Tag: rainbow

Playlist: February 2020

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Warning: contains dairy

These Piscean days, I lose whole mornings to night. I spread every hour like butter to sleep, back to the melt-world with its length which is only the sentence, dripping at the end of the knife a line. These nights are nothing! Paragraphs are so conceptual and I am always failing to come inside them. I wake up to ill-formed texts and forget my dreams. ‘There is a type of daydreaming that can foretell the future’, Jenny Boully says, ‘a type of dreaming that explains why nothing is being written’. Nothing gives itself up this way. In the diner, pressurised to justify something of which I have nothing to say, I took my leave of the mirror. I watch butter drip from the knife that is poised on a plateau. Honestly, I would eat truffle fries with Deleuze any day. He’s like, ‘what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying’. In saying nothing, I dream my days and nothing gets written. It is a process but nothing gets written. Yes you can take the menu away. 

As nothing happens, indistinguishable figures surround me and my space key sticks. The mark between will melt in your mouth. Some of the figures make violence, they bear what I can’t say of the happening. They are dripping with the fat that won’t hold language. So I am struggling to say this to you. I had this beautiful dream of the world’s oasis, its heart, not the world’s but you know whose, what that dream belonged to, what heartfreak is it the dream contends. When you cut the knife in the middle and it melts all the rainbows around it. 

Truffle smell is just vapourised rhizomes, baby.

A refuge cove, pastel-hued in some new time before dusk and dawn that was not night, unnameable, not even twilight. I feel it is a word only islanders know. I was swimming so freely in this cove, my soul was archipelago, and I knew it was the end of the world, breakfast, not the cove but everything breaking up, it was happening, at long last, and we were so calm. We were so calm in our pieces. Disaster is archipelagic these days. The other person was asking me questions, confused, and I was saying it is only that things will change, and you knew and you knew, like Nico. It all breaks up. Can I convey to you the beautiful feeling of the water, which always continues? How I touched that chalky rock like it was a planet, how I said (being spoken) it is told to believe, the scales are disordered; if we keep touching the rock it only can happen. The water surrounds us smooth as cream. The sea level rose around me; I felt rosy, I knew I wasn’t the only one — I couldn’t wait to feel truly atomic, after all. The violent figures would extinguish each other, I won’t say like love.

~

Have you heard Grimes’ new album? For me, it is more like, I felt so light I could fall above earth, like angels descending. We might catch each other on the way. Our wings would stick, like my hair in your glasses.

After the end of the world, like the single annihilation of a mountain, bmbmbm, a kind of love that eats you from the inside out. A love without purpose. I read this satirical piece in The New Yorker which goes something like, but what about when there aren’t many fish in the literal sea? What then? Is there an app for that? Someone keeps scrolling for other expressions

…and the fish will catch you back 🙂

~

The scene in my dream was like the one in Antonioni’s Red Desert, where she swims around the turquoise bay, she is so bronzed and this is the lightest moment, the music, before industry almost. Childhood’s idyllic shelter is water.

I wonder about the shelter of water. What is it to swim and not actually swim, from my perch in the city, a milky white cat at the end of my bed? You end the things you say with salt. Chalkmatter colours my black leather shoes. It only snowed or almost snowed; they salt the roads so poorly. At the end of The Topeka School, revolution just is the kid doing asphalt sketches in front of the cops. I read that book by an early winter, on the old Virgin, heading north. The full spectrum of my psyche swings between two types of moon: the black cat and the white, the lunatic cappuccino continuum. miaow / miaow / miaow. It is a foamy thing, otherwise slender, dusted w/ safest chocolate stars. I could mew for a future, should it work. I sleep through the pickets; I am wracked in guilt, I wake with a cold full of head.

Why don’t you tell me a story?
Why not yesterday’s?

Reality is bladderwrack.
My dreams are thickening; they scent so hard.

~

It is mostly, surely — I’ll tell it properly later — that the story has to come out backwards. You pull the child safely away from the water, you unravel the knotweed ribbons of time, you tweeze a poison stem from my lips. Why would you? I had forgotten the cove was an island, a place to be always alone. Robert Pattinson pulls the kelp from her belly. Why would you let her fall in love with the water? You can have these luscious, indulgent memories, salt spray, and still be unsure as to who they belong. This is our state of it now. How long had I lived in nature documentary, ambient music, instead of the freak of my heart? The freak of my heart was a golden foam. The island was upside down; its bowels were dripping into the sky, there was so much lava, gold-dripping lava. The sea all warm with thermal energy. The sea gone almost gold. I go to see a movie about the smallest glacier in the world, and Iceland is a word I cherish like fruit. 

So eerie, only the splash her legs make slicing the water. There was no sound. 

Two types of cat, they eat up my thoughts like golden commas.

It was between what I wanted to say. It was covered in gilt and leaf. Before I slept, thinking the unsaid is a tan line and surely if I took off these clothes you would see it, crinkling frost of gold, how the not-saying had burned the skin of my chest and back, how it was all there, so plain and white, negative scripture — what I had covered. If you could insufflate the measured lines, excoriated pores of deepest carat. Shame is expensive. Whose fault is that violence? The moon-cats, white and black, they blame the sun. The scratch little hieroglyphs from the skin of my arms.

~

It was the interruption of a ship. A wreck. I fell for it. She leaps off the rocks of her refuge cove. She fucks up, walking through the park in tears. It is only Monday. The ship is a ghost. What do we mean when we say ‘alone’?  It sailed away to a moonscape, burning. The child wants to know what that also means. Eudaemonia. The ship coming back, as it always will until the end, which is the after we’re in, we’re ever. 

I want us a mountain. The strangest isolated music, whose voice was all. I dreamt somebody was threshing corn, impossibly on the side of a mountain. There was an operatic howl from the sea. I could feel these landscapes start to collapse, this deep impending heat, inland and littoral, which would surely explode on a note I couldn’t reach.

The rocks resembled faces. I found my inlet. The rocks like flesh.

~

‘Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent’, writes Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain, ‘But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible. But paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled’. Am I afraid of this fulfilment? 

Every hour a transparency you catch on not-sleeping. 

Brain function down by infinite percent. 

Pareidolia is a symptom of material contingency. My transparent success of walking this back to air, a bodiless gratification, ephemeral as rainbow. It’s coming around. In time, to erase like a tan line, missing the call of a thought.

The train goes north to Aberdeen, and I want to keep going, to go as far as Inverness then west — so painfully do I miss the summer, the midges around the loch, the rich excess of Highland rain. We took photos at the mirrored curve of the road. The crazed church cat, wild heather and car rides, rice cakes. Now the light is pink on granite, there is snow on the hills. 

That break I took, listening in the corridor; ‘How to Disappear Completely’. Labour’s psychic debt is a cup of tea. And why are the blossoms here already?

~

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There’s this line by Karen Dalton in ‘Remembering Mountains’, ‘Do you think the seasons change? / Without your heart’. It’s a miracle when they do, and I hear Sharon singing it, and I love the name Sharon. I can’t stand the sight of snowdrops and crocuses, when colour still hurts because it throttles towards the overlap of the year, a loop I won’t complete. I wear it necked. They used to say I look like her. ‘Are you dreaming?’ asks the song, and I wish I was, as if I could sleep, and it is five in the morning of a Wednesday, indigo light / cheap lager, and I am watching Joan Baez on the BBC. It’s Edinburgh, 1965, and the crowd sing along in the chorus, and she is so beautiful and soft, the chords familiar, ‘O the summertime / is coming’ and I can hardly bear it, the fact of this five in the morning and the promise of leaves, long hair and warmth. Angel Olsen: ‘If it’s alive, it Will’, ‘So That We Can Be Still’. My heart among strangest cacti trembles. Whose purple heather belongs to the mountain? Her voice will carry me through the morning light, the screaming gulls, the missing sea. My cousin gives birth to a boy. And I melt on the blue I wake up to / in this flat that isn’t mine. And when the others sing along Joan murmurs, that’s beautiful. 

What are your favourite books to read? I used to think, I used to think…

Everyone watches in such stillness and awe. ‘I watch you grow / from a child of shimmer’, Julia Holter sings on a fragile, chiming version of one of Dalton’s songs, ‘My Love, My Love’. What belonging does the shimmer really want? It feels like the loneliest fragment, plash of a fountain, so significant. As I write this, it’s starting to snow: rich flakes of not-snow, the long and melt of it.

Remember when the world seemed plenitude. She was 24, her voice a soprano hillside, ribboned with crystal. 

Dude, the river is a drum machine.

~

There is an era I long for. 

~

When the rabbit appears, is it like Donnie Darko. 

When the rabbit appears, is it like in Donnie Darko. 

I guess I could never get the physics.

I always felt too meta. 

When the rabbit gets away.

~

‘Knowing another is endless’, Shepherd intones, ‘The thing to be known grows with the knowing’. I don’t exist apart from the knowledge of others. Somehow that’s soothing. Like never really knowing what you know of me, and not to know that. I give little pieces to the sun, like wine gums of soul. The sun could chew my life to its sugar and cinders. It gives me a tan line. I think about solar panels installed in the desert, a solar forest, a solace. Send a stupid text like, all of the funk is cherry coloured. Waft between; what bleeds of a middle, you press the knife in. They were playing it in the restaurant, ate to eight, and I knew this would happen forever, and I knew it had already happened. Black stuff gushing straight out from the centre. The bookings cease behind Billie’s lashes. She gets up to eat her ocean fish and the sky is an ocean eye, skinned by a knife.

