nature – Page 3 – mariaology

Playlist: May 2021

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

Arca – Brokeup

Nap Eyes, NNAMDÏ – Blood River

Burial – Space Cadet

Brian Eno – Little Fishes

A. G. Cook, Charli XCX – Xcxoplex

Katie Dey, Lonelyspeck – Darkness

Caroline Polachek – Breathless

Slayyyter – Troubled Paradise

SOPHIE – JUST LIKE WE NEVER SAID GOODBYE

Zoee – Host

Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen – Like I Used To

Judee Sill – Down Where the Valleys Are Low

Lana Del Rey – Blue Banisters

Bright Eyes – The Difference in the Shades

Playlist: April 2021

Last year’s April was a leap year. For every 29^th day I summoned to think of the hours as gifted, secret, strength. I spent the actual leap of February in somebody else’s bed, a cherished cliché: cradling sadness, cat-sitting, reading Anne Carson and rolling the word ‘tableaux’ around my stressy mouth, whose hostile environment required twice-daily salt-rinses. On the 29^th of last year’s April, I wrote about vermillion and silverware, ‘the lint of your heart’ and hayfever. A friend and I exchanged tips on how to best work from the floor, how to make it your best work. I miss ‘working the floor’ in other senses.

What do you want is not the same as What would you like?

There was a reading group on Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal (2020), and the Zoom chat was elliptical pursuit, a good fuck pendant, fractal kissing and restless deferral. The word besmirch which isn’t a word search.

Those days

I remember cycling long into the hard sun; I recall better eyesight.

⋰

Okay, recently. Do you want to hear this? I spent a week of anticipation, languishing with migraines and digestive upsets and the kind of blues where mostly you curl foetally into the fantasy that really you, or this, doesn’t exist. Sip worry coffee and brush the hair, tweeze or shave, sit patiently on top of the abstract, waiting for something lucid to hatch. ‘Opening up’. A weekend bleeding, the minor cramp of womb in Autechre rhythm; then a further week of physical ailment whose primary treatments, according to the lore of reddit, included punching one’s spine, counting to ten, pinching between nose and lip and lying in hot baths. I did not have the baths, which seemed terrible and luxurious given how faint they could make me. I read two books by Samuel Beckett.

In Garments Against Women (2015), Anne Boyer writes that ‘Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing. We embarrass each other with comfort and justice, happiness or infirmity’. It is awkward to smile and to squirm. To be red-faced and faint after a luxury bath. To be found frowning in the Instagram reel of somebody else’s dreaming. To apologise, to dwell upon, to ask for help. To be the one clutching a hot water bottle in the Zoom call; to hide or show this. To sip beer, the migraine coming. To say “hello” from the room next door. To deem something luxury, to partake of it. ‘I have done so much to be ordinary’, writes Boyer, ‘and made a record of this’. Say I learned this month how to paint my nails grape soda, define hypercritique, appreciate the slept-in curls of my hair.

It is awkward to be unwell, to express this without clear definition. “Sorry it’s all late, I’ve been sick” and to not elaborate on that sickness, the specific ways it kept you up all night, kept you retching or clutching something tight inside yourself which seemed to want to give birth. A stray barb or small contaminant. A numb pill. Transpiration is the process of water movement through a plant and its evaporation from aerial parts. Plants are not awkward; they just grow. Sometimes upwards, sideways; sometimes back inside themselves. Wilt logic. ‘Let’s be happy insofar as we were for a few days not infirm’ (Boyer). The ecstasy of a new morning where the body stretches out, the mind clears and one is ready to work. Who gets these mornings? Can they be traded? Is their delicious ease somehow fungible? What would I give for more of them? Fungus, rot, the fangs of lilies.

Maybe it starts with crisp garments. But pretty soon the neat attainment of day will unbutton. Watch it happen in Lorenzo Thomas’ poem ‘Euphemysticism’:

Some happily sing
They have joy for white shirts
Singing “O white shirt!”
And that’s just the start

What ecstasy to declare the white shirt! What embarrassment! The chiaroscuro of lily-white shirt against the everyday’s dull shadows, but then showing up ‘baby pictures / Of pollution becoming disaster’ and Thomas’ poem is all about this. Disaster. Headlines, emissions, confusion. And that’s just the start. ‘A man crashes with his shadow’, perhaps because there is no one else. I did this for months on end because nothing else was safe. I could go the long walk for my safe grassy spot and crash there along with my shadow. I crashed in sunshine and rain. Crashland. Why did I bring the lily. It was like being fourteen again and walking for miles just to find a safe, anonymous place to smoke or weep. Sleep crash. ‘In the prickling grass in the afternoon in August, I kept trying to find a place where my blood could rush. That was the obsolete experience of hope’ (Lisa Robertson, XEclogue). It was like staring at the potential of Marlboro Golds tucked behind books and wondering what version of me they belong to. Synecdoche. Rising swirls. The poem burns out but also gets better. Blood rush and screen crash are lyric in pop songs. Sorry my windows. They are getting cleaned today.

Narrate my day again to you.

Thomas’ poem turns to the reader: ‘I’d like to check your influence / Over these ordinarily mysterious things’. The poem takes pictures or talks about it. What is a photographer responsible for? Do they re-enchant or estrange? If someone took a picture at this point or that point, if there was evidence, who would need to be told. How do you photograph pollution? Is this merely witnessing? In the past year and more, I have become witness to my own inability to really see. Disaster itself recedes into medial condition, blood swirls, scratching matter. I think of the way Sibylle Baier sings ‘I grow old’…

Some happily sing the white shirt and are they complacent with their conditions of work? Influence! ‘Desire is a snowscape on a placemat’ (Thomas). I trace its snowy lines in the stray thread of this weave. Ant-sized bloodstain. Am I to be made safe, or eat giant buttons? Put your plate on a place elsewhere and devour the rolling hills. Artificial snow is delicious. Crinkled thread. The white line curls around my tongue like spaghetti. Lila Matsumoto has a poem, ‘Trombone’, about hammering buttons. I unbutton the top three buttons of my blouse to walk around in fifteen degrees, absorbing/zorbing, and call the sunlight oil inside me.

‘There is a risk inherent in sliding all over the place’ (Boyer). This is what language does. There is a risk in crackle, in static, in the O shape of ‘sorry’ or ‘love’ or ‘alone’. Petition to upgrade for bubble emoji.

⋰

Last night, on the train back from another city I had not visited since August, I opened Sarah Bernstein’s new novel, The Coming Bad Days (2021). I did not close this novel again for several hours, except to pass through ticket gates or beyond groups of steaming men whose presence was vaguely threatening. They seemed cardboard cut-outs, stumbling towards me. When a migraine began burning my temples, I took paracetamol and kept walking, reading. When the light became gloam I walked faster. When I got home I sat at the table and opened the book again, like a schoolchild eager to begin their homework (as a ticket to freedom) or revisit a dream. It is risky to write about something you finished barely twelve hours ago. It’s embarrassing, the way talking about illness is, or happiness. To gush. You risk offering a raw piece of thought. Something has stuck to you and you are trying to convey the exact, impossible, vicious way in which you are changed by it. Still steaming.

