No.245

August ending, a list:

1. The world undoes itself a million tiny times each day and there are some who work, who try so very hard, to stitch it back together, while others are hell-bent-hell-shaped and intent on destruction and I wonder how plain it is now, that it is becoming undone more quickly than we can mend unless there shortly ensues a great and thorough dissolving of the systems which are bringing us all to knees

2. The ground is too hot for knees, for kneeling

3. After engaging in deep and determind avoidance for months, I fill out a tax return and then surprise myself by how absorbed it is possible to become in accounting software—this is not a variety of absorption I’m familiar with

4. I speak with friends about infants, and the moving of lives from one end of a country to the other, and shades of white for walls, and anxiety, and how books could perhaps be discovered as opposed to categorised, and the art of distraction, and—

5. Leaving a small box of ripe plums from our tree on the neighbour’s window ledge which consequently get heavily rained on before she can find them; another small heap of plums left up in the first-floor entryway of slightly further away and beloved neighbours, to them I send a message stating I have left you plums on the windowsill next to your shoes

6. On the days in which I don’t get anything tangible done—whether that is writing hours or painting hours or the facing of space-time hours generally—I will glue and place a carefully cut-out image or fragment from a magazine or journal of some sort into the blank diary space to lend an air of but something did happen here, images such as:

7. “August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.” — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

8. There have only been perhaps five occasions this month where I’ve left the main front door open all day long, because it was warm and sunlighted enough and because I’ve been attempting to store as much of that reality as possible in the cracks in walls, in between the gaps of the stairs, the small dusty gaps where things have fallen out or been broken-through—if I’ve filled enough of those tiny voids with summer perhaps it will leach back out slowly and steadily over the course of winter

9. The autumn ‘Root Catalog’ column, as of two days ago available to read in full on the Orion website:

   Watching the Japanese maple closely in the garden this year (the first time I have been able to observe a Japanese maple day-to-day) its leaves appeared like ships stretched out on strings inside bottles, or like those strands of flags whisked out from a magician’s sleeves. A cold branched silence for months on end, then leaves pulled out by the sun in the manner of bottled ships, in only a week growing larger than hands and a deep purple-red. It all felt highly improbable.

10. We test old electrical wires with an unassuming-looking plastic box to see if there is anything still alive in there—hello?—before cutting and taping up their severed coppery ends, a surprisingly heavy yet flexible strand of lead-coated history pulled from the walls and safely disposed of which means it has lived at the bottom of the staircase for a few days

11. Living in a small enough town that, as the postwoman has informed me, people will sometimes send mail addressed with only things like ‘Grandpa, Market Street’ and hope for the best

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THIS POEM AGAIN, FIRST PUBLISHED OCTOBER 14TH 2023:

Concerned with Atrocities, Before Breakfast

This morning I neatly slice a slightly overripe

slightly wrinkled peach

in half

It occurs to me that so much fruit of faraway places will not get

eaten

Will not get

loved, held

Instead, I read of the words said aloud by a mother in Gaza—

wishing her small baby had never been born because already

its fragile life has

gone, taken by types of violence the universe never meant

to touch its tiny form

The stars I suppose they cry themselves awake, asleep, I cannot focus on anything

because I am eating two peach halves and

walking alongside a river

as the daily promises made by gentle people in hotter, smoke-filled apartment buildings are broken

and burned in ways

that cannot be put back together

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

New to the website are three original paintings: ‘Ghosts’, ‘Swifts Returning’ and ‘He Drank His Coffee in the Rain’.

Along with low-stock copies of some signed books: the Vietnamese and Korean editions of The Illustrated Book of Sayings, the UK edition of Everything, Beautiful, the Brazilian Portuguese and Korean editions of Lost in Translation.

Single copies left of the Italian Illustrated Book of Sayings and the French and Chinese editions Lost in Translation.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Paintings of various sorts by Australian artist Alice Laura Palmer, with some of her still life pieces reminding me of Lucy Roleff—longer term readers of this newsletter will know Roleff’s work appears with a strange regularity (No.231, No.220, No.190, No.176, No.156, No.148, and initially back in the September of four years ago, No.136).

— Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas Salomé, September 19th, 1913

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

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