~ 

Angelina, I had written so long — I wanted you to show me how to wash windows, like in the Pinegrove song, or how to paint the walls pink like in Betty Blue, or how to be painted that smutty colour of being extinguished. You would pull the ladder away. There is a ladder scene in a film you say is super beautiful but I haven’t yet seen it. 

~

Bright Eyes are coming back! Spotify has a playlist called lofi love. I have seven unread messages; I keep deleting the apps, choosing colours to flush the hours, wishing I was outside if I felt less ill, changing skins, crying in public — 

The republic of crying in public! The spun out sky is another seduction. I took notes, returning to Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. I was particularly struck by her use of the word ‘encradling’. It seems this is something a cat can do. There is a fountain made of glass we cry beside where we used to make wishes. The secret is the fountain is a harvest of tears. In the dream where me or the girl was clung to the rock (who is she) and I knew that in touching the rock I would survive the end of the world. My paw on the rock, I would promise. Well the rock was whittled and polished and shaped, and now it’s a fountain. ‘The harm will come’, Boyer writes, ‘it never doesn’t’. We only cry beside it, cradling kittens. This is so metaphorical, he says in the movie. We can’t cry exactly inside the harm; it would be like trying to trace your own flesh with a cloud… ‘for the harm may also be like an entry in the encyclopedia of what has not yet been written’ (Boyer). Shamefully, I am still more interested in wishes than knowledge, even if the knowledge would allow me to be. 

                                        A waste of paint! 

                                         An elixir of less!

                                        A precious index!

~

Watching the figure skaters twist and snap their ankles on ice — temporality of wishes — love that spark snap kick when they leap and pull each other backwards, forwards. Some of them are infinite flowers. Halo selfie in lieu of sleep, so graceful I dream of the tessellating rainbows. Watching The Love Witch, Spinning Out, Parasite, Ismael’s Ghosts, The Lighthouse.

~

These Piscean days are strange and excessive. Spread rainbows from the jar by your dreams and remember the all-night messaging, the synchronised falling asleep two coasts apart on autoplay, other Aprils. You look cute without glasses. I get ID’d at Sleazy’s, give the bouncer my whisky to borrow. He’s like, ‘Good night?’ and foolishly I tell him of the day, one sip on the train. That is not what he meant. I go to Aberdeen and back. I read the whole of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume in one go. In the novel, the Marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse has a theory that ‘life could develop only at a certain distance from the earth, since the earth itself constantly emits a corrupting gas, a so-called fluidum letale, which lames vital energies and sooner or later totally extinguishes them’. So his theory is trash or whatever, but what if I am scared of the earth inside me? Mum, did I really eat mud as a kid? I gathered petals from roses and watched them float in a soup bowl, calling it rosy cologne. I love the bit about developing an angel scent, so ‘good and vital’, what happens towards the end is success. I am scared of the invented theory of an earthy sickness, so I eat truffle fries with Deleuze in my dream. I am trying to garner immunity. You have lamed my vital energies! I dab my wrists with liquid tobacco, maple and cherries. I want to seem resistant to the fluidal theory. I want the teeth to sink in my wrist, a taste of pulse. Maybe like Nan I need to get close to the mountain, melt with its snow and sleep there. ‘No one is the only one‘. I am totally extinguished. They would dredge me sick from my earthly perch and call me hahaha a virgo. Sleep has its pulse like a feline body of sugar and grass and plasma. Sorry, I’m feeling milky. Sick tidings, bro. What is the odour of fresh-fallen snow? In the library the scent is quiet. When I get stressed, sometimes I experience a phantom olfactory glitch. I smell what isn’t there, this extra-sweet and ersatz presence. What is the scent of a coming storm? Who is behind me? I joke that I can feel it in my breasts, some quip from a movie, bruising me.

Melt-world of the fridge makes ice of this milk. And who would pour it?

There are so many storms of this month you could fill a class of primary children with their names, and they would take off their coats to fly with the wind and in the Red Desert story, its central heartfreak, that was the tale of the kites, to fly by your coattails, his heart murmur that almost broke us. I was sorry to cattily tell you the story. And so to gather up those fish, get caught again, you stay inside the essay.

Pour me a storm? What of language catches.

~

From the stage on Valentine’s Day, Angel addresses the crowd, my sweet lad, and the dusk flavoured Buckfast on the walk to find you, darkest blueberry red assessed, and the gossip would settle its glitter on song, and we would have cried had she played ‘Sister’, but to fall upon ‘Lark’ was ultimate. As if she were singing Angelina, farewell or washing windows, as if we were singing along in the car and this was the long and winding road to Arran, St Abbs or Skye. We have all these earnest chats about burnout. It’s been a fair while since I’ve seen the moon, or even the news. It snows but doesn’t settle.

~

Free Love – Bones

Sufjan Stevens, Lowell Brams – The Runaround

Melody’s Echo Chamber – Snowcapped Andes Crash

Sharon Van Etten – Remembering Mountains (Karen Dalton cover)

Perfume Genius – Describe

Weyes Blood – Lost in Dreams

Culte – It’s Too Cold to Be Spring

Joanna Sternberg – My Angel

Joan Baez – Will You Go Lassie Go

Conor Oberst – The Rockaways

Julia Jacklin – Don’t Know How to Keep Loving You

Billie Eilish – xanny

Ratboys – Peter the Wild Boy

Deeper – Pink Showers

The Orielles – Come Down on Jupiter

Disq – Loneliness

Sorry – Starstruck

Kississippi – Cut Yr Teeth

(Sandy) Alex G – Salt

Nice As Fuck – Angel

black midi – Sweater

Hannah Lou Clark – Trigger Happy Kisses  

TOPS – Witching Hour

Hatchie – Stay With Me

Wild Nothing – Sleight of Hand

Grimes – So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth

Arthur Russell – I Kissed the Girl from Outer Space

Nekkuro Hána – Loverspy 

Tan Cologne – Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico

Bonniesongs – Dreamy Dreams

Bright Eyes – Waste of Paint

Heather Woods Broderick – Wyoming

POLIÇA – Little Threads

The Concretes – Miss You

The Mountain Goats – Tallahassee

HOLY – Heard Her

The Hollies – Jesus Was a Crossmaker (Judee Sill cover)

American Football – Never Meant

Roddy Woomble – Everyday Sun

Radiohead – How to Disappear Completely

Lana Del Rey – Terrence Loves You

Playlist: December 2019

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There is this Anne Carson poem, ‘God’s Work’, which ends with the line ‘Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work’. By chance, I was reminded of the poem via some post on Instagram that came up an hour ago. I want to think about this ‘it’, like how it is the sadness and also the work, and the pronoun of living, the abstract embodied. ‘Mantle’ is something that covers, envelops or conceals, it is a portion of the Earth, a sleeveless cloak or cape. Is it also the bevelled edge of a door? One can be mantled with a blush, the mark of a covering shame. Is it a mantle of work to hide your sadness, or does the ‘it is’ refer to some other thing whose outcome is that we must put away our sadness? We must close a passage of time behind us? Notice I am switching to a plural pronoun, because I have entered the poem, sharing the position of both addressee and speaker. I am the the person with this feeling; I am the person addressing this feeling. To speak at all, I am doing the mantle of work. There have been these tectonic shifts in my life of late, the underlying move or loss that is a portion of everything. ‘Put away your sadness’ asks you to imagine a physical form for the affect, a classic poetic move: my sadness is a bird, my sadness is a stone, my sadness is a rose, a scrunchie, a sea. These are things you can put away, tie back; or you can hide with a cloud, or you can dive in. Typing in ‘my sadness is a’, Google suggests: 

addiction
a smile
a father introduced
a souvenir
a smile
a text
a joyful dance
a science

It seems these things are all correct, at the present moment. For instance, I drink from this mug and I think about Prague, and how it looked in the rain of a flickering image. That is a souvenir, but it is somebody else’s rain. The internet offers ‘Healthy ways to deal with sadness’, ‘Why am I sad all the time?’ and the old adage, ‘It’s okay to feel sad’. I have been reading Heather Christle’s The Crying Book (2019) and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Didion insists, ‘The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room’ where one could ‘touch a key and collapse the sequence of time’. In one of my favourite Laura Marling songs, ‘The Captain and the Hourglass’, she sings ‘Behind every tree is a cutting machine and a kite fallen from grace / Inside every man is a heart of sand you can see it in his face’. I love the pessimistic, teenage fatalism of this album, Alas I Cannot Swim (2008), its jump cuts of warning and love and familiar pain. Is the man the whole of humankind, or men in general? What if instead of words we had the bark of a tree, its abrasive shavings; a shaven novel or heart of sand in which to bear our suffering? Dissolve is imminent. There would be the rings of your life, the brief achievements of flight, but then the fallen linen, the tired old string, the particles blown. Didion wants it all at once: a simultaneous display of the frames, the scenes of a life. You would then choose what to cut, reassemble or stow away. What doesn’t matter to be dispersed. In the cutting room, a mantle of work is required. And what of the work that is to write who you are, when what that seems is only pencil shavings, sawdust and woodsmoke? 

