Surprise visit with Sue

Sue and I usually spend week days apart, but I had to nip by her house this afternoon to borrow her 18mm lens for part of the photoshoot I am so excited about, on Saturday. This is the table where I found her, watercolor journals, brushes, pens, and inhaler. Sweet interlude.

I’m enjoying Lauren Groff’s novel, Matrix (2021). It’s set in the 12th-13th Centuries at Shaftesbury Abbey. As soon as I heard about it, I knew I would have to read it because I had a forty-year intention, never fulfilled, to write a novel set in the 13th Century at Shaftesbury and Wiltshire Abbeys. Mine was to have been a female version of Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. Didn’t happen. 

Sylvia Townsend-Warner did write a version of the thing I had in mind. Hers was called The Corner that Held Them and is superb. Groff’s is a little less superb but wonderfully wrought and she finished it and got it published, so my hat’s off to her. It’s very sensual, rich in relationships and loves between women, violating every possible taboo and formal requirement. For example, no quotation marks, odd punctuation. But it works. She writes this of menopausal hot flashes:

“Her body is inhabited, electric with heat, her skin has a roiling fire stuffed into it, the heat is unbearable, she is now running toward the low light off the water. Night in its heaps of darkness spins by. Off with the clogs and the stockings wet from night dew and the mud cools her toes, the water is at her ankles, dragging hard at the hems, at knees at shame at belly so cool at chest and the arms, the wet wool pulling her body down. The frogs hush in the disturbance. Only her head is aflame, water lapping through the cloth at the chin. A body like a dog’s in the dark water.”