Blank Slate
A contemplation of sweating via tribute to Kafka.
The latest Cassettes theme “Sweat/Sueur” immediately reminded of something I had written on vacation in 2024 in Italy. I reimagined it on a trip to Brittany with Elsa… and fit it in the structure of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. You can read the audience and editor’s picks for “Sweat/Sueur” here:
As I awoke in the late afternoon from a wave-lulled nap I found myself transformed atop the sea-round stones into a gigantic slug. I was laying soft on the beach which had begun to squelch into my back as I melted, and when I lifted my head a little, I could see my sunglasses sliding down the absent bridge of my nose, while my hat lay completely to the side of the goo-soaked beach towel. I helplessly reached out to wipe my perspiring cheeks and found that I could only arch my gelatinous body.
What has happened to me? I thought. It was no dream… Had I left a glistening trail of sunscreen and bug spray and sweat while I sludged to a cove, away from the miasma of the port and its sun-roasting seaweed? Above me, grey cliffs cut into the Plomarc’h, the shade of whose trees only barely reached the edges of the sand, and before me lapped the tamed waters of an Atlantic creek. Pack light layers since the weather in Bretagne doesn’t get very hot, said the art residency website, but the cannicule didn’t get the memo and now I was a slug in the sand in the Finistère.
I turned my eyes to the white-hot sky—punctuated by the bright wings and cries of seagulls—and became quite lethargic. What about it? I thought, with half a glance back down to the notebook I had packed for the day. I could continue my nap and forget all about this, but actually I couldn’t, because the stones which pressed into my soft back (or was it my belly) were liable to make a permanent impression.
Oh God, what an impossible task I’ve set for myself! Writing a novel day in, day out. It’s not any easier here, alone among a dozen sea-soaked artists. Though if I can be thankful for anything, it’s for the fact that I am not packed in like a sardine back at the BnF—a tremor ran through my body and I squelched closer to the retreating shade, where there is no moisture left, though the yellow grass and greenish lichen remind me of the concept of water. I could just stay here, unbothered and alone, where the sun pierces through each leaf above so that even the tree-shade is day-bright.
I slid off of my beach towel entirely. This napping in the sun, I thought, makes one quite stupid. A writer needs to write. Friends of mine have already published a novel or two, or at least submitted a short story to a literary salon1. Well, there’s still hope. I’ll come back to Bretagne in the dead of winter; the perpetual rain will be perfect for my writing. I dream of precipitation and wet pavement and dew on leaves and misty mornings, but for the moment, I’d better at least scribble something down, since it’s already five.
I looked at the notebook splayed next to my useless shoes, my abandoned hat, my half-dead phone. God, it was already half past six and my battery valiantly hung on at 2%, black box cooking in the oppressive heat. What could I do now? I supposed they’d start apéro without me. They might criticize my laziness as they open the first bottle of wine, but would they be so wrong on this occasion?
I scraped my belly-back on seashells and driftwood back to my bag. Do any of us walk during a heatwave, or are we blindly trawled to the nearest, easiest relief: packed into beach, crowded in a patch of shade, retreating to a writer’s residency, overpaying for a sip of water…
Heat finally makes me crave a drink after hours of ignoring the need. I’ve been drinking other beverages during this residency—cider, beer, wine—anything to take the edge off. In my current state, I finally accept the necessity of bland water in order to not metamorphose yet again, from slug into raisin. I scratch my way forward to the foamy edge of the sea, salt burning the cuts in my belly-back.
I have been thinking about what it takes for me to write. Today, it took two espressos; a phone call with a friend in a different time zone; words of encouragement from my roommate-resident; a long walk to the beach during which my ice cream melted; and an afternoon-long zone out for me to face the blank page. I wanted to write from the moment I woke up. I am learning how to nurse myself into it.
My slug body shriveled up as the salt from the sea coursed through my veins like milk, nourishing the story I was finally ready to tell. As I curled up into the salt-encrusted rocks, the sunshine lit the creek just so that it flared white, ready to be inked.