Day 12 : Rivers in the Sky

Previous book by Elif Shafak was reviewed in 2020, coincidentally during my last 100 Days to Offload. I have also very much enjoyed 'There are Rivers in the Sky'. It is a tangled tale of Arthur and Zaleekhah, by the Thames, and Narin, by the River Tigris. Arthur, born in the victorian slums, manages to pull himself from the mire, drawn by a interest in all things ancient, to a role at the British Museum translating cuneiform tablets, and a passionate desire to understand the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story delves into all sorts of historical details of ancient Mesopotamia (about which I know nothing), and a voyage for Arthur to Nineveh. Narin is a Yazidi girl who lives in Turkey, who travels with her grandmother and father to her homeland to be baptised, only to encounter violence and terror. In 2018 Zaleekhah leaves her husband and moves onto a houseboat on the Thames, with vague plan for suicide. And it is a drop of water that links them all. 

The stories are woven together across the years by the rivers and the poem: Arthur meets Leila, the great great grandmother of Narin and learns about the history of the Yazidis, and I learned that the massacre that happened in 2014 was not the first time that they had been persecuted as a group, being seen as outsiders even in their own homeland. Zaleekhah meets Nen, a woman who tattoos designs of cuneiform and is as fascinated by Mesopotamia as Arthur, and confronts the privilege afforded her by her uncle's wealth. It's way more complicated than that, Zaleekhah is a hydrologist so loads of sciency stuff about water in there too, but I was so engaged that I didn't even note any quotes down. 

Here Arthur's home is flooded, just a lovely train of thought that gives you some idea of the way she writes:

"That weeks it rains incessantly. The Thames swells up, surges forth. The frontier separating the earth and the sky blurs into a listless grey that covers everything, as a gauze would swathe a wound. the spires of the city glower like gibbets in the twilight. So forceful is the downpour that a primordial dread bestirs amongst the Londoners, a fear deep down that they may have angered God - or a river-dwelling nymph or naiad. Gushing through the gutters, pounding on the windowpanes, the water demands to be seen and heard. London shivers and shrivels, folding into itself like a rose withering under the absence of sun.

On the third morning, the family's basement floods, and they find themselves up to their knees in murky foul-smelling water. What little they have, they haul on to the street. While his father carried the mattress, his mother the stools and his younger brother the cooking utensils, Arthur rushes to save the impressions of the Mesopotamian tablets.

'Look at you, stewing over a bunch of scribbles,' says his father under his breath.

Hours later, the rains having finally relented, the ground saturated, a defeated hush falls on the neighbourhood. A full moon hangs in the sky, so bright that Arthur can make out the maria on its surface. An arrangement of light and shade. So much in life is composed of recurrent designs. The zigzags traced by bolts of lightening, the rings inside a felled tree, the threads on a cobweb, the tessellations of a honeycomb, the twists of a conch shell, the petals of a chrysanthemum ... A city also teems with fractal geometry. The catacombs beneath Campden Market, the arches of Paddington Station; the Neo-Gothic ornamentation of the Houses of Parliament ... People, no less, are formed by repeated habit and conventions. The Mesopotamian tablets, too, embody a series of patterns whose meaning Arthur is determined to discover.

Wrapped in an old blanket for warmth, he places his finger on a line of cuneiform and reads out a mysterious name he has not come across before.

Gil-ga-mesh." (p213-214)

Purely coincidentally I had also ordered from the library 'The Beekeeper of Sinjar' by Dunya Mikhail, which is a recounting of the experiences of Yazidi women captured by ISIS during 2014 and sold into slavery and a man from Sinjar who created a network of support to help many of them escape. It was very harrowing and I confess I only skim read the second half, partly because it focussed very much on the 'escape' and I found myself left with a shadow of the unspoken horror that these women, often very young girls too, who were traded as sex slaves, bought and sold repeatedly, and the casualness with which real human beings are treated as disposable. Sometimes a story reminds you too much of the horror in the world and while it is important to learn and acknowledge it, dwelling on it is neither helpful nor healthy.

Stay sane. Be kind. Remember everyone else is a human being too.

