"Autumn"

[fiefoe]

For no rhyme or reason, Ali Smith actually took for me this time, even though the short novel is about so many disjointed things all at once.

• it’s sand, it’s under his tongue, he can feel it, he can hear it grinding when his teeth move against each other, singing its sand-song: I’m ground so small, but in the end I’m all, I’m softer if I’m underneath you when you fall, in sun I glitter, wind heaps me over litter, put a message in a bottle, throw the bottle in the sea, the bottle’s made of me, I’m the hardest grain to harvest
• it’s sand, beautiful the detail, the different array of colours of even the pulverized world,
• But pure joy! He’d forgotten what it feels like, to feel. To feel even just the thought of one’s own bared self near someone else’s beauty.
• He can stay here while he gets his bearings. Bare-ings. (Puns, the poor man’s currency; poor old John Keats, well, poor all right, though you couldn’t exactly call him old. Autumn poet, winter Italy, days away from dying he found himself punning like there was no tomorrow.
• He had forgotten there is a physicality in not wanting to offend. Sweet the feeling of decency flooding him now, surprisingly like you imagine it would be to drink nectar.
• or maybe also a nuclear after-child, the leaves hanging off her looked like skin become rags, hanging to one side as if skin is nothing but leaves.
• Regrets when you’re dead? A past when you’re dead? Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?
• quoting Shakespeare. ‘O brave new world!’ Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. ‘O brave new world!’ It was a challenge, a command.
• In any case, it’s one of those coincidences that on TV and in books might mean something but in real life mean nothing at all.
• He pulls the colours green and blue like a string of handkerchiefs out of the centre of himself. The orange in his hand turns Cézanne-colours.
  People crowd round him, excited.
  People queue up, bring him their white things, hold them out.
  Anonymous people start to add tweet-sized comments about Daniel beneath Daniel. They are commenting on his ability to change things.
  The comments get more and more unpleasant.
  They start to make a sound like a hornet mass and Elisabeth notices that what looks like liquid excrement is spreading very close to her bare feet. She tries not to step in any of it.
  She calls to Daniel to watch where he steps
• The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.
• If he was very old, the neighbour, he didn’t look anything like the people who were meant to be it on TV, who always seemed as if they were trapped inside a rubber mask, not just a face-sized mask, but one that went the length of the body from head to foot, and if you could tear it off or split it open it was like you’d find an untouched unchanged young person inside, who’d simply step cleanly out of the old fake skin, like the skin after you take out the inner banana. When they were trapped inside that skin, though, the eyes of people, at least the people in all the films and comedy programmes, looked desperate, like they were trying to signal to outsiders without giving the game away that they’d been captured by empty aged selves which were now keeping them alive inside them for some sinister reason, like those wasps that lay eggs inside other creatures so their hatchlings will have something to eat. Except the other way round, the old self feeding off the young one. All that was left would be the eyes, pleading, trapped behind the eyeholes.
• In fact, according to the history I’ve happened to live through, I’d say that her first name, Elisabeth, means that one day she’ll probably, quite unexpectedly against the odds, find herself being made queen.
  A queen? Elisabeth said. Like you?
  Um –, the neighbour said.
• How do you mean, finally? Elisabeth said. We only moved here six weeks ago.
  The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.
• has been painted over with black paint and the words GO and HOME. <> People either look down, look away or stare her out. People in the shops, when she buys some fruit, some ibuprofen and a newspaper for her mother, speak with a new kind of detachment. People she passes on the streets on the way from the bus stop to her mother’s house regard her, and each other, with a new kind of loftiness.
• All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing. <> All across the country, what had happened whipped about by itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm and was whipping about in the air above the trees, the roofs, the traffic... All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing.
• The women in that small gathering on the side of the road moved closer together. Their hush was audible. It spread back across the market like shadow, like cloud-cover. <> It was a hush, Hannah thought, related to the quiet that comes over wildlife, happens to the birdsong, in an eclipse of the sun when something like night happens but it’s the middle of the day.
• The word gymkhana, Daniel said, is a wonderful word, a word grown from several languages... Herbal and verbal, Daniel said. Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there’s even more language waiting to come up.
• Elisabeth would remember seeing his eyes open, and how it was like that moment when you just happen to see the streetlights come on and it feels like you’re being given a gift, or a chance, or that you yourself’ve been singled out and chosen by the moment.
• I saw it in the early 1960s, Daniel said. <> He said it as if a time could be a place.
• What exactly don’t I get about an old man putting ideas about suicide and a lot of lies about Bob Dylan into my thirteen year old daughter’s head? her mother said. <> And anyway, Daniel says it doesn’t matter how she died so long as you can still say or read her words. Like the line about no longer grieving, and the one about daughters of the darkness still flaming like Guy Fawkes, Elisabeth said.
