No.244

Not yet at the end of August and already the darkness is replacing the light in a way that unsettles. Still in the summer habit of not needing to switch on any lights in rooms of the house—at and around the summer solstice there never comes a dark dark, so it’s possible to not touch a light switch for several months—it is now alarmingly, noticeably, thickly dark by 10pm. Even an hour earlier it is starting to feel ludicrous to persist with the not-turning-on-lights, though we do, animals as we are, slinking albeit subconsciously towards a season of cold and hibernation and sore throats and that it was laughable we ever sat outside warming our exposed skins.

“As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.”

— Joan Didion, Blue Nights

This morning the sun is firmly hidden within dense, river-valley cloud, which brings with it the kind of rain one might expect more from an October. The sky a flat paper-white, no apparent punctuation of birds to interrupt, though enough trees at close distance that instead of birds I can watch for the moments where large raindrops make single leaves shudder to themselves. To myself I think but how quickly do birds dry.

A short time previously I’d ventured outside to pile yesterday’s laundry onto a single tired arm—having optimistically neglected to bring it inside last night, it’s either immediate retrieval or forevermore giving up completely on the notion of dryness—halfway along the sagged line scaling a small and temporary mountain of gravel in too-large shoes, the laundry stacking damply and surprisingly heavily and obscuring my resigned face from any up-early neighbours. I forgive myself for thinking wistfully on occasion about climates where one can reliably dry clothes outside in sun in less than a morning, starched with bright light, perhaps even a slight dustiness or pinch of salt.

When we lived on the southwestern edge of Ireland during one of the COVID-19 lockdowns it would often be so excessively windy that clothes hung outside on the line would essentially be dried horizontally, and anything less than strongly-placed pegs would see smaller or more slippery garments taken halfway down the garden, sometimes as far as the pond with the optimistic wooden chair positioned for a person to sit and look out across the bay—I think the idea was that one would be able to sit and watch the orange-pink sun slumping gently down, but in reality sitting in the pond-side chair was sitting and watching rain approach.

I suppose that pegging up laundry to dry en plein air, while likely not a deep or existential thrill for anybody, is one of the few remaining and consistent ways in which we interact with the whims of weather, with seasons. Perhaps hanging out laundry is now even a revolutionary act. Something that says I still believe in nature and its powerful, delicate balance. We’ve so completely divorced ourselves from the natural cycles of everything that it’s shocking to us when those cycles don’t cooperate with plans made, and the daily habits of a great many people look more and more like determined, mindless, concentric circling away from what is most essential, most beautiful, most alive.

As I’ve sat here, in one comfortable chair of a number of comfortable chairs likely too numerous and indulgent for two people, the sky has moved from white to grey to discernible gliding cloud shapes and back to white again. It says I will change, and don’t wait for me, and I ask again but this time to the returned whiteness but how quickly will the birds dry.

The Sometimes Newsletter is an entirely reader-supported publication. If you love reading, and are able to, please do consider becoming a paid supporter to help ensure the newsletter’s continuation. Alternatively you can subscribe at no cost to receive the regular, numbered posts by email, and the main archive currently remains accessible to all.

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

In the coming few weeks, the Autumn 2024 issue of Orion will arrive to the newsstands and to people’s mailboxes, this issue being my second-ever outing as designer for the magazine, now in its 41st year.

The issue is a ‘super-saturated celebration of green, looking back at a colour that once sustained us in the hopes that we won’t let it disappear.’ It is true, there is green on every single page, much of it, and I know this because I put it there.

Related-ish, and the most tangible way to encounter my work: The currently available collection of original drawings and paintings on my website, which includes the piece above, Blues.

(A few more paintings will be added in the coming days, so do contact me if there is a particular piece you’ve seen elsewhere and have interest in.)

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Paintings from an ongoing series titled ‘Holding Patterns’ by between-London-and-Brisbane artist, writer, and curator Miranda Hine.

While out in town the other day, an exchange brought forth the following question from someone just-met, a visiting friend of a friend, who had been surprised to hear from the aforementioned mutual friend that I’d once painted a very tiny slug atop a door handle:

“So, where do you get your ideas?”

I didn’t have an answer to this, because although a common enough question to ask of a person with purportedly artistic sensibilities, what it felt I was being asked, and why I didn’t have anything remotely articulate to offer in return, was:

“Where did you get you brain?”

Again and for however long necessary: (Actions for demanding a ceasefire in Palestine.) / (Report Palestinian censorship in publishing.) / (Reading list for a Free Palestine.)

---

Paid supporters of The Sometimes Newsletter receive several additional posts each month, including things like short stories, illustrated essays, and more detailed looks into creative processes. The most recent of these is an illustrated three-part essay, Bird Flying, I’m Walking: