“you discover yourself in wor(l)ds, rather than hide in them”
— Writing with reading
“Charles Simic’s ‘Reading Philosophy at Night’”
by Katherine Stewart
Charles Simic, ‘Reading Philosophy at Night.’ The title is enough to construct myself a hostile foundation.
Philosophy. Bricks of anxiety. Mortared insecurity. Wont to be erected by an inability to understand. With knee-jerk shaking I distance myself from it for fear of confirming this bias.
Night. Danger. The mind will wander, finding gaps to let in a fell wind. Perhaps there is safety. Solitude, a tower.
“Whoever reads philosophy reads himself as much as he reads the philosopher. I am in a dialogue with certain decisive events in my life as much as I am with the ideas on the page. Meaning is the matter of my existence. My effort to understand is a perpetual circling around a few obsessive images.”1
Reading Charles Simic to read myself. I disliked the text. ‘Reading Philosophy at Night.’ The words touched my lips, and I was prepared to spit them back. I think
I am afraid.
________
I appreciate collage – the cutting, ripping, affixing of fragments. I learned first to associate it with visual art. My mother is an artist, an edict she may not comfortably engage herself – who, after all, can with easy sincerity find their work worthy of consideration as literature, as art? Some can, I’m sure, though perhaps not most.
She follows the process – starts with a charcoal sketch, a photograph, more likely twenty, her camera less clicks than buzzes. She brings ink, oilbar, varnish to the easel; applied with a triangle of cardboard or a clean-enough stick from the garden. She rebuilds the image from scratch. It is not the same. It is not always recognisable. Never pretty, though sometimes beautiful. Besides this, she uses pieces.
________
I am afraid of uncertainty, determined to reconcile it. More likely to ignore it. I am afraid of Simic and of Descartes because there is no certainty that I will understand. More so, I am afraid of certainty. I can’t digest the piece in its whole. It is certain.
________
Pieces she found: wallpaper scraps from a condemned tenement soon to come down in a mushroom puff of dust; or a crumbling weed-eaten ruin where she was chased off by a security guard, in part, at least, for her own safety.
Pieces she bought: old sheet music and graph paper, antique lace she found on eBay; troves of empty frames and the tailor’s mannequins which continue to haunt my parents’ bedroom.
Pieces she made: pictures and plaster-coated fabric (still half determined to make an artwork of her wedding dress), the same plaster which burned a hole in the plastic table that sits still in our garden.
It follows then, as I learned my art from hers, that I hold an appreciation for those who work with texture.
________
Reading slowly, abstaining judgement. The passage from Descartes is full of uncertainty. It comforts me. Perhaps not afraid, but overwhelmed.
________
I am not usually one to linger at exhibitions, preferring to find a few pieces which engage my being and then manoeuvring swiftly to the café for cake. I stayed, though, and returned, for as long as I was able, to the small collection of paintings by Francis Bacon held at one or other of the galleries of modern art in Edinburgh. I savoured the brushstrokes, the layers, the vulgar application of paint. The paintings in whole, as to be expected of Bacon, were an uneasy delight, with twisted fleshy forms and ghoulish palettes, unsettling in purple and orange.
But it is the texture that catches me raw.
________
“Then we saw a man having his throat cut. The killer sat on the man’s chest with a knife in his hand. He seemed pleased to be photographed. The Victim’s eyes I don’t remember. A few men stood around gawking. There were clouds in the sky.”2
Simple. Devastatingly so. There were clouds in the sky. The line catches my breath the third, fourth, twelfth time and I wonder how I could have missed it. In my response to the text, I said nothing about the clouds. Whoever reads philosophy reads herself and I read a fear of Descartes.
I did not read the clouds.
________
The contorted smoothness of those monstrous, alien, undeniably human shapes is shocked by the violence of dry-brush bars.
The stippling wounds me, breathless, in the gut.
I do not wonder that his portrait studies scream.
Seeing pictures in my mother’s books and magazines, I was familiar enough with the framing, content, to an extent the colours of his work, but a picture can’t quite capture the feeling. I tried anyway, getting too close with my phone’s shitty 8-bit camera, returning a flat image. My own reflection in the glass.
________
It is evident that I am not able to swallow Charles Simic’s essay in its whole, nor indeed should I be inclined to do so. Perhaps that is no bad thing.
Whoever reads philosophy reads themself and that must never be easy. A person is a fragmentary thing, a body built up in layers. If you were able to skim a stranger and know them, what would be the point? Myself, I know in trickles, in stretch marks, in smears. If I knew myself, what would be the point?
Perhaps it is the process which holds purpose. A process in which understanding must be sought in its parts, its clouds, its strokes. Chewing through. Piece by piece. Feeling the hurt of the gristle.
