No.163

October, a list:

1. At this time of year, if I’m not wearing my glasses, I cannot always tell if the movements across the trees are birds, or dead leaves—when it is windy those two things can look eerily, beautifully similar

2. You said ‘I guess this is what missing someone feels like’, which for me is like having a pincushion for a heart

3. Summer ended, defiantly, and like a magic trick there are no tourists here any more

4. So often I seem to be in my own way, like a small landslide, or a knee-deep flood

5. You’re in the hospital, in Ground Floor South 2, and others come and go around you—right now, for example, there is an elderly man in the ward who plays the radio and the television at the same time, so loudly, and also says unkind things over the phone to people

6. I do not regret purchasing three notebooks in the last week, but I am yet to have anything to say in them

7. When I drove home on Wednesday there was a lone white egret standing at the edge of the sea, an empty beach and a low tide and I wonder what it was thinking about

8. If you’re lucky, you’ll be looking outside just as all the streetlamps turn on, or off, and that feels like witnessing something important

9. At present there are 61 tubes of gouache paint on the desk which is arguably too many: burnt sienna, deep violet, light apricot, etc.

10. Is there a word for how small, dense clouds will come down to rest themselves on the very tops of mountains?

11. You and I, we met in a cloud, do you remember?

WORKING-ON-A-BOOK NEWS:

I’ve now completed not-enough of the artwork for my next book, but as I will explain to my editor in an email I’m yet to write, I cannot go any faster than I can go. I think that for a lot of people, the pandemic has left them holding liquid things where before there were solid things, and I count myself among this number. What can you do with armfuls of stuff and tasks that feels like water, instead of stone, or clay? Probably lots of things, if I spent some time thinking about it.

(I hope very soon, too, to be able to share something that I’ve been working on for the remarkable Orion Magazine, which will appear first in the winter issue, a thing that I think as readers of this newsletter you will appreciate. I know I keep mentioning this, but by way of a clue, it is something that will be mentioned recurrently—in fact it might be that I could just tell you, right now this minute, but I haven’t asked anyone and so I don’t actually know.)

BOOKS THAT I RETURN TO:

Returning to a book isn’t just about re-reading it, a physical hold-in-hands revisiting, it can also be the returning of characters or images from a book unbidden, or certain emotions felt while reading later coming back to haunt in a generally positive manner. Similar to being tapped lightly on the shoulder, or whispers in a quiet corridor, or touching the bottom of a swimming pool. In hindsight perhaps this section should have been called ‘Books That Return to Me’.

This book, Pond, I have read a total of once, in the January of 2019, but images and feelings from it return to me fairly often. It would be hard to say why, so I won’t try to now, but the strong, baffling desire to read it again has not left me alone, and so when I’m next reunited with the various cardboard boxes of my lonely books, expect to hear from me again.

Previous ‘Books That I Return To’ can be found in newsletters no.133, no.134, and no.138.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

More work from Copenhagen-based photographer and art director Armin Tehrani, whose images I first fell in love with around the time of newsletter no.133. I think it’s the light.

“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all. I’m not sure it can be made external you see.”

— Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond