No.147

It hasn’t happened in a while, but sometimes I encounter a night where sleep is presented to me as wishful thinking. Call it insomnia, call it Earl Grey tea, call it anxiety, call it February, call it deadlines, call it catching up with the feelings you thought you’d already felt, call it losing sight of futures, call it the raging storm blowing in from the Atlantic, call it whatever you like. On this recent night, I resorted to reading Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband until 4am, the pages of which turned up more than a few good punches:

“our moods do not believe in each other” (Emerson)

“Possible night, impossible night”

“After all the heart is not a small stone to be rolled this way and that.”

I don’t mind these nights, and I don’t mind the strange corridors of thought that I find myself wandering around in as dawn approaches, but it can be hard to complete the next day or two in a normal way. Lack-of-sleep delirium can lead to revelations, but mostly it’s just being very, very tired. Some good things have happened in the last two weeks regardless, like putting together the object below and finding another house to rent that has mountains pouring in through its windows, like attempting to knit a woollen hat. On that note, why did nobody tell me that knitting makes your hands ache so much? Likely I am doing it all wrong but I actually needed to ice my right hand the other evening.

In conclusion: as battering as February and its weather is, as absurd as some days are, I feel alright, I think we’ll be alright.

SMALL ANNOUNCEMENT:

This morning I pressed ‘GO’ on a small order of slim books, the end point after some late nights and a lot of hours moving illustrations this way and that way on the computer. If you follow me on Instagram, or if you received newsletter No.145, you’ll know that in the last weeks I started illustrating some of the ways in which we used to be close pre-pandemic. Almost all of us have, as the months progress and the strangeness continues, found ourselves longing for familiar places or for foreign ones, for the curls of loud steam in coffees shops or the hush of libraries, for the screech of subway trains or the aliveness of city centres, for our families and for the moments of serendipity usually promised by daily existence.

1. If I may be so bold the endpapers are quite spectacular and 2. The final cover paper is significantly creamier in colour than the mockup above

With all this universal longing in mind, I thought it would be nice to make a treasure, one that could be rested on a bookshelf at home or (perhaps especially) sent to a loved and missed person in another place, or another country. It felt it was very important to offer worldwide shipping at a low cost, because everybody everywhere has been tangled up in this pandemic one way or another.

There are some more details about it on my website, but I wanted to include it in here, before Instagram, before the books have even arrived from the printer because I’m excited and because the people who read this newsletter are some of the loveliest ones I’ve ever internet-encountered. (For the first 15 orders I’m going to include a small original painting, just to say thank you for supporting this more personal and deeply-felt project.)

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

More images by Emma Hardy. I fell in love with her work around the time of newsletter No.126 (last April), and have thought about some of those photographs on and off since then—partly because of the light in them, partly because of the greens in them, partly because of the people in them.

When things get more challenging (see: global pandemic, all other worrying aspects of the planet) I find myself wanting to retreat from optional interactions, from sharing more personal work or thought, from excitement and demanding ideas and all the things of that sort. I think it’s a type of self-preservation, as if I were a jam in a privileged pantry somewhere. I’m trying to actively pull against this instinct though, something I feel important to try and do because, well, the world isn’t held together by silences.

The end.