On first meeting a person, you are too busy trying to familiarise yourself with them – a bodily and intellectual them—to be able to study the face properly: you are encoding onto it. This is why I like public spaces: public transport, parks, city centres. In them you meet strangers with whom you will not form a relationship, and so with a disinterested eye you can study faces.
Location: The spaces in between (Taking moments (back))
The colours in the evening are a carefully selected palette, moving from rich pinks to fiery oranges, then a gradient of deep blue pulls itself up from behind the buildings, and up and over us it goes. It’s an old man slowly pulling more duvet over to his side of the bed, across his rounded, curled shoulders, with his firm forearm and frail wrist. It is an agonising slowness with all the beauty of something so delicate.
Location: Home (Intellectual Attraction)
Let's talk about loving people. I don't mean loving someone, which is a more determined affair, but loving en masse. Loving people feels like cupping clear spring-water in your hands – knowing it's going to leave, but also knowing it still available, and knowing the source isn’t far from grasp. It’s their mind you’re after.… Continue reading Location: Home (Intellectual Attraction)
Location: Train (Books)
It is only through becoming an encyclopedia, a reference book, a resource myself that any doubts are removed. In those moments I know there is a use for these books and for the time I have devoted to them - more use than the act of reading provides alone.
Location: Liverpool (Birds)
But back to the birds (they, like the ping of a notification, punctuate my day and lasso attention towards them.)
Review: Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley
'Somewhere in the mind a lunatic shuffled a pack of snapshots and dealt them at random, shuffled once more and dealt them in a different order, again and again, indefinitely. There was no chronology. The idiot remembered no distinction between before and after.'
Location: Iceland (6)
And perhaps whatever reality there is in the notion of coherent individual continuity is just a function of the physical existence. - Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza
Review: The Handmaid’s Tale
The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopic book written by Margaret Atwood in 1985. It explores a new regime in America borne of an infertility crisis which levels the country’s population numbers. In it, the protagonist Offred takes her place as a Handmaid, one of a group of women who are still fertile, given the task of breeding for the sake of the country
Location: Iceland (5)
All writing is an obituary. In writing, as with any confrontation with reality, the person writing begins to change. Once they write they admit the thoughts of the person now dead: a new self-emerges, with a more refined or more confused idea on the subject that they have discussed. However, unlike a rabbit trying to escape a fox, or a plant getting repotted, this is self-directed. This is an object of the universe allowing its own internal logic to alter itself, taking experience (known or projected) rather than living it. It's an alchemy of the self.
Location: Iceland (4)
I am coming to understand today why taking time to think is important: thinking takes time. A whole month for one piece of work seems excessive but really it is a perfect amount of time. I’m learning to not rush things along, to give them the attention and care they are due.
Words on Location 