Essential Material
Kimberly Campanello | Tolka Issue Five, August 2024
K. arrives at the cottage first. It is still covered in red, white and blue bunting a month after the jubilee, as are the rows of cottages and the detached houses in the village, the community centre with the yoga class, the café with decent coffee, the shop selling basics including newspapers and artisan local products, and the three pubs triangulating the square – one standard fare, one gastro, one wood-fired pizza. These amenities had been advertised in the house’s listing, which pinpointed their distance from the doorstep in fractions of a mile. The local walks in the famous landscape were also listed, including one that takes you up to a twelfth-century shrine to the Virgin Mary that had been restored and reopened to pilgrims in 1961 after centuries of ruin. This and other walks are circular or could be made that way using the maps held in the cottage. These were all reasons for the two poets to choose this village for their week of writing.
It is their fourth time. Every six months or so, K. and another poet called A. meet in a carefully chosen rented spot to write. They sit and write in separate rooms, often in bed because holiday rentals tend to lack desks. They take separate walks. They eat separate breakfasts and lunches, coming together in the evening for dinners that they cook themselves or eat in a pub or restaurant. These dinners require a bottle or two of wine, which they open at what they call wine o’clock, a time that isn’t fixed but is adjusted to their pace of work as the day winds down. On the last evening they go out for a self-congratulatory steak dinner and finish it off with a whiskey.
K. opens all the windows and the front and back doors to allow the air to flow. The hottest day on record is supposed to be the next day, and this area is predicted to be the epicentre for the whole island. She unpacks her clothes and books while she waits for A. to arrive. She takes meats and cheeses and milk from the cooler. She slides the container of gazpacho into the fridge. She had made it herself using a recipe she learnt in Andalusia ten years before while on an artist’s residency. That residency had ended suddenly with a wildfire and an evacuation from the villa where all the artists were housed. K. and a painter, a printmaker, a sculptor, a photographer and another poet were driven in any vehicle that could be found down to the beach where all the panicked townspeople and tourists assembled.
Helicopters carrying butts of water flew overhead and dumped them onto the fields. It was overly hot. There was a drought again, like every summer now.The helicopters had been organised by the regional government when all this had become commonplace.This time, herds of goats and horses were wiped out and the wild rabbit population was endangered. Villas were damaged and abandoned cars exploded when the flames reached their tanks.The agricultural sites in the desert, with their plasticated hot-house vegetables tended by unseen migrant workers, were spared. The archaeology in the hills was also undamaged, including the cave that houses prehistoric paintings. One of them is of a figure holding a rainbow or the horizon of the earth between outstretched arms. He is called the ‘Indalo Man’, though he has no hair, penis or distinguishing features aside from that meaningful arc between what seem to be his hands.
The artists were housed in a hotel in a nearby village until they could return to their home countries on hastily booked flights. The other poet on the residency, another American, wanted to go back for her notebooks but was not allowed. The fire was lurking on the edges of the villa’s lands and could flare up at any time. The residency staff told the poet that they would post the notebooks to her once they themselves got access to the buildings, but of course this could only be so if the notebooks had survived. The other poet waited over a week until she could go collect them herself. She later wrote a poem about the notebooks and the fire. K. hadn’t lost any material. She later referred to the exploding cars in a poem. The painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer haven’t used any of it – the fire, the townspeople, the tourists, the migrant workers, the animals, the archaeology, the figure in the cave, or even themselves – as material in their work. They eventually allowed the residency to ship them the small number of works that were complete and still intact after the fire. All work-in-progress that had not been destroyed was let go.
When A. arrives, they have the wine and gazpacho and meats and put ice cubes on their wrists to cool down.They talk about what has happened in their lives since the last time, notable situations and incidents at work, in their families, in their own heads, folding in recent politics and experiences of consuming art and literature throughout. They work through this material, turning it over, moving on to the next topic, digging in for longer when the stakes are raised by subjects like illness or death or anything to do with a child. They note abiding themes within and across their own and each other’s experiences. They speculate on how these themes are best dealt with, and whether in some cases they are meant to be endured or let rumble along in the background. They aren’t sure whether the immediate depth of these conversations signifies their respective maturity or whether they are discharging a flood of material in order to silently summon whatever is left unsaid, and is therefore essential, in their writing session the next day.
