Saturn & Saturation
on reliving the marginalia
A few weeks ago, a friend of a friend hosted a music party in her garage. A semi-outdoor event in the dead of winter sounds like an odd idea, but we are in upstate New York here where we’re used to the cold, and besides it’s been an uncannilly mild winter to say the least: no snow and temperatures hovering in the mid-40s, lower-50s even sometimes. Moreover, this friend of a friend’s garage was heated anyway, and the shear number of people dancing inside would have created enough heat regardless.
It’s unclear what our host uses her garage for besides hosting live bands and music. The walls were covered in tie-dyed Grateful Dead blankets, string lights galore, and had some pinball machine art somehow mounted to the concrete walls. Maybe she just likes hosting music events year-round, but maybe she stored her nice cars or motorcycles or workshop in another spot for the weekends. The latter feels unlikely given how much I know she loves supporting local bluegrass and jam bands.
As much as I too enjoy a li’l bluegrass, jam bands are certainly not my preference. I do earnestly try to listen to and find something that I like in the enormous Grateful Dead repertoire, but I struggle. I can easily get distracted from the music by dancing with my fiancé, but there’s only so many songs that I can two-step to until my ears are sore.
So you can imagine that during the GD cover band, I lingered inside circling the delicious food that folks brought, potluck style, and hung out in the living room with my little plate piled high with a little of everything. The host had a pile of books on the side table next to the warn and perfectly comfortable (faux?) leather couch including one I’ve been trying to find at local book stores for quite some time. Skimming through it, she had made some neon pink highlights, sparingly and tastefully, at least throughout the first third of the book.
“Getting into the mind of Jen, are you?” my fiancé’s bandmate asked.
Without having actually taken note of the highlighted phrases, I can’t say that I was getting into our host’s mindset or tapping into what she thinks is valuable within the text. But, I do think that if I did witness these details better, then I would be able to at least glean a little information about our host. Which is a very vulnerable spot to have put herself in. At least I might have felt vulnerable if I walked around the corner to see a friend of a friend, effectively a stranger, pawing through my annotated books.
Just before I met my fiancé, I had gone on a handful of dates with a guy and we ended up exchanging books: he lent me “Rings of Saturn” and I Rebecca Solnit’s “The Faraway Nearby.” I could tell from the loseness of the spine that it had been read perhaps twice, but otherwise there was no indication the book had been engaged with. No notes scribbled in the margins, no underlines, no dog-eared pages, no water or coffee stains, not even folds or wrinkles from having been in a cluttered bag for any amount of time. A pristine text as if from a library. Meanwhile, the copy of “Faraway Nearby” was, by comparison, beat up. I cherish my books and take very good care of them, but my definition of care is read thoroughly and carried wherever the reader goes, so there’s a fair amount of light damage that comes with that inherently in addition to constant annotations all throughout the text itself.
“It’s like I’m being saturated with your mind,” I remember him texting me. Which is a lovely thing to say, but a very asymmetrical one given the circumstance. I was getting no insight into his psyche and was only exposed to the text-in-itself. Though I was encouraged to continue my practice of annotation in his book, I had a hunch that I wouldn’t be able to access these notes in the future because could discern (through the avalanches of text messages) that things were incompatible. We finished the books, met up at a park, and returned them. I got a significant piece of myself back in getting Solnit’s book back in it’s place on my bookshelf. Relieving, really. It’s always so painful to lose a chapter of your life when the notes surrounding and describing that era are not at-hand.
Having the inclination that things weren’t right, I preemptively bought a fresh copy of “Rings of Saturn” expecting that he’d rather have a clean copy than one “saturated” (though to a tamed extent — I did not write all over this book as I had with Solnit’s) with my thoughts. At our park meet up, when I showed him the two copies, he laughed awkwardly and took back his, the one I wrote in. I knew I made the right decision calling it off with him in this final action of his. The asymmetry was too much. He got to keep a part of me, something that can be engaged with again and again with each read, and I was left with nothing but text messages that digitally rot at the bottom of my inbox.
In past relationships, book sharing had been a common practice as had been writing in the books. As such, I have a few notes from exes scribbled in some of my favorite books. Yes, this is mildly awkward or sometimes embarassing when I go to read them now, or when my fiancé sees an unfamiliar handwriting. But it allows the book to tell a bigger story. The book is not just the text-in-itself, it is “saturated” with my own life’s journey. A parallel story alongside the primary literature. It’s a signal that I had a life before him, and even though the reversal of that (that he had a life before me) can sometimes make me uncomfortable, it’s a good reminder that there’s so much more to learn about each other and there’s so many little details that have influenced who we’ve become and who we’re becoming.
We’re now reading Gottman’s “Seven Principles of Marriage,” a text that I started reading while single before meeting him, but didn’t get very far through because the book contains prompts you’re supposed to share with your betrothed. As we prepare for our wedding later this year, we’re going through it together. It’s really enjoyable to actually share the same book at the same time, to write in it together, and I look forward to come back to it in a few years from now and discuss the text again and our notes again, to be saturated in ourselves and our lives together throughout the ages in part through this exact edition of print media.
For what it’s worth:
“Rings of Saturn” is a very good book and worth picking up if you find it (or seeking it out if you’re really into abstract/performative/looping narrative). The voice is really engaging, the plot itself is very plain (it’s just a guy walking along the cost in England), but the story loops around themes of isolation, decay, myths, silk worms, and identity.
“The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet's equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.”
“The shadow of the night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of Saturn – an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.”
It takes Saturn about 28-28 years to orbit the sun. In that time, the cells in your body will have replaced themselves four times. You’ll be a totally new person, in a sense, by the time Saturn comes around again, astronomically speaking. Astrologically speaking, Saturn is the planet of karma (perhaps its rings signifying “what goes around, comes around”) and of rule/patriarchical authority.
Noteworthy
I wouldn’t go so far to say that I’m a “That Girl,” but I am a sucker for life-style YouTube videos, creating aesthetic mood-boards for my desktop backgrounds, and making meals and fitness plans that look and feel nice. Yeah, I subscribe to the Huberman Lab podcasts, I re-read JBP’s books on the rules for life, I bullet journal, I read the reference list of books, video essays, and podcasts to check the science of the cited study. So I found myself cracking up at this satirical article. There’s a lot of pressure and hype to optimize life and podcasts like the Huberman Lab podcast, while invaluable to making health accessible, I can imagine giving a lot of prideful people even more hubris now that they have “science-based tools” in their pocket and the language to boast about it. It’s a funny ad absurdum piece that tempers my own enthusiasm for the genre.
I’m not a fan of box stores, not even book stores. But this feature piece on Barnes and Noble is interesting. It gives me hope for that some corporate/capitalistic chains will put more power and autonomy into their individual stores and truly care about the product (in this case books, the best thing to by, imo) rather than the money.
There’s a lot of thinking about digital media and communications these days. I have no idea what the future holds for it as academics in my sphere migrate with various levels of total commitment from Twitter to Mastodon. Robin Sloan thinks that “the platforms of the last decade are done” which leaves a lot of room for creation. But also in thinking about the concept of “degrowth,” I do wonder how future infrastructures will be maintained better so that we’re not constantly starting over from scratch.