What she writes might be thought of as essays, except they read more like diaries, though they aren’t really diaries, either. Or they start off as diaries or lists or notes and then they become essays, and when they are essays she might talk about fridges or a film she’s been making or she’ll quote Roland Barthes or Mary Wollstonecraft or she’ll write about her child, and then there’s maybe something about photography, too. Then more fragments, lists. Something about clocks, something about weddings, something about love letters, Thomas Mann, Vivian Gornick. Then she writes about a memory but doesn’t much get into that, either; we don’t in fact ever learn what it is she’s recalling—it’s something to do with a park, I think, or a fairground, probably. It’s the summer, and the sixties, and she’s holding the hand of her mother. Her hair is long and tousled and tied into a clean pink bow and meanwhile her mother is guiding her somewhere and that somewhere is down a very long very narrow road where occasionally she turns towards a direction, and then away, and all of a sudden we find ourselves in a completely different town under completely different circumstances and it seems utterly impossible that we’ll ever reacquaint ourselves with familiar surroundings. That’s the way I pictured it, at least. I pictured it while on the scaffolding outside my parents’ house because that’s where I read her. I pictured it while smoking my first cigarette of the day and when I got back inside I poured hot water from the kettle all over my other cigarettes and used the remains from the kettle for the bath. And when I read her again I decided she had a sort of palpable and insidious ability to move me quite forcefully without ever taking a moment to explain precisely what it is that is actually occupying her, which is something I enjoy, I think. I think I find something pleasant about being so hopelessly unmoored in another person’s mind or their own projection of their mind or a version of their mind that they are willing to project onto me. I like the closeness of it combined with the obvious distance. I like feeling left out but welcomed to peer through the door. Imagining that there are certain very peculiar and underground little notions that are too slippery to be so simply pinned down. That there’s something deep as the well goes down. Beneath all the ink and black. The black and quiet. Just deep under all that.

In Les Goddesses, one of Moyra Davey’s more illustrative essays, she returns often to this idea of the ‘wet’. The wet here refers to the most pressing aspects of her life, which usually are what she wishes to write about, though it seems now she feels she can no longer write about them. She feels stuck. The essay has forced itself to become awkward, structured like the very rough notebook of a very busy person without the time or space or inclination to say what they mean, cleanly or clearly, to anyone. Quoting Marguerite Duras, she writes, ‘to be without a subject for a book, without any idea of a book, is to find yourself in front of a book [ . . . ] an eventual book, in front of writing, live and naked, something terrible to surmount.’ Except Davey knows her subject. Or she can sense her subject working on her and isn’t sure whether she has the strength or stamina or inclination to force it past so much ‘biographical reticence’ and out onto the surface. The essay, in the end, is a love letter to her family. A distilleddepiction of the first however many years of her and her sisters’ lives. But there are other things here, too. There is her body and Aaron Burr and Scandinavia and Goethe’s Flight to Italy and then hints of other, vaguely unmentionable things, also occasionally moments of grief, guilt, a slight sense that despite offering so much paper and ink, and so many dispassionate quotations, Davey hasn’t quite bared herself to the extent to which a writer is meant to bare themselves. Despite her efforts, the ‘wet’ has remained somewhat allusive. At best, she can produce a few snapshots. Single photographs. And she can never quite pin down what happens once the camera’s put away. This does, I think, make a lot of sense. In my own writing I am consistently hopeless at reaching my specific point; rarely do my writing and I get along very well, and often I’ll want to talk about an idea but in talking about it I’ll end up talking about an idea near the idea that doesn’t really have anything to do with the original idea at all. I’ll get confused somewhere. It’s awfully difficult to ever get at precisely what our ‘wet’ even is. Naturally, this partly comes down to that ‘biographical reticence’ again – that despite whatever polemic handwringing we might offer to the contrary most people aren’t too keen on being truly vulnerable or indicatory about themselves within their work, or in anything, at least not completely, at least not most of the time. Usually one wishes just to brush against things, and then turn swiftly away. But I want to argue that there’s also something else happening here; it seems to me that when Davey mentions the ‘wet’ she’s perhaps speaking to the nagging sense that there’s something else beneath the everything else. That yes she’s speaking about her sisters and Aron Burr and photographs and drugs but also there’s a slightly more slippery thing that sits between all that, too. A small somewhat auxiliary but essential section that she doesn’t quite have the capability to access but which is, in fact, here. Only there’s only so far the well goes down before it becomes too black to see. It’s something I’ve noticed within my own writing. When I’m doing my best work it feels as if I’m letting myself into that very deep dark hole and I’m just about touching upon the ‘wet’ and I’ve yet to come back onto the surface and my skin is imprecisely burning and my mind is caught up within itself and it seems to me that I can just keep typing and typing and typing fairly reliably forever. I already know, of course, that once I stop it’ll all likely begin to break apart. I’ll realise I haven’t quite hit upon whatever had been important to hit upon. I might have made a sideways glance at my ‘wet’, but I’ll have been imprecise, clumsy. The result, ultimately, will be a disappointment. I can’t think this is an uncommon feeling. At the very least it appears to be a propensity Davey and I both share, which is likely why I have been as taken with her for as long as I have been – her position that ‘the thing is only alive (and by extension [she’s] only alive) when it is in process’. Her admittance that ‘it interests [her] more to frame the question than to answer it’.

