Nina MacLaughlin's Blog, page 5

The time has come for a new language. We can vibrate with the...

The time has come for a new language. We can vibrate with the tulip
petals, the sunset, the morning light in the asparagus fern on the
windowsill. We can share that ring. Between us, though, for now, words
are what we have.

On language and longing and the invisible egg of the universe. For the Paris Review Daily, the fourth essay in a series on the sky asks, what is the word for sky?

Does an ultimate landing place exist? Or are we always arriving,...

Does an ultimate landing place exist? Or are we always arriving, always
Arriving, falling, faltering, flying, to land once more, then fall
again? Our dreams offer glimpses of what could be, visions that can
change what we know and how we exist in the waking world where we live.
We fall asleep, sink into our dreams, and rise, ascend, Arrive, wake up.

For the Paris Review Daily, the third essay in a series on the sky looks at black holes, tigers, and dreams, and what we can and cannot know, asking where does the sky end?

[The Flammarion engraving, unknown artist. First appeared in Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire, 1888]

Robin’s egg. Peach. Opal. Purple. Baby-hair blond as my...

Robin’s egg. Peach. Opal. Purple. Baby-hair blond as my brother’s was.
Garnet. Lavender. Turmeric. Charcoal. Periwinkle. Dirt road. Yarrow.
Powder. Bruise. Rice. Absinthe. Piss. Shadow. Mussel shell. Ash. Blood
clot. Clementine. Pistachio. Mauve. Faun. Inner thigh. Midnight.
Cantaloupe. Underblanket. Honey. Olive. Orgasm. Peppermint. Raisin.
Sapphire like the wedding ring my mother wore, a thin band of tiny flat
sapphires so dark it looked black, but off her finger, where always it
is now, marriage done, held up in the light, deep dark blue. Heather.
Smoke. Yolk. Bone. Baseball. Candle. Creamsicle. Lichen. Lilac. Bile.
Black silk. Hawk eye. Camouflage. Amaranth. Lamb. Is vacancy a color? Is
absence a color? If you try to think of nothing, does it have a color?

For the Paris Review Daily, the second essay in a series on the sky asks, what color is it?

When are you in the sky? There are the obvious times: in an...

When are you in the sky? There are the obvious times: in an
airplane; a hot air balloon; a rocket; the moment of peak height after
being launched from a diving board. But if you are in a room on the
second floor and lean out the window and trees outside your window are
taller than the roof, are you in the sky? What distance must one travel up to meet it? Is there a
scientific measure with numbers and variables and exponents riding the
shoulders of the regular-size numbers? Does an equation exist? Sky =
11.19 squared over weather to the third times Time times light times
height of person measuring minus birds? Does an invisible band like the
Tropic of Capricorn trace a line above, an invisible eggshell of
guarantee that delineates: this is sky, this is not sky?

For the Paris Review Daily, I’m writing a six-part series about the sky. The first one asks where does the sky start?

This evening, April 27, at 7 pm, please join me in celebrating...

This evening, April 27, at 7 pm, please join me in celebrating the virtual launch of
SUMMER SOLSTICE, an expanded version of a series of essays I wrote for
the Paris Review Daily, published in a beautiful letterpress edition by the legendary Black Sparrow Press and hosted by the mighty Brookline Booksmith. I’m lucky to be in conversation with author and Paris Review online editor Nadja Spiegelman.

You can register for the event here.

And you can support your favorite local bookstore and buy a copy here through Indiebound.

Here’s to calm and health and the seasons continuing to unfold.

And so what can we do? We’re in a time of the interiors,...

And so what can we do? We’re in a time of the interiors, and
days pass in fast-slow ooze. Keep busy with the birds, keep busy with
the buddings. Time moves and we do our
private work. I finished a spoon I started carving months ago. Spent more time
than was demanded rubbing the beeswax and flaxseed oil into the wood, kept on
caressing because what else was there to do except sink deeper into my
imagination, and, it turned out, I could do both things at once. You miss
laughing with your pals? Same here. Yesterday I took an evening run, ran in the
middle of the roads in the small city where I live, no such thing as traffic
now. Being in the world made me miss being in the world.

The amaryllis was a Christmas gift from my mother and itsbulb...

The amaryllis was a Christmas gift from my mother and its
bulb sits two-thirds out of the soil. Life mound, dirt egg, root sack. Brown
ball of onion skin firm as bone in the womb. Three green stegs rise from the
bulb. They rise faster than seems possible and will join two full-sizers from
Christmas pasts on the sill, whose elegant green sweeps reach longer than my
arm, shoulder to fingertip.

For now, the stegs are smooth and firm. And before the
fronds need propping, a flower redder than red will throb itself open and make
me wonder if blood pulses through plants, too. A busted lip, a finger sliced, a
bright and living flash of wound.