Charles Simic, ‘Reading Philosophy at Night’ in Anthaeus: Literature as Pleasure, ed. by Daniel Halpern (New York: Ecco Press, 1987), issue 59, pp. 135-142, p. 136
Ibid, p. 139
“Beverly Bie Brahic’s ‘Arrivals’”
by Sarah Axt
Dear Arrivals –
as I open you on the first page of this collection, I can’t help but feel welcomed
and tricked by you. Arrivals. You speak to me as much as you speak to any other reader. Address us together.
Let’s unpack the rental car we scratched backing into the old stable – 1
I know nothing about this rental car of yours. You ask me to make the bed, too, and to ponder dust.2 I guess I can do that. It seems familiar, your demand to start unpacking after a long, long drive. It feels like returning home to a place that isn’t quite home. It is a temporary rest, a safe return. When were you there last, this home?
You use words I don’t quite understand, and it bothers me. I want this to be my home, too. I want to take you to the farmhouse we went to every autumn, quite certainly. The arrival there; being greeted by dog after dog, hoping they’d all still be alive. I knew the grounds like the back of my hand. We could “track” dirt “in” as much as we’d like.3 We would collect eggs in the morning, say hello to the chickens. We would stop by the horses and the goats. On some days, we’d walk to the farm one road down to buy fresh milk. We’d play game after game, in the wooden shed near the swing. It was home. The rain and the mud were the heart of it. The sun and the trees were the soul. We made the beds in the mornings, without being asked. We ran downstairs to where new adventures awaited. It was joy. It was our place to be children.
It is there I learnt most about closeness to nature. We foraged mushrooms with confidence, though always knew this could be it. It was Mum who was the expert after all, and if she was wrong, we might not live. We laughed about everything and slept deeper than ever. Our hair was tangled, and our clothes smelt like fire and field. There were holes in our trousers as much as our knees. It was home.
Have you uncorked “this green bottle of last years Can Saint Marc”?4 Are you drinking it, sat down on the chairs in the garden? Does the air smell like rain? It took me a while to take hold of the nostalgia described. Your language is beautiful and forceful. Though I hear the poem’s voice, your voice, so clearly now. You are reminiscing as I am now. You wish to “wind [back] the clock,” as I wish I could.5 It makes you think about all that has changed throughout life and that this place can exist outside the limitations of time. You think the people are the same and the joy is the same, but you never know, do you? Every time you go, at least you make the bed.
Thank you for the invitation to dive into you, Arrivals. I thought I understood, or that perhaps I wouldn’t have to make sense of your memories fully. And while I don’t, I still do. Poetry is effect and I am all in. The home you create is as much mine as it is yours.
Yours sincerely,
A reader
Beverly Bie Brahic, ‘Arrivals’ in Hunting the Boar (London: CB editions, 2016), p. 3
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
“Hymn (written with ‘Stretto’ by David Wheatley in mind)”
by Ella Ferguson
I only went to church for school concerts.
My friend told me he was gay when we were thirteen; told me how terrified he was of his parents finding out. He knew he would never be able to go back to his church, and he couldn’t be sure his family would want him in their house either.
We cried a queer kind of tears on the morning of the pride parades every year, singing each other’s praises, painting each other with all our shades of love. Hoping in vain that our brightness would blind the protestors at the edge of the route with their angry placards and their knife-sharp words.
The glass stained blood red on my skin, burning my eyes when I looked up. I thought the hymns were beautiful, but when I tried to sing them, the words got jumbled in my mouth, falling over each other as if they were too big for me, like mum’s heels in her room when she wasn’t looking.
A girl in my class wore a hijab and got to stay in school when we went to sing. The teacher told us that she liked to sing different songs. I thought of the blaring speakers at the centre of the crowd that cried out for freedom in June. I wanted to stay back too but I didn’t have an excuse; at least not one that anybody could see.
The spires of churches loomed over me back when I hadn’t yet grown into my nose. I asked my friend who said Grace at dinner when I went to her house - what was that bleak, spiky building like on Sundays?
She said like a big family gathering.
They would say that we were too immature to understand. Too young to know. My teacher told me I was disrupting the class, as if that wasn’t already written in all my school reports. I asked my Religious and Moral Education teacher when we’d study atheism. He laughed.
When I sat in the church, I wondered for my friends.
I wondered if I would be welcome on Sundays.
“about war and children (Agota Kristof’s The Notebook and Dmytro Bahnehko’s ‘Occupied’)”
by Jeannie MacLean
How often do you have to look away during a television report from Ukraine? As Clive Myrie or Lyse Doucet graphically describe scenes of horror in understated tones, as Russian invaders seek to obliterate everyday life –
I glance away. Even at the remove of thousands of miles and a television screen, so much of what I see is only bearable for moments.
