The Sometimes Newsletter No.284
As of April-just-gone I will have been writing this newsletter for over ten years. This felt like an alarmingly long time, and I was scarcely able to find the patience necessary to scroll back far enough in the archive to verify the passing of time. It is alternately reassuring and deeply unnerving to find one’s own thoughts from as dusty as a decade ago feeling true, or relevant. A selection of examples:
Saturdays have not really felt like Saturdays lately; they feel like slippery, fruit-that-is-too-bruised days, something I can’t quite put my finger on
I generally sleep like a caffeinated gnome
I think as a planet we must still have no idea what we’re doing, how to manage our millions of people, millions of paper money, millions of opinions about nothing in particular. The world is most definitely not at rights
the pink light is already slipping down the sky
culturally we are encouraged to suddenly alter, prune and snip ourselves into better shapes, different shapes. But I like my shape just fine
It feels like I am leaning toward something, but I don’t quite recognise it yet
if you’re not watchful the wonderful is made mundane, but on a good day, the mundane can be made miraculous
Where do these Saturdays keep coming from
It feels like I put this week down somewhere safe before promptly forgetting where that was
The inner workings of my mind don’t always work consistently—they get distracted by softness and the bite taken out of a leaf, or by the argument that couple is having in the doorway of a church just before 7pm; how time can feel slippery, silver, whether or not we have already said that before, maybe even a thousand times.
this tends to happen when you return to somewhere, and not only is everything precisely as you left it, but you also pick up exactly where you left off; left it, left off, leftovers. In conclusion, everything feels very left, and not particularly right.
it’s 7:30am, the birds with small lungs are doing their best to drown out the sounds of traffic
this Northern Hemisphere is reminding me that we cannot ever decide how much dark, how much light
Quiet things need to hold just as much of our attention as the loud ones, because they almost always have a better ratio of love to noise
Everybody can probably be placed into one of two categories: those who think they have corners, and those who think that they do not
there are hardly any moths left to notice in the twilight
And then I’m returned back to the present sitting-uncomfortably self because you call up from the bottom of the stairs DO YOU WANT TO COME AND SEE AN INTERESTING BUG and I do, I do want to see an interesting bug, and the bug in question is green and angular and bronze and winged and shocking and seems perfectly content to walk its six tiny legs across your hand, then your other hand, and on and on a strange dance we are watching until you say that you’ll go and put the bug back where you found it, near the potato plants.
There are definitely days when I’m made nervous by a ghost-thought along the lines of you are only managing to think or speak the same things over and over, circular and ultimately unchanging but then proof is in pudding, and nothing stays the same, and I don’t think I’d be able to recognise some versions of my younger self if we passed each other in the street.
Having freshly realised the newsletter has existed in this ‘sometimes’ incarnation for over a decade, I’m leaning further in the direction of something slightly else something different something more of now. I have some moderately-vague ideas of how this other incarnation might take shape, and it involves slugs, but that can all come with (more) time.
For now, and especially if you’ve been here since some sort of beginning, you have my very deepest gratitude for reading, for keeping my words company, and for standing out in whatever kind of weird sometimes weather this newsletter has been so far.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
I haven’t been as forward-motion as I should have been with work matters, in part because I was away from home for a week, and within that week felled by a virus, and then I shut myself in a room labelled denial, but I think the weather is now changing and as such here is a Catalan expression (and a French one) from Words to Love a Planet, also found in this Lithub piece where you can read the essay from the chapter ‘Weather’:
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Photographs by India Hobson, whose work I’ve very much enjoyed returning to periodically since its inaugural falling-in-love within newsletter No.217. I find a lot of reassuring echoes in these images—shadow, light, the growth of green, a beautiful variety of mundane—and overall find them to contain a sort of humid feeling, a closeness of atmosphere.
“It is June. Let’s hope
Someone is kind, just in time.”
— Vanesha Pravin, from Disorder
Your work is so gorgeous, I revel in it.
Thank you so much for including my work :-)