Tag: shadow

I mean this is the world, a blue teardrop of luck in endless vasts of the barely understood

(Rachel Blau Duplessis, Blue Studios).

First month of the year: it feels like lifting a veil, very tentative, seeing more of the veil underneath the veil, endless skeins of the veil, kind of gross and beautiful at once, the way the light gets in, stains; the gauzy veil, the exhausted veil; the veil beneath the veil just more of January. One might lift more folds and bundle further, or perhaps a violent stripping motion is required. Dreams about denuding a cloud to find a glistening core of rain inside, this congealed tear, the ultimate raindrop, which services the cloud as the source of all rain, which leaks when prodded with blue emotion, little tilt of the climate. Sometimes the ultimate raindrop leaks as ordinary rain, other times what falls is something akin to the moon tears found in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. These aren’t so much lunar rocks as actual bodies of frozen water, so mysteriously frozen, given the skies are warming like the seas, given we are warming all over, like turning the planet into a mammalian body, like collapsing all biodiversity in channels of haemocentrism. The domination of whoever bears blood. I go to see Stuart MacRae and Louise Welsh’s Anthropocene opera and there is a girl cut out from a cube of ice, there is all this stuff about the necessity of blood to warm the waters, to thaw where the people are frozen in, to escape. The world is mostly white, just a couple of isles remain. Is this rescue or sacrifice? What of our bodies remains as archive?

What if we walked around with moon tears for necklaces, waiting for the day their diamond-hard ice might thaw? What would that mean? It would be a sort of hormonal release, perhaps, viscosity of the foreign element melted. Skin as interface.

We’d wear tokens of solidarity, secret knowledge. Moon tears mean the melt of the world. The absurdity of colonising the moon rent specific as melancholy fragment.

I find myself up late, five in the morning, reading Bradford Cox interviews. I get deja vu with almost every line. Very clearly there is the diner where the waitress writes lyrics on the receipts, and nobody even drinks beer — it is all sodas and sodas, and the colours of the cans and the crimson serviettes. And he is talking in vibrant circles, and he veers between things, and his beauty belongs on a prairie with the silhouette of everything said of ever, a precarious sensation of shadow, the proximate disappearance. Collapse sculpture, razored gesture. Philosophical pessimism catches in my eyelashes like carbonated flakes of rain, as if in a future time rain will become so congealed with pollution that it really will just fall as flakes. I love fundamental misunderstandings of Nature. I’m a child again, drawing up the world as I see fit with scraps of intuition. Admitting all this is nonsense, that I have no correct perspective at all. I just need to write about the sea in me, and how when I read about the Mariana trench I feel a great lurch that exposes some great depression hollowed deep, cartography of the feminine body spliced with hydrospace; rumours they wanna dump nuclear waste and I think of the toxins we eat, the chemicals that spread and seed in our wombs. Does this happen? Carefully, I scrape pesticides off stalks of celery. I peel the shell of an egg I later choose not to eat. It is too white, true solarity white, and I want a better lunar silver.

What if there really was a world inside the moon, and the moon wasn’t just avatar? Like how can we plunder that lunar geology for something like utopia? I think if the viscous moon tears would thaw just so, they could mutate and replicate like cells, they could cluster together with tears of lava and form something of an elemental aberration. This is the stuff I lie awake at night thinking, seeing all the dramas projected upon my ceiling. Those globular IKEA lampshades, in all their ubiquity, serve as ideal avatars for planets. Just like the gross paradox of stamping Trump’s face on an ecstasy tablet. Just like wearing flowers in your hair while smoking and eating imported avocados or fistfuls of Peruvian blueberries. Imagine we got likes for air miles in a negative economy, and the interface asked us to breathe into it each day, porous screen like the soft breathing walls of the Southern Reach trilogy, and it would gauge our lungs for toxicity? To exist is to accept whatever X degree of contamination. You just have to. I’m scared to phone up the sky for answers.

Smell of Body Shop Rainforest shampoo in my hair. Just finished watching The Shape of Water, second time. I would like to dwell awhile in the land of teal and polish a very beautiful longing for heritage, marinal expanses, salt water I gargle for toothache. Egg-timers. He is earth and I am air. The simplicity of things is really all about what they cannot show, what parts we don’t access. What we are drawn to, what we draw in our dreams. This could be so fresh.

I wake up with the entire song ‘Slow Motion’ by Third Eye Blind stuck in my head, sitting there whole for no apparent reason, and the person singing it is actually Brendon Urie, and it’s 2006 and I’m staring at my dad’s laptop at four in the morning with my eyes full of tears. And my pleasure at listening to this song again is wholly embarrassment for existence, sure, for the fact of my pre-adolescent self so stung, and the vocal flutters, ‘because he hates his life’. It all happened in the days I used to wander the backstreets of desolate American cities in video games, crash cars into walls or off piers for the sake of it. You never saw the moon in these places. You never filled up your car with gas or took a piss; there was always something missing.

Maybe I should write a poem about narwhals, but I wouldn’t know where to start. I did this tour of Stirling Castle and the best parts were the unicorn tapestries, and the simulated flames on the candles, which were plastic and operated by some sort of vibrational shimmering motion. It’s either 5am or the middle of the night or the afternoon, some lost hour; the hours are pure emulsion now. There’s still a lot of work to do on the pace. It’s petulantly mild, man. I mean it could be any time of year, if you ignored the fact of the naked trees. I’m reading this story about a bird-woman climbing into a hollow. Sometimes I think of Ted Hughes’ Crow and feel sick again, like that time I wrote about it in an exam and used the phrase ‘disembodied genitalia’ and I don’t know where it came from and I got the best grade I’d ever got in an exam for that, presumably for that, that resonant terrible phrase. Such images abound in the work. I saw a dead crow, irl, on my way to my next exam, the last one. 

Next time I see you, I’ll bring my copy of the album in its cracked CD case. Remember when they used to call them jewel cases, and plastic seemed less sinister then. I want to be flat-packed inside the plastic jewel case of my life, distributed evenly to interested parties. They’ll laugh and score out the lyrics, but that’s cool; I was never much good at hiding in sleeves. They were always getting dragged through watercolour paint or pasta sauce. It’s 2006 again, I draw kohl around my eyes like the rings of a planet, and gradually bits of black flicker into my vision like space debris.

Up late again, I’m assigning myself to American time zones. I think if I just got jet-lag, I’d fix my sleeping pattern. I imagine it as that falling feeling when you are very drunk but lying beside someone, feeling safe so you feel like you’re falling, there’s a gravitational slide born somehow from final stasis, you keep very still and relish the feeling. Maybe I don’t want to align with normative rhythms.

These cathartic deep cuts from Dookie. It’s all gone shit, the world etc. I put ‘When I Come Around’ on the jukebox and whisper apologies. Warily I sign up to the Guardian’s Green Light mailing list. Do I want climate news delivered to my inbox weekly? Plug in necessary affective transfer. Photoshoots of seabirds dripping with oil and U. from Satin Island rattling on about kitsch. I need to upload those papers.

Line from my diary: ‘Here I am at 4am of a Tuesday morning, listening to “Out on the Weekend”, listening to the birds, stillness, forgetting to breathe. How do I relate to joy, man? What is a thread?’

Tim Morton puts up this essay on Milton he wrote when he was 19 and it was really decent and I didn’t understand it, and I wanted to go back to what I wrote when I was 19 to see, but that was a mistake.

This guy I know drives with erratic precision, smokes out the window. It’s great.

Something cuts deep in my thumb, leaves a crater that crusts with a layer of topaz. I walk adjacent to the Kelvin and there are little green shoots already, snowdrops around the university. This is a good thing, we hold to it.

Okay so I haven’t found actual moon tears yet to prove my theory. Not in waking hours. I buy a gold clamshell necklace but honestly it feels like it was bought for me. Wearing it gilts the hollow between my collarbones with something like presence. Imagine it contained a tumbling sea. Imagine it opened like a locket and there was a tiny moon tear inside. All of my heroines go tumbling in water, they swirl in narcotised lines beneath the sea, they gather themselves over and over, rolling like tides. I watch my friend roll tight little cigarettes, she keeps them in a sanitary tin; there’s this whole fort-da thing of the smokers getting up to leave and coming in again, the swish of cold air in their wake, waft of tarry poison, longing. I stand very close to a stranger, we’re in a crowd and I can smell the smoke from his hair. The smoke is everywhere, dripping residues of it, traces of habit you can read like the gaps in the canopies of trees.

Imagine you could varnish the entire surface of the sea, a sort of lunar glaze, very thick, resistant to the pull of the tide underneath because made of the moon’s own spirit. You could make the sea perfectly static, and extra shiny. There would be a fashion for walking out onto the water and scrubbing at its hard, varnished ridges with acetone, and all of the beaches of the world would stink of the bedrooms of glamorous mothers. There would be a rehashing of the picturesque fashion, where every painting features the sky as a mirror: these flat mise-en-abymes of grey and misty blue, with a moon smudged top right like an inverse signature. They resemble a certain trend for such computer-generated works of fantasy landscape that circulated on DeviantArt circa 2005, minus the women with curvaceous, gunmetal skin and hair of gorgeous, impossible kelp.

