a stone's throw

Nico, Koenig
 

'Without my noticing when, the pavements had contracted and toughened under the early cold.'
– Bridget Brophy, King of a Rainy Country

'Only you [I] could melt this stone.'
– Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

The problem with writing a narrative of the self is that it undoes itself behind you just as soon as you think it safe enough to write down. This reinforces what I already know: narrative is artificial, self is fragmented, text is a construction, for me a necessary one. When all our homes are falling down, I first wrote for a piece about Francesca Woodman, words may build a shelter.

'Where I am now and where I am staying', you may have read in my first letter. I remember hesitating over the words 'most likely' which previously fitted before 'staying'. I thought back to how S had rolled her eyes when she asked whether I would still be living t/here next year, and I had shifted tentatively, answering finally, 'probably'. I thought of my adverbial caution, my contentedness in the present, and deleted the qualifier. I'm no longer there.

Despite thoughts to Samhain as a liminal phase for cleansing and chasing away bad spirits, autumn is a time for curling in, not breaking through anew. I didn't feel like moving because the season wasn't right for it, the weather as ever being but one of many excuses. I'd just started to send tendrils into the East Berlin ground – an old socialist soil whose minerals make the leaves by the Landwehr Canal turn intense yellow for the month of October.

Inside, the bedroom still felt provisional, suitcases visible; I had tried to hang prints but the ceilings in these Altbau's are so high there is an avalanche of cold white whatever you do. Outside, the pavements did harden beneath my feet, and I felt myself hardening, then softening, then hardening again.

In a Brutalist ex-church now gallery I did yoga, drishti set on nobbly concrete walls. During the third sun salutation I noticed a single droplet of water in the middle of my mat. I had been overflowing with salty liquid, brimming but 'alive for a spell in the day's aquarium' for several weeks, but this tear was not by me. Like the building had cried one for me, blessed me, maybe. Or, You read the signs wherever you want to.

A friend, also heart-torn, also a writer, is building a wall on the island on which she was born. She will write about building that wall in her own words, but as she posts pictures of the slotted together stones on social media, I too find the incremental progress of matter over mind reassuring. Heidegger writes that building is poetic – 'Making is in Greek poesis' – and inversely that poetry, arrangements of words, is a place in which the mind can dwell. Text has one possible root in the Greek techne, the act of bringing forth, of making appear; this is as much about conjuration as consolidation.

I like what Boris Groys says about writers being the last industrial producers, like seated bricklayers, paid per word to put 'one sign after another.' This trade is less arduous than manual labour, service labour, bodily labour, by far, but this conception of it demolishes the ivory tower, and returns writing to accumulation. Earlier in the conversation, text is read not as productivity but excess. The texts of my life(s) are overflow (liquid) and cloaking (fabric) – another Latin root of ‘text’ is in the weaving of Ariadne’s thread. They might try to make solid, but they like me are always shifting.

Given my temporary kinds of dwelling, texts are bolsters to living. Moving much, the mind becomes unsettled, but returning to the notebooks is like entering into a dry hut: at cold times, an igloo, less treacherous than the wider glacier; in transitional seasons, a cocoon. Back on the borrowed balcony, poetically woman (tries to) dwell. But out in the world, these texts many only be excess – or in the most fulfilled scenario, a short-term shelter for someone else.

I will write you more on 'home' soon, but for now know that some time has passed – even digital letters have lag – and that I am steadier, softening, solid, and sword-bearing.