Hello-ha!
I accidentally came across a strange Instagram post two weeks ago. A woman, beaming beatifically in the background, holds a leaf with a hairy caterpillar on it, towards her camera screen, and begins to sing: fecunda, fecunda, fecundaaaa. Fecunda, fecunda, fecundaaaa, letting the last syllable hold and vibrate and hang a little.
‘Fecund’ is such a great word. Kind of dirty and rich and full of secrets. A bit ugly and a bit sweary too. It’s a word that has to do with soil or land in which lots of things are likely to grow.
That’s how my brain felt when I took that week off at the end of January. I keep dreaming about babies and about older people too – mostly my friends’ parents – either fussing about someone or needing attention, a sort of intergenerational symbol soup of support, movement, new things and baton-passing. If I wasn’t already hyper aware that my life is in what one would call a transition phase, my dreams muscled in to point out the obvious.
Now though, I’m back to trying not to freak about how much I have to do and wondering why I decided to act on one of the ideas (this very Love Letter) that typhooned through me during my R & R.
But I did. And I will push through, because I feel like these records of the year will mean something to you. And to me. And for the selfish reason that perhaps I can remain attached to my creative energies by having this free and easy thing to work on once a month.
While we were walking along the shore over the rocks on one of the days of the mini holiday, I felt queasy. Okay, look, we know the seas are in a state. We know we’re walking on a Plastic Beach a lá Gorillaz, but this time, it really got me. Most vivid, were the two plastic water bottles with Korean writing on their labels still fresh as the day they were printed, and the football-sized knot of fishing line in every colour of nylon available. The irony of our nourishment requiring us to throttle the seas.
It made me think of the poem that made me fall instantly and irretrievably in love with Sam. I had no idea who he was when he got up and read it at an open mic in his very quiet voice. I had to strain to hear him. The poem was about a father and daughter on Boulders beach, among the penguins, between those beautiful round stone colossi. They find a sea anemone and he shows his child the fringe around its mouth. Then he notices there is something in the mouth. In an instant of shock and embarrassment, he realises that it’s a chicken bone stuck inside the anemone, and he turns his daughter away from this horror while trying to dig the cartilage out of the sea flower.
That poem hit hard. I found the title devastating too: ‘visitation rights’.
Last week, back home, I went to swim in the Seapoint pool with Jacobs. We got there a bit late and all the lanes in the big pool were taken, so I went to the smaller one, where children usually play when it’s not a school day. It’s long enough to do lengths and, though shallow, deep enough to accommodate my strokes.
Halfway across my first length in that bright, clean water, I swam over a clean chicken bone.
There should be a word for the queasiness of unexpected evidence – in the middle of doing something restorative – of how disgusting humans are. Any ideas? The ease-quease? Kind of works too, because ‘having ease’ implies a kind of insensitive insouciance towards what is kak about the world. Maybe we always need our ease queased.
The highlight of my extensive reading in January was definitely Deborah Levy’s Real Estate. The book, as always with her, touches on many topics, but this one approaches those many things from the perspective of the claims we make: real estate, ownership. Our cubing, colonising and capitalising.
On one of the days of my mini break, I walked past the rolling waves, which looked weirdly oblivious to the crap they churned up. On the beach, a dead seal lay stinking. I thought about assumptions of tenancy and proprietary rights. Across the coast road were enormous houses, spectacular in their ugliness, obscene in their footprint. Most of the two-storey palaces had their curtains and blinds drawn, their alarm lights gleaming in the shadows of ridiculous porticos, until next December.
I often wonder about what to do with individual worry. Or rather, what I should do with MY worry, to alleviate the anxiety so that it doesn’t amount to mere – unhelpful – wheel-spinning. I have my little solutions that I tweak and adjust all the time, but I enjoyed reading Rebecca Solnit’s Ten ways to confront climate crisis without losing hope.
I’m attending a Zoom seminar shortly on gender-affirming health care and harm reduction.
