No.177
June, a list:
Reflections of birds in windows
We are destroying mostly all things at a broken-neck speed and so surely there is simply no time any more for people to spend on destroying each other? Though this does not seem to be widely accepted or even acknowledged
I noticed a male mallard duck standing by the edge of the road and this seemed unusual initially, but it was there because its duck-partner had been hit and killed by a car and was lying a small distance into the road—the fact that the duck was standing there and waiting for something to perhaps happen or for someone to perhaps help was instantly and overwhelmingly sad
We found our neighbour at the front of the building looking for her bank card, which she explained had been used just the evening previously in the convenience store across the road. The following day we saw her again and were informed that it was OK—she had found the bank card in the fridge
The four bluest-blue blackbird eggs tucked away in the garden hatched into breathtakingly vulnerable things
I’m quite sure I’ve been emotionally held together by swimming pool chlorine for the past couple of months but it appears to be holding up
I bought you a book on Japanese joinery but have not given it to you yet, though I don’t know what I might be waiting for
Most of my small problems appear to be solved with crumpets
I have almost run out of the gouache colour ‘D043’, which is beige, which is surprising
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
Two weeks ago (I am late) the summer issue of Orion Magazine arrived to mailboxes and inboxes; within its pages is my illustrated essay ‘The Age of Noise’. For their 40th anniversary Orion asked 40 different writers and 40 different artists to consider the same question: when did the Anthropocene—or the age defined by man's imprint on planet Earth—really begin?
The result of this question is a very powerful and highly beautiful/thought-inducing issue, and I’m incredibly humbled by my inclusion. It’s one of the most serious pieces I’ve had published, and I’m thankful for spaces like Orion, which provide homes for the types of thinking and questioning we so sorely need.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Work by Italian photographer Arianna Lago.
Last night, let’s say about 10:30pm with daylight still firmly hanging in the Scottish sky, I turned the last page of Natalia Ginzburg’s 1962 essay collection The Little Virtues (Le piccole virtù)—having gulped down the second book half following news of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade there were almost too many thoughts inside to consider myself a reasonable person with a reasonable head or a reasonable body. There is a feeling-emotion that should perhaps have a new word, a feeling of being so saturated in thinking that you are stunned like a bird into a glass window and scarcely able to lift an arm. Two slices from her sentences follow, because they landed on me like stones and I think they need to land on more people like stones:
“We found ourselves living at the centre of a landscape on fire”
“It is not given to us to choose whether we are happy or unhappy. But we must choose not to be demonically unhappy.”
(That is it, I am sure! We must at least be firm in our resolve to not be demonically unhappy.)
This! is such a gift! Thank you.