Ariana Reines has this poem called ‘Glasgow’ that features the lines: ‘We wanted life now / But not “real” life / We wanted the exact science / Fiction / We were living in / We didn’t want it’. I keep thinking that just living is so often this contradiction, or Eileen Myles declaring ‘a poem says I want’ and knowing how right they are, Ariana and Eileen, and where are we when we come to this knowing. I mean, why does such philosophising happen in a poem called ‘Glasgow’. It’s clearly set in Finnieston, I mean there’s ‘Berkeley Street’ and ‘the Sandyford / Hotel’. I wonder if Ariana knows the pawn shop is not really a pawn shop, or if she ever bought poppers or condoms or candy from the 24hr place near the Hidden Lane. Here I am with americanisms again. I mean I wonder if my idea of Ariana would bother nipping from her hotel room to replenish the tobacco she ran out of. Would she bauk at UK prices? Does she even smoke? My idea is always a she here and she likes to go into contingent nightclubs more than the store. It’s what we give away. Finnieston used to be not-expensive. I once wrote a poem called ‘Finnieston’, I was younger, it was kind of bad. It was about this release you get from finishing something, crossing a bridge. I used to go through the park to get to my friend’s house or the 78 and every other time the shops and bars along the strip would be different. A kind of fantasy district, reinventing itself coolly around me. Someone in the world is having the gentrification blues and listening to Courtney Barnett’s ‘Depreston’. Like sometimes I just sit and think, oh how about that whimsy! It’s hers, but you can borrow it with a jangle tone. Bottle it like Tango. And we shriek the world percolator into the dark, fizzing stars of etcetera. In the morning order lattes. Goodness sake is this what it is to write now, I love it.
Slowly, slowly. I measure out my life in Scotrail tickets. Walking around cities and trying to carve them into a poem, I mean that’s not what any of us are doing but it happens. Just comes, like orange. This month I spent a lot of time outside of my usual quadratic existence; I didn’t have to count the change in the leaves, there was already so much that was different. Things sped up. Once we live in it, do we not want it? Orange curls at the edge. That feels like a worded conundrum of someone who’s spent awhile on the streets, in some capacity. Not necessarily without home. I was counting the crisp packets from my perch on Uni Avenue, overlooking the construction works. Is it that nothing online is real as well, if you can have as real a nothing as the something of life? We don’t want this and yet it’s what we built, what we live in; we crave the ‘outside’ still, as though it were possible. It’s all in process. The station goes on a real bright tangent.
I like to just say, Ariana Reines wrote a poem about Glasgow. I feel honoured on behalf of my adopted city. It ends ‘Way out’. This consideration of exits, secret passages under the Clyde, riding bridge-wise towards the April I had to trudge hungover from tea-room to tea-room, listening. Hey. I saw Ariana read last summer at the Poetry Club (thanks Colin!), I think she was wearing a white dress and she said she might menstruate at any minute, she said something beautiful about the sun and the moon, synchronicity, and it was exactly what we needed. I mean her sultry voice filling the room, release. I mean I felt validated in my cramps and misery.
Tiny red spots appear like a migraine painting my belly.
There’s the rain now. The rain broke the heatwave. Is it Cetirizine causing my headache, this marathon pain like a marble rolling between my temples? When I go see Iceage play Broadcast, the room is sweltering. There’s a general jostling and adoration of bodies, like this guy is Scandinavian divine and just one lick of his sweat would cure your ills. The ills of a lack of a life. When we are living between. Catch It. I like to use the phrase ‘out west’ as a general euphemism for escape. Like sorry I gotta go, there’s a meeting out west, something happening out west, I’m owed time back west like the sky’s owed snow. A Sand Book (Reines, 2019). If you close it too fast the grains fall out. As though I could make of Kelvingrove the savanna that takes us out of my dreams. In the novella I wrote last year, there’s a whole childhood set there. It’s somewhere in America that you’d find in a song, but it crackles with violence and the fat-spitting fry ups of diners. Or does it at all. Who did she wait for.
Cherubic sleeping face.
Sketches of rooms.
Seafoam teal & mustard yellow.
