I want to write this before it’s come into focus. It’s a
strange sensation because, for me, writing is often a kind of
getting-into-focus. So I am trying to do something while arresting and
resisting the very thing that I am trying to do. I want to write it quickly before
it comes into focus, and I want to write it slowly so that it never comes into
focus. The water is turning to glass or the glass is turning to water. There
are moments that feel life-changing. I don’t mean the big ones, the ones that announce
themselves like a soap opera and break you down. I mean the quiet ones, the
ones you might miss if you hadn’t been facing a certain direction at a certain
moment, ears up to the wind. This is one of those. This was one of those. It’s
a sequel, though. A sequel. A sequence maybe. A series of indeterminate moments
of being. It has a relationship to other moments that have come in the years
before. Heavy weeping moments. Clunky moments of understanding. Things clumsily
falling into place without knowing why. Sheddings of fear. Sheddings of
complacency. And I want to write about it in a way that teaches you nothing,
that directs you nowhere. I’m not sure why I want to do this, why I want to do
this with you and not only on my own. Maybe as a kind of intervention. As a
kind intervention. A kindly disorientation. A pocket of lost-ness in your
well-planned day. Maybe as a resistance to answering. This, this desire not to
bring my thoughts to a waking state, this is why I am writing without paragraph
breaks today. A lump, somewhere between states, not yet differentiated. That’s
this blog post. Read it slowly without wilfulness. It resists arriving. It
resists unpacking. It resists being yours or mine and it resists, also, being
held back. It even resists having friends. Or maybe it just resists being tied
down by friends, or maybe it resists being tied down by friendship as a
suffocating niceness, maybe it resists all the things I’ve done only because they
were to be done, and only for you, and only for you on a small scale, and maybe
it resists those things because they are merely excuses, because I have been
using our friendships as an excuse to be held in place when what I wanted was
to be between in so very many ways. I could leave you behind. And you could
leave me behind. And it would be kinder. It would be kind. And if at one moment
several people stood in a room in a particular constellation and that happened
to change the course of their lives, it wouldn’t have to be written about and
it wouldn’t have to be monumental, it would only be the what-happens that is
around every day, that is around us every day. And if one of us disappears, or
one of us becomes famous, or one of us begins to live with other animals, well,
that’s just how the landscape changes all the time. A kind of dreamscape, I
think. A dreamscape that is more ours than we have allowed. And the title of
this blog post is a mistake, they’re all mistakes, the things that sit
alongside what might have happened otherwise. And maybe a mistake is like
sleeping, or just like what is next to being awake.
(influences: a week spent in dialogue with Karen Christopher called We are capable of so much more:experiments in listening; and seeing Doing Dirt Time by Suzi Gablik performed by Philip Ralph, Fern Smith and Jane Trowell)
