Hi, Friends.
I promised you back in October, or I promised myself at least, that I’d try to go light on text and keep it more visual in this newsletter. Then I broke my promise and started writing you philosophical essays, mercifully skipping the one for March/April, so here we are in May.
What I’m going to do for the next 12/13 months is each month send you an illustration for each chapter of Fugue, which is now in the re-write phase. I’ll put some preamble for context and an excerpt from the working draft with each illustration so hopefully it’ll all make sense to you.
Here’s the one for Chapter 1.
Rhea goes home to her parents in Tennessee. Her boyfriend pulled out a blade in a soundproof practice room and nobody talks about what happened after that. This is how they try to negate the painful thing. They do it with love and Rhea copes by reading books. But she’s stuck on this notion of “gaining” clarity, when clarity is not something to be gained, or acquired intellectually.
Rhea floats on a float on her parents’ pool. It’s a big rainbow-colored float and it takes on the color of the sky and the water because it’s see-through and the sky is reflected in the water. The sky is blue and the water is blue and the sky and the water blend into each other. There are clouds in the water and Rhea floats on the clouds. Her legs are flopped over the sides of the float so her legs are in the sky underwater. She lies back and holds up a book to block the sun. The book is Self-Reliance and it blocks that ninety-three-million-miles-away flaming ball, ninety-three million miles away and still burning her skin. A Ralph Waldo Emerson solar eclipse. The words of Self-Reliance are legible in shadow and sunrays shoot out from them like the words were the source of illumination. But even Rhea knows you can’t learn self-reliance from a book; self-reliance is a ninety-three-million-miles-away concept, inert in her hands. She can hear some rustling down in the bushes in the yard surrounding the pool and thinks, “Shit, must be the pool guy. He’ll come drag his net along the perimeter and see me lying here, see my body or worse, my desperation.” Rhea lowers Self-Reliance down onto her breastbone where a puddle doesn’t form, and sunrays hit her face. She thinks, “Fuck this. Fuck reading about the real thing and not having the real thing. This is chlorine. It’s pool water imitating fresh water.” Sunrays beat down on her and she lifts herself upright, her whole lower body submerged now. Holding the book in one hand, she paddles awkwardly with her legs and the other hand to the side of the pool. She puts Self-Reliance face down on the hot terracotta tiles of the patio the pool is carved out of, so its pages are splayed out and she won’t lose her place. Actually she puts it down on the other title she’s got poolside, the one she’s ashamed of because it came from the self-help section of the bookstore and calls her out as a carrier of the disease referenced in its title: The Disease to Please. A soft breeze flutters the pages of Self-Reliance. Tiny wave crests break and water laps the side of the pool. Rhea shoves off the side of the pool, her toes scraping gravelly cement. She turns over onto her stomach, sunrays on her back, then she puts one hand on top of the other and her forehead on top of her hands. She closes her eyes and she floats. She floats and drifts and drifts and floats until her float bumps up against the side of the pool and she shoves off it, scraping her toes. This goes on for a while, her doing nothing much and letting everything happen. Soft breeze, gravelly cement. No pool guy. Then she opens her eyes and the surface of the pool is a diamond, blinding-bright with liquid facets changing from moment to moment and before she can touch them.
Sensitive and evocative. Look forward to the next peek preview.