This is what I understand by gorgeousness. As in, I gorged on it.

In the book’s last third occurs a fabular moment. The narrator is often telling their inner life through external surroundings — textures and fluctuations of weather. This is also to tell disaster. It is not the dramatic crash so much as a slow, implacable violence whose consequence ripples below and above the surface of our lives. Sometimes there is rupture: a cyclist is hit by a motorist, a storm occurs, an unspecified act of harm is committed, a life-changing conversation alluded to. But so much is in the insidious atmospheres which turn between dream and reality, which refuse to be nailed to the moment:

I dreamt of a landscape, overgrown grass, trees blanketing a hillside, leafy canopies moving against the sky, a deep river bisecting the scene. Fat berries pulling on their stems, apples weighing down their branches. Then a breeze came through with a slow hiss, and I knew it carried poison on its back. Here was a green abundance that I could not eat, a cold stream from which I could not drink. Take care, a voice said. Take care to call things by their names.

(Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days)

In this Edenic scene of harvest and green abundance, nothing is properly named. The landscape is unspecified, generic, anywhere. The voice belongs to anyone. It could be a serpent, a god, an angel, a person. Unlike Adam, the narrator cannot name things in nature. It is not their purpose. They came to Eden in dreams and after the fall. What fruits of knowledge exist are overripe and almost a burden to their branches and vines. In addition to the biblical resonance, this passage recalled for me the fig tree motif in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963),the poison tree of William Blake’s poem from Songs of Experience (1794). Wrath is in the air, and failure. I want to wrap around the passage like a kind of vine. Hold and be held in it. Is language a kind of taking care? A watering cruelty? What are the ecological arts of attention and tending to, towards, against?

I was struck by the possibility that Bernstein’s narrator embodied the abject and porous, slow and injured thought of an anthropocenic subject. This statement feels inevitable. The only abundance they could conjure was unconscious and laced with ‘poison’. It could not be imbibed; was not nourishing. But somehow such dreams nourish the text. For all its depiction of coldness, cruelty and the failure of communication, the cold stream of suffering, the weathering of Bernstein’s lyric prose effects a possible intimacy. Weathering, for Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, ‘names a practice or a tactic: to weather means to pay attention to how bodies and places respond to weather-worlds which they are also making’. I think of the narrator skittishly eating cheese sandwiches at the window of their office, every single day of the week. I eat this sandwich with them. What is it they see? Each iterative mention of the weather reminds us that the social and interpersonal dramas of the novel are part of the medial, immersive or remote dramas of climate. The agential presence of rain, frost, clouds and fog, the turn of the waves, the ‘glistening violet evenings’: it’s more than metaphor. It sinks into the prickling skin of Bernstein’s language. Maybe you’d want to call this a weathering realism.

This novel seized me to read with compulsion, the way a dream does come and the writing of the dream is luxuriance that only later you bathe in. Not quite vulnerable or resilient. Responsive. Exposed to something.

⋰

On the 28^th April 2019 (no entry for the 29^th), I wrote in purple ink:

We would do better to sleep now, I have been sleeping much better and trying to resist the pull of insomnia, trying to perfect a monologue. What comes and goes in a dream without noticing, whose handwriting on the sun you recognised chancing your luck with yellow corn and fields of trials against sensitive, colours of smear and floral obstacle. Hyperboreal data flow into the crinkle cut futurity. Applying for latitude, acid.

Not sure about ‘we’: did I mean the ‘we’ of me reading back, and the ‘me’ who was writing, there in the moment? Are you also included, reading this passage over one of my shoulders? Can we take care to name things in dreams? But when I dream of people — friends, loved-ones, family, colleagues the famous — as I often do, what happens when I write their names? Am I opening them up to something that could harm or exhaust them? Is their presence a giving over of energy? Am I to be persecuted by the purple, anonymous flower of somebody’s need? What if I didn’t even know? What if the mark-making of initials was key? Will it bloom or wilt?

Go back to sleep in the forest, soft cosmos of dissolving forms.

⋰

There is a sense of missing someone that grows an acorn in your belly. It hardens and rattles with new life. It burns out of place. Leaves you with a feeling of placelessness. Impregnates every word with the possible, the fizzy wake, the fear and hurt. Makes you grow sideways. Hey. To exist in no-time of not knowing when the feeling comes. Pastel vests are back in fashion. Pull over. Kisses. Rarest flower emoji that doesn’t exist. To be sometimes well and other times racked in a well-documented ~~madness~~ that pays various attention to weather. Something painful. A few days of goodness seized. I would leap out the door, do 15,000 steps each day; so I would name the colour chartreuse when I saw it. Watching for changing bone structures in Zoom tiles. Your hair grown long and lemon blonde. My internet broke for a whole day and night. I felt old-timey in the pdf archive. Phoned you.

Bebby Doll – Weeks

Ana Roxanne – I’m Every Sparkling Woman

Zoee – Microwave

Cowgirl Clue – Cherry Jubilee

Laurel Halo – Sun to Solar

trayer tryon, Julie Byrne – new forever

Life Without Buildings – Sorrow

Cocteau Twins – My Truth

Kelsey Lu, Yves Tumor, Kelly Moran, Moses Boyd, ‘let all the poisons that lurk in the mud seep out’

Iceage – Gold City

Le Tigre – Deceptacon

FKA twigs, Headie One, Fred again.. – Don’t Judge Me

Porridge Radio – Wet Road

Angel Olsen – Alive and Dying (Waving, Smiling)

Big Thief – Off You

Perfume Genius – Valley

Grouper – Poison Tree

Sonic Youth – Providence

U.S. Maple – The State Is Bad

Sky Ferreira – Sad Dream

Waxahatchee – Fruits of My Labor (Lucinda Williams cover)

The Felice Brothers – Inferno

Bright Eyes – Train Under Water

Weyes Blood – Titanic Risen

Lucinda Williams – Save Yourself (Sharon Van Etten cover)

Dear Town Square

Pokemon Let's Go Guide - In-Game Alolan Pokemon Trades - Just Push Start

Dear Town Square

My horse disappeared. I had contrived to love the rat
with cheats. Have you considered the ethos

To save your game, pluck acid out of the water;
is communism good code to love you

For bread? In summer I chose the orange grass
with yellow grass, the blue inedible magic flower.

In winter the white grass, blue grass of spring
a verdant seaweed and moondrop flower

Will you take me to school today? I want to learn
the inevitable lesson, in the law of spring/summer

Green-grass fashion, will you describe a toy
flower, sift me from hill, let grow?

I put the wild-grown light in my hunger
I put the coloured grass under soft expense.

I cantered hard across the dream salad
of somebody’s laughter, I lost you

Pinkcat, gathering these flowers afield
before I fell into clement spinach.

If hurricanes come, bless a watering can.
The rats will carry me gently

For every yield of our life, soft rain
the average shipping cost of corn and onion

Or a peach tree dies in the sun
as soon as we receive the foiled mushroom.

