Our home is on fire and our houses unmade. When climate change is also (as Margaret Atwood puts it) ‘everything change’, how might poetry reckon with the far-reaching implications and existential contradictions of environmental crisis? In this panel discussion, we ask what tools exist for poetry to retune our senses, coexist with multiple species, tell stories of deep time while envisioning resilient and resistant communities. Our three poets will explore key strands into a climate-responsive poetics: elemental, collaborative, mindful, wild. With close attention to form and language, we discuss practical, ethical and poetic interventions in ecological thought.
Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of working with two excellent poets, Jack Young and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, on bringing to life their pamphlets in the country garden /the end of england and All in Animal Time. It’s been a fair few months since SPAM published anything physical (our most recent print publication was Cocoa and Nothing back in February) and coordinating everything for season 7 reminded me why I love doing this in the first place. There is something magical and alchemical that happens in the process of getting something from email to book in a series of whirlwind zoom(ies) and frantic whatsapps and editorial ping pong and delicious in-depth reading. I love figuring out solutions to a design problem, shunting things around, letting things bleed into the edges or splash into place, phone calls about word choice and line breaks. Generous margins and snaky wee texts / embarking upon font quests.
We got to know our authors, who are based in Bristol and Iceland, variously over the pandemic through Zoom workshops and the great poetry boulevard that is gmail. You can read one of Jack’s poems in SPAM005 and one of Karó’s in SPAM004. The SPAM editors are big fans of their work and we were delighted that both authors had pamphlets that kind of grew out of the poems in the magazine. This season has a lil rainbow-shrouded eco flavour: poems of the anthropocene everyday, poems of queer pastoral, poems in animal time (as per David Berman’s advice). J&K are poets with a real interest in the scholarly work of poetry as much as the playful. These are really thoughtful works which traverse everything from decolonising botany to Commander Keen, the dietary needs of black holes and the sonnets of rats and punctuation marks. Ugh I really love them! Thinking about these pamphlets is like coming up on coffee with sunlight pouring through the morning and having adequate sleep and remembering why the little things really fucking matter. It’s like the libido of the knotweed exerting pressure to break concrete and escape the walled garden which is like beautiful open source software. I am so lucky to have worked with these poets and also to have collabed with my co-editors Mau Baiocco, Kirsty Dunlop and Ian Macartney in bringing them to fruition. Long live SPAM!
Coordinating this pamphlet series also reminded me that publishing is an act of worldbuilding, brick by paper brick, pixel by pixel. It’s like: how do we give birth constantly to the word-pearls of what you wanted by accident of so many factors to have an idea for ~ ~ it’s like……a gift, a life-changing conversation, a journal entry for the language of flowers, a frolic through girl city’s sugar cubes and the delicious lumpencoal of the poem. Stop to admire the ‘four-star review sycamore’ (KRO) while you’re at it.
We worked with two v talented artists, Maura Sappilo and Sam Williams on cover design. Thank you Jack and Maura!!!
If you’re in Glasgow, please come along to our launch on the 10th November, where we’ll also have a reading from Edinburgh poet Murid L. Keshtmand and there will be many a pamphlet on sale and a lil wine & snack to be had.
PEOPLE OF THE PRESS! If you’d like to review the book, interview one of the authors, have them on your podcast or stock copies of the pamphlets in your store, please email spamzine.editors@gmail.com.
You can preorder the books at inflation-resistant prices => spamzine.co.uk/shop.
You can watch two Instagram live sessions with Jack and Karó here, where we talk about the thinking behind the pamphlets, inspirations and the craft of writing.
It’s been a while since we recorded an episode of Lunch Club over at SPAM HQ, but I was really excited to join Jac Common and Ian Macartney in the studio to discuss the 2020 spamphlet Bad Moon by Samantha Walton.
Galina Rymbu, Life in Space (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020, trans. Joan Brooks).
William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) public domain.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ii.I
Aiskhylos, Agamemnon in An Oresteia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, trans. Anne Carson)
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (London: Vintage, 1992).
Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).
Fred Carter (2022) ‘`Crude Oil Shaping Forms of Writing`: Galina Rymbu’s Life in Space, Ecoes, 4, 56-65.
Esther Leslie, Fog, Froth and Foam: Insubstantial Matters in Substantive Atmospheres in Electric Brine (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021, ed. Jennifer Teets).
Sophie Lewis (2017) ‘Amniotechnics’, The New Enquiry, link
Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (New York, London: Duke University Press, 2021).
Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
It’s almost autumn and I can’t stop listening to The Corrs. Something ringing in the falling rain a leaf-lorn runaway, never gonna stop falling, wish I could play the strings and not cry over a snapped shoelace that Saturday, wish I could never need name this. A fresh nostalgia for Flash player, a bad new year, kneeling in the car dirt of roadsides to fix my bike, the air all gone out of each tyre it’s tiring to be here / wish I could change. Not into other people but into the person I was, rosy-fingered sleepless rolling cinnamon skins and talking on the internet while in the other town this guy throws a mattress out of a window. If memory serves to fall out with it. Black lace and white corduroy out to the woods I’m happiest on the hill where I see this deer, evidently a teenage stag and I’m calling angel androgynies the very next stray. Fucked up salads of affect, afraid to go outside. Emma says everyone’s a poet. You just go.
Crying in the cobblers for other omens.
Girls in the nineties with strands of dark hair, box-dyed. The electricity all gone out. I was supposed to be planning a workshop, writing a lecture. The universe owns me, doesn’t owe me.
Across oceans of static, watching you typing…
I cycled past the cathedral and saw the sycamores blush orange as if in real-time metabolising their chlorophyll before me. I google the phrase ‘fall splendour’ in guilty luxuriance. A man on my street pisses against the wall, daylight screams; he pisses for so long I think he will disintegrate in dumb liquid gold. Can’t concentrate on this Zoom call. I’m missing something real of the days before me. Girl in old man bar is singing a ballad. Can you drink a black hole if you can’t drink a Guinness? Colin says Brian says you’d have to suck through a straw at the speed of light. Girl in old man bar is wearing tartan, a velvet headband, recently expired lipstick. I like her.
Singing Eliza Carthy, singing Amen Dunes…
I always want autumn too early and pine for spring. Trillions of magazines tell me it’s not cool having holes in my tights. It’s not cool having ragged cuticles.
Ten years of sleazy beauty.
A paintbrush yellowing in sordid water.
Forever down Cathcart Road.
Incurable bed mornings of limb ache and long illness, it’s fine like to say it’s totes, bring myself coffee in bed and emails filling me with autumn leaves and the fly infestation fed upon fruit and air…a red car rolling backwards up the street…
It used to be so easy to write these like it never mattered to write at all. The sky is still whey and there are new routes to get to the same old temples. I swirl my tongue in the google doc long enough to know how I’d touch you; the hopescape bristles with city pollution. My friends have been to Greece and Bali, the Hebrides. I have been to Edinburgh for work. Come down the wrong side of the hill among gorse and scramble, the rocks coming loose and my heart gone trash-eating in the nights of bad sleep again, all again, falling awake with the light on, spilled ink in my sheets. I met the same America on Netflix checking my brain, my gag reflex.
I heard the blood blister in that guitar riff and it was like vomiting behind the shopping mall in Kilmarnock, drunk on bus wine and the Alice in Chains of my arteries…you awake, say the word clavicle, touch my spine…
Experimenting with Weather A workshop with me and Tawnya Selene Renelle
(Online and free)
Thursday February 17th
6-8:00pm (GMT) via Zoom
Join us for this free workshop. Maria Sledmere will be our guest as she gets you ready for her new course Writing the Everyday which will begin on February 24th.
We will be deep diving into all the ways we can experiment with weather and thinking about the ways that weather can shape both the content and structure of our writing. We will be thinking about the influence of weather and how something simple might be woven into experimental writing.
Suited to all genres, skill levels, and artists of any medium.
Ecopoetics and Postcapitalist Desire As part of Glasgow Goes Green Festival (QMU, University of Glasgow)
(in-person, 5pm on 23rd February)
In his 2012 essay, ‘Post-Capitalist Desire’ Mark Fisher recalls protestors at the Occupy London Stock Exchange critiqued in the press for having iPhones and buying Starbucks coffee. In many mainstream framings of environmental activism, to be ecological is to be solemnly ‘pure’ and somehow entirely free of the taint of consumerism’s impulse. How do questions of energy, desire and expression come into artistic and activist responses to the climate crisis? Can we complicate the binary of ascetism and pleasure when it comes to ecology? This workshop asks: what does it mean to be ecological in and beyond capitalist society? Looking at various works of contemporary poetry, we will locate ecological thought within complex expressions of excess, hedonism and despair; works which intersect ecology with queer joy and critiques of racialised capital; works which negotiate ecological politics and ethics within everyday life and its games of recognition.
After a short introduction to ecopoetics, we’ll read some poems (distributed as pdf handouts), explore writing activities and have discussion.
Open to anyone interested in reading and writing poetry.
Location: this workshop will take place in Committee Room 1 of the QMU. Enter through the front door of the building and take the stairs or the lift ahead to the third floor. A member of staff will be present to direct you to the workshop.
Please bring your own preferred writing materials.
