Ellena Savage

'I mean who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever, when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath.' The body frequently escapes her, but is always very much present in these compellingly vivid, clear-eyed essays on an embodied self in flight through the world, from the brilliant young writer Ellena Savage. In Portuguese police stations and Portland college campuses, in suburban Melbourne libraries and wintry Berlin apartments, Savage shows bodies in pain and in love, bodies at work and at rest. She circles back to scenes of crimes or near-crimes, to lovers or near-lovers, to turn over the stones, re-read the paperwork, check the deeds, approach from another angle altogether. These essays traverse cities and spaces, bodies and histories, moving through forms and modes to find a closer kind of truth. Blueberriesis ripe with acid, promise, and sweetness.

Essays Concerning Understanding

Blueberries

Rebecca Lum

So what good is it to be a woman except to resist the universal that denies us specificity (as does the category ‘woman’), to occupy a position as female person in solidarity with other women? This is something I talk about with a friend who is trans and femme, whose femininity has been violently denied to them by the public and continues to be, and so is an expert in femininity more so than I am because for them their claim on it is a claim to a recognition of their full humanity, and in this sense their femininity is politically significant in a way that mine which is naturalised and unquestioned is not. One day my friend was telling me about the breasts they longed for, and how at some point they'd have to decide the what and the how, what ‘type’ of visible, legible femininity they might stake a claim on, and they said— ‘the question is not how large should they be, but now many?’ —and this for me confirmed the answer to the question of what is a female person. And what is a female voice. And what is the point of continuing the class of women. The point is always to be in resistance the point is to play the point is to be relentless in the desire to unmask callous reductions the point is to multiply breasts the point is to love what is different.

I was in America at a very expensive writers workshop, working on my social mobility, which was foolish, not because social mobility and cultural capital are useless pursuits, but because people who have already passed into the field of the elite tend not to attend these very expensive writers' workshops. That the students did not know this proves that they had not passed, may never pass, into the field of the elite. Which is also not to say there were no deep, thoughtful, stylish writers attending this very expensive writers' workshop, because elitism is not excellence it is barriers to entry.

Sudden knowledge that I, the puniest least consequential human being, am the same as the love feeling of looking at the ocean.

“…the only thing in our power is to avoid distorting the voice of life which sounds within us”

Why is it that the closer we get to sadness the realer we feel? Sadness is the glue between the days as we live in them. Sadness is the other face of those object-events, the face of the world that stagnates and abnegates and doesn't much change. By ‘sadness' I don't mean depresion; I don't mean the feeling of poor, pathetic me. I mean the bodily response when humour, and life, have been extinguished. The opposite of love. The closing down of possibility--and the reluctance to see and name and claim possibility when it appears. Self-hatred. Emotional ineptitude. Complicity. Complacency. Overwhelming meh-ness.

One of Red Rosa's sweetest pleasures its incorporation of some of Luxemburg's personal writings, also collected in another Verso title, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, where she delights in being alive, in being a body in the world. From prison, she writes to her lover: "The hour before sunset has a magic all its own. The sun was still hot, but one gladly allowed its slanted rays to burn on one's neck and cheeks like a kiss.' Politics is not removed from the way the sun kisses your neck at the hour before sunset. Politics is the pleasure in the body and the imagination, too.

Sadness is, perhaps, the most honest response to living.

In response to “Why write, when there is so much horror going on in the world?” from Notes to Unlived Time

Because there is a human future; maybe not a forever-future, but one beyond now. Writing is an argument for hope: it believes in the future; it believes, even, in futures it ought to know better than to. It believes in the ongoingness, the wanton tenacity, of human beings.

Who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath. Every body reaches into the future to touch someone there.

I was still a sad teenage girl: my heart was torn up, I didn't know how I was going to pay off my rapidly increasing credit-card debt, I was paralysed by the truth of my not being any of the people I longed to be. I wasn't grown enough to untangle my desires from my reality. If being grown is desirable at all. My writing, even my diary writing, was terrible. Not because I didn't know about sentences, or because I didn't have literary ambitions, but because I couldn't tell a truth. Insincerity, I now know, is the language of those who deny their interiority.

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