14. November Digest/Digress
Leaving London, dethroning thought with poetry, an archive of impossible feelings
Half victims, half accomplices, like everyone else
— John Paul Sartre
Hello to you and goodbye to November. This time last year I was in the final few weeks of writing my English MA thesis in Auckland. I was in the kind of fugue where you forget to eat and stay up working until the earliest dawn birds startle you off to bed. This November looks eleven thousand miles different, but some things stay the same. I love starting each month-end letter with a photograph from the past thirty-odd days. It might be an attempt to wrest beauty from the world, sometimes in the form of a gold-toothed grin and sometimes merely a wan consolation. This month it is a scene from a doorway in the deliveries bay at the Barbican, the centre itself being closed under England’s lockdown. I also love heading up each month’s end with a hand-plucked quotation, imagining the phrase squawking its way through to you in the epigrammatic zing of an absent context. It must be about ritual and constancy, making small alters of thanks to the time spent reading and to the time spent marauding around whatever place my two feet can take me. Routine makes its designs on the random, alchemising obsessions out of accidents.
But routine is a stranger to me once again. Last week my partner and I packed up and left London. And since London has been so interior this year what leaving London really felt like was leaving our room overlooking the row of bins. It was hard to conceive of leaving a whole city but we could conceive of leaving behind the wall with the graffitied character that, blessedly, no one had ever scrubbed clean. I did not expect it but I am mourning the loss of that view. We also left behind our other vantage point, the one from our shared desk looking over the pedestrian crossing, where we would see fathers and daughters wearing early pandemic gas masks, then braided and hatted and smile-plastered women carrying mid-pandemic bunches of summer flowers, then autumnal trend-watching couples with their matching felted bucket hats and cross-body bags of the right-now pandemic. We left behind our tempered rage with the world, the fine glossy snap of it. We left behind our too-close-for-discomfort comfort with each other. We are in Scotland again - in Edinburgh, for now. There are more moments of strangeness between us now that we are in a strange place.
I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself: launching changes when I know that any change, at least at first, so unmoors me. Maybe it is a need to live inside a Shakespearean drama, in miniature - all recognitions and reversals. Maybe I don’t trust myself to have thoughts in a vacuum, needing the thoughts to emerge through movement and the shifting of fortunes. But thoughts aren’t that important. On Ryan’s birthday we broke our journey north with a stop in a borrowed apartment nestled into York’s old city wall and read poems at random from a Sylvia Plath book. Poetry - less about thoughts and more an experience of language - offers a kind of dethroning of thought, where the connections or disconnections between meanings, sounds, rhythms and images are operating not strictly outside of but strictly without dependence on rational thought. We didn’t say much after each back and forth except for asking to press replay on certain sternum-sticking sound combinations. It wasn’t really cognition as much as some kind of order of the body. It made me feel sorry for every time a school child is coerced into reading meaning from a poem on the spot. It made me feel sorry, momentarily, for every time I have gone through some outrageous change that could otherwise have been experienced in a poem. But it doesn’t work like that.
Let me tell you a little more about de-programming, or about my entire life being an exercise in de-programming. It is not a virtuous project, I’ll tell you that. De-programming is its own survival instinct, a way to survive against the conforming arc of the universe of schools and families; of marriages and churches and states. De-programming is also a tiny litter of slippery warm deaths. That’s certainly what it feels like this year, not a contrarian HA! but a reckoning with fictions that used to bring structuring shapes. All of our feelings become impossible at some stage, and we have to let them go. There are all the regular small impossibilities: we love places and then we fall out of love with them, we feel looking-glass invincible and beyond-flesh ugly, we feel as though we have an elegant handle on something and we feel deathly stupid. We are not brands. We are not on song. I am not the same person that I was here a year ago - filled as I was with a skittish, self-deprecating jauntiness and a blogger-like swagger. It might come back but for now that mode is in the archive. This November I am not in an accidental faster’s fugue. Instead I feel weighty - more under the spell of gravity.
It’s hard to think of anything other than deadly borders and fires and droughts and viruses. The weight of the seriousness is ratcheting up for everyone - some more than others - but for everyone, nonetheless. It’s a world-ending weightiness. The impossible feelings are not so small this time. I have not known the sparkly flash of a corporate-style achievement in isolation and for that I am glad. I am learning that work is not the way to freedom, unless that work is care, which should be all of our work, together. This year has been an accelerated de-programming, where the things I thought I needed to do turned out to not really need doing. The old style of ambition looks both personally and planetarily comical, and so too do my hurts and embarrassments. Right now they are impossible and they are in the archive. I do not judge them (okay maybe a little) but I do miss them sometimes - that light kind of life where a career counsellor could earnestly ask and what do you want to be? Now the question is more and what do you want to survive? That want is still there, at least.
Even though there was a spring and a summer along the way it is as though this entire year has been a winter - a kind of fallow, indoors time - not a waste, by any stretch, but a time to reflect and repair and mend and tend to all the things we don’t usually have time for in the busy bursts of the year’s high points. I have been tending and mending, I have. But maybe that’s why the seasonal fact of winter’s literal arrival feels so hard to accept this year. In the north we have had our winter of the heart and are ready for release. The pandemic says otherwise. The waning daylight says otherwise - today’s sunset was at 3.44pm. So we have been reading and watching more films on all these long interior nights. A recent memory-themed trifecta that I would recommend to anyone has featured the film Dick Johnson is Dead by Kirsten Johnstone and the novels Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi and The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. All three focus on the dance between those who have full and and painfully accessible archives and those for whom the archive is rapidly disappearing. No full reviews this time because I find myself outside interrogation mode. All I want to do today is lavish everything and everyone with loving sympathy.
Quickies:
Listening to: billy woods + kenny sengal, “spongebob”
Watching: Moses Sumney - Live from Planet Afropunk
Subscribing to: Anne Trubek’s newsletter: “As Marx put it, the small business owner is "cut up into two persons. As owner of the means of production he is a capitalist; as a labourer he is his own wage- labourer”
Reading in the line for the coffee:
1) “Another person’s intimate disclosure can be a gift, or it can be an unwelcome demand: for sympathy, for attention, for reciprocity” - Sophie McBain’s review of the memoir Group2) “Surfing TikTok feels vaguely creative, as if you move through the field of content with your mind alone” - Kyle Chayka’s newsletter/post on TikTok and the triumph of the lowbrow, the absurd, the unimportant
Sewing: Persephone Pants (though the pandemic has definitely archived a lot of my prior romantic feelings about self-sufficiency)
Missing: third spaces - places like Coffee Pen back in my stolen home town of Auckland. Have a look at Pen’s new book.
Elsewhere: my article in ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics, on the decolonial moves of poet Jacqueline Carter.
Keep in touch on Instagram or Twitter or there’s always hannahleesplease@gmail.com
Until next month,
H xxx
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