Days of audiobooks : day eleven

Listening to audiobooks in my 'office' and doing puzzles has been my relaxation for some weeks. 'Bird Life' by Anna Smaill was a delight; curious and turned into something unexpected, it tells about the friendship between a New Zealand young woman teaching english in Japan, and mourning her brother, and a Japanese woman, also a teacher and also mourning a loss. Here just a lovely moment (that I had to take down like dictation so I may have the punctuation wrong):

 "Dinah placed the carrier bag on the table, she cleared the pile of advertising circulars, the place from this morning's breakfast, the new letter that had been misdirected, sent to a different prefecture, finally redirected to the correct address, finally out the carrier bag on the cleared table and reached inside. It held a box made of thick quality cardboard, white as snow, white as bedlinen, folded along pre-scored lines. Inside the box she felt something shift, heavy and unevenly weighted, it slid. she put the box down in order to delay the moment of opening. She went to the bathroom, studied her face in the mirror, her heart was beating. she washed her hands and face, removed her makeup. She drew the curtains so she could see the light outside, then she walked back to the table and opened the lid. Inside was a pie. It was the pie from Shinjuku, the one that she had not bought. She sat down. Had anything before ever been so beautiful? It was unlikely. The pastry was crisp and fragile, like a bank of fine, sunny, buttery sand. The apples and sweet potato were so thinly sliced they were transparent, glimpses of the apple's perfect pink skin shone through the caramel glaze like flowers caught under rice. It was a fairy tale of a pie, a platonic vision of a pie, it was a pie you might find cooling on a windowsill with a red gingham cloth beneath. she folded the lid to prop up the interior so that the box sat on the table like an expensive display case. Then she took a knife from the drawer and cut herself a thin slice. She took a clean plate from the cupboard and returned top the table, placed the thin slice of pie on the middle of the plate. She sat down. Outside it had started to rain slightly and the sky was a vessel slowly filling with dark resonance. There must be a hole in it somewhere, something leaking. She thought about that bit of lore, was it true? that if you were in a car accident and the car was submerged, that you had to wait until the vehicle filled up with water, until the pressure of inside and outside equalised, then, and only then, you push the door open, and swum out.What strange beauty there must be in that darkness, she thought, the car's headlights illuminating the silt world of the water. You would not need to surface then, you would be able to swim forever. She looked at the piece of pie on the plate, then she took a fork and ate the first mouthful." 

Also 'When We Were Bad' by Charlotte Mendelson, that I may have started previously and then abandoned as it felt familiar. A lovely family saga, guaranteed to make you feel like your own family is nice and normal and well adjusted, and a wonderful window into reform Judaism. The fallout of the decision by Leo to walk away from his wedding echoes through the family and the community and seems to allow his siblings to face up to how much they are living their lives for others. I love a good story examining close family relationships.

Currently listening to 'The Way Home' by Mark Boyle, about his experiment living without money ... 

Stay safe. Be kind. Listening to audiobooks is reading.

10th (yes I know it's the eighth today) : radical honesty

You know how hard it is to tell people what you really think. So as soon as Duffy walked in to work yesterday I told him that his wedging the packets into boxes, stacking packets up and wedging everything onto the shelves was driving me round the bend ... being the person who mainly has to remove items from the shelves. I have told him this several time before. I said it was nicely as I could and made light of it. But it is very annoying. Other human beings are so annoying. I regularly walk around the office muttering to myself about the idiots that I have to work with.

A few months ago a young woman came in for her package. She apologised as she scrolled through her phone looking for her tracking number. I said 'It's ok, I just die a little every day watching people scroll through their phones', and then smiled at her. 

Stay safe. Be kind. Maybe see you tomorrow.

the ninth : work stuff

 

Couple of items at work yesterday amused me. Firstly the fact that that snails really aren't fussy and don't only wreck your spinach seedlings ... they crawl inside post boxes and quite enjoy munching on envelopes too. There was a postbox in Chastleton that was always full of snails as it was in a stone wall and was old and damp under the trees. 

The other letter, from the King, I wondered if it was a sign of the times. I delivered one only last week, presumably a 100th birthday card to a lady on Brunswick road; these letters had always previously been Special Delivery, but they seem to be economising and only sending them recorded delivery now:

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

Day Eight : Garden Stuff

Had crappy day at work, and it's a bit wet and windy but I stepped outside to say hello to the babies.

The honeysuckle is just coming into flower and is going to be lush again this year.

