It has been five weeks since the last newsletter, and in this time I have been full of notions. Notions about what it meant that there would soon be two hundred newsletters, notions about announcements and intentions and weather, and notions about myself in relation to all of it. In truth, it felt very much as though I needed to say something large or at least vaguely important at this point—so many paragraphs and observations and lists had been written, and published in this form, and did I need something more to show for it.
As it turns out, what I have at this precise moment in two-hundred-newsletter-time is nothing to show you. Not because all of this time and effort hasn’t accumulated in a good way (it has) and not because I couldn’t face sitting down and making it into something whole (I did), but rather because things simply don’t seem to happen before their time. One could argue, in fact, that everything is only and always on time.
What I have held—clutched manically onto—for the past five weeks has been frustratingly intangible. Beginnings of things I believe to be worthwhile but that I know would not find an easy home with a publisher; the sense that I keep missing small, critical happenings; the shock of greenness in this river valley; the routines that ensure a tethered feeling but that nonetheless drink up precious energy. I’ve reminded myself of the hares glimpsed in fields, their frozen stillness, their apparent indecisiveness when it comes to knowing which way to run. More and more I am unsure if I’ve spelled words correctly.
I send a text message to someone saying that I’m trying to get this newsletter off the ground, and then immediately wonder why it seems so urgent. Like a weightless yet lumbering hot air balloon before it goes anywhere, it would remain happily grounded were it not for intervention. Why, I think, are we so quick to intervene? Why, exactly, are we always so determined to avoid meeting ourselves where we are?
Where we are, much of the time, is not worthy of announcement, or exclaim. We are, usually, in situations of small-to-medium struggle and stress, perpetually used up or distracted by the business of maintenance—though the buildings all seem to have been built by someone else.
The day that the swifts returned was a Sunday, May 7th, and I was halfway through a migraine. I didn’t know I was barely halfway through, and I only knew the swifts had returned because the person caring for my migrained body told me so—I did not go outside for another two days, but he brought a small snip of a larch branch inside. Their needles are incredibly soft and supple and did you know about this?
People still do not really know the exact migratory routes swifts take to get here from Southern and Equatorial Africa, but it is one of the longest migrations of all of them—over 10,000 miles, and never once landing during that time. Here above the river they will feed on insects, high up, fifty to a hundred metres, and my neck aches even thinking about how many hours I will spend watching them, eyes craned upwards, over the next few months. It bothers me, that I missed the arrival of those earliest, warm, soot-crescent bodies.
In the supermarket, today, I wait for a man wearing a pale blue polo shirt to select bananas. The top row is incredibly green, the bottom a supposedly perfect and edible yellow, and I am not surprised when he bends to rip a perfectly yellow punch in half—taking three, leaving three. I’m also there for a supposedly perfect and edible yellow, and briefly contemplate picking up the rejected half he left behind before deciding that I wish to rip off exact bananas of my choosing. For whatever odd reason, it seemed important.
A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE INTERACTION BETWEEN ANXIETY AND CREATIVITY:
I suspect that while it may seem that anxiety can effectively fuel creativity, and it can for a while, the reality is rather more sinister. Like an invasive plant species, first curious and even beautiful, perhaps a fresher shade of green, it slowly but surely pushes out whatever was growing on the land before, and pretty quickly you can be left looking at a single species where before there were hundreds. You might even be complimented on the lushness of green that anxiety has produced, but as with any single-species system, any apparent health is entirely illusion.
The small beginnings of creative thought cannot hold on inside this type of environment, cannot be adequately nourished, and it can be difficult at first to figure out what has happened around you. Why, although you are looking at the same quantity of green, it feels so different, so barren, so exhausted.
Techniques for dealing with invasive plants are varied, but it is generally acknowledged that you need to clear everything out—usually carefully and including all the root systems—before other species even begin to stand a chance again, or can find the oxygen to do so. This isn’t to say that you cannot begin to grow other things, in fact it would be wise to do so, but keep them protected, in a greenhouse or in trays and small pots in your front room.
Anxiety has attached itself to many, many more of us in the last handful of years, grown vigorously. As a result we still look our different shades of green but are being pushed out from under ourselves, and cannot keep up with the demands produced by something that spreads so quickly—anxiety will take all the light, the water, the oxygen, and when you have given it everything it will turn around and ask for more. Personally I haven’t landed on exactly the right method to dig out such roots, but they say spring is an excellent time for gardening.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Astonishingly beautiful pieces by Japanese artist Fumi Imamura. There is a short interview here, which goes into a little detail about her process.
“A certain amount of silence might be useful at this point. She hopes it will be the kind of silence that mends its own tissues, and that maybe she’s learning something out of all this difficulty.”
“It’s hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.”
— Carol Shields, The Republic of Love
“Still, while it's one thing to love words, she understands it’s quite another for words to love back.”
— Joan Barfoot, Some Things About Flying
Thank you for these 200 newsletters, Ella. I'm always glad to see a new one in my inbox.
“Still, while it's one thing to love words, she understands it’s quite another for words to love back.” Anne LaMott writes in “Bird by Bird” that the reader must like the narrator. I am aware of this when I’m writing but it’s always an elusive goal. I find myself shaping and re-shaping sentences in an effort to get the words to love the reader back. Perhaps if I used more longer, oh sounds, or softer consonants, or wrote in a slower tempo, like Lento in 6/8 time. But I always feel like I’m trying to make my writing. Be quiet when I do that. Like I’m telling it to shush. You on the other hand, I believe have captured that ability.