I have not walked in the woods for so long, and the last time it was with you. But let that not be the last. I was cloaked in so many layers; I could not get rid of the cold. It was a damp and green, needling feeling. It was not so much inside as around me. 

Heather Christle puts it really well, this question of the cutting room and the cry: 

Maybe we cannot know about the real reason we are crying. Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact. Not just stories. I won’t say just.

It is a relief to write while crying. There is something comforting about the simultaneous flow, as though letting two substances at once run through you: one being language, the other chemical; each in a woven relation. Crying, then, is the anarrangement (ana being Greek for ‘up, in place or time, back, again, anew — OED), of a state of things that are happening in life, in the body, in the social, in various temporalities. There is the before and after of a break; there is the running on, running behind, the sense of feeling this from ‘above’ or ‘below’. Like when for ages I didn’t properly eat the world was a glassy thing I was seeing from underwater, poking the ripples, falling backwards. To cry is to indulge in both prolepsis and analepsis, to slip and collapse, to blur and feel into. A friend says, you have to work through and not around it. I try not to cry about, but recognise the ambience of sadness. I won’t know until later what is really happening, what narrative this can all be placed in, or slip from. 

Somebody nearby is playing a flute really badly. 

The chime of a text message. It’s okay to feel sad. 

In the office, friends and I exchange tales of election night. One of us is trying to fix a puzzle, the other drinks for sorrow; there is a mutual sensation of violence which can only ‘end’ in blackout, keying a car, throwing a punch, posting a rant or falling through sleep’s amnesia. For a while, I could only listen to songs that came out before this happened, and before the Tories were a bad new government, which felt forever ago. 

What if daylight itself became elective, and that was the bold democracy of what it was to enter a day. Do you choose the light, or does it summon you? I just make playlists.

The moon has been flagrant of late, or was it right before. I remember seeing rainbows around the moon for days at a time. I remember that seeming too much, like I’d overdosed on the dust of this planet, like there were molecules of colour in my nose I could not sneeze or shake out. Like there was a terrible high about to happen. 

I have not seen the moon at all this week. 

I write this raining. 

A thought of the before and after which remains unfixed and semi-colonic. It is to say and not say of what was said. 

There is a special release in crying by bodies of water. I believe in a clairvoyant sadness, one that predicts some upset to come. It is the body’s sincerity of knowing. So you cry by the sea, or lately, a river. All that I have. Cry your eyes out by the Clyde. When you arrived, I was reading about the horror of purple, that ‘which hurts both sides’, ‘the horror’ (Hannah Weiner, The Fast). I wear it around my sleepless eyes. It is a bruise colour, the muscular failure to move through the day; it is a pile of clothes, a burgeoning energy of the horror. So I turn to blue, which is a star, or a gas flame because someone is cooking. 

That line in Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’, from Blue, a lifesaver every Christmas, which goes, ‘Just before our love got lost you said / I am as constant as a northern star’. And it’s that ‘I am’ that I like, the moving throughness of it, the insistence that this is and not was. Because there is something of forever which is getting lost, or a wound that is hidden and cannot be healed. That is forever opening up. For we were so close, a year ago. And of course Joni flips, deliciously, to the mundane. She asks ‘Constantly in the darkness / Where’s that at / If you want me I’ll be in the bar’. As though to look down in your soupy negroni, you would find that hot abyss from which love is turned, over and over. And maybe you’d shed a few tears in it. And you’d struggle to say the location. 

I remember dressing as a wise man for a play at school, wearing a homemade crown and parading slowly towards a manger. Somebody was acting the part of the star, and we followed them. 

Somehow in a notebook I wrote, ‘I am going to be fine. I am going to shine at it’. To be shiny in this being fine, I wrote that in a café and I remember my hands were trembling, my earrings were not real gold. 

There is this dream from last night where I wear a blindfold made of a banana leaf, and you are helping me cross this road, this road that is river. 

In Goodbye, First Love, there is a hat that floats away in the river where Camille is swimming. This happens at the end. It is either too late or too soon, and she is crushed. This is the wiki summary. From the film I remember the widening shot of the river that flows on but closes, and the sunlight, and crying as I watched this at six in the morning, after reading about it on somebody’s blog, the link now lost. It was almost spring and I had not cried since winter. Back when I would add things to my weekly list like, ‘more on lattices’, ‘a setlist’, ‘a more explicit weave’, ‘reply’ and ‘pack’.

Writing this now, am I attempting to ‘put’ this ‘away’? 

When he tried to be practical, mentioned ‘In the long run…’ I could only think of that song by The Staves. It was a churlish note, curled at the edge and not mine or yours. That night, there was a cat called Olive, a taxi to Greenbank, sleeping in a friend’s sister’s bed, waking up face to face with Sophie Collins’ small white monkeys again. In the notebook I had written in a slurred hand, ‘I wish I would cry now but I feel afloat’. It was the elated tiredness, the denial. I had a freezing shower to cool my shame. 

Climate breakdown is also a breakdown of the heart. We have to admit that. Something is always stinging, ‘I’ve been thinking’, a mug of hot water. I could not sleep, I was reading Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva in fits and starts, which is perhaps how it demands to be read:

I swallow a mouthful of blood that fills me entirely. I hear cymbals and trumpets and tambourines that fill the air with noise and uproar drowning out the silence of the disc of the sun and its marvel. I want a cloak woven from threads of solar gold. The sun is the magical tension of the silence.

A spoon of blood, not sugar, not jam. It is the hot lump in your throat when you cry and the blood that is anyway. About to. Remember I bled for thirteen days, or was it more. It was because of hot liquid, a rush, a pill. How you nourish yourself or not. A friend says, when I cry on buses and trains I listen to specific kinds of music and pretend I’m in a movie. Is it detachment we want from that? Would there be cymbals and trumpets and tambourines in this movie? I want you to put me in it, the noise. I want to stand at the front of the gig, be buffeted. I want to be bashed around like a note that won’t break from the instrument. I want to find a post-it note stuck to my back, but what should it say? Over time, I garner respect for the sun. It is not that my nocturnal years are ‘over’, but I am wondering what it would mean to truly love and rejoice in the sun. The giver of life, not Byronic darkness. To lie in a colourless sea. What would this clarity that Clarice writes of look like, the woven cloak of ‘solar gold’, its ripples? Is it the mantle one could wear to cloak a sadness? But what if the sadness was the clarity itself? I say, I think you are brilliant. It is a mantra. It is a giving away. When the van swerved and nearly hit me, I felt the sunlight so incredibly brightly. The east coast, the sense that this was someone else’s morning. The silence remains still, and I look for it in that ‘magical tension’ of the said and unsaid, and I am doing what Didion does with her grief, the magical thinking that is arranging all these scenes at once for something to emerge as possible. That is trying to sort a timeline or feeling yourself ‘invisible’, between things, the living and dead, an incomprehensible love. 

In Ariana Reines’ recent collection, A Sand Book (2019), the pages of the final section, ‘MOSAIC’, are black. She introduces the scene that prompted this section with italics, 

The sun’s warmth kept filling me, and what had begun as a slightly above-average warmth kept growing. It was starting to fill my body, and just before I totally surrendered to it, I had the inkling this might be something like the “bliss” I had heard about in old books. I had to sit down.

What is relayed as a religious experience, a spiritual experience, is then a series of transmissions (‘MOSAIC’ is in reference to Moses). But it is also fundamentally a solar experience. I think of Laura Marling’s heart of sand, something grazed by a coming warmth, the lap of a sunlight like the sea. A hot liquid thing that is coming inside me, causing the bleed, the bliss, the generous massage of some hormone. It is embarrassing writing, it demands a hot bright mantle. To feel it, feel through it, you have to sit down. You might go to the bar, as Joni does. In fact, I write this lying in bed, as is often the way. There is nothing to set out for or plan, so much as the needling of this ‘inkling’. 

I go to see Little Women, and focus on Jo’s ink-stained fingers.

I have not been ‘on holiday’ for so long but if I did I would make a solar panel of my opening chest and lay where the river and the light would take me. I think the black space on Ariana Reine’s pages is just as important as the whitely capitalised text, ‘EARTH IS SPECIAL […] THERE IS NO “BACK” TO GET TO’. We can’t get back to any bliss other than what is felt in the present. And there has to be so much energy. Put down your phone.

Dorothea Lasky says she tells her students ‘not to have a plan, but to collect things and poems and then put them together’, there is this ‘holy idea’ of ‘emergence’. I write mostly by assembling quotes I like, streaming things down (for to ‘jot’ implies a decisiveness, an almost violence) whenever they do or don’t make sense. Text myself so the thought is received as though in reply. I have all these poems from the month I don’t yet know how to assemble. They are as much of the rain as the rain. Someone comments on a fresh sense of ‘scarcity’. 

‘I wish I had a river so long’. And there is no snow here. The lines feel hard and overly sweet. 

Candy canes hang upon the tree.

