No.194
February, a list:
My mother and I saw two goldcrests (Regulus regulus) in the greenless hedging up by the sewage works while walking last week—they weigh five or six grams and sometimes fly to the UK from Denmark, and in European folklore they are kings of everything
Yesterday marked, with grief and like a black smudging candle soot, a whole year since Russia invaded Ukraine
It was also the day my grandparents’ home became a new house for a family of strangers and how the significant facts of 2) and 3) can exist at once in the world is impossible to understand
During the winter the caravan park is completely empty, and the paved rectangles on which the movable caravan shells sit in the summer look very much like tombstones, or burial plots
In town I walked past a fenced garden on the edge of which was a large shrub completely, completely covered in large green buds and it obviously knows something
The anxiety of late winter is perhaps some of the most unrelenting anxiety
After approximately five years of denial and avoidance I’ve started keeping a migraine calendar, a physical one, where I paint dark blobs over the affected days—so far this year there have been ten blob days
I have been to the pool only once this month, which I suspect is because it was getting too strugglesome to risk small talk with other swimmers quite that early in the morning and also to experience every last one of the planet’s fluorescent lights before 7am
It is impossible to ever vacuum carpet faster than the carpet accumulates dust; by the end of your vacuuming the carpet is already dusty again and this makes me wonder what alternate agenda the inventors of carpet might have had
There should be a word for the strange period of time that takes you seemingly immediately from ‘Tea undrinkably hot’ to ‘Tea disappointingly lukewarm’—it appears a kind of tiny error in spacetime and/or perception
You are down by the river pruning the laurel and when I called you said “I can see the river now” which makes me wonder if there is any laurel left at all
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
The spring issue of Orion Magazine is out, you can read below my column in full, and currently on their website can also be found this piece about Senegalese food heritage by Jori Lewis. Th issue features exclusively works in or about translation and I believe it is a very, very good one.
vázzit (vad-dsit)
Walk
As it happens, I am currently preoccupied with rivers, with the night, and with walking, and often find myself at the overlap of all three.
At my latitude, winter days are all the obvious things—very long, very dark, often frozen, unforgiving—but I’ve nevertheless been walking toward or along the river. Certainly a strange craving that perhaps, and simply, stems from too many hours curled over the desk. This craving has led me in the cold-fingered months to certain books, and to certain thoughts while reading those books, and to a selection of things and places and people who have spent winter feeling even colder than I have, in lands so desolate I can’t even dream them.
Some words within the Sámi languages, like njoammil (hare), and njuolla (scar), can be followed back to more than six thousand years ago, an impossible stretch of time to consider as I crunch my way down the same piece of gritted river path I’ve been pacing this winter. The dark at 4 p.m. isn’t quite dark enough, and there is still too much to-ing and fro-ing in town for the dark to feel calm or the nice kind of purposeless. Around 5 p.m., a truer gloaming, the eyes are deprived of the usual landmarks and are able to focus on the noise instead. The last strands of cloud-filtered light pick out the fast-moving river water, which makes the kind of unfolding heart sounds we don’t have words for in English. I look up the Sámi word for walk, vázzit, and for year, jahki, and imagine the relationship between the two.
In a world so full of not-walking, it feels almost subversive to set out on foot. But the mind seems most keen and able to think its realest thoughts while walking, as though the two acts were tied up in some ancient, well-worn, unspoken routine. And even then it is possible to notice a difference in the texture of one’s thoughts depending on whether you are walking with or against the flow of nearby water, a phenomenon that can likely be replicated in crowded streets of people.
Last week someone told me an interesting thing about robins and their wintertime singing. I’ve now forgotten what it was, but I know that countless millions of buds have waited patiently on trees all through the coldest months, and I hope to still be walking along the same length of river when the first green arrives.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Further photographs taken by Colette der Kinderen, who can also be found in newsletter No.167.
— Megan Dunn, Tinderbox