The hospital is at the end of the block, less sirens than
you’d think. Down the street, the tennis courts in summer in winter get flooded
for skating. Bright festive lights bulb the perimeter, glowy on the ice, when
there is some. Most nights now, here in the latter half of a winterless winter,
the lights are dark. The NO ICE sign hangs in the clubhouse window.

The Christmas cactus bloomed at the end of January. A little
late or very early, depending how you live with time. The bud spent some days
looking like the pointed fuchsia slick that emerged from MacDuff’s dog dick
when he tried to make love to his pillow. The plants in the window express their own excitement, a pure and unwearied eagerness for what’s to
come.

Bright-dim afternoon, the light was gauzy-grey, sky thecolor of...

Bright-dim afternoon, the light was gauzy-grey, sky the
color of a shiver. Christmas Day, mild, quiet. Away from home, afternoon lull,
and a run to move the blood, five miles on farm roads. Stone walls, silos,
barns, wide flat fields to the west, and wide fields that slope down to the
tidal river to the east. An ocean close, sensed in the lungs, and in the
magnetic way the body knows where ocean is.

It was Christmas Day and something happened.

A mile or so from the house, some movement ahead and a fox came
into focus. There it was, ahead, 20 yards. It stopped in the middle of the road
and looked at me. I stopped on the side of the road and looked at it. Then it
turned and ran, right down the yellow lines. I followed.

Thirty seconds, a minute, two, who knows, it stopped, looked
back at me, and kept running. An easy loping pace, this sleek orange flame
against the yellow lines. Skeleton, muscle, fur, yes, and also: a ripple of
heat. This low-down animal, its tail tipped white with grey, candleflame on the
wick, fire-fleet, and moving. Then it stopped again, there on the
yellow lines, it looked back at me. Come,
it seemed to say, come, come, keep coming.

I did.

Here we were on the road, farms every evidence of human’s
control over nature; we were not in glen or forest dense and dim. A driveway
there, a fat shiny car, chimney smoke, little lights on a wreath, even the stone
walls showed the hand of human work and our arbitrary, imbecilic idea of
boundary.

As we ran, these structures, these delineations, started to
dissolve.

It was a fox, a fox, a fox, a fact as true as the slugs I
sometimes see on the sidewalk on summer morning walks in Cambridge. Pure
animal. And it was more, this flame, this guide, keep coming, animal and energy. Force and substance both. A
flesh-blood creature and a loping potency taking its place at the center of
things, defying the boundary and uniting two sides. The stone walls didn’t
matter, the road, the yellow lines, the driveways, didn’t matter. Our human
movement of time didn’t matter. The world was getting wilder.

And then a third time it stopped, turned, faced me. This
animal, this flame in the street and I, I cheek-flushed and breathing fast, we
looked at each other, and for seconds, an epoch, eternity, who knows how long,
it was only the two of us in all existence. A shared heat, an awareness only,
total, of each other. Not the sky, not the hawk, not the rabbits, squirrel, or
deer. Not the silent tractor in the field nor the wooden fence nor the greenhouse
or road sign or mailbox. And inside this moment, for an even smaller mote of
time, immense and nothing, we were not two, the fox and I, but one. Time
dissolves, the regular flow deregulates and the boundaries slip away. “Out of
time, out of space, before the fire, our being is no longer chained to a being-there,” Gaston Bachelard writes.
So it was. I was before the fire and the chains gave way.

A second, less.

Time returned and the fox veered left toward a farm. I caught
up enough to see its tail slip behind the silo. The thought moved across my
mind: keep following?

But no. It had showed me what it needed to, had set the pace
and way, and I was not meant to tail it into the woods. I knew two things at
once. It was fox and more than fox. Why does one feel so self-conscious when
using words like magic? I have trouble finding others for it.

That night, awake in bed in the dark, I kept seeing the fox
in my mind, its fire color, its curious face when it turned to face me on the
road. Could it possibly have happened? French writer Henri Bosco gives an
answer when he writes: “I was not dreaming. I was getting warm.”

[Fox Hunt by Winslow Homer]

Coming this April, SUMMER SOLSTICE, an extended version of...

Coming this April, SUMMER SOLSTICE, an extended version of essays I wrote for the Paris Review Daily, being published by the mighty, storied, Black Sparrow Press. With the most gorgeous honeycomb cover by artist Jennifer Muller.

As antidote to cold, place your pre-orders here.

Friends and readers in Providence: tonight, Friday the 13th, I’m...

Friends and readers in Providence: tonight, Friday the 13th, I’m lucky to be heading down to Twenty Stories to read and talk about WAKE, SIREN. I hope to see you there.  

And if you can’t make it, consider buying the book. You – or the myth-lover in your life – might really like it.