“This is what shame feels like.”
—Ali Smith, Autumn
I love this season (summer) but I am reading a book about autumn. Worse, I am about ten years late in arriving at this book. Also, I find that I’m ashamed that I’m jealous.
Ten-day-old purple and white irises strike the most sorry pose in twelve directions. It’s actually, actually, yes: floral erotica.
Mosquitoes ferry around my fingers and face and mew. Little cats. What do the Irish say for—butterfly? Oyster? Snail? Something minutely grand: Ladybird—rather than ladybug, that’s it: “God’s little cow.” A flying one, at that.
But I’ve requested this book, Autumn, because a theater director recommended it to me and because I am indebted to every direction the theater gives me, now, again.
To the point of it: Have we grown too old to take our shoes off in an art gallery? Is a grain of sand in the eye held immortal? Ali Smith here is doing what Italo Calvino did, what Lawrence Durrell did, perhaps what Carole Maso does; and what the pyramids, lemon, anchovy, olive, pomegranate, cherry wood, granite shroud, silk lining, paper birch book binding, hull of a dory and even keel have done.
Autumn, p. 11, like eleventh month November (a time for introspection and days of consideration for others): there is no escaping the junkyard of the self. A used book—a library book—is a sexier thing as it’s shared and this Autumn is used. I am not giving anything away to quote Autumn early: “In his bright coat he comes out of the woods, across the plain and back towards the shore.”
…out of the woods, across the plain and back towards the shore.
This is all we’re talking about. For some, a bright coat will help. For others, a book will do—and you’ll wear it.
If you know someone like me (who doesn’t mind making a mountain of books and journals), your stacks sometimes topple to reveal a gem—sometimes flowered with universes of dust. Mahmoud Darwish’s The Adam of Two Edens (poems) shows itself from under my lampside detritus. I open to p. 129, one number beyond a former address of mine, and I read:
So, we are who we are, as the Mississippi flows
and what remains of yesterday is still ours—
but the color of the sky has changed,
Maybe (probably) I’ve read this before. Maybe you, a Darwish fan, have too.
My old teacher’s friend Michael McClure offers an endorsement this way: “It is Palestinian sunlight falling on the odors of salt, horses, braided hair, and olive.” I like this last image, especially: “and olive.”
My director friend who suggested I’d feel affinity with Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet himself was raised around olives—in Catalonia. I discover myself picking green olives from the floor.
All this is emotional stuff. Has it been a year?
Let the book call you. Early in Autumn, our Smith spills out (I’ve kept the prose lines as they end in my Anchor paperback edition):
Through the windows, there on the other side of
the road, she can see the grand municipal building
that used to be the town Post Office. It’s now a
row of designer chainstores. Perfume. Clothes.
Cosmetics. She looks round the room again. The
people sitting on the communal seat are almost all
exactly the same people who were here when
she first came in. She opens the book in her
hand. Brave New World. Chapter One.
In Shakespeare and Company (The Story of an American Bookshop in Paris), Sylvia Beach wrote that Hemingway, in her view, was “wise and self-reliant.” But this cannot have taken into account Hemingway’s end. How could any human being rely on wisdom and self-reliance alone, over time? (What do I mean here?) I mean that time is a mean-mfk but within, in time, time’s beautiful. So shows Autumn with ordinary people, and her protagonist Elisabeth Demand—and her subject Daniel Gluck…and Pop Art, change, regret, relations, memory, stories. Stories we tell because we need to tell them.
The “color of the sky” may change—and we may feel some sense of shame when it does, for the sky becomes the big and little hands of time even as time stands still; and we may never get it back. Clutching to our Brave New World, or Eden, or Autumn of another season, we’d do ourselves and each other well to let it go; let go the difference in narrative and excavate the “junkyard” of the self and harvest instead, one thing at a time: purple, iris, boat; taking off your shoes; olive, lemon, triangle.
Regrets when you’re dead? A past when you’re dead?
…
He is the boy collecting chestnuts from the ground
under the trees. He splits the bright green prickly
cauls and frees them brown and shining from the
waxy pith. He fills his cap with them. He takes
them to his mother. She is over here with the
new baby.
May Autumn fill your summer.
Peter Money is a poet, playwright, and author of the novel Oh When the Saints (Dublin) whose mentor was the Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg. His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, The Sun, American Poetry Review, on The Writer’s Almanac and RTE Radio 1 Ireland (“Loves: Silence and the Music of JS Bach”). Peter plays in the band Los Lorcas (their latest album Wild Island tracks are online) and his memoir about “leavings” is forthcoming in autumn of 2026.
