in The Circle

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 10 years ago

I decided to stay home from the Writers Festival and read, all weekend, in the hammock. Yesterday I read three Mills and Boons, today I am reading a novel by Dave Eggers. The writing is so beautiful it’s almost a liquid. It is modest. It does not proclaim about itself. It’s blood temperature, so I can move through it without noticing. But every now and then I turn the page and read some startling description that has to be reread aloud, like the summing up of the book’s character Mae, offered to her by a woman sitting in a deck chair, with her eyes closed, on a boat.

I am that woman today, moored near an island. Outside of the hammock world, which is permeable, storm clouds mass up on the horizon behind the big spiky city. The camphor laurel tree whickers and sways. A sudden gust casts down a spray of its gentle, tissuey blossoms on me, and its red-veined leaves.

A seed falls into the seam of my book and I tilt it and shake it away. The sky is blue but clotting with piled hulks of soft-serve cloud. It’s always blue but only when lit. As I watch, it grows colder, and the blue begins to sour into a sweet daytime stay-at-home white. A lamplit day, an indoor day. I’m outdoors, slung on a sharp hilltop. Outdoors is always blue but whitening now and filigreed with the leaves’ underbellies, which churn in the wind like a school of fish, and closer to home by the large open net I am lying in. Sky in the gaps. Today my own writing is not modest, it’s first-drafty like a camp bed slung between two trees, it takes a fancy word like ‘filigree’ and cuts it right open, filleting like a fish whose screams outside the water are conveniently inaudible. The writing and the day and its transience fill me with greed and contentment. I’m full’o’greed. My thoughts are sounds that make no sense and I’m so comfortable. Outdoors, and at home, all day.

Down the street aways two crows seem to be boasting to each other. Ark, says one. I don’t believe you, says the other. I lay the book down open on my chest. Willing to be dragged through the day by my own brain and by another brain’s writing and communion. The grey cat, who is herself a hammock, turns into herself, bristles, and sighs. Far behind the big boat of this city and its festivals I ride the churning water. A long time later I pick up the book again, wishing it was heavier and fatter. I will read to the end today, then read it again, I’m so glad and relieved that greatness exists still among us, that it won’t all die when Shirley Hazzard dies, that it didn’t all fold down into the grave with Elizabeth Gaskell and her “kindly spirit that thinks no ill [and] looks out of her pages irradiate.”