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ON MAKING MULCH BY EMMA YEARWOOD
Published in SICK issue 6, 2024
Emma Yearwood is a librarian and writer living on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land in Melbourne, Australia. Her writing has been published in Island, Aniko Press, The Suburban Review, and other places.
Lydia Davis writes that a piece of writing made from fragments is like a ruin or something half-built; the reader is the builder.1 The writer, something else.
A creative writing tutor I respect deeply says that she used to think of fragmented writing as a radical thing full of possibility, but now all she sees is laziness, a lack of commitment to putting the work in, a complete cop-out.
My mother cannot remember, or perhaps it is that she cannot pronounce my illness, myalgic encephalomyelitis, so instead she just leaves a gap and asks, how are you?
Is it my illness or do I suffer from it? Have I gathered it up around me like a prickly blanket or has it been laid upon me?
Alice Hattrick wonders: “Who has not thought: I have brought this on myself.”2
Shame and embarrassment—a sense of failure—are circular emotions, spiraling in and then out and then in, always coming back to the same sore place. They are not like joy or contentment, which are linear, never returning in quite the same way.
I tell myself that fragments are a process of sedimentation. Fragments are a collage technique to communicate the incessant ambiguity of life; each layer sits upon another imperfectly, rough edges sticking out. I tell myself that I prefer clippings, incongruent ideas, and hybrid forms not because of some lack within me but because they point towards expressing ineffable ways of being.
I suffer from brain fog intermittently. My fog. I cannot hold what I want to say in my mind so it remains partial, blurred, obscured, out of reach. Yet I’ve always found the phenomenon of weather fog to be clarifying, how when a cool mist descends upon you, the little that you can see takes on a crystalline and holy focus.
It is hard for me to concentrate for long periods of time so I like to read short books with short paragraphs made up of short sentences. Only blank space to get lost in.
I do not want to write about illness when I already have to live it. I would rather imagine myself elsewhere.
Maria Gainza writes, “I spend the majority of the time in bed—it’s my own personal raft. I drift along on a sea of papers, a long way out from shore.”3 For me it is a sailing couch and the sea is the padding of time needed for rest, all the blue in-between.
Today is a lost day, a listless day, a lust day.
There is something to be said for constraints—you can do this but not that, or that but not this. In George Perec’s La Disposition (A Void), the letter e is absent throughout the whole novel.4 Joe Brainard’s I remember is structured around the repeated “I remember… I remember… I remember…”5 Sheila Heti’s diary experiments consist of sentences from her journals which are placed in an Excel spreadsheet and then alphabetised, so that “She looked exhausted and sad” is next to “She looked like Reese Witherspoon.”6 Kathryn Scanlan’s August-9 Fog is made up of sentences from an 86-year-old stranger’s diary found at an estate auction in Illinois.7 An incessant ordinary dailiness made strange and ethereal by blank space.
My friend’s long-absent father writes her meandering emails in which the only punctuation mark he uses is the ellipsis…no questions…no endings…no short pauses…only trailings off…he is often sick…often well…often feeling something spiritual…often looking at a nice bird…sometimes my friend receives emails from women that her father has lived with for a time and then left abruptly…for short periods he can be very charming…but of course charm is difficult to sustain…
Having to work out how to think again. Having always associated movement with thought. Thought as a landscape, writing as an act of mapping. The structure of an essay like the structure of a walk. Thought without movement becomes so soupy, so wishy-washy. What might you scoop out?
I move slowly. I rest before going out, and then I rest upon returning. A family wedding = two days lying down to prepare + ⚡️⚡️⚡️ + two days lying down to recover. Everything becomes a calculation, a careful calibration, and yet it is still so prone to error. So I cancel and say no, not that and not that either, and I spend a lot of time alone.
I watch so much crime TV, comforted by mysteries that can be solved. Is it the sad-eyed father or is it the faulty sodium-ion cellular pathway? Is it the helpful teacher or is it the rogue T-cells? Is it the beautiful neighbour or is it psychological?
I keep getting requests to participate in a trial for krill supplements by a reputable research organisation. I keep getting told how well I look. I keep getting told to stress less. I keep getting told I’m very sensitive.
