No.199

I’ve been thinking—in other words dwelling to a likely unhelpful degree—about the unnecessary and peculiar nature of a great many things. For example, haven’t we made enough cars? There are probably more than enough to go around, but we go on making more. We probably, and in fact, have long since passed the point where we have enough of a huge number of things, but we go on, and on, and on. More, and more, and more. Do we just lack that setting of ‘enough’ completely? Did we lose it along the way? Did we sell ‘enough’ to the devil in return for decent internet connectivity? Most probably.

If, like me, you are overly sensitive to the world and all it contains, you will likely feel similarly about the fullness of everything, everywhere; surely we have enough roads, enough chairs, enough supermarkets, enough fishing vessels, enough rocket science, long since enough of all of it. We seemingly set in motion a series of fortunate-yet-unfortunate events that we now can’t stop, and for me it has same feeling as running too fast for your own legs. We know how that ends.

As a consequence of dwelling on this, I’ve also been trying to figure out what the antidotes might be. Is it the sum total of all the over-used, eye-rolling proverbs? Is it small moments of revolution adding up to a weight that equates to total overhaul? I’m worried that the antidotes we have are too weak now, to counter the scale of the problems. I’m worried that we’ve forgotten how to be happy with anything small, that the brief moments in which we could feel genuinely sated simply aren’t recognisable to us any more. I think, maybe, that we are very confused. We dismiss and overlook the ephemeral and delicate found in the natural world in search of a permanent, purchasable feeling or promise that, in the end, decomposes more easily than a forest floor.

All of the things we were told to run towards have left us disenchanted and disembodied, but it’s like something caught in spiderwebs—you can’t realistically find many ways out of it, and if you do you’re not in great shape. In addition, being stuck in spiderwebs has become a comfortable, even safe feeling for a lot of people. And would we recognise the spider? Perhaps the only thing to do is truly and swiftly pull it all down. Perhaps, if everyone pulls down their own small piece of sticky, ill capitalism, we will be able to see something better.

While I dwell on the desperateness, spring here feels reluctant, and maybe that’s part of my own disenchantment. The cherry tree just outside the house found itself with blossom two weeks ago, then dared to add a bit more, and yesterday most of it was already on the tarmac after some high winds and rain. It seemed wrong that all of those delicate, whisper-thin petals had been brought down so abruptly, and I felt a visceral protectiveness of the tree. It had waited all winter. It had bravely, while snow still lingered on the mountains, dressed itself in a perfectly light shade of pink, and then it couldn’t do anything to keep it.

It’s turned cold again too, and it can be difficult to keep your hopes afloat when the temperatures drop grimly back down. My fingers turn numb holding onto the umbrella handle, my exhales are horrifyingly visible in the air, rain finds a way to dampen socks anyway, and I conclude on the five-minute walk from the house to the post office that the only reasonable solution is to run away with my book collection to northern Portugal. I won’t do this though, because I suspect my literary agent is getting tired of updating my address details.

Instead, I think about how this town is glued together by the grimness of winter, the way any place falling at a precariously northern latitude has to be. Do we wait, in order to let ourselves fall apart a little in the warmer months? I think that’s what we have no choice but to do all winter, stay together, and it only feels safe to fall apart in the sun. I listen to a woman called Beverley who tells me that she is organising a sock knitting workshop, I make small talk about empty shelves with the people working in the Co-op, I apologise again to the postman about the bicycles half-blocking the hallway, I notice people picking up litter but I never manage to see people dropping it, I see while driving down the main road that the hillsides covered in old oaks are just barely, imperceptibly, putting their leaves on.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

These richly-layered and feeling paintings, informed by memories of both Australian and Philippines landscapes, by Chloe Caday, based in She Oaks, Wadawurrung, Victoria. (There are paintings I’d like to look at, and paintings I’d like to roll myself up in, and these are definitely the latter.)

FINAL IMPORTANCES:

The violet carpenter bee is the bulkiest of all the bees; The place where the Solimões and the Rio Negro unite to form the Amazon river is called the encontro das aquas; The woman who runs a cake shop in town has added a long-haired chihuahua to her life; The line “Only a man who hates his privilege can be trusted with it.” from Rebecca Lee’s collection Bobcat and Other Stories; In fact from the same book the haunting sentence “It doesn’t know what you want so it tries to give you everything.”; Agreement on the consistent fact that by the end of eating a banana you no longer want to be eating a banana; The number of nanoseconds in a second is the same as the number of seconds in thirty years.