The horse has lost too many races. On Friday we missed the Aurora Borealis. Today the clouds were more muted, a soft grey bruise. Over the course of the day they broke up, leaving lines in the sky. When the horse needs a boost of confidence we have him race a couple of the trainers. Yesterday the clouds were from the Renaissance, sculpted, dramatic, pillared. Layers flowing into layers, in ridges high as mesas or canyons. With a tinge of darkness in the distance, threatening rain that never came. The horse starts to feel better about himself after a couple of races or two. Once he sees that he is able to win again they return him to his place at the track. There is no connection between the horse that has lost too many races and the clouds in the sky.

On a slow day I was reading Paradise Lost when X came in, and I could tell she did not like to see me doing something that didn’t look like work, even though there was no one there to serve, nothing else to do. Work must look like work in order for it to be work. Work that requires attendance, and waiting, and clients, must somehow also be work in the slow hours. Once I worked for a study testing the speed of improvements to an MRI waitroom, where we were paid to track the intake and pace of appointments. But the flow had been so improved that, in contrast to the period prior to the renovations, no one volunteered for the study. Because the patients were minors, we weren’t even allowed to ask them ourselves if they wanted to participate, and so we sat in the hallway with our clipboards, uselessly, waiting, for hours at a time, judged by the doctors rushing through the hallways—why weren’t we doing anything?—and forbidden from even reading books.

Attention must be diffused, a page open to a spreadsheet or to an email, no matter the job or its necessity, in order for “work” to count. But there is another toll this work takes from the worker, especially the contract or hourly worker, who often finds themselves having to check many different boxes, sign many forms, be attentive to an email account even when he or she is not working. The contract worker squeezes their time: “How much of the fifteen minutes it took me to compose that email was I really writing?” Whatever they write—five or fifteen minutes—they are harmed just by doing the calculation, doing more work. The worker on salary gets paid for the slow mornings they send two or three or four emails and do nothing else. And yet it is the salaried worker who judges the contract worker, who scowls when they find them “not working,” who needs to find them false work that will be then distributed, checked, and vetted, hours of more work for both salaried and contracted worker, in order to justify the two or three hours a week, in the off hours, where the employee may not be working. The “off” hours where the worker is ready and able to serve, only prevented by a lack of clients, though they do occasionally come, but also which keep the worker available (prevented from taking another job which might pay them more consistently) during the periods where they are in high demand. 

It goes without saying, but after sitting in that hallway in front of the MRI machines, after spending a summer picking weeds that didn’t need to be picked while we waited for one gardener to finish trimming a hedge, after refusing to do busy work for the library where I also ran checkouts and answered questions and re-shelved the books (because some couldn’t stand the idea that the student workers standing behind the terminals might not be busy in the way the administrators were busy, that they might be using their time to read or write or do other work necessary to students and far more valuable than the make-work the library wanted them to do), there is no world in which I want to find myself doing the work that no one wants and no one needs to be done, training work that is unnecessary for holders of graduate degrees, certainly not more valuable to any job dealing with words than Paradise Lost, no more of the work assigned and categorized and distributed by office workers who are paid far more than contract workers to do work that may play integral roles in the organization and distribution of resources and services but is removed from the core business that the salaried worker is seemingly meant to serve.

It is a different kind of drowsiness. One that pulls you down from somewhere in the middle, a drowsiness that extends from the torso outwards as opposed to one that falls from your temples and down your shoulders. Long Covid—if that’s what it is—catches me, most often, in the mid-afternoon, sitting or lying down to work or to read. Aside from weariness, it is also lack of focus—fingers running up from my chest to catch my thoughts and stifle them in fog. The books I have forgotten, the words, the past that I kept for so long neatly arranged, now more difficult to navigate. I wonder, sometimes, if this feeling is emotional, a symptom of nervous breakdown, or of burnout, coming out of a hard year, or at least a busy year in which I did not always give enough time to myself. 

Today I thought this after walking to the office, sitting on the couch with my manuscript, prepared to edit, and falling almost immediately asleep. But the way my weariness follows days of exercise, yoga, cycling, jogging—even push-ups—the way the body wears down and becomes weaker with repetition and time, contrary to will, contrary to the body’s methods in all the time I have known it, tells me it is different from any emotional issue I have known, in which I have often exercised out of my “funk.” 

On the back deck after Sarah comes home, amidst the detritus of our new life, tied up in black and blue plastic bags, we eat an early dinner and cancel the yoga class for this evening that it turns out I didn’t even register for. I am alarmed, because I thought this weariness was leaving me, this new illness which has followed me at least since last August, when I first noticed the long naps that I never seemed to come out of, the hiccups with my heart when exercising—or, even, sometimes, at rest or while meditating. But I am hopeful, too, that the problem is being treated, that it will pass, eventually, hopeful that its source has been discovered—it’s said that Covid can persist in the gut, and why wouldn’t it, as that has always been a challenging place for me. So now I must live carefully. Treat my inflammation. Refrain from drinking. Rest in the face of my instincts which always tell me to work harder. I think for a long time this new state of affairs depressed me, and I don’t want to say that it doesn’t, still. But frustration doesn’t mean giving up. 