On Christmas Day, we walk by the canal and stop by the locks. The trees seem anorexic, as in a Plath poem; as though they had chosen to strip this pure and gleam on the water. They too will see from below, but they know a different renewal. 

I can’t say a certain five letter word. 

I want to know what the seven words are in the Weyes Blood song. 

‘I wish I could swim in an ocean / As cold as’ a line I can’t finish, listening to Grace Cummings as though it were autumn all over again. But people on the internet are still going wild swimming. The world is not everywhere cold. The caption reads, literally all I want for xmas. 

Two photos on different accounts of a landscape blurred by the motional train. 

It’s funny, I even wrote, ‘it’s like The Topeka School and the failure of language’. 

To sob into the warm, soft fur of a cat. 

The want of a cigarette.

Astonishing winter light.

I couldn’t finish the wine. 

In The Fast, Hannah Weiner writes, ‘I didn’t know any golden light people, but I knew a couple of blues. I knew I had to be rescued (I thought of it that way) by a blue, or someone near it’. One of my closest friends and I both Instagram a snapshot of ‘River’ on Spotify at separate points across the festive period. It is this secret, not-so-secret gesture of the living-on, the warmth and possible. I think she is one of the golden light people, in loops, and I wonder what I am, if one of the blues. Who else is a blue? But I have always loved green eyes. And the Earth, which is a globe of something like green and blue, (de)pendant on/of the universe. Whose. And I have seen the garden in four seasons now, but just barely. The scene is still swinging and won’t stop to focus. 

What Reines writes of how there is no ‘back’ of the Earth to get to. I think of the back of a tapestry: a ragged collation of stems, snipped-off threads, criss-crossing lines. A simultaneity, a mess, a work in progress. When I am trying to write about the anthropocene, about what is happening, about the earth, is it this ‘back’ I am trying to write. It is not to get back to, but a back that is happening, the other side. I have been trying and failing to learn crochet; I think those who succeed are beautiful and perfect, I won’t turn over their lovely creations. In her song ‘Other Side’, Grace Cummings sings ‘The fall of a raindrop / Returns blue to the daylight / Your mind must return / To behind your eyes’. One drop of blue can restore the day. I think of Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, living on Montague Street, in one or more stories. The worried thread. It is like putting on makeup to stop yourself crying, but doing it anyway, later in rivers of mascara and other clichés. When you are watching a movie and the crying is about to happen and you feel it as a sparkle, because it is not about the movie for which you are crying, but something around or near the happening, the space of it, being there in the other imaginary. And then what is going on ‘behind your eyes’. Crying happens in a space. It is all the prettiness we do while we can, which is a mutual hurt, a hot slide of a tear that catches your neck and means something small and inexplicable. 

The Bright Eyes song ‘Train Under Water’ begins, ‘You were born inside of a raindrop / I watched you falling to your death / And the sun, well she could not save you / She’d fallen down too, now the streets are wet’. I used to think that song was about miscarriage, now I know it could be about any kind of love and loss. Remember when Jeremy Corbyn said something offhand about getting the train to Orkney? I dream about the sub-thalassic train sometimes, northerly moving, passing by jellyfish and flashes of shapeless light. Where are you going, where have you been. The milky unborn thing that we bear yet. Feeling sick from relative motion. It is the glassy way we watch from behind falling water, all of our lives. What touch do we really share of each other?

The air is a key change.

At the reading, Gloria says something like, we have all been thinking of writing as a practice of moving through the days, a practice of living, of marking time. Here are the days I give you in words. In Utopia, her little red book, Bernadette Mayer writes, ‘Everything you or I or anybody says always seems 100% wrong sometimes, unless you keep forcing it to be closer to the truth’. There is a truth quality, say, to the way plants photosynthesise or a starling assembles her nest. The percentage quality in which I can or cannot get out of bed, and whether you are ‘Active Now’ or in fact just barely online. Again, it is a question of green. 

Marianne Morris has this beautiful poem, the last in her collection Word / World (2018), that a friend and I once read aloud together on a patio in summer at the XR climate café, the first I’d attended. Everything seemed shimmer then. The poem, ‘Lion’s Gate’, is a prose poem of some intensity. It is about what it means to love and to hate, and what is worth keeping. I really want to quote the whole thing but I can’t, so I’ll make do: 

We do not want to go back with more questions pertaining to life on this Earth. We must learn them before we leave, loving every possible second upon this beautiful Earth, because we will not come back. We will move on elsewhere. It is like a heart breaking feeling suddenly, I see it all so clearly and I want this moment to stay. This feeling of certainty that the only thing that matters in this life is that you enjoy your time here and keep thirsting and seeking and do not resist the lessons, rush towards them and learn them all, so that you can die to yourself, die into light. 

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~

 

Green Day – 2000 Light Years Away

Caribou – You and I

Market – Told

Angel Olsen – Lark

Fleetwood Mac – Dreams

Pinegrove – Skylight

Rob St. John – Your Phantom Limb

Laura Marling – Tap At My Window

Karen Dalton – God Bless the Child

Joni Mitchell – River

Grace Cumming – Other Side 

wished bone – Pink Room 

Nirvana – Something In The Way

Wilco – An Empty Corner

Belle and Sebastian – We Rule the School

Vashti Bunyan – Winter is Blue

Connie Converse – I Have Considered the Lilies

Bright Eyes – Train Under Water 

Big Thief – Dandelion

The National – Guilty Party 

Organ Tapes – Simple Halo 

Björk – Sun In My Mouth

Eartheater, LEYA – Angel Path

Mitski – Last Words of a Shooting Star

Playlist: November 2019

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The hall is full of noises, sounds of torrid airs and sigh. It is a steel hall, non-place, serving lusciousness in plastic cups. The animals sing on a loop. The choir just lifts. ‘The science is clear’ (Greta Thunberg). I stayed up waiting until the cries came, curled on my little sofa. It isn’t years that slip when she starts, when the young ones start, when the colour is like a radical hydro seminar. What do you have to contribute, I give you my silks just once, clutching a ticket. Can’t stop worrying the skin of my cuticles into a bleed, scrape the hard bit sore against my thumb. She just swirls. Something has shifted between us since. She moves she. Moveable she. I can’t start up.

Two of us drift in dresses, crushed of scarlet velvet.

It has been a long time since this was honeyed. I felt sultry like an Everly Brother, his actions speak louder. On the line standing and learning, the lines, I think it hurts.

In the poem I am clipping my nails again. Words, words, words; a snip.

How is it that we sat up late, same sofa, in the skeins of this year? Have you even come down yet?

His actions speak louder than shimmer_

Bliss not this, Christmas cactus at the corner of_. Is it better to cry in the sun or the rain. The rain is so obvious. I confected a dialogue to spite the blues and the cherries, rinsing packaging in the sink. It was supposed to be red. You said it fell flat. There was a half-moon curve between us and I sat there hugging my knees. The others. I like when you say you like a riff. Let’s be as I was in the hall, champagne later, tiniest bubbling; don’t say rise, let’s hold it cute. A sippable glitch in the music. Walking home in the rain, I murmured it: wtf wtf wtf. I made this punctuation; be here now, missing the body. She does this thing with her lips; teensy bubbles taste dust of gold & angel.

Watching your arms like a symphony, fucking—

Perhaps it is not about being at all, yet I am at the table and the hydrangeas are just too much. I wish there were Silk Cuts. Deathly attendant, where writing to you at the specific moment was standing in the flashbulb of a passing car and trying to look up at the stars. Just as the stars in the valley, we visit the shire. The stars you say are most particular, yet they are anyone’s; the stars are in the garden now, a proximate shrubbery and I put on my makeup. Deep bled fuchsia into sage and clary; yet we are violets, smelling the sea. And a dram before class, something citrine to start us, blendable night. I try it again; the word ‘frenetic’ peals from me.

If history was different, wouldn’t I be singing this.

Merry season helichrysum. There is a headpiece of corals worn by the sea. A quartet of angels play the flute-hoop and daylight twists, and Greta says it more than clearly. So hot this hurts. At current emissions. Someone in the back shouts FUCK THE TORIES and I put on my shoes. I wake up to my nails not coral-red, my eyes not pressed with cornflower blue. ‘if the word / does not arise it will fall back, the thing itself, it will fall again / into that ocean where it is not biodegradable’ (Beverly Dahlen, A Reading: 11-17). The thing of the word fell back into water, lots of it deep and luxury water. I wanted to say, the word has been waiting in shallow poetics. Floats of white. Water is a memory of the water before it. That feels like love but is that a falling. Into it, into it. That ocean speaks its chords again, thingly and falling. Dear degradable, non-bio daylight; sentiments of infrared, blip of foam.

I wanted to ask, are you striking, striking. The blood clots around the skin of our thumbs. Got lost in the rhythm I leave at the door / you painted helium blue. I knew it would bring me home to you. I was immediate, here, I knew what to do. This electric hand, hello.

What did you have to almost wake up for?

There is so much to grasp, at any one point. ‘We’ll clear a trail through the forest’, Hélène Cixous says, but ‘We can’t go via the city, nor at will, nor by bus’ (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing). All those doors in the underpass, surely one was a portal? I thought it was only that you wanted me back in the leaf-trails of language. What is it that carries you now? The cold air whipped your chest and I pissed in the bushes. How much neon is the news.

