Why I hate summer

Exaggerated as this shocking title may sound, this post is all about explaining and nuancing it. To do so, we’ll talk about literature, memory and enthusiasm for things. All infused by summery vibes. Enjoy.

English edition by Kathelijne Bonne.

The obligation to be happy in summer

There is a kind of uneasiness that governs the summer season. It feels like an inkling in the tummy without really knowing what it’s caused by. Is it because I write less? The falling apart of routines or  the overwhelming heat? It’s hard to write but not impossible. For me writing is a refuge because, in general, I don’t really like summer. Social media is flooded with smiling people who feel obliged to say they’re having great fun. This need for summer to be a special and happy time, makes me feel uneasy. And I wonder:

Why is summer more demanding than other times of the year?

Maybe it’s because we start new things we want to go well. We go on holidays, or we sign up for a course, we visit friends. Something unusual always happens and in those beginnings, there is a component of randomness that expands as the routine falls apart.

In El verano en el que mi madre tenía los ojos verdes [the summer when my mother had green eyes] (Impedimenta, 2019. There is no English version) by Tatiana Tibuleac, a few promising months for the protagonist turn into a period of pain and learning. The backdrop is a French village and a mother and a son.

That contrast between the always idyllic summer landscape makes the tragedy stand out more. In winter, one expects bad things. But in summer and all its splendid beauty, tragedies become excessively tangible. Kinder is the summer of Mia, in Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer Without Men (Sceptre, 2011), a poet recently dumped by her husband after thirty years of marriage. She returns to her childhood village, a refuge full of old secrets to be rediscovered. The bucolic atmosphere contrasts with Mia’s tormented mind.

But undoubtedly, the one who perfectly captures this grotesque contrast between summer and boredom is Truman Capote in his wonderful The complete stories of Truman Capote (Vintage, 2005):

“This part of Alabama is swampy, with mosquitoes that could murder a buffalo, given half a chance, not to mention dangerous flying roaches and a posse of local rats big enough to haul a wagon train from here to Timbuctoo.”

Showing the excitement of summer

Photos of people toasting.  Get-togethers with so-called friends. I observe them with curiosity and I wonder if the need to parade happiness may well cover up less attractive realities. Maybe all is not good at all. Those people seem to tell me: if you like something, the world must know. But sometimes I experience happiness from beautiful things and it gives me pleasure that I don’t have time to talk about it.

Personally, I prefer to write than to talk about what captures me, excites me, moves me.

I don’t understand people who exude enthusiasm. But I do admire them for their ability to get excited about all kinds of things. I’m easily taken in by enthusiasts and I hang on their every word. I want to be like them. But when I do fall in love with something, I’m so into it that I fail to transmit anything. And I wonder why anyone would care.

And this leads me to something else. In general, people don’t listen. We don’t listen to each other.  The best way to resolve that is by not saying anything, which is what I do. Enthusiasts don’t seem to mind this extreme. They radiate enthusiasm to all angles. People have attention deficits. So, I find it more useful just to watch people. Sometimes I don’t realize I’m staring too intensely at someone and my better half tells me: stop staring, they’ll notice.

The way I observe humans, he observes birds of prey.

In general, I don’t care as much about what is being said as, as about how it’s being said. The expressions in the eyes. The tone of voice. The clothes.  The eyes of the person watching someone else speaking. That intrigues me a lot. But what intrigues me even more is the way people say goodbye. Because for me it’s a difficult thing.  I don’t know how to handle the small talk of goodbye. I’m not talking about the big goodbyes, but the small ones when you meet someone for lunch, for example. So, I like to see how others do it to get ideas. Because I’ve been running away from such situations all my life. I escape. I disappear. The «see you later» small talk unsettles me. Is it because I think they won’t let me go? I don’t know. But going back to those interactions between people, apart from watching the eyes of those who listen, I notice the subtle facial expressions that show when people are paying attention, or when they are not. My face probably produces those expressions too. I get easily distracted if a story is not well told. And then, it occurs to me we’re all stuck in our heads. We try to get out, but we can’t. It may not be our fault, but rather a neurological impossibility. We seem to come out of ourselves and be empathetic, but we are still inside our body. We are prisoners.

Sometimes literature gives us tools to escape to another dimension. But it is an illusion: we are still in our mind. It is a perpetual prison of existence.

Memory as narration

Something strange happens that borders on the funny. Even when inhabiting the same space, we experience things differently. And this brings me to memory as subjective narration. Elisabeth Loftus, an American mathematician and psychologist who specializes in studying the minds of people who remember things that did NOT happen, says that memory is like a Wikipedia page that edits all the time and also generates memories that did not happen. I experience this all the time. Do you remember when we went to Miramar in ’86? No, I never went. Yes, you did. And I love it when these discussions take place in the family because then I realize that we are doing literature all the time.

