December-ending-January-beginning, a list:
The visitors came and went, bringing with them aged cheese from Paris
The migraines came and went
One neighbour elected either optimistically or recklessly to leave their laundry hanging out on the line during sub-zero temperatures and the next morning the various items of clothing were frozen solid, glittering
“… Home Scar. It’s the mark limpets leave when they cling to a rock. The longer the limpet sticks in the same place, the deeper the scar and the safer the limpet.” — from a forthcoming short story collection by Kirsty Logan, and after reading this I wondered who or what I might consider my own home scars
At Christmas you gift me an axe, I gift you a kitchen knife, and without intending to this fact forms another layer of agreement between us which states I will not hurt you
Weather warming to the point of tricking certain tree buds into opening before promptly sinking to -7 degrees; unnerving and I worry about it all
Many pathetic little prayers, as per further down in this newsletter
Amongst other resolves I am resolved to knit myself a hat
Walking through one of the streets which tie this town together we stopped at a wooden gate to look at sparrows in a garden; you noticed there was a bird flying and trapped inside a small polytunnel so I opened the gate and then the door of the polytunnel and the relief of the bird was palpable
Flooding, because it always floods here, the golf course watered down and the caravan park watered down and everything saturated as the river exhaled in its fullness
On the first day of the new year I watched with a camera and a receeding migraine as thirty or so friends and strangers took off their warm layers and swam into the loch under snowed-on hills and I thought again how strange we are, how kind and how strange and how awful
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
On December 20th, now already feeling long ago and therefore thought of as sometime in the distant past, I sent off my next book to its editor. Deadline end-of-year, deadline which loomed and which I am happy to have passed over, like a superstition or a small river.
During the process of illustrating this book the piece above served as a sort of waymarker, a tidepool, something which could be returned to in order to confirm the direction I was heading in, confirm that I was still carrying with me the essential ingredients. Completed early within the 156 paintings that now form seven chapters it contains the smallest silhouettes I’ve ever put to paper, and something about that decision subsequently followed me around—such small figures then featured frequently throughout.
More on this book, no doubt, soon, but for now it rests in a digital state, waiting for its return to paper.
IF YOU CAN FULLY ABSORB ONE THING THIS JANUARY, LET IT BE THIS:
Thoughts shared by Lebanese-Australian journalist Jeanette Francis (Jan Fran) as the year turned itself over. If you are already very overwhelmed—I would guess that a good proportion of this newsletter’s readership is sufficiently sensitive to global horror—it truly may not be the thing to read, but if you are feeling blasé or ambivalent about the world and your place within it then read and, honestly, be overwhelmed to a point of change:
The first time it happened I didn't think too much of it but then it happened again and again and again. The not-knowing. I'd be cutting a showreel (a terribly stale exercise admittedly) and I would struggle to find a single clip of anything I had ever said or done that I wanted to include. I'd get invited to events but I couldn't work out whether I wanted to go and if I did want to go, nowhere in my densely populated wardrobe could I find a single appropriate item of clothing to wear. And if I did find clothing, on my way home from the event, I couldn't decide whether I had enjoyed myself or not.
Friends would call and I wouldn't know if I felt like talking to them at that moment. I'd get offered gigs and decide to do them, then decide against them, then decide to do them again, then decide maybe I should practice law except I don't have a law degree and I can't work out if I want one. I feel a strong urge to cut my hair even though I'm certain a pixie cut would not suit me. I got some bad news but I couldn't work out if it was bad news or just news and then, when I finally decided it was bad news, I didn't feel bad about
it.
In a few hours 2024 will be over and 2025 might be the first ever year where I say this and actually mean it: new year, new me. It's out of my hands. It turns out seeing an unprecedented number of dead children in real time changes a person. It's changed the rate at which my heart beats and the number of hours I sleep each night and the thoughts I have while in downward facing dog. It's changed my friendships and mentorships and the overall sturdiness of my nervous system.
I have lost count of the number of charred children I have seen, of the number of fathers running through streets carrying the bloodied, lifeless bodies of their toddlers or the headless corpses of their babies. I've lost count of the number of orphans consoled by other orphans. I've lost count of the number of children with eyes like saucers, shaking in dusty hospital rooms. I have lost count of the number of children I have seen take their last breaths on camera, their final moments broadcast between a video of DIY storage solutions and an ad for discount linen. I've lost count of the bandaged babies who will wake from their comas one day and discover everyone is gone and that they are alone in this ashen world. That there is nobody left to love them. What greater hell is there on Earth?
Once, I saw a dead toddler with his skull cracked wide open. He was wearing a nappy. A nappy. He was wearing a nappy. And there's me at three in the morning thinking about the nappy. Who put that nappy on that little boy, who lay him down and pulled the nappy between his play-dough thighs, who wiped his soft skin, who tore the velcro strips and stuck them down? Who? What was their name, did they know it would be the last time they would put a nappy on this wee boy, that soon his mangled corpse would be photographed for the world to ignore? At that moment from somewhere within my flooded brain emerges a prayer for that little boy and when my husband turns around and asks if I am okay I say yes because what else can I say? That I'm thinking about the nappy of a dead baby I've never met at three in the morning on a Tuesday?
