This newsletter is free to read. It remains so because a small group of awesome readers choose to support it.

1. Reading

Sleeper’s Wake by Alistair Morgan.

I thought this was going to be a novel about grieving. It starts off this way but then it becomes something else. Here’s the dramatic situation, more or less:

John’s wife and daughter have been killed in a car accident whilst he was driving. He doesn’t remember how it happened. He moves from Durban to a cottage in Nature’s Valley to recuperate. In Nature’s Valley, he meets a family who is also grieving the loss of the their mother/wife. He develops a, uh, relationship with that family’s teenage daughter, Jackie.

That last part is obviously a spoiler, though, I think, a necessary one. Necessary because it made me feel tricked as a reader. Perhaps it is unfair to say that I felt tricked because the blurb of my copy does, more or less, reveal it too: ‘Seventeen year old Jackie… for whom he feels a confusing mixture of protectiveness and sexual attraction.’ I completely missed that when I read that blurb. In my defence, the blurb is too long.

Anyway, this novel is only about grief instrumentally. Really, it seems to be about ‘sleeper’ traits – an idea from the psychologist John Steiner, that ‘within violence-prone people there are aggressive personality traits that remain latent until awoken by particular conditions.’ The broader view of sleepers, which the novel explicitly espouses, is that they are ‘very common… and that almost everyone has a capacity for extreme violence and destruction.’ Unsurprisingly, much of the literature about sleepers pertains to concentration camps in World War 2.

So this seems to be the core idea of the novel: what will a person do when stripped down by tragedy and difficulty to their ‘animal’ nature?

I put ‘animal’ in quotation marks since that’s very much the way Sleeper’s Wake portrays the issue. Animal v man comparisons abound, culminating in a fairly ridiculous, if exciting, scene involving chacma baboons. In this way, the novel feels like an uncritical take on some old ideas of the Romantics.

Suffice to say, I wasn’t enthralled by this one’s plot. Although, I will allow that the line level was often very good.

By the way, one reason I picked this up, is that Alistair Morgan has had a bit of a bizarre career. He published two short stories in the Paris Review, then became the first non-American to win the Plimpton Prize, wrote another novel, and then, it seems became a very successful copy writer in London.

Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard

This is the first book in Knausgaard’s season’s quartet. The volumes are framed around a series of letters to his unborn daughter. I presume that they end with her being born.

The approach is seemingly simple but wonderful: the book progresses by sections of a few pages each, reflecting on ordinary things very closely, with the apparent intention of explaining the world to his daughter. Some of these ordinary things are: wasps, frames, apples, beekeeping, lightning, or the funniest so far, piss:

‘Of all the things we do, pissing is one of the most routine. At the time of writing this I have been alive for roughly 16,500 days. If we assume that I have pissed on average five times on each of these days, the total number of times that I have pissed comes to about 75,000. Not once have I wondered at the phenomenon, not once has it felt alien to me, as one may feel about other bodily functions and phenomena – for example, one’s heartbeat or thought impulses – even though for the body pissing is a singular act, since it connects it to the outside world, which through pissing becomes something that flows through us. No, I just position myself in front of the toilet bowl and piss down into the water, which slowly changes both colour and consistency: from being clear and transparent, it turns faintly yellowish green or a dark brown-yellow, depending on how concentrated the piss is, and becomes full of little bubbles.’

I feel like this passage gives a pretty good sense of the book. Only Knausgaard could write about pissing as being to do with some idea of the interior/exterior of the body/world.

Anyway, as those who've been subscribed to this newsletter for a while will know, I’m a big fan of Knausgaard in general. I’m a big fan of Autumn too. In particular, I think, because of how clearly it represents the Zen idea of shoshin, or ‘beginner’s mind.’ As Shunryu Suzuki famously puts it:

‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.’

This is an idea which has been applied to writing often, and, in my opinion, appropriately. Writing guides like The Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron), Writing the Bones (Natalie Goldberg), and Still Writing (Dani Shapiro) all feel quite explicitly in this vein. Autumn, however, is probably the single clearest application to writing that I've encountered.

By the way, if you're enjoying this newsletter and you’re not subscribed yet, you can get in your inbox for free, every two weeks.