Tonight in the new office we get three quarters of the way through Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, and we stop only because Sarah starts to drowse. The movie, so far, is about a man living a quiet but dignified life of manual labour, reading, taking thoughtful pictures, looking at trees. There is a quiet resistance in the way the man refuses to bend to his circumstances, in the way that every action is performed with care. Sometimes circumstances force us to move slower, or in different ways than we are used to. But we should not forget that labour follows life, and that life should not follow labour. 

And what if it’s true that no one wants to read anymore, and that in the future all of the reading will be done by robots who are trying only to read through us, to our desires, our words an equation (even despite faulty autocorrections, misspellings) that demonstrate our interests. This is the word undone, the power of the word used against us, the word also trivialized, no longer a tool of thought or resistance or art, very far from God. But of course the story we are told about the domestication of the word is not true. As clumsy AI writing tools demonstrate, they have no power to use our words as mirrors, to anticipate our unknown thoughts and desires, to scry into our deepest recesses. The only word the algorithm knows is keyword, the rest a hallucinatory guessing game of hopeful and generic sludge. 

Instead, we authorize the microphones they swear are not listening to us to reveal our interests or topic of conversations (we talk of disposing of a typewriter, and typewriters are then advertised, as if “to dispose” meant “to acquire”; a couple speaks dimly of marriage, but never over text, and engagement rings are shown). The camera tracks our facial expressions as we peer down into the software. And our gestures, our keywords, are collected and tested on our circle of associates, to friends or even strangers who merely share a wifi password. This is merely cheap and easy manipulation, a charmer’s art, set into motion by disinterested financiers, by rent-seeking coders, in that order, those for whom the “word” long ceased to be a mystery, lunatics who trust their own creaking AI to summarize and imagine and hypothesize, to ideate ever-shrinking limits in its narrow processing band as field of possibility, in which only what is already accepted by those who seek or hold power is capable of articulation or value. 

Reading Molly. The lies she told, at the end, her husband the brute, rude and lazy, the man out in Tucson that she would love. Telling him around the time she purchased her gun that she had to take care of certain things. The trail that Butler found in her journals and on her phone, reminding me of an appointment I discovered on January 10th, we were still talking, a date or a phone call I wasn’t sure, an appointment I discovered crossing the threshold from the single room where I was putting my life into cardboard, into her office where the planner lay open on her desk. This was February, after I’d seen the evidence of that day—or the evidence of another, later perhaps—in the open bathroom trash, and been blamed for it, I can’t believe you saw that, as if I’d placed it there, and well after she’d reported having dreams where I was yelling at her, her own guilt speaking. What I’d been told: that in ever trying to initiate the man before me had committed assault. Over and over and over again. That is who the book of poetry is about. That they had moved there, to the province, and never had sex again because for her the relationship was over, but this man, who did not know this crucial fact, was an abuser because he clumsily played with his towel after showers. Because he tried to kiss the woman he was living with. And then for a month after it was done she could not be rid of him, she said, he would not leave, and I wonder sometimes how much that situation resembled mine, kept on the edge of hope, somewhere between hope and contempt, until the contempt ran like river water. Or what was said of me in her telling, though it doesn’t matter now, how I was represented to justify her strange whims, her changing the locks, her conviction that I had threatened her when the only threat ever uttered between us was that all I owned belonged to her. That’s not an exaggeration—all, as she restricted my comings and goings, reserved the ability to talk for herself. Strange to be idealized and discarded and to have the stories, fiction, in which you are idealized coming out still. On the fridge, a business card for me she’d once printed, the nicest man in the world, a reduction of myself only replaced after I’d discovered her infidelity, by a fledgling birthday card from the other man. Strange, too, to be told that somewhere she has written that you were a condescending, or unsupportive husband, that you tutted to remind her that you, too, were a writer in the relationship, never mind that there might be cases in which saying that is itself evidence that it needed to be said, the time spent in consolation, and in support, rather than on the page, the help you did not regret offering but which you thought, might, for months multiplied by months, sometime end, or lessen, so that there might be equilibrium, absence of catastrophe, time to sit and be together, to write yourself, to not be tugged underwater, toward your own end in someone else’s impulsiveness, mania, and despair. (Let me be destroyed by my own mania, my own despair, my own impulsiveness, my own hope.)

Reading while walking. A woman coming down the trail from Regent St has a library book held in the air in front of her. A familiar black cover, blue lettering (Moshfegh’s Lapvona). “Love that book,” I say, in passing. “It’s crazy—” she says, “I’m almost near the end.” I think of the end—I won’t spoil it, the high climb back to the mountain, the reader perched there, hanging, at its close…

Behind the Sobey’s a young man with too short pant legs skateboards slowly up the street. Something about him seems notable, but I can’t place it. He reminds me of a roommate I once had, who came from genteel country poverty. Perhaps it is only that everyone here seems notable, in a town of so few. I’ve already started to see the same people more than once, in vastly different contexts, across worlds. But I’m proven right when I see the man looking through the dumpster behind the grocery store.

