I have been wanting to read Helen Macdonald’s collection Vesper Flights for quite some time, and so when a family member recently gave the book to the person I spend most of my time with, I took the opportunity to inhale it before the intended recipient had a chance to object (inhaled along with several other books, to make more bearable the transition from December to January). Vesper Flights was aggravating, and good, and stirred me into a suitable soup of things—anger, distance, a passiveness, grief, exhaustion—and I suppose the overall feeling was one not dissimilar to when you try to focus your passenger-eyes on individual trees while driving down a high-speed highway. In particular I’ve been unable to stop thinking about the following passage, because it’s something that I don’t think I knew and because I find it quite unnerving:
“They used to think that we record a short-term memory, then archive it later, move it to a different part of the brain to store it to long term. But now they’ve discovered that the brain always records two tracks at once. That it is always taping two stories in parallel. Short-term memories, long-term memories, two tracks of running recollection, memory doubled. Always doubled.”
Unnerving in the sense that it has begun to feel as if I’m happening twice, all the time, mirrored sides of the same moments or decisions, a shadow that cannot be shaken. But it brought me to thinking about the recent months we’ve lived, perhaps months we’d rather we hadn’t needed to live, and how easy it can be to only consider half of something—half of a situation, half of a person, half of an apparent progress. In dealing with the unforeseen, with the inconceivable of any kind, it can be hard to untangle or slow information down, and processing cannot take place at anything like the same rate as the happenings. What is so difficult at the moment is to see anything like a whole, because fear and discomfort and the vanishing of futures puts instant and huge magnifying glasses in front of us—we look at one tiny brushstroke on a painting the size of a planet, declaring it final and terrible and entire.
I’m thinking of the last year as two tracks. One is the happenings, the dread, the absences and the unravelling, the unknowing. The other is our understanding of those things, those events and people there and then not there, the deep processing that cannot be rushed or pushed along. Unlike our dual memory recordings, these two tracks are not always parallel, and they certainly don’t move forwards at the same speed. The happening of things is hurtling, and the understanding by comparison is glacial. It can take a person years to find the right places in which to properly store and comprehend an event that takes only seconds, and I try to remind myself of this when these early January days are filled with whispers of movement and achieving and what-will-maybe-be-or-not-be.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
Early in December I spoke with Ruby Josephine Smith for her podcast, Process Piece. I rarely end up saying yes to these things, partly because I prefer to explain myself on paper, and partly because I find that the questions asked often make me feel smaller and then I’m left walking in small confused circles for days afterwards. Ruby has a tender way of asking questions though, and the questions themselves are so beautifully irregular, that I found myself possibly talking more than I had in weeks. She published our ‘Big Questions and a Few Birds’ episode yesterday, and so I’m pleased to be able to offer it for listening—the full episode and show notes are available on her website here, or alternatively you can listen through Spotify and iTunes.
Late last year I also finished up the illustrated essay for Orion Magazine, which will be in their spring issue and which I am oddly really pleased with. It has been something luxurious to give this piece proper time, requiring a number of hours that was quite frankly absurd and will make best sense when it’s out and about—I will enquire as to whether I am allowed to share any of it prior to publication, likely not.
(I make lists, and wait for decision-type-news from my patient book editor, and plot for futures in the dark, in the light.)
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Photographs by Alex Catt, ones that feel to me like timelessness, like the insistence of nature, like remembering to breathe.
“I am far from an industrious soul, except in my capacity, perhaps, to pay close attention to things.”
— Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights
I could not write a more accurate summary of myself.
The end.
"It has begun to feel as if I’m happening twice, all the time"... This. This, all the time. Thank you Ella for always putting the indescribable into words - I can't wait to see what you create in 2021.