5 February - 7 March
Things lived
I spent as much time these 29.5 days as I could on the beach. I have always lived next to the water, but it’s only recently that I’ve begun to feel comfortable in it — to strike out (more) confidently into the blue, to dive, to glide along the ocean floor and notice that the patterns made by waves mirror the patterns made by the wind, to pursue fish, to be swept back and forth by the tide without panic. In recent times especially, this has been a gift.
After being chased out of the water on one occasion by Surf Patrol due to the presence of a bull shark detected north of the coast, I wandered around the beach and stumbled on the most elaborate sandcastle — no, sand empire — I had ever seen. It looked as if it had fallen out of someone’s mind, fully formed. A tall arch heralded the entrance of the city, which was built of delicately fashioned spires à la GaudÃ. Paths and ditches led one through a series of structures that branched off here and there and finally arrived at a sand Colosseum. And colossal, indeed, it was. Who built this? I asked of a child who was pottering busily around a collapsed tower. Some people, she said, they just left, and hopped unsteadily into the middle of the part-ruined Colosseum to begin rebuilding its south wall. They just left, I thought, feeling as though I’d arrived in time to witness the death throes of a civilisation that would one day be known only through myth.
I came back the next day and, as expected, it was gone. Devoured by the tide, the damp sand smooth as if it had never been there. Children turned their attention to other things, children who had never known it was there. After walking off yesterday, I had run back to the sand empire to document it more fully, acutely aware of the ephemerality of the sand empire and gripped suddenly by the fear of letting it go. As if my shaky iPhone videos could do it justice. But life moved on. The shark had moved on. All things have their season and all things shall have their end. I did my usual march around the bower and dove into the water, headfirst.
Things end, I know that much — I continue to learn the lesson of not trying to record the present so faithfully that I end up being removed from the moment itself. Rather than reaching for a camera, I wish my instincts were, like the children, to reach out and touch, to preserve by partaking. But after years of drifting around and starting to toy with the idea that I could put down roots where I am, I feel things slipping away from my grasp even as I try to stand still for a while. As if I was not, in fact, the unmoved mover. I was recently reminded of a post by Tumblr user @finelythreadedsky, who pointed out that “nostalgia” originally meant longing across a displacement in space, but these days we use it to mean longing across a displacement in time. It’s not that we physically leave home and think, as Odysseus did, of Ithaca, of Penelope — rather, it’s that we stay, and home disappears with the passage of time.
I find myself floating on my back in the water, eyes closed and weighing these thoughts, wondering how I got here when all I wanted to do was to make sure someone else knew it is entirely possible to build a faithful representation of the Sagrada FamÃlia from wet sand. Besides filling my day with intense beauty and expanding my sense of the possible, I like to think the sand empire people were saying we should build anyway. To lay brick upon brick, to stay the path for yourself and those around you, even knowing the tide is coming. Even so, it means an afternoon well spent with the ones you love. And isn’t that what we build for anyway? Isn’t that what it all amounts to in the end?
Things loved
1: The shining darkness
The anchor of my year so far has been Septology by Jon Fosse. I spent so many words trying to explain to myself why I was so floored by this for so many weeks. I’ve danced around sacredness and prayer and memory. I think it’s something to do with prayer as the direction and redirection of attention, as the continual pulling of the self back to peace.
But how does one describe adequately in words what has been deeply, deeply felt? For Fosse doesn’t opine on sacredness — he inhabits it, allows us to partake in it. As one who walks into a holy place is struck by awe, wonder, and all we cannot know, even where one doesn’t keep the faith of the place. And then spends the rest of one’s life trying to commune with this mystery, to argue with it, wrestle with it, come to some sense of peace with it. He creates within the reader an experience, a deeply felt sense of the joys and grief of being alive that run like undercurrents within each of us and surface only if we step out of our own way and allow it. This isn’t the mere evocation of emotion — it’s more like the transfiguration of perspective. I’m laid as bare as the words on the page.
I am not, however, going to describe what it’s about because it’ll sound terribly mundane and pretentious. I will only quote: “and what I want to show to other people has to do with light, or with darkness, it has to do with the shining darkness full as it is of nothingness, yes, it’s possible to think that way, to use such words…”
2: On repeat
- Parachute by Caroline Polachek
- Haters will say it’s autotune, but live performances suggest otherwise — i.e. Caroline Polachek is operatically trained in bel canto. With her voice lilting over synths both dark and sparkly, this falls squarely into one of my favourite genres of music: “songs for commuting home in the deepening twilight, not knowing when or if you’ll reach the other side”.
- Blades of Grass by Lisel
- Lisel’s album Patterns for Auto-tuned Voices and Delay (2023) is actually autotune, and it sounds the way I imagine Gregorian chants might sound like if written in the year 2170 by someone who plays a lot of video games.
- Under Pressure (Aftersun version) by Queen & David Bowie
- Taken from the needle drop scene in Aftersun (2022), directed by Charlotte Wells. I spent a lot of time on Soundcloud when I was in high school, fascinated by the art of the remix. This one is the kind that spins off a lyric and perfectly darkens it into its own subplot — the dizzying anxiety, the freneticism of dancefloor bodies, the chaos of motion untrammelled, the desperation in the voice, pleading…
- Winter Time Blues by MF Tomlinson
- Sounds like a song that’s making it up as it goes along and so it goes exactly where it needs to.
3: Excerpted
rather the dew on the window of / the castle than the castle itself / rather the flight of the bird / rather burned than captured by Robert Montgomery (2013)