8: rapid unreadable articulations

Spinning too fast for living – September 2022

There’s that painting of the sausage dog trotting beside its owner on a leash: Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash it’s called. It was painted in 1912 by Giacomo Balla. What’s remarkable is that he paints the whirring of movement.

How did he see that? Would I be able to see that? Can you see motion in its intricate parts if you make your eyes go soft when you’re looking at something that is moving? If I was able to see it, and I was a painter, would I be able to paint it? The seven tails, the paws without number, the swinging of the leash?

That picture is how this past month feels now in a moment when I must recall it to make sense of it.

A blur. A smear of action. A smudge of enterprise. The rapid, unreadable articulation of minor and less-minor feats of working and living.

I prefer to think about my days and weeks as they pass and assign them neat adjectives: productive, lazy, boring, frustrating, busy. But I can’t distinguish any of the weeks from one another since the last time I wrote you.

It feels like the most significant thing I can remember was having my equanimity disturbed during yoga. Of all places.

The two characters who talk in whatever the opposite of sotto voce is right up to the final minute before class starts, and then begin again within a minute of the end of Śavasāna were there. The one who assumes that everyone is interested in nasally updates on the progress of her house renovation always walks in rubbing her hands, exclaiming about the cold, shutting the sliding door (the single ventilation aperture in the room) and turns on the fan heater.

The usual teacher turns the heater off when we get started and opens the door a crack. But the usual teacher wasn’t there. This one switched the heater back on when someone switched if off and closed the doors when someone cracked them for some air. Twenty bodies breathing into a space already overheated and under-ventilated less than two years after we all became aware of the necessity of ventilation for health. I left within twenty minutes, because I felt like I was going to chunder on my mat.

I was so cross. I realise that the world is divided into fresh-air freaks and those who believe drafts are work of the devil himself, but surely exercising warms us? Surely Covid has made everyone wary of stuffy rooms stuffed with breathers breathing?

I was still feeling cross and cheated in bed that night. Mostly because no matter how wild life becomes, I always make time for movement. It’s how I cope.

I will stop seeing people, stop buying groceries and just eat buttered toast, stop reading, stop listening to podcasts – offer up every good thing – but not the scheduled exercise hours. Sam once called my dedication to exercise my silver bullet. And it’s true. When I don’t move, I get sick.

It’s still weird for me to think of myself as someone who is dedicated to exercise. I grew up thinking that only people who were good at sport exercised regularly. I also had the idea that the only real proof of ‘proper’ exercise is longer legs and daintier boobs. Since neither of those things have materialised for me I can’t possibly be an exerciser, can I?

I have always moved: rollerskating, cycling (not the kind that requires cleats and shorts with padding on the bum), swimming, beach volleyball (when I first moved to Cape Town), Nia, tennis, Badminton (!), squash, karate for a while, hiking. But the point of everything I did when I did these things was the pleasure of doing something that was fun.

Then for a long time I got caught up in the word ‘exercise’ as something that had to be done with the intention of improving. Your times, your reps, your weight – whatever could be measured had to be measured and calibrated and compared and – mostly importantly – improved on.

It took me so long to realise that that simply doesn’t suit my personality at all. I’m bad at keeping meticulous records and when I managed to overcome that resistance, I found that the records always proved only one thing to me: I was falling short. I wasn’t good enough. For what exactly, who can guess. It took a while to work out that exercising like that – counting and analysing – extracted the pure joy of movement out of physical activity. Movement became a chore, something I had to fit in so that I could earn my daily good-girl points to secure my place in heaven. Or something. I dunno what I thought.

Doesn’t matter what age you are, you must always remain alert to the possibility of being sucked into silly ideas that don’t suit you. You have to fight (often yourself) for your right to be wrong. To be different. To want differently. To do things the way they work for you.

At the beginning of this year (sometimes it takes very long to learn something), I realised that I didn’t need to count or measure anything as far as exercise was concerned because my only goal is really just to get away from my desk and to feel air (or water) on my skin as confirmation that I am not merely a sitting being whose only moving parts are her hands playing laptop keyboard tunes.

