No.262
Sitting down and twisting the tired-yet-still-attached legs in the uncomfortable-familiar around one another, had been thinking it was time for the usual ‘month ending’ list here but it distinctly is not the end of a month—the length of May caught me out, gleeful, shrewd, in that same way it can catch out whatever or whomever it pleases. May will go on without you, it won’t wait, and it also won’t make any concessions when it comes to the rivers and the rain and the insects and the modern noise we have collectively conjured. Spring is not quiet. If you’re not careful it will never end—to be stuck in an eternal May would, I think, be too exhausting to feasibly maintain, the pace of growth unhinged and the summer’s arms reaching both forwards and back to make unkeepable but tantalising promises.
It hasn’t rained in weeks, the moss is parched but ever-patient because it knows water will come, and the neighbours to the west consistently play an alarmingly eclectic variety of loud music throughout most days, releasing anything from ABBA to EDM out from their sliding patio doors, which encourages for me a practice of dissociation and apologising to the birds. Dogs bark aggressively at each other with their teeth mere inches away from meeting through a wooden slatted fence, but the neighbours prefer to keep talking as if nothing about the immediate environment could possibly benefit from any adjustment. Plums begin to make themselves known on the ancient tree, green and unlikely.
Currently poised between two weather fronts the temperature seems to think it will manage to lurch back to zero, and I so drove this morning to find some kind of soft fabric with which one could wrap up tender garden things, à la Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Concerned for the already-optimistic tomatoes at a mountain-surrounded latitude similar to Copenhagen. The tractors kicking up dead brown dust in the fields as the tarmac bakes and cracks, roadside horses fly-covered and indifferent, hawthorn flowers holding on for dear life within the hedgerows. The woman at the store who measured out and cut for me four meters of I’ve-no-idea-what-exactly-it-is not at all unsettled to learn I planned to swaddle small trees in the stuff, and was I think just impatient to resume a more normal dress-making-customer kind of conversation.
At least once a day it seems the sound of nearby grass being mowed makes its way through double glazing, a selection of people consistently sit glistening in the sun of the tables out at the front of a pub in town, windows are opened with a universal enthusiasm during the warmest hours to let in the bugs and the sharpness of late spring growth before being closed up at dusk as the air cools and the bats sweep out.
I think there isn’t time for everything and then I think there is too much anyway and then I think I can’t decide what’s worse. I think about people lost forever and about the blackbird parents diligently feeding three young in the safety of the garden and about an entire population being starved to death. I think about the hollow unyielding centre of feathers and my own un-hollow yet vulnerable centre and the fact that people make careers out of having opinions about lamps and wonder why exactly it is that we haven’t made it all okay by now.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
The distinctly unsettling paintings of the Belgian insomniac and moonlight-wanderer Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946).
“Soon Mrs Hull reveals that the husband uses bad words and wanders his yard like a lunatic, checking under rocks, plunging into bushes, chasing after birds. I privately consider this behaviour as the best way to get to know your yard and grasses.”
— Danielle Dutton, Sprawl
Again and for however long necessary: (Actions for demanding a Free Palestine and an end to occupation.) / (Reading list for a Free Palestine.) / (Postcards for Palestine, free PDF downloads.) / (Send a physical postcard demanding an end to UK arms sales.) / (Ten free ebooks for getting free from Haymarket Books.)
Paid supporters of The Sometimes Newsletter receive one or two additional pieces each month, including things like short stories, illustrated essays, and more detailed looks into creative processes. The most recent of these being:
In Praise of Anything
There are many volumes which specifically aim to praise things to a dramatic literary degree, whether that be folly, shadows, slowness, idleness, walking, floods, boredom, missing out, the night, poetry, hands, mountains, diaries, or really any topic or theme you can additionally think of. To me most of these literal titles seem either obvious, diminishing, misleading, or a combination of all three.
If there was one month I’d endure eternally, it would probably be September. It’s like the early 40s when you’re not so old that you don’t remember your 20s but not so young that you’re fumbling your way around in the dark. Loved reading this on a quiet but too hot May evening.