Like: then I began making portraits, not just portraits in colours in designs in styles, in blue, in patterns, in abstraction, but this, & I’m trying to describe to you what it was that I was doing. Portraits of the right thickness or thinness, portraits I could retrieve in a moment from my mind, portraits with false bottoms & receding backdrops, false perspectives, like memory, with layers & layers in different shades, in different states of decay, & a whole picture of all of it, first strung out in sections, as though it were on the floor, then pieced together, with some rearranging, and recorded, or put in a place, whatever you like, but in such a way that I then had to again cover & review each part, and handled, taken from place to place, until the right situation was found, as this is the only way to remember where you put something, as you already know, and then, and this is all so obvious, waiting to find out what I had done, so I could begin again. And each portrait, if I can now still describe them that way, each one had some elements which seemed to feed back into the next one. And that this for a while was becoming the most important part of the process. And these portraits, as I’ve tried to describe them, were what was going on in my mind, as far as I can say.
— Bernadette Mayer, Studying Hunger (1975)
In Studying Hunger, Bernadette Mayer writes of the feedback loops of writing that also comprise a sort of feeding. Reciprocity of materials, bodies that give and are giving, that expel and consume. How different our words might look in hunger. The month brimmed over. Designing these words you could eat, with breath of sweet pastilles, marijuana — scents arise at specific districts. Is this the green haze of Finnieston. I tried portraits too, crazed lines of abstraction, tangles that tugged me into sleep as though sleep were a kindness, a simple feeling. The month brimmed over, it was so much. I lost my appetite, fell into stasis. It was the first December in five years where I had not worked my exhausted ass off, serving tables, sick. I was sick but I wrote instead, through the guilt. I opened your letter.
Most vital when the ink bleeds through the page and the drawings stick together. We drove through the dark with Amnesiac blaring, there was a hot red halo on the night that tasted of whisky, and was empty elsewhere, the emptying streets, the plasma tv.
In Ruchill lies a store called Bammy Beverages, beneath whose armoured shutters lie many dusted bottles of tonic wine, and a key to unlock the sullen underwater future.
‘Pyramid Song’, and the field dark green, last summer’s stoned apparitions of light. A girl beside me just vomiting, vomiting. We stand tall as we can in the glare of it all, watching his hair flicks, the shuddering riffs. I dream of a train ride south and we walk home sick. July is a month impossible now.
(It seems that what I am trying to do with these playlist pieces is akin to Mayer’s portraits. How to depict the month, eking around it, associative entrails. Sketch into negative space the purple lines, the lime green silence. Salad of flavoured sentences, turn over leaf, blogging duration. December with all its aporia, were you good to me?)
I dream of a cooling desert at night, crisp prose like the fronds of a palm tree.
December fills the streets with Christmas, which had come early as early does, November fat on lights already. I write bad things about neoliberalites. I drift around looking at lights in other people’s houses, the extravagance of Park Circus; the way of the Kelvingrove trees, such eerie silhouettes at dusk in the park. An old man stops to tell me where I can find superior trees, more interesting trees. He mansplains arboreal aesthetics to me. I take pictures regardless and slip on my headphones with Spiritualized blaring. He is still muttering about the spirit tree, the one by the Kelvin. I will photograph this tree also, later.
They are selling fir trees in the street, carpets of sweet-smelling needles that haunt the air even after the vendors and their wares are gone. I think of Kyle MacLachlan saying with relish, Douglas firs! down the telephone.
What if a phone call is just millioning ellipses into the night?
So much frustrated reading in annexes, waiting for my little head to just bob into sleep. Avoiding coffee and feeling high on a similar, delirious prose that was not mine. Seek a settling. The stylish oblique mode of writing around your feelings with theory. It is like candy, it won’t dissolve; it is so much about the rush and texture. Bevel my paragraphs, curve all messages.
What cusp of the year is this, or this?
He said he’d flown through the night of a trafficless Amsterdam, four in the morning, eyes like saucers. I could not think of a more perfect event; I need to start cycling again. He said it shaves years off your life, by which he meant it drives you to youth. Sleep does it other ways.
Everything written in the month of August, so vicious. Rejections all round. Flashback to 1998, a date on a chalkboard, the scratch of the white and crumb of time. The playground was a wind-trap and we’d go flying, bearing our jackets as sails. The short day comes, folds itself into the smallest, most elusive square of white. It is a tab I can’t take, so I stay inside; languish in dark, think vodka.
Everyone is on their myriad trajectories, which the lines might fail to capture. Flicker online, line of online over. Try to see y’all before y’all go away. The elsewhere families, unfamiliar.
I felt blessed to have that sliver of access to his mind awhile. After the meeting. It is nice to see the trees like this, enviable spindles of branchware. Sip eucalyptus tea of an evening.
These unheated attics, silicone coffee.
The weather is powder and pretty today, it is so rare I must get outside. Experimental series.
As far as I can say, I want to set tables forever and ever. The people keep coming, it is astounding how many of them exist. As though I could not remember, but then the stamp of each one returned like a flurry of letters, bills, demands of me. They want our stories, bloodthirsty they open their mouths for politeness, performance. They want drinks, pepper grinders, napkins, salt. I take cetirizine because of the dust. I set foot into the building thrice this month. I make cards with pens that ooze gold glitter, smear with black ink my thoughts.
