Some time here, some time there, adding up to something.
This is often how I think about days, life generally, because for the most part it is impossible to know what will come of anything—outcomes and incomes and everybody is always leaving. We cannot know what we add up to, and other people aren't always a reliable measure of adding-up either, which makes one feel at times like a collection of disparate ingredients, impossible to know what can be made of them. We like to think that we are moving decisively, and independently, towards a particular moment, or event, or person, or reality, when in fact we form just one tiny, tiny part of a monstrously large and complicated sum—the sum of everyone, the sum of everything.
The sum total is composed of: Every inanimate object and every building and all those damn windows people look in and out of, the fruit still ripening on trees and the fruit being eaten by wasps on the ground, every rusted hinge, all those fake plants that say nothing, plastic and plastic and plastic, smooth blue creatures in the oceans, glass in the oceans, every sock on every foot, hair pins, corners taken too quickly, reflections, the clothes that you should have put on to wash, glances between strangers, the smell of orange peel.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
Two small book proposals were sent off to my long-suffering agent, and I now pace up and down until our conversation about them on Monday. Another more lengthy book idea will also be sent along by the end of this month, and it is about this one that I am particularly restless. It has taken more time that I thought it would need, to put these proposals together, partly because the muchness of the world has been very loud and shrieking lately, partly because I am in between countries and workspaces, partly because some days you just have a headache and you need to lie down.
There is also the same-same-but-different cover for the German edition of Eating the Sun, Alles ist aus Sternenstaub, which will be published by Edition Michael Fischer in a period of time.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Work by French artist Nelly Monnier.
There are days when every idea and feeling you try and hold on to slips from your grasp, and I wonder whether or not it would be practical to quite permanently wear those gloves, the ones usually made for the tinier hands of children, which are entirely covered on the palms in small, gripping, rubbery spots, because perhaps the ideas would stick better, perhaps we could hold onto each other more effectively when the storm season arrives.
Copyright © 2019 Ella Frances Sanders, All rights reserved.