I’m never going to run a marathon. Ever. Or do ocean swimming races. Or (sadly) become one of Beyoncé’s back-up dancers. I’m never, ever, ever (I say this with a very heavy heart) going to have a flat stomach. So, why the constant gauging and fathoming of my movement? Since I started thinking about it like that, it seems as silly as measuring or counting my breaths.

I move because it makes me extremely happy. Because I cannot sit and meditate in one spot because I have ants in my pants. I move because I start with thoughts jamming up the system, and end with the blissful hum of an empty brain. Because repetitive motion has a calming effect on me, the way the clatter of train wheels has a calming effect on me. Because when my feet are hitting the ground in whatever rhythm at whatever speed, my thoughts are beside or behind me instead of running up ahead of me. Because when I move my arms overhead to pull my body through the water, and the water has dulled the sound of the surrounding world, I can swim through a bad feeling or a badgering thought until it simply drops off and dissolves into the chlorine out of sheer boredom.

I’ve not been able to go for walks at all (too busy) and I’ve only managed to fit in one swim a week for several weeks. So to have that one yoga class spoiled was a big deal.

To dwell on it is a bit sad though, so I’m glad to report that I have finally got over my failed yoga class. Go me.

Speaking of meditation, I’ve started doing a new and very un-me thing (it’s only three days old, that’s how new a thing it is). After I’ve had my tea in the morning, I light a little tea candle, set a timer for five minutes, and then stare at the flame for a bit. Because things have been a blur of more deadlines than I can handle in a forty-hour week and I haven’t had a weekend for three weekends in a row, I am in constant danger of spinning out entirely.

Also, I’m in the middle of some major work changes and there is so much to do that if I lose momentum, I’m going to give up through sheer overwhelm. Where my focus is usually tight and controlled, I now have several things I need to think about in a day, on several different jobs and undertakings, and I keep losing the thread of things.

I thought of doing this morning moment because Natti told me last week that she gets up at 4.30 every day to read her bible and pray and sit for a few minutes before she gets ready for work and wakes her daughter for school. It seemed like such an infinitely peaceful way to start a day.

I don’t read the bible. I don’t feel like journaling because then I’ll just get sucked up into word-things. I am not a great fan of meditation, though I know it works well for Ollie and Sam. But sitting and staring at a flame for five minutes in the morning seems like a good way to approach a busy day. It’s like me and the day can face one another and say hi and peace-be-with-you before we start ripping one another’s limbs off in a feeding frenzy.

I woke early on Sunday and tried it for the first time sitting on the carpet in the living room. Something just beyond the candle caught my eye. A drop of water was wobbling on the end of the geyser overflow pipe. I could see it fattening but it clung on, reflecting the early morning light. I kept expecting it to fall and I didn’t want to blink in case I missed that moment when it detached itself. When my timer beeped, all I’d done was try to outstare a will-I-won’t-I bead shimmering on the end of a workaday pipe.

But it didn’t feel wasted. If I hadn’t seen that drop, who would have? And if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have seen it. I would have seen all the things I usually see every day, but not that. I wouldn’t have remembered that there is a world in which a drop of water can hang poised between here and there until it is ready to let go and allow the next drop in line to mature behind it.

When I was still working with Mvelase, I remember him saying that when there was too much to do, he tried to forget about everything on his list except what he was working on that minute. I’ve been trying to do that too.

That, and moving, and staring at a flame or a drop of water for five minutes every morning as the sun bangs into Cape Town now that it’s spring, might unblur my days.

Because I don’t want my life to pass in a smear. I want it pointillist and defined so that I have pleasure in each event. I will always have to be busy because there’s just one of me doing my work. But I want to try hard to mitigate in every way I can life simply passing me by.

I am always changing. Everything is always changing. And to watch and name the change is to make stories. And to make stories is to live with every pore open, every sense attuned.

In the centre of my stomach, at the centre of the peach of my existence, what is there more beautiful than a living thing in transformation?

Lyrics from Gap Year by Twin Tooth

And here you are, beside me now, at the dining room table. You are no longer over there. You are transformed. And I am transformed. And the Queen is dead, and the world is changed again. And what is more beautiful than bearing witness to the slow revolution of life?

Now that you are here, I suppose the letters are superfluous on a purely practical level.

But I won’t stop writing this Love Letter. It’s become a monthly date with myself.

And with you who reads it, regardless of where we are in relation to one another.

Love,

Kowski.