Dorothy’s Opiates is the name of the real Arcadia not to be busted, learning that sleep deprivation is a kind of spiritual death from a podcast featuring the Nap Ministry I set off to sleep under three duvets: one is representative of snow, the other a sleep mode, the other a body. I write to you from beneath this slumberous context to wonder why anyone who ever lived in a single glazed tenement loved the cold. I can think of reasons: always something to look forward to such as the crocuses and milder temperatures, the searching of someone to warm you, wanting to dissolve into their skin this someone who is never cold like you. I can’t explain this cold but I can summarise its various sensations, cold as in a kind of disease that eats your bones from the inside with terrible icicles and lives in your back as a demon, cackling from within your kidneys; a small child dependent on your energy, the cold needs fed. The cold is in your chest, your throat, your head. It throbs in your fingertips until they are red and puffy and burning like nothing else you have ever felt: imagine every orgasm of your life summarised and congealed as an opposite evil — pain — and concentrated in the tips of your fingers, as though a malformed heart had grown in each one, beating out of time, each heart individually failing at the tips of your fingers until the pain spreads out like a juice all the way down your fingers, hot, the nerves pulling into your arm but it is so concentrated at the tips, you can’t really move and to hit them against each other is like clanging vegetal matter against blunt metal, they are thumpy and numb, now the pain is melting it becomes a warm sensation of somewhat release as though only a generalised bruising of the nervous ends of all your digits. And by this time I hope I’ll have gotten home to run them perilously under cold water, bringing them to room temperature as if they could crack off and crumble into snowflakes of ache it takes ten minutes or more; after which they will sting with the feeling of having been battered. And it will happen again the second your blood spikes, you go outside; they may as well have been trodden on or run over by a van the way they feel right now. I ask you sometimes to squeeze my hands so hard it bursts the blue of us. Once I knew a worse cold accordant to body weight this kind of cold is all-consuming for all seasons of the year, a kind of inverse fire that licks your insides with its ice so you feel it as a constant in your sternum, the cold that is eating the meat of your ribs so you become a delicate succulent, always with sugar on your mind, wanting to be watered. Always watering yourself fruitlessly and feathered of flesh, wilted as if to float upon a snowdrift and not leave footprints. Sometimes it is barely to speak or, having dry Januaried the masses, some lubricant of society was missing sorely from our dreams. So we did not dream of touching each other so much as falling from breezeblocks, frosted, the hard fuck that doesn’t come bounding down stairwells to greet you at sun-up with cigarettes and coffee, which you cannot touch, which aggravates your nerves to a passion. Nicotine, caffeine, dopamine. The endocrine systems of our dreams are running on empty and I have fed this day with the manifest boilersuit, as though to fix my own boiler with mechanical prowess, die in your arms and so on. There are parts of the city whose arteries confuse to the point of a general surge, desirous of insulation and drivers arrange the marzipan animals of their dashboard tenderly. Snowfall. The first of the year’s cold drama gone to pick up a wardrobe through the Narnias of other vinyl records caught on the loop of the sweltering imaginaries a slice of life, of liquorice. Flying by the Vogue Chippy of Cumbernauld Road. You play loose with it, as if the rain alone would melt what meadow remains of the innocence. A summary of the movie of other Januaries: asking if I am a bad feminist for not liking such-and-such a book, the enclave of housing utopias, the sunshine duration of the ad for Stella Artois, the scene in All is Forgiven where the drunk kids dance to The Raincoats’ version of ‘Lola’. I want to be inebriated with chips and cheese on the corner and kissing you darkly in the overlit takeaway. Anniversary of another fascist coup. The cold in blunder, spraying my tongue with Vitamin D, worrying about sleep. ‘Dorothy’ is a song by Kevin Morby in the video, somebody plays a trumpet underwater. I drape a cardigan over my daughterhood, pull stories across my knees until I am deep in the grass with you, the snow grass, a long sore note, we have pink faces keeping up with each other’s sleeps, to rotate in the bed, the powdery dreamscapes gathering form. Dorothy, Your warm apparition not to be sold or bought, an account of the aspirin sunlight, too much, taking the flower pill that makes me react as a plant, long stem in your arms and coaxed of sap. Calcium is a luxury to those who might keep their flesh self- sustained and hard and warm. I thought of Kansas and corn with the morning yoghurt as a viscid snow, spoonfuls of what we are missing to kiss goodbye of the freezing streets of Partick, melt in your mouth, the pressure of boilers adjusted by release, the way our bodies incline to the light even when it is missing, how I wish you could trade kisses for calories of actual heat, the truthfeel of one in the morning stands for baggies of memories the prized alacrity of exercise, I insufflate the nervous internet. If this poem really were sentient, this would be the queue for the doctor’s office, which is a location after all, novel in its banality, after the fact of actually being here, a state of waiting requiring the mortal presence of your body. I stopped asking what a poem can do when it seemed like I was done typing with my fingers searing hot white words like arrows tearing the flesh as they wrote, O Dorothy, listening to a band called Trapped in Kansas. I was born. Wrestling with duvets to change the music sheets afresh, up close with the soot-covered mountains, called to the room with thermometers jammed in the hole of the poem, its quavers jostling with old composition, bloodstream, organ, snow. It is safe, it is safe.
