Apologies for inconsistent posting; I’ve been away for a brilliant vacation in Scottish highlands and islands. I’ll someday fill you in on my adventures amid grazing cattle and neolithic ruins, but for now you might infer their beauty from this snapshot of my going to answer the mountains’ call.
This holiday has made me want to become, in many ways, an archeologist——to reconstruct a history from detritus, a story from a landscape, a narrative from the souvenir. To be sure, the derelict crofts, castle grounds, and touristy gift shops have demanded of and inspired in me different modes and means of remembrance and interpretation. I am by nature a deeply nostalgic person who’s long felt that everything was better in a time before, even if that is not the case. Eagerly, I await the end of a good thing so that I can remember it——I’m hurrying through the Good Old Days, urging moments to morph into memories, preferring the indulgence of retrospective. Probably because in hindsight I have control, the power to glean (or in fact produce) meaning from tableaus in time.
Three years ago, I was angry, disillusioned, frightened, and absolutely bursting with creativity. The beginning of the pandemic coincided with the beginning of my and Aidan’s relationship which meant we were a new couple with a fantastic excuse to be trapped in a home together baking bread and fermenting kimchi and, above all, consuming and producing art. Comparable to the era in which I now find myself——though differing most only in that it is past——it was a strikingly vibrant time in my life, equally alarming, novel, and generative.
I was writing so much poetry then, as though that were the best (or perhaps easiest) way to mess around with my feelings and their expression. While wrapped in the moment itself, I knew I wanted to carry it into the future, and I laboured to freeze it in language. What I come up with here seems to be at once the articulation of my desire to fix a moment in the past even as it is unfolding, a fevered attempt to congeal it, and a lamentation of my inability to ever truly materialize a memory in an infallible way. What brought me, at that time, to be writing so much in a style that I felt was destined to fail me? How will I write about now, about Scotland?
Anyways… Here is “how to write during a pandemic”:
Forget you have ever written
Anything worth reading
Slurp back your
Limited Edition Chocolate Toast Crunch™
And know that there is something clever to say about it but don’t put your finger on it just let it sit right there
on your tongue
andhopetheydontlimitthisparticularedition.
Secretly read your partner
‘s writing and feel inadequate
Slurp it back and tear up
This cereal is so good
I can’t imagine a world
without
This cereal
I can’t imagine
A different world
Or a poem
Worth reading.