No.136

This week the newsletter is a different shape in that it contains only a short story and what I fell in love with. I’m conscious of (and sometimes do read) newsletters or mailings-out that contain what seem to be seventy hundred thousand snippets or links or thoughts or informations or factual wonders and within minutes I am horribly anxious. Anxious and reminded of the black hole that is Internet, gobbling everything up into a overly-connected unreality of glaring pixels (a gobbling similar I feel to that of ‘No Face’ from the Studio Ghibli animation Spirited Away). The other day I wrote down a note:

patience has been replaced by pixels

and since then it has thumped me over the head daily with its trueness.

So for today, afternoon or morning or wherever you are, I hope precisely nothing about No.136 is overwhelming because there is already quite enough of that.

A SHORT STORY:

We drove to the sea mid-morning, and for fifty-something minutes we talked in slices about issues at hand, trying to explain who we are within this reality, and who we would be in another. I look in the silences out of the window at intensive agriculture, the parched, barren fields, at birds who know where they are going (I do not). When we arrive to the cliffs, there are several parked cars and I dislike this, because it can be harder to say what you mean in the presence of additional humanity. But we continue talking, cracking the doors open as we get too hot, you pausing to point out a snake or lizard that is moving through the grasses in front of the car—I do not see it.

I pick up a paper receipt that looks too white from the gap in the dashboard in front of me, and proceed to tear it up into maybe a hundred or so tiny pieces while we continue to talk—they are about ladybird-sized. As the black plastic surfaces of the car begin to melt, we decide to walk down to the sea and continue this conversation in the presence of seaweed, and so I carefully place the nest of tiny white paper pieces on the dashboard.

Stepping down to an empty fishing cove and met with a beach of ancient pebbles to oversee events, picking our way into the barnacle-covered rocks, soon submerged amongst sea anemones and limpets, seaweeds that house pink snails and young fish and secrets not known to us. As the salt makes us more sensible, we speak less and feel more, time only passing because small waves wash repeatedly towards us. This is followed by comfortable silences and revelations, and peering at large grey rocks that whisper fascinating stories and taste of the sea when licked.

As we drive home the day reaches its highest heat, and so we keep the windows down the whole way. This allows me to drop the nest of tiny white papers out of the window one at a time, and I do this because I fear I might need to come back to the decisions I made down in the cove; a trail of minuscule white clues that could potentially lead me back over sixty kilometres to the seaweed and good sense. You don't seem to notice I'm doing this, and I don't tell you that I am, a possible interruption to the peculiar magic perhaps. I drop the last one out of the window as we turn the corner by the house, before hoping with closed eyes that I won't ever need to follow them back to the sea.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Works in oil by Melbourne-based musician and painter Lucy Roleff, which to me speak delicately but decisively of solitude, the everyday, and of how much I miss certain things.

I recently remembered how Deborah Levy writes in The Cost of Living about her sadness, comparing it to how Beckett describes sorrow becoming ‘a thing you can keep adding to all your life... like a stamp or an egg collection’.

The end.