Delight
in pursuit
Hello hello,
Another month gone. It is not a unique observation, that as one grows older time appears to charge by with swifter and less detailed passage. However, what is not news to humanity always has the opportunity to shock the individual individually.
It has been depressing for a while, personally since about April, more in July, and the Fall wasn’t great either. But a little trick I play on myself, in order to stay alive, is to be interested. That is to say, no matter what, even when bad things happen, are happening, I approach it as much as I can as an observer. How interesting, the researcher and child inside me muses. This is adulthood, this is the world, this is my life. The din in the living room I once overheard from bed, is now mine. However brutal, however charmed.
When I cannot achieve delight, which I chase in perpetuity, I hold onto interest for dear life. Despair is understandable. It is often inevitable. However, it thrives in a continual loop of self-focus and is best short-lived. Transformed into more valuable pursuits.
I am always struck by how rote political conversation sounds. People open their mouths, they seem to feel things, but when they speak, so often, to me, it sounds like bad acting. Like a speech being quoted poorly. Or, quoted correctly, but with the wrong cadence, wrong delivery, wrong impression behind the eyes. I feel jittery with the blandness. Worse yet, the blandness meeting the extreme fear and extreme destruction. Divisiveness, bland and treacherous. Sand in the mouth, inspiring the lethal tandem of panic and what is the point.
The only divergence between good and evil is the belief that we must subjugate/diminish/eradicate others to achieve our visions. With this in mind we would do well to reevaluate perceptions of historical good overall. Too often, we allow the distinction to become a matter of perspective.
It is one of my deepest held beliefs that the reaction to suffering should not be a leveled playing field via more suffering. Like I said, delight, the truest, most ephemeral, but also most resilient facet of human experience. I search for it, try to provide it, shore it up always, for times when it is gone. I think of it like a tonic, an antidote, for when shit really hits the fan.
It is a delicate distinction. Not distraction, leading to apathy, nor oblivion, but a fundamental hopefulness. Without which, liberation is impossible.
Recently I re-read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. The first time I encountered it I was 19, and in my panic about the world around me, it was part of the cavernous syllabi I was shoring up to try to understand. To rediscover it, in this precise moment felt destined. For though it was first published in 1963, Baldwin’s observations about the world, and about America in particular remain as true as when they were first written. I will not do it justice trying to summarize, for its elegant concision and precise intelligence stuns.
Its specificity, regarding the Black American experience is important to absolutely everything because specificity reveals vastness. Connection. We cannot talk about history, politics, religion, war, power, beauty, pain, violence, death, life…need I go on, within fantasy vacuums of exclusivity. Divisiveness, regarding any categorical distinction, is, as Baldwin says, delusion. If history proves anything it is that opposing sides, should they be conjured as distinct entities, are ultimately tethered to the same myths.
As I said, I wont tell you as well as he will, but I implore you to read it. I myself am here to tell you about other things.
I do ultimately, in this silly little newsletter, want mostly to buoy you. Counter the despair with beauty. Plant 98 bulbs, of all different varieties, so they may emerge, explode upon the privilege (and should be right) of un-scorched earth, come Spring. Or the Narcissus, before hand, indoors, for Christmas. Unfurling with such human sweetness, nearly fleshy, polarizing in its intense life-like aroma. To watch green so quickly erupt is, promising. I can smell its first bloom as I write this, reminding me of the pikake perfume my great grandmother wore, dripped onto a little piece of tissue and wiggled inside the hatched mouth of a brass fish-shaped charm around her neck.
What else is good?
Drinking red wine when it’s cold outside, not novel, but, persisting. A big round goblet of a glass, thin and tinkling, an echo of a chyme when clinked. The work of Les Cailloux du Paradis is real and tangible, right now it exists and I get to drink it. So lucky. So vivid is the experience, each time, like fruit trees, immortal and somehow managing to flourish in a cave. Red currants, a thousand years old, never diminishing. Left as an offering for the afterlife, and discovered after a millennia, in perfect, even improved, condition. A tapestry where threaded oranges glow goldenly.
Calling my brother. To be reminded we come from the same place. Feel the need to tease and to protect. A curious but pleasant feeling, watching him get older. Refracting back years to me, in a paper-weight of shared history. Heavy but decorative in its self-contained universe. An image of life, running always parallel, to the independent life lived more separately. The foundation from which all other experience is reacted to, resisted, or confirmed.