There was a whole Monday morning in London I filled alone. It was strange to come close to a cacophony of accents you only usually heard on the telly, the city accenting its vowels to deliver things quickly. And yet we’d roll like beads in jelly, very slowly towards ourselves. I walked along Regent’s Canal with the flowers spilling out around me, cyclists slipping past and women smoking fags from canal boats, smiling their air of propriety. ‘Way out’ I could not go here. I knew if I stuck to the water it would all be fine, follow the line that was not the Tube. In London Field Park, someone had chalked XR slogans everywhere. ‘Rise Up’ was the order of the day in green and sorbet yellow. I tried to recount what had happened in a slim black notebook; I sat there on a bench for an hour and a half, just writing. A man asked me if he’d seen ‘a gaggle of unruly school kids’ come past. I answered in negative. There was only the other man on his phone, securing deals, pacing. Hot desking now meant you’d conduct interviews with iPads in parks, squinting against the light. I saw that also. I was at a gig where the band had a song about hot-desking. The drummer was also a vocalist, equalling my dilemma in the park: how to co-ordinate melody and rhythm. The runners ran past. Rucksack cutting into my shoulders. The air thickened black soot in my lungs but the buildings were lovely. I nearly left my orange socks behind. They weren’t even mine, originally.
When the sun sets on Finnieston, you see it spill syrupy gold and pinks, dramatic skies up Argyll Street.
Rise Up. [?]
That tree was an ash, the other a sycamore. I found myself in St Pancras Old Churchyard, staring. Supposedly Mary and Percy Shelley would cavort here.
I could drink coffee and be utterly happy, in a New York poet kinda way. Better to be the one who’d been to New York. Just to say this happened, that happened, I like it or not. We live this. There is something we want to get out of. Taking the subway in endless circles. Glassware exotica rimmed with sugar-salt.
All the aloe vera on stage was infinite juice.
Why the lack of seagulls here. Isn’t the Thames a tidal river?
People come to the gardens to make phone calls in London. Everyone exists in the cellular orbit of this extra life, the telephonic aura that follows them. Can you call my extension. She sits there with sushi on her lap. “Elaine’s not having IVF anymore.” I live off M&S egg and cress sandwiches for days, it’s good. Soon I would watch the land sweep back the sea from the train, heading north, east-coast. There was all this chewed-up rhubarb, but I sat there regardless. The birds were so tiny and tame, with their injured wings, polluted fashions.
Casual nymph mode: Fairy Pools of Skye and a swim. The car ride singing Joni while the hills just spread their green; we are so deliciously far from Paris. I lie awake with the skylight, listening.
In Dumfries I eat vegan blueberry pie at the start of the month, we talk about American politics. I’d been watching that Years and Years programme and freaking out on a casual basis. When it’s the eve of 2029 and the grandmother makes a speech about the utopianism of thirty years prior, 1999, how we thought we’d sussed it. That got to me, because for the first time so clearly I saw my own lifespan as part of this history. I remember the millennium new year also, of course I do: my hair was crimped for the occasion, I ate pringles and kept my bunny close. Blonde self red-eyed pre-digital. I played Game Boy in lieu of karaoke; it was the latest I’d stayed up in my life. I had nothing to sing; soon I’d be seven. The exact science fiction of this scenario, Years and Years playing out the extension of what was already in motion, terrified because it was imminent, believable, situated here in front of us, the domestic reality of interconnection. But in a way, it felt very English and I realised that was different. Glasgow has its own science fiction and maybe it’s just this or better politics or something more solid that doesn’t result to a haze. I think of everyone jostling at the hothouse gigs. Something we can’t hold still, glass bottle of cider from your bag that might burst. I’m happy. That blueberry pie was so good. I didn’t even care about radiation.
In Sam Riviere’s poem ‘american heaven’ (Kim Kardashian’s Marriage, 2015), ‘the level of heaven we develop within us / is the level it was possible to imagine / of the assorted early 80s, on earth’. Keep reading these articles about local bands sporting eighties outfits, drinking in the same old man pub as the previous feature. A general vacuity coming on like a front, but what can we do, lacking the ‘facsimile architecture’ (Riviere) of a more american heaven? The pie was served without ice cream of course, that was the point. No dairy. I keep five different diaries this month, split across documents, notebooks, assortments of train tickets. Creamy excess of this prose. My purse empties a cascade of rectangular orange. I throw around terms like ‘post-vaporwave poetics’ and mean them sincerely. What if we had to incubate our own heaven first? Lana Del Rey: ‘You’re my religion / You’re how I’m living’ (Honeymoon, 2015). 2015 was a good year for heaven. We hadn’t had 2016 yet; we were almost teenage of a nation. Riot, right?
