May Please

I hope I'm more than I think about

The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

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Letter Please:

I love coming back here to this newsletter at the end of every month. It’s like returning to a favourite park bench or beloved booth at a diner; seeing what’s changed and what remains. What song can you hear this time, and what shape does your shadow make? What winnowed revelation appears; what grief, what thrum, what way to see the world anew.

Well I feel none of that incantatory calm right now. None! Gotcha! Right this moment I am crying on a train, with my back to the future, vertigo eyes laptop-looking while the trees wrong me. How dare they disappear rather than approach!

Everything went wrong this morning. It was already getting light at four when I began my quest to get back to London from the north. A grainy Sunday dawn mocked the remaining Saturday nighters and their borrowed-from-tomorrow stumbles. I didn’t exactly feel better than them. But I didn’t not feel better than them. I feel sorry about that now.

Lately I’d been priding myself on not needing to compulsively text my mum my obsessive thought loops. Well I just caved. (I binged? I thought-relapsed?) And then I performed a manic close reading of Aldous Harding’s song, “What Am I Gonna Do,” from her new album Train on the Island, released this month.

The song goes:

What my God is thinking?
I get lost in that place
…
I know things ain't working out
But they may come good later
I hope I'm more than I think about

My mum sent me back an audiofile of her cat purring.

(Damnit the newsletter-as-pilgrimage-to-the-park-bench worked on me again. I do feel a prayerful calm. I do feel my self pop back into its socket, tender but intact.)

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Digest Please (three texts I appreciated this month):

• “I knew that I was going to die, but I had to stay alive, even though I had already lost my baby. I woke up in the Indonesian Hospital fifteen days later, to the voice of my uncle, and I couldn’t see anything. My uncles were crying all around me, I could hear voices, then I blacked out again. I didn’t know myself for an instant and I asked someone nearby, Who am I?’”
  
  - Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Palestine, Samar Yazbek Translated by Leri Price, Fitzcarraldo Editions, p. 164.
  

• “Adults use children to manage their own childhood, writes Young-Bruehl in Childism (2012). They do not meet them, emotionally, as they really are but rather through the filter of their own, unresolved disappointments, humiliations, unmet longings and terrors. The child is an unwitting participant in the adult’s struggles to regulate feelings that were never made sense of in their own early life.”
  
  - Being small: Nobody quite recovers from being a child: the asymmetry of power between parents and children always leaves a trace, Tom Wooldridge, Aeon Magazine.
  

• Not at all literary, but a surprisingly refreshing textual experience! I started a new work contract and needed to do the compliance training, including Safeguarding Adults and Safeguarding Children. I actually love these compulsory modules. I read every section in detail. I love the quiz at the end. I think my appreciation comes after starting my adult life in New Zealand, where I witnessed and experienced bullying and sexual harassment, where I spoke up but there was nothing much but a pained shrug or a there there pat on the shoulder or a, “you’ll have to get used to that around here”. I feel good when I read these UK modules. A cynic slash economic materialist would say maybe that’s all they’re really there for — a feel-good sense of trust to manufacture consent. And yes, I know reality is messy compared to policy. But I love that there is something of integrity there in plain language, and someone has put a lot of time and effort into the writing of these units to make them as accessible as possible. It’s an art form, I tell you! One section urges professionals to avoid stereotypes and bias about what abuse can look like. “We need to think the unthinkable”. Okay now that’s a turn of phrase! I love that these modules plainly recognise our psychological foibles; our normalcy bias and bystander tendencies.
  
  Another plain-spoken moment in the training: “Violence is commonplace and frequent in nature”. (Okay module-writers, yes! Give it to me! I am loving this mash of HR and anthropology.) The paragraph went on to say that at the escalatory stage preceding physical violence, “the worst approach is to use an intervention that assumes the person is thinking rationally”. Too true. This gem, too: “non-matching behaviour is when your body language contradicts what you say. People pick up on this, even if we think we are not being obvious. You will find being genuine, open and honest, reduces the probability of conflict.” Thank you!

  And this definition that disarmed me in its directness: “Trauma is an event that combines fear, horror and/or terror with an actual or perceived loss of control. It can often be a life-changing event with negative and sometimes lifelong consequences.” That forward slash did so much for me. Horror and/or terror, hell yeah! Many such cases right here!

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Archive Please:

May 2025 - Damnit Hanny, she was pissed: “After 20 months of atrocity it is mind-numbing to see some institutions and leaders now come to find some weaselly kind of voice. None are saying, “gosh I was wrong”. Instead they behave as though something new or different has happened, and that there is a category change in the situation. Polite people who care only about preserving normality, and their place in it.”

May 2024 - Damnit Hanny, maybe poetrylessness is perennial May problem: “It’s one of those rare end-of-month times that holds no impulse to alchemise poetry from existence. Tonight there’s no sudden arrival of the usual proper peace that comes when I sit down here for my appointment with you, to find out together what is real and true.”

May 2023 - Damnit Hanny, she really went there: “You’ve got lovely long hair don’t you, can you tie that up? Sure, of course. Is there any chance that you could be pregnant? No. Can you hold still? Yes. Even more still? Mmm. Can you take only the shallowest of breaths? Actually can you hold it? Can you hold it in?”

May 2022 - Damnit Hanny, maybe May is for poetry after all: “The only place that feels like home here is the island, which can’t stay home forever. On the ferry back to the little house from the city last night I sat alone out on the top deck. White harbour lights began to perforate the night wash of blue-black. A choreography of seagulls wheeled about the berthing boat.”

May 2021 - Damnit Hanny, that dog is dead now: “Joanie was looking out at the garden as she peeled potatoes, Ryan was at the table patting the proudly offered tummy of the floor-rolling dog, and I was tidying away the clean lunch dishes from the drying rack when she said it. “I think what’s hardened me is death, being around so much of it.””

May 2020 - Damnit Hanny, maybe you should put more current affairs in your newsletters again. This one is a real time capsule (feat. the brief cancellation of Alison Roman!): “Such a moment of backlash or cancellation is a relief, of sorts. Catharsis feels good (see - racism does have consequences! We aren’t just getting away with it anymore! Maybe there is a scrap of justice in this world!). But it’s all too neat and ritualistic: we can exteriorise then exorcise the discomfort of knowing that our existence has been made possible on the back of others’ suffering. Cancellation tells us how not to do things, how not to say things. But what to do?”

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Okay one more photograph of the early summer genre, why not (is there a rule that rhododendrons must be planted in twos? And in two shades? This duo is everywhere):

Until next month may you receive a cat’s purr in a moment of need. Or, you know, feel free to borrow from tomorrow. I won’t judge you,
H x

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