No.228
Февраль. Достать чернил и плакать! / It’s February. Get ink and weep!
— Boris Pasternak
The month when we are lulled, in the Northern Hemisphere, into a false sense of something. Crocuses, snowdrops, hellebores, primulas have braved the above ground in the garden, only to become appalled when snow returns for half a day. The soil freezes, unfreezes, then freezes again, and we don’t have time to retrieve the rhubarb or the strawberries from the old house in between. So instead, on one of the coldest days so far we prune the three ancient apple trees, before the sap rises, which were poorly maintained and shaped for some time. Older than us put together though—they could easily be one hundred years old, and more if they were planted when the house was built.
You can read an old tree like a book. Here, someone pruned well, cut close and cleanly, although perhaps it would have been a good branch to leave for the light. Here though, the cuts made left the tree open to the weather, to infection, and it put up a huge number of fruitless watershoots in alarm, crowding itself and preventing airflow.
It takes most of a day, one ladder between us and the robin on needle-thin legs keeping a close watch on proceedings, its shriek-singing interrupting the consistent sound of a saw blade, of sighing with shoulder-soreness, and the slicing of small red secateurs that came from a plant nursery in the deep southwest of Ireland where the small birds flew inside to be ignored by a huge tabby cat named Cobnut.
The light is frantically disappearing by the time we finish attending to the third tree, which means it’s time for the rookery to fill the sky in its hundreds of wings, bird-time, landing and leaving.
As I wait for the fresh green to appear, which will be weeks yet, I feel overcome with the need to purchase stationery, ballpoints or erasers or gridded books for the express purpose of accounting—because maybe I will be more likely to feel enthusiasm for maintaining expenses properly if QuickBooks is not involved?—or envelopes to keep secrets in, or graphite pencils with points that haven’t yet uttered a single word.
On a recent Friday, I notice a stationery store while caffeinated and in the Stockbridge neighbourhood of Edinburgh that fills this need very well, and leave the towering shelves with a wedge of thickly textured, off-white envelopes. To fill with overdue letters, to fill with things I’ll forget about.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Photographs taken prior to 1948 of Palestinians which have been embroidered, painted, made so beautiful, by the Amman, Jordan-based multidisciplinary artist and urban planner Dana Barqawi. They come from a 2018 series titled ‘A Land Without A People’, as Dana states on her website: “inspired by the widely cited colonial rhetoric “a land without a people for a people without a land”. The artworks portray and focus on the people of the “claimed” land without a people: Palestine.”
From the Museum of the Palestinian People: “The artworks celebrate Palestinian existence and culture, portraying the people of the land before 1948, focusing on the absent, erased narrative.”
War is no longer declared,
only continued. The monstrous
has become everyday.
— Ingeborg Bachmann, from “Every Day” trans. Mark Anderson
Paid supporters receive several additional posts each month, including things like short stories, longer illustrated essays, and more detailed looks into creative processes. The post going out tomorrow (Sunday 11th) is similar to Story of a Painting:
The photographs of Dana Barqawi….so very beautiful! ❤️✨🇵🇸
Reading this beautiful piece and discovering these pictures after having seen through my phone a body with half a face and no feet hanging by a literal thread to the window of a building located in a "safe zone", a "safe zone", a "safe zone", and I feel a little less alone in my grief, if not less angry or heartbroken.