Against August

There is something off about August. This part of the summer season brings about an atmospheric unease. The long light stops feeling languorous and starts to seem like it’s just a way of putting off the night. There is no position of the earth in relation to the sun that comes as a relief. Insomnia arrives in August; bedsheets become heavy under humidity. No good habits are possible in August, much less good decisions. All I do is think about my outfits and my commute, constantly trying to choose between my sweatiness and my vanity. People are not themselves. I go see the party girls and find them wistful. I meet up with the melancholics and find them wanting to stay out all night.

In August I cannot think, so I cannot work. This is not not-working in a restful or decadent way. This is not-working as certain doom. And I can’t not-work in peace either: if I leave in July I consider myself traveling but if I leave in August I am just leaving. The best I can hope for, in the absence of a purpose like business or pleasure, is an escape. Maybe a light excursion. In any case I am rarely in the place I can reasonably call my home in August, and instead stay in other people’s basements, in their living rooms, on their couches. I sleep on what was once a little brother’s bunk bed and wash my hair in his parents’ shower. I walk down the stairs and see their children’s fingerprint smudges on the banister. I stay in hotel rooms by myself and think: What a waste. (I am convinced that hotel rooms are designed for sex, even though I am not particularly into the quality they have—sealed, hermetic, identical. Hotels are to sex what time zones are to jet lag, I think. A change of interiors out of proportion with the body.)

I am against August. When I try to explain this position, some people instinctively want to argue. These people seem to love the beach beyond all reason, to have never suffered a yellowed pit stain on a favorite white T-shirt in their life, and to eagerly welcome all thirty-one days of August as though they are a reward for a year well-lived rather than a final trial before the beginning of another. These are people who vacation with peace of mind. To them, I say: Go away. To the people who agree with me, I say: Go on. 

Many friends who share my malaise compare the experience of the month to the Sunday feeling of knowing work or routine is imminent after a break. I don’t agree exactly, but I recognize the comparison. In August summer ends, and so whether or not you are done with it you must accept that it is finished. Everything you meant to say or do now exists in the past tense: it was said or it wasn’t, it was completed or never even begun. The month does function, I will admit, as an excellent excuse. I reassure myself and others about mistakes or failures with promises of what we’ll be like in September. Any accomplishment, no matter how minor, is astounding to me: In August?! I think.

***

I note references to August when I find them, and keep them as though I am preparing a defense of my position. I must have my rhetoric for when pettiness alone fails me. There are, of course, many who have romanticized August in art. In Emily of New Moon, L. M. Montgomery describes a vacation spent in “the long, smoky, delicious August evenings when the white moths sailed over the tansy plantation and the golden twilight faded into dusk and purple over the green slopes beyond and fireflies lighted their goblin torches by the pond.” I probably read that for the first time as a child indoors, while hiding from an August unlike the one she had written about. I have never experienced this delicious smoky August that looms large in our cultural imagination; instead of white moths, for me, there are mosquitoes. 

Some poets agree with me, some don’t. I am always on the lookout for allies. Marge Piercy’s 1984 poem “Blue Tuesday in August” begins:

The world smelled like a mattress you find
on the street and leave there,
or like a humid house reciting yesterday’s
dinner menu and the day before’s.

Like that, yes. “In an invented summer,” wrote Etel Adnan in Sea and Fog, “the world breaks apart … Love is wedded to time, and revelation is their breaking apart. In one of August’s sizzling days, the sea swallowed a woman whose flesh gave up resistance.” Also just like that, yes. In Mary Oliver’s 1983 poem “August,” she writes that she is

cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is.

Hmm. “What I want,” writes Kim Addonzio in her poem called “August,” “is to slice open its stomach and watch / its toxic sun uncoil into the sea.” Yes, that’s better. “August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her journals. “The odd uneven time.” Another entry:

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: “After a heavy rainfall, poems titled ‘Rain’ pour in from across the nation.”

Many experience it with a sense of finality. “The summer ended,” writes James Baldwin in Just Above My Head:

Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse … The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.

Then there are movies set in August, many defined by catastrophe: August 5 is the day Do the Right Thing takes place; August 29 is the day, according to Terminator 2, the world ends. And there are the movies I believe should be watched in August because they capture something of its claustrophobia (Rear Window, The Talented Mr. Ripley). There are the heroines of Rohmer’s films, undone by the pressures of vacationing alone and the vacuousness of beach holidays. 

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