Plainwater by Anne Carson

Another year has gone by without Anne Carson winning the Nobel Prize For Literature, and I don’t know if my presumption of the inevitability of this is a consequence of me being frequently surrounded by Canadians (having lived there and now having one and a half (or two, depending how you count) in my home), or if that’s a generally held opinion in the literary world…

Anne Carson is a classicist, a poet, an essayist, an academic, an intellectual, and one of those powerhouses of learning and knowledge who has an understanding of linguistics, etymology and historical and historic meanings of words, stories and texts, as well as a rich and layered hold on myth, legend, and the ideas and ideologies that link them both.

In short, Anne Carson is cleverer (smarter) than me and probably cleverer (smarter) than you.

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Plainwater is from 1995, and so is a relatively early Carson.

It’s difficult to realise that 1995 was 30 years ago, but it was (that’s a fact there’s no getting around), so although my initial response to Carson – someone who I think of as wise and agéd – writing a text about youthfulness and being young was confusion, I was surprised only briefly (soon I remembered that everyone is young at some point), and accepted that what was being written about here was fresh(ish) to her at that point in time. Yes.

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There are five sections in Plainwater, and they are a mixture of poetry and essays.

The final (fifth) section is split into several sections, too, and (for me) it was from this final section (which is about half of the book) where most of the book’s deep joys came…

The opening section is a sorta typical Anne Carson piece, comprising translations of a classical text, followed by a commentary, and then followed by a playful postmodern imaginary interview between an interviewer (probably Anne Carson) and the ancient poet whose work she’s just translated. This is enjoyable and fun, but also difficult, complex and – for a dumb dumb like scott manley hadley aka SOLID BALD – ultimately confusing.

There are other sections that do explore these complex (literarily serious?) ideas and topics, but it’s when the text of Plainwater slips away from that I really found myself engaged.

Why, then, do I keep reading Anne Carson when one of the key themes / topics of her output is too difficult for me? Well, her literary styling is beautiful – undeniably beautiful – and it’s not like every single page of every single one of her books presumes a postgraduate knowledge of ancient texts.

And – and and and, here especially – it turns out that there is a Carson idea I do know more about than many other readers might, because a biiiiig chunk of Plainwater (maybe as much as 80 pages) is taken up with the diary she wrote (or fictionalised) about walking the camino de Santiago across the north of Spain.

Longer term readers of this blog may well remember that in 2016 I spent a little over a month walking this pilgrimage, solo, doing little in the evenings and meal breaks other than diarising and reading some of the Old Testament…

I wrote copious diaries during my pilgrimage, and began tidying it up into a book-length manuscript soon after I arrived back… Unfortunately, however, I found the manuscript too upsetting to be able to complete and finalise on any of the occasions I attempted it. That manuscript was written during the darkest period of my life, following a miserable year that I knew in my heart was about to transform into an even darker, even worse one, and the camino was something I understood would possibly/probably be the only and final respite of my adult life.

I had no hope for my future while on that walk, I had no optimism for any kind of joy or peacefulness to come, and that walk – those few weeks, including two nights during which I was sleeping rough in the Pyrenees – was the only time I ever really felt untrapped and untethered from a life I didn’t want to be trapped or tethered in for years either side…

The camino is a caesura from life.

I think walking that route, for me, was the closest I ever got to the way in which addiction is (memorably) depicted in Trainspotting…

The complexities of life slip away and there becomes just one, simple, all-consuming urge and goal…

You wake up, you walk… you wake up, you walk… you wake up, you walk… you wake up, you walk…

Life reduces to a simplicity that – finally, for the first time – makes sense.

The meaningless complexities and iniquities of everywhere and everything else fade away when there is a bed available for ten euro and food on offer for whatever price you want to pay…  Water is free and and and the views are beautiful and there is company for everyone who wants it, and solitude for those (like me) who don’t…

During the year of my life that followed the camino, thinking back on those weeks of simplicity and pleasure and satisfaction (just simple satisfaction) found in achieving the stated goals of each day was really quite important…

And though I barely got out of that year alive, I did get out of that year alive, and in the many years (the near-decade) since, I have slowly, gradually, piece by piece, built up an an an an an existence that is more compatible with my personality and my self…

Right now, I’ve simplified my life down pretty aggressively (again), and I suppose I’m ultimately the least unhappy I’ve been in a very long time, even though this simplicity (ultimately) isn’t sustainable in the long term and it likely isn’t even sustainable in the medium term. (Sustain me via this link. (Don’t ask, don’t get, ey?))

Every day now, I wake up, I play with the baby, I sing to the baby, I walk the baby and the dog around the park, I return home. Sometimes I take the baby to a baby class, sometimes I go to a free museum, sometimes I try to do an hour’s exercise on the static bike that I purchased while I still had a job in order to be able to facilitate easy cardio in the home once I was a full-time parent. After that, we have lunch and I play with the baby some more and then one or two (a couple of occasions it has been three) evenings of the week, I go and perform amateur comedy.