A feeling that I covet: the freshness of a dewy morning but in your body and your mind. Ready and clear and calm and crisp. Or the kind of exhaustion that comes from physicality—that is not nebulous muscle aches, not a post-cyclone flattening, not post-exertional malaise—but one that is explainable and predictable, and easily recoverable from. Stemming from healthy, vigorous activity that is not restricted by fear that it will backfire the next day or the day after, when you’ve allowed yourself to think, am I getting better?
A frantic stillness.
The guilt from being well enough to work part-time and the anger that I spend most of my free time recovering from working. The guilt of being able to stroll along a beach sometimes and the grief of no more mountain hikes. The wild swinging between feeling too sick and not sick enough.
I haven’t been able to figure out whether being chronically ill is fragmenting, because there is so much nothing-y time, so much resting in between and missing out, or whether, you could argue, that the sameness is a connective tissue, one big slab of undifferentiated time. Maybe chronic illness is more like a novel made up of a single sentence, a little dull and quite difficult to get your head around. Looping round and round and repeating itself. Fuzzy, indeterminate, uncomfortable.
Mulch shouldn’t be chopped up too finely because it will either all blow away or suffocate the soil. It should be chunky and protective but still allow some breath, whilst retaining moisture. It will break down, eventually, and become soft soil where something might grow. Or it will be prickly underfoot and make digging difficult. At the very least it will change the texture of the soil’s surface and I don’t think anyone would say that mulch was the same thing as a branch or a stick or a tree, even though, really stretching it, you might be able to say that mulch was made from trees and might also, eventually, make trees. No matter how you toss it, it continues to settle into something resembling itself. And my father is showing me his new technique for making it. He is pushing the lawnmower over the collection of small to medium-sized sticks, while I stand at a distance to avoid errant projectiles. It is a labour-intensive process, erratic in outcome and dangerous, yet it is effective in its own way.
Endnotes
• • •
My father has developed a new way of making mulch. He lays a considerable collection of small to medium-sized sticks in a line and then runs the lawnmower over them. Whilst labour intensive, erratic in outcome, and dangerous, it is effective in its own way.Lydia Davis writes that a piece of writing made from fragments is like a ruin or something half-built; the reader is the builder.1 The writer, something else.
A creative writing tutor I respect deeply says that she used to think of fragmented writing as a radical thing full of possibility, but now all she sees is laziness, a lack of commitment to putting the work in, a complete cop-out.
My mother cannot remember, or perhaps it is that she cannot pronounce my illness, myalgic encephalomyelitis, so instead she just leaves a gap and asks, how are you?
Is it my illness or do I suffer from it? Have I gathered it up around me like a prickly blanket or has it been laid upon me?
Alice Hattrick wonders: “Who has not thought: I have brought this on myself.”2
Shame and embarrassment—a sense of failure—are circular emotions, spiraling in and then out and then in, always coming back to the same sore place. They are not like joy or contentment, which are linear, never returning in quite the same way.
I tell myself that fragments are a process of sedimentation. Fragments are a collage technique to communicate the incessant ambiguity of life; each layer sits upon another imperfectly, rough edges sticking out. I tell myself that I prefer clippings, incongruent ideas, and hybrid forms not because of some lack within me but because they point towards expressing ineffable ways of being.
I suffer from brain fog intermittently. My fog. I cannot hold what I want to say in my mind so it remains partial, blurred, obscured, out of reach. Yet I’ve always found the phenomenon of weather fog to be clarifying, how when a cool mist descends upon you, the little that you can see takes on a crystalline and holy focus.
It is hard for me to concentrate for long periods of time so I like to read short books with short paragraphs made up of short sentences. Only blank space to get lost in.
I do not want to write about illness when I already have to live it. I would rather imagine myself elsewhere.
Maria Gainza writes, “I spend the majority of the time in bed—it’s my own personal raft. I drift along on a sea of papers, a long way out from shore.”3 For me it is a sailing couch and the sea is the padding of time needed for rest, all the blue in-between.
Today is a lost day, a listless day, a lust day.
There is something to be said for constraints—you can do this but not that, or that but not this. In George Perec’s La Disposition (A Void), the letter e is absent throughout the whole novel.4 Joe Brainard’s I remember is structured around the repeated “I remember… I remember… I remember…”5 Sheila Heti’s diary experiments consist of sentences from her journals which are placed in an Excel spreadsheet and then alphabetised, so that “She looked exhausted and sad” is next to “She looked like Reese Witherspoon.”6 Kathryn Scanlan’s August-9 Fog is made up of sentences from an 86-year-old stranger’s diary found at an estate auction in Illinois.7 An incessant ordinary dailiness made strange and ethereal by blank space.
