One of the most difficult parts of my anxiety recovery was the constant harping on about the importance of being present. I didn’t want to be present – I felt spaced out, struggled to function in everyday life, was unhappy with my body and the general state of affairs that my small life was in. It was easier to long for the surely sunnier days of future months, or happier times I reflected on from last summer or even years ago before anxiety had manifested. But apart from my personal, quotidian troubles, I struggled with the grim reality of the present. At work, a place I found it easier to be mindful because I had to be (pulling pints, counting money, forcing myself through small-talk) I would have horrendous moments when I believed I was looking at people and seeing things as they truly were. In an episode of a great podcast I listened to recently, John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, Green outlines his own experience of this feeling and labels it as a game called ‘What’s Even The Point?’ My boyfriend and I listened to this episode in perhaps not the most fitting of contexts: a beautiful car ride from Florence to Val D’Orcia, where, incidentally, the first part of Crudo is set. But then again, maybe this setting was apt: feeling the shadow of existentialism even on the richest of days. Green references a quote from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem which sucked up those feelings that would come at work into a hard ball that punched me straight in the chest:
The chill is in the air
Which the wise know so well, and even have learned to bear.
This joy, I know,
Will soon be under snow.
Not So far as The Forest, Edna St. Vincent Millay
It would be this depressive chill that froze me, momentarily, in the seemingly inescapable pain of the present as I looked at men guzzling pints of beer and middle-aged women enjoying gin and tonics. How do people go on? How do people face all the badness and evil and sadness in life and carry on, enjoying the rest of it? There’s so much to be fearful of and to hate and so much anxiety to control and another wave of depression that’s just around the corner. How can they keep coming to the pub each week and seem happy? Is everyone stronger than me? Is it all just a façade? The questions would carry on in my mind, a wired monkey jumping from vine to vine and into oblivion. Forever – existing like this forever – seemed a breathless, draining feat that I wanted to get out of somehow. Green says, “It feels like the only way to survive life is to cultivate an ironic detachment from it. If I can’t be happy, I at least want to be cool. When my brain is playing What’s Even the Point, hope feels so flimsy and naïve—especially in the face of the endless outrages and horrors of human life. What kind of mouth-breathing jackass looks at the state of human experience and responds with anything other than nihilistic despair?”
Green’s notion of an ‘ironic detachment’ seems precisely what Olivia Laing-as-Kathy Acker is so anxious about in Crudo. It’s the horrendous summer of 2017 – Britain in the throes of Brexit negotiation, Grenfell, Trump threatening to bomb North Korea and vice-versa, Syrian refugees drowning each day. But Kathy Acker’s having the greatest few months of her life – she’s getting married and has just holidayed in Tuscany. Laing’s novel is day-by-day, an alarming present-ness that’s meant to aid anxiety. Acker wakes up and spends most of her days, pre- and post-marriage, obsessively scrolling Twitter and reading news articles about the latest atrocity or the most recent Congressional resignation. Her daily life is infested with the central fact: “You could go on holiday but you knew corpses washed up there, if not now then then, or later.” Crudo is fast, fragmented, entirely worried with death, happiness, threat and living. The temporal tracking suggests a building to something, some D-Day from which moment forth nothing will be the same. It’s completely oxymoronic, anxiety-wise; it’s a useful exercise in present-ness and noting but it’s also propelling the inhabitants of its narrative forward – what will become of Trump’s tweets, when will those made homeless by the Houston floods be re-homed. People in that wider, outside, detached world don’t have the luxury of being present, of enjoying momentary pleasures of a bug on skin in the Tuscan sun or sunbathing naked in a garden. Acker is suspended between being happy, content and whole and being individual, metamorphosing and worried about the outside.
Laing asks, “how could you be happy when you know the tendencies humans had, their appetite for cruelty.” In fact, the lack of a question mark morphs the tone of this into an appalled statement with no room for an answer. You can’t be happy – can you? But Kathy, eventually, guiltily, realises she wants to be alive and to experience the energy of life without it being marred by the threat of death. Death is everywhere, she concludes – she just wants to live.
