Hello people,
I hope this email finds you well. Today, I bring you the first post in ‘Notes on Living’, a new column in which you’ll find a collection of online content that moved me (or whoever curates the list) to a deeper connection with/understanding of myself, community, environment or history.
From this interview with Harriet Loffler (Curator of the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College), I learnt about Brian Eno. Eno is the first person to release music under the label ‘ambient music’, a genre he explained as music intended to "induce calm and a space to think" while remaining "as ignorable as it is interesting." The interview with Loffler made me miss living in a city intentionally committed to cultural exchange/organising through thriving and accessible culture/art institutions, be they Mbari houses, museums, libraries or what. Missing it reaffirmed to me that I deeply value culture work because it is the making of the light through which we can see meaning and patterns in our collective doings.
Speaking of light, here’s an essay on how our minds are affected when there is no light. “In colloquial Nigerian, we do not speak of ‘blackouts’, ‘power cuts’ or ‘load-shedding’. We generally simply say: ‘There is no light.’ And we mean light as in ‘to make things visible’, light as in relief from a burden, light as energy and light as power, all at once. All the connotations of ‘light’ combine to draw a fuller picture of the multiple dimensions of energy poverty.”
Back to patterns. My life lesson for this year has been recognising harmful patterns that I perpetuate in my life, finding how the patterns came to be and taking responsibility for my well-being by endeavouring to break said patterns. It is not a figure of speech when I say it’s been the hardest, most energy-consuming thing I’ve done (still doing) all year. For everything I have made/written/done this year, 60% of the time and energy was spent crying and addressing personal problems that were stopping me from seeing road as clearly I needed so I could settle down and do the work well. Be it cooking or getting to my desk in the morning, I have first had to do this dance perfectly played out in this short extract of Cafe Müller, a dance/performance art piece by Pina Bausch. I am usually all three characters simultaneously.
Going back to therapy/counselling could have helped but finding a new right-fit therapist comes with the risk of trying and suffering bad encounters. I have not felt able to afford a wrong turn—the streets are not safe from inflation—so I’ve been DIY-ing this pattern-breaking, story-rewriting process. At first, I listened to too much therapy-speak from TikTok and people who hate people and regard isolation as the mark of emotional maturity. (It was ill-fitting for me and I paid for the wrong turn in kind, but at least not in cash… not in this economy.) This article on the word—and essence of—'boundary’ offered one of the many correctives I needed. It points out that popular discourse around boundaries “make dependence look like misplaced possessiveness” and “promote a comforting fiction that if you use the right words, you can control whether or not you get exploited by others, and protect yourself against it.” These two things were worth bearing in my mind. Esther Perel’s thoughts about the therapy-speak I was consuming also helped me understand my dissatisfaction and suffering better.
Zooming back out to the larger collective, if you have a Fumnabulist subscription ($2/month), please read The Story by Fowota Mortoo. The Story “begins with maps, transgressions of truth, and conviction in the superiority of one […] with body placed beneath mind, the embodied made irrational, the spirit invisible. […] with curriculums and schools that churn out believers in a world as it is instead of how it came to be, echoing the insistence that this is all normal, possibility foreclosed...” The world really is made of stories and we enact the ones we believe. Change your narrative, change your world, says Uzodinma Iweala.
3 Delicious Things:
I enjoyed listening to Alayo Akinkugbe (of a Black History of Art) speak to the photographer and filmmaker Isabel Okoro on Akinkugbe’s podcast, A Shared Gaze. Among other things, they discuss two films by Isabel: Everything is Possible Under the Wonderful Moon and Come to Me, I’m Already Here. These two are titles of love.
I found a reflection of something my art practice aspires to in James Perkins’s art. Tamarisk (2018) holds a dream for my tongue. It is on my tongue (or the part of my brain connected to my tongue) that I feel the desire to be-hold it. In other words, I want to eat what the painting has.
I saved my best bite for the last: this So Textual interview with the literary agent Emma Paterson. I deeply enjoyed it. I desire to sleep in it. Here’s a glance. She was asked “I know you especially loved DeLillo’s Underworld. Can you tell us why?”
Her response was: “It is hard not to sound annoying […] but [the book] is an event—moral, emotional, intellectual—that threatens to overtake you. I experienced a similar certainty when I started Nella Larsen’s Passing and Susanna Moore’s In the Cut. Some books convince you from the first page, even the first paragraph, and usually that power comes from a precision and force in the language, which are qualities beyond and above just beautiful sentences. In the Cut opens with such skill: ‘I don’t usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake.’ Two very spare sentences but in them there is voice, tone, past and consequence. Immediately you feel the writer’s control.”