No.131
I found myself swaying uselessly back and forth on the question of whether there needed to be a newsletter this week, whether it was necessary, or of any value. Then the pendulum that was my head sort of snapped, I slept with uncomfortable dreams for too several days in a row, and then decided to simply write some thoughts, to share a couple belonging to others.
Mary Oliver, because human lives should not be compared to buildings: ‘Things! / Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful / fire! More room in your heart for love, / for the trees! For the birds who own / nothing—the reason they can fly.’
As much as I might sometimes long for this to be the case, I am neither articulate not persuasive in person. I am a writer, not a speaker, and there are reasons why that is so—I feel more comfortable seeing words fall out of my head or hand onto a page, rather than hearing them fall out of my mouth, and with a page I can get much closer to what I actually want to say.
The air is good, the air can be cleaner, the air is where most of our words fall, but sometimes there must be a page.
The discomfort is tangible when I feel pressed to speak at short notice, perhaps attributable to perfectionism or a fear of lacking the true information, the right word, but discomfort is the majority of what I’ve been feeling for the last few weeks, and there is a very long list of why.
Discomfort because: sudden growth, the kind that makes your knees hurt; knowing that I have not been doing enough, that I must do more; oppression in so many corners I wonder how anybody is able to see clearly out of their windows; wondering if seeing clearly is actually an impossibility when we are all existing inside the same system, when surely there is no such thing as a true outside perspective; how to move forwards when my forwards might inadvertently hold others back.
It is very difficult at present to allocate the correct importance to things, or to put them in some kind of appropriate order, and while I don’t believe this is the only way to sort events or obligations or tasks, a horizontal and entirely democratic line-up of things is not possible for me.
What should take precedence? First things should come first, but I no longer know what they are.
Where do people learn to be so unfeeling? How do they become so completely unable to see themselves in others? I think and think and think until I am a melted sea of thinking, conclude that perhaps we all need to walk around carrying mirrors that face in both directions—a reflective surface towards us and another outwards to show any inhumanity what it might look like.
Laurie Sheck: ‘I suppose you are weary now of remembering, / that being mortal you want to convince yourself you belong / to this earth, and are anchored to the earth by love.’
The recent album On the Other Side by Blanco White, many times over.
Wondering in a large, constant way about people I haven’t heard from in weeks or months, and who haven’t heard from me—we haven’t heard from each other but I’m still spending a long time listening.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
The aforementioned book proposal was sent off, and who knows. I personally do not feel like I know anything with anything resembling concrete certainty this week (imagine! a certainty made of concrete!), and as such it would be absurd to think I could predict what might happen with work, and when, and if. But below is a small selection of blossoms from the proposal, part of a larger and arguably nonsensical page of them numbering exactly 1,958.
(I suppose the feeling I have about work is somewhat similar to the feelings I have about everything, a sense that an uncountable number of things are currently very up in the air, and that it’s impossible to know what is going to come down again, if at all.)
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
An editorial directed by London-based, Nigerian-American photographer Oghalé Alex. I can’t say precisely why I fell in love with them, but something about the odd spaciousness and the movement-in-stillness of these images—the peacefulness they exude and the strange escape they provide—I found quite mesmerizing.
There is an art print in this temporarily-rented house depicting an oddly suspended clutch of different flora, things like irises and poppies and willow buds and that plant which looks like silvery, pearlescent paper moons when dried. I cannot tell if the original would have been paint, or pencil, and to be honest I haven’t looked very closely, but there is a single word in a small, unusual typeface at the very bottom, just before the paper slips into the wooden frame—‘Magnificence’.
The end.
Beautiful, I just flew through the clouds into another world of gentleness and lightness. Thank you.