K. often ponders this tension between the self and the made thing. She tells her poetry students that the best favour they can do for the so-called confessional poets is to read their work closely and put their biography aside. She says this is especially true of the female poets who sieved the essential material of their lives and folded it into their work. Reading the poem, the made thing, on its own, for what it does with language, seems the least we can do. K. knows this is not a unique insight, no more unique than the one she is hunting for now but can’t quite locate as she is so new to the state that brings about the question, the question of the ill self and its presence in relation to past, future and otherwise possible versions. Specifically, she wonders about her self and the medication she will soon be taking for her incurable degenerative neurological condition, the disease that causes mass neuron die-off and eventual shutdown of various bodily processes, including and especially the most essential and automatic – turning over in bed, getting out of a chair, walking, sweating in response to a change in temperature and lifting one’s eyes from the ground to meet a gaze.
The medication she is beginning to admit she will have to start soon can bring about changes, causing compulsive behaviours like excessive gambling and shopping, sexually inappropriate speech and activity, and aggression. Apparently, the people experiencing these extreme shifts in their selves can’t even tell they are happening. Potential shifts in her future medicated self flag for K. the distance between her current ill self and otherwise possible versions. Her brain needs the medication to achieve what the doctors call ‘the desired effect’, which, they say, is entirely defined by K. and not them. She wonders about her brain and its self, which are always shifting. She is unable to pin them down in order to compare them to what might be, or what might have been. It may be ‘her’ desired effect, but who is ‘she’ and how is her desire determined in a given moment?
The next morning K. and A. rise early in the airless cottage. It is the hottest day on record. K. closes the windows and draws the blinds to keep out the sun and heat. They begin by trying to write in their bedrooms as normal. Soon they are both downstairs on the floor alongside each other, typing on their laptops at pace. They share an urge to be low to the ground, close to the damp earth under the cottage’s stone floors that are now covered in plush grey carpet. A.’s reflection shines back at K. from the oven door. Their bare legs stick to the floor. K. doesn’t seem to be sweating any more or less than A. This seems like a victory.
At the end of the day, they sit outside the gastropub and drink pints of beer and eat unsuitably heavy meals. They check their phones and find messages from family and friends around the world, each making sure that K. and A. have survived and are staying hydrated. Someone K. knows has gone into hospital for the third time in a month. A sudden incurable illness is taking her down. Her family is all around her now to help her die, which is like helping someone be born and begin living.The day’s messages in the group chat describe the intensity of this process, the helping her to get up and out of bed, the comforting fabrics brought from home, the arguing with staff and winning a delay to catheter insertion to let her sleep. K. thinks about an individual dying in the next few weeks or days, which is what is being faced. She thinks about a complete collection of individuals and the planet’s ecosystems dying over years, which is what is being met but not faced.
There is a party atmosphere at the pub. The oyster starter is sold out, as is one of the craft beers. The climate of everyone’s usual vacation spots surrounds them here in the moors and they are giddy. The sense of doom is not there the way it ought to be. K. and A. feel it and yet their own bodies luxuriate in the heat and its attendant evocations of past selves, including the self who buys special clothes for hot countries, speaks the language and hopes to blend in and truly feel that a life in the sun is one’s own. A wildfire is on the horizon of this life, but helicopters carrying butts of water are nearby. All work-in-progress not destroyed can be let go.
That evening they decide to go back to the cottage and watch a film that had made an impact on them as teenagers. They want to see what viewing it now might stir up for their thinking and writing.They log in to the streaming service and purchase the film set during the Second World War in Europe and colonial north Africa. After a series of major events, both global and personal, a woman called K. is injured and can’t walk. She dies in a cave with prehistoric paintings of swimmers lining its walls. She copies the paintings into her diary until her flashlight and candles run out and she drifts away in total darkness. After the film, K. and A. talk about the portrayal of empire and colonialism in cinema. They refer to various films spanning decades. A few of the films are in French, which they both learnt as teenagers growing up in America and Ireland.