You’ve got a nerve to be embodied. Lana says it pains her how good the male vocals are on ‘Dealer’. Season of frivolous spending I call you from the floor of a mall, you spend £16.90 on coffee, I don’t know what prose is.
At some point I must have remembered the password to the room of amphibians, Analysis.
It’s not like the contact is there. A plate of sliced ham many decades ago, the puppy ate. A palate refined into podcasters who go out for cheeseburgers, murmuration of commas, choleric entropies. It’s a form of sleep paralysis. Horny letters to environmentalists.
Save me…as…
You lucid dream or you stop / shall it be blessed to touch the furnace a hard-light, the caterpillar blonde.
The door is locked. It needs a medicine. Rivers of cognac coagulate arterial: one is gold, one is white. Nightmares of Fancy prose. Aperitif or signet ring. Solid aura.
The barista gifts me free lemon cake “for someone that needs it” and it might be me or I half it with you? All canal walk I sipped the glow of that coffee their human kindness
The city a hologram out of Musk’s Eye™️
Sharing our name with the semblance of oatmeal, remembering for the business of hibiscus. It’s not as if I don’t want to say sky leaf, high staples, the charcoal nights of London. The bars are still apparently ours, a sensibility measured by flood vibe. Names of boats.
I can’t listen to music it’s all ships. The pillow faults of true music. Soundcloud was a planet. Salad Daze. Salad translates leaf array, a contour irrealism, swarm economics, morbid blonde. Wafer arrangements of transistor radio.
A feedback loop of the dark. The edifice of gelatine.
Time goes off like a triangle.
Photoelastic buoyancy; saline; bone; lime.
Nearby they are sleeping so I am the night elf
I miss tinsel I want so much tinsel I want Porphyria’s Lover erotica tinsel I want to be metaversed into the scintillant realm of tinsel a mass effect class tinsel I want blonde tinsel a gold physiology I want reddish the trad version tinsel ikr
Silvering with these destroyer lawyers
What was the original chipmunk music?
tinsellllllllllllllling total tinsel insensate a hard sell 🙂
I sue you!
Remember the xmas we listened to psychology podcasts as we hung gold baubles on the natural tree I wept in the eighties before sun lamps were invented
Life changed the moment I minted my depression as an NFT. The process was long and boring, but now I am a clean one who has never grasped the meaning of silverware. Let me try to explain the process of having a life thus expunged of its fungibility, which is to say, I feel now worthy of anything. I don’t even need to log on.
This is not a book of ‘the environment’, nor do I profess care for the precise expenditure required to fuel that sluice of the blockchain which facilitated said transaction. Honestly I am just glad to have sold my black dog to an eager buyer.
I can hear someone crying thru the walls most nights, the kind of wail that angels do, having no sex to think about they might body millennia of pain. The quality of having no carnal emotions owing to calorific deficit is guaranteed.
The black dog was adopted from more or less insipid childhood fantasies in which more or less I could not have lived this far. Small red marks on my glyph flesh. Not to be dramatic but there is a reason why I am scared of cars. The first time what is called Marlene sat behind a wheel I freaked.
Communiqué over Excel spreadsheets had led me to believe my sadness was extractable. I started feeling it everywhere, standardised and flashing among the long trails of light exposure.
Imagine buying a thing for its absolute exclusivity, only to release its essence, bit by bit, in meatspace! The ambience of my original sadness spread across the mall, where generally I was to be found weeping by the ceramic fountain, where people tossed coins as the wanton value of wishes.
[Autumn redux]
Dramatic monologue of the dog: I am a dog! A fucking dog! You better not touch me.
I tell you, I freaked the fuck out. She did. Is it better to have someone crying or having sex thru the walls? Irritability is a relative condition. I’m so tired and fucked up. Moan.
I want my black dog back Why are they not a blue dog, someone asks in the comments. The internet is so fucking literal. I paint my nails hot pink and chew them so all the polish flakes into my mouth like itsy bits of sext.
Have to stop myself reading Lauren Berlant’s blog again. Get kinda sentimental at night. ‘I was lucky to be the dreamer because the dreamer never stops being interested. People know when they haven’t said enough, that’s why they dream’. I never say enough, that’s why I write. There’s something I always wish I told you, but you never could tell.
Every time I sit next to a man on the bus, I assume he’s gonna reach for something intangible, a long red thread you could tug from my cunt with this terrible thing at the end, that’s it.
The black dog had impossible puppies and the puppies are always following me, especially onto the bus. Ten black puppies is a lot of transport coverage. Driver winks and goes, ‘you’re just a pup’. When I close my eyes, we spit in each others’ mouths. I hear a Belle & Sebastian song in the distance.
Scenery passes, etc. Static poplars.
