Jarret Middleton
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading and why. One Note 012: Jarret Middleton, Paul Bowles, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Jarret Middleton.
Both generic literature and wafey experiments leave me at an impasse. Namely, that language and thought play more of a direct role in an experience of life, and then, at the same time, that life is mere sequence and brute consequence, just more visceral and real than either textual extreme tends to faithfully represent or allow. To this fatigue, Paul Bowles is always my health. A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard takes on the simple direction of distinctly Moroccan café chatter or cautionary tales. Here there is far less of the Westerner’s lament than what appears in The Sheltering Sky. These stories take on Islamic and Eastern fable to illuminate sets of lively commoners who are also sexist, abusive, addicted, and who prove steadfastly incapable of making a single moral decision. He calmly documents the life of blind emotional reaction, trusting that the portrait is grotesque enough to warrant no additional heavy-handed techniques. The joy of escaping the African heat, of women, money, evading the police, and wasting long hours smoking kif, quickly heightens to the frenzy and violence that characterizes a life that is miniscule in its awareness of itself. “’I must kill him,’ he thought. ‘He sold my ring. Now I must go and kill him.’ Instead, he took off his clothes and bathed in the sea, and when he had finished, he lay in the sun on the sand all day and slept.” While self-consciousness is painful, purposelessness is a desert far worse than death. As quickly as the conflicts flare, they taper into insane normalcy, all lessons forgotten. “’It’s finished. They’ve forgotten,’ he said. ‘Good,’ she replied.” They say the desert has no memory. Bowles tempers us with the truth that, since we are incapable of becoming better people, the best we can do with the world and our experience of it is to forget it the second after it occurs. At least then we might have a slim chance at staying interested in whatever comes next.
Jarret Middleton is the author of An Dantomine Eerly and other fiction. He is the editor of Dark Coast Press, a literary publisher in Seattle. More information visit darkcoastpress.com and jarretmiddleton.com.