Time collapsed so soft, we were in thrall of the science tiara.

We sat in this anonymous hotel lobby while the rain piled on and the beats got wet. Tresses of soaking beats. You say the only music that gets you now is pop. Continuum of sweetness in the formula lifts: the trick is melodic. So hot, you’re a burning peach. Embarrassed, I look at such childhood photos, the soft plash of it: language out of language it folds me again. Brush your hair. Softer your face, I come back to that star that is it. Approach, he holds out a finger to say, hello hello, hello you green. Is there something like a sour glissando? The bass was flat, my wilted leaves; the Styrofoam kept your guitar too warm. There are so many strings, collecting the sea. Only one you know

I was at the edge of a rainbow, sipping echinacea tea. ‘Farewell, Angelina, the sky is on fire and I must go…’ (Joan Baez, ‘Farewell, Angelina’). Do you think maybe it’s like, those emails were part of the plenum of summer, when I passed so south on the train with sugar-licked cakes of rice and a readerly silence? The sky was burnt and strange. And you could have boarded at the requisite moment, or maybe you were in the glass also, the glassery crying for the sound of drowning Amy from the game. When she did this impression of the lamb, I could not help but cry out. The aw, the aww, the missing ‘e’ in awe, a ewe. It was you. http://www.findyourfood/. Zombie tunes, sonic aporia. Mum said she nearly called me Amy, and I would have pink hair and sheaves of lyrical gestures, like this. Someone I loved had a house.

The sky is untitled.

Branding me narcopastoral, shepherdess at stringent dawn. We drag a high—

Break into it, careful at first then with clear intention. The wrapper falls back and away by clouds.

Upside down, we approach the softest waves. I’ll not harp on about the light, how it caught the crease of our plastic. You take us to the boat, so lovely and blue like sky. In the dream she unfurls her fist, a lot of blue dust comes out and her voice is thick and quick as an auctioneer’s. She has swallowed the age of the water. But we are rowing on, cordoned from time by the ripples of unforgivable sea. I want you to never forget this. Dream again—

We wandered a garden of samphire and crystal, met some friends at the edge of the blue. The grasses were singing a grassy melisma. Suffering cramps by the burning sea, the glass of the elsewhere orange, trembling sky. Scrolling my phone, I was reading an essay on birth control where the author, a man, argued that taken daily two spoons of honey would regulate your cycle. She got him by accident, a cherub handed down by the gold-dripping moon. I polished his soapstone limbs and drank from the chalice a lateral condition. Let’s go at this sideways, say every droplet of rain was a baby. Honey.

The additive birth of water, over.

Most palatial things are isles or sets.

They bring treacle scones for the picketers.

Bottles of wine for your glistening birthday. The sky is a film; it goes click, click. The season you say is looming, a moment agogic and I let you tender the rain of me down. I was all strings when the image appeared and you pulled on a tensile thread, a tease and we fell into the same whole notes…

‘Ion square, perspex swings / I breathe out, you breathe in / Permanent midnight’ (Bloc Party, ‘Ion Square’). It’s this song that feels like fucking, live in happiness, breakable day you free in a hold, before this sleep and the night bus home. I walk along the motorway. A breath between us feels like math, the ruination of the norm. I had nothing to bring you; I was reaching the end of the film where they find her dead, but only in photos. End of the lilting road. Quadratic Lily, Lily, say this is Lily. It’s just somewhere in London, and I want to love my mind. And I want to love my mind again. Did I love yours and yours too much. The fog rolls out of the square the same. When you drew me, it was like I didn’t have a face. The birches gifted their silver and I felt like sleep, so heavily berried. The sky is a film, you take it.

Trapped in acid, the hotel air is seething. I wanted breakfast to feel the same, and I wanted to love my mind; to love my mind for the sake of you in it. When the lyrics appeared it felt like the end-of-the-world digested, yes, it was a crème de menthe apocalypse — by which we mean, you can just hop in the grass of the future. Björk’s utopia. Juuuuuussssst that kiiiiiisssssssss. Perpex swings in helix of flute, could you insinuate a sleep, these spirals of harp. I’m not where I want exactly; look out the window. Sugar-rim. They pay less, pay less, pay less. A shot.

By the time I got back, the leaves were all gone. The stars, as if they were plural.

In the belly of the gnarliest graphics / I felt impaled on a former capital. There is luxury in the curriculum, but we live off our clearest cakes of rice. Break this as crumbs, don’t say word / The consoles cast their dust again. Press replay. I wanted to lie in a field, but that was you. A salty fist. I wanted the lie. Little curled hairs in the sink. Your name is doing well / Look where it got you.

The university a corpus ate the rat.

I was tired, you were tired, my mum was tired. This makes a rainstorm a screensaver.

Has anyone notified the trapeze artists about our sea?

Most things don’t occur as they do in this space. It flexes and folds in lucite, yet against the glint, less of your mobius eye. Roll it up, like a wave. We wait for the bus and it rolls in smoke / I press my faceless against the glass.

 

~

Bloc Party — Ion Square

Björk, Arca — The Gate

FKA twigs — home with you

Double Discone — Sam’s Kinky Hat

Clearance — Chances Are

Bradford Cox — Natural Harp Monitor

Princess Nokia — Balenciaga

DJ Heroin — My Veil

Grace Cummings — Paisley

Alice Coltrane — Lovely Sky Boat

Malibu — Nana (Like A Star Made For Me)

Hiro Kone — A Desire, Nameless

Hannah Peel ft. Hayden Thorpe — Cars In The Garden

The Brian Jonestown Massacre — Food for Clouds

Maija Sofia — The Glitter

Tomberlin — Seventeen

Weyes Blood — Seven Words

Soko — Sweet Sound of Ignorance

RF Shannon — Snake Oil

Caroline Polachek — So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings

The Everly Brothers — Love Hurts

The Cure — Charlotte Sometimes

Princess Chelsea — Come As You Are

Astrud Gilberto — Look To The Rainbow

Playlist: September 2019

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Poetry is a great consolation for all the ways you fail to be present. 

— Eileen Myles

Did I not have a dream of horses and document. The document was very full indeed, if you can standardise what a document should look like in full. Its no print zone. The document started to lag, by dint of its size. I was flitting between offices with my hands like noons that smelled of yesterdays. The positive rage of all this. Collapse on the library floor while freshers fly staples through the air in click & spring and if I tried to type it was only to make the time faster. But faster only to go backwards, in a kind of MSP political-orgiastics ‘Yes’ sort of way by rewind. In the thrift shop, bearing my huge pink book to the counter, ignoring the diamond earrings. “Who?”

& a wound in the name for a tree. Trochee. Freely moving

glitch & clasp.

The document bloated with calyxes of unquotable glass. We are usually green, but lately the politics abused us to violet. Perianth refracting the thing that most excites, the lightning. If a bolt struck the whorl of a flower. They die in graves of obscurity, loamy soil for the paparazzi. 

Remember we drank a non-trademarked cola. I hid beneath a canopy of photographs.

No, I will write this simply instead. September is a series of concentric air bubbles, each of them gleaming rainbow mutual. A series of unanswered emails, illnesses, unreadable entries in one of several notebooks. If a leave flows, the oak will shiver. There were a lot of books! The books were in towers, guarded by long blonde hair and wine. The air smelled of plimsolls. I slumbered dearly on the train, reading of clouds. Remember when clouds were a feature of sky. In the aftermath, there will always be tinsel. Books will cost what albums used to.

Bloated economy.

Block chain.

Bubbles he would drown without, sonic, and how I went anyway, breathably pink.

I was surprised at the glass that came out of me, sequined at the disco. I slammed the fridge door to spite the silent conservatory. Men came to be sweet with numbers and glasses of milk, the wrong glass type for the glass I needed. For I had been bleeding, heavily, from my perch. They smelled the blood across the bar, they always do. Swerve across lights to find me. Listen to hip hop, softcore; implore, implore. 

Off to Jupiter, via the lily pads. I phoned citizens advice to protect my weekends. 

What if instead they brought me coffee? Many times this month in the Pret on Lothian Road, nursing a 99p filter, shaking my skin of the rain. This liquid has excellent shadows. My palette changed like the colour of coral. I was being bleached, as though salt were coursing through my veins. So ho[a]rse, the coarseness. 

At the end of the world, was there blog posts? 

Once more, with chicory. 

Who could remember the first deception? It was a hothouse flower, swaying in the programmed breeze with a smile. Stupid hothouse flower. You won’t grow taller than me. 

I am the horse from a Dorothea Lasky poem, ‘black smoke’ and ‘the squeaky noise at night’. Mostly paper and things that “start”. 

I am a failure for having never tried a Girl Scout cookie. Adult tastes are savoury. If you recall, my data pertained mostly to alarms for marmalade, pills and scree. We spread it all upon the rocks. I was thinking about Sophie Robinson and ‘fucking up on the rocks’ and a drunk sensation beyond me, like sewing your skin to the air and having it pulled so tight by the breeze. Whose breeze is it forever. Wordsworths I believed before. Grave trip. That photo of the pop punk hero in a hospital bed with a bloated liver, my phone cracked of shame and screen, eyelashes curled in the sheets with your curls of hair. A cereal.

