Let’s talk about lobsters

Nina writes about lobsters. The last time one of her partners left her, she began to develop a growing interest in these animals. She even bought two plastic ones. She named them Tristan and Iseult. An extraordinary idyll for two toy crustaceans. Nina still has one. She hangs in the hallway of her house, “like a mutated crucifix,” she wrote on the first page of a novel I won’t get to read, at least not now. As long as no one translates it, Tristan and Isolde will be locked in the shell of the language in which they were written: Dutch. One page translated into English is enough for me, just one, to know that I want to read Nina Polak and that I need to peek into an immense story of heartbreak that strikes me as ironic and maybe, why not, even autobiographical. I can even think that she is talking about me or all the heartbreaks in the world united in the shell of a sea creature. But until someone extracts a common meaning from Nina’s words, I’ll know nothing about lobsters, or the crucifixion implicit in all pain of love, or the affective symphony of an animal that is usually cooked alive in a pot of boiling water. Lobsters look like humans, right? I write these things because it is good to look out the window and look in the other for the unexpected possibility of something new and surprising. A recent tendency to weariness pushes me to think that the world offers me the same replacement of itself and that life is what people spit on Twitter. It even looks overheated. It’s hard to chew that leathery thing that days have become for some time now. If I talk about lobsters today, it is because I like to think of a space where it is possible to enjoy beauty for the sole fact of its existence. And I think Nina’s writing points me in that direction, even if I don’t fully understand it. And when I say Nina she could also mention any other person capable of producing beauty. It’s okay for there to be unexpected, illogical, and arbitrary things. It is good to live outside of oneself and inhabit that other place that is created in the encounter with others. It’s okay to want to see a heartbreak episode in a lobster. It’s okay to talk about other things. Exit and enter the cabin of our own boredom and hopelessness. Sure, it’s okay to talk about lobsters.