Everybody started to ask, Where do you see your future? I see my future in NFTs, is the prepared, p(r)eppy answer. No, not as an investor. I’m not even a flip in bed, where it counts. Can you guess?
Everybody who doesn’t have a choice has a price. I used to text M. like, what do you think I should do with my life. There’s nothing to buy at the mall. You should go home, she says.
Earlier I lied. I kind of do care about the environment. Black dogs let loose among burning forests.
I have no memory for the feeling of rain.
Non-fungible errors cluster my dashboard. That I had my sadness minted and then accused of bad metaphor. Darling, I was the economic downturn all along.
I eat with my fingers among the dogs. They love me.
There is much I cannot tell you. I’m not going to be autobiographical. I want to be “bio.”
— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, trans. by Stefan Tobler
Hidden gardens where a bioluminescent frisbee, in imitation of the mysterious diskettes that roam the deepest zones of ocean, drifts upon the late May breeze. It is unseasonably cold. We take pleasure in relishing the ‘unseasonably cold’, as to say something is unreasonable or unforgivably it. The thing. The heating is on all through the month of May. Rain-sodden trainers left to dry on radiators. A documentary about nudibranchs had revealed to us the secrets of experts. Experts in general. How you really have to hate the thing you study, in order to love it. The thing has to perpetually withhold from you what you want, not knowing what it is, but always in pursuit of it. So the nudibranch in question, this pinkish one, does what is told as a ‘dance’ for the diver, who has gone too deep in the song. The sea tells nothing after the bridge. It is barely a chorus.
I am a heart beating at fish time, deep in the abyssopelagic city along with the dumbo octopus, the cookiecutter shark, the shrimp. I will not say much about these animals and how they came to adapt to such aphotic lifestyles. I myself was once a chaser of light. We are circus anomalies, dependent on a phrase of unseasonable coldness. The freak quality of not-to-want oxygen or like, having been left here then stubbornly I will stay here. Make of my heart what you want — a jewel or rock, a piece of cold life, swallowed. Bare and beating. Something is getting dark around us. Darker yet.
And so never to leave the perpetual lockdown of the not capital city, and so to leave it for gorse and blue realms and the haar of what is by the sea, in a wavelet transformation. Having to go inland to escape it. And so to give up one’s limbs for the personal study of human impossibility, as if we had also been persons all along. I wear a delicious, impermeable bracelet of kelp. The order of adjectives tends towards certain qualities, for instance when I say a blonde soft hair it is wrong somehow, touching the thing in a wrong order, when everyone wants a soft blonde hair as delicacy. To be in this month and spearing the secret fish of the story, one after the other meandering down this channel. At the bottom of everything, when you see it. When you see the story.
Let us go deeper yet. I have these new glasses, you have these hands that will brush away masses of silt and sand. You have the order of words corrected. Living in a grammar of ceaseless helium. Lamentation of the soft urban fox you were once, once were. The frisbee glows quietly in the grass at night. At dinner, J. gives the lowdown on *********** and various fish glow quietly in their sadness and having been farmed to believe I too am in this story, eating. The very delicate scarce thing we would toss to the word of the mouth, the open wound of it, melted substance. Brushing a fork through soft blots of cream and saying is it so, deep sea, very scarcely. This instant, speared, you are the story also. Salt. Twice removed from the lavender thing twigged from the garden and drank in gin with soda, so the ice knows more than I do. So the ice clinks in the quiet night, which is never a night. So T. confesses the end of dark lunch. I read it.
The cold fresh lenses allow us to witness how the deer get sick, how the white deer especially are beautiful by any standard of “I love you” said between the innocent eyes of how we are also roes, taking our glasses off to see better the way faces exist when brushed together, clicked and twisted, kissed. And the gorse so yellow, sky so blue. Immediately, to have been tourist for mourning. The most disappointing best hot chocolate in the world has all the good sweet silt at the bottom. I finish it, feel sick as expected. Flush. I throw up my arms or something. Wash the cup, recycle it.
So the nudibranch’s name is derived from the Greek words ‘nudus’ and ‘brankhia’, meaning naked gills. They have no special skill in discerning between light and dark, often using chemical signals to locate what is needed: food and each other. They possess a pair of ‘oral tentacles’. Soft-bodied, dragon-like, losing their vestigial shell during a larval phase. The extreme vividity of their being works as advertisement. I am obsessed with them. The sap-sucking slugs, algae rich. They produce solar power from munching on corals, absorbing their chloroplasts to photosynthesise nutrients. Bright colours result from their diet. The month of May has a toothed structure that tongues the very campion and jewelled aurora that passes for what you want ‘pure total nature’ or sweet poisons, for which I take showers to exhume from this system.
The writing, at the bottom of everything, is colours. They come from what we eat.
Null cerise and sweet neutral grey, back into darkness again and gently.
