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When an idea begins to inflate itself she will become purposeful, but until then she will just read.
This is the silence of no phone and no computer, which are both switched off and kept well away from her desk so they don’t frizz her thinking so early in the morning.
For basic sense you can read each of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in a minute or two. For a little more chewiness and analysis, five or six minutes. The trouble is keeping them apart. Each one seems to annul the previous one: no longer that, but this. They dissolve into a mass of little qualifications and turns and particularities and withholdings and accusations and escapes.
He wrote them over many years, probably, and here she is trying to rustle up a theory in two days and hook it convincingly on.
Don’t keep your pen in your hand, just pick it up when you really need, or else your pen will get ahead of your thoughts.
Look away from the text and out the window if you have to, try and pause your mind on the one thing. Focus on the experience of you reading this text now. But always remind yourself, it was written, some time, by someone.
It is so still and gradual, this way of getting light. This is why there is the phrase painfully slow, because that is how it feels. Hard to convince herself that even this dark blue light is from the sun: with a capital S: the blazing tremendous Sun.
By lunchtime she will be getting too blurry for work. Having expended her mind’s energies for five or six hours she will address herself to the body: yoga, then meditation, then a long walk. To twist the dial marked Body and the dial marked Mind in opposite directions until they find each other again.
And every day she has to catch and deal with little wisps of resistance: but broadly, there it is, the routine is well established, it gathers and directs all her various strengths and susceptibilities.
Sometimes comes a random burst of love for parts of her body: her feet, their thick-skinned soles and neat toes, or the delicacy and strength of her hands, or something stranger like her teeth. Then she finds the meditation space as a place of strangeness, nothing really happening, but it morphs and shades itself, and brightens again, in its own mysterious geometry. Also sometimes an instantaneous sense, of a film, a person, a memory, which she’d never be able to describe. Her brain can trick her into thinking something is pictorial until the moment she opens her mouth to talk about it: like
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Perhaps the only reasonable part of the whole thing had been months earlier, during the exams themselves, again and again asking her brain for the right word, the right quotation, and it came willingly to her: and she thought, this is an improvement. And after each exam she spent a few minutes sitting quietly in her room and decided that, on the whole, it had gone well.
If you recognised your own disgrace and freshened your soul with tears, you would pass.
One day perhaps she will be someone about whom people say, she’s read everything. They’ll ask her if she has read a particular text and she will simply reply Yes, with no drama, just an understated massive erudition, like suddenly the ocean floor opens up and the sheer vastness of her reading and knowledge comes into view, dark blue and receding into further darkness.
But then – he is such a presence, such an other person, a thing she seems not to be good at coping with, the sheer massiveness of a whole other human. If he comes to visit everything will be different, all this, this chilled bright space in her head – she turns her head from side to side, mouth open feeling the brilliance of it – all this will be squashed out for a few days, covered instead with a dark blanket which is his presence.
Whereas this genteel modern edition gives each one its own spread: notes on the left and the sonnet on the right, suspended in white space like a silent, double-glazed room. Poems that are in the world, and poems that aren’t.
But after all this is not exactly about the Sonnets. Suspects herself somewhat of laziness. Poems are there to be read, not combed through for evidence: a mass of hair to be brushed into a deep shine, not to have nits brought out of it.
But there is so little time here, an undergraduate degree is so hyperactive and glancing. She has three days total to research and write her whole Sonnets essay. Plenty of topics are therefore outside the penumbra of the possible. She cannot write about the Sonnets’ connections to other sonnet sequences, to other Shakespeare plays, to historical context. Or real-life candidates for the Young Man or the Dark Lady, or the authority for printing, or the vagaries of the sequencing. She needs something sharp, like a dagger: to slip in and quickly out again.
A theory of critical reading might begin: Know your texts for decades. Recite many of them to yourself so often that they seem your own speech. Type them out, teach them, annotate them. A critical ‘reading’ is the end product of an internalisation so complete that the word reading is not the right word for what happens when a text is on your mind. The text is part of what has made you who you are.
She reads in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick that: for a man to undergo even a humiliating change in the course of a relationship with another man still feels like preserving or participating in a sum of male power, while for a man to undergo any change in the course of a relationship with a woman feels like a radical degeneration of substance.
If she can write this essay she will be like a small snail successfully climbing a blade of grass. She will see clearly perhaps twelve or fifteen more blades of grass around her, and beyond that an undifferentiated mass of green, and above her the summery darkness which she vaguely understands to be trees. Climbing other blades of grass on other days she will become familiar with how each differs in angle, breadth, hue, curvature. They will vary so extremely as to barely belong in the same category, or else the categories will proliferate to the point of uselessness. This then is scholarship.
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Be damned the series of historical moves which created reading as a stationary activity. She wants to be walking all day.
She notices: no smiles of actual amusement. The Sonnets are not funny, when the plays are so often oh my god hilarious. Could that be an essay. She writes it down. Compared to the ravenous, jeering crowd of the theatre: the sonnet’s narrow room, where one can hole up and take oneself extremely seriously.
That is: look at me, look at what I have meticulously noticed, see how piercingly I catalogue you.
This is bad now, about the Sonnets. She still has nothing. She will have to push her routine even further back, work far into the afternoon, trawl ever more desperately for ideas. Could she, she flickers a smile, could she provocatively write an essay about her own failure to write an essay. Would the tutorial eyebrows raise.
He would read the Sonnets intensely for a week, perhaps two, and if he still had no ideas by then would be content with the intimacy his reading had afforded, he would trust it to reveal itself over time and attach itself to new things.
The phrase that best describes him, (one she tries not to snuggle into,) is private scholarship. Study undertaken for its own sake, with no deadlines, no projected outcomes. Its motives, movements, machinery, all are inward and evolving. Following a butterfly across a field, accompanying its intensive dithering, with no net.
Sometimes she thinks, she could be a poet. She has never actually written a poem but that’s unimportant, she knows the essence of the poems she would write: small, opaque, complex. About nothing in particular. Producing not so much a meaning as an effect. Like a music of words. Well. Perhaps not a coincidence she has never written one.
She has worked: here is the proof: a sheaf of poems annotated in her own narrow writing. She has had many small thoughts and written them down, they do not form an argument but there is at least a quantity of them, they have accumulated like seeds.
The first thing is to notice the wreckage of all the thoughts she has had today. Here they are in a clump, some threatening to become urgent. She tries to see them with a liquid calm interest, not to muscle them out. Here they are. They quail under her gaze, refusing to come in to be gently smiled at, and squirm away.
And as she nears the college gate, another thought: is not the cat’s cradle the very image of the Sonnets? A single loop of string arranged and rearranged, crisscrossing over itself in self-references, self-shaping. The poet with his four hands. And her, likewise a fantasist, with hers.
