On a beach in Martinique - Grande Anse d’Arlet - we heard the word “Tortue!", "Tortue!” from time to time in excited tones as children came back from a swim and reported to their parents that they had seen a sea turtle.
It created a sense of anticipation, of being on the fringes of delight (with a hint of FOMO). There were turtles somewhere nearby, but well, what are the chances of seeing one, and perhaps it’s fine not to, and just to hear the awe in the air...
Until CMH, still very close to the shoreline, said “look!” and for the next twenty minutes or so he, JNH and I floated a few meters above and behind a sea turtle as she (or he?) went about her way, grazing food off the sea-bed and swimming calmly, sometimes coming up for air when we would surface too and watch her reptilian head rise above the water for a second or two. As we followed I felt astonishment at the details - her ringed eyes, quilted skin and shell, the folds in her neck. And also a closeness, our human movements really not that different from hers.
Various factors had contributed to us being in Martinique this August, an unforgettable break with us four and Dad. There was C’s suggestion of it in May, and me taking it up given that earlier in the year I’d read Martiniquais writer Eduard Glissant’s Traité du Tout-Monde / Treatise of the Whole-World.
It has been a year of mind-opening (mind-guiding) reading, with the joy of each book's interpretation of the world functioning individually as well as in conversation with the others. I had come across some of Glissant’s writing and thought that perhaps I could find a copy of Traité du Tout-Monde at Albertine on Fifth Avenue, one of those loose-yourself wooden-shelved bookshops with the occasional nook for reading, and with a statue of Le Petit Prince nearby.
Then in Le Bastion des Larmes, the gay narrator reckons with his past on a visit back from Paris to his childhood town of Salé in Morocco (just over the Bou Regreg river from Rabat) to help his sisters organize his mother’s affairs after her death, and to sell the last part of their home. Physical places build the book's narrative, containers of deeply personal experience and memory, both traumatic and delightful. A hamman, the house, the streets, the Bastion des Larmes itself.
At the beginning of the Summer, we drove up to Lake Placid. (It was a jump in the deep-end driving-wise as neither C nor I have driven in the past 18 years or so, having had little need to in the city). C has bad memories of the bicentennial of the United States when he was a small child in NYC. He wanted to be somewhere different for the 250th, and also for the kids to have a good memory of this anniversary. In particular, he wanted to visit John Brown’s farmhouse, so that’s what we did on the first morning there.
At some point on the 4th itself I browsed in the bookshop on Main Street while the boys were in a nearby arcade. I picked up The Bear by Andrew Krivak (apt for where we were), and Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls (“work related?” asked Dad, when I was reading it in Martinique - and that’s not at all the case, but just shows how I gravitate to all things cities and buildings. C had said, “I guess you chose it because of the title").
Like Glissant, Murakami also engages in boundary-blurring in The City and Its Uncertain Walls, though rather than blurring the boundaries of real places his borders are between places real and imagined, and even more so, between our real and imagined selves, our conscience and sub-conscience.
In S.L Huang’s brilliant science fiction Language of Liars, which I read next, the boundaries in question are between cultures (across galaxies, and time), and the motivation for bridging them - in this case literally involving “jumping” from a culture to another - can be life-affirming or life-obliterating.
And now, back in NYC, I’m halfway through The Bear. It brings the reader into an almost post-human future inhabited by a girl and her father in the wilderness, and then just the girl, who journeys with the bear as her companion. Here again I’m experiencing, this time through the page rather than in the ocean, the sensation of being up close to an animal that humans are not used to being close to. Realizing that perhaps we have more in common than we think, what stands in the way is an openness to understand.
When the girl asks the bear why he can talk:
“The bear shifted and sighed and was quiet for a time. When he spoke finally, he said that long ago all the animals knew how to make the sounds the girl and her father used between them. But it was the others like her who stopped listening, and so the skill was lost. As for the bear, he learned it from his mother, who learned it from her mother. Not all animals had the range of voice that could be heard, he said, but all living things spoke, and perhaps the real question was how she could understand him.”
