Dreaming the World

We awoke to clear skies after an evening of rain. At breakfast, more cloud came in, then left, so that now the sky is a vast open blue. It’s cool but hardly cold. Still, we keep the doors and windows closed until the air warms, much to the consternation of Nori the Cat.

On Saturday we went to the local outdoor farmers’ market to restock the fridge, and were reminded that having social time is a large part of the draw. Now, in early October, there are only three weeks left before the market moves inside for the winter. We shall certainly miss the stroll to the park and the many leisurely conversations in the open air.

Yesterday we went to Bristol to walk on the rail trail, get apple cider donuts (delicious!), and have lunch, and lost one of our brand new vests along the way. How we lost it remains a mystery, but there is no doubt it is gone and unlikely to return. This morning at breakfast, Jennie was on her laptop ordering a replacement, which was on sale! I love vests, yet somehow I was able to restrain myself from ordering another.

After a couple of weeks of stasis, there is now more color in the canopy each day. The maples in the schoolyard across the street, while not at peak, are awash in vibrant reds and orange, highlighted by splashes of deep green. It is a joy to sit at the kitchen table and breath in the color. Other trees have yet to turn at all.

I’m reading The Light Room by Kate Zambreno. While it reads as a memoir of raising a baby and three year old daughter in pandemic, Kate has insisted that it is not really memoir. I suspect that it is social criticism in a memoirist’s cloak, a fierce outlaying of the impacts of late neoliberal capital and its apologists. (Here’s a link to an intriguing interview with them.)

Zambreno is noted for writing between genres, or even against them. They are a brilliant writer and have won a Guggenheim, but find themselves struggling to make ends meet even with two, abet part time, wage earners. Of course, adjunct academic positions are really full time gigs, as is parenting young kids, and the pair are constantly exhausted and desperate.

In the midst of autumn, then winter, social isolation, and sleepless nights, Kate finds room to write about the luminosity of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, art created from profound personal loneliness. It is her desire to illumine the lives of her kids but there is precious little time to recoup enough from everyday stress to shine.

I am drawn to writing that insists on living in the cracks that open between genres, writing that places us squarely in the complexity of the human experience. If my writing has a project, it is surely this, a goal given ever more urgency by the steady collapse of the possible human. I like to imagine that there is a community of writers and artists like me, and that when the collapse is complete, we will be thrown clear of the black hole, into a new, and expanding universe. What do you think?