Playlist: July 2020

landscape painting with green triangle

lime green triangle

and Spicer says, ‘don’t worry I will tell you everything’. this is the dream where you appear as a lime green triangle and there is nothing I can do _ lime green isosceles learning spelling looking at the great internet for hours, very lightly _ lime green isosceles learning your angles /

\ if you appear to me lime again, full-flesh of note

I know a great red splash will appear on the side of the morning, best side, coffee breath not four hours on call, or shepherd style. So how a triangle holds me like every brushstroke, something gestural in lieu of a writerly end. July, july, like who is writing?
(so nice
out of your window the mews were, smoke-warm lung
just one
accident) is a landscape even real? where is my juul, my eye?
There is this line in Katie Dey’s ‘Bearing’ (mydata) which goes, ‘I am warm by her username’.
None of ever disembodied; always a record of brushstroke, beautiful people on the pavement outside and bouncing a trite kind of fungible language, who goes. To shop for that same geometry. It tumbled out of the wow so luminous. this dream I kept having about going for half a Guinness with you / and all pretty drunk on aphid dependence
is jangle
is jangle                     expensive impressionable air!
look up from the mic it’s there, like yellow flower
went in tesco wearing a mask
felt lux of outside
purchase protect like
there is so much of so little bread in the world
‘But I write
you tomorrow, I always say it in the present’, says Derrida, of a bookleaf letter.
Look who’s shining back, sarments of a username. what is the use value of
removing the bees from the kelvin meadow? sweet carb, sometimes
I am barely iris
growing sideways
and the milk is sour trochee / streak of copper
want to draw us a room to live in
depth of field, dappled motion. Like a ramen hack
all it takes slight pinch of telling you everything. like we camp this close to the website
with duckmice, star anise . . .
growing sideways
that season I got everything early. and it was all good, kind to me
very bloodful much dawn, little saltish, waking only to sleep again to vague
dreamnote will you go
sent up to Parkland or like
a sluice of weather, let me swipe it from yr brow. wild
reclaiming the word for thyme vibration
abundant / gold sounds / this
you is more / Disentangle
prettily the screen again, hair in fist and first / make space for your
space it_ Don’t worry I will tell everything
by the sheen of my wrists a bracelet
of upstroke acoustic lines of steel, latching sun.
Best side, coffee a short breath upon pale-coloured air is how have you slept,
synchronise “morning” for warming, always already
I had that poem about the warm London air and
wanting to kiss us, where did it go
the poem
cut thru a land &
dumb smoke without snow as it was in Glasgow, then
lemon balm smoking a natural data by summerised fountain, four
in the not now morning
O wow like salt lakes
look at us float!           no money
you can or can’t say swim
you swap pronoun for leaf
Like
leaf is barely iris
leaf is barely eating
leaf is barely anyone
I was so happy to just say afk :                                    )
breathe me / is only the accidental priceless picnic
of being barely alive like
somebody taking a polaroid, here in my doll’s dress
I-i mean leaf never felt sick as america, except to say sickening!!!!
the worry of telling you everything, that’s practice
so much I would crisp by it, hot swear
everything bluegrass
nude in the
locket of
new soft animal shapes
“golden green, red blue”
These are just lights! growing sideways
you pull up slick at the station, leaf coming
before say come
round the corner you
narrate my emails
deleting erotic gasoline, plainsong smelled of triangle
caught you in chord. lime green over Laura Nyro
say what I held in my hand was just
neat spliff
or tiny bird
the heather all over the heather
wild I keep wanting to say it would never go
just about purple
best thing I ever saw or heard
no name of a name
learning to spell say oxeye by the layby
eat three almonds, live in Japan
to jumpstart
liked songs make wonderful life / it’s coming

Aye Nako – Sissy

Tacocat – I Hate the Weekend

The Kinks – Rats

Orange Juice – I Guess I’m Just a Little Too Sensitive

R.E.M. – Crush With Eyeliner

CAN – Moonshake

Khruangbin – Time (You and I)

Klein, MONG_WOONG – V3

PJ Harvey, Thom Yorke – This Mess We’re In

U.S. Girls – Rosebud

King Krule – Stoned Again

Sonic Youth – Bull in the Heather

Thee Oh Sees – The Axis

Sun Ra – When There is No Sun

Fire-Toolz – It’s Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer

NNAMDÏ – Glass Casket

Thanya Iyer – Always, Be Together

Christelle Bofale – Moving On, Getting On

Toro y Moi feat. Old Grape God – tron_new_rose_hifi_v2

James Blake – Are You Even Real?

Porridge Radio, Lala Lala – Good For You

Immaterial Possession – Tropical Still Life

Sharon Van Etten – Malibu

Silver Jews – Animal Shapes

Modern Nature – Halo

Fair Mothers, Faith Eliott, Esther Swift – Monochrome

Magnolia Electric Co. – Josephine

David Bowie – Wild Is the Wind

Karen Dalton – Little Bit of Rain

Christian Lee Hutson – Northsiders

Portishead – Deep Waters

Elliott Smith – Whatever (Folk Song in C)

Sparklehorse – Sunshine

Joan Baez – The Wild Mountain Thyme

Playlist: June 2020

The daylight was like ordering pyjamas off the internet. Light blue. Sky broke for when it rained and the hills were seen as old pornographers watching us pass like gifs. I’m grown into us to reach for the kettle, for the internet, wearing my silks, something’s on the boil and it’s not quite tea. I think of some other season and know it is cornflower, not quite light, not quite blue of dawn because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the dawn. People are buying vintage files to play dialup connection. The old pornographers eat their cameras for warmth. I’ve seen them do it to be secret, fucking careful to be made up in a lovely afternoon with blusher, oranges and Russian vodka. It’s the same thing you lie down for, sometimes lying down because I can’t get a word, or a line, can’t catch or watch. You have to watch it for happening. The daylight was like that, then pulling on silks, moth-fringed, light blue it was like the colour of the internet turned inverse for ‘its’ children. They were still making artillery in the system, so we could sleep here peacefully and not be disturbed by the old pornographers and their bits of camera. The sexual motion / of foliage all up in my software. It wasn’t that we had any tension, there were other kinds of ars poetica, but something’s on the boil and it’s not quite tea.

There were other kinds of daylight the colour of the internet and not the quite blue of this tea. Because sky is making us pass like gifs in such loops as I can’t get a word. The deteriorating resolution of you are not bloodleaf. Because June is super lovely, moth-fringed, pulling on silks. You pass a lot of grasses, long-grown from their natural habitats, watching the drops fall out of the sky for what, for love. I don’t know what shape it is they make on the surface of water, but I watch. The old pornographers were making a nature documentary at the edge of the forest, which was inaccessible, badly rendered. So I could sleep here peacefully, I came out of the shower in cornflower to tell them the best blue spots they could film. The colour of the internet is touching a liquid, then it goes through the lens, fucking slow, so huge, it belongs to this season. Snapped. The tree was just that down the middle, sort of bruised where it had stood, not light blue, lightening out into favourite tone. The old pornographers scolded my aura and told me these pretty white lies. Like. Say your best tree was a willow and we do it lightly, willowy, that’s how I know what tallness is, like pulling on silks in London. It’s the same thing because I can’t get a word, moth-fringed my mouth is pushing up cobwebs. (*) The loop is very beautiful it feels like you are grasses, lots of them exist unmown for hours, how at dawn for the children, light blue, how they enter and trample; only the old pornographers trespass for profit.