Let nothing happen, just for a bit, let the minutes toll in the stunning air, let us lie on our beds like astronauts, hurtling through space & time.
p.82
Imagine what a process it was to unnumb yourself […] to see it as it actually was. That’s the only reason to be an artist: to escape, to bear witness to this.
Words of Philip Guston on prisoners that escaped the Holocaust, p.87
The two quotes come within five pages of each other, in the same near-stream-of-consciousness that’s occupied the whole book. It’s Laing blended with Acker blended with books each, both or neither have read and tweets that have been scrolled past and articles published. But the sentiment of each is staunchly opposed: the former calls for an ostensibly rosy being-out-of-time, allowing time to pass without anything happening, without paying attention to the news or worrying about climate change or political aggravation. The latter, though, frames the former’s detachment as entrapment in itself. A blind numbness which one needs to escape to see the world as it truly is. If nothing else, art, says Laing-as-Acker, is living in the present no matter how bad it is. Laing’s Crudo, her work of art, is often depressing and repetitive and sees the world warts and all – but it’s defiantly present. It stages the impossibility of escape from oneself as a being in the horrible and pleasant world, and confrontations with an unimaginable forever. And in the end of Crudo, the end of the ‘raw’ account of the present 2017, she realises the possible wholeness of life by separating herself temporarily from her happiness – boarding a plane away from her husband for a trip to America. Laing writes the final lines, beautifully;
She loved him, she loved him. Love is in the world, pain is in the world. She was in it now, she was boarding, there was nowhere to hide.
p.133
Kathy gives herself up to not detaching, not disappearing, not hiding from the ugliness in the world. She is on board – but she is happy. My therapist once said to me, “nobody is guaranteed plain happiness. It’s not a rule to subscribe to or a goal to aim towards.” It sounded like shit at the time (why wouldn’t you aim towards being happy?) but I think I understand it more now. Happiness will come in waves, the good with the bad, but don’t stress about life if it’s not sunshine and rainbows. Be fully in the shit and you’ll come out the other side, even if just for a second. Green; “You keep going. You go to therapy. You try a different medication. You meditate, even though you dislike meditation. You exercise. You wait. Your mind keeps playing What’s Even the Point, and you keep refusing to give in to it, battling it with philosophy and self-help books and religion and whatever else that works. And then one day, the air is a bit warmer, and the sky is not so blindingly bright.” Or, in the case of Kathy Acker – you go through cancer, a double mastectomy, your husband’s ailing health, doubting your marriage, fear of nuclear annihilation, watching the world crumble from afar – and life goes on.
When reading, it seemed to me that Crudo comes from the bourgeoning sub-genre of modern feminist literature of the Messy-Adult-Woman narrative. Usually first-person stories who don’t really know where their lives are going, struggle to exist in a despicable and chaotic world and are mostly nihilistic. Each day is a tangle of scrolling the news and grazing on food past its sell-by date and forty’s knocking on the door but they don’t care, for god’s sake. Think Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Rachel Cusk, Levy’s Hot Milk – cool stuff. In Laing’s story, “Just drifting, accepting their fate, not saying no, saying yes” […] “like a feral animal, she had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as an invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain”. In Green’s, “If I can’t be happy, I at least want to be cool”. And Crudo is – a fiercely strange, cool book which is intimidating and intelligent and pokes around in my own fracas with reality, the future and being happy in times of death and sadness. I don’t know why Laing chose post-modern punk feminist writer Kathy Acker, but why not, I guess. A woman who wrote so much as others – Dickens, Cervantes – can be usefully resurrected by another brilliant writer inhabiting her vivid persona. Life continues after, and because of, death proves Laing – and it can be as real, beautiful and traumatising as the original artefact itself… perhaps decorated with a few ugly hashtags and deleted tweets.
hbiswriting 