No.220

Oct 21, 2023

Something spoken of this week on a long-distance call with a friend has stuck, evergreen-sap-like, in my mind since. It concerns the noticing of how, when speaking of heavy, sad, or atrocious things with someone, it depends a lot on the someone as to how you might feel afterwards.

The Dutch language has a word, uitwaaien, which translates to mean an invigorating walk, excursion generally, in the wind. I was thinking about this yesterday while walking through the town in strong winds and near-horizontal rain in search of a pastry, as we are currently in an area being moderately brushed by storm warnings. The coast east of here, Aberdeenshire, has been far more affected, with red warnings and the chaos that ensues from such colour, while here flooding and other damage has been more manageable with a few pieces of roads washed away here, and there, some trees down, and the weather reminding us that we are not in charge of it all.

The pastries in question are delivered on Fridays from a local bakery situated across a couple of mountain valleys, the route over being more or less the same as the one I take each week. Having walked through town in the bluster, pausing at the Post Office to drop off a parcel and comment to the person behind the counter that my umbrella wasn’t really achieving much outside, it was faintly saddening to find the coffee roaster empty of any and all bakery wares. Myself and another determined patron committed to holding out, and our increasingly caffeinated patience was rewarded an hour or so later when a squat man in a high visibility vest came steaming through the door laden with the usual paper bags. The wood fire was hot, the music was The Mills Brothers, and the importance of being safe and known inside a small community, especially when surrounded destructive forces, natural or otherwise, was I think appreciated by each and every person who stepped through the door after that.

This morning the sparrows are back on the windowsills, once again busily throwing out less preferred seeds from the feeder. The storm seems to have calmed slightly, or at least moved further west, and as much as I don’t find a lot to say these days, I do think that certain things are never wasted: mending after any sort of storm, putting out seed for birds, fetching a glass of water for someone who has lost track of time, tucking arms into other arms, rescuing small pale-brown slugs from the inside of glass doors.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

New paintings by Lucy Roleff, from a 2023 group exhibition in Melbourne. Long term readers of this newsletter will not be at all surprised that I fell in love with these, as I seem to have taken to falling in love with all her paintings, as evidenced by their appearance in newsletters No.190, No.176, No.156, No.148 and No.136. Even after all this time, I still can’t quite put my finger on what it is about them.

“I have always been someone who feels no time is ever wasted—and watching my life you’d think I waste a lot of it. Yes, I am overwhelmed by demands on my time. But I am a great daydreamer. I lose track of time and have little to show it. I’m a big believer in letting time unspool, in just being there for the so-called dreaded waste of time. Feeling the presence of time sometimes requires just letting it flow through one and being unoccupied by all else. It’s not meditation. It’s just a way of feeling the passage of irrecoverable minutes, and how letting them go, just go, you suddenly feel them so fully by feeling how you will never get them back… I love feeling that erasural current. Its fierce subtraction. Its indifference. I love the “forever gone” in it. The absolute. It’s one of the few ways to touch it, to feel it touch you. It’s cold, all right. But it’s so real. It excites me. It restores me to my right human size. Randomness. Brevity. One needs reminding.”

— Jorie Graham, an interview from January, 2023 in The New Yorker (italics my own)

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