but I want to be who I am, going where I’m going, all over again
- Ada Limón
I’d never attended a marathon before this month. Certainly not as a runner - running makes me feel too much like I am under the influence of a terrible threat, with all my blood turning to an acid burn right beneath the surface of my skin. Being on the run is not something I do willingly, more something on prehistoric standby for the present-day occasion of a poorly-timed dash for the bus. But this was my first marathon event even as a supporter, and I was astonished. Right up until the morning of the race I’d believed that a marathon was about running. I was wrong. As soon as Ryan (the runner) and I (the not-runner, not-ever) got down to the start point my heart started squeezing and my throat started lumping up and my eyes started leaking and I knew that this was about more than running. No one had to be there. Everyone could have been keeping (or not keeping, just running!) their times on their clocks or apps around their own neighbourhoods, but instead they had signed up to do this thing together - an event so pointless that to see so many people opting in to such pointlessness was to see the creation of a tremendous spectacle and, ultimately, some real kind of point.
Marathons seem to be about a pure distilled human energy, so non-instrumental as to be deeply affecting. Yes you have to pay to enter, and, yes, there is some prize and placement involved, but that’s where the transaction ends. Everyone was there in pure support for someone, maybe just (especially!) for themselves, or maybe for a friend or towards a cause or in honour of the dearly departed. The marathon also inverted the hierarchy of the wealthy waterfront. Cars were directed away and the road was turned over to the runners and wheelchairers and walkers each racing their own race, and all the supporters supporting their racers. My tears weren’t only my own emotion and pride for Ryan overcoming his hurdles, they were the inevitable vibrational motion caused by so many people oscillating at that very same frequency, all in one place. I could feel them all. My eyes would not stop leaking for the whole two hours. I thought about the past (and, let’s face it, ongoing) years of isolation, and I could not believe that such a congregation was possible. Beyond the steady leakage was the occasional sob. A sob for joy! A sob for pure distilled human energy! Who knew that April 2023 could bring such a thing! Ryan’s aunty Debbie later called me a sook, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t me anyway, it was the marathon.
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I don’t have too much else to say this month. I must be in some kind of incubation period. Another one of my positive disintegrations - still in the goop of it, though. Not yet emerged or awake or fully online. Day to day I’m finding it hard to write and reply the words for things, or to find the executive function to plan simple things. A few understandable stabs of shame about the external impression (or non-impression) I’m making, but ultimately huge internal faith in the goop. When I do talk it feels good. I’m simply still in burnout, so wary of situations that make my nerves jangle. I’m valuing direct communication. I can look anything difficult in the eye; I can hear it all and not flinch away. The truth is that the bad and the good are always thrumming away at the same time. I have so much less patience for begging for or dancing around the truth. I want all cards on the table. I want everyone to say and do what they mean, and for everyone to have come to know what they mean via frank interactions between inner and many outer worlds. Workplaces are generally not conducive to this need for openness.
This month I read There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, translated by Polly Barton. The title performs the plot pretty accurately.
‘You do know there’s no need for you to be making this much of an effort?’
‘It’s my job,’ I answered offhandedly.
‘Yes, and that’s exactly why I am saying it.’
I’d only found Tsumura’s novel because I had stumbled upon a link, with two minutes to spare, to the live UK book launch of Florentyna Leow’s memoir, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart. I don’t remember how I first found Flory’s writing (maybe a mutual Instagram follow? Algorithmic intervention?), but I subscribed to her Substack a few years ago and have loved each missive. Flory’s book is a recollection of early adult friendship and heartbreak in a new-to-you city of seasons. I was transfixed by the story of the book’s making: a single month of fevered effort - a product of many years of thinking, but ultimately precipitated by the external push of a submission deadline for The Emma Press. I love the idea that things can be made by sort-of-accident. We are not really in control, we merely ride spiritual or chemical currents, depending on your persuasion. The launch was hosted by Polly Barton. The next day I listened to an interview with Barton, in support of her new book Porn: An Oral History. It was only when I went to request Porn that the Auckland Libraries catalogue offered me There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. The only full fiction I read cover to cover this month, I laughed at the narrator’s confession that, “ever since I burned out in my last job, I haven’t been able to read” - a job where she felt “chronically betrayed in regards to both the nature and the quantity of the work involved.” Ha.
