This month of intense transition, brisk walks after dark in a state of delirium. This PhD is all over me. My screen is so white and it glares all day. The moon is so white it’s almost offensive and so is the carton of milk which sits by the homeless man at Charing Cross. He rolls cigarettes and watches the traffic. I rarely see him smoke, but he is often rolling, and watching. Rolling and watching, as if the two were entwined and utterly necessary. I am watching too as I walk, but I walk fast and make of all features a blur. I run out of routes. I take the park at night to see the stars spread out on a sky of blue velvet. Nothing is nameable this way. It grows colder.
My feet look for a path but often find the grass instead.
Days pass, immersing myself in the journals of Gilbert White for a sense of the seasons, and how they manifest in the Earth. All the dead leaves of centuries swept. Then also Derek Jarman’s garden, so lovingly noted in Modern Nature.
To have such connection to the land, documenting its events. White:
Baker’s hill is harrowed-down after these great rains: it was no easy matter to subdue the clods at all. Some of the olde elders round the garden are almost leafless. Wallnuts are this Year innumerable. The white-apples are fit to make pies. Grapes, peaches, nectares very backward.
This is in August. Arboreal fruits and other riches. I ate a lot of apples in August, because there are always apples at conferences, nestled on paper-linings. In air-conditioned rooms, you crisply attend to knowledge. Something tart and sweet that activates the acid of many collective stomachs.
Mostly White’s journal compends the minutiae of fruits and vegetables grafted and grown and harvested in the garden. Little discoveries named in both English and Latin. The beauty of regularity and daily rhythm. But there are glitches: talk of ‘vast rain’ in the night, eerie events that just happen and remain unexplained —
A great light seen, & a vast explosion from y S: about a quarter past nine in the evening: the Cause unknown. It shook peoples houses very much. It seems to be meterous.
(White)
I write this on a Sunday morning, just as the bin men are creating a cataclysm of the garden. On Wednesday morning, the cleaners come early and the sound of the mop hitting the wall wakes me up from insomnia’s half-formed slumber. I dwell in these rhythms of other people’s labour, and consider my own, fingers on keys.
I have been thinking about data and how we access climate change as both event and ontological condition. What kinds of data do I attend to on a daily basis? I do not check the fluctuating air quality of my city, although Google allows you to do this. I rarely check the weather, at least beyond a cursory search as to whether to prepare with waterproofs or not. Checking the weather reminds me of the days of the week and all I have to do, and how the days are just units and thus the struggle of cramming things into them. I stay up very late because I am anxious about the days ahead, the things I am supposed to do in them. I remember a period of my life where I’d stay up all night all the time with friends, and when they’d lament the loss of their imminent day I’d say, no but this is great, it’s like cheating time! I did not realise they would sleep through the day, while I would ride wild on a sleep-deprived high, seeing the world as through frosted glass. The wee hours came, then the sun, and they would roll cigarette after cigarette in televisual flickers.
Summertime draws to a close, and dusk acquires a drama of light that demands photography. I skirt around Park Circus, following the curve of the streets, the incline. Ruffles of deeper darkness. How many memories are concentrated at the top of Kelvingrove Park, with the lights spread in ribbons of gold and red and glimmering distance. Collect my intensities, try not to think too hard. The air in my lungs reacts and is hot and sweet. The clocks go back and what a pleasure it is to flip straight to 1:01 again. Where does the hour go that is lost? It shaves a little light off my evening, for which I lament. Last year I was working until 3am when the clocks went back, and I was scared I’d have to work the extra hour unpaid. This is something we never talk about, the impact on those who pull night shifts. Luckily, there was a system. But customers did not understand. It got to 2am and we were kicking them out and they demanded we stay open till 3. The way it was on their phones, which automatically reset in electric synchrony. We were open till 3am that night; just on retro time, the time of before.
So tired I fall asleep with the light on, my face in some book. The luxury of curling into yourself and disappearing until all the dreams come.