When Christmas lights are blurred in the rain and make me sad, of course I think of ‘Cody’.
A carousel of shoppers and a chance encounter, and we hide upstairs with cups of tea and you teach me how to buy shares on your phone. I watch the little lines zigzag up and down, a portrait of financial temporality. There is this stupid line from a 1975 song I can’t get out of my head: ‘Collapse my veins wearing beautiful shoes / It’s not living if it’s not with you’. Boy whose veins are green not blue. You never require a polish; you are shine. There is heroin in the world again.
Björk’s Vespertine is probably the only festive record we need. It glisters and cocoons me. A friend says it is the Christmas hit for cancers everywhere. I love the harp, the frailest cry, the video with pearls that lace her skin. I want to be lain in a field of dewdrop clover.
It did not snow as promised but it rained a lot. We sat in the cafe for hours and bought little pins with animals on them. There were these gifts. I ate something because it had the word ‘acai’ in it.
Quite a horror to see office workers unleashed in the streets, the drunken invitation to tables, lying about my name to strangers.
That hot needle feeling when you go inside and the heat rushes back to the tips of your fingers. When you wake up late and cough and cough your way through a spinal landscape.
Losing my taste buds. Mustard is recovery flavour.
I am handling the place I miss most. Something about these emails helps me think like a child again. The place where the floor just fell away, exposing that sloshing, hot springs water. And we say one thing, we feel creaturely, we made a wish to capture. It was Ash’s wish to be a trainer forever. Someone says I look like an anime character, the high-waisted jeans thing, luminous t-shirt. Read old notes and the only good line I wrote last year: ‘a breath rent asunder by mystic cat Pokemon’. So much still to recapture.
I think about Carrie & Lowell I think about William’s Last Words I think about A Silkworm of One’s Own. There is a funeral, an offer for coffee, a small admission, a kiss on the cheek.
Excruciation at personal mannerism, listening back to the interview.
We sat by the fire and talked awhile.
We sat by the fire with wine.
We sat by the fire and it rained outside.
She didn’t even buy me flowers, she didn’t even think twice.
My mother swears so much better these days.
An expansive hamper arrives in the post.
When you leave, and the air hits your face.
The city is emptying. True nocturnalism is listening to Jason Molina in grim mist of rain, on your way to Maryhill Tesco at 2am. The workers sit smoking in the carpark, scrolling on phones. It was funny to leave with bagfuls of vegetables, ache in my chest, ironically playing ‘Perfect Day’. When he said we looked stunning and suddenly it was Christmas again.
The air just smelled of fish and chips. Comfort of a town I used to call home.
I awoke to my alarm clock, which wasn’t a pop song and it wasn’t that loud. We walk along the river, catching the fog. It was so nice to see you! Victorian bridges house numberless ghosts, and we pass between. I leave my green scarf in a bar and rush to retrieve it the following morning. It is never loud enough, warm enough. I write this essay about lines and Derrida and the work of crying. Nobody drinks Sangria round here.
Sauchiehall hellscape.
If I live to your age and in what situation.
Listen to the Morvern Callar soundtrack on Christmas Day, paint my toenails blood red like a call. We trade solstice poems online. Full moon energy of weekends, and how we sat in Category Is on Saturday reading from Midwinter Day, this quiet ritual of voice and warmth. Homemade treats and spiced orange tea. Passing the book around. Catching myself on the science vocabulary, lush words of reaction, wishing I could roll my r’s like him. You should just write, just write everything.
It is so nice to see you all. Candid photograph, conversation.
One hand
Loves the other
So much on me
Try to write to make myself hungry. I learn this word petrichor, which feels like a word I already knew — I can taste it. Softest, resonant earth elsewhere. Takes shape in your message. Remember teenage wanders, unruly longing, misdirection. Sweetness.
I walk north, west, home. I walk through the rain and my brain is sparkling. The year does not simply ‘close’. It is a recurring dream. The city just shimmers as temporary portrait, and I add the blue to accentuate insomnia — a little violet around the eyes, significance of the Clyde as a river. How to write about those I miss? What a year it’s been, we say each year. Christmas, so we’ll stop, surely. The way the BBC lights looked, pregnant in fog in the picture. The river drags through us, the ones it swallowed. Everything just streaming and streaming, the way winter goes.
~
The 1975 — It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)
Let’s Eat Grandma — Falling Into Me
Perko — Rounded
Sharon Van Etten — Jupiter 4
Deerhunter — Element
Stereolab — Blue Milk
Björk — Heirloom
Oneohtrix Point Never — Last Known Image Of A Song (Ryuichi Sakamoto rework)
aYia — Ruins
Mogwai — Mogwai Fear Satan
Swans — Oxygen
Peter Broderick — Carried
Kathryn Joseph — Cold
Conor Oberst — The Rockaways
Frightened Rabbit — It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop
Sufjan Stevens — Lonely Man of Winter
Angel Olsen — If It’s Alive, It Will
Damien Jurado — Over Rainbows and Rainier
Penguin Cafe Orchestra – Thorn Tree Wind
William Tyler — Call Me When I’m Breathing Again
Phoebe Bridgers — Friday I’m In Love (the Cure cover)
The Delgados — Coming In From The Cold
The Verve — Virtual World
Spiritualized — Cop Shoot Cop
mariaology 