Anne Michaels - Infinite Gradation

My very special thanks to Gareth Evans, Jess Chandler, Barry and Michael Callaghan. All thanks to Rebecca and Evan, always. Thanks to frieze magazine for commissioning an article on Eva Hesse, and to Exile Editions for commissioning articles on Claire Wilks, portions of which are included here. The poem You Meet the Gaze of a Flower is from the collection All We Saw (McClelland & Stewart, 2017). Thanks to David Sereda, Paul Gordon, and Janis Freedman Bellow. And may these pages honour in memoriam Harvey Bernard Freedman.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT BY GARETH EVANS: TOWARDS INFINITE GRADATION AND THE NECESSARY WORD you looked at the sea. For weeks,the most conscious act of looking.If you could take in that unendingmovement, that light, the momentwater is displaced by water. You knewthere was an answer there From here, high above the beach, it becomes luminously evident how the world works at scale. How its fractal beauty multiplies the expressive quality of a landscape, this coastline, from the intricacies of a tidal pool, out through the surf-hollowed curve of a cove, into an estuarys mouth, the reach of a bay and finally the wide-open arms of a peninsulas long embrace with the waters. And how those waters compel, beyond the means of words to hold; with their full fathom fluency, their muscular currencies, their myriad of wave formations and the murmuring dialogue with lunar air that lifts them into being; and with the spectrum-spanning colours of their skin, their blue/green/grey/black ceaseless salt variety, in that infinite gradation. It is essential to remind ourselves that we come first, central and last to the work of Anne Michaels as a reader, that participant most honoured in her work, the person for whom space, like the setting for a stranger at the evening table, must always be made.

And there are few writers who welcome the reader in like Anne Michaels, who seek to bring the distances (of whatever kind) closer, with words as the transport, the nomadic home, by which one remains humane and grounded in the passage. Who can forget their first encounter with Fugitive Pieces, her astonishing prose poem of resistance and resilience and such enduring love; of history as fiction rendered into psalm. And equally overwhelming to remember she was writing this into its reception in her twenties and early thirties, coupling her lyric brilliance to the philosophical and emotional urgency of historical witness. Years in the finding and forming nights and days and nights How she sowed the words into the open field of the page, harvesting them a decade later. How she distilled expression into its literal spirit. Poetry, novel, a dialogue; the following two decades saw her Skin Divers, the singular engagement with engagement that is Correspondences and now All We Saw. She entered The WinterVault; she spoke about all the love and loss of those described distances with the late, great, oh so missed John Berger in Railtracks . But this is not to suggest a frequency.

The books are years in the writing, in the living; in the finding of their truth out of the long dark of not knowing. In wait. As readers, we wait also; the stakes in no way comparable; but, if we are attentive readers, perhaps we could claim to wait as allies; out on the border, in the snow, among the winter trees, waiting to help her cross from the unwritten into warmer welcome, into common sisterhood with the grace of something necessary so beautifully and truthfully expressed. So it is that Infinite Gradation arrived. Out of an unshaped enquiry across the reaches of the internet for speeches, discussion, occasional writings; out of listening to bookstore conversation, radio interviews, filmed festival dispatches and realising that, in these apparently momentary, even fleeting appearances, there was/is the profound working through of the what, why, how to write and live. And so, to asking Anne if she would like to gather these texts, some intended as such, others made as it were after the event, into a collection.

She, ever generous, agreed at once; but of course would never simply sequence such a diffuse series of sources. You hold now the results of her concentration, of her working and reworking, impelled by the poetic to make every word count, driven by narrative to find her words singing alongside the experience of being. Rain now is falling over the sea. The sky runs water-colour streaming to the furthest horizon. The hard borders between land and not, between field and foam, tide and tree dissolve. Ends and beginnings also, and the infinite gradation of all that lies between.

Mevagissey, Cornwall Anne Michaels is a novelist and a poet. Her books have been translated into more than forty-five languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award and the Lannan Award for Fiction. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film. She is Torontos Poet Laureate. Other books by Anne Michaels Poetry The Weight of OrangesMiners PondSkin DiversPoemsCorrespondencesAll We Saw Fiction Fugitive PiecesThe Winter Vault Theatre Railtracks ( with John Berger) For Children The Adventures of Miss Petitfour The stillness between silence and muteness. The last weeks and hours before the imminent death of one we love a time of desire so overpowering it is rendered chaste.

The moment desire is forcibly renamed grief. The precise space between those two words. It was the finest stone you had ever worked, bitumen black, fine as the finest Ashford, black as earth, black as space. And when you polished it, the glow rose from within like a soul from a body, like the shine on a black whale breaching the sea. In your hands the stone became glass, it became water, a dark pool you could step into and disappear. And when it was finished, each corner sharp as a fold, and lowered into place amid the trees, the leaves swam in that black water, tossed and travelled across the stone, where they remain forever, even when theres no visible shadow, the way the stars stay in the sky when morning comes.

You came so often to see the sky in that stone and sat so still beside that black door that I thought you were a mourner. I did not know you had set aside a piece for yourself to lie under when the time came, though I saw your thoughts slip into that blackness and watched as it closed behind them. When my mother died and there was no fare to bring me home to see her buried, I walked through the great cemetery and found the grandest stone to sit beside, to be with her. My mother loved a bit of grandeur and I knew shed find me there. But instead, you came and, one day, in the averting of my eyes from an old man whose gaze kept reaching for mine, and in that moment of you lifting your gaze from the stone in that movement of eyes among the three of us my life became no longer my own. Fiction sets a broken bone in the hope that it will mend straight.

It is a plea, a prayer, and because language itself is hope the autonomic hope of a voice calling out even in despair, even involuntarily fiction seeks the error in a complex mechanism, seeks to reset the human flaw. Fiction recreates what never happened. By recreating that potential, it addresses both past and future. It does not seek forgiveness, it seeks to understand. It does not dare to hope, yet it is hope distilled. It is both solute and solvent, resignation and conspiracy.

Buried within the history of what did not happen is the possibility of redemption at the core of failure. That redemption does not lie in words or in the writer, but in the reader. What words can we have for death? What words restrained or spare enough for its totality? To render language chaste. What language can we have for the unknowable? What words for a mystery distinct from thought? We imagine the end, but not the beginning. The workshop was a single room, chill darkness saturated with wood smoke, and marble dust white, finer than sand, a kind of moonlight. You spent your days slicing stone, and brought me back with you at night.