Going bad. In some ways I wonder if I need to let loose, go bad, go further, in my writing. But in life I want to keep things close, want not to trip those feelings, want to get underneath the trigger, recognize what makes me vulnerable and what won’t let me feel that vulnerability. One seems related to the other. But at the moment I’m not sure how. 

God it’s so hot on the deck where we sit in the two chairs I found on the street, you in your new slip and me in my shorts and t-shirt and hat. The sun sears everything, paint is stripped and bleached and the Coleman cooler that R put under the table in 2017 has lost its blue skin. Two tables finally collapsed this spring, and the wood of the deck is so thin I could put my bare foot through the railing. We sit baking in the two new chairs which are the only things that feel as if they are vital, aside from ourselves. The two chairs, castoffs from some wealthy household, with the bright blue cushions which will themselves I know become bleached in time. Behind you a robin feeds its chick, whose little head peeks out of the nest and when it has eaten waits patiently for the father to return. I think briefly that we should put the chairs together, facing the same direction, since that is the way we sit most comfortably outside, but it is nice too to sit across from you and see you with your crossed legs and your golden hair and your tattoo on your left foot. I want to reach you to touch you but you are too far. On the old TV aerial there is another bird, perhaps the baby robin’s mother or perhaps another species entirely, and it is keeping watch, but when I point to it you say the sky is too bright for you to see. Oh to sit out on the deck and be beaten down by the light. Oh to be out there with you as the sun’s rays punch us to nothing. 

SOUNDING

At the park, it takes me a while to calm down. I wish I wasn’t upset at all. Nothing upsetting happened—or nothing that should be upsetting. At the picnic table the paper bag that once contained my sandwich almost blows away in the wind. Runners, like rumours and bad feelings, are going in circles around the track. On the street before the entrance the man seemed bashful, the dog looked backwards at me, over his shoulder. No one can explain anything to a dog in a way that will stick. Perhaps I was a dog, for a long time, believing—or trying to believe—in a lightness and a possibility that had long been foreclosed (which is why I alternated that belief with anger). Reading about aversion, I unconsciously diagnose the last person I came into conflict with—I mean, the last time I regularly came into conflict. In the book it is said that a pattern of aversion can lead to disengagement, rebelliousness, anger (which are strategies in themselves). I see my own methods. I see my failures. It’s hard to get through a chapter. 

What do the others know? I’m sick of asking the question, and I’d like to leave it in the park with the waste from my sandwich, though I sometimes console myself imagining that the ways I was misled are unknown (to all but one person) on that side. I think I must feel the need to justify that I was hurt—sadly, that’s obvious. What do I have to say to a dog, anyway? Even if his absence from language (or at least its more complicated forms) means I still want to ruffle the back of his neck. Perhaps it’s that I felt like a dog being told what to feel, and if that’s true I should find a way to scratch myself. Oh, I’m trying to—dreams of a binder clip that was passed lightly, as a gift. Fantasies of some final repair. And then an encounter which jerks me awake. I want some confirmation that I wasn’t alone in it. I want to know I wasn’t just a dog in a cage I didn’t see. But I can’t count on anyone else to tell me. 

I have been hungry for the language of Chaucer. Some interior gnawing, growing every day in strength. Perhaps I always desire Chaucer at this time of year—in May, when the leaves become thick and the air is redolent with flowers, which recalls Chaucer’s dreamers peacefully drifting off in the surprising new heat of spring. I have just read—I am unsure if for the first time—Borges’s “Translators of the Arabian Nights.” In that essay he praises the Burton translation, which he notes others find so successful because “Chaucer’s English” is so close to the thirteenth century Arabic original (Borges clarifies that he also sees, in the translation, the influence of Urquhart’s Rabelais). But it is the words themselves—Chaucer’s words—which I long for, now with an additional desire: that their vocabularly might work some deep interior change in me, perhaps something like the translation from winter to spring works on trees. So that later commentators will feel obligated to note that it is Chaucer’s English that I speak. 

For the Pennance that Man Taketh of Himselfe Was Not Shewid Me—

To Calais, I thought, to Calais
where I will eat chicken fricaseed
So much in France that if I died
my effects to the king and no one else—
From the bedroom to the kitchen
to the office and up stairs and down
And the doorframe of the bathroom 
and in the tall ship from Dover…
Oh how little I wanted to be there!
Dover, Calais, a chicken waiting 
Fricaseed in the little parlour
facing the king’s portrait, the king 
With his chickens, his tall men
with chicken legs, they call this 
Calais, Calais, Calais, this feeling,
these men, this steaming dinner
If only I could turn this ship around
scorn this scowling shore, forget Calais
Forget this feeling, if I could bow
before some one other than the king
The king and myself and his portrait—