In the end of course a select admittance to the inadequacy of words to convey what it is you really mean isn’t exactly new. Whatever Davey wishes to write about, whether it’s very deep inside of her or not, is always going to chafe against the surefire unavoidability of the ineffable. I won’t be able to say precisely what I mean to say because what I mean to say is in here and you are out there, and beyond that, even allowing that what I want to say is in here—is in me—there’s also the fact that I am out there, too. And any enjoyment I might get from this inflamed honesty I’m trying to reflect won’t be the full extent of what it’s meant to be; how could it? One ends up with a lot of very unattractive paragraphs that ultimately aren’t about very much at all. You can quickly lose your grip. Or you become aware that you never had much of a grip on anything to begin with. Everything becomes disarrayed and not quite and too much, and usually when this happens I’ll decide that whatever it was I figured at first brush was fervent and valuable, really isn’t worth the bother and I’ll store it in a Documents folder and just about disregard it forever. Never mind. Move on to other things; one can get very caught up in these sorts of hasty contrivances and forget to propagate much of anything else. Get drunk and flirt again. Give a very good blowjob and receive a so-so blowjob in return. Talk about making scrambled eggs, talk about moving to Madrid, talk about Joan Mitchell paintings, collarbones, ghosts, black cats. Do fairly whatever you want but don’t spend too much time writing. Remember that within writing, a ‘here it is’ as opposed to a ‘working out’ is the opposite of helpful and one should be very careful of ever attempting something so definitively conclusive. To do so kills whatever it is and makes everything very boring. In an article for the London Review of Books, Fredric Jameson notes that this might be his main problem with the memoirs of Karl Ove Knausgård, mostly basing this opinion on Knausgård’s seemingly insatiable need to index and catalogue everything around him: his penchant for describing the process of going to the supermarket, smoking cigarettes, picking up his children from school, and then proceeding to write about writing about the supermarket, the cigarettes, sitting quietly in traffic with his children. It’s a mode of writing where everything is jotted down and stated dispassionately and concretely after the fact. There’s no sense that any thought Knausgård offers hasn’t already been positively picked upon and prodded and galvanised and torn through to the point where it isn’t just completely done with. Everything’s already been handled and finished. He may describe the supermarket shelf, the contents of his father’s house, the office where he writes, or he’ll tell you about an evening, lying awake, watching the streets of Oslo below his window. He’ll even tell you the thoughts he had while doing so. But the thoughts aren’t new. Nothing is in progress. All that’s left is to list the comings and goings. The goings and comings.

I really can’t say whether Knausgård’s memoirs are as dire as Jameson claims they are because I’ve only read part one of My Struggle, and then only half-heartedly and while living between houses when I was twenty-five, and only because my boyfriend at the time had stolen me a copy from the bookshop where he worked. I remember I found certain sections of it appealing; I enjoyed the descriptions of Norway and basements, and I enjoyed how often the characters smoked because this was when I’d begun smoking in earnest again, too. Overall, though, the style felt flat, and it’s nice having my somewhat arbitrary dislike of the book being halfway justified. I don’t like to suppose that things can be so simply pulled apart and cauterised such that they can be examined cleanly by anyone. It’s why Davey’s methodology makes more sense to me; something akin to Sontag’s erotics of art as opposed to a hermeneutics. The sort of glassy thing that exists in process but falls apart when more directly examined.