Now it’s 10:29 of Sunday morning and last night’s song thrush and the afternoon skylark and none of this heard on a podcast exists — it is all true and continues. The frisbee flies sentences through the wan air and hark is it early to never want to leave, to always be entering the room spreading butter on toast and holding a glass up for persons, wild-cats, in a language the daylight speaks and speaks along, another dark lunch hidden from the universe only to be camembert nightmares of rosemary — whisky — do you remember this shadow man or his shadow step-daughter, do you remember the riot, do you remember the castle of gold, clearance and loneliness? This place is tricky to heat. Black tulips, white hyacinths. Coming up the stairs is the question.
A nudibranch bristles into coral and kelp bed. At the bottom of everything is the nudibranch. Do you see it? Do you see it?
I burn my tongue on the question. What will be coming around the mountain of bleached consideration, haunted and lovely through the haar and more blue to come exists as breath, underwater, this pause before each born to scrub our hands with sea kelp soap from the isle of darkness and safety trending in the United Kingdom of the girl, with her voice of crunched glass abolishing sky castles, sand castles her salad days her spectacular glands her nudibranch heart
Lately I’ve been haunted by a couple of lines by James Schuyler: ‘In the sky a gray thought / ponders on three kinds of green’ (‘A Gray Thought’). I can’t work out what kinds of green he means. Funny how the trees of London still have their leaves, mostly, and how the city keeps its own climate. Sunk in a basin. Schuyler names the source of the greens: the ‘tattered heart-shapes / on a Persian shrub’, ‘pale Paris green’ of lichens, ‘growing on another time scale’, and finally ‘another green, a dark thick green / to face the winter, laid in layers on / the spruce and balsam’. A grey thought to match the greyer sky. The sky has been grey in my life for weeks, it came from Glasgow and it came from England; I saw it break slightly over the midlands, a sort of bellini sunset tinged with pain. I just wanted it to fizz and spill over. I saw my own skin bloom a sort of insomnia grey, a vaguely lunar sheen. Schuyler’s greens describe a luxury of transition, pulling back the beaded curtains of winter and finding your fingers snagged on pearls of ice.
There is a presence here, and a space for mortality that starts to unfold like the slow crescendo of a pedal, held on the upright piano of childhood, whose acoustics promise the full afternoons of a nestlike bedroom. Which is to say, everything here. Protection. Which is to say, where every dust molecule seems to glow with us, which makes us multiple. A commodious boredom that opens such worlds as otherness is made of, ageing. Annie Ernaux in The Years (2008):
During that summer of 1980, her youth seems to her an endless light-filled space whose every corner she occupies. She embraces it whole with the eyes of the present and discerns nothing specific. That this world is now behind her is a shock. This year, for the first time, she seized the terrible meaning of the phrase I have only one life.
There is this life we are supposed to be living, we are still working out the formula for. And yet the life goes on around us, propels through us. It happens all the while we exist, forgetting. It is something about a living room and the satisfying crunch of aluminium and the echo chamber of people in their twenties still playing Never Have I Ever. And the shriek and the smoke and the lights outside, reflective laughter.
The many types of grey we can hardly imagine, which exist in friction with the gild of youth. He shows me the birthday painting hung by his bedside. It is blue and green, with miasmatic tangles of black and gold, like somebody tried to draw islands in the sky with lariat shapes. I look for a roar as I walk, as though something in my ears could make the ground tremble. The air is heavy, a new thick cold that is tricky to breathe in. It requires the clever opening of lungs. I stow cigarettes from Shanghai in my purse. My Nan says she gets lost in the city centre. She gets lost in the town. She looks around and suddenly nothing is familiar. She has lived here for years and years and yet. It is the day-to-night transition of a video game, it is the virtuality of reality, inwardly filtered. She sucks industrial-strength Trebor mints and something of that scent emits many anonymous thoughts in negative. How many worlds in one life do we count behind us?
From P. Syme’s Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821)
There is something decidedly Scottish about singing the greys. A jarring or blur of opacity. We self-deprecate, make transparent the anxiety. There is the grey of concrete, breezeblock, pregnant skies delivering their stillborn rain. Grey of granite and flint, grey of mist over shore; grey of sea and urban personality. We splash green and blue against the grey, call it rural. Call it a thought. Call out of context. Lustreless hour of ash and in winter, my father lighting the fire. In London they caramelise peanuts in the crowded streets, and paint their buildings with the shiniest glass. It is all within a movie. My brother walks around, eyeing the landmarks and shopfronts fondly, saying ‘London is so…quaint’. He means London is so London. I stray from the word hyperreal because I know this pertains to what is glitz and commercial only. It does not include the entirety of suburb and district; it is not a commuter’s observation. Deliciously, it is sort of a tourist’s browsing gaze. Everything dematerialises: I get around by flipping my card, contactless, over the ticket gates. There is so much to see we forget to eat. It is not so dissimilar to hours spent out in the country, cruising the greens of scenery, looking for something and nothing in particular. Losing ourselves, or looking for that delectable point of loss. As Timothy Morton puts it, in Ecology Without Nature (2007), we ‘consume the wilderness’. I am anxious about this consuming, I want it to be deep and true, I want the dark green forest inside me. I want the hills. I’m scared of this endless infrastructure.
