No.242

July ending and August beginning, a list:

1. “I’m doing badly, I’m doing well; whichever you prefer.” — Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

2. Apparently if you hang something which looks like a wasp nest in places where you do not wish wasps to nest, the wasps will suppose unavailability and move on to elsewhere

3. Many nights I’m falling asleep with the suspicion that this reality is surely the one we wake up from, to something far more beautiful

4. But, then, this reality has the albatross, and honeysuckle, and clouds that settle themselves in valleys, and magnolia trees, and the way I see people look at each other sometimes

5. I wonder how much all of the concrete, everywhere, weighs, and how much the tarmac weighs—is that even different to concrete—and the steel, and the machines built to move all of those things around, crush them up, flatten them back down. Does it all weigh more than love?

6. Is love, perhaps, one of the heaviest things of all, and after all which is more reassuring—that love is the heaviest thing, or that love is weightless and more difficult to catch than an airborne seed in high wind

7. The number of days in the summer with enough sun, enough late in the day, that the desire to get into the freezing river overwhelms. In the east of France we used to get into a section of the Loue, a tributary of the Doubs, which had created for itself a soft whirling pool within the water below a natural line of large rocks; it was possible to be carried around and around in the water with barely a single stroke of the arm or kick of a leg—I could have stayed there forever

8. A discussion about communication, how different it is now that we are so easily able to send a message here, a message there, small drips of hello and look at this and I am here rather than long spaces in between the talking. Now, people rarely seem to elect to speak on the phone, let alone write physical letters, and instead instant, digital messaging lies like a thin layer—would it be fair to say veneer?—over almost all relationships. Periods of silence though would allow for something to grow and deepen, perspectives to develop, an envelope of existence which can then be brought back between two people and opened in a richer way

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9. For example my deepest friendship is one in which we hear each other’s voices on the phone once a week; I suspect this allows for a clarity of seeing each other which would not exist were we to message back and forth every day

10. I am supposing

11. I am deadlines and meetings and emails and too much computer screen, but I am also unplanted seeds and the neighbour’s cats and sitting quietly and picking up feathers and cutting the entire hedge into cloud shapes

12. Watching an incredibly round man in paint-marked overalls scale an incredibly tall and thin ladder next door in order to repaint the highest wooden dormers sitting out from the third floor—the wood is in rotten shape and needs replacing, not repainting and so our neighbour, who owns the second floor of the building, despairs

13. A dark cloud looms

14. Loom; ‘mid 16th century: probably from Low German or Dutch; compare with East Frisian lōmen ‘move slowly’, Middle High German lüemen ‘be weary’.’

15. I still think you sometimes say weary when you mean wary

16. From my current desk I can see many things—out of an east-facing window—but consistently any person walking on the pavement on the opposite side of the road to the house, seen either clearly or blurrily depending on whether I’m wearing glasses or not, and I find it surprising how reliable my peripheral vision is at knowing there is a passerby of some sort

17. A page of stray dogs for adoption shows up on the screen and you later say I of course like that one because it is scared

18. I haven’t seen the house martins above the front door in some days—could they have left for Africa already? On the British Trust for Ornithology website I read that their wintering grounds remain a complete mystery. That the reason for this is because in the non-breeding season, in Africa, they are rarely seen. This has led to speculation that they might spend long periods of time feeding at high altitude, perhaps above the rainforest, where they can go unnoticed.

19. I read this and feel very strongly that I’d also like to spend long periods of time at high altitude above the rainforest, going unnoticed

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Painted people doing painted things by Dahye Choi, whose work can also be found within newsletter No.226, from January of this year.

The body of a bird in your mouth
breathing songs.

…

I let alphabets cling to me
as I climb the thread of language
between myself and the world.
I muster crowds in my mouth:
suspended between language and the world,
between the world and the alphabets.

— Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, from ‘A Body’, translation by Atef Alshaer and Sarah Maguire

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