I think that it is advisable to test one's feelings out, on oneself, sometimes quite rigorously. This may sound strange, and it might be a little, or it might be impossibly obvious, but I've been noticing more lately the importance of cross-examining feelings, especially those that aren't being particularly helpful or contributing anything useful. This investigation is done simply by moving yourself through different scenes and environments, through different volumes and varied scenery. In doing this, one can swiftly and effectively sift the loosely-knit feelings from the denser ones, because the sort of feelings that stand up and leave without a fight when you open just one window, when you cut a piece of ripe fruit almost perfectly in half, when you run as fast as possible down a hallway, they are not the ones you need to keep going back to, and certainly not the ones you need to carry.
Below: Geffen Refaeli
It is the feelings that are still lingering at the end, those are the ones that you must pay tender attention to—the ones that are still there after a day of gentle sun, the ones that are waiting for you behind the doors even after swimming in rivers. In the end, in the longer-running, these are ones worth looking at.
We get more attached to feelings that we would care to admit, I think, more attached because it becomes seductively comfortable to keep anything around for a long time, and after that longer while it can be difficult to assess whether or not we are still feeling something because we are actually feeling it, or because we are remembering and remembering and then remembering again how it might have felt, nothing more.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
Strictly-speaking, the only news part of the newsletter. Work and its peripheral accompaniments could be summed up as 'everything is on-going' or 'going slightly forwards with everything'. The everything part is deceptive though, because it is only on rare occasions that you can put the rest (actually some of the least resting parts) of your life aside in order to think in an isolated manner about work and the pulling of ideas from thin air.
In April of this year, I wrote a question-note to myself asking 'Do I need to go and be solitudinous in order to think up these ideas?' and I'm still not sure what the answer is, because it isn't yes, but it also isn't no. While I figure that out, here is a dark bird, definitely one too heavy for a single arm.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Paintings by Cinta Vidal, whose work I've fallen in love with before, but it seemed to happen again, and here we are—this week needed to feel greener.
“Don’t forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.”
— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Copyright © 2019 Ella Frances Sanders, All rights reserved.