The purple stuff on the walls that comes back reliably every year is lush too, and the bees love it.

The sweet william survived the winter and is enjoying the damp weather:

The valerian is everywhere, but again the bees like it and it's a gorgeous colour.

I realised I don't have a name for my gnome?

He was 'rescued' (a couple of years ago now) from the garden of a deceased customer, because I knew that the council would sweep in and put everything in a skip, which they duly did the following week. He was very worn and faded and I finally got around to repainting him.

(Do not google 'good name for a gnome', that is one weird rabbit hole.)

I've decided on Benedict.

Stay safe. Be kind. Adopt a gnome.

seventh (7th): Three Days

Anne Tyler is my comfort read. I have read at least half a dozen of her twenty something novels, and they are always warm and human. They are about people and their small incidental lives, which is what most of us live, which is what makes them relatable I think. I was thinking this about 'To The Dogs', how the events it contains do not happen to most people. The storyline is escapist because it offers something more 'exciting' than most people's lives. It's not that I only like to read about lives like my own, far from it, I relish vicarious experience of other people's lives, but events do need to be part of real life. In the crime fiction it felt like so much was 'happening' that I wasn't connecting to what the characters were thinking and feeling about their experience. In fact the point of the story is for 'things' to 'happen', the people they are happening to are secondary. Having said that sometimes writers like Anne Tyler blur ... their books do not leave a strong impression, no strong emotional response, only a vague something...

On the other hand Anne Tyler often has huge things happen to her characters, things that totally disrupt their lives, but it is all about how they deal with it. Here Gail's daughter is about to get married, something she feels a little on the periphery of, the grooms parents having taken over the organisation of the event. When her ex-husband arrives on her doorstep with a rescue cat needing a place to stay (away from the allergic groom), they find themselves settling back into their former comfortable routines. They kind of potter about through three days while the momentous thing happens to their daughter. That's all really. I really related to how much she found other people stressful and annoying. 

" 'You're talking as if it would be a beach house,' I said, 'but the cost of living at the beach is astronomical.'

'No, I'm talking about my neck of the woods,' he said, 'Cornboro. They could stay with you in Cornboro and then drive to the nearest beach every day in not much more than an hour.'

'Oh, you're right,' I said. 'And the drive would be so undemanding that Kenny Junior can take the wheel as soon as he gets his learner's permit.'

Max looked confused, but only for a second. 'True enough,' he agreed.

'Max,' I said. 'I appreciate the thought. But the fact is that I believe I have only one span of life allotted to me. I don't feel I have the option of just ... trying out various random ideas and giving up if they don't work out.'

'Yes, well,' Max said with a sigh.

He himself, apparently, assumed he had an infinite number of lives.

Someday I'd like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have." (p.151)

Stay safe. Be kind. Maybe move to the beach. See you tomorrow.

Sixth day: Completely, unjustly, darkly alone

I bought 'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey and sent it to Monkey, fully intending to pinch it back when I visited. Interestingly mum did not enjoy it at all, but Monkey and I both loved it. I love a book where nothing much happens. And floating around in space nothing much happens. Is it like being dead I wonder. I mean they are almost like Schrodinger's astronauts, there is a nasty crack in the space station so potentially they are kind of alive and dead at the same time, since nobody could save them if there is a breach.

This was quite a scientific book. Much research must have gone in to understanding the flight path and also the experience of the astronauts/cosmonauts. Six people are sealed in a tiny container rushing at thousands of miles an hour around the planet. And they just wake up and get on with their routine day. The book hops from one to another of the people, telling you what they are doing, what they are thinking, what they are eating, what they are talking about. I expected it to feel claustrophobic but they spend so much time looking out that it doesn't feel confined; it's almost as if they live in the whole of space. And I loved the fact that they never seemed to lose their sense of awe at what they are getting to experience. 

