Yesterday (Friday), I found it very strange to be a person. There are occasions (and certainly more of them at present) when it is just plain peculiar to have a body, be a human, have ridiculous and often exhausting thoughts from dawn until dusk. Being a person is constant work and attention at the best of times, a raging mess of rocks and impossibility at the worst, and it can be difficult to see oneself as anything other than just an ageing accumulation—an accumulation of scrapes and loves and nutrients and weather.
As I write now (Saturday) I feel differently, because about half an hour ago I decided that instead of finding it strange to be a person, I would choose for the remainder of the day to feel like a wilderness. This came about in part because while the sky here in north-west France is pale blues and lit-up cloud in one direction, the other side of the sky is a dark, muddied and restless grey, and the house has been shaking a little with low, displeased thunder for the last hour.
(Unrelated illustration of a dream I had the other night in which a giraffe was looking over me and offering useful advice.)
I can feel the aforementioned thunder in my grey-socked feet, as such I am expecting it to rain, and so we have taken suitable actions: brought in the lone towel from the line, closed the two top windows that when left open at times like this bring about either a scattering of raindrops or an entire pool on the wooden floor.
The things that have been done or spoken of the last two days (like closing windows, or offering thoughts on the future) have seemed more significant than usual, simply because on the night of the 7th plans to ‘deconfine’ people in this country were put forth, and after the weekend our world will slowly and tentatively start to expand. The knowledge that it will be possible to drive and look at the sea is absurd, but we will be doing so, and then we will be swimming out into it, and I suspect this will feel like a sort of quiet, lonely-in-a-good-way baptism.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
The days of this week have made far less sense that those in the week before, and in terms of work this means the things I wanted to do have been spread out like stray and frustrating toast crumbs. The things include:
Slow revisions to an article due for publication at the end of the month
Making a clear plan to carve out time specifically for writing a new book proposal/entire pieces of said book (you would think that right now there are countless available and patient minutes, but the days are oddly full)
Another illustration for an ongoing and secret collaboration (the drawings from which may one day come to light)
Replying to a nice backlog of emails (if you are waiting on a reply great sorry and I’m getting around to you)
Reading-as-research, a lot
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Images from Senegal, by French photographer Charlotte Lapalus. The reasons behind this series for the Marseille non-profit charity Autour de l’enfant are important, drawing a different kind of attention to the trauma of FGM and the history and ignorance underlying an outdated and violent atrocity. The editorial “reveals the irrationality of the practice and gender system in place, while testifying to the uniqueness of the land and the women that walk its streets”—more can be read here in a tender write-up on IGNANT.
It is, it is now raining in a definite way, and I cannot help but hope that when I meet with seawater again it will rain heavily then too, because after weeks of walls and dry land, a body will feel its best in waves with rain.
(Go gently, won’t you? Go gently as and when you begin to move towards all of those freedoms we were so used to and so careless with.)
The end.