• the trunks of Scots pines do tend to be narrow. Straight and tall, because this is the kind of tree good for telegraph poles, for the props that pit builders used in the days when industry relied on people working in pits and pits relied on pitprops to hold the ceilings of the tunnels up safely over their heads. <> If you have no choice but to go underground, go in the form of something useful. If you have to be cut down, good to spend the afterlife as messenger between people across landscapes. Pines are tall. It’s a lot better than being confined in a dwarf conifer.
• the best thing of all about being inside this of all trees is the fact that it’s more versatile, when it comes to colour, than your average general tree. The green of a forest of Scots pines can verge towards blue. And then in the spring there’s the pollen, as yellow as bright paint pigment in an artist’s jar, plentiful, pervasive, scene-stealing like the smoke round a conjuring trick. Back in the old days, the primeval days, the people who wanted others to think they had special powers used to fling such pollen about in the air around them. They would come to the woods and collect it to take home and use it as part of their act.
• One might imagine it’d be unpleasant, being sealed inside a tree. One might imagine, ah, pining. But the scent lightens despair. It’s perhaps a little like wearing a coat of armour except much nicer, because the armour is made of a substance through which the years themselves, formative, have run.
• Can laughter be well-heeled?
• First up, Keeler versus Ward, her friend, Stephen the osteopath, the portraitist. No suit of armour but nonetheless she’s armoured here, sheet-metal listless. Impervious. Masked. Perfectly made-up. Dead with a hint of exotic.
• The girl’s in the box again. Today she is almost all young tree. Now only her face and her hair are unleafy. Overnight, like a girl in a myth being hunted by a god who’s determined to have his way with her, she has altered herself, remade herself so she can’t be had by anyone.
• And then what happened next, well, it happened next, and history, that other word for irony, went its own foul witty way, sang its own foul witty ditty, and the girl was the one who died young in this story.
• She speaks it as her first language. She knows the flirting is the thinnest layer. She knows exactly what they’re saying.
• Can the sheer breadth of someone’s chest be insidious? <> Oh yes it can.
• Then the other spokesperson in the dialogue said, well, you would say that. Get over it. Grow up. Your time’s over. Democracy. You lost.
  It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue.
  It is the end of dialogue.
• I’ll tell you what will happen, Daniel said. This. You and I will know I’ve lied, but your mother won’t. You and I will know something that your mother doesn’t. That will make us feel different towards not just your mother, but each other. A wedge will come between us all. You will stop trusting me, and quite right, because I’d be a liar. We’ll all be lessened by the lie. So. Do you still choose the ballet? Or will I tell the sorrier truth?
  I want the lie, Elisabeth said. She knows loads of things I don’t. I want to know some things she doesn’t.
  The power of the lie, Daniel said. Always seductive to the powerless.
• Elisabeth had last come to the field just after the circus had left, especially to look at the flat dry place where the circus had had its tent. She liked doing melancholy things like that. But now you couldn’t tell that any of these summer things had ever happened.
• And whoever makes up the story makes up the world, Daniel said. So always try to welcome people into the home of your story. That’s my suggestion.
  How does making things up welcome people? Elisabeth said.
  What I’m suggesting, Daniel said, is, if you’re telling a story, always give your characters the same benefit of the doubt you’d welcome when it comes to yourself...
  The necessary benefit of the doubt, Daniel said. And always give them a choice – even those characters like a person with nothing but a tree costume between him or her and a man with a gun. By which I mean characters who seem to have no choice at all. Always give them a home.
• Cut to a celebrity who’s spotted a cluster of charity boxes in the shapes of little life-sized figures – dogs and children... They’re the boxes that used to sit outside shops for passers-by to put change into... those boxes came about because of real dogs back at the turn of the last century who worked going round places like railway stations with boxes hung round their necks for people to put pennies into. For charity.
• The painting by Pauline Boty comes into her head, the one called With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo. Maybe there’s something in it whether she’s got a job or not, something about the use of colour as language, the natural use of colour alongside the aesthetic use, the wild joyful brightness painted on the front of that house in a dire time, alongside the action of a painting like that one by Boty, in which a two-dimensional self is crowned with sensual colour, surrounded by orange and green and red so pure it’s like they’ve come straight out of the tube on to the canvas, and not just by colour but by notional petals, the deep genital looking rose formation all over the hat on the head of the image of Belmondo as if to press him richly under at the same time as raise him richly up.
• this one was the winter of 2002–3. Elisabeth was eighteen. It was February. She had gone down to London to march in the protest. Not In Her Name. All across the country people had done the same thing and millions more people had all across the world. <> On the Monday after, she wandered through the city; strange to be walking streets where life was going on as normal, traffic and people going their usual backwards and forwards along streets that had had no traffic, had felt like they’d belonged to the two million people from their feet on the pavement all the way up to sky because of something to do with truth, when she’d walked the exact same route only the day before yesterday.
• I’m not seeing anything new here, he said.
  He cleared his throat.
  There are lots and lots of highly sexualized images throughout Pop Art, he said.
  What about the titles? Elisabeth said.