You pop one bubble, you give into the next. All of my glitzy messages, failing. A water lettuce of vitreous finish, salvaged with salt. We dined upon tips from a haircut. I was so thirsty.

“What matters is the passion alone, and your polo neck.” 

The man that was named after myrrh and water. I stood in front of the hundreds, played licking at carpets to catch the box. What if you won and you’d reconstruct it, rip by rip, to make a home. And we lived in that like sulphites, crying. 

All of my friends, erasing tattoos. 

A week of walking.
Walk the week
Walk the week

The pace of her voice fitted my walk and I saw that Lock 27 was open. The colour of lager in springborn hangover; the back of my throat. Kept walking for the sake of the cloudless sky. Craving rainbows, sugar, arcadia. A harvest moon glowed as I made my way home, listening to Titanic Rising as nameless birds made their roost inside me.

There was a launch, the end of a diary, a new kind of wildness. 

I stop my breath at the stop. At Wembury Beach, I go barefoot in the sun-warmed pools. Silver gelatine in lieu of a sky. The world pictures us back, I feel pinholed & nearly a cinder. What do we mean when we talk of aries. The track marks of cormorants were a font. Sticky toffee aporias of sense, a sugary endlessness. Plymouth.

<Oculus diacritic>

Train take me east, where the time goes slower. We can hear the waves from the wall again. 

We can hear the waves from the wall again. And the horses, horses. Horses come out of the sea. So many white horses, ‘and the ground shook I got this feeling so strong for the first time ever, then I just put my eyes down on my knees and covered my ears’ (Alan Warner, Morvern Callar). 

I woke up to ‘Carry Me, Ohio’ and the soundless canal with the slender girl, swallowing whisky from a watering can. Things slid down my cheeks. In the border of drunken plants, we thinned in hormonal resilience. From the dream-gig returning with postcards. Imagine return to implore, say over. Press that lovely Enter. 

“One of us is a mushroom.” 

What Rachel has to say about roads.

I had the new books and the covers; the poem felt like a cover I was singing it so much I forgot the truth. Do you have the time, a laminate silk.

I was so tired I could hardly lift my eyes to roll. 

She screamed the city through my ears for me. 

Trolling in the pleistocene, trolling waters. They triggered my sorrows set to fleek.

My phone died in the south side I was wandering around at some pace. The exhibition opened out into shimmer and light, in dramas of beauty and violence. Not violent beauty. Not violent. Kept saying it as the ornaments turned. Art. Art. Art is a finishing. I felt cliché in the gardens afterwards, sipping chardonnay alone, reading Mary Ruefle:

There are poets who are resigned to not being able to save the world, who barely have enough time to catch up with themselves and the attendant mystery of their fear and being. 

(Madness, Rack and Honey)

Once again, twice over the text. A hardening gold. School girls shrieked in their uniforms, throwing rocks at each other. Their mothers drank wine like me, but talked. The air started to simmer as the shadows came over and I realised too early that it was no longer summer, despite the heat; the mind crisped at its fringes with golden exhaustion. I got sick. I climbed into a lighthouse / It was a very bright house. The light over the sea was gold and also.

Type slowly, time is stained. 

New clouds fill the lines, like something extraneous from the hand of Klee. Shaky coke. Vegan bakery caper / The Archers. Narrative is this luxurious telling from the ethnographers’ disco. I put down my reflexes one by one for an earnest thought. He broke a glass. A surprise encounter. I drank until the bubbles soothed my burning throat. A toast to books

Between thick slices of books. The brain. Splayed on Marmorie Paper. Someone I loved had a house and filled it with spiders, drawing silver all over the rooms in complex geometries; the house was teeming with lines and if you passed through they’d stick to you. The resultant tattoos gleamed with mercury; you could tap a needle on the line to coax a red. The little ones come out the dark, they were crawling with cries. Lasers of silk and intrigue!

I close my eyes to salt again. “Away / Shyest.” 

There was no moment of ‘disembarking’ in the green-hued dream of Shetland. At the hostel I lay in the bottom bunk dreaming of ink in my veins. I peeled apples for the invalids of the moon. We colonised the office with shades of blue. 

Remastered the inches of that single. His voice quicksilvered the rain. I warmed.

Walked around listening to Lana, blood-lilted by a Larabar. My session timed out where the space exceeded. 

Did you spell the calorie correctly. 

I ate until the morning came

Lately /

A file name

Adjusts us.

