Wet Mouth

summer, speaking

It’s been a slow, cold and damp summer, now warm and damp like the earth is a close-talker, breathing in our faces. I’ve travelled and been with family and friends to various parts, Oslo and London, Kelso, camping near the Cairngorms, but it seems as indistinct and full of sensation rather than thought. Fire crackles, a goat bleats. The wind soothes the long grass like a wild animal and bullies the trees. I dreamt awake of writing a sentence. But no time, no space. And now August is looming, with even more activity, and pressing crowds, and strange, startling humid silences, and I want to at last stand up properly and be a person, distinct and calm.

I’ve had a rejection again for my short story collection, in which I tried experimenting in different ways, so that the whole perhaps feels too jumbled, as I was when I wrote it, with grief and longing, sleep deprivation and climate despair and the churn, the deep confusing hopeful sick loneliness of early parenthood in the pandemic. In the autumn I will try to write a different book, one a clear distinct calm and dryly witty person might write. It is the effort of making a role for one book or another that gives writers shape, I think.

I’m reading Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Leslie, a huge, hulking, creepy book, with summetime corporeal ghosts wandering (and murdering) in the countryside, which would perhaps be better read when the land is sleeping under a hard frost, for contrast’s sake. This on the back of Mr Fox by Barbara Comyns, which went by in a snippet, and Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, which was written in black and white and grey - or is it just because I rewatched the 1964 film in an overlapping period?

I learned that in 2013, The National did a six-hour concert for MoMA in which they sang one song, ‘Sorrow’, over and over, a hundred times. You can listen to the concert here, though I haven’t yet. Apparently, when it was over, the audience cried out for an encore, which the band duly peformed, Matt Berninger saying ‘this one’s called ‘Sorrow’’. I am thinking of cycles I think, alterations, the revision which is not a revision, drawing the ‘cool s’ over and over, the point of exhaustion. The way we are created to haunt, and how refining this haunting is essential to locating a clear way through to- the beginning?

Summer is for getting stuck. On the train, on the bus. In a menacing formulation. In the grass.

In August, I’m doing a short reading as part of the Gutter issue 30 launch. 9pm, 17th, at the Speigeltent. What if I just said the one line over and over again, how long would you stay? I’d like to see you, looking uncomfortable for several minutes, sweating in your ill-advised pullover, before you finally gave up, miming the universal symbol for ‘drink?’ at your friend, then noisily left for the bar. I’d watch you go. I’d not pause for breath. The wind outside in the gloaming cool on your face, and my voice, droning, commiting to something. Maybe just the bit.