BOOK! ANNOTATION! TIME!
Last week I read Zadie Smithās Intimations, a collection of essays that Iāve been eyeing forever but only recently picked up (at a Stockholm art book store because Iād run out of things to read on the bus), and maybe somewhat late, since itās a collection specifically about the pandemic.
I donāt know why, but I have developed somewhat of a knee-jerk-cringe reaction to reading anything reflecting on lockdown or the pandemic or 2020 in general (probably why I havenāt read this book until now). Intimations cured me of that aversion. I think what was beautiful about it was how, for Smith, lockdown/the virus/2020 in general serves as a staircase through which to enter conversations about writing, creativity, existing in general. And itās true that those years changed everything, creatively-speaking too.
Here are my favorite moments from Intimations, along with the places they led my brain.
On banana bread
I use this term (āon writingā) somewhat jokingly, since itās the title of Stephen Kingās memoir about writing, and since at the beginning of the third essay Smith pokes fun at the mass of titles that have been written on āWhy I Writeā and āWhy Write?ā (āOn Writingā seems to fit this bill). But the thing is that this is perhaps one of the most important questions I, personally, can imagine.Ā
Smithās answer to this question ā that writing is āsomething to doā ā is one I have not heard before. In fact, her entire narrative around writing, developed partially in the first essay and added to in the third, is one I have not heard.Ā
āWriting is routinely described as ācreativeā ā this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative.Ā
thenā¦
āWriting is control.āĀ
and thenā¦
Writing is all resistance.ā
and, the most surprising of them all:
āThere is no great difference between novels and banana bread.ā
This banana bread quote is possibly the most memorable ā and shocking ā things I have ever read. Her argument is that writing is simply something to do, in the exact same way that baking banana bread is something to do. They are quirks of how we spend our time, what we know, what we have formed habits of doing. The end results ā novels and banana bread ā are essentially the same.Ā One is not more valuable than the other; they are both just something to do.
Iāll be honest: my first response to this was one of resentment. Writing and banana bread? But Iāve thought about it quite a lot since reading this, and now Iām convinced that the beauty of writing lies not in any sort of divinity/virtue of it, but actually in the notion that it is no different from banana bread. Because in this vein of thought ā in the thought process that everything is something to do ā then existing is about baking, about going to the supermarket and buying ingredients and mixing them together and filling your home with the smell of cinnamon and feeding yourself and your friends after. And Iām happy with this.Ā
I find it easy to turn everything into a productivity sprint, into some means to an end, into a measure of my own success (internalized capitalism who???) but at the end of the day, I write because it makes me happy. And sometimes baking banana bread makes me happy ā so I bake banana bread.
My roommate is an incredible baker, and she tends to bake more when sheās stressed. During intense finals weeks or when thereās a lot going on Iāll return home almost every day to find her in the kitchen with her apron on mixing something, measuring cups and chocolate chips strewn about. Over a few days various trays of muffins and cookies and breads and cakes will start to accumulate in one corner of the counter, accompanied by sticky notes identifying them: āgluten free oatmeal cookies!ā ācarrot cake! please eat!ā Itās the most endearing thing I can imagine, and itās the first image that came to mind when I read Smithās little treatise on banana bread. We create because it makes us happy, or because it is something to do. And then we get to share it <3
On āScreengrabsā
This is the title of one of the Smithās sections. I underlined it purely because this word has been a philosophically charged one for me ever since I watched āScreenshot,ā part of the video essay series āPractices of Viewingā by Johannes Binotto. A screenshot is a fascinating thing. The first time I ever took a screenshot it felt as if I was stealing an image from a dream, like I was capturing something I should not be able to capture. (The number of times I have been in a dream and decided, super earnestly, to take some object with me into the āreal worldā ā a book or a relic or, god forbid, a person ā only to wake up and discover it has been ripped from my hands during the journey! Someone should figure that out.)
The majority of us take hundreds, perhaps thousands, of screenshots per year. Maybe we look at a few; maybe we come back to none of them. My favorite screenshots are the ones that capture the entire workspace ā the dock, the battery meter in the corner, the windows and tabs I have open. In these ones, I feel I am looking at my brain, or at a set for my brain. The lights are on, the stage is set, the single actor sits atop a blank word document.Ā
Anyways. None of this has anything to do with Intimations other than thatās where it made my brain go.
