journal — eight
On painting the ocean, animal ancestors, and my self
Hello, reader.
This letter takes roughly five hours to write & edit & record each week. I’m currently saving any spare pennies & pounds I earn from it to study literature & enter short story competitions.
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Thank you.
Hello,
Here are ten things I’d like to remember from this week.
one
What do you think happens when you die?
Speaking for myself? Myself. My self. That's the problem. That's the whole problem with the whole thing: that word, ‘self’. That's not the word — that's not right. How did I forget that? When did I forget that? The body stops a cell at a time, but the brain keeps firing those neurons — little lightning bolts, like fireworks inside, and I thought I'd despair or feel afraid, but I don't feel any of that. None of it. Because I'm too busy. I'm too busy in this moment. Remembering. I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter, this body is mostly just empty space after all. Solid matter? It's just energy vibrating very slowly, and there is no me. There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I'm no longer breathing. And I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin I remember I am energy. Not memory; not self. My name, my personality, my choices — all came after me. I was before them and I will be after, and everything else is pictures, picked up along the way. Fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain. & I am the lightning that jumps between. I am the energy firing the neurons, and I'm returning. Just by remembering, I'm returning home. And it's like a drop of water falling back into the ocean, of which it's always been a part. All things: a part. All of us: a part. You, me, and my little girl, and my mother and my father, everyone who's ever been, every plant, every animal, every atom, every star, every galaxy, all of it. More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach. & that's what we're talking about when we say ‘God’. The one. The cosmos and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It's simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I'll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams. But now, in this split-second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once. There is no time. There is no death. Life is a dream. It's a wish. Made again & again & again & again & again & again & on into eternity & I am all of it. I am everything. I am all. I am that I am.
I was in need of a sermon this Sunday morning — long week; long night. This, from Erin, a character in Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, wound around my mind like a vine: the intersection of science & gods.
two
In Car Crash While Hitchhiking, the drug-addicted narrator recounts hitchhiking in four different vehicles: with a Cherokee, a salesperson, a college student, then a family. I read the short story just before the start of the pandemic, opening Denis Johnson’s slim collection, Jesus' Son (1992). (I’ll re-read, as I don’t remember giving it a fair go the first time around.)
Inspired by Johnson’s real experiences, covered here in New Yorker, I wondered at what point, or with what reason, parts of our life lean towards fiction or memoir / essay — what tips the balance, and what has been written in all ways decide which of our recollections, which slices of our history, become inspiration for fiction, or essay — what tips the balance? I assume it’s just something that becomes apparent while writing, but I’ve added to a new list of potential essay questions.
three
Driving to a pumpkin-picking patch yesterday morning, a couple of moments:
On a quiet road, seven steps wide, we waited 30 seconds before the light turned green at a crossing where no one crossed. Already late, we hysterically shouted at the lights to change. (Three nearby schools explained its existence.)
In Godspeed by James Blake, lyrics follow a piano introduction. The pause between the two, though, stretched longer than I remembered. My bated breath had time to choke ‘I… I…’ before continuing as planned.
Neither moment was significant. It felt odd even describing them. Together, though, they reminded me why I expanded this journal after the first few issues: noticing moments in everyday life that inspired a grander thought.
In this case: When we know that the nothing we’re sitting in, at a traffic light or a pause in a song, is pregnant with a thing that will happen shortly, a delay beyond our expectation — a longer wait or pause — can feel as though we’re falling forwards in our confused momentum.
four
Here is Young Woman Sleeping by Rembrandt.
Referenced in a book I’ll have finished within another day or so — The Colony by Audrey Magee — Hendrickje Stoffels (Rembrandt’s long-term partner) rests her head on her arm. It’s a sketch, practice & preparation for something larger, or perhaps something that made it no further.
I’ve not yet sat with it properly, and I’ve added a few new lists I’ll mention shortly to my Trello board to explore. What I enjoyed was seeing just how much writing, discussion, symbolism was pulled from the working-out stages of an artist. Sketches are treated with equal marvel as his completed paintings.
The process as glorious as the product.
five
From The Colony by Audrey Magee.
You’re not understanding the way the light falls on the sea. You’re seeing it the wrong way. [You should be seeing it] from underneath the sea as well as above. The light doesn’t just stay on the surface of the water. It gets broken up and some of it ends up underneath. It should look as though it is being lit from below as well as above.
six
To inform my recent curiosity with deep connections between humans & other animals, this Five Books article on animal consciousness handed (paw-ed?) me a fantastic place to start. I loved this:
We have to face the unpalatable fact that we treat animals primarily as sources of food & nutrition [for the sake of human comfort & benefit]; that our principle interaction with them is at the kitchen table. This presupposes the existence of a hierarchy organised according to an imbalance of power, where humans treat other animals as objects for the advancement of our own ends simply because we can. And one way in which we justify this hierarchy is by insisting that only we, humans, are conscious of the world around us.
Moving away from that hierarchy requires changing institutions that we are currently invested in, such as scientific research, factory farming, zoos, and so on. But it also requires a momentous shift in our assumptions about animals, especially our assumptions about their mental and emotional lives.
(& I think I may be getting closer to adopting a plant-based diet again.)
seven
From Svetlana Alexievich’s LARB interview, discussing the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on local animals.
People left dogs, horses, and cows, or they were shot … we really betrayed animals. Humans were leaving on buses, and they were afraid to look out the windows because, around the buses, their dogs or cats stood there looking at them. The people were ashamed that they were leaving the animals. Then hunters and soldiers came in and killed the animals. [Driving through the Zone,] there are no traces [of humans]. The village is empty … just biotombs where the animals are buried. There are animal tracks, as if they come to visit their ancestors.
& answering a previous curiosity I had on technique:
We process the experience together, the interviewee and myself. We think about the world together. The person did not only experience the war, of course, but also had a life in peacetime and after. All these memories influence each other, so it is not just me writing things down.
eight
I decided to start catching up on podcasts, forgotten for a few months in favour of audiobooks. One of the early ones that hooked me at the start of the pandemic, on long walks without music (a revelation at the time), was Stuff You Should Know. (They mostly soundtrack my cleaning routines now.)
Below are a couple of examples you might like. The first, which I’ve wound to the correct point, discusses MRI scanners detecting facial recognition in the brains of blind people handling head-shaped moulds — evidence that there’s a part of our brains solely present to process faces. (I wondered whether degenerative brain diseases like dementia hits that particular part of the brain — I’ll ask someone.)
The second: humans have stripes. (I know. Listen)
nine
Another attempt to catch up on an old favourite: Austin Kleon’s weekly letter, the first newsletter I ever regularly read and, coupled with Patti Smith’s Just Kids, one of the first few things that got me exploring my creative interests.
As well as reigniting my interest in recording journals rather than writing them, and making sure everything’s filed properly in a way that makes them useful, it gave me a new step to try once I’ve got something:
Reading to an audience is best because you start really judging the thing when you have to project it into a room full of people. Quentin Tarantino says he likes to read his scripts to his friends, not for their feedback, but their presence. ‘I don’t want input, I don’t want you to tell me if I’m doing anything wrong, heavens forbid,’ he says, ‘but I write a scene, and I think I’ve heard it as much as I can, but then when I read it to you … I hear it through your ears, and it lets me know I’m on the right track.’
ten
This, my eighth journal post, is the first with which I’ve reviewed what I’ve written and said I’d do. Rather than list it all here, I used it as an excuse to clean my website a bit — then I created a working to do page.
(I never really understood the strikethrough option in text — what the point of creating it was — but it’s very satisfying here.)
Two months and eight issues, but I got there!
Thank you for reading.
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Have a lovely day.