I want to tell you a story. In my early twenties I spent an evening in Montenegro with an American who talked incessantly about the Second World War and the importance of the Second World War and how, eventually, it had been very important to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, too, that it had been very vital, in fact—and in fact the word vital was the exact point when the girl I was with got right up from the shisha bar, leaving me alone with the man who proceeded to offer me a shining peach pill in the shape of a dolphin’s head. I’m unsure why I stayed. I hadn’t wanted to, but I did, and since back then I still couldn’t think of myself as a woman I took the pill along with a small portion of powder and when I made it back to the hostel I sat in the bath for several hours and proceeded to smoke a whole 30g packet of tobacco, one after the other after the other. Smoking and reading in the bath. A gleaming reflection of the day beginning in the ornamental patio outside. Once I came back from Europe me and the American exchanged emails for another six months. Again, I don’t know why; I think I liked the novelty of being connected to someone so completely beyond the pale and disastrous. He resettled in the States and got almost immediately married and after that we mostly stopped corresponding, save for one instance on my friend’s twenty-sixth birthday when I sent him a picture of my left tit in the pub bathroom. It was the first time I’d done anything like that. It hadn’t occurred to me before then that there was much in the way of tits for me to display to anyone, and as with most other transformative and totalising elements in my life, I hadn’t noticed the new way I was moving through the world until some stranger had cupped his hand right against my backside as I was waiting for a taxi on my way into the city centre. The whole episode (the bar, the pub, the taxi rank) became something I was quite keen to write about, though I didn’t in the end write about it much at all. Possibly because after a few preliminary sketches it didn’t appear that the situation would be that revelatory to anyone other than myself. I could write the details, but the ‘wet’ remained somewhat far away. There’s another essay by Davey, Hemlock Forest, where she interrogates and expands upon some of her thoughts from Les Goddesses. In it, she confesses that she’s ‘piecing together fragments because [she] doesn’t yet have a subject’. And I suppose that accounts for much of my problem: I’ve rarely if ever been able to find my subject. It will, occasionally, appear as I’m moving around it. I will allow for certain real and fictitious details relating to whatever it is to sometimes sneak through into my work, but the exact centre of what these details relate to has never been particularly clear to me. They have to be looked at to the side. Even now, I can sense whatever it is I’m nominally meant to be grasping for becoming somewhat distanced: my ‘wet’ refuses to stay rooted. In a later essay Davey admits to her fear of ‘low-hanging fruit,’ her worry of only doing the work that’s easy and simple and obvious and comforting and is in some way supposedly palatable, and this is undoubtedly also part of the issue. It’s not so easy to write about yourself in a way that doesn’t completely miss the mark and turn you into something so conclusively indexable. When in ‘I Am Love’ Claire-Louise Bennett writes, ‘once an image becomes definite and persuasive it settles like a patio slab and no longer reverberates with intimations and possibilities,’ this is, I think, what she’s getting at. Like Bennett, I have ‘a fancy for a rather more dappled conflation of vagueness and exactitude’. You can look at the ‘wet’ and then look away again, before it gets too filled up with your looking. Before it’s just another thing you can just about see.