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Last night I re-watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love. This time I loved it even more, especially the hyperbolic redemption in the face of oppressive family and work and other normative demands. I simply trusted that Lena knew her own mind when she chose Barry, and that his reactions to the world were in the realm of the reasonable, all things considered. But I found a 2003 Guardian review that perceived it all very differently. [Side note: must always stay in the world of any given film via criticism! Must enter the happy place of the hermeneutic realm after the sensory bath of any given viewing!] The review’s final remarks at first felt like a paranoid symbolic reach, where the two lovers are figured as stand-ins for the warmongers of the era:
What a curious experience it is, just at the present time, to see that stammering, nervy, belligerent all-American hero, oppressed by his own sense of being a victim and yet ready and willing to mete out violence, inspired by the unhesitating, uncritical adoration of his British helpmeet.
But then I remembered the stunning newsletter piece I read in one big gulp last week, on Madonna’s “American Life”, the Bush-era 2000s, and the slide into hell ever since:
Maybe the slack-jawed dread I felt as I sat in my car in my friend Mark’s driveway on March 20, 2003, staring through the windshield as NPR announced American troops had just officially invaded Baghdad, is still too close to the surface.
I am so grateful for this careful excavation of personal and cultural memory; “day one of what has become Millennials’ and Xennials’ greatest talent, dissociating while the world burns down around us”:
Other recent pieces I appreciated:
Uneasy Money: on arts funding in New Zealand, by Emil Scheffmann (Metro Magazine)
All this untaxed money raises the question: if our state could more fairly gather its portion of the nation’s wealth, maybe our arts wouldn’t have to depend on the benevolent discretion of a wealthy few? … “One of the biggest challenges that we have in New Zealand is the dislocation of the property market from the rest of the economy. It’s almost like a false economy of its own” — savvy words to a journalist who also happens to be a landless millennial.
[This month the New Zealand Inland Revenue Department revealed that the effective tax rate paid by New Zealand’s richest individuals is just 8.9%, compared to an effective tax rate of 22% for a median salary earner. For the ultra-rich who were the subject of the IRD’s survey, tax-free capital gains underpin much of their wealth.]
Reframing the garden: thoughts on gardens and grief, by David Lambert (Radicle)
Maybe we need to reframe gardens. It is deeply engrained, culturally as well as etymologically, that a garden is an enclosed place; boundaries are integral to the very idea of a garden. Beyond its walls or hedges, there is wilderness, industry, hostility, or even just other people and their property. But maybe in a time of unravelling certainties and securities, we need to reconsider that idea. Maybe we need to think of gardens as microcosms, places to help us process what is happening in the world and to connect with other than human lives.
Mariame Kaba’s conversation with Kelly Hayes, in the lead-up to the release of Let This Radicalize You:
… a lot of people find the inevitability of something bad easier to process than uncertainty. Most of us have an epistemic need to reduce uncertainty. So it’s actually easier for a lot of people to tell themselves that they already know what’s going to happen, and that it’s going to be bad, and to just sort of suppress their feelings about that, instead of challenging the direction that things are taking, or imagining a way to make things better … If we fight, we might lose. But if we don’t fight, we’re definitely going to lose. And I think that this book ultimately encourages us to fight, to keep fighting, to stay in the game, to refuse to abandon each other through the ongoing struggle that we’re all engaged in.
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This newsletter is arriving a bit later today because I took a break, left my laptop behind, and headed up to the headland to watch the ferries coming and going for a while. I hope you find all the best breaks. I hope you run for your life or for your friends or for our shared human energy or just for the bus.
Until next month,
H x
P.s. bonus behind-the-scenes:
Above: All the runners standing in the line for the banana stand, at the Auckland Waterfront Half Marathon, April 2023 (Ryan fifth from left, with the day-glo orange backpack).
Below: best restroom, ever.
Snapped many recommendations, thank you! Esp interesting the porn one, tangentially relevant to convos I'd been having here with a friend about... a whole bunch of stuff. Unexpected topic/lens for it, so v curious. Also love the sound of that essay collection and thanks for the discovery of new people to follow here on Substack. Feeling similar in terms of my writing mojo!