To be moved
I am experimenting. Right now, it is 9.02am, Saturday 11th May. I woke up at 5.40, needing to catch a train at 6.30, to catch another train at quarter to eight. It’s from the second train that I’m writing now. When I made this Substack, I wasn’t sure how it might come to be, the shape it might take, what I might write or post or share. I still don’t! What I do know is that I want it to be an exercise in wondering and making connections, in noticing, in observing — an exercise in recognition and care. Over the past three to five years or so, I have written sporadically, usually fuelled by an intense feeling of grief or joy (and often red vermouth!) where what I write comes from deep within my chest — I think it’s Mary Oliver who has written about this, in her poem Don’t Hesitate: if you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate—give into it and don’t be afraid of it’s plenty, which is to say, Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Yes, and when I read Joy Sullivan’s substack post, Write where it's warm, this calls to me, too. I have always written from where it is warm, from where it burns, singing like salt in an open wound, where your muscles involuntarily tighten and clench and then soften (Actually, my mum would say I write from the dusty corners—rummaging deep within them where it dark and webbed, gleaning, coaxing what I find there out and lighting it up, sense making).
But the sporadicness with which I write has felt stagnant for a while — the last thing I wrote came after a trip to Margate, back in November last year. I spent a long weekend there with one of my closest friends, eating chips and Hellman’s mayonnaise, hypothesising the origins of a cavern of shells; on the balcony, wine-drunk and finding constellations. Anyway, when I got back to London, I wrote. What I wrote really wasn’t connected to the trip in any meaningful way, other than in the idea of what it means to be in the offing.
That was six months ago now, and any time I’ve sat down and tried to write since I can’t seem to find my voice, nor the curiosity that I always felt was so intrinsic to myself. I think working a 9-5 office job, rife with rote mundanity and repetition can do this to you, but it is also a shift of my own making because I know that I have disengaged. And so I have been reckoning with ways to re-attune to myself and a creative practice (if I can call my writing that!). I read another of Joy Sullivan’s newsletters earlier this week, wherein she writes of writer’s block, that “it’s about partnering with your body to find the strategies that move you into a more imaginative state”, and then I think of this email sent by the late Louise Glück: periods of blankness are desolating, but the well will fill up, everything good she owes to endurance.
I don’t think the idea of writers block entirely resonates for me, not necessarily—mostly because I can’t envision myself as A Writer and my “practice” (for lack of a better word) has never really been consistent enough to allow me to feel this period as something out of the ordinary. I think I am learning that stagnancy and rut-like feelings are quite intrinsic to the way I exist in, navigate through, and make things from this world and my place within it. These are my quiet moments, absorbent, an osmosis of sorts, where I am filling myself up despite not knowing what exactly I need to do when I’m full. But it’s good to be full, satiated, and to trust that the time to do something with all of that will come when it needs to come.
I don’t think I’m ready, yet, to return to writing anything that might resemble an essay, whether personal or otherwise, nor to consistent poetic output—and, really, I never was and might never be—but I am trying to find that spark again, however it may come. At the moment, I feel this needs to come in the form of mental rock-climbing, retraining the parts of myself that have felt shrunken and contracted, decayed and untended.
This demands attunement and I have been trying to re-practice noticing, and in the very act of practicing practicing I have felt myself tear wide open. Yes! I am waking up to the ways the world is delicately interconnected! And so then, I want to offer up some of what has made me want to scream or wail or write (even if I haven’t), which is to say: I want to feed you the things that have moved me, caught my eye or made me catch my breath, in the way that they’ve fed me.
Floor finds, patterns and lost things; a wooden spatula in the middle of the road; a leaf shaped like this <3; a bookmark, a lego ship, a Nine of Diamonds in the centre of the pavement; a sweet wrapper, flat-laid; a manhole cover, checkered and tonal from the rain
Kumquats
The feeling of a new lunchbox
Understanding post-it notes as a fishing net
Impatience and to-go culture
Atmospheres of spatiality
Ikea catalogues; foraging; ice cream vans
A true half moon
The aetiology of rocking chairs
Labour, exhaustion, rest
Beachcombing; alphabet rocks (@alphabetrocksalaska)
Epistemological nuance
A train conductor with compassion
J.J Cale’s discography
Anne De Marcken’s It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over
Seeking out the divine in the ordinary; the sacred and the profane
Anagrams, ephemera, fish
I am letting myself be attuned to noticing without the creative expectation of much else. To do this is to live in the undergrowth and fallowlands, and I think that this is where all the joy is. The big picture will find me, I hope, but if I try to live there it obliterates me, and so for now: I will remember there is magic in all of the small and I will remember this might be enough.