Pathetic little prayers escape from me at all hours, usually in the form of tears or exhales or screams, which by a newly acquired skill of alchemy, present as nervous ticks in meetings or vacant stares on walks or the grabbing of a bus rail a little too tightly so that when I let go my palms are unexpectedly blanched. I recognise this as an expression of a grief so taboo it must manifest only in private, in tiny imperceptible moments.
Most days it feels as though the Earth began spinning on a different axis and I'm the only one who noticed and when I turn to the person next to me and ask if they too felt the weight of the planet shift, they reply what planet? Most days I feel as though I'm operating on a frequency few can hear. I find myself staring intently at the barista as he brews my coffee, hoping to catch his eye so I can lean in and whisper, do you know? Most days I go through the motions of cleaning and working and packing and talking and staring at yellowing ceilings as an impossibly lithe woman with nimble fingers plucks tiny hairs from my eyebrows every fortnight. I've perfected the choreography required to function in 2024. But inside is a different matter.
Inside, they all are. Six-year-old Hind Rajab who died alone among the bodies of her relatives in a car riddled with Israeli bullets; seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna whose legless corpse was found hanging from a wall; Shaban al-Dalou, burnt alive in a makeshift hospital with an IV drip attached to his arm; Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, the orthopedic surgeon tortured to death in an Israeli prison; the journalist Fadi al Wahidi; the artist Mahasen Al Khateeb; the farmer Yousef Abu Rabee; the content creator Medo Halimy; the poet and professor Refaat Alareer; Khalad Nabhan and the soul of his soul, his four-year-old granddaughter Reem, whose small lifeless body he cradled in his arms; ten-year- old Rasha al Areer who wrote a will leaving her toys to other children; Mohammed Bhar, a 24-year-old non-verbal man with Down syndrome, who in his final moments, separated from his family and besieged by Israeli dogs managed to utter the only word left to say: khalas. Enough.
Inside, every cell in my body is working overtime to suppress the rising feeling of contempt. Contempt for those who killed them and for anyone and everyone who did nothing to stop it. Contempt for every world leader and their wretched impotence, their pathetic politics, their lies and manipulations, their self-serving contortions, their rank hypocrisy. Contempt for those eager to offer private praise but never public solidarity because what they really seek is absolution, as though anyone has any power vested in them to dispense it.
Contempt for every social justice warrior with a brand deal, whose silence is the loudest sound they'll ever make. Contempt for all the institutions for whom ethnic cleansing is the second-worst thing that could happen; the worst thing is controversy. Contempt for a hackable press whose North Star requires it not to take sides, even in genocides. Contempt as we squabble over this word and that word and wait for all of the terribly intelligent lawyers to officially define the state-sanctioned shredding of children. I can assure you, the body doesn't wait for definitions before it dry-heaves. But the greatest contempt of all I reserve for myself for ever thinking we were anything more than we are, for ever believing in even an ounce of the mythology we drench ourselves in. What a dumb bitch.
It has been a steep learning curve to discover that everything I thought I knew about the world and everyone in it was a mirage. That actually this is who we are, a world that allows - nay - abets the unfettered slaughter of children and innocent people while boldly extolling its empty virtues and vapid morality in the hope we don't notice its dark heart. It's a world whose formidable structures were made of sand the entire time. Well, the tides are in so tell me, what is an appropriate item of clothing to wear when the world is crumbling?
Tellingly, this is the question I get asked the most on this app: how are we to be in this new world? The truth is, I don't know. This is ultimately what the not-knowing is, it is not knowing how to be anymore. I know you feel it too and I'm sure others far wiser, far more learned than I will have an answer. I only have this: If you have even the slightest inkling, the slightest fear or the tiniest trepidation that this horror and its attachés might change you even in the smallest of ways, let it. Let it in. Let it change you. Be a new you in 2025.
—Jeanette Francis, December 31st 2024
LATELY I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
The idea that one could balance out the long darkness of a Northern Hemisphere winter with soft paintings by Ethel Carrick (1872-1952), later Ethel Carrick Fox, an English-born Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artist who lived most of her life in the light of France and Australia, developing as style which centered on the interaction between people and landscape, people and environment, people simply being people and consequently doing people things.
This past month’s reading/re-reading, as our Norfolk Island pine houseplant grew tired and dispirited under the additional weight of the coloured Christmas lights:
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir, No & Other Love Stories by Kirsty Logan, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, Written On the Body by Jeanette Winterson.
(If anyone is in need of a book I would most recommend to you the collection of stories that is Unaccustomed Earth.)
“I became an apostle of ordinariness.” —Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
Again and for however long necessary: (Actions for demanding a ceasefire in Palestine.) / (Report Palestinian censorship in publishing.) / (Reading list for a Free Palestine.) / (Print your own postcards to demand an arms embargo and freedom for Palestine.) / (Send a physical postcard to a government official for the cost of a stamp.) / (Ten free ebooks for getting free.)
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