London is all facsimile architecture. There’s this slime in the canal that’s thicker than lawn turf, extra real. I can’t stop thinking about that. Algaeic esplanade trapping the fishes. Can’t stop listening to that King Gizzard song, the refrain that’s like ‘I’ve let them swum’ and maybe that’s minimal ethics for the anthropocene. You just perform a minor twist in grammar, you make that the way you live:
Our human responsibility can therefore be described as a form of experiential, corporeal and affective “worlding” in which we produce (knowledge about) the world, seen as a set of relations and tasks. This may involve relating responsibly to other humans, but also to nonhuman beings and processes, including some extremely tiny and extremely complex or even abstract ones (microbes, clouds, climate, global warming). Taking responsibility for something we cannot see is not easy.
(Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, p. 97)
You could say the hypothetical fishies. We can fish for other things! Sentiment, care! Wholesome lyrics leading towards charismatic solos. Some kind of upbeat. Magikarp! so nothing happened. Things beneath the orange-green we cannot see. How are we supposed to care for slime? That song is a world, makes over the world. I think of powder and glow, contour, blend, gloss — a process of ‘make up’ or making up that structures Kim Kardashian’s Marriage (from ‘Primer’ to ‘Gloss’), that fashions a map of the face, the frontal location for ethical relations. In the library, the girl beside me writes about South Korean politics while listening to ASMR makeup videos. We all have our imminent fictions; not ‘real’ life, but it’s not always science.
Sometimes I want algaeic to fall into angelic, both pertaining to light.
We didn’t want to live in the life we made to live in where we might want.
To walk down the Royal Mile in the rain, bumping tourists, slowly crunching into an apple and letting your hair down into noise, a sort of soundcloud rap of near-distant, muted present. The apple was green and particularly sweet, low volume, like something discovered in the pockets of a pair of jeans you borrowed.
I’m awake at four am again. It doesn’t seem to matter so much. The gulls are morning/mocking. Later I’ll be at the kitchen table, chewing oatcakes with the window open. Reading Peter Sloterdijk’s Foams: Spheres Volume III. Is extinction one kind of what he calls ‘semantic antibodies’? Who is trying to excise that from the conversation?
Mostly I dwell in vicarious haircuts.
There’s a thought after the thought.
Drink whisky in the park, read fiction.
Your pinstripes lack a fly but still.
We fall asleep five times watching this Will Smith documentary about the planet. We never finish an episode. It seemed to stage the incoherence of a Hollywood sublime set to reverie’s overdose, but only the scene where he’s playing with his dogs in the garden remains. Sepia, sleep better. I slept deeper than a rock at the bottom of everything. June still feels like a dream.
I only want to get home to write the day. Every entry begins, another sweltering…
That’s what…good is?
~
Slowdive – Sugar for the Pill (Avalon Emerson’s Gilded Escalation remix)
The 1975 — The 1975 feat. Greta Thunberg
Mark Hollis — The Daily Planet
Grouper — Invisible
Laurel Halo — Out
Joni Mitchell — Rainy Night House
Devendra Banhart — Kantori Ongaku
Joanna Sternberg — For You
RF Shannon — Angeline
Fionn Regan — Collar of Fur
Thee Oh Sees — Moon Bog
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard — Fishing for Fishies
(Sandy) Alex G — Hope
Slow Hollows — Selling Flowers
Frog — Bones
DIIV — Skin Game
Ibeyi — River
Blood Orange, Tori y Moi — Dark & Handsome
Aisha Devi — The Favor of Fire
How to Dress Well — Nonkilling 6 | Hunger
Organ Tapes — Springfield
black midi — Western
Bon Iver — Faith
TOPS — Sleeptalker
Let’s Eat Grandma — Salt Lakes
Carla dal Forno — Took a Long Time
mariaology 