  (The titles of the paintings were It’s a Man’s World I and It’s a Man’s World II.)
  The tutor had gone a ruddy red colour at the face.
• It is possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren’t yours let you see where you are, who you are.
• We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters... It’s the only responsibility memory has, he said. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They’re foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.
• Rastus was a name popular in blackface minstrel shows. It became a character-name, a racist shorthand for someone black, in early films, in turn of the century fiction, across all the forms of early media entertainment.
• Today he looks like a Roman senator, his sleeping head noble, his eyes shut and blank as a statue, his eyebrows mere moments of frost. <> It is a privilege, to watch someone sleep, Elisabeth tells herself. It is a privilege to be able to witness someone both here and not here. To be included in someone’s absence, it is an honour, and it asks quiet. It asks respect.
• One day he said a very fair thing. When the state is not kind, he said. We were talking about the vote, it was coming up, I’ve thought about it a lot, since. Then the people are fodder, he said.
• It doesn’t feel that far from summer, not really, if it weren’t for the underbite of the day, the lacy creep of the dark and the damp at its edges, the plants calm in the folding themselves away, the beads of the condensation on the webstrings hung between things.
• Nothing’s different, but everything is. It’s scented by the same old trees. It is summer-jovial. But this year its joviality is a kind of open threat.
• Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all. But in that Augenblick there’s either a benign wink or a willing blindness, and we have to know we’re equally capable of both, and to be ready to be above and beyond the foul even when we’re up to our eyes in it. So it’s important – and here I acknowledge directly the kind and charming and mournful soul of my dear brother whom I know so well – not to waste the time, our time, when we have it.
• Performing arts. Well, that’s Scotland and women and a brace of continents all well and truly in their place. <> She hands it back to Elisabeth. <> If I’d seen this ridiculous thing that passes for a passport before the referendum, she says, I’d have known to be ready well ahead of time for what was so clearly on its way.
• _it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us._ The words had acted like a charm. They’d released it all, in seconds. They’d made everything happening stand just far enough away.
• and if I say that, the thing about cigarettes, the eyebrows go up and it’s like that’s an abuse of innocence, the urge I had to be my older self. The urge we all have to be older, to not be the child any more.
• Then, when darkness falls, the symphony. Oh. Oh, that’s a beautiful idea. The symphony of the sold and the discarded. The symphony of all the lives that had these things in them once. The symphony of worth and worthlessness. The Clarice Cliff fakes would be flutey. The brown furniture would be bass, low. The photographs in the old damp-stained albums would be whispery through their tracing paper. The silver would be pure. The wickerwork would be reedy. The porcelains? They’d have voices that sound like they might break any minute.
• Elisabeth wrote in pencil on a page of her foolscap pad: art like this examines and makes possible a reassessment of the outer appearances of things by transforming them into something other than themselves. An image of an image means the image can be seen with new objectivity, with liberation from the original.
• a copy of the Denning Report on the Scandal scandal. She hadn’t known that proximity to lies, even just reading about them, could make you feel so ill. The whole thing was a bit like being made to watch something as innocent as Alfie through a gimp mask and a lot of painful S&M gear you’d never agreed to wear in the first place.
• Hello, I’m calling from the Spencer-Barnes Agency, my name is Elisabeth Demand, that’s D, e, m, a, n and d, and I’m calling on behalf of my client Mr Daniel Gluck whose copyright via your use in your current campaign of Mr Gluck’s 1962 hit song Summer Brother Autumn Sister is being infringed every time your latest television commercial is aired. Obviously if you or your agency partners will be so good as to contact me, which you can do on this number – clearly we’d appreciate your alacrity – and negotiate and then be ready to transfer immediately funds totalling what we agree is legally owed to our client Mr Gluck, then the matter will cease to be problematic for us as far as both our client and the question of infringement law is concerned. I’ll wait to hear from you that the situation has been resolved. If I haven’t heard within twenty four hours we’ll be taking action, and I’d suggest at least blanket suspension of your commercial until this has been taken in hand. Many thanks.
• I bet it goes like this, Zoe says. Ignored. Lost. Rediscovered years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered again years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered ad infinitum. Am I right?
• Film star, French, she said, that picture’s all heart-throb versus cunt-throb don’t you think? and poor old Gershwin blushed all the way to his tips – ears, toes, everywhere he had a tip blushing, sweet older chap he couldn’t help it, he was from another time. Well, they almost all were. Even the people meant to be from now were really from then.
• But she’d married her husband because he liked women, he knew they weren’t things, or something you didn’t quite know about. He accepted me intellectually, which men find very difficult.
• Life? was what you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you. Painting? was what you did, alone, and you sat there, and it was your own terrible fight or your own lovely bit, but it was really terribly alone.
• her mother’s new plan is that every day she’s going to go and get herself arrested (and here she imitates Elisabeth’s mother perfectly) bombarding that fence with people’s histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times.