The deep haze
Nun in heat
“I stay out too late. Got nothing in my brain.” — Taylor Swift
I’m tired and outside “feels like” 40C, whatever that means. (It means 104F.) I’m struggling to type good sentences. This air conditioning unit has never worked so hard in its life. This apartment makes no sense, neither does my behavior in it, I keep buying new things to put inside, making it harder and harder to leave. When things aren’t working, I want to move. But equally I want to stay. I want to leave with you, but equally I want to keep you here with me. I want to be a tree, but inside the trunk there is a bird beating.
The heat of this hangover is thick.
Last night on El’s terrace having dinner I see two stars but no moon. The fat white haze around the magenta glow of the Docomo Tower is hot just to look at. After midnight we bike with Ma, the three of us ascending a big hill to the club shouting over the din of construction about phone addiction, forehead to toes my skin is sheathed in moisture. When we reach the windowless concrete cube, a cloud of cigarette smoke clings to every hair and fiber. Hours later, as I leave Shinjuku going north the sky is dark, and by the time I arrive home and park my bike, it’s getting lighter. Through the warm cloud of air that’s settled over the city streets, I see no moon.
I’ve got nothing in my brain. I don’t just mean now because I had three too many G and T’s, but in general. I read books, I see art, I look at mountains, it goes in and out, my ego is tired, it wants to stop having to assert itself, I report stories that have nothing to do with me, my assessments, my perspective. I want to get rolled up in a big duvet and put away for the summer. Unfurl me when all of this is over with.
For work I read a study that says the act of preparing the house for summer can make people perceive that they’re cooler. Meanwhile I break a sweat dragging fans all over my apartment to try and find the ideal positioning that will cool the loft without overtaxing the AC. My apartment becomes a rube goldberg machine of cooling contraptions, I’ve got thermometers set up in two places, I make detailed diagrams and notes. I try not to think about it, but the next minute I’ve come up with a new scenario to run through. It’s an obsession that seems worth spending time on because it’s something I can incrementally exert control over and which if successful brings the promise of relief. But I think it just makes me miserable.
For self I read three letters from Rilke to Paula Modersohn-Becker, a painter I know primarily from writing about her google fucking doodle at a previous job and later from the weird and exceptional Being Here Is Everything, by Marie Darrieussecq, whose sleep book featured in last month’s letter. Rilke is writing to Paula (“I call her Paula and I call him Rilke. …Women do not have a surname. They have a first name. Their surname is ephemeral, a temporary loan, an unreliable indicator.”), with whom he shared an “intense friendship,” about getting settled into his new apartment in Berlin in 1900*. He writes in detail about each bench, window, and curtain, and he writes about writing about them, writing to her:
“It is evening. Silence. It seems almost impossible that you will not simply appear in my room at this moment — since everything has been set up and the pictures are hung on walls that, seen from the out-side, have now become the walls of my little home. I am waiting: waiting for you and for Clara Westhoff and Vogeler and for Sunday and for the song … and nothing is going to come. I know that nothing is going to come, and yet I wait.”
Since I started writing a storm has broken across the back of my shoulders, moving in sheets on the roof that curves overhead of my top floor unit. The rain is loud and the sound is steady, I turn off the AC to hear better, because all these electronics add so much noise on top of the volume of the heat. The thunder is like garbage trucks rolling across the heavens, or a garage door shuddering shut. It also reminds me of an angry father I used to have, there’s no doubt that thunder is paternal, what have we ants done wrong this time, then I wonder if it’s not just some teenage gods in the sky, bowling, oblivious. I slide open the back door because I expect the air has cooled, and I get hit in the face by my misjudgment. It smells like Vietnam but a little sweeter.
The storm is abating. Now it “feels like” 35. I hear a bird.
I’m pleased that my feature on the story of sitting Japan got an honorable mention for Excellence in Arts and Culture Reporting from the Society of Publishers in Asia. The paywall has been temporarily lifted so read it here if you haven’t.
*I mistyped in the original email version of this. Rilke was not alive in 1990!