Here look at the tiny bird nursing her young which are tinier still, it’s the same thing as knowing it rained and a goldcrest buoyed up on the birdbath, tiny thing, not quite vodka. Because I can’t get a word, there are gilded flakes in my colourless tipple – visceral realists! – like anything we had off the internet, like this particulate stuff that fell from the sky. I want to be fucking careful to light blue the mise en scene of this feeling, tell it slow to flicker. Be made up in a lovely or a line, can’t catch or not be disturbed by the old pornographers, whose interns were cameo sylphs of such beauty as to even sleep peacefully here, or inhabit the air. It was like the dream of Bloomsbury and the supermodels draped over carts that advertised mustard to the masses and it made no sense except mustard can boost your metabolism maybe, yellow it is, so I ride my bike beside them. I’m grown into us to reach tension, summer thinspiration, I dawn because it’s been a long kind of daylight to find this, pulling on silks, dust caps, yolks, some time since the colour of the internet turned up bits of camera. The contact sheet of ruinous cornflowers, raindrops stained; pinned animals appear in separate parcels, how it all looks side by side is not quite vodka. It is yet a shard. Archival. I’ve seen them do it for happening. Warmth. Freedom is the edible mischief of knowing poetry could never. Warmth, warmth is keeping a secret, local to cygnet, melt & forestry slenderness. The daylight blusher made love of your face, I’m fucked.

Sun Ra – Realm of Lightning

Run the Jewels – yankee and the brave (ep. 4)

Spellling – Dirty Desert Dreams

Noname – Song 33

Fleetwood Mac – Storms

Laura Nyro – Broken Rainbow

Connie Converse – Sad Lady

Ratboys – A Vision

Big Star – Dream Lover

Bright Eyes – Mariana Trench

Coma Cinema – Tall Grass

Gleemer – Brush Back

Feng Suave – People Wither

Tricky – Fall Please

Let’s Eat Grandma – Glittering

Soko – Being Sad Is Not a Crime

HAIM – Gasoline

Kelly Lee Owens – On

Tomberlin – Tornado

Slowdive – Some Velvet Morning (cover)

Mogwai – Take Me Somewhere Nice

Bing & Ruth – The Pressure of this Water

Ecco2k – Hi Fever

Lil Peep – driveway

Ashnikko – Cry (feat. Grimes)

Donny Hathaway – I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know

deeper – Pink Showers

Katie Dey – Dancing

Christine & the Queens – People, I’ve been sad

Thurston Moore – Hashish

Ian & Sylvia – Early Morning Rain

Robert Wyatt – Shipbuilding

Soft Machine – Why Are We Sleeping?

The Replacements – Can’t Hardly Wait

Songs: Ohia – Didn’t It Rain

Kath Bloom, Loren Connors – Wait For My Love

Lianne La Havas – Weird Fishes (cover)

Phoebe Bridgers – I Know the End

Playlist: covivid+chill

dan 5.jpg

which is to say, the hours were broke a sunlight. so we put on clothes and forgot what we owed to our calendars. this ‘we’ a sort of lipid, held too long. dolphin emoji. the end of all cauterized architecture, you go out at lunch with yesterday’s virals and plans are ceasing. plans are cancelled, crisping. play this list. I miss ‘us’. which is to say, suspension is only the length of a line where you want sleep for the morning. instamatic date nights, we give up a cutlery. lap keys. calories… livestream, light. my useless tickets.

the neighbours whistle in rounds. the isotope of you and I, washing machine, say once I ran glistering to active. mindful of only day, octave, schooling the goldfish. lovely supposition _leaps_ how they memorialise touching aslant. who wishes for rain. whose moon is a size. eeeeeeeeeEEeEeeee minus. st. johns wort. curl tail. once we occupied very sofas, listening for the light to get blue and it wasn’t emergency but something was bleeding. I’d like to walk around through the back of it / skin burns in window, awhile.

¾ time is taxing me back to the snail mail, waiting for the lyrics to ‘Movies’ and put me back on the porch, and put me back on the porch where you found me. adaptive, contagious, stupid egregious. blonde mops up the politics. pretending to speak of the stars, I only mean dolphin. pipsqueak! no infinite fulfilment don’t be / foster a wallace. soft explosive give me a sentient moment, call it crisis, therein a high rusticity. always said I was a shepherdess; now herd me a meadow of sparkling, v simple flowers.

Playlist: June 2019

This time last year, ‘I would look up, intermittently, through a canopy of light-filled leaves’. The unrealism of a momentary viridian, admitting I could not partake in. The nights went on and on in those days, there was a quality of sorry-not-sorry to the usual erasures. And asking for numbers, and watching shambolic ones fall into chairs and windows; the ceiling tilted.

Serotonin is my friend. I want to invent a character. The pressure front hurts my head.

We enter the gallery and there are the nymphs, the lilypads. You have told me a dream in which you ascended the lilypad stairs to heaven, was it heaven, and each one made a satisfying sound and sway when stepped on. I am thinking of Deku leaves and swirls in the ochre night. Here we go with synonyms. ‘There may be lunch’, Anne Carson says, ‘Or we would eat / many more paintings’. As it stands, I order jasmine tea. The paint drips green from the edge of the lilypad, chromium oxide staining the lake. At some point I refused to live without sleep. I surrendered to what its depth could do. A man told me, every time you blink, you refresh your thoughts. I have my muscles set to Command+R with cool deliberation, but all that fluttering won’t get me served. The rain washed all the mascara away. So I order into warmth again. Tequila Maria, something bloody with spice and celery, black pepper’s vast and negentropic heart. Did I mean to say negative calories. Tom McCarthy has this essay about Toussaint called ‘Stabbing the Olive’: ‘We don’t want plot, depth or content; we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want patterns’. A flat asymmetry of energies. I used my pinkie to lick the rim of red dust from the glass, like the last of a meal. Circumferential intimations of love. I was hungry, the night was not warm. Moments of aloneness. Who is McCarthy’s ‘we’? All these lit-critics, clamouring to borrow the spirographs of the twentieth century. I lose a pen.

Thom Yorke is getting on a subway somewhere.

I thought that taste itself formed an interval, a thickening of presence. Crocheted objects appear on my wall like the lacery of untranslatable dreams. Red, blue and yellow. These are the primary materials of my current research:

Instagram
Gifted books with signatures
Colours of sky and cloud
Seagull transposition
Conference sandwiches
The question of ambience in poetry
Oil pastels
Clay
Absences in friendship
Tropical levels
The inbox
Scotrail

Paranoia is former. As if I could not align the tulips to the complementary turquoise wall, the lilt, the residual. The animals depart when we start writing, a narcissism for darkest_.