I return to the subject of enthusiasm.

Writing as an escape route

When something really moves me inside, I need to write, not talk. A writer on Twitter was complaining because her family never asked her about her work.  She felt misunderstood. I didn’t understand the problem. I don’t expect anyone to understand my work because I don’t understand it myself. Literature has to do with that which is incomprehensible. True writers are ahead of their time, they should not be «understood».

I am not interested in anyone understanding what I do because it is something so intimate that it cannot be explained and when someone asks me, I’ll try to explain, but all I can say are insubstantial banalities. So, I keep quiet and I realize that I write precisely so that I don’t have to speak.

Writers should never have to present their own books. For me, talking about my work is the closest thing to writing with my left hand: I make a great effort to sketch an idea but I come up with something else.

I speak in scribbles.

My voice produces clumsy scribbles that compose their own music.

Happy summers

I lay out my towel. I brush the sand off my legs. My hair flies in the wind and I’m all sticky from the sunscreen. In the distance, I see a family carrying banal stuff like coolers, flippers, umbrellas. An inflatable flamingo in the distance wants to escape from a restless girl. Beach vacationers always carry ordinary objects. The beach is very vulgar. I also see myself immersed in happy summer vibes. And people keep talking about beautiful places. How little do beautiful places matter to be happy. Why do we insist on looking for beauty as if our life depends on it? Why do we want to talk about it? Sometimes I get carried away by the inertia of beautiful places. It’s nice and you feel privileged, but the question always arises: why?

There is a beautiful cathedral. Look at that cute little town. There is a beautiful temple.

It’s like a drug. Something the eyes need. And the tongue that wants to talk about it.

We spend resources. We get into debt. We pollute. We eat junk food.

People hit the road and cause accidents. They get drunk. They get into fights. When people are in holiday mood and moving around, inconvenient things happen. By this I am not glorifying work, for God’s sake. Far from it. I love to work but it is still something that not everyone enjoys. Maybe we can think of leisure on a smaller scale, less pompous, more in-tune with the needs of our bodies and with our human nature.

Or maybe we can think of new ways to mix and alternate holiday and work without the need for such a drastic and shocking change of state that it is hard to enter and hard to leave. Perhaps then people would not be so traumatized by the transition from one state to another.

I confess that for me, one of the nicest things in one summer (apart from certain family moments that can be experienced at any time of the year) was discovering these verses by Francisco Álvarez Velasco, a book I bought at the beautiful Paradiso bookstore in Gijón.

Holidays and summer

There is something in the silence. The heat. The napping. The lowered blinds. It’s like every day you have to rebuild leisure. To put it together. Because getting out of the routine is to expose yourself to the great unknown, and each new day the same tremendous question is staring you in the face:

What are we going to do today?

That question kills me. What will we do today? It is despair. Unrest. It’s like falling into a very deep, very black hole.  Especially when children are involved. Of course, this problem is clearly one of white people, a luxury problem. Skin colors aside, it is still scary business to figure out what to do every day. It’s like rebuilding the house brick by brick over and over again. Plunging into a void. And all you can hold on to is that amazing routine, that strong unbreakable rope. That’s why I love routines, breaking them can be fun but you can always grab the rope when everything else gets dark. It’s the foundation. It is the skeleton of life. It is hidden in the bowels. It protects the order. It limits us. It forces us to move forward. And it gives us happiness because we find peace in it, as in a placid bed. And we can close our eyes and let ourselves go.

When we rest, it feels like we are floating.

And I want to float all day long.

And I am reminded again of Álvarez Velasco’s verses

Adobes

Were threshed straw

And fresh water and clay

August sun

Today they are a wall and they offer you

Against the July light

Where to rest your back

And the love of the shadow.

(own traslation. No English version available)

When the phone rings

Nobody calls anymore. Very few people do. In general, it’s highly disruptive when the cell phone rings. We manage by texting and when my phone rings, even my kids get upset, they come running, they think something new is going to happen.

It’s SPAM, I say.

I shake a little too. Phone conversations  creep me out. The exceptionality of it makes me anxious.

Having said that, I adopt Schopenauer’s words in Aphorisms on the Art of Living (Alliance, 2009).

«The aim is not so much pleasure as the simple absence of pain and an imperturbable state, at least if the person concerned is sensible. When, in my younger years, there was a knock at my door, I was happy: I thought that what I was waiting for had finally arrived. But with time, my feeling in the face of the same event has ended up resembling a fright: I fear that I will be given bad news.»

(p.297)

This is what I ask of summer and of life. To overcome obstacles and bad news.

Just the little things. Some silence. Conversations between two of us.

Nothing more.