And sometimes that comedy goes well and sometimes that comedy doesn’t go well, but ultimately it’s not the success of the act that affects my mental state, so much as doing it or not doing it…

Making an effort, making an attempt at living, or not…

I feel more satisfaction from a bad gig where I perform new material than I do from a good one, performing something I have performed 10 times before…

It is the sense of creating and exploring and developing that excites me about the process, rather than the laughter…

I mean that isn’t entirely true, lol, a good gig with loads of laughs is the ideal, is the dream, but I’m not I’m not at the stage where I can get that every time yet (even when I pivot material if a gag or two on a theme doesn’t land), so even my polished stuff isn’t without its detractors…

Sorry, this has – as the blog often does – just descended into me talking about myself.

I mean I think it’s too late to totally pull it back…

Anne Carson’s description of walking the camino was very familiar to me, from my own trip doing that a decade ago.

…The ability to focus on thought and ideas, whilst simultaneously being detached from any meaningful needs to communicate or concentrate on those…

…The walking, the repetition of walking, the repetition of hiking, is a framework on which one can hang a day in a very satisfying way, and it’s also a way to ensure that one is tired and exhausted and exercised, all of which help to keep the the darker thoughts buried within the body…

I love that Carson piece about the camino, and I will likely read it again.

I will also try to find some time at some point in the next few months to spend a day or so looking, once again, at my own camino diary in order to see if there is anything salvageable or publishable there…

There might be. There might not be…

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There is a passage about the Camino in the pleasure of regret. Below is a video of me reading and reflecting on that:

[tbd – my baby moved slightly while I was filming this and got a big hard reveal of his adorable – yet private – face. I’ll blur his perfect visage out and upload asap and link in once I have. Sorry for any crushing disappointment the temporary absence of this video may cause. Here is a link to part of it on TikTok.]

Here it is:

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Elsewhere in Plainwater is a really beautiful essay on a road trip travelling as part of a relationship that is on the rocks… They drive from Quebec to Los Angeles, and alongside description of the journey and the collapsing relationship, Carson reflects on the dementia and increasing decline of her father. There’s also another piece about a brother who disappeared.

So, yes that is a lot of autobiographical detail in this volume, as well as lots of explorations of ideas around Catholicism, of pilgrimage, of religion more generally, of ageing, of health, of love, of sex, of relationships, of family and of linguistic ideas around translation, too…

This very much is vintage Anne Carson, and if you like any of the aspects of her oeuvre, you’ll almost certainly find something to love here in this varied volume.

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Below are some quotations and excerpts that I particularly loved, though to be honest you could flick this book open on any page and highlight any sentence or line and have things of equal potency:

On Hedonism
Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls. [p. 44]

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It would be an almost perfect love affair, wouldn’t it? that between the pilgrim and the road. No mistake, it is a beautiful thing, the camino. It stretches away from you. It leads to real gold: Look at the way it shines. And it asks only one thing. Which happens to be the one thing you long to give. You step forward. You shiver in the light. Nothing is left in you but desire for that perfect economy of action, using up the whole heart, no residue, no mistake: camino. It would be as simple as water, wouldn’t it? If there were any such thing as simple action for animals like us. [p. 154]

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What is a pilgrim’s life after he quits the camino? There is an ancient tradition: the afterlife of a pilgrim is three ways shame. Never hungry again. He will eat and eat and taste nothing. Never free again, according to the terms of the freedom he finds while bound to the road. Never angry again, with that kind of rage that scorches two animals en-snared on the Meseta. [p. 163]

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On p. 201 Carson uses the phrase “fuck boy” – could this be the earlies example in print?:

Make me your fuck boy, I hear one of us whispering in the midst of dark tent nights

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Pain is bad for conversation. But men are always in pain, aren’t they? in some sense. The mischief of desire is viral in them. [… I]t is not a question of loyalty, but of pleasure, he says. I sit on my calm heels and listen to this reasoning […] Pleasure is important. Pleasure is a way of knowing people. Pleasure is the infinite experiment. [p. 238]

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Can you read a map by the light of a thunderstorm? [p. 241]

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This is a really, really, powerful book, which (at least for me) forced lots of self reflection and contemplation.

Maybe that isn’t something everyone else sees as a positive in a book, but for someone like me (arguably self-obsessed, which is confusing because I have very low self-esteem but I also do (kinda) think I’m more interesting than most other people (which I acknowledge is a bit of a paradox – if I’m as interesting as people get, no wonder I’m so fucking bored, yeah?)), it’s ideal.

I loved it. I love it.

Anne Carson for the Nobel etc etc etc.

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I tried to go see Anne Carson give a live talk once in Toronto, but she pulled out at the last minute due to illness and, unbelievably, I have forgiven her for that.