Hello, my darling,
I’m starting this letter rather late, and somewhat empty of ideas.
Everyone says – as they should, as they would – ‘You must be so excited!’ And I am, and that’s true, but the word falls so short.
I lie awake for at least two hours every night, frantically rifling through scenes that I think are imaginings of future moments. I get so far down insignificant rabbit holes of impossible-to-imagine that I become frustrated. I start trying to focus on my breath, and within milliseconds, I’ve transferred myself into some future scene, where I cannot imagine how I am communicating, where I am sitting, whether the clothes I have are right for the weather and what my hair is doing without the regular attention of Mullet Liesel and her precision moves with her barber shears held in the hand of the arm which bears the ornate barber-shears tattoo.
I’m going to miss her. The way I think about her you’d swear that no one in any other country has ever cut hair with anything other than a bush hacker’s sensibility.
I think what happens at night when the resident frog here in Montagu starts ticking and chirruping and wakes me up, is that all the stuff I suppress in the day, comes tumbling into raw consciousness.
Since I moved out of the flat at the end of January, I feel as though I have been in free fall.
In my journalism honours year, Lulu and Cecilia and I drove down the coast to meet Theo and Rupert and Russell to go bungee jumping. We were all so tired driving (this is before one is old enough to manage one’s sleep properly) that we played the music loudly to keep the driver awake. When we got to Vic Bay, Cecilia asked me – I think it may have been in irritation – whether I knew the lyrics of every song that had ever been written.
When we got to Bloukrans bridge I was fully expecting to jump. I wasn’t gung-ho. I was afraid. But a part of me always thinks that I’m very brave and then a bigger part of me says, ‘No, you’re not. You’re not brave at all.’
I watched people gear up. I looked into the abyss – which is beautiful – and it seemed like a good place to imagine you could fly. People returned from their jumps whooping, their pupils dilated, high, high, high on life.
But while I could imagine the falling and the flying, I could not imagine the stepping off the ledge.
I didn’t jump.
I’m reading Notes on Falling by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen. She is an extraordinary writer. This is one of those books where you get lost enough to only think to google something she’s mentioned later, when you’re not reading, but things from the book are still very present with you. It’s a fictional work, but it incorporates the history of an experimental dance movement from the Sixties and Seventies and the work of the dancer Steve Paxton who began a system of movement he called ‘contact improvisation’.
In Tel Aviv in 2019, Sam and I saw a dance show choreographed by Ohad Naharin. That led to us searching out the documentary Mr Gaga. In the trailer you see Naharin demonstrating how to ‘just let it happen’, meaning how to just let your body fall. I realise now, of course, that he must have been influenced by Paxton’s work.
In dance, falling and responding is instant.
I, though, am falling in slow motion. Like Alice in Wonderland, I’m just falling and falling and it’s curious and not entirely unpleasant. Just very strange.
The act of falling has come to include an ability to adapt to the variables of distance, position and direction, and to intuit which part of my body will take the first moment of impact.
(Steve Paxton)
I am making deciding to take a few months out of my own environment to do my transportable work elsewhere sound terribly dramatic. It isn’t. I’m not fleeing. I’m not running. I’m not relocating. I’m not selling up. My back is not up against a wall. The stakes are low.
I like home very much. My home. I’m always so glad to come back to it, even after just a weekend away. And now I won’t be coming back to it for months.
Which. is. just. so. weird.
I think a lot now about what ‘home’ means when you’re itinerant.
I think about the things that make me feel ‘at home’ that are transportable, the little props, like my notebook and my lip balm. There aren’t that many, but I’m glad for them.
I think about how I dwell also in habit, another kind of home for me, but how – apart from the obvious daily habits of teeth brushing and winding down to sleep – those are disrupted by travel too.
Home, for the next while, I’ve come to see, is simply the inhabitation of my skin.
And I wonder how you inhabit your skin when your context is removed. Skin, in any case, is not objectively a neutral thing, nor is it, subjectively, a safe place.
For now though, at least during the days, I can hold excitement at bay and inhabit my body and the flow of my work, and the new little quirks I develop to assert a kind of belonging in homes that aren’t mine.
This, I understand now, is my first true lesson in ‘live in the moment’.
But at night, with my defences down, my imagination goes wild trying to hold on as I free fall into the next chapter.
I’ve stepped off the ledge.
I’m jumping at last.
I am empty of ideas.
I am full of motion.
I miss you and Ollie already. Write soon.
All my love,
Kowski