Now imagine the varnish was actually plastic, and gradually it grows in opacity, it thickens and eventually comes apart, sags, is like the great lurid hide of the world’s excess. Slowly the birds come to die on its surface, they just lay there until their wings turn limp.

I’m thinking about the idea of the tower in tarot. There will be a sudden upheaval, a sudden upheaval. The river stretched out of itself, lifted, pulled around the world like salty taffy, threatening constriction. I guess it was gorgeous to watch. I want to learn more about the Tower but I’m too tired to read Yeats. In Annihilation, the biologist calls it the tunnel instead. So I think of a tilt and a burrow at once. So there is a slackening, pale anguish of the writing that writhes on the walls like imagine your thoughts were worms and hungry for mulberries.

She swoons around and draws a blue bead from her eye like a hormone.

The bead is a piece of plastic, she looks good with it, she decides to set it in a ring and hires a renowned silversmith for the purpose. He is an Aquarius and born of a January moon, so they get along just fine, and they talk about the birds from her caravan window, which is draped with all manner of silks spun from the worms of the thought of the tunnel. He calls it the tower, but she doesn’t mind. He has seen this before as she has also. They consider new methods for breaking up the varnish. Flamethrowers and blow torches, a special depositing of luminous chemical. There are rumours that some continents have burrowed their way through with military drills, but what happened next was the shattered varnish grew warm in the air and leaked toxicity into the nearby regions. People put down their water bottles.

What they should really do, she says, is slice the varnish off of the ocean. You know like when you prise flakes of paint off your nail? They just need to peel away at it. This revelation unnerves him. He welds the plastic for her ring and chooses not to speak. Sparks fly between them, from the metal. You are very precious, she says, pressing a kiss upon his cheek. That night she will lie awake with her silks, watching the silver fall upon the varnish of the ocean. She will paint her nails with Chanel, burgundy red.

I pass a crow in the morning, black against a bright blue sky. I want to save up all these messages I’ve been meaning to send, hypothetical conversations I’ve had in my head that want the shape of an email. You can lose too much in the hills. The email folds into an email, and slides into its cracked jewel case in the box beneath your father’s bed. I’m too tired to post it.

Remember the way the seabed felt on our soft little feet. We will never feel that again.

Imagine her at the brink of the shore, tearing strips off the water the way you would wallpaper. Her back draws a diagonal line between sky and sea. She insists this is a love story. She takes all the strips and wears them as a cape, a veil; off the water they are so transparent again, they are more like vapour, gossamer caught in the breeze. She wears the veil and it is still January, and shrouding herself in January she weighs up what is left, strokes the smooth stone in her ring, which is shaped like a tear, which weeps black oil on her hands, with every caress. Nobody knows what goes on anymore, and the black oil gets on the transparent veil, leaves all these stains. Later she will hang the stained veils to dry outside her caravan, and she will try to parse the blobs and lines, the tracery of oil. The dying birds groan with every tear, like the turn of a page. There is too much narrative altogether.

She will take off the ring at night and feel very empty.

Scream at me / until my ears bleed / I’m taking heed just for you.

~

Jesu – Christmas

Laksa – Feels Like I’ve Been Here Before

James Blake ft. Rosalía – Barefoot In The Park

Billie Eilish – you should see me in a crown

Anna Meredith – Honeyed Words

Shinichi Atobe – Regret

Nine Inch Nails – I’m Not From This World

Water Knives – Follow Me to the Uber Mountain

Julia Holter – Have You In My Wilderness

Jonny Greenwood – Tree Strings

Low – Fly

Penguin Cafe – Coriolis

Jeff Tweedy – I Know What It’s Like

The Sea The Sea – The End of the Year

Tomberlin – Any Other Way

Adrianne Lenker – what can you say

Lana Del Rey – hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me

Thom Yorke – All for the Best

Sharon Van Etten – Seventeen

Alice In Chains – Heaven Beside You

Third Eye Blind – Slow Motion

Lil Peep – Life is Beautiful

boygenius – Me & My Dog

Better Oblivion Community Centre – Sleepwalkin’

Parquet Courts – Tenderness

Savage Mansion – No Flags

Man of Moon – Ride the Waves

Lee Gamble – Many Gods, Many Angels

HOMESHAKE – Nothing Could Be Better

Deerhunter – Plains

Neil Young – Out On The Weekend

Peter Broderick – A Little Lost

Suzanne Vega – Marlene On The Wall

Mount Eerie – Tintin in Tibet