My friend’s long-absent father writes her meandering emails in which the only punctuation mark he uses is the ellipsis…no questions…no endings…no short pauses…only trailings off…he is often sick…often well…often feeling something spiritual…often looking at a nice bird…sometimes my friend receives emails from women that her father has lived with for a time and then left abruptly…for short periods he can be very charming…but of course charm is difficult to sustain…
Having to work out how to think again. Having always associated movement with thought. Thought as a landscape, writing as an act of mapping. The structure of an essay like the structure of a walk. Thought without movement becomes so soupy, so wishy-washy. What might you scoop out?
I move slowly. I rest before going out, and then I rest upon returning. A family wedding = two days lying down to prepare + ⚡️⚡️⚡️ + two days lying down to recover. Everything becomes a calculation, a careful calibration, and yet it is still so prone to error. So I cancel and say no, not that and not that either, and I spend a lot of time alone.
I watch so much crime TV, comforted by mysteries that can be solved. Is it the sad-eyed father or is it the faulty sodium-ion cellular pathway? Is it the helpful teacher or is it the rogue T-cells? Is it the beautiful neighbour or is it psychological?
I keep getting requests to participate in a trial for krill supplements by a reputable research organisation. I keep getting told how well I look. I keep getting told to stress less. I keep getting told I’m very sensitive.
“Maybe chronic illness is more like a novel made up of a single sentence, a little dull and quite difficult to get your head around. Looping round and round and repeating itself. Fuzzy, indeterminate, uncomfortable.”
A feeling that I covet: the freshness of a dewy morning but in your body and your mind. Ready and clear and calm and crisp. Or the kind of exhaustion that comes from physicality—that is not nebulous muscle aches, not a post-cyclone flattening, not post-exertional malaise—but one that is explainable and predictable, and easily recoverable from. Stemming from healthy, vigorous activity that is not restricted by fear that it will backfire the next day or the day after, when you’ve allowed yourself to think, am I getting better?
A frantic stillness.
The guilt from being well enough to work part-time and the anger that I spend most of my free time recovering from working. The guilt of being able to stroll along a beach sometimes and the grief of no more mountain hikes. The wild swinging between feeling too sick and not sick enough.
I haven’t been able to figure out whether being chronically ill is fragmenting, because there is so much nothing-y time, so much resting in between and missing out, or whether, you could argue, that the sameness is a connective tissue, one big slab of undifferentiated time. Maybe chronic illness is more like a novel made up of a single sentence, a little dull and quite difficult to get your head around. Looping round and round and repeating itself. Fuzzy, indeterminate, uncomfortable.
Mulch shouldn’t be chopped up too finely because it will either all blow away or suffocate the soil. It should be chunky and protective but still allow some breath, whilst retaining moisture. It will break down, eventually, and become soft soil where something might grow. Or it will be prickly underfoot and make digging difficult. At the very least it will change the texture of the soil’s surface and I don’t think anyone would say that mulch was the same thing as a branch or a stick or a tree, even though, really stretching it, you might be able to say that mulch was made from trees and might also, eventually, make trees. No matter how you toss it, it continues to settle into something resembling itself. And my father is showing me his new technique for making it. He is pushing the lawnmower over the collection of small to medium-sized sticks, while I stand at a distance to avoid errant projectiles. It is a labour-intensive process, erratic in outcome and dangerous, yet it is effective in its own way.
Endnotes
- Davis, Lydia. 2019. Essays. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Hattrick, Alice. 2021. Ill Feelings. London, Fitzcarraldo Editions.
- Gainza, Maria. 2023. Portrait of an Unknown Lady. Translated by Thomas Bunstead. New York, Catapult.
- Perec, George. 1994. A Void. Translated by Gilbert Adair. London, Harvill.
- Brainard, Joe. 2001. I Remember. New York, Granary Books.
- Heti, Sheila. 2014. ‘From my Diaries (2006-2010) in Alphabetical Order.’ N + 1. Issue 18: Good News. New York.
- Scanlan, Kathryn. 2019. Aug-9 Fog. New York, Macmillan.