June Please
The new fealty + three poets
I want no part in revolution where I emerge the same on the other side
- Sophie Lewis
The other day I read the TikTok story slides of a uni student who has freshly arrived on exchange to study in Edinburgh. She talked about being terrified of the posh English students that have come up to study in Scotland. She marvelled at the easy ability to catch a train to another city and the ready availability of affordable fruits and vegetables. People in the comments (oh how we love comments sections, my postcode is forever In The Comments) asked where on earth she could be from — a place without a culture of train travel, and where you have to ration vegetables? Her answer for her place of origin was, of course, New Zealand. I too love the cheap vegetables and the inter-city trains here in the UK. And while I am not terrified, I certainly find posh people amusing. I went to an event where the London-home-owning speaker praised renters for, “being brave enough to grow a garden when it can be taken away from you at any moment”. The patronising comment went down like a lead balloon with the crowd, so that’s something.
The honeymoon period has worn off with this rented flat. The first stormy night revealed a displeasing musical quality to the cheap old uPVC windows. The wind doesn’t so much howl as create a kazoo effect through the shot seals. It’s like a beginner clarinet player struggling to master their reed, or like that primary school trick of placing a blade of grass between your thumbs and blowing it to hell. This has been a June of many broken sleeps. But the light lingers till midnight and returns so soon that there are little by way of tortured dark hours. We are happy in our misery because it is ours. I wonder how long we will live here. The rent is high and there is no balcony or garden to bravely and unattachedly toil over; there are weird wiring jobs and suspect plumbing routes and mystery holes plugged up with old plastic bags. The gaps in the floorboards are so big and the nails so exposed that any visiting child would probably come to some harm. No child has visited yet. The third floor location is unfriendly to buggy or wheelchair users. And it is unfriendly to me, a car-hating person used to living on a quiet island who now finds themselves teetering above a road, thoroughly buzzed out by the new tick of the hands of my days.
And I don’t care if I’m flip-flopping here. I don’t care if my time in Scotland is high-romance soul-retrieval one moment and bathos-squalor ambiguous-loss the next. I don’t care if I am inconsistent. I don’t care if the romance and the rage make jarring diagonals. It’s all real. I am in love with this place and we are living in a time of strain and horror and collapse. The ‘cost of living crisis’ has outgrown its twee monicker. Things aren’t going ‘back to normal’ after a wee blip or two. The owning class [think they] have got us in a chokehold. They charge what they like for food and warmth and shelter. They can take care of a dwelling or they can not take care of a dwelling and they will currently make the same rent either way. There is little by way of beauty and finesse, let alone care and ethics. They can belch their chemicals and seep their sewerage and make weapons to enclose land and kill kids as a side/main hustle. I’m tired of everyone still profiting in some way from going along with the current order of things, and I’m not letting myself feel bad about being unable to go along with things. I don’t make a lot of sense in the sensible order of this world. I have not had a normal life. Sometimes its painful and I feel like an alien, for I seem unable to Just Do Things. But I’m an alien with conviction, and that’s something.
Call it what you want, maybe for some its not conviction but exhaustion, which we all share. We’re all tired of being in a codependent relationship with the capitalist class. Tired of having to be careful how we talk to landlords (or their property managers) — to have to read their feelings, use the charms we learned at school (where the teachers taught literacy for the futile dream of mass upward mobility within this current economic order of compulsory winners and losers). Tired of carefully finding the safest tone to use with an employer. Deploying the right words for the egos of the people with power over the basics of life, we don’t have the right to feel what we feel when we feel it. The opposite of codependence is emotional sovereignty. Emotional sovereignty means loyalty to our experiences as autonomous (and connected!) beings. We have a right to feel how we feel, when we feel what we feel. What would happen if we all agreed to just feel when we feel? All of our liberation is connected, it takes everyone.
Books that agree to feel what they feel (the new fealty):
Them! by Harry Josephine Giles (Picador, 2024) — wow, what the heck, this poetry collection made me feel normal rather than alien & the launch was a contrapuntal carnival:
“We grieved. We bit. We waded from girls to women and were girls anew: sticky sorrowful, spite” (Materials, 20)
“the bargain we are made to make for food and shelter is to force our bodies beyond their own wants, to place the gold of our agency at the service of another’s thirst” (Living, 33)
“cloud a bone white challenge” (The Hills, 66)
“If home is an island, build a bridge of spit and hairclips” (No Such Thing as Belonging, 88)
“but nothing’s as queer or as true as a theory unwinding” (Signs, 91)
Baby Schema by Isabel Galleymore (Carcanet, 2024) — “Galleymore hones in on cuteness and its relationships to hyper-capitalism and environmental crisis to produce a deliberately queasy ecopoetics” plus a great will-I-or-won’t-I-procreate pairing with I think about it all the time by Charli XCX:
“I wait not knowing what the next vision is and already I am firmly behind it” (My Earliest Memory, 15)
“by such abundant hurtability, I find myself surrounded” (It’s a Setup, 19)
“and children, what could we offer them” (Heritage, 27)
“goosebumps hatch across my skin, instinctively again my daughter nuzzles for my breast, which I muzzle by my not having had her yet” (Animal Product, 31)
“I like the word mother only because I’m still a child — or want to be — the one cared for; no debt, nothing on file” (Baby Schema, 49)
“Fear of Happiness” (1990) from American Originality: Essays on Poetry by Louise Glück (Carcanet, 2021):
For five years I had been struggling desperately to become whole and sane in order to rejoin a world made, as I saw it, entirely of the whole and the sane, a world free of the humiliating loneliness and fear that constituted my reality. And I remember very clearly my panic and the terms in which I accused my analyst, who had conspired in all this: he was going to make me so happy I wouldn't write. I also remember his response. He looked at me directly, an event in itself rare (and possibly the underlying reason I remember this exchange). His response was memorably succinct. The world, he told me, will provide you sorrow enough (182).
And not a book but a podcast, in ‘celebration’ of voting season (this July 4th in the UK! Oh lord!):
“The world is full of people with broken souls. It’s our fault, your fault, my fault for venerating them just because [we’re] frightened”
- Joseph Lee, “The Dangerous Ripple Effects of Toxic Leaders” (This Jungian Life, Jun 13, 2024)
Until next month, be not afraid to feel!
H x
subscribe / heart / share - it all helps