2. Question

What makes some people prolific correspondents and not others?

I’ve been thinking a lot about a friend of mine who was able to maintain a staggering number of close friendships and familial relationships, and it strikes me that correspondence – letter writing, historically, or WhatsApping/iMessaging in our digital age – is very different from being with people in the same room and doesn’t necessarily correlate to the same characteristics required for simply being ‘social’.

The natural assumption would be that someone who corresponds with many people is hyper extraverted. But, anecdotally, this doesn’t seem to be the case. H.P. Lovecraft, for example – one of literary history’s examples of the prolific letter writer – has always seemed a bit curmudgeonly and prickly to me. I don’t think H.P. Lovecraft liked people.

One reason for this, is that communication-from-afar is different in nature from communication-in-person. When texting a friend in another country, for instance, we have a tendency to speak about our actual lives more. In part, this is because we feel the day-to-day events of our lives are trivially obvious to someone we see every week. Except, the difference isn’t just to do with knowledge of each other, it’s also that there is a significant difference between someone encountering the pieces of our life versus explaining those pieces. There is also, a difference, of course, between verbal and written communication. But, perhaps, more importantly, communication-from-afar – especially when it was conducted by letters, or, now by email – creates prolonged explanation prior to back-and-forth. Based on the logic of ‘discovery’ in writing, or the way some people are ‘verbal processors’ this means that we end up explaining more essential things about our lives.

This, presumably, is why people can feel very close to ‘pen pals’ whom they rarely see. In contrast, with the friends we see often, we tend to make activity-based arrangements which exist, in large part, to dodge the burden of actually speaking about ourselves.

3. Reflection

(Previously, this section was ‘Something I’ve noticed;’ though, because of how fun I’ve found Autumn, I wanted to try something new here.)

Dry needling.

In dry needling, a very thin (filiform) needle is inserted into or near a muscular trigger point to relieve pain or tension and improve mobility. Like all cases in which a foreign object enters the body – dental procedures, colonoscopies – there is a natural, evolutionary, barrier of resistance to the idea. That dry needling involves only a outer layer of the body, the skin and muscles – rather than the more intimate mouth, for example – might make this resistance the lesser, but this is counterbalanced by the simple fact that a needle is sharp, and that, when we usually encounter it, it draws blood.

I imagine that most people primarily associate the needle with a medical/surgical context and this is unlikely to be a comfort. It shifts what should be a physiotherapeutic process closer to the realm of white coats and IV bags. The alternative association is to thread and fabric and clothes, but it isn’t any more comforting to imagine your back being made into a scarf.

For these reasons, I’ve never been too keen on trying dry needling. I am also, more straightforwardly, afraid of needles. Probably not much more than average but I always look away when my blood is drawn.

However, last week I had an injury to my neck/trap/facet joint. It was regularly painful and not getting better on its own, so when my physio suggested dry needling, I agreed. I figured it would be okay since I was on one of those massage tables, face down, and I wouldn’t have to see the needles.

The first instant that the needle goes in is okay, actually, not very sore. But the following instant is very bad. The muscle twitches in a way that it is very much not supposed to twitch. The feeling brought to mind the writhing of some non-sentient mollusc trying to peel away from its shell. I think what was disconcerting about it was that the muscular reaction was completely involuntary despite being so violent.

Once all the needles were in, I started to feel pretty horrible. Nauseous, clammy, panicked, faint. This, I have since learnt, is called a ‘vasovagal response’ and is due to the overstimulation of the vegas nerve as blood pressure and heart rate drops. However, I find it interesting the vegas nerve simulation, in smaller doses, is also a way to produce a calming response in the body. Others I’ve spoken to report leaving dry needling sessions with feelings of relaxation, even euphoria.

What I find so strange about this, is that the axes of emotional/physical response usually run from either happy-energetic to anxious-jittery; or, from happy-calm, to knocked-out-groggy. That the vegas nerve doesn’t conform to these axes, feels like a rare exception.

If you'd like to support this newsletter and keep it free for everyone, you can become a paying member (and therefore an extremely awesome person) below.

See you in two weeks,
Blake