Like / all we ever had to do was make everything strange again?
- Stephen Collis (via Matthew Ogle)
I use a bullet journal each year. A system of little dots and crosses and arrows, sometimes helpful, other times not; always kept up, regardless. Today I cracked open a new dotted notebook (a red reply to this year’s green) and drew up the frames for the months to come. In hand-ruling my grids I touched each day of 2022. In previous years this set-up was the boring bit before I could use my book, but this time it felt almost sacred to meet each day in advance - a shiver to see all those squares of unknown promise and peril. I couldn’t believe how blithe I’d been last time. How entitled I once felt to plot and plan! How much I now need to genuflect to chance!
Here’s a true thing: this December has been good. The chance involved in being alive in December in New Zealand has been good - the closest thing to the pre-pandemic I’ve found in the pandemic. I went to a 30th birthday party, a baby party, a wedding, and two Christmases. I only hid in a bathroom once! I received untold kindnesses. I stayed overnight with friends. I sat inside a cafe for the first time since March 2020 (one espresso, thank you). I sat inside a cinema for the first time since March 2020 (Spider-Man, sue me). The only downside was my digital negligence (in-person stimuli crowding out long-distance attendance). This time last year I was typing from my grandmother’s attic room, chaperoned by a glass of her husband’s brandy. It was snowing and digital connection was all I had and death was all around. We all had a lot of hopes for 2021. When I look at 2022 it is less about hope and more about a fuller, stranger existence.
In service of this full existence thing I’ve finally been going along with mindfulness. In the past I’d felt fobbed off by harried GPs, I’d suffered foolish app voices, I’d assimilated critiques like this one (mindfulness as a troubling “metaphysical denial of the self” that “render[s] our mental challenges dangerously apolitical”), but something clicked when I got back to New Zealand. Maybe a no-self does work, at least as an heuristic or passing exercise. In mindfulness I am practising active rest, big smallness, quick slowness - all the things we need to curb toxic-chemical-capital-yes-forever. But that’s all pretty grandiose. Maybe mindfulness is merely tapping out from time to time, and maybe that’s okay.
The Best Books Bit:
The place where we lived in Leith had a faulty shower, so for a month it was baths only. Soaking was good. I listened to a lot of audiobooks while staring, glassy-eyed, at the ugly grey tiles. The best bathtub listen was Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out: “being homo did not amount to being the same.”
I will never get over authors reading their own books - the courage and care involved in making their mind voices vocal. The best New Zealand audiobook listen (no bathtub time here, just long walks with walls of bush and planks of sea) was Nina Mingya Powles’ Small Bodies of Water: “I submerge myself in cold water and my body comes up burning.”
The most bristling laughs came from Raven Leilani’s Lustre - the only book that’s ever seen me break into a spontaneous talk-to-camera Instagram Story review: “I think to myself, You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing.” The bristlingly breakneck giddy award could also go to the Fran Ross’ Oreo: “Louise was once challenged to name a food she did not like. She paused to consider. That pause was now in its fifteenth year.”
My favourite poetry-not-poetry collection was Hana Pera Aoake’s A Bathful of Kawakawa and Hot Water:
LONDON WAS MY NEMESIS AND MY NEMESIS TOOK
SO MUCH FROM OUR FUTURES AND CELEBRATED
THIS WITH EVERY GRAIN OF CONCRETE ON EVERY
STATUE DEDICATED TO BRITAIN.
A favourite poetry-poetry collection was Returning the Sword to the Stone by Mark Leidner: “It’s like Sisyphus making direct eye contact with you while sarcastically kissing and licking the boulder.”
The best re-read was The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch: “of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”
And the best re-re-read was The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson: “Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible. Beauty makes sex sex” (with the entire essay dedicated to Keats, “for his general surrender to beauty”).
*
The Year in Letters, Please:
The year started out skittish and chatty, then slunk into an anaesthetised kind of dignity. We may have arced back around to garrulous again, a little unhinged and swaggering (staggering?) into the new year. Throughout all the tone changes some kind of story emerged:
January (Dalry, Edinburgh): here here is not here. Lockdown curiously strips context from a place, especially when you’re relatively new in town
February (Dalry, Edinburgh): all of the ecstatic end-of-winter fecundities all around and - ha! - nothing to report from my sorry little sternum!
March (Dalry, Edinburgh): shuttling the suffering off somewhere else like nuclear waste buried underground or launched into space, hoping it will disappear but knowing very well that you can’t rush a half-life.
April (Leith, Edinburgh): I began to make small talk with people in the park [and] I knew that this was their big surrogate garden, too.
May (Montrose, Angus): when I finally make it back home to New Zealand I will fail and fail and fail to adequately explain the experience of this carelessly-induced long-term isolation and its scary slide into non-mattering.
June (Shacklewell, London): Finally the year is up to speed, days are peopled, and streets bounce with summer-rubbered promise.
July (Shacklewell, London): a like-it-or-not greeting of hot rubbish by day and randy jasmine by night.
August (Bethnal Green, London): I feel all eyes and no hooks, a strip of velcro missing the necessary friction of mingling. I still do not feel normal here, and here does not feel normal.
September (MIQ, Auckland): IT’S SO NICE HERE. NICE AS IN COMPETENT. NICE AS IN CARE. CARE! COMMON CARE!
October (Waiheke, Auckland): dopamine is all I’ve been dreaming of, but instead we have the quiet of yet another lockdown.
November (Waiheke, Auckland): I wanted to wring pleasures from life and I also wanted to mourn. I wanted it all, for the living and the dead.
*
For 2022 my wish for all of us, after Günther Anders, is this: do not fear fear, have the courage to be frightened.
It’s great having you here. I mean it. I would love to hear from you – just hit reply.
H x