Words that might someday mean something:
words that might someday mean something, to someone other than myself: a running transcript of half cooked thoughts.
A running transcript of half cooked thoughts, still pink and fleshy under fork bite. Metallic taste, and that’s why I don't eat meat - no stomach for blood, metaphorically or literally. Yeah, I know sorry this is how my brain works, and I still don't understand the correct use of proper punctuation. Teeth locked bars, lips parted in hyperbolic twist, awkward face smile, and a semi-ironic double thumbs up baby.
October 2022 - a revision of handwritten notes,
neon pink notebook - overdraft in paperchase because the aesthetics were just too darn cute, and i was feeling lost and low
I’d like to think that I'm not materialistic, or captivated in a capitalist’s wet dream. I’d like to think I don’t care about money - as in I have some but not that much, and will probably never have enough to own a home or rent a one bed flat in london. I save a little, but also, what’s the point if home ownership is unattainable and I might die anyway so might as well have a few nice little things to get through the day. Anyway, tangent.
I’d like to think I don’t care about money. I’m human. I worry about it, everyday, a lot. Anything and everything I see, I see a number flash. Message on a video game, low battery on the screen
Annoying - not catastrophically urgent
Mosquito ripping through the air to zip across your pixelated screen - mosquito nipping through the air to zip across your skin - low level fear - anxious - bloodsucker buzzes off, buggers off, to furthest corner of the room, where it hums
Humming in harmony with the fridge
And the neighbours’ TV
White noise melodies.
Tangent - “bugger off” do you think that was derived from bug get off? Like warding off a mosquito, hmmm?
£15! £5! £80! £2! £10!!!!!!!!!
1.5 HOURS! HALF AN HOUR! FULL 8 HOUR DAY!
Meaningless economic numbers - derivatives? - but they flash redundant currencies, cost of my labour, spent. I look at a thing and I see its price, I see that and think of its cost, the time I could spend, would spend - have, for that thing.
It’s just a thing, same way money is just a digit.
A friend said “Santander’s gone to Malaga, Barclays to Corfu!” First bank holiday of the year. Back to work tomorrow, feels like a slushie thought, fuzzy thought, distant tendrils of cloud hanging low in sympathetic parallels to the horizon line. The horizon’s always blue, did you know that? A creamy blue, full fat, extra thick, poured straight from the tub, circumvented the jug entirely. Extra step, arbitrary but pretty, upholding middle class values, the importance, no, necessity of respectable stone and earthenware. I wonder about the discerning qualities of stone and earth. About the symbolism of status and worth.
Fuzzy thoughts laying low under clouds but above the wavering baseline.
“It’s just capitalism, baby!” One friend says to the other, as they compare deodorant cans. Sharing is caring, but hygiene is important.
sure men
right guard
extra strong
extra bold
“For sure, man, it’s got that extra strong hold!”
Deodorant hangs in the air, parallel lines with the clouds and ceiling and tabletop. Sunglasses on, polarised lenses, inside
tabletop pools of buttery yellow.
Work feels far away, another faint blue line over the horizon.
Jam jar flooded by paint water, egg whites with curling tendrils. It’s all fuzzy baby. SSRIs mixed white into the deep night sky. Sertraline with a pallet knife and bristles.
And it’s all blue baby.
Weak winter sky blue, still SAD but it’s subdued, paler hue, it’s all baby blue.
Still - it’s fuzzy.
Cold toes on the pavement outside the pub - NOTES ON PHONE
Words slip from lips
They stain
The sheets in virile abundance
Lady Macbeth tries her best
Knuckles cracked and trailing red
Water runs pink
The words remain
Oil slick that slipped
From lips
Loose
And twisting
Seeped through the polyester sheets
17% cotton
White sheets are no good
With slippery lips
And words that stain.
b&w 35mm - Abingdon 2022
Soft Intro
The repetitive action of looping yarn
over needle,
and sliding needle through yarn, pulling yarn taut,
and counting up the stitches.
Knit and purl,
knit
knit
purl:
keep that tension consistent.
Patient repetitions of simple movements, meditations slipping into muscle memory.
Repetitive strain injuries
on the wrists,
friction smoothing out fingerprints,
and still,
thread caressing with its gentle kiss.
Trance-like, transient.
Time slips,
slides -
hours crashing in an avalanche.
But here are the rows;
neat, tidy, imperfect rows, a scattering of stitch markers puncturing the lines.
And I can count up the lost hours.
Days spent with yarn wandering down my forearms,
snaking up my wrists and deftly moving through my hands
to loop
and rotate
and twist on the needles.
Loops eventually forming fabric,
thick.
Spongy to touch and
clench in fists.
Visceral evidence of the time that had disappeared behind my back.
The world was unravelling,
but I had my knitted scraps,
and that was enough.
*
These words (both above and below) were the first two pages my dissertation tutor read, after I submitted a frenzied blur two minutes before the extended deadline, seven months after it was first due. Blind panic had set in; and the cocktail of sleep deprivation and excessive caffeine consumption was dancing across the screen with pixelated footnotes.
Obviously, I pretended my dissertation did not happen and never existed, blocked it out from my memory with a couple of beers and a blanket of sleep. I only looked at it again recently, when I was searching for my expired student number. Decided to read the soft intro, soft like a pillow to bulk out the word count.
I remembered why I wrote it, and how these words were the only ones I could catch hold of amongst the swirl of half thoughts and broken phrases. almost like cloud staring, and these words were the only shapes I could pull out.
Words mean everything and nothing. So I thought maybe these would mean something to someone else. Or maybe they mean nothing, and that’s okay too - they’re only words.
P.S. In the process of transferring it here, I have fixed it up a bit to save embarrassment.
*
I think it would be naive to ignore the overwhelming presence of the Pandemic, and the effects it has had on modes of cultural production, ways of creative thinking, and even the most base and deeply personal states of emotional wellbeing. If it were not for the pandemic and the acute set of circumstances it has generated over the past year, I would not be discussing the necessity of craft practices, nor would I have discovered my interest in craft making processes and histories.
In a period defined by isolation and loss of the physical experience, I found myself lost and spiralling through virtual interactions. I’d venture outside once a week to walk three minutes to the cornershop, before shuffling home and urgently closing my bedroom door again, as if pushing a towel against the inch gap between the door and floor would nullify any reality outside. After too much time obsessing over news cycles and daily statistics, I shut down. Numb; as if my brain was pushing that towel against my nervous system.
I didn't quite trust anything that danced across my screen. And so, in desperate pursuit for something physical to do, whilst my brain slept, I dug out an old ball of yarn and slightly warped set of needles from under my mum’s bed, and relearnt how to knit. Simple squares of garter stitch to begin with, serving no practical purpose as an object, or in terms of aesthetics. But it was the process and repetitive actions of knitting these “useless” squares that embodied the sense of urgency I felt to create something tactile and tangible.
Squares, eventually morphed into metre long stripey strips, with the distant desire to make a blanket - perhaps a need for functionality, and subsequently a practical purpose. Eighteen months later, and that blanket is yet to materialise. However, I knit almost everyday, finding a quiet comfort in the motions, and the gradual growth of the indecipherable knitted things I produce.