Recently I reread some of those emails the American and I sent to each other. They were almost all about love, as it happens. Not that we were in love with each other or had any plans of being in love with each other or really imagined that we’d ever be in a state where we would fully extol our loves, ourselves, to anyone; certainly I didn’t ever want to take flight across the Atlantic and proclaim something stupid and menial to someone who in any other circumstance I’d want precisely nothing to do with. Besides, he was a man and I was a woman but I wasn’t yet a woman that thought of herself as a woman, and he was a straight man, I think, though we had kissed once, that first night, but again I was a woman then, too, in a manner of speaking. There were other people in our lives by this time, but we were both fairly convinced that we weren’t in love. Or we were convinced that any love we did have couldn’t possibly compare to the love that was being given to us, and as such we were usually left tired and guilty and would write long melodramatic emails to each other proclaiming quite forcefully that half the battle of love was coming to terms with the fact that no one will ever love enough—that to love is to hope the other is loving better than you are. Describing love as a kind of battleground or clandestine failure where you both collapse and you both attempt to hide this collapse and you both hope beyond hope that the other is somehow better while simultaneously hiding your own inherent inability to truly give yourself and fall apart and beg of the other and become the other. We were both of the opinion that we were the issue. Fairly set upon the notion that everyone we would ever sleep with would begin as pressing and shining and beautiful but would invariably turn into a flat nothing that ideally we’d want to be very far away from ideally very much as soon as possible. I don’t know what it was that led us to be so totally candid with each other; it’s not as if there was any fondness between us. And aside from the picture in the bathroom I never explained what was going on in my life or expected he would do the same. There is perhaps just something indeterminately gratifying about baring the very worst of yourself and having it reflected right back to you by a complete stranger. And this is potentially what made it so easy for him to proclaim so explicitly his fear that just while he was bored and alone in bed whoever it was beside him might be feeling the same. That everyone is bored in precisely the same way and that after the initial flutter of organs slapping together there’s the sudden ball drop where both parties will have to hide their boredom until one or the other can’t be bothered to hide it anymore. It can be a real thrill to be told something like that. To have someone shout all his unfiltered insides out at you. I love you, I’m fed up with you, I’ll wait for you, I’ll run, I’ll kill, I’ll see you in the light of the morning and bleed into you, hold you, refuse you. I don’t think it’s likely I’ll ever again come across that special sort of stranger willing to divulge themselves in precisely that raw a manner. And maybe that’s why I kept up with it for as long as I did – feeling so specifically needed in a way that was at once total and transactional, knowing that even after yet another high-strung diatribe on the specific nature of his failed loves there was every chance that for no reason at all I would be completely disposed of.

There’s something from Roland Barthes that I think could be relevant here: ‘to try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).’ It’s what, I suppose, I’ve ultimately wanted to get at. You never say what you want to say with anything, but maybe especially with love, which is odd because love is likely the one thing that most people are dreadfully keen to talk properly about. Whenever I’ve been in love it’s all I can do not to speak about it pretty much constantly: certain intimate measures, little unthought thoughts become very big little unthought thoughts, everything becomes rhythmic and pictorial; and then once I’m done with it, whatever supposedly fervent feeling I’d been experiencing seems so anaemic that it’s all I can do not to write off the whole period entirely. Whatever I happen to write appears both cloying and too much and bitter and aleatory, which is, perhaps, Barthes’s point. I’ve tried to navigate whatever happened inside myself to outside myself and the space between has changed it. I’ve had to flip it around. There’s been a system of shaping and folding and scattering that previously was amorphous and undefined and which now has been imbued with this cracked and fragmented somethingness that I know won’t fully encompass what it is, not completely. It’s an anxiety that Hélène Cixous echoes in her essay ‘Writing Blind.’ ‘I want to write before,’ she confesses, ‘at the time still in fusion before the cooled off time of the narrative. When we feel and there is not yet a name for it . . . later it will be pacified into a name. But first it is passion.’

And when I’m in love I want to write out that passion. But I know I can’t. There’s too much. I’ll have to arrange something that is precisely not words into words and there’s only so far I can go before I lose the thread entirely. There’s only so deep the well goes down before it becomes too dark to see.

Issue 002: Speak to Me

Featuring new work from writers including Horatio Clare, Emma Glass, Manon Steffan Ros and Ania Card.

The multitude of languages we use to communicate, be they spoken or non-verbal, are arguably the most integral – and human – elements of our social existence. A painting can change a life. A telephone call can save one. A smile can, at times, reveal more than the most epic of soliloquies, while at others, a whisper can be deafening.

Buy it here

References

Claire-Louise Bennett, ‘I Am Love’, in Gorse, vol. 2, 2014, 37–58.

Fredric Jameson, Inventions of a Present (New York: Verso Books, 2023).

Hélène Cixous, Stigmata (London and New York: Routledge, 1998)

Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book One. A Death in the Family (London: Vintage, 2013).

Moyra Davey, Index Cards (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020).

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979).

Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009).