Cider Chiasm

What was it I was supposed to be doing? The paper – again? But I was watching The Simple Life, and now I’m listening to Laura Cantrell. And the caffeine isn’t lifting me, no doubt because of the strong cider I drank last night.

I can still taste cider. Laura Cantrell is singing and I congratulate myself for having found the heart of the summer this summer. In the cider I can still taste. I think to myself: that cider – the taste of that cider – is the chiasmus of the summer. Summer crosses itself there. On the one hand, the sun, the sky and what withdraws as the essence of summer in the same sun, the same sky, and on the other, a cloudy cider and what withdraws in that same cloudiness.

That withdrawal which presses forward as you taste it not like the memory of Proust’s madeline which brought more memories in turn, but as a kind of forgetting, one which is no longer the opposite of memory. A forgetting which is the propitiousness of what sets itself back as summer, in summer, from which issues a kind of steadiness, the allotment of a kind of fate which steers you through the days of August.

What is it that sets itself back thus? What withdraws? There are experiences whose sense seems to withdraw as you have them – a sense that leaves a trace, a floating half-forgetting that seems to point enigmatically into itself. The cloudiness of cider says:  I am not, I am nothing in particular but I am also what forgets itself in you. That nothing jostles with the nothingness of everything, I decide to myself, which hollows out all the world, all meanings. 

Every day the world is reborn, and what can you do except walk down to the river and along the river and up to the pubs where you can drink cider? The condition of the summer is close by. It hovers in a kind of forgetting, in the haze on the roads, in the cloudiness of cider. You are very close to the source, but to what are you close? To the hinge, the articulation of a season. To its secret, its promise. To what outplays your work and your ambition and wrecks your papers against itself, laughing at them.

How do you meet it, the essence of summer? How does it lay claim to you? In the golden pints of summer beers (Wylams), in the cloudy cider which calls you from the other side of town. In the cider that called forward the summer-witness you were chosen to be.