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spending an evening with my family. an evening where nothing of significance arose. yet it weighs heavy. a dinner, a catch up, a mild, bland, beige, uncomfortable night. we sit at a distance, like co workers trapped in a pub after work. In London I try to keep myself separate. It’s better at a distance, of course it is. I am not like them and yet I am them, of course I am. Still, I feel so untethered, so un-rooted. I do not have a hometown, nor feel at home in my family, in my body, in my compatibility with the demands of the world. It is a feeling I strive to avoid being reminded of. 36 more hours of this and then -

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Environmental protection poster from the Lithuanian SSR, mid-1970's

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"Optimism is often unbearable; so is the fact of openness to life, which is inevitable but often feels forced, coerced, or uncomfortably constrained, even when we want whatever stands for "life." The optimism that sex tends to trigger is for an impossible state of things: the perfect rhythm of being in and out of control, of being open and closed in the right or bearable ways, achieving a smooth, unambivalent holding environment for our own and the world's incoherence... Think of the clumsy physicality sex induces, in the body, the voice, and the face; the confusions and resignations of knowledge even in a scene of delight; the small and large breakdowns of concentration and confidence all throughout any episode, and the work of quieting those down so things can proceed. Think of how unreadable the lover is, even when response is well-amplified. Think of the sometimes desperate, sometimes bitter, sometimes dejected, sometimes funny rage to stay in sync in the middle of all the internal and external noise, and of the aggressive desire that must be mobilized not just to stay in the zone while keeping the inconvenient other in it, too, but to maintain one's own openness to openness. ... What happens in sex, therefore, is not just a figure for the social at its best and worst extremes, but a training in how simply hard it is to be in the room with another person, even someone you want there: because it is hard to show up fully to sociality in general, and once there, to maintain an openness toward the objects about which one feels aggressive, has variable confidence, few skills, and little trust that the world will be patient for your self-inconstancy. It is toward building skills for recognizing, explaining, and finding temporary housing for the discomfort of these inconvenient genres of the intimate that this chapter is written." Lauren Berlant, "Sex in the Event of Happiness", On the Inconvenience of Other People

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lately (fragments of april mostly)

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“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us. It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.”

— Adrienne Rich, from On Lies, Secrets & Silence (via violentwavesofemotion)

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first days of spring

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someone said yesterday that i was living the life they pictured of an artist. a shrug and a red face were my knee-jerk reactions. she name-checked my recent travels. and being unemployed, on universal credit. maybe getting a part-time job at a cafe or a sauna for one or two shifts a week. working on a novel. an audio-drama in the works. speaking at literary festivals. winning poetry prizes. teaching writing workshops. i realised that my [creative/professional] life, although sometimes so frustratingly mundane and still + shapeless and incoherent, has actually shifted so radically from a year or two ago.

today i read an excerpt from a personal essay i wrote (// was paid to write?) at a small literary festival in south-east london. not that many people were in attendance, and i soon grew tired of my own voice in the conversations afterwards. but i felt such a calmness at the reading. i stuttered once in fifteen minutes but that was it. on the cycle back, i thought about how i didn't care or fixate on these public events as much as i used to, something that may come across as apathy but that i see more as assuredness.

a few days before i got back from my trip around morocco, and a brief stay in granada, i was awarded a literary grant from the arts council that will allow me to write two days a week from april until january, as i scope out the first draft of a novel. when i read the news, i rushed to call heidi, who was already back in london at the time, saying over and over again 'i got it'. three weeks on, the disbelief i felt initially remains, along with the feeling that it was all maybe just a mistake (i'll be thinking this until the funds hit my bank account).

this moment has underpinned so much of the hope i feel currently. both the grant, and the validation that comes with it. the luck of my application arriving on the desk of the right government worker who saw something in what i proposed; and deciding, amidst so many cuts in the arts, to afford me the 'time to write'. with no end product expected. if i didn't get it, i know this would all be upside down. i'd feel adrift, reframing my unemployment in a more anxious light, or seeing my recent commissions as coincidence or my aspirations as delusions. but i did get it, and so, for now, it feels like i am moving in a direction, however illusory that may turn out to be. and it means that if i can get a shift once a week, or sometimes twice, that will be able to sustain me over the rest of the year. a blessing beyond anything a younger self could have imagined.

it helps, also, that the sun is out so often now. that i feel a more solid confidence in myself and in how i present to others. that my relationship is back on steady footing, that the love between us feels so clear and rooted, with so much space still to grow, that i have a spring and a summer, that tomorrow i will go to a friend's birthday picnic in hampstead, that yesterday i went to a nowruz concert. and a friends poetry pamphlet launch the night before that. that i increased my estradiol dose. that i have messages to reply to. a goodness to savour.

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Freud said that we endlessly repeat past hurts, forever re-enacting the same patterns in a futile attempt to patch the un-healable wound. This, more than anything, is the terror of the personal, digital archive: not that it reveals some awful act from the past, some old self that no longer stands for us, but that it reminds us that who we are is in fact a repetition, a cycle, a circular relation of multiple selves to multiple injuries. It’s the self as a bundle of trauma, forever acting out the same tropes in the hopes that we might one day change.

Navneet Alang, "Terror of the Archive"

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last weekend in the brecon beacons

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tangier

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the last days of my time away, my mind turning now to the tapas and wine and jazz tonight, the Sierra Nevada tomorrow, the Alhambra the next day - but also to home. a feeling of a countdown forming, of returning to a flat, dumping my bag on the floor, showering and putting on fresh clothes. a coffee i can make in peace in the morning. a love i can be alone with. i miss the soft afternoon light at the living room table. i will return with my relationship on firmer footing, a sense of longevity and hope returning. i will fold back into regular life and these days of walking aimlessly for hours, (stopping only for a coffee and a journal entry or some more pages in a book at the top of of viewpoint) will fade. but i feel a longing and it feels so beautiful to have that restlessness in my chest; i am grateful for the life i have waiting for me outside of these trips - a gratitude (and life) i don’t think i have truly had before.

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today i had planned to finish up an essay commission before i send it off tomorrow. and also finalise my route back from morocco / plan the trip itself a little bit (ten days away). and a dozen more tiny errands on top of that. but instead, i woke up lazily, went down to feed daisy and make two coffees, brought them back up to bed, kisses and sex and a warm shower followed. i cycled to a breathwork class (a first) and ended up loving the clear blue sky day, the feel of warm sun on my face so much on my cycle back from the class that i ditched my to-do list and went to volunteer at the community garden for an hour and a bit. i returned to the flat feeling a goodness and so baked a cake using apples from my grandad's apple tree. i'm about to go cover heidi's shift at the sauna, which, while new and so potential for fucking up, doesn't feel like work-work. there is maybe half an hour or at most an hour of sun left of the day. i know the abandoned to-do list will put pressure on my brain and on my time another day this week but for now, that's okay.

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january