Doesn't it feel strange

[breathedout]

Doesn't it feel strange, I heard myself ask, putting your fingers exactly the way someone put hers only she's been dead for a few hundred years? Louise smiled, as if it was fine for me to join in. Not to me, she said, not anymore, anyway, I'm always trying to do what dead people tell me. And especially when I'm making a replica, spending days looking at and feeling and listening to some prehistoric object, I'm kind of trying to think their thoughts too. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn't it, that when I really concentrate on the spaces between decorative dots or the exact tension of a twist, my mind's doing what their minds did while my hands do what their hands did. I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same. I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the reenactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, we or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds. It's a shame I couldn't bring a loom, Louise was saying, it would have been interesting for you to see, perhaps I should ask Jim to arrange a session in my studio next term.

—Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

I am thus far enjoying this novella not only (predictably) for the meditations on hauntings and the ways in which our interactions with artefacts of a past world interface with our perceptions of our own world, but also for the painful but believable psychology of the first-person narrator, a 17-year-old girl bullied into submission by her father. Also for the portrait of said father's British-nativist xenophobia as filtered through the lens of a daughter who has maybe 2/3 of an analysis of what's going on there. It's very well done.

(Also, hello! Apologies for vanishing; the social media and meatspace-life juggle continues apace. How have you been, friends?)

Comments

[starshipfox]

I hadn't planned on reading that book because I wasn't keen on Moss's earlier short stories, but I really love the section you quoted. The sense of touching places and being in places that also belong to people in the past is always very meaningful to me. I love the way Alan Garner writes about it too.

[breathedout]

I keep thinking of you, actually, because her style strikes me as a poet's prose: spare, supple yet intentional, with a steady, well-realized voice. But it's interesting you didn't like her previous work; what about it?

I too LOVE evocations of occupying shared space with people of the past, and as such this book both plays into my weaknesses for that and also challenges them a little bit (because the narrator's father's worship of the past is all tied up with his xenophobia & investment in the supposed purity/superiority of a pre-Roman Britain--not a quality I share, but it does make me interrogate my own investment in the past as a concept, a bit). We'll see where she takes it; I'm only about 1/3 through.

[starshipfox]

So apparently I have been wronging Moss, because I was thinking of a completely different person when I said I didn't like her work. I'm not sure who I was thinking of, but Moss didn't write the book I didn't like. I guess if you read as many books as we do, you'll get mixed up sometimes! Sorry, Sarah Moss.

It's good when a book forces you to interrogate your own perceptions: for me, too, my interest in the past isn't tied up in the idea of purity or xenophobia -- or the idea that anything, aside from our proximity to environmental collapse, was any better -- but why am I so drawn to it? I definitely associate a proximity to the past with a sense of the numinous, which probably means I overlook its hardship and violence at times. Anyway, it sounds like Moss's book is interesting, and I shouldn't have been dismissing it so readily!

[clarasteam]

*waves* good to see you!

I haven't read Moss but this sounds like something I should check out.

[ruinsplume]

I'm so glad to see you posting! I was getting worried, tbh!

This is OT, but I finished Real Queer America and would love to hear your thoughts on it.

I am currently on vacation in the middle of a 19th century landscape painting (aka a small farmhouse in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee) where I could never live because of the cultural aspect (which is interesting to think about in light of reading RQA) but oh my lord is it beautiful here.

[breathedout]

Aw, I'm sorry to worry you! Just a matter of Too Much Life Stuff going on at once, really. In addition to work and the puppy, Greywash & I are trying to secure financing & contractors for extensive renovations on the house we bought earlier this year, the whole process of which is just. A Lot.

That sounds like a lovely place to visit, if not to live! I will try to summon my less-diplomatic thoughts about RQA (I posted about it here but, especially having talked with my bookgroup about it, do have more to add). I'm interested in your reactions, as well!

[ruinsplume]

I'm glad you're doing well and just busy! House renovations is always a lot. And then some.

whoops, just left you a long post about RQA here, thinking I was DMing you. Just deleted it to repost in the proper place.

[donut_donut]

Glad to see you around! I hope your meat space adventures have been mostly good ones...

[breathedout]

Thank you! I would say the meatspace adventures have been mostly good, yes, although they've had their ups & downs. I'm in a place right now where I have to keep reminding myself that I actually *am* making progress on all my various projects, because a lot of the time it feels like there are just so many that none of them are moving forward. (Primarily, our massive home renovation project is pretty overwhelming at times, despite having broken it down into multiple, sequenced steps and doing our best to take things one step at a time.) But I guess that's a better problem to have than if I had nothing going on.

[donut_donut]

oof, renovations are indeed a life-sucking enterprise. but definitely more positive than many of the other things that take people away from DW, like ill-health, or employment upheaval, or family crises, etc. So I'm glad to hear it's not something like that, at least.

[digsdigsdigs]

I'm happy to hear from you! I had been wondering how things were going.

I really like this excerpt -- it reminds me of a lot of Zen ideas about the form of practice putting you in direct contact with the bodily and intellectual efforts of teachers and ancestors. The posture of meditation mirrors, the verbal/sonic effect of chanting mirrors, the mental engagement with apparently-obfuscatory koans mirrors, etc.

[chestnut_pod]

That reminds me so much of looking at a tablet of Linear A text and seeing the little jiggles where someone's chisel slipped…

Novella-length seems perfect for this story. I read The Tidal Zone back in 2017 and thought I would read her next book too, but somehow missed this new release! Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

(Also, irrelevantly, I think "Moss" is a great name for an author writing a book called Ghost Wall.)

[oldshrewsburyian]

Ooh, this sounds brilliant (and very relevant to my interests.) And hello to you too!

[breathedout]

Having now finished it, I highly recommend it. Though it definitely does carry content warnings for physical & emotional (but not sexual) abuse. But it's super thoughtful, thought-provoking, and well-realized, and it lives very lightly in that synthesis of the personal and the political. Sylvie's first-person voice is well-done, too.

[oldshrewsburyian]

Thanks for both the recommendation and the warnings!