I am still thinking about walls torn from the fronts of buildings exposing shreds of lives lived there, shots of women grieving the loss of family members, parents holding children close. Close for now.
And one image remains and repeats.
Almost offscreen,
A pile of rubble,
A broken doll.
And the child?
And the child?
Time makes no difference.
During the Spanish Civil War, Virginia Woolf wrote of the power of images:
This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room…1
Agota Kristof was a child in Hungary during the Second World War when the country was occupied by Germany, and later by Soviet Russia.
She knew war as a child.
She fled Hungary with her husband and baby daughter a month after the beginning of the Hungarian uprising and, having settled in Switzerland, she became a writer.
I am reading her first novel, The Notebook.
Can I read this book without being profoundly disturbed?
No.
Do I look away?
Of course.
Kristof wrote the story of twin boys taken to live with their grandmother because of war. The story is in the boys’ own voices, written in short sentences as they would think and speak, and arranged in short sections. Their voice is always ‘we.’ Each piece focuses on their growing separation from a ‘normal’ childhood, as they choose to survive the circumstances they find themselves in.
The writing is visceral, the focus full on.
See what’s happening?
This is what war does.
This is what cruelty gestates and gives birth to.
This is what hunger drives.
This is what alienation gives rise to.
As twins they are together. They speak with one voice. They teach themselves to dissociate from pain and emotion, to survive.
You wouldn’t like them. Their lives reflect the depravity of war.
The images Kristof creates as the novel moves towards its devastating completion are hard to witness, clear as any photograph.
Susan Sontag writes on the power of war photography:
The scale of war’s murderousness destroys what identifies people as individuals, even as human beings. This, of course, is how war looks when it is seen from afar, as an image.2
In 2022, Dmytro Bahnehko made a short documentary called ‘Occupied.’ He and his wife and young daughter live in Kherson in Ukraine. It is a city on the Black Sea occupied by Russian Forces. He filmed everything on his mobile phone.
The images linger.
His daughter speaks to him from underneath a table in the living room,
“I don’t want them to shoot bombs at me.”3
His wife says to nobody,
“Hate grows inside you.”
He says on camera,
“We pretend life is normal to protect Sucha.
How much does she understand?” he asks.
He must go away overnight, and his daughter tells him from under her table that she saw a robot in the sky, and she was terrified.
“It wanted to kill me.”
Her parents decide they will leave Kherson and drive to Kiev with his sister, who is expecting a baby. These are terrifying moments; crossing no-man’s land, passing checkpoints. As her parents talk, Sucha spends mile upon mile looking out of the window at blackened, burned-out vehicles lining the road.
How much does she understand?
Since I began writing this, the Russians have retreated from Kherson. Dmytro and his family are free to return. To what, we might ask?
Susan Sontag gives us a flavour of the heritage of war:
To designate a hell is not, of course to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists […] when confronted with evidence of what cruelties humans are capable of inflicting […] has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.4
What a devastating legacy for Sucha Bahnehka to come to understand.
Children unwittingly carry the imprint of warfare into their futures; the sounds and images; the learned hatred; the memories of loss.
Quoting Virginia Wolf in Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), p. 2
Ibid, p.53
Occupied, dir. Dmytro Bahnehko (2022) [video]. Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer>
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 100
“Charles Simic’s ‘Reading Philosophy at Night’”
by Callum Gavin
“Whoever reads philosophy reads himself as much as he reads the philosopher,” wrote Charles Simic.1 A few decades later, I scrawled it in my notebook. Then forgot it. This is the way I study, a magpie for treasures from great writers and thinkers. I find a quote or thought gleaming and glimmering, only to be drawn to something dazzling in the distance. And so on.
So much of what it means to me to be a reader is to discover myself in the words of others in more excruciating detail than in any mirror; to feel, however ludicrously, that a writer addresses me and only me. David Foster Wallace did this, between some admittedly patience-testing tennis games, when he described depression in Infinite Jest. I believed him when he wrote, “no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable,” and I still do.2 Happening upon the Simic quote again, sifting through my occasionally incoherent scribblings, I realise it is not only how to behave as a reader but also as a writer. I want to see more than reflections and hear more than echoes. Simic remembers reading at night, “the open book, and my face reflected dimly in the darkened windowpane”; I realise, when I read or write, there is a whole other world even though my reflection is always present.3 This world is a shared one.
Whoever writes essays writes a stranger as much as they write the self.
Simic, ‘Reading Philosophy at Night,’ p. 136
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (London: Abacus, 1997), p. 631
Occupied, dir. Dmytro Bahnehko (2022) [video]. Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer>
Simic, ‘Reading Philosophy,’ p. 135