In the late Tesco he jumped me, the former doorman, halfway through a dj shift with the Haribo fizz and the bottles of whisky. I wondered what music he would play nextdoor. If you could make a vinyl of sunlight, how I would live for the interminable patterns of notches, solarity catching and catching on loop. Fingers tracing sugar dust over the records, a sourness in his mouth. I was wearing this purple-pleated skirt, five years ago, and a man outside Tesco, another Tesco, asked if I was pregnant. I only wanted the placenta of his mean stare and I wanted to salt it and eat it hard. My twenties recede without drop.

She describes the effects of gluten as a sanding down, an erasure; inside her the tangles made desert. We want clustering, sway of villi, performance. I eat bread and think less; my head fills up with fog.

Soreness in coccyx equals aporia. I awoke to the pent-up throb of the washing machine. Let’s talk about the arbitrary constraint of 30 days. Clusters of black tights as the serpentine symbols in Turner.

Something from a solar poem, a thing for the solstice:

if I go

grassily

drunk in June

it’s just sky

in our lungs

What I meant was, maybe something in the difference between the length of our breaths, and is this a question of the daylight hours, a quantified tiredness, or is it the smoke. My laconic lungs suck in. The grass comes away in tufts where we pull it, like the fluff from a dog’s back in moulting season. I have this dream about reaching the end of a lawn, like I’m staying in a house where the garden is seen from the window only, it looks unreal. You could not exhaust it. Anne Carson says a pilgrim always seeks a horizon, is never satisfied. The dog I had would run round and round, until the grass wore down into dirt. There would be a ring, a halo of ruined earth. She was not looking for anything particular. Instead, she ran around.

I remember the basement party where I sat between two boys, holding a sparkler and watching the smoke trails recede.

I am thinking about foam, immortality, fractal gifs. Coffee opens me up, so I don’t have to look.

No-one knows. On Fridays I listen to Gardeners’ Question Time, I cut rice cakes into quarters.

There was this girl, she lived in the orange-painted room. Her name sounds something like citrus. A long time ago, I wrote a story about her. I was in the library with a stack of philosophy books. I can’t do it. She skips ballet class to eat blueberry muffins in the local café, to flirt with the waiter. She wears a yellow raincoat, even when it’s sunny, and he calls it her famous raincoat. She never gets the joke but she likes how he twists a smile at the same time as he twists his break-time cigarette into something thin and perfect. He always wears blue, regardless of uniform. She wants to be that cigarette, she wants to be rolled into one straight line, but she likes her sugar too much. His smile, surely, is for her alone; it looks delicious. She imagines the taste of ash, smouldering in her mouth if she kissed him and the trace of the cigarette and the one before that would glow like the orange in her room.

Adrianne Lenker sings of ‘fragile orange wind in the garden’.

Should we go outside? And for what.

There was a time when every story had to end, which was fiction. Poetry is getting to have your loops, to sweeten and eat them profusely with silver spoons: imitation privilege. I could keep stirring and stirring until they melt into milk, this miasma of found words, of nourishing.

Kathleen Fraser:

Everything is so agreeable, tangential, so light

of foot.

Tangerine, all pungent with its leaves intact.

The way the egg yolks look when they split, the shit on a watch face, the intimate pixels of a harp up close, a part song. Selective arpeggio carriage to morning. I’m so grateful I’m basically grapefruit, this single devourable bauble of flesh. My skin is thick and explicit. It’s a time in the month. That there, that’s not me. You can peel off the sticker to see.

In the park, the weekdays fill up with hormones.

I played Everything. I was a mushroom, a jet-ski, a palm tree, a planet, a hawk and an oil rig. I rolled and shuffled; scale itself became a sort of music. At once, I soared in threes and sevens. My favourite world was streaked with pink, cacti and celadon rivers. Time was a trick of the hard-drive.

We collect the cherry-chocolate cake. Later he says something like, The ocean is an orca. Which is much better than, We are all Earth; or, I am what I eat. The literalism is looping its way around cornfields and train delays, better to solder the evening with marmalade light and a buttery spread of new messages.

I have hardly been listening to music at all.

The weather was briefly incidental.
Vague plans to read Plato’s Timaeus
scarpered by the way the roses look
in ache, my dream alarm of cascade
is softened by limbs and transport.
We take a lot of time to take the river
in us, hungering girls in old movies
as though they could speak the end
of a call, prior to numbers. We eat
plainly in several vegetal airs, our
cutlery shines like a weather vane.
The intermediary function of skin
is just this much. You glow inside
a tentative plan, the sparkle of re-
grettable voice. I paint my nails a
venus flytrap green. Who decides
what grows inside you. Should eat.

We reply, that it is the receptacle, and in a manner the nurse, of all generation. I have spoken the truth; but I must express myself in clearer language, and this will be an arduous task for many reasons, and in particular because I must first raise questions concerning fire and the other elements, and determine what each of them is; for to say, with any probability or certitude, which of them should be called water rather than fire, and which should be called any of them rather than all or some one of them, is a difficult matter.

— Socrates

The secret mysticism of nicknames
and particle physics. If we are just water.
And what if this water never smells like shame.
And what if the water turns red
like Topshop lipstick, or the gilded cover
of my Kathleen Fraser. Chili flakes assemble
upon the soft lawn of your fruit, a stone
falls out in lieu of the heart. I try particulars:
99p filter coffee, office politics, the milk
chocolate bunnies on campus. I mean they were real
as morning. Star power. When the beach breaks out
to cure, the lovely scrambling of a darkness shared.
Say a soundtrack feels special because it bristles.
I fell asleep in the workshop. My hair all huge
in the hotel mirror. We collect red words for green
and call it geometry. The trad effects of earnestness
and other lyric qualities of indie
I tried to recede like my twenties
I tried halloumi, salt, breakfast vodka.
The longest day of the year
was shorter than anything
I could bother to write.

On my birthday we visited the island, eight of us on the ferry. Kitsch displays of gifts without crystals, trying to fit ourselves into the minigolf. We shared red wine on a jetty, alas not spiralled; we wrote a poem, according to the economy of one red word for a sip.

sultry walks seem elusive to those players of croquet taking milliseconds out of capitalism or inducing epilepsy, throwing linguini into darkness and leaving finite symphorophilia to the gannets

The water was cold and clear, the barnacles softened the soles of my feet. The sky broke an almost symmetry of peachy leakings, yellow colours spilled on the sea. Gloria stood with her scarf to the wind; we brushed the horizon on the swings. I sang and sang. We ran for the last ferry, in usual fashion, salt and Tennents. The tide came in.

We sat on the picnic bench of the terminal, singing ethereal Judee lyrics. Heavy in my throat, a halo; the mists. A pleasurable tiredness.

