In July 2018 I traveled with Carla Harryman to visit Etel Adnan in Erquy, the beach town in Brittany where she kept an apartment with direct access to the beach, weather, and sunset. Simone Fattal was not present, while Etel was staying with a younger companion and gifted painter, Eugenie Paultre. I cannot locate photos from the period but Eugenie’s painting titled Mer, recalling the view from Etel’s balcony, suggests the drama and strangeness of this coast—while Erquy continues as a mid-tier vacation retreat, with small hotels, flea markets, parking, normative uses of the beach, hang gliding in the distance, strong tides.
In 2020 Etel published Shifting the Silence with Nightboat Books; the bio notes state that she continues to live in Paris though the work anticipates her death the next year. In terms of genre, the writing is a hybrid poetic meditation, a sentence-level nonnarrative that records states of being and mind, with the turn to language always present and exact. Time is marked at the level of the sentence, with only the sparest narrative motivation: “My thoughts drip, not unlike the faucet. They don’t let me know what they’re about. Other ones follow, strangers equally. / The daylight is getting dim. We’re not in winter, no, we’re somewhere in early July. The sunset will happen soon. Then it will disappear too” (5–6) Temporality emerges from the writing as a form of roughing out, coloring in, and smoothing over—and along with it rhetoric, perception, memory, affect, comprehension: … More