~

Neil Young — After the Gold Rush

Sun Kil Moon — Garden of Lavender 

The National — Terrible Love

This Mortal Coil — Another Day

The Innocence Mission — The Lakes of Canada 2019

Lens Mozer — Cut My Heart in Two

Electrelane — Birds

Cate le Bon, Bradford Cox — Secretary

Purple Mountains — Nights That Won’t Happen

Angel Olsen — Lark

(Sandy) Alex G — In My Arms

Black Belt Eagle Scout — Soft Stud

Infinity Crush — virtual heaven

Vagabon — Water Me Down

Perfume Genius — Eye in the Wall

DIIV — Blankenship

Thee Oh Sees — Plastic Plant

The Nightblooms — One Weak Moment

Mark Hollis — Inside Looking Out

Playlist: August 2019

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I felt the only thing to do was to write a Book of Rain. I was reading all these San Francisco poets. Sure, you can get detailed climate data on more or less whatever you like, but it meant nothing on its own to me. I looked at the annual hours of sunshine, average precipitation. How many days of rain. I mean you could say Glasgow was like 329 or something. How many days in a year again. I have never been to San Francisco, let alone lost my mind there. Or maybe I have, the latter I mean. I googled what’s a box of rain and it started relaying info on radio access networks, because I’d left out the ‘i’ in rain. Access all radio until the signals run streams in your mind forever. We ran out of the box and into the street. I had a dream someone was coming for me in the bathroom of a restaurant and I had to escape but the floor was ridden with rats. They were beautiful rats made of iridescent glass, and I was nervous about shattering them. Beautiful soundless rats all around. You could drop a box and break them all. The waitress was crying outside because the boss had discovered her glass menagerie. “How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken” I was murmuring to her, quoting Williams in some echo of what I had wrote in some essay, forever ago. Not for Emma. She was like, “But what is that it of which you speak?” She had a thick Polish accent and the tone of her breath was like full-fat butter, melting inside me, running down the side of the walls of the box. Animal ashes. I tried to give her a key, a single silver key to my office. I was like, you can hide in here and bring all the plants. The plants were also made of glass. There were avocado glasses, lemon glasses, aloe glasses, spider glasses. I’m not saying it was “unrealistic”. She carried them with such tenderness I remembered the names of many friends I’d abandoned to youth. Everything we said in the street outside was set to music. These kind of Vivaldi swoons of violin, with pizzicato flutes from the boys by the roadside, doing parkour. I felt stupid and reached for my cello. She was like, “do you not have a viola d’amore” and I had to demure I did not know. “It’s okay,” she said, “summer is in G minor.” I took off my dress and walked down the street, shrinking. I was waiting for a bracket to scoop me up. Something of her molten voice had shattered the glass heart trembling inside me. But where, but where! Where would I go. Summer is so stressful, those bloody erratic strings. I needed something that felt more like the rain. Soft rain pouring a chord inside me. What they say of the viola d’amore: with sympathetic strings. Whose love are we even soft for. The extra resonance of the rain lent weight to the future. The future auxiliary is. What did he die for. At the end of the rain, the air is composed of cinders. I missed Edinburgh before the Fringe. I was in a bathtub drained of water, lighting cigarette after cigarette and letting the ash pop the bubbles of thought. When I ask the internet of cinders, People also ask: ‘How did Derrida die?’, ‘How many languages did Derrida speak?’.  I want the resilient self-presentation of all this nothing. My mother goes out in relentless rain. I composed a sonnet of the city, it went like All devices lying down and already I’d fucked up the iambs. So I googled it properly, what’s a box of rain. Any morning, any evening, any day. The box of rain is what this is not. I put pressure on the ash to summon a dormitory, the many-bedded archives of sleep. The world is a box of rain. The world is as fugitive as the bubbles of a sad geometry. Whose idea to play. They blew of our world a glass with walls and lid and corners. The rainbowed edges of slender aporia. Container for rain. You could prise open the box, its sticky lid, as though inside you’d find the most opulent yoghurt in the world. Imagine a yoghurt that would fill your belly with billions of tiny, glassy eels. I made of my guts the Hudson River. A lyrical gesture of elements came to count. I can’t listen to the song that makes me so happy I am instantly sad, like being stuck in a dream of a dream where all you can touch is reflection. I had all these stupid lines about gemstones, trying to hold that feeling. Cleavage. It’s existence, you idiot. ‘The reflection / itself’ (Cedar Sigo). They were all swimming inside me and I had a dream about swimming and chlorine depression and all the red sucked clean from my hair. The water would leave me a mousy self to crawl into her former corner. I would let the glass mice eat me like sugar. In the aquarium a sea mouse is pushed quite cruelly towards the water filter by a petulant scampi. Nobody puts baby in the corner but scampi. He was cute though, bug-eyed and orange-pink. Crustaceous slice of sunset, all feelers and limbs. They sometimes add colour to salmon, there’s a whole gradient of petrochemical pellet effects. A dark wild salmon is best. Dark a wildness, swimming. Pure aesthetic pigments. In the café, she spoke of how octopuses feel with colour and then I remembered everything. Everything I loved of your ruddy shade. Politics talking. Glass rats and pint glasses brimming with gold. A clip of the soft, panicky salt of the dark. Then morning relief. I sensed the light through my skin which was also glass, shaved glass reformed into something more convincingly epidermal. I was camouflaged, cold-blooded, cuttled into daily life. I cradled a corner. The eels propelled to the surface and left tiny blots like shingles. I’ve let them swum. I felt sick with all that had happened. In the salon, I read Plath’s Letters Home with my hair in shiny, sci-fi foils. ‘I plan to build up into the lovely creature I really am during the next two weeks’. First blush of ‘“champagne ambrosia”’. The herbal tea in Largs was better. Everyone crusted with salt & waves & exhaustion. Little roses among the leaves, expenses. The silver quality of island light fell on a speech. Someone recited the seasons in tiny, seed-like stanzas. I was handed a hazelnut shaken from the roadside fresh, cracked at the back of my mouth a green sort of sweetness. Yes, Sylvia, it all ‘bear[s] a whirl’. August is almost over. The sympathy of your cephalo-strings. A low kind of aching tremolo, plows through the intertidal zone, the reef, the abyssal depths of later. Paradise froze on a brooch. I had opened the blinds to nothing like light. Your diamonds are studded on tentacles, prodding their way through the window. They were sticky with yesterday’s circadian tears. When I dream, I wake up wanting to see the person. Palm oil on toast. My cutlery grief. People are having sex in swimming pools at Christmas. Tinsel of lindens lining the parks where cats enjoy their kill. A river runs into the sea. I am touched by a terrible language, the jellyfish trying to erase me. There was this wasp, we were trying to eat lunch. My fingers were black with tapenade and wine. You cannot swat this call away. I was a lover in the telephonic sonnet. I need a scholarship to write my Book of Rain. The kind of money that weeps from a nourishing prairie, melts like chocolate. I needed a whole milk scholarship. How to prove I was worth it. There was a green banana, a frazzled conscience, island jealousy. False green money, emoji, insomnia. There was all this ink on my sheets, like an oil spill. I was nobody’s refinery in the dead of the night where life was a story poured out on my shoulder. Oh you are lovely. We have our boxes of rain now, so many. I had not thought the rain would undo so many. Rain overflows its glass. Once again, sand again. It is a crisp apple rain. Held in the ampersand between days. I drew one on my wrist to mark that night where the colours were heavy inside me. I singed the fledgling arrivals of chorus, red-skinned greens. After ‘The Gilded Cunt’, I never looked at a bin-man the same. They are doing the rubbish in the garden in sync. I flung syrup from the window to tint the rain, and all the black bags would glow with gold. We had too much, it was sodden. Woke up at 8:am to find my laptop was streaming a video on pyramids. I watched Lana Del Rey step out of the screen and shake up the car where the cheats make out. Everything became an off-peak day return to the sea. Sunday of twenty-seven degrees. Triangulate clouds to a future point. In my Book of Rain, it’s stopped raining. ‘It’s stopped raining. My fingers graze the yellow flowers beneath my window as I turn back to my desk and write. These past two years have been difficult. I keep thinking of the time I’ve wasted. I was the undergrowth—always underneath taller trees, always wanting’ (Rae Armantrout). I was wearing white and not crying. If you could see my bones underneath. The order mattered not like an emptiness. A sculpted classic of ashes. The rat let out in singular, rain afresh. On your mother’s instruction I hiked in the wild farmland around your dreamhouse to find the Marsh Library, the Library of Marshes. The air smelled of opium incense and late summer pollen and I sat with my brushes, painting false dreams inside the dreams of the movies, and then the dream that held me melted. Directive. Natalie says, I felt cheated. I missed the marshes, required an Air. The broken hyperlink became a book by Nicholas Royle about the plaza of bootleg pdfs and I opened the book which was a sandwich, leaking sweet potato mush onto brown lunch paper. That was so disappointing. I would feed it to the rats; the rain had melted the words into gluten. End of the box of the endless rain. How do we say an object is ‘teeming’. I would bite the brittle stars of September. 

 

~

Angel Olsen — All Mirrors

Björk — Virus 

Tropic of Cancer — I Woke Up And The Storm Was Over

The Velvet Underground — Venus in Furs (Demo)

Cat Power — Blue (Joni Mitchell cover)

Leonard Cohen — Master Song 

Fionn Regan — Riverside Heights 

Silver Jews — Room Games and Diamond Rain

Sufjan Stevens — All Delighted People

Four Tet — She Moves She

Gross Net — Of Late Capitalism 

Slowdive — Changes (Demo version)

DIIV — Taker

Black Country, New Road — Sunglasses 

Swans — Blind

The Grateful Dead — Box of Rain

Anna Meredith — moonmoons

Big Thief — Not 

Pinegrove — Moment

(Sandy) Alex G — Southern Sky

Nick Drake — Northern Sky 

Lana Del Rey — Bartender 

Red House Painters — Medicine Bottle

Jeff Buckley — Sky Blue Skin

Weyes Blood — Away Above

Playlist: September 2018

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💎

 

and the new day forms
like a china cup

hard, cream-coloured, unbreakable
even in our travels
— Adrienne Rich

 

Whatever else requires a lightness.

The man with the vacuum is making love among dust in the corridor, a clack clack clack that wakes me each Wednesday, before my time.

To fuck in the dirt, the dirt. To forgive.

I am crawling around the floor at work, the shadows pressing into me. In the dream I cannot access the glass of water I want. The ice coruscates, tumbles over and over in a distant machine. Its absent-presence smoothes me, the creases in these dreams; once the ice went missing, we had to replenish. We have ran out of the beer she likes and she is twisting my arm and when I wake I cannot move it for half an hour.

Whatever else of lightness.

I smell the metallic tang of me. The perfect little cigarette you rolled, like you’d preserved a secret wave from the sea, a roll of paper and salt-clung thought. I’m trying so hard to be sweet for the world.

Lightness wherever.

The ice is a panorama of what’s happening. I catch a landscape and watch till it melts into memory. Mottlings of familiar tulip glass. The peach-struck colours recede into this chiaroscuro of hills, mist of sky and sheep. They are the blurry insistence of words, each one a cloud, a bleat. They emblemise time.

To say it lightly, I love you.

There are two songs called ‘Heavy Water’. One works like this: ‘We bully clouds now’; the other, ‘I want the love I fought to say’. I leave one zone for another and sometimes bring you. Bring little motes of dust, and so struggle to breathe.

The air here is heavy.

I am dragging myself up out of dreamtime, requirements of lightness. You drift as snow, your water is crystal. It tessellates, the shape of your thought which is silver. The sound of silver.

Autumn is restless, there is more of it in me.

How the wind came, named with volition, stealing the limbs of the trees! I felt good in all the arboreal catastrophe, I relished the chaos. It beat the blood back into my cheeks. Climbing the hill at the park. Air sign. I sent letters, felt better. I arrived at the bar and asked for a double.

To write of starry-eyed narrators, textual chalices.

‘If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?’ (Rebecca Solnit).

My best clause is a blue you can’t see.

We look for each other in mysticism, she seizes us. When I inched my way to the moss and felt the fronds of that fern betwixt my fingers, when my own skin became mycological x-ray. We look for the eye that already recedes, a flash in the room, twinned in blue. Verisimilitude.

We floated ideas like spores. Those songs were both tender and epic.

I am going to take a fresh notebook and paint every page blue before I write in it. The watercolour tinge will be green on blue, a cool viridian. To swirl, then invite lines.

Each page like a pool you can swim in.

You walk along the river and walk along life. I am so drowsy I can’t feel time, excepting the hour of sunlight this morning. The permanent sofa. I’d rather be sleeping. This is not to say, I won’t cherish a week, a week to come. I hope despite blood this one’s a good one.

To suck out the essence like liquorice.

In the shower the dream water came gushing reams of hail. My skin red raw and amazing. I notice the spidery cracks on the back of his hand, how they make a sort of Pier Kirkeby sketching pattern, a blueprinting cobweb. He pours pints like a pro. We are clean out of work but otherwise dirty.

I would like to be ‘splashed and held’, like Schuyler’s bluet.

Paring acoustic versions of old Kinks songs, leaving the core of my sadness around the room in plural, like apples. To say thank you and mean it, there is always a breaking, the lit parts eking their news into juice and crunch.

I need a day elsewhere.

The dark is just circumstance when you touched my shoulders, a situation thinks its way out of the rainbow. I find them now scattered on cream plaster walls, and twilight is terror. The reflection just happens, occurs in circles. Somebody comes to mop it up. The upside smile.

This is a shimmer. It stirs in me.