A. describes how the glaciers are moving. The surface of the planet rearranges itself, and my impression of the continents sinks like wax. I melt the very edge of a tectonics, craving stories. The citrus girl is so much older and younger, she exists as though only in song. Her raincoat is made of honeybees.

A rushing sound I attributed to rain but then not.

She sits in three kinds of tree and fingers her decorative suggestion of dawn, worn as a necklace. I can’t sleep for the gulls and the lines of unmannered flight, the concept of ‘politics’ filling the air of my kitchen. The pearls burst everywhere. I draw a radio silence around each project, I try to choose.

Never have I ever asked Siri.

I get stuck on a train. We move south, but only gradually.

Pip Blom – Daddy Issues

Holiday Ghosts – Thinking of You

Bat for Lashes – Kids in the Dark

Katie Dey – Solipsisting

Jay Som – Superbike

Beach Fossils – Be Nothing

Hop Along – Waitress

(Sandy) Alex G – Gretel

Jai Paul – Do You Love Her Now

Thom Yorke – Twist

Gross Net – Gentrification

Sylvan Esso – Die Young

DOPE LEMON – Salt & Pepper

Crake – Glycerin

Big Thief – Orange

Silver Jews – The Wild Kindness

Jessica Pratt – Mother Big River

Claire Cronin – Wolfman

Yo La Tengo – Green Arrow

Galaxie 500 – Summertime

Kelly Moran – Water Music

Yohuna – Fades to Blue

Karen Dalton – Something on Your Mind

Judee Sill – The Kiss

Manchester Orchestra – My Backwards Walk (Frightened Rabbit cover)

Dorothy

Dorothy

I worked in the morning
A very fine morning
A fine cool pleasant breezy day
A fine day
We walked in the evening
In the morning we walked
Very cold
Putting linen by and mending
Came home
Very hot
Dried the linen in the morning
My head bad and I lay long
Rain in the night
In the morning I copied
All the morning I was busy copying
Gathered peas
Still very hot
Received a letter
Very warm
Still hotter
A very rainy day
A fine morning but cloudy
Dullish, damp and cloudy
A very cold morning
I was not well in the morning
A fine sharp morning
In the morning walked up to the rocks
In the morning worked in the garden
I walked to Ambleside with letters
A very fine warm day
Ironing till tea time
A very fine day with showers
Went often to spread the linen
Incessant rain from morning till night
Warm and mild
Baking bread apple pies
A coldish dull morning
Hung out the linen
Walked
Walked I know not where
Coleridge dined with us
A fine sunny and frosty morning
We sate in the house in the morning reading
Still a cloudy dull day, very dark
I have neglected
Poole dined with us
Rain all day
Rain all day
We rose early
Went a part of the way home
I have forgotten
A pleasant morning
Turned towards
A foggy morning, but a clear sunny day
A clear sunny morning
I lay down in the morning
A mild morning
Walked through the wood
Walked to the sea-side
A tolerably fine morning
A showery day
A mild morning
A sweet delightful morning
A very rainy morning
A dullish rainyish morning
A thorough wet day
Coleridge came
A sweet mild morning
A cold dry windy morning
Ironing
Walked to Rydale
William better
A fine October morning
All the morning mending white gown
We rose by candlelight
We put the new window in
Omitted
Made bread
We walked round the lake in the morning
A very fine beautiful sunshiny morning
A very fine day
Set forward
…
The green paths down the hillsides are channels for streams.

(Each line of this poem is sampled from the opening lines of Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary entries.)

Source text:

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 1971. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. 2nd ed., edited by Mary Moorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Playlist: March 2018

I was turning all the lights off, trying to mute history. There were several moments in which it felt like things were changing, possibly blossoming for the better. The aftermath stung and went backwards again. There was a song about the M62 I followed briefly, thinking about motorways more generally and something expansive and grey, crossing the Pennines eventually. For a week, I wrote down descriptions of the sky. Mostly they read: the sky today is grey. I then started noting the patterns in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, which often begin with vignettes of the morning:

3rd February. A fine morning, the windows open at breakfast.
6th March. A pleasant morning, the sea white and bright.
26th May. A very fine morning.
31st May. A sweet mild rainy morning.
2nd June. A cold dry windy morning.

Mostly, she summarises the day. There is much letter-writing, Coleridge dining, William writing. Walking, cooking, taking guests. There is a rhythm and comfort to her entries, the circling of Ambleside, the sauntering in sun and air. Days condensed and hours expanded, cute little details in pastoral glimpses: ‘Pleasant to see the labourer on Sunday jump with the friskiness of a cow upon a sunny day’. She sees into the life of things. She inspires me to mark the simple, joyous moments of daily existence. Like walking home along Sauchiehall Street (the nice part towards Finnieston), close of midnight, seeing a couple in each other’s arms, sobbing, the man with a bunch of flowers held behind his back. They were not by any means striking flowers, probably bought cheap and last minute. I wonder what sort of gesture they were supposed to convey. At what point in the night did he decide to buy them; did he attain them from those wandering women who pray upon drunks with their floral wares? Did he cut himself, ever so slightly as he paid for those unlovely thorns? Is love always a form of apology for self? The self when it expands beyond too much of itself, hotly craving?

17th March. I do not remember this day.

It seems irrelevant to say, today is Easter Sunday. Jackdaws torment me in the expensive fruit of a wakeful morning. I imagine pomegranate seeds falling from a pale blue sky. These days unfold with wincing clarity, like the hypnotic drag of a Sharon Olds poem: ‘I could see you today as a small, impromptu / god of the partial’. There are things we are maybe not supposed to remember. As if survival were a constant act of lossy compression. Like a contract between two people, pinkie promise, except one of you has broken it. Has let out the glitches. Your dreams and daily reveries are full of the content you’re not meant to remember. You are clasping this thing as if it might live again, and indeed it might really. It is not easy to simply file away memory. Its particular phraseology of physical pain comes floating to the surface regardless. There are techniques of displacement. Letting yourself shimmer in the wind. It was one more step to be gone again. So every song I went to put on, clicking the laptop, he was like, stop, it’s too sad. When they ask what’s wrong and you’re smiling instead, worrying the edge of your lips into muscles you don’t recognise at all. The room was a singular bottle of beer and a breeziness to other people’s sweetness. They wear lots of glitter and laugh as we did once. They are singing. I feel like the oldest in a test of forever. But anyway this is all only temporary. Things break down but they do not go away.

30th March. Walked I know not where.