Queue the quotes, so much good writing in this book:

"At first on their missions they each miss their families, sometimes so much that it seems to scrape out their insides; now, out of necessity, they've come to see that their family is this one here, these others who know the things they know and see the things they see, with whom they need no word of explanation. When they get back how will they even begin to say what happened to them, who and what they were? They want no view except this view from the window of the solar arrays as they taper into emptiness. No rivets in the entirety of the world will do except these rivets around the window frames. They want padded gangways for the rest of their lives. This continuous hum." (p.12-13)

I love her long convoluted sentences. She has so much to say each time she starts one that she just keeps going:

"This planet that's been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines - the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it's a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind's ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through." (p.28)

Here Nell is on a spacewalk:

"She was outside for hours - almost seven, so she was told. You have no idea at all of the passing of time. You install or repair whatever you are tasked to install or repair; you photograph some of the hatches, the external tools, you do a litter pick of debris, plucking from space a few of those tens of thousands of remnants of jettisoned or exploded satellites and launch-vehicle stages and craft; wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this. Dusk steals upon you and the earth is a bruising of azure and purple and green, and you remove your sun visor and turn on your light and darkness brings out the stars and Asia passes by bejewelled and you work in your light-pool until the sun comes up once more behind you and burnishes an ocean you can't identify. Daylight spills blue on a snowy landmass moving into view and, against the black, the rim of the earth is a light bright mauve that brings a pain of elation to the gut. What might be the Gobi Desert rolls out beneath you while ground crews give soothing instructions and your partner leafs through the manual attached to the arm of his spacesuit and you can just about see his face through the sun visor, a tranquil oval of human face in the enormous anonymity of our landscape, and meanwhile the solar arrays drink the sun until dusk comes back and your partner is blackened by the sunset behind him and night creeps from the underside of the earth and engulfs it." (p.69-70)

Here Shaun and Pietro discuss a postcard. It is of a painting that, earlier in the book, we had learned was discussed in a class where Shaun and his wife first encountered each other. I liked this conversation because I like art, and I like how sometimes you have to really look. And so much of the book is just about looking. So much of science is just about looking. You have to look to understand, in both art and science. 

"Did someone send you a postcard? Pietro jokes, coming to the doorway of Shaun's quarters and nodding at the Las Meninas that's in free drift.

My wife, fifteen years ago, he says.

Pietro nods, and Shaun nips the postcard from its drift and hands it to him.

Read the back, Shaun says.

I wouldn't - 

No, go ahead.

What is the subject of the painting? his wife has written on the postcard's reverse. Who is looking at whom? the painter at the king and queen; the king and queen at themselves in a mirror; the viewer at the king and queen in the mirror; the viewer at the painter; the painter at the viewer, the viewer at the princes, the viewer at the ladies-in-waiting? Welcome to the labyrinth of mirror that is human life.

Is your wife always so obsessed with petty small-talk? Pietro asks.

And Shaun replies: I'm telling you, it's relentless.

Pietro stares for a while at the painting, and a while longer, then says, It's the dog.

Pardon?

To answer your wife's question, the subject of the painting is the dog.

He looks then - when Pietyro hands back the postcard, reaches across to squeeze the bony dome of Shaun's shoulder before diving away - at the dog in the foreground. He's never given it a second glance, but now he can't look at anything else. It has its eyes closed. In a painting that's all about looking and seeing, it's the only living thing in the scene that isn't looking anywhere, at anyone or anything. He sees now how large and handsome it is, and how prominent - and though it's dozing there's nothing slumped or dumb in that doze. Its paws are outstretched, its head erected and proud.

This can't be coincidental, he thinks, in so orchestrated and symbolic a scene, and it suddenly seems that Pietro is right, that he's understood the painting, or that his comment has made Shaun see a different painting altogether to the one he'd seen before. Now he doesn't see a painter or princess or dwarf or monarch, he sees a portrait of a dog. An animal surrounded by the strangeness of humans, all their odd cuffs and ruffles and silks and posturing, the mirrors and angles and viewpoints; all the ways they've tried not to be animals and how comical this is, when he looks at it now. And how the dog is the only thing in the painting that isn't slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities. The only thing in the painting that could be called vaguely free." (p104-105)

Las Meninas by Velazques

You could read this book in one sitting it is so short, in fact I might recommend it, for total absorption into their experience. And finally:

"Pietro doesn't dream. He has a rare night of deep and solid unthinking sleep. His breaths and heartbeats are smooth and few, his face resolves of its crease, his body a well of atom-self, an unworried sum of parts, as if he knows that outside the earth falls away in perpetual invention and leaves nothing more for him to do. Our lives here are inexpressible trivial and momentous at once, it seems he's about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere." (p.121)

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.