The Parts of My Own Sluggish Bloodstream
I’m currently taking an online workshop with the small press word west. It’s one of two courses dedicated to New York Review of Books Classics, and for our meeting two weeks ago, we read The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, an English-born surrealist artist that I’ve become a bit obsessed with. If you find yourself in the mood for something absurd and fantastic, I highly recommend it. It reminds me a lot of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, who coincidentally (or perhaps not coincidentally) penned the afterword for the NYRB edition. There was one passage in particular that I underlined, grinning, struck by its bit of serendipity, I guess you could say. I’ve included it below:
“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself. This is true of the back yard and the small room I occupied at that time, my body, the cats, the red hen all my body all part of my own sluggish bloodstream. A separation from these well-known and loved, yes loved, things were “Death and Death indeed” according to the old rhyme of the Man of Double Deed. There was no remedy for the needle in my heart with its long thread of old blood.”
- Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
I’ve gotten some very nice feedback on this newsletter so far (thanks to those who have sent kind messages and those who have grabbed my face in person to tell me they love it - please know that in my heart, I’m grabbing your faces to tell you I love you), but I think I’m still having a bit of trouble explaining the heart of it exactly, the why. So I feel incredibly lucky to have found Leonora Carrington and have her help me out. There’s a few things that really speak to me about this passage.
Though I wouldn’t describe myself as a homebody by any means, I would definitely say that I’m a “nester.” For me, this is how I connect myself to the space, how it becomes my body, like Leonora Carrington says. And I love this process. I find it to be a type of busybody relaxation, a way to expel whatever pent-up energy or frustration I feel. I know not everyone is like this. I have numerous, hyper-transient friends whose lifestyles I have always been seduced by, who I envy for their ability to live in the permanent state of hopping from place to place. I envy it, in part, because it removes the painfulness of extricating yourself from your nest, from your home that has also become your body.
I recall the summer of 2019, when I was packing up my house in Oxford to move to Wyoming. I was all too giddy to leave. I desperately wanted to get away from a town where it felt like everyone was staring at me, that everyone was shaking their heads in disgust and whispering when my back was turned. And yet, somehow I found myself sprawled on my back on the floor as I binged Bojack Horseman, surrounded by my possessions, sobbing uncontrollably during those last several days as I sold my bookcases and tables and the move became reality. It seemed I could not cry enough, that I would never be able to cry enough to satisfy the deep well of sadness I felt as I was leaving this place.
I felt a similar sadness when I left Wyoming. I once again found myself sprawling on the floor, overwhelmed by this sense of a deep, incalculable loss, even though I was once again eager to get far, far away from this place. In this passage from The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington’s narrator Marian Weatherby describes being forced out from a place that she loves, but I think the pain of detaching yourself from a place is always there, even in less straightforward situations.
I like also the description of Marian's frame as “haggard.” I extrapolate a bit here, assuming that the narrator views her extension of her body, her home, as also being a bit haggard. And I love this, because the homes that I have found myself most deeply attached to have always been a little haggard. There’s been no central heating or air or the oven doesn’t work exactly right or the doors swell in the summer or my hot water goes out with consistency. And yet there were always pieces, moments that, as Marian describes, became “all part of my own sluggish bloodstream.”
There was Breakfast, the little tortoiseshell cat my neighbor owned who would roll in my driveway on North 15th Street. There were the bright yellow walls in my last house in Laramie, with their strange corded texture and the way they caught the sunlight when there happened to be sunlight to catch. There was the way my little house in Oxford was hidden behind a cluster of trees, the way it was built into a hill so the back of it slipped into a lush, green pit of ivy and grass. There was that small upstairs room that slanted with the roof, the window there that reached the floor that Barry would sun himself in front of on a very precise schedule every morning. There was the wild mint that grew in my yard. There was my walk to work every morning, my drunk stumbling home every night. There was the gingko tree one block over. There were so many things in so many places that stuck themselves deep inside my heart, and it pained me deeply to leave them even though I had to.
Yesterday, I found a long-haired cat sitting in front of my door. They waited for me to scratch them behind the ears, forced their little head into my hand. I wonder if they knew in that moment that they were attaching themselves to me, becoming a part of this new body in this new place.
They had to have known, right?