Eating Pomegranates in the Dark (Five Things, 14/12/20)
1.
I forget how to do this.
I haven’t kept a diary at all this past year. For a few years I would try to write in a journal every morning, but I found, when reading back over them and typing some of them up, that they were mostly vessels for my anxiety. The things I needed to do. The things I hadn’t done yet. The things that I promised myself I was going to get better at. Just reading through them, I was filled with a rising alarm, as if the journals themselves were contaminated and contagious. As if I was going to catch those muted morning terrors all over again if I revisited them. Still, there amidst the high whine of difficulty, there were also some little polished stones of observations. These, I imagine, are the point of such journals as far as the future is concerned. In the moment, it is useful to exorcise oneself of the day ahead and the day before, but in posterity, one values only the look of the light on a wall, or the events of a day that can give context to something. I hated these journals, or at least I hated reading them. I hated the incessant patter of my anxious mind. A mind always behind deadline and living in a kind of muffled abject terror of it. A mind full of panicked promises: I know I am bad, I intend to get better, all I have to do is this, or this, or this other thing, and then things will feel clean again, then things will improve. They were the journals of a person in distress, and that is not what I wanted to remember. So I stopped making them. But I also stopped doing a particular kind of writing that was useful to me. I have missed daily reflections. I have missed what I wrote that was intended for a reader of some sort. I was busy, and writing was demanded of me by people in official positions—editors—and so I felt stupid or perhaps even delinquent to simply be writing and giving it away in its raw form without trying to hone or monetize it. But I hate that. And it means I’ve lost something. I’ve lost an honesty, or a spontaneity, or something else I can’t describe because I’ve grown so rusty.
2.
It reminds me of the year in which I could not listen to music. Some time ago, I had something terribly distressing happen. I don’t want to get into it, but it was a thing that shifted something in me, and changed how I operated in the world. In the short term, the change was dramatic, and in the long term, maybe not so much, but I can never be sure. In the short term, I needed to forcefully dull my exposure to certain stimuli in the world. Music felt too emotional, too unpredictable, and so for a time, I stopped listening to it. When I wrote, I wrote to silence. If I wanted something on in the background at home, I put on a TV show or a movie. When driving, I listened exclusively to talk radio and to podcasts. I’ve gone back to listening to music of course. And even during that year of no music, music pursued me. Bands performed at bars. Music played in bakeries and in restaurants and at friends’ parties and even at the dry cleaners and the supermarket. I don’t know how conscious I was of avoiding it, only that I never chose to listen to it when I was alone, or alone with my thoughts at least.
3.
I’ve been eating a pomegranate every day for about the last two weeks. They are in season, and cut-open pomegranates are displayed at the front of many fruit stands, arranged atop massive piles of the mottled red and gold globes. They are sweet and tart and pithy, and seem somehow appropriate right now, as if we are all Persephone, clocking out our hours in the underworld. They are supposed to “help with inflammation,” which I am experiencing. It seems like everything, everywhere, is inflamed these days. Every morning I arrange before me two bowls, one white and shallow, one deep and blue, and a paring knife. I cut out the crown of the pomegranate, and then score along the fruit’s five ridges before pulling the six bloody pieces apart. The rind and pith goes into the white bowl, and the seeds collect into the blue. They are pushed out of their hive, like red honeycomb. They make a satisfying sound, which may be the rustling sound of them being pushed loose from the fruit, or the plinking sound they make falling into the bowl. I’m not sure, it is more or less the same sound. It is strangely soothing and satisfying. A short burst of familiar, meticulous work. Maybe in this way I can also learn to write again.
4.
In Paris, the shops are open, but all of the restaurants are closed. All of the cafés and bars and bistros and brasseries are closed too. It turns out that the streets have been lit to take into consideration the almost perpetual glow of these drinking and eating establishments, and so without them, with their metal-shuttered doors and windows presented instead, the streets at night are very dark. The shops and street lights are not enough to light them. In the summer, I noticed a space of about twenty to thirty minutes each evening when the deep blue evening sky had grown too dark but the sodium street lights had not come on. This happened every day. Suddenly, the streets were a little too dark. A lilac-gray-blue twilight had fallen over the pale houses and monuments, over the river that was suddenly dull. And then, the lights would come on. The street lights and the lamp posts in their ancient frames that once held gas lights or oil lamps, and the lights on the bridges that send gold shattering across the surface of the nighttime river.
5.
This was a year that most of us tried to make pass faster, and for me at least, it worked. I could not believe it when it was already fall, and I cannot believe that it is already winter and the holidays. There is a kind of horror in that, which I am actively trying to ignore. Much like I once avoided listening to music when I was alone, I now avoid thinking about the passing of this year, and the places that I am not, and the people I have not seen, and how long it has been since I have seen them. I can’t look at it, or I will go blind. I cannot turn around to look, or else I may be trapped in this strange underworld forever, and never be able to escape. Like everyone, I suppose, I am compelled to just keep looking forward. To make my world smaller, and smaller. Small enough to manage. Reducing my life to the tiny space of a single asteroid-planet, the home of my little life, with its many sunrises and sunsets flashing by, and its volcanoes that need cleaning and the baobab trees that need weeding, and what roses that may land and take root in my soil, as I continue on, hurtling through the darkness.