I watch a film about plastic in the ocean. They haul fish after fish, bird after bird, prise exorbitant quantities of bottle caps, ring pulls, microbeads and indiscernible fragments from stomachs and lungs. It is quite the display. Hopelessly choking. Seems obscene to describe that deep blue as ever pure again. There are patches of plastic in all its particles swirling. It makes not an island exactly, more like a moment in species collision. Whales absorb plastic in the blubber of their skins, digesting slowly the poisons that kill them. I wrote a story about a whale fall once. The protagonist trains in swimming, in underwater breathing, in order to enter other worlds: ‘This place is a deep black cacophony; you hear the noises, some noises, not all the noises, and you feel the pressure ripple pulling under you’. There have been bouts of sleeplessness this month that feel like dwelling inside a depleting carcass. If every thought dragged with subaquatic tempo. Blacking out at one’s desk into sleep. Forgetting in the glare of screen flickers. I meet people for coffee and feel briefly chirpy, stirring. There are pieces of colour, uncertain information, clinging to the shuddering form of my body. Do not brush my hands, for fear of the cold. I am so blue and when he squeezes my fingers my insides feel purple. The woman at the counter remarked on the cold of my hands. I am falling for the bluest shade of violet. How anyway in such situations I become the silent type as I never do elsewhere. So ever to cherish a bruise as violet or blue. I polish vast quantities of glassware, lingering over the rub and sheen. One song or another as 4.30am aesthetic.

Emily Berry: ‘All that year I visited a man in a room / I polished my feelings’.

The questions we ask ourselves at work form a sort of psychoanalysis, punctuated by kitchen bells and the demands of customers. What superpower would you have? The ability to live without fear of money. We laugh at ourselves as pathetic millennials. I have nothing to prove but my denial of snow, power-walking up Princes Street on the first bright day of the year. The sky is blue and the cold flushes red in my cheeks. But I am not a siren, by any means; I wish mostly for invisibility. The anthem for coming home the long way is ‘Coming in From The Cold’ by the Delgados, feeling the empathy in lost dreams and the slow descent into drunkenness that arrives as a beautiful warning. Like how he deliberately smashed his drink on the floor in the basement out of sheer frustration with everything. The ice was everywhere. As though saying it’s complicated was an explanation for that very same everything. The difficulty of cash machines. Emily Berry again: ‘I wanted to love the world’. In past tense we can lend shape to our feelings. Will I know in a week or more the perfect metaphor for this dread, this echo chamber of grey that longs to be called again? I punch in four numbers.

I covet my exhaustion in slow refrain. There are people whose presence is an instant comfort. There are people you’d like to kiss in the rain; there are people you’d kiss in the rain but never again. What of the gesture of that bouquet? Surprise or apology? The sky is catching the mood of our feelings. Is this a melancholic tone of regret, or maybe an assured and powerful one? I twist round the memory of a mood ring; its colours don’t fit. I photograph the rings beneath my eyes, finishing an eleven hour shift. She shoves rose-petal tea biscuits under my nose but I smell nothing. I watch the chefs at work, caressing their bundles of pastry and sorrow/sorrel and rocket. I climb many stairs and assemble the necessary detritus of another funeral. Sadness requires a great deal of caffeine.

I eat mushrooms on toast with Eileen Myles. I long for the lichens on the trees of Loch Lomond. I sleep for three hours in Glasgow airport, on and off, cricking my neck and drifting in and out of vicarious heartbreak. Lydia Davis is often perfect:

But now I hated this landscape. I needed to see thing that were ugly and sad. Anything beautiful seemed to be a thing I could not belong to. I wanted to the edges of everything to darken, turn brown, I wanted spots to appear on every surface, or a sort of thin film, so that it would be harder to see, the colours not as bright or distinct. […] I hated every place I had been with him.

(The End of the Story)

Must we coat the world in our feelings? What of the viscosity that catches and spreads on everything? There is an obscenity to beauty in the midst of defeat. Year after year, I find myself dragged into summertime sadness. There is so much hope in the months of June and May, soon to dwindle as July runs spent on its sticky rain. The lushness of a city in bloom, all fern and lime, is an excess beyond what dwells inside, the charred-out landscapes of endless numbness—or ever better, missing someone. We covet the world’s disease as externalisation of our hidden pain. Let things fragment and fall away; let there be a sign of change in motion. How hard it is to be happy around depleted friends; how hard it is to be sad among joyous friends. They pop ecstasy and go home for no reason. It is self-administered serotonin that mostly buoys up the souls of the lonely. There were songs from the mid-noughties that now sound like somebody shouting down a coal mine. I want to offer them a smile and a cup of coffee. It’s all I have, the wholesome concatenation of smooth flat-whites.

There is a song by Bright Eyes, ‘If Winter Ends’: ‘But I fell for the promise of a life with a purpose / But I know that that’s impossible now / And so I drink to stay warm / And to kill selected memories’. Winter’s demise in conditional form. Alcohol convinces us of a temporary rush into the future that blooms and is good, is better than before. The drinkers I know have muffled recollections, blotted out mostly by false nostalgia. We covet a swirling version of life in the present, its generous screen flickers, its spirals of affect. We pair off in the wrong. There are days when nothing will warm me up—not the dust-covered space heater, not the hot water bottle, not the star jumps that scratch heart-rates out of the hour. Was it the same sensation, hanging on for his vowels on a hazy afternoon, four o’clock stolen from whatever it was I was supposed to be doing?

Summer, however, is forever. It is supposed to be best. The clocks skip forward.

I learn to riso-print. To work with the uncertain blot and stealth of brighter inks. What results is a marvel in teal and burgundy, splashed with cyan. See it as past with glitters of future.

In a cramped, fourth floor hotel room in Amsterdam, I lay on my bed, leg-aching, listening to ‘Shades of Blue’. Yo La Tengo get it, the vaporous sprawl of the days upon days, days replacing days: ‘Painting my room to reflect my mood’. It is a kind of overlay, the new versions of blue which are deeper maybe than they ever were before. Which lend alter-visions to original blues, the ones you thought were bad before. I see my first IRL Yves Klein in the Stedalijk museum. Words elude this particular blue. It is deep and extravagant and more oceanic than the ocean would dream of. I have no idea what materials or dreams created this blue. Lazuli, sapphires, the pigmented stain of a rare amphibian? It is the steady, infinite eye of the Pacific. It is sorrow itself, the wound of the world. The Earth bleeds blue, not red. It is this kind of blue, a supranatural blue. After the first crisp cold of a new blue day, the rest of the week is brumous and mild. My feet get wet in a cemetery. I learn that Paradise Valley is an affluent town in Arizona, and not in fact merely a Grouper album. I drink mint tea all week to detox, then stay up all night when I get home. The gin sodas sparkle within me for days, but I’m feeling guilty.

The canals are parallel, the streets are winding. There are neon and fishnetted girls in windows, drolly sipping mysterious drinks. Their eyes are heavily lined. Nobody is looking. The air is warm and spicy at night. The tourists admire displays of various erotic paraphernalia; I take pictures of the lights splashed gold on the water. They say if you get to know the place, you can really settle into a meandering layout. A guy at work supplants my name for ‘Marijuana’. I wonder if ever I’ll be someone’s Mary Jane, and what that means in the long run. Feels like a Green Day song. Marijuana, they’ll say, Marijuana I miss you. There are pockets of Finnieston that waft forever between early summer and fullness of June; evenings hung by the scent of a stoned hour poised on forever. I stay sober. I think of the river, the people and dreams it steals. The world crystallises with ridges of cold, so I must sleep beneath sheets in my click&collect coat. Blue-fingered, shivering.

Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ has been lingering on my mind: ‘Consider that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us’. I keep writing out line after line, just for the sake of avoiding full stops. I’m not yet ready for that singular compression, even as it strikes in its simple beauty.

There was the massive, narcotic blue of the sky from the airplane. A blue you can cling to. A blue you descend through.

Lana Del Rey: ‘Blue is the colour of the planet from the view above’.

Pop singers these days are attuned to new scales. That Bright Eyes song opens with a whole lot of static and children shouting, rasping. It is like watching some black-and-white film in a museum, shudders of war or monsters in every low boom and flicker. There are ways we strum ourselves out of the mourning. It’s okay to be enraged and frustrated. Oh Conor, how I love you: ‘and I scream for the sunlight or car to take me anywhere’. So when things fall apart, fray at the edges, I’m thinking of myself as a place, a location elsewhere, ‘just take me there’, and the ridge of my spine is a highway that ends where the best palm glows afire by its imaginary desert. The curve of my neck and uncertain horizon, something of all this skimming around by the brink of etcetera. What else do I have to say but, ‘it’s gonna be alright’, not even realising when I am quoting something. It is hot here, adrift on this sofa, then cold again.

The walks grow ever more indulgent, Mark Kozalek humming in my ear. I think of all his familiars. I think of my younger self thinking of all his familiars. Is it cats or is it women. How many supplements do we make of lust?

The day afterwards, it’s best to drink again. Grapefruit is cleansing. You can order whole pitchers but I choose not to. A certain suffusion of gossip and horror, ice cubes crunched between teeth to ease up the gaps where I’m meant to speak. I see Hookworms play the Art School and they were incredible: they were a rush they were eons of dizzy vigour and sweetness, the music you want to surrender to. I stop giving customers straws with their orders. It snowed again. I wasn’t drinking; I was wearing green for Paddy’s Day. I was so tired my eyes felt bruised. I keep dreaming of islands, motorbikes, exes; broken tills and discos. The flavour of these dreams in surf noir; like even in the city it’s as if a tidal pull is directing everything. I don’t mind being sucked away into nothing; I don’t mind feeling the impulse of a pale blue dot. At least in my sleep. A good collapse. The order of pain is reducing.

29th June. It is an uncertain day, sunshine showers and wind.

This week I will find a hill for my vision. New forms of erasure. I see myself boarding a train.

Yo La Tengo – Shades of Blue

Bright Eyes – If Winter Ends

Iceage – Pain Killer

Tessela – Sorbet

Bjork, Arca, Lanark Artefax – Arisen My Senses (Lanark Artefax remix)

CZARFACE, MF DOOM – Nautical Depth

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Barefoot Desert

Grouper – I’m Clean Now

Sean Nicholas Savage – So It Appears

Snail Mail – Pristine

Little Comets – M62

Manchester Orchestra, Julien Baker – Bad Things to Such Good People

Hop Along – How Simple

Frankie Cosmos – Apathy

Sharon Van Etten – I Wish I Knew

Amen Dunes – Believe

Cornelius, Beach Fossils – The Spell of a Vanishing Loveliness

Sun Kil Moon – God Bless Ohio

Good Morning – Warned You

Lucy Dacus – Addictions

The Delgados – Coming in From the Cold

Belle & Sebastian – We Were Beautiful

Mark Kozalek – Leo and Luna

Pavement – Range Life

Firestations – Blue Marble

The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die – Heartbeat in the Brain

Manic Street Preachers – Dylan & Caitlin

Bob Dylan – Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

Crosby, Stills & Nash – Hopelessly Hoping

Courtney Marie Andrews – Long Road Back to You

Grateful Dead – Box of Rain

Playlist: June 2017

A salt-water taffy stretch of a month with some sun; some wasted afternoons, park light gold and green, memory dappled like so much impress can you picture it, the wax press of light on the mind. Cherish this. Treasure, bittersweet conversations with no trajectory maybe the manner of space cadets like every direction plucked from some passing ethereal breeze. Too weird the feeling. Procrastination at its various extremes. Opening a page at random, waking up to construction groans, sleeping to evil seagulls. Surreal dreams, too much sense of the early; the precinct to late where we walk hand in hand in a daydream dazed, like looking in windows, like looking for light. Play truant for a day or two. Wine/whisky. Disappear into this fantasy space. I imagine a hallway, a series of doors. Your number etched on each one, till code or eye colour. I’ve remembered. Not much is that easy. I suspect he’s heftily medicated, some metallic blood-borne balm of the soul. There are light tunnels, there are patches of cirrus pulled apart by the bad breath of godly machinery. My stomach haunted by absent coffee. Terrible brew, extra blend. Gold and blue. The little coffee shop with the warm fire in winter. Let’s pretend that it’s summer. But even in summer this has been such a terrible grey. It’s heartbreaking to think of the seasons so out of joint, the failed slot of transcendent system, of coiled and invisible process. Like, imagine someone splitting the world’s greatest crystal of quartz, its milky opaline smoke spilling across what should be galaxy or sky or absent, beautiful blue or whatever. No clouds, just atmosphere. Hoary, gloomy, frost-mottled, dreary. My sombre face with the lines beneath the eyes, great shadows of stolen time. No sleep. We stay up all night with dawn our best friend floating by open windows; smoke drifting out in sinuous, snaking curls. I love it, love watching the smoke. It’s like the dramatisation of something opening, the stop-motion voyeur of a yawning flower. This serenity, the silky pieces of petals and sepals. All of them white, glistening eye whites. Egg whites. Fluffy matter. Solidifying objects. The turning secrecy of energy within. My body continues. It chemicals, processes, chemicals. The bitter taste with its sharp promise, O shard of six hours, shrapnel matter remembering freedom. Soft mulching Irn Bru gums. That forgetting, release. The June roses bloom so fat and sad; I wish them happy diets. Dripping rain, more rain. Slow-falling, luxurious rain. Green-sheen. The rain we can’t quite touch. Access. Restricted perception, reception. Notches on wood. The mole on my side like a miniature insect, sweat-glistening. Rain. We walk home in a daze for more chemicals. Gin. Feeling. Looking in windows. I know these streets more than the capillaries within me. Layering synths, familiar chords. Oh god the half-key octave twist, the little flicker of generous melody. Rain and rain. Return to Twin Peaks.

🌧

Johnny Jewel – Stardust

The Cactus Blossoms – Mississippi

Sufjan Stevens, James McAlister, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner – Jupiter

Marika Hackman – Violet

Big Thief – Dandelion

Beach Fossils – Sleep Apnea

Radiohead – Backdrifts

Portico Quartet – Endless

Slowdive – Sugar for the Pill

Sharon Van Etten – Every Time the Sun Comes Up

Elvis Costello – I’m In the Mood Again

Fleet Foxes – Fool’s Errand

Pond – The Weather

Lorde – Homemade Dynamite

Metronomy – Miami Logic

Japanese Breakfast – Machinist

Bonobo – Grains

Tag: nature