Harm reduction, in social and public health terms, the way I understand it, is about policies that are designed to lessen the negative and physical consequences that come with the things people do.
It’s like this: if people use drugs, how can public health policies make what they do safer for them? For instance, if people inject drugs, they are at much higher risk of becoming infected with HIV. So, programmes might be run to ensure that they’re supplied with clean needles, and a system for disposing of needles so that they don’t become an environmental health risk.
I like the idea of ‘harm reduction’ in a general sort of way too. It feels like the best way to proceed considering that we are implicated in earth’s devastation simply by being alive right now.
I found a scrap of paper earlier today on which I’d written ‘forward contamination’ at some point. I don’t know what it means or why I wrote it down. It felt like randomly finding the antonym of ‘harm reduction’.
To avoid forward contamination, as far as that is possible, and to reduce harm, seem like generally good principles to live by.
Later
The best thing that happened in January was the unexpected party.
Your new sibling’s calm and lovely mother turned forty and invited me to join them because I’d driven you through for the party. I wasn’t going to say yes. I had work to do and I wasn’t sure about whether it was right to presume that I fit in there. But they’re just such wonderful, open, lovely, accepting people, that I felt at home.
I might have felt more at home than they wanted me to: four hours of non-stop dancing outside between the sea and the enormous Arniston sunset. I could hardly walk the next day. My night of reckless dancing introduced me to old-person knees. I’d had young-person knees until the sun set on the hottest place on earth that day.
But it was worth it. I didn’t realise how starved I was for uncomplicated human connection with strangers around the things that bind instantly: music, food and beer. I was lucky to have an excellent quarantine bubble, but man it was nice to meet new people and dance and sing (maskless!) in the open-air after two years of extreme conservatism for the greater good. That night felt infused with love and hope, though that could just be me projecting my needs on to Gee’s special day.
I sweated right through all my clothes and, together with the smoke my threads and hair absorbed from the braai fire, I can say with absolute conviction that that’s the smelliest I’ve ever been. It was fantastic.
It’s the memory of that that made Tick Tick Boom by Sage the Gemini the song I’ve most listened since you left. It makes me dance every time I hear it and reminds me that getting rowdy sometimes is the absolute tits.
Add it to this month’s playlist, okay?
Here’s some other stuff I did that I think you’d be interested in.
You already watched Clickbait, at my recommendation, though it’s had mixed reviews. I thought the relationships between the characters in the family were well-pitched and that Zoe Kazan and Betty Gabriel’s performances, particularly across from one another, were really good. I also liked the two sons. Main thing: limited series. I love a limited series.
But after the first season of Ted Lasso, I was so glad it wasn’t a limited series. I know I’ve told you already because we started before you left, and I sensed some resistance, which I think is based on my own initial resistance: urgh – football. How interesting could it be? Well! I can’t get enough of it. It is extremely well-written and the way the characters develop is deftly managed.
The show is a triumph of bright and excited minds working together. The intertextual references, the internal structuring and structural signposting (which is not overdone – you have to be alive to notice it, and when you do, you have these little sparks of ‘how cool!’), the dialogue and the depth of the acting (it’s comedy, but there are some very hard scenes too, and the actors all produce the goods in both directions) work together to make this one of the strongest and most satisfying streaming experiences I’ve had.
One doesn’t want to overstate things, because then you set people up for disappointment, but I really hope you get around to it. Another reason I love it: seeing people read in the series. Just normal people, doing normal reading, casually, no big deal. I spend a lot of time with my head upside down, trying to work out what they’re reading. Turns out Coach Beard reads the very book I bought Sam for Christmas last year.
I want to make a deal with you: when you’re a bit more settled and can start something, you do Ted Lasso and I’ll finally start Euphoria, which you’ve been urging me to do for ages. What do you think?
Rightio. Cape Town’s hot today and I need to go and stretch my scrunched-up editing body out in the gym pool before I start the next chunk of work.
Bye-bye,
Kowski.