A year or so before her time with A., K. had bumped into the film’s lead actor, the one who plays the lover of the woman in the cave. One afternoon the actor appeared on the street outside one of the antiquarian bookshops in the town where K. lives. The actor struck her as someone she knows from somewhere. She slowed and said hello. The actor stopped and stared. When K. shared this story in a group chat, her friends came back with links to tabloid articles giving accounts of the actor’s hypersexualised ways. K. should not have been surprised. Now K. wonders what might have happened if she had been on the compulsive behaviour-inducing drug when she saw the actor. She wonders to what extent the actor’s behaviours fall into a category beyond his control, or if they are an enduring part of him, or if they are the materials from which he has made himself, and if they are beyond his awareness, whether compulsive or essential. Apparently, the actor was in her town to perform a stage show he made based on a key work by a famous poet.
It is slightly cooler the next morning, so K. leaves early to walk to the shrine of the Virgin Mary and light a candle for the woman who is dying. K.’s steps are hard to coordinate, and speed is impossible to maintain. She has the sensation of being pulled backwards with each step. Her toes painfully claw into the ground because her brain doesn’t know where her body is. Walking is now the most difficult thing she must do on a given day. As she nears the shrine, she notices that she is dragging herself alongside the Stations of the Cross. Each station has been carved in wood atop a stake, which has been pounded into the ground. K. passes Jesus falling for the first time. She stops to wipe sweat from her own face when Veronica takes out her cloth for his. He falls twice more, but K. keeps going.
It is cool and quiet inside the stone chapel. No one else is there. K. sits down in a pew and reads the shrine’s history booklet. She wipes more sweat from her face and neck. The booklet says it is possible that the martyr from the town where K. lives, the one who was pressed to death when pregnant for harbouring priests, was buried here. Excavations revealed two appropriately dated and aged skeletons buried under the chapel floor, but their sex is disputed by experts. A rose from a vase of flowers beside the altar has dropped petals all over the stone floor. K. lights a candle. She collects the petals and spreads them at Mary’s feet. She uses the hand that shakes.
K. walks back to the cottage and brings A. an artisan ice cream from the local shop. It is the last day. They spend it expanding what they have started making here despite illness, death and the climate. That night in the gastropub they eat their steak dinners. As they cut into their fillets, the family of a leadership candidate for prime minister walks in and takes a seat by the window. K. and A. realise that this village is in his constituency. At the end of the evening they watch the candidate’s wife, a billionaire, pull aside a member of staff and talk down the bill based on what she says they usually pay for split dishes. The server nods and agrees to the alteration. A fresh bill is produced from the computer.
A few months later, that candidate is prime minister. K. listens to a podcast about the song that begins with the line about not believing in an interventionist god. The podcast brings together several people to talk about what the song means to them. Some say they want there to be such a god despite not believing it to be possible. Others understand that the reference in the context of the rest of the song is meant to convey the heights and depths of love the songwriter has for the song’s ‘you’.
An interventionist god could save the dying woman and heal K. and remake the earth itself. Instead, we have our made things, timeless like the cave we are born into that contains a figure holding the horizon of our whole planet between outstretched arms, timeless like the cave we die into in darkness, surrounded by a sea of fellow swimmers. In this made thing, K. can become ‘I’, a self that is timeless, but not essential. This made thing allows me to say to you, the beautiful woman who has died, You are missed. This made thing says we must make, regardless of the material, despite ourselves. This made thing says we must intervene for what is essential.
Kimberly Campanello is best known for MOTHERBABYHOME, a 796-page visual poetry-object and reader’s edition book, which will be on display at MoLI until September 2024, and at the Arnolfini Gallery in October to accompany a screening of the film Máthair by artist Keira Greene. Her prose from the perspective of the poet K has appeared recently in The Pig's Back, Somesuch Stories and Issue Seven of Tolka.
‘Essential Material’ was first published in Issue Five of Tolka (May 2023). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
