No.230

So far this month has been marked by migraines. After a couple of months at the end of last year where they seemed less hell-bent on disruption March has, disappointingly, already provided three of them.

“I spent yesterday in bed with a headache not merely because of my bad attitudes” — Joan Didion, In Bed

In the late 19th century, doctors believed patients with migraine had a nervous energy, and though medical science no longer feels there is anything so convenient as a ‘migraine personality’, the practical madness and pain of the brain disorder will ensure you remain clawing at possible correlations and convictions on all the days when you do not have a migraine (because on the days that you do, you cannot do anything that even vaguely resembles functioning).

I make three small, incredibly unattractive handled vases out of air-drying clay, for no other reason than the clay had been in a drawer for long enough. Then I paint them. They are awful, and I like them hugely, and it’s a good reminder to just make things whenever the mood strikes, even if the end result isn’t anywhere near the standard you demand in your daily work.

Feeding the neighbour’s two cats again, as they are away for a weekend. They rehomed them as small-ish kittens and initially kept them both inside for some weeks, and even though they are now free to roam the town and river edges as much as they please, one of the two resolutely refuses to ever go beyond the hallway. Instead, she uses up her energy variously: by crash landing around their apartment, scrabbling and swooping in a highly focussed manner in an empty bathtub, investigating the underneath of kitchen cupboards, pushing pencils around the table, hiding in houseplants, etc. Soft, and quite mad.

On your birthday I run down several streets trying to locate the postman. We had missed each other by half an hour, finding an ‘undelivered’ notice stuck halfway through the letterbox, and I only caught him up because it happened to be the day of the month when they are required to post a copy of the local magazine through every single door.

Last weekend, while visiting family in a cold Inverness, I joined a group protesting the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. It’s impossible not to notice, attending a rally of that kind, how most other people are not there. That, in fact, from in front of the town hall in the city center you can see people upstairs in a McDonalds eating, while below others wave flags and shout for massacres to stop.

Patiently, I wait for the spring issue of Orion Magazine to arrive in physical form to me. From my Root Catalog column within its pages:

“Any paying-attention encounter with a bird feels notable, like the other week when a small sparrow came in through the window from the feeders hanging outside, and jumped about for a short time on the floor before realising I suppose that the landscape didn't quite make sense. I picked her up gently from her panicked flapping against a closed window on the other side of the room, carefully and the way I know I'm meant to—the way I've seen them hold birds when ringing them—and in the handful of hand-full-of-feather seconds it took to carry her to the open air I was acutely aware of the smallness of her organs, the tiny-strong heartbeat, the determined fragility.”

— Chelsea Dingman, from “Of Those Who Can’t Afford to Be Gentle”

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THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Paintings by the distinguished Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour (b.1947).

“When I close my eyes, there are no names written on children’s hands to identify their lifeless bodies. There are no teenagers reporting the latest from their throttled 2G broadband, screaming for attention, screaming for someone to care, screaming for it to stop. There are no journalists grieving their loved ones or shot dead at borders while trying to do their jobs. There are no makeshift love letters sent between queer Palestinian teenagers, one still living and the other already dead, who never got the chance to hold hands or say I love you before bombs struck their home. No. There is only love. All kinds of love. Big beautiful love that everyone can see and share. When I close my eyes, every love letter reaches its lover in Gaza.”

— Elena Dudum, “When I Close My Eyes: A Prayer for Gaza”