 

~

Peter Mannerfelt – Shining Beacons of Light

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Blues From a Gun

Fred Thomas feat. Anna Burch – Altar

Lana Del Rey – Venice Bitch

Kurt Vile – Loading Zones

Beach House – Drunk in LA

Surgeon – Seven Peaceful Deities

Yves Tumor – Limerence

Sarah Davachi – Gilded

Thom Yorke – Suspirium

Peter Broderick – Two Balloons, Pt. 4

The Clientele – Losing Haringey

The Kinks – Days

Kiran Leonard – Unreflective Life

Jeff Buckley – I Want Someone Badly

Alice in Chains – No Excuses

Low – Rome (Always in the Dark)

Airiel – In Your Room

Hiro Kone, group A – Pure Expenditure

Tim Hecker – In Death Valley

Petro-Pastoral in a Smouldering Era: Lana Del Rey’s ‘Mariners Apartment Complex’

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And so stripped back to a ballad, the waves makeover their casual gyre. Time passes, it just does. Time is learning to think at new angles, the rules of the slots. There’s a reason we rotate, we go aerial. Her videos started with the road, all flesh and metal. Oil was the ever-hidden well of jouissance; but even in presence it was already filtered, the rutilant skeins of a Hollywood movie, its flickering scenery.

And she’s cigarette breath, smoke-eyed, bronzed and burning a brilliant white.

‘Love’ was notable for its speculative community of lovers at play in lunar waters. Now we have ocean, we have a sea without people; an image presented in clean abstraction. This is not just emotion applied to landscape. The image churns with a white flecked affect, a semiotic excess expressed in waves. Life’s complication a cool hard block; this song is simple. No birds visit here. Close enough to touch again, but then again lifting. Must we ever be heavily-shadowed here?

I break at the rock in search of quartz. To hold out for solar in her wide hoop earrings, glinting gold. It’s so cold in this house, so I look to America.

Articulate feeling in the life of insects. Tiny moths are especially beautiful. W.S. Graham writes close, coming home to his wife, ‘My dear, I take / a moth kiss from your breath’. My best crepuscular species. Release with lyric on-screen, participatory invite. The monochrome softens the present to memory, so every trope is another refusal, ‘no candle in the wind’. I am not telling a story. I am playing a part. There is a hesitancy, a deep breath, a slow glance west. She is so aware of her former effulgence.

Then all of this infrastructure, the wire-mesh fencing concealing our fuckups. Dwell at the edge zone where communities meet. A little light lets in, a sort of high voltage. Our communion is no longer electricity; it flows without fault, but listens for glitches.

(…A woman in the bathroom at work last night cornered me, post-shift with her stories. She told me she was bipolar; she taught me the proper way to breathe. There was an involuntary quality: make of your diaphragm a quiver. She said there was a time when she was the only bipolar person on the island. She screamed out in the shop, buying bread. She told me I was young enough to still go swimming. People kept opening the door on my face. She said she needed a transplant, but I didn’t ask for details.)

The sky is an essay, skimmed of originary silence. The grey clouds clutter a daylight milking.

‘And who I’ve been is with you on these beaches.’

Albert Camus’ narrator in The Stranger, savouring littoral pleasuring:

Marie taught me a new game. The idea was, while one swam, to suck in the spray off the waves and, when one’s mouth was full of foam, to lie on one’s back and spout it out against the sky. It made a sort of frothy haze that melted into the air or fell back in a warm shower on one’s cheeks. But very soon my mouth was smarting with all the salt I’d drawn in; then Marie came up and hugged me in the water, and pressed her mouth to mine. Her tongue cooled my lips, and we let the waves roll us about for a minute or two before swimming back to the beach.
       When we had finished dressing, Marie looked hard at me. Her eyes were sparkling. I kissed her; after that neither of us spoke for quite a while. I pressed her to my side as we scrambled up the foreshore. Both of us were in a hurry to catch the bus, get back to my place, and tumble on to the bed. I’d left my window open, and it was pleasant to feel the cool night air flowing over our sunburned bodies.

Desire is a chasing game, the coolness and heat; how proximate it is to lethargy! A gamble we make to enjoy these landscapes, the overlay between beach and body.

‘At four o’clock the sun wasn’t too hot, but the water was pleasantly tepid, and small, languid ripples were creeping up the sand’.  

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Lana’s last album was lauded as her happiest, transitioning ever from black to blue. But still there were songs about heroin, elegy, the lonely enigma of ‘13 Beaches’. And the closing song so proximate to ‘Creep’ is hardly unshackling. A song first heard on the pro-ana forum, ‘you float like a feather / in a beautiful world’—where delicacy persists distasteful. Precious chord progression matches the rarity, harmonises one of several sighs, the rainbows receding: ‘Their arches are illusions / solid at first glance / but then you try to touch them / there’s nothing to hold onto’. All that is solid, the luminous infrastructure of late capitalism, dissolves. ‘M’ for McDonald’s, drowned in a tidal reply, the yellow suffused in blue. The waves move over the rock again. From this angle, in monochrome, the rocks look like a hunk of meat, a severed heart lost at sea. When the waves calm to a whiteout, silken ocean, they become a selkie skin. A pile of kelp, a remnant piece of PVC, peripheral. All we leave behind in metamorphic identity.

A starlet mythology never settles. They are dressed like children, all ripped jeans and t-shirts. Enid Blyton’s evolving addiction, innocence loses quick on the brink. We know too much already of everything, it gloops like sambuca inside us. Nobody bothers to finish the mystery.

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The ambiguous sweetness is oily, narcotic. It falls in fat drops like piano notes, takes our ‘sadness out of context’. My brother in the next room, obsesses in metallic trap beats. Why someone asks me, at ten in the morning of a Saturday, how important is spirituality to you? Waves of pleasure and reward; all over the coast, an opioid crisis. Lacing our dreams with extinction. I feel heavy, although I feel slightly—  

They set up the room, my fellow millennials, polishing glassware carefully for the bourgeoisie, while I am in the office, counting other people’s money. We listen to Gillian Welch’s ‘Everything is Free’, completely out of sync with the skin of this weekend. Only some of us have touched a straight job. We wear out the concept, til it flakes like rain, softening every abrasive material.

Soulfully she sings, ‘I’m your man’. Urge for identity, bodily merging, no need for horizons: ‘Don’t look too far, right where you are, that’s where I am’. After spending her career chasing this man, longing for him in the blue-dark, a starry placeholder, looking down highways immune to an ending, LDR becomes the object of her desire. In lieu of cheap thrills, this shift is one of quiet empowerment. I think of the mobius identities of Mulholland Drive. A recognition of the textuality of thresholds; step into the membrane, make cool with the heat of your distance, colourless. Warmth in the icy, fire-churned wildness. The water looks like Pepsi Cola. And did she not once sing ‘My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola’; and was this not womanly body cast consumer synecdoche, sparkling with chemicals, the cynical poetics of delicious? Diamonds for eyes will never break, except…

We start to think geologically now. Just be, just be. These faltering wedges of mass temporality. Earthquakes happen and so do we. Soft drinks whose flavour will never expire. Rocks that erode in derisive time zones, no longer immune from human acts or experience; species of moth that survive millennia. Butterflies and hurricanes; an ugly shred of progressive metal, scored in the multiplied spike that somebody else deemed gold, a scientist’s quibble. The woman in the bathroom, her shrunken organs; her failed heart lost to impenetrable histories, a ravaged desert of smoker’s complexion.

Here is the rock out at sea, an open direction. Here are the girls and their insects. A tiny wonder.
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They play with the lepidoptera by the road; this is a petro-pastoral. Cars pass as LDR sings of her lover lost at sea. Fossils are the song’s ambient economy: the rocks beneath, the fuel in those vehicles. The black water, oily in sunlight, the sweetness.

The rainbow will ghost anything monochrome, oil on water. To kiss in the last light of summer is lucky. Give me your harbour. 

Material ipseity swirls, ‘All the things that make me who I am’. Highway adjacency, human and natural history’s collision. A water-wave in unicode. Lana Del Rey in the Anthropocene. Her name is an ever-(re)invention; formerly known as, universal/personal. Lost adrift on the always already. Stuttering within smoothed out to a sweetness, make lyric glitter from shattered rocks and melting ice. Matter. Make it matter. The matter of mattering; be the man, as the man-made only, as merely threshold for desire’s discerning in the crest of everything’s vibrant liveliness. Thrashing waves, lost capital, penultimate travel. Dwell awhile slow in apartment complex, who we are as we are as sailors—lives lived here are intensely temporary, and isn’t that a matter of life on Earth, or life in movies?

Jonty Tiplady:

Anthropocene evokes numberless chiasmic defence formations and programmable aesthetic relapses to come — easy to cash in with and easy to cash out. What is perhaps more difficult is to remember what it meant and bear it. Engineered as distraction or not, it remains stuck in the world gullet, a limit term, a virtual-war word, evoking an ultimate intersectionality whose historical tractor beam iconically continues to fail. What the hyper-anthropocene breaks open is the historicist principle that nothing matters so much that that thing is the only thing that matters. The hyper-anthropocene quakes this idea, and then falls in line.

 

🌊

*all stills taken from ‘Mariners Apartment Complex’, directed by Chuck Grant. Song written by Lana Del Rey and produced by Jack Antonoff.