On Wasting Time
āAnd I make good use of my time [at the back room of this nail place], if the purpose of time is to fill it always with activity, never to just be in it, nor ever to acknowledge its fundamental independence from your conceptions of it.ā
I donāt have much to say on this at this moment other than to put it here. But I think itās worth it to think about the function of time. Do we live inside of it? Can we go outside of it? What is the effect of our own way of visualizing it? My friends and I once compared our visual conceptualizations of the months of the year; each was bizarre and vastly different. My year forms a strange Z shape, where the summer months diagonally bridge between the spring and the fall.
If there is anything I have learned from travel, it is that everyone thinks of time just a little differently. Here in Sweden, where I am staying for the summer, time is a little more stretchy, more taffy-like; it seems like you can play with it just a bit. Getting to work at 10:00 is not much different from 10:30. On my first day, my boss encouraged me to go on a long hike during lunch and to ācome back whenever I felt like it.ā I looked at her with my mouth in an O. Here, you can sit in time; you can take a long, slow meal. In the US, time feels a little more religious. You schedule down to the quarter-hour, a task for each box; you complete things as quickly as you can. (this is maybe a bit of a dramatization, but often how it feels).
But as a result, I have developed an aversion to waiting for people. My biggest pet peeve is waiting for others to be ready. I donāt think this is a good thing, and Iāve been trying to get better at it. The question often crosses my mind ā āhow much time in my life will I spend in the act of waiting for something?ā (the problematic assumption being that waiting is passive, or negative ā just as sleeping, or transporting yourself from point A to point B, or laying on your bed staring at the ceiling ā is passive, and therefore a waste of time.)
But these āpassiveā activities are just as active as the things they lie between. Perhaps more so (I am more physically active in my dreams than in eighty percent of my day; my best thoughts come in the shower, which is an activity I have always hated because it feels too āintermediary.ā) Somewhere in me I know that it is liminality that holds most of the meaning in our lives. Connections over nodes (to draw on Deleuze, my default philosophy reference). And yet, every day, despite the fact that I know in my bones that most meaning lies in the in-between, I calculate the fastest route; I plan to the quarter hour; I tap my foot while waiting for a friend or the bus. I will feel a dull panic rising in me the longer I have to wait.
And yet, as I wait, I get to watch a bee land on a flower; a strand of wind makes her trajectory through a tree; two clouds converge. What does it even mean to āfillā time, and how do we remove it from the structure weāve built up around it?
Onā¦ I donāt know what yet, actually
āAnaĆÆs Ninā
I underlined this name because I wanted to look it up.Ā
On Immune Systems
āYou start to think of contempt as a virus.āĀ
In this essay, āContempt as Virus,ā Smith talks about the idea that hate and racism and other oppressive ways of thinking infect individuals and communities and society, working invisibly within us until weāre sick. This was a powerful essay, and this idea is one that will stick with me for a while. I think itās a useful way of looking at things, for the most basic reason that it helps you be more resistant to the virus in yourself. The feeling of contempt certainly feels like an infection when it descends upon you ā it seems to come from outside yourself, from elsewhere (ādescendsā), and yet it overtakes you. How do we build up an immune system against this?Ā
On Public Land
āā¦ to read every line of a book with the same sense of involvement and culpability as if you had written it yourself. And, conversely, to write your own sentences as if you had no more ownership over the lines than a stranger.ā
Perhaps one of my favorite feelings in the world is the feeling when you read a sentence in a book or essay and you feel as if it came from yourself, from your own depths. It is as if the writer has reached deep within you, seen you, given you a piece of yourself you did not know you had.Ā
I love this idea of writing your own sentences as if they belong to strangers just as much as to you. Isnāt that the beauty of writing? Isnāt that the idea of āpoeticsā? (mimicry and structure) In this vein of thought, writing is fundamentally an act of love. (And, I guess, it follows that so is baking banana bread.)Ā
In Sweden, where I am writing this from, all land is public land. You can sit on any rock or shore and swim in the water. I guess Iām starting to feel this way about writing, after reading this. Thatās not to say that we should share writing we want to keep private; what I mean is that, maybe, we should think of writing as public worldbuilding. Each sentence we add to our environment is one that others can walk on, build a house on, repeat and mimic and involve yourself with as if they strung the words together themselves. Maybe this is what we already do; I donāt know. I just think itās a nice thought :)Ā
-chlo (writing this from my favorite cafe, Lykke, in Stockholm!)