I am in the Scottish Highlands at Moniack Mhor for a month. This is a slow, fractured, gap-filled, impressionistic, sometimes dull, tree-obsessed timelapse:
I want to make the best use of my time while at this beautiful residency. My feelings oscillate between: the warm and dreamy acknowledgement of having time, time to focus on writing and