Seasons. I buy plane tickets to San Diego. I picture it like the white embossed notecards of a cactus plant I bought from a small shop in Arizona. I like the smooth plainness of them, arid but graceful, like clean white bones. More true of the dessert I think than the midcentury technicolor we so often see it represented in. The heart of the dessert is white, white sand, a horizon nearly invisible as it greets a blaring sky, so immaculate, so cruelly void of cloud cover, beaming in constant bright absence. Its dry cleanliness distinct, even in winter. Never sopping, nicely chalky, colors emerging in smokey pastel, but saturated too, like nearby plant life smeared onto a rock. Desert grey-green. Magenta. An Agnes Martin mauve.
And then it’s opposite. Fall in New York, how I remember it, all golden yellow. The clock tower on 6th Avenue as the sun rose behind it, crisp and timely. Hot, clear, glittering cortado glasses in a row. The Brownstones on Bainbridge promising a kind of adulthood and civility, I dreamed of so ardently. A newly acquired mustard yellow jacket from the Salvation army on 23rd. A newly acquired perception of existence from a book, or class, or love. A tortoise shell barrette from C.O. Bigelow, for hair which is sheared, or grown again, in perpetual celebration of malleability. The way my living room, on the third floor, with its wide windows and white walls, would look at 4pm. An incandescent gift to arrive home to. A surprise, each time, that special light. Then finally, the shadow the cutwork curtains cast, intricate and lacy on my closed bedroom door once the tree outside my window dropped its leaves and the streetlight shown in.
Now British seasons. Wet but romantic. Everything mossy or peony grey-pink, flushed but cold. Or just grey, sullen adolescent grey, which we accept by lighting a fire. I write this while one burns. I lit it upon waking, while my coffee was dripping slowly into a mug. I light a candle that smells like mimosa blossoms and toasted rice. I love to have candles lit during daytime, watch the way light interacts with light. Camel-colored cashmere against my skin. Scrambled eggs, flecked with shallot and spinach, stirred slowly in a cast iron pan. Cast iron pans, how their lore has been passed down to me. If lore is function, which, it is.
What else? You won’t be shocked to hear that I love Christmas. This time of year in general. I love thematic structure. Every seasonally-infused festive opportunity latched onto with a palette. White & silver tinkling, blue and green tartan, red of course in syrupy wine-like transparency, resisting the classification of either blue or orange undertone. True carmine, invisible purple royalling the whole thing up.
I always work on New Years Eve, or else tend to avoid it. Yet the image of gold sequins and delicate pasta bellybuttons floating in steaming brodo lives on. The candelabra in my mind ablaze. The big band reaches its crescendo in perfect saxophone humanity while I’m spun around strongly. Shiny clean hair belonging to friends and strangers puffs gentle smells around the room which is scented otherwise like burning wood, blue cheese, ginger, and wax.
I want to make mont blanc and chocolate cake with prunes. Have grilled cheese sandwiches, sturdy slices of apple, and Champagne. Bougainvillea-pink craft paper with a sheen tied in fawn-colored velvet ribbon. Wine kept cold outside, retrieved as needed, from beyond the steamy-windowed room. Black and gold. Silk and metal. Brocade vests stopping at the waist of billowing dark skirts that hold their shape. Long walks in the hills with cut-glass sunshine, cold and bright. Paper invitations gleaming with angel trumpets and looping navy blue script.
My cooking advice: remember that dill is wonderful on Winter vegetables, and not just beets either! Throw it on slow-cooked parsnips, carrots, leeks, and potatoes with a squeeze of high bright lemon. Mix crushed fennel seeds, celery salt, white pepper & black peppercorns, garlic, red wine vinegar, and olive oil and put in on some lamb. A scoop of French grainy mustard in with pestled curry spices is a welcome addition to applicable dishes. Chicken soup is a great winter breakfast and makes you feel like a million dollars for the rest of the day. Pour hot whole milk in your french press instead of boiling water if you want to experience true luxury. Poach pears in white wine instead of red, and eat them with stiffly whipped unsweetened cream, maple syrup, and crushed hazelnuts. Snack on paper-thin slices of Emmental, spelt pretzels, and a glass of rosy-skinned Chardonnay from Tissot. Slice a winter squash in half, deseed it, sprinkle with salt generously, fill the cavity 3/4 full with milk, wrap carefully in tinfoil so as not to spill liquid, and put it in a hot oven for two hours. Serve hearty custard-soft slices with oozy stracciatella and crisp sage leaves. Preserve meyer lemon peels and use them blitzed up in dressing for tumbling sherbet-hued chicory salads. Make tea-cake with pureed sweet potato and rye. Drink Genmaicha in the afternoon. Put tangerine peels and herbs like thyme and mint into a jug of cold water and drink it all day long.
Sending delight to you all! As much as possible. Xxx A
