Three storms in the north Atlantic have taken most of the leaves off the sycamores and hazels. They lie in piles, some saturated with water and becoming compost quickly as foot commuters trample them. Some are swept up over the day, so I see them in the morning but walk home along a completely cleared path. Out the back window, the little birch tree is totally bare now. Its leaves were bright yellow—not gold as the hazels and sycamores were, but a cadmium yellow. Now the branches are revealed in their creaminess, outlined in peach that darkens to red. Through the big windows of the house across the back courtyard I can see gulls flying. Winter is here—my students tell me this when I remark on the fall weather. They are right: winter in this landscape is so subtle, as subtle as spring was in Maine. It will pass without my seeing it, if I look for temperatures below freezing or the arrival of snow. My friend texts from much farther north and I see the snow on roofs where she is. Here, the sidewalks are perpetually damp and the laundry will only dry if it is set next to the radiator. The boiler breaks and the landlord is in no hurry to fix it, so as the mercury falls below zero Celsius we wrap ourselves in blankets and put hot water bottles under our clothes. The laundry hangs in the cold damp air of the apartment.
On the corners of major streets the flower sellers show up every morning, and now there are cut trees and evergreen branches as well as the hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, lilies, freesias, carnations that are the general stock. They never seem to run out of tulips. And on Moore Street, the vendors’ flowers and fruit are priced with signs that someone’s drawn by hand. I like the care with which that number 5 was made. Makes me think of this other instance of the number 5 (I Saw The Figure Five in Gold), which points to this one.
November was an exceptionally outward-facing month for me, with readings and performances and talks and extra lectures at work. And now that most of that is done (I have one more talk coming up, December 10 at 2 p.m. US Eastern/7 p.m. Irish time; information here) it is very good to have a moment to step back and say, oh, that’s what I’ve made.
It’s not possible for me to see what a thing is while I’m making it, and that goes for everything. It’s necessary to step back from the place I’m cutting out or sewing together a dress, and from the poem, and from the performance, and from the drawing, and see it apart from me. Then I can make the kinds of decision that are about seeing patterns from outside rather than feeling them from inside. I think this is what Corita Kent (and her students) meant when she wrote that “to create and to analyze are different processes” (rule 8). We need both in artmaking. But we have to be bifocal with them. Go out and come back, be immersed sometimes and up for air at others. It’s good to have a very active period of making. And it’s also good take stock of what you make. It’s good to pause, and it’s good to wait. Breathe in and also out.
The work I did this past month meant I spent more time at work than usual but it also brought me to parts of the city I don’t often transverse on foot, as I looked for certain materials (for costume-making) and tracked down certain places (for poem-making). I love the old neon sign on the Rotunda Hospital, just north of the city center, its delicate stork and that great O. I saw the figure O in neon.
And this gate, that greenblue color I see in many places in this city, especially gates. Every place is a paintbox. I have been thinking about samples recently—the musical practice of borrowing and the sample as a tester or miniature, and the forms samples take (like paint sample cards). Bits of something else brought into a new situation, they change the situation and are changed.
I go to the art museum on a very gray morning and find myself surrounded by someone else’s vision of light. I’ve been listening to “Ladies and Gentlemen, We are Floating in Space” by Spiritualized on repeat. I am reading Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence and Kate Beaton’s Ducks. We boil the kettle to make more hot water bottles and also cups of orzo with a tiny bit of sugar and a good bit of milk.
This time of year it is easy to be bogged down—under the darkness, under the damp, under the fact that the heating is broken, under the cost of living and the made-cheapness of human life, under the very real weight of grief and horror and fear. How to go on? Step by step, little bit by little bit, without anesthetizing myself to the sharpness of the world that is: the indicator of its preciousness and the thing that spurs me to act. But also, without insisting on a hairshirt.
It’s comfort. That’s what I’m talking about. Not numbness, not a commercialized ‘self-care’ that’s really just care for a corporation’s bottom line. Not a “peace of escapism, this peace that fails to confront the real issues of life, the peace that makes for stagnant complacency” (Rev. Dr. King; source). Comfort of body and of whatever the thing is that used to get called a soul. The dignity and integrity of the person. And that’s what I want to write about this month: the words of a few old songs, comfort and joy.
I’ll try, this month. I’ll do my best. But for now I will leave you with this beautiful display of brooms, snapped (with permission) through the door of a shop on an already-dark Thursday evening at the end of November, as I and everyone rushed through the city, our passage lifting up the leaves among us, waiting for the ones who sweep them up while we’re asleep.
Comfort for everyone, and safety, and belonging.
And freedom from occupation, and from fear.
And shared, active liberation.
And peace of the positive kind, that is the presence of justice.
Swords into ploughshares.
Free Palestine.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.
Thank you. Now there is no ordinary.