? :) Memento Mori and all that. This one struck a chord — I got a lotta notes about that one and thank you.
— What I want for us as humans is more than just to live with the unbearable, the unthinkable, the violence, the injustice. As Lauren Berlant says in their book On the Inconvenience of Other People, “Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple, in the sense of resolved once and for all.” How can we go on asking better questions, repairing, when it’s all so overwhelming? How do we, as they say, “live on with.” Life is so grievable.
– How will we be when the dust settles? How many pennies do we leave in the rosebud ashtrays? How much ash? rosebuds?