Some prefer a world in process. The greys reveal and conceal. The forest itself pertains to disturbance, it is another form of remaking. Here and there the fog.
In ‘A Vermont Diary’, it’s early November and Schuyler takes a walk past waterfalls, creek flats, ‘a rank harvest of sere thistles’. He notes the continuing green of the ferns in the woods, the apple trees still bearing their fruit despite winter. Our craving for forest, perhaps, is a primal craving for protection of youth, fertility, sameness. But I look for it still, life, splashed on the side of buildings. It has to exist here. I look up, and up; I j-walk through endlessly aggressive traffic. What is it to say, as T. S. Eliot’s speaker in The Waste Land (1922) does, ‘Winter kept us warm’?
Like so many others, in varying degrees, I walk through the streets in search of warmth.
Lisa Robertson, in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), writes of the inflections of the corporeal city:
Architectural skin, with its varieties of ornament, was specifically inflected with the role of representing ways of daily living, gestural difference and plenitude. Superficies, whether woven, pigmented, glazed, plastered or carved, received and are formed from contingent gesture. Skins express gorgeous corporal transience. Ornament is the decoration of mortality.
So with every gorgeous idiosyncrasy, the flourish of plaster, stone or paint, we detect an age. A supplement to the yes-here fact of living. I dwell awhile in Tavistock Square and do not know what I am supposed to do. So Virginia Woolf whirled around, internally writing her novels here. There was a great blossoming of virtual narrative, and so where are those sentences now — might I look for them as auratic streams in the air, or have they regenerated as cells in leaves. There are so many sycamores to kick on the grass. There was a bomb. A monument. Thought comes over, softly, softly. I take pictures of the residue yellows, which seem to embody a sort of fortuity, sprawl of triangular pattern, for what I cannot predict. Men come in trucks to sweep these leaves, and nobody questions why. The park is a luminous geometry.
I worry the grey into a kind of glass. The cloud is all mousseline. If we could make of the weather an appropriate luxury, the one that is wanted, the one that serves. In The Toy Catalogue (1988), Sandra Petrignani remembers the pleasure of marbles, ‘holding lots of them between your hands and listening to the music they made cracking against each other’. She also says, ‘If God exists, he is round like a marble’. The kind of perfection that begs to be spherical. I think of that line from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ (1960): ‘Marble-heavy, a bag full of God’. So this could be the marble of a headstone but it is more likely the childhood bag full of marbles, clacking quite serenely against one another in the weight of a skirt pocket. Here I am, smoothing my memories to a sheen. I have a cousin who takes photographs of forests refracted through crystal balls. I suppose they capture a momentary world contained, the miniaturising of Earth, that human desire to clasp in your hand what is utterly beautiful and resists the ease of three-dimensional thought. How else could I recreate these trees, this breeze, the iridescent play of the August light?
I like the crystal ball effect for its implications of magicking scene. One of my favourite Schuyler poems is ‘The Crystal Lithium’ (1972), which implies faceting, narcosis, dreams. The poem begins with ‘The smell of snow’, it empties the air, its long lines make every description so good and clear you want to gulp it; but you can’t because it is scenery just happening, it is the drapery of event which occurs for its own pleasure, always slipping just out of human grasp. The pleasure is just laying out the noticing, ‘The sky empties itself to a colour, there, where yesterday’s puddle / Offers its hospitality to people-trash and nature-trash in tans and silvers’. And Schuyler has time for the miniatures, glimpses, fleeting dramas. My cousin’s crystal ball photographs are perhaps a symptom of our longing for other modes of vision. They are, in a sense, versions of miniature:
“Miniature thinking” moves the daydreaming of the imagination beyond the binary division that discriminates large from small. These two opposing realms become interconnected in a spatial dialectic that merges the mammoth with the tiny, collapsing the sharp division between these two spheres.
(Sheenagh Pietrobruno, ‘Technology and its miniature: the photograph’)
Miniaturising involves moving between spheres. How do we do this, when a sphere is by necessity self-contained, perhaps impenetrable? I think of what happens when I smash thumbs into my eyes and see all those sparkling phosphenes, and when opened again there is a temporary tunnelling of sight — making a visionary dome. Or walking through the park at night and the way the darkness is a slow unfurling, an adjustment. For a short while I am in a paperweight lined with velvet dark, where only bike lights and stars permit my vision, in pools that blur in silver and red. The feeling is not Christmassy, as such colours imply. It is more like Mary of Silence, dipping her warm-blooded finger into a lake of mercury. I look into the night, I try to get a hold on things. On you. The vastness of the forest, of the park, betrays a greater sensation that blurs the sense between zones. I cannot see faces, cannot discern. So there is an opening, so there is an inward softening. What is this signal of my chest always hurting? What might be shutting down, what is activated? I follow the trail of his smoke and try not to speak; when my phone rings it is always on silent.
