field notes; week of july 30, 2018
i’ve recently started a work-from-home writing gig which requires me to hand in a project every monday, which means tuesdays are now my recover-from-all-the-work-you-just-did-by-doing-absolutely-nothing day. i highly recommend designating one day of the week to do fuck-all; it’s been transformative. all i did today was read and nap and make risotto, and i capped it all off with a “yogic sleep” class, which is a very fancy way of saying that i laid on a pillow in a candlelit room for an hour while gentle flute music played in the background and the instructor said things like “let the earth support you” and “give thanks to your body” and “hold on, we’re going om,” because this is, after all, a yoga studio in toronto, and drake’s personal brand knows no bounds.
anyway, between this super-chill day and the aleve i just popped to nuke some cramps, i feel like a human noodle. i feel so relaxed. let’s do this.
one hundred and seventy-three.
i guess you’re as real as me
maybe i can live with that-- rivers cuomo, butterfly, 1996
in the winter of 2014, i discovered pinkerton, and i was never the same. it’s an unbearable cliché, i know, to say that a certain piece of music Changed Your Life, but it’s impossible to overstate the enduring impact it made, or the depth of my absorption. if you know it at all, you know that it’s a hideous record, cuomo laying bare his misdeeds and neuroses and grappling against self-loathing. it was unspeakably vital — life-saving, even — to discover this song cycle at the nadir of a deep depression during my final year of university. this was someone diving into his ugly wilderness and emerging with acceptance of his own imperfections, and a commitment to getting better. he doesn’t quite make it to redemption, and that’s okay; the record is stronger for it, for the ambiguous, bittersweet ending that is “butterfly.”
i can’t listen to it now and feel what i did then. the previous, wounded peyton who needed this record doesn’t really exist anymore, a skin i’ve shed. but i found myself needing “butterfly” this week, if only as a companion to cuomo’s more recent salvo: “everything will be alright in the end.” i have it tattooed on my arm. i trace the words with the tip of my finger when i need to remember it’s true.
one hundred and seventy-four.
are you mine?
my heart?
mine anymore?
stay with me for a while
that’s an awfully real gun-- joanna newsom, only skin, 2006
and then there’s part of me that regrets the amount of time i sunk into dedicating literal scholarly study to weezer when i could have been wrapping myself up in the impossibly intricate Joanna Newsom Cinematic Universe (JNCU). i’ve been meaning to take a deep dive into this blog full of feminist criticism of her music. i think my life will be the richer for it. there was a period of a few days this year, right after her music came to streaming services for the first time, where i decided i’d spend an entire month listening to just joanna and nothing else. and i managed to keep it up, too, until cardi b’s album dropped, and i wasn’t about to ignore that. it made for a potent listening combination. the week-long period wherein i banned all music except joanna newsom and cardi b was the most open my third eye has ever been.
anyway, even knowing her art on this most very basic, surface level, it’s very clear to me that i need to be paying attention, that i have a lot to learn from the way she uses words. the devastating, restrained economy of “stay with me for a while/that’s an awfully real gun.” god.
one hundred and seventy-five.
friend is too small a word for the dead, lover too small a word for the cruel. hope is too dumb a word for change, heal too wide a word for time.
-- @_her_moth_, 2018
big themes of the past week, slash things i try not to think about when i’m in yogic sleep class and i’m struggling desperately to relax: friendship, death, love, cruelty, hope, potential for change, healing, the passage of time.
one hundred and seventy-six.
you want to make everything live. you read about pruning and try it. it says don’t be scared to cut a fuchsia back even just a few inches from the soil. so you aren’t scared of anything anymore and do it. it lives.
-- her-moth, not(e)s toward i know not what, 2018
i really want you to click that link and read the whole poem. it was a completely random find for me, an errant click; it only had seven notes on tumblr when i found it. every word of the piece is stunning, but this moment of it… it reached out and gripped me and fixed me, like bones cracking back into their right place under the hands of a chiropractor. a much-needed bit of reassurance that i’d done the right thing.
p.s. fuchsias are beautiful to behold.
one hundred and seventy-seven.
nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it. and that’s a place to start. that’s where the hope is.
-- chris carter, the x-files: herrenvolk, 1996
this is of a piece with tony kushner’s, “you haven’t seen what’s to come; you’ve only seen what you’re afraid is coming.” i think if i took some of the energy i throw towards trying to know everything and funneled it backward, toward acceptance of the things i can’t know, i’d be a lot happier.
one hundred and seventy-eight.
you can’t jump off the bridge, you have to move on to the next part of the story. despite the times you monumentally fail to connect to others, you continue to choose to try.
-- remy boydell, night in the woods, 2017
still thinking about night in the woods, babey! buy it! play it! if you can’t play it, watch somebody else play it on youtube! give yourself this experience!
one hundred and seventy-nine.
i don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces “intelligence.”
-- susan sontag, journal entry, 1965
it’s getting harder for me to write around the life events that make these words so resonant. it’s also getting harder for me to justify my longstanding choice to hide my own humanity in favour of doing the “intelligent” thing. no one cuts right to the heart of my bullshit like sontag.
one hundred and eighty.
no pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too small if it’s cherished.
-- edward st. aubyn, never mind, 1992
i’m two deep in the patrick melrose novels now. they are brutal reads, particularly the second, which is essentially a minute-by-minute chronicle of a life-threatening drug binge. there’s no glory in it, and st. aubyn never flinches. after a lifetime of abuse, patrick turns to heroin — lots and lots and lots of heroin — to numb his trauma. but he’s effectively ladling pain on top of pain; the line between pain that hurts and pain that’s cherished just disappears. i don’t mean to make light of the issue of substance abuse, but i think we all have our own versions of this, these little pains that we seek out in order to make the big ones more tolerable.
one hundred and eighty-one.
there was no one to blame and everyone to help, and those who appeared to deserve the most blame needed the most help.
-- edward st. aubyn, at last, 2012
part of being an adult, i’m learning, part of being someone who loves someone else, is learning to reach right past blame and into help. again, i’ve got three books to go in the patrick melrose series, but good christ am i looking forward to sailing over this redemptive arc.
one hundred and eighty-two.
the desire for reassurance. and equally, to be reassured. (the itch to ask whether i’m still loved, and the itch to say, i love you, half-fearing that the other has forgotten, since the last time i said it.)
...i valued professional competence + force, think (since age 4?) that that was, at least, more attainable than being lovable “just as a person.”
i can’t drive out my obsession with i[rene] -- my grief, my despair, my longing -- with another love. i’m not capable of loving anyone now. i’m being “loyal.” but the obsession must be drained, somehow. i must force some of that energy elsewhere.
-- susan sontag, diary entry, august 6, 1964
susan sontag: girl
me: ikr
susan sontag: sis…
me: who you telling
susan sontag: what i tell u
me: girl i know