The moon this week was consistently incredible. As in, cloaked in a halo of rainbow; magnetic, amphetamine rush of staring at it. Walk walk walk with the moon above, so below. The white pools of light that fall on the street. It gave me this charge or energy. I couldn’t sleep because I was full of the moon. Some lunar reaction inside me. I wanted to be more alone.
A friend describes my poem, ‘A Beautiful Video’, as ‘an autumn harvest of internet trash’, which I like a lot.
Adulthood means getting your bike fixed, over and over. Testing the brakes. It means learning to say no to things. It means being responsible for this and that. The ontological condition of email, with its beautiful intermittence — the sway of send and arrival. Kindest of wishes. I have been trying to start a letter all week but there are so many things I want to say to you. It’s been so long and I have no idea how you’re living.
It hurts to write ‘now’, like the lostness is already always.
On Hallowe’en, I’ll see Grouper play in Mackintosh Church.
The month began with me listening to Leonard Cohen, and ended in electronic abyss.
Spooky as the air is, filling the wood.
In my diary I seem to write a lot, ‘I feel sick at the thought’.
This is the month I leave my job of five and a half years. I have a lot of separation anxiety and maybe one day I’ll be back. Strange to have such emotional dependence on a place and its people. To measure yourself against the pace of its shifts, the demands of others. To love and love and love unconditionally. I miss everyone already; I did the very moment I set foot in the door for my last shift. We played a game of flexibility and were lovely to everyone, got good tips. A table of Texan tourists, the last people I served, told me: ‘you’re so pretty…you’re like as pretty as this glass of rosé wine’. The wine in question was our house, Angel’s Tears, so I said, ‘and I’m as sad as the tears of the angel’, to which they laughed uneasily. They meant it earnestly and I checked on the menu and a large glass was £7, so I am happy that my apparent attraction matches my second-favourite number. It was a cheap thing to say but I kinda liked it.
There have been these twangs in my chest, like someone pulling the strings of a harp too hard. I have not been sleeping too well.
Maybe I don’t miss the lush excesses of summer’s end, but I miss the extra light.
The way it feels to cycle downhill in freefall, giving yourself to the traffic, choking on the fumes of the cars around you. Red light upon red. Watching a film about homicidal ants. Messy situations and Skype conversations. Virtual reality and the value of objects. The enchanted beings appear on Byres Road, glitter-eyed at the crossing. Have written a sonnet a day for a week.
When I write in my diary it always begins so tired, so tired, or a variation of. I feel like I’ve done everything and nothing, and there’s so much still to do, to write into.
I watched The Garden until five in the morning and my eyes burned red all through the day. Something extravagantly eccentric about the manner of epic. Rub salt.
Erase yourself for rain and call it extinction. People have a lot of things to say on the matter.
So I sit here polishing pairs of shoes. At least I have something to walk with.
Begin again ordering rounds of Guinness. Almost asleep in the taxi, river-cross, the motorway morning orbits a thought. The mattering treacle of darkness. The air so cold it is almost sticky. When you see the abyss but take it anyway. This is such a soft short story to write in the library.
I lost my keys in the litter and leaves. I lost something in the hills, along time ago. Finding the words to say it.
~
Pinegrove – Rings
Angel Olsen – California
Red House Painters – Grace Cathedral Park
Sharon Van Etten – I Wish I Knew
Half Waif – Every Animal
Big Thief – Capacity
Karen Dalton – It Hurts Me Too
Haley Heynderickx, Max Garcia Conover – Slow Talkin’
Fleet Foxes – Icicle Tusk
Kiran Leonard – Working People
Leonard Cohen – The Partisan
The Innocence Mission – Lakes of Canada
Cocteau Twins – Summer-Blink
Arthur Russell – Losing My Taste For The Night Life
Sun Kil Moon, Jesu – You Are Me and I Am You
Oneohtrix Point Never – Love In The Time Of Lexapro
Lo Kindre – Torment Of One
Hiro Kone – Outside the Axiom
Low – Words
Mazzy Star – Mary Of Silence
Sibylle Baier – I Lost Something in the Hills
Nico – Afraid
~
mariaology 