Enter the zone through the sky… Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
It becomes increasingly clear that I am looking for some sort of portal. The month continues, it can hardly contain. I think of the towns and cities that remain inside us when we speak, even the ones we leave behind. Whispering for what would take us elsewhere.
Write things like, ‘walked home with joy, chest ache, etc’.
They start selling Christmas trees in the street at last, and I love the sharp sweet scent of the needles.
There is a sense of wanting a totality of gratitude, wanting the world’s sphere which would bounce back images from glossier sides, and so fold this humble subject within such glass as could screen a century. Where I fall asleep mid-sentence, the handwriting of my diary slurs into a line, bleeds in small pools at the bottom of the page. These pools resemble the furry black bodies of spiders, whose legs have been severed. A word that could not crawl across the white. I try to write spellbooks, write endlessly of rain. Who has clipped the legs of my spiders? I am not sure if the spells I want should perform a banishing or a summoning. The flight of this month. The icy winds of other cities.
The uncertain ice of my bedroom: ‘tshirts and dresses / spiders in corners of our windows / making fun of our fear of the dark’ (Katie Dey, ‘fear pts 1 & 2’). Feeling scorned by our own arachnid thoughts, which do not fit the gendered ease of a garmented quotidian, the one we are all supposed to perform. I shrug off the dusk and try out the dark, I love the nocturnal for its solitude: its absolute lack of demand, its closed response.
In the afternoon, sorting through the month’s debris. A whole array of orange tickets, scored with ticks. The worry is that he’ll say something. The dust mites crawl up the stairs as I speak between realms. This library silence which no-one sweeps. There is the cinema eventually, present to itself. I see her in the revolving glass doors and she is a splicing of me. Facebook keeps insisting on memories. People ask, ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ Wildfires sweep across California and I want to say, Dude where are you? and for once know exactly who I am talking to. I want to work.
On the train I wanted a Tennents, I wanted fresh air and a paradox cigarette. They kept announcing atrocities on the line.
She talks in loops and loses her interest. She gives up on her pills, which gather dust in the cupboard among effervescent Vitamin C tablets and seven ripe tomatoes, still on the vine.
Every station unfurls with the logic of litany, and is said again and again. Somewhere like Coventry, Warrington. This is the slow train, the cheap train. It is not the sleep train.
In Garnethill, there is a very specific tree in blossom; utterly indifferent to the fading season. It has all these little white flowers like tokens. I remember last December, walking around here, everything adorned with ice. Fractal simplicity of reflective beauty. Draw these silver intimations around who I was. An Instagram story, a deliberate, temporary placement. Lisa Robertson on the skin of an architectural ornament: well isn’t the rime a skin as well; well isn’t it pretty, porcelain, glitter? Name yourself into the lovely, lonesome days. Cordiality matters. I did not slip and fall as I walked. One day the flowers will fall like paper, and then it will snow.
It will snow in sequins, symbols.
Our generation are beautiful and flaky. Avatars in miniature, never quite stable. Prone to fall.
Maybe there isn’t a spell to prevent that, and so I learn to love suspense. And the seasons, even as they glitch unseasonable in the screen or the skin of each other. Winter written at the brink of my fingers, just enough cold to almost touch. You cannot weave with frost, it performs its own Coleridgean ministry. Anna takes my hands and says they are cold. She is warm with her internal, Scandinavian thermos. Through winter, my skin will stay sad like the amethysts, begging for February. Every compression makes coy the flesh of a bruise; the moon retreats.
I mix a little portion of ice with the mist of my drink. It is okay to clink and collect this feeling, glass as glass, the sheen of your eyes which struggle with light. A more marmoreal thinking, a headache clearing; missing the closed loop of waitressing. Blow into nowhere a set of new bubbles, read more…, expect to lose and refrain. Smile at what’s left of my youth at the station. This too is okay. Suddenly I see nothing specific; it is all clarity for the sake of itself, and it means nothing but time.
Paint my eyes a deep viridian, wish for the murmur of Douglas firs, call a friend.
~
Katie Dey – fear pts 1 &2 (fear of the dark / fear of the light)
Oneohtrix Point Never ft. Alex G – Babylon
Grouper – Clearing
Yves Tumor, James K – Licking an Orchid
Daughters – Less Sex
Devi McCallion and Katie Dey – No One’s in Control
Why are they not a blue dog, someone asks in the comments. The internet is so fucking literal. I paint my nails hot pink and chew them so all the polish flakes into my mouth like itsy bits of sext.
mariaology 