No.188

A good portion of people measure their time in springs or summers, and recently I've been wondering about those who measure their time in winters. Likely not many of us. We may be expert at concerning ourselves with the darker matters of living, but that isn’t the same as consciously existing on the north side, the side which knows it's in shadow. To dwell in the dark is often to dwell with anxiety, or stress, to only be able to look out with half-closed eyes. It becomes easy to believe that this is just how things are going to be from now on.

These things can be collected into a category we will henceforth call “Where the Sun Never Arrives.” Stepping on a snail in the dark. Clear-cutting of forests. Bad haircuts. Finding moths stuck to the car windscreen. Not knowing how to say I love you. Leaving things behind on trains. Insomnia. Damaged books. Infestations. Unexpected bills. Root canals. Family members forgetting who they are. Shins being bruised by furniture. Plastic in rivers. Rising damp. Meaning well but in fact doing harm.

This is not to say that the shadow doesn’t sometimes give a home to beauty. I’m thinking here mainly of hidden, whispering species of moss, and bat colonies, of the sorts of things we don’t often go looking for. It can be easy to feel that the extent of a shadow is the extent of everything, but the sun remains there all day on the other side of those mountain ridges, and more often than not it only takes a few steps one way or another to find a small handful of that warmth.

Extract from my column in the winter issue of Orion

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

As per above, below is the next edition of Root Catalog in its painted completeness. (However while writing this my mind is already firmly in the spring issue, which contains a beautiful few words from Sámi languages. It has been strange and reassuring to, every couple of months, be reminded that the next season is approaching us, unstoppable and full of lovely unknowns.)

This past week also contained the slightly manic going-through-final-checking of the few hundred painted files of Everything, Beautiful, which will shortly be on their way to a publisher for its first foreign language edition. About this I’m hugely pleased, because given the awkwardness and intensity of the book in terms of lettering and colour and placement, I really wasn’t sure if foreign publishers would rise enthusiastically to the challenge—it can definitely be considered a challenge—and I hope there will be other editions to follow next year, because the translation of any sort of beauty into other places or people is a very large and glimmering part of what the book is about.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Paintings by Melbourne-based Jesse Dayan, the colours of which felt important during an especially frost-bitten-below-zero beginning to December.

I’ve realised, though why it’s taken me so long I don’t know, that my shelves contain very few books that could be thought of as fun or light-hearted or, hell, even relaxing. I naturally (or unfortunately?) gravitate towards serious thoughts and serious things and what I deem good writing, but lately this fact has been unbalancing—the other night I walked into my study to try and find such a book and simply could not locate one.

And so I will scrape myself through the rest of this year free (ideally blissfully) from Serious Works, and I certainly will not be taking any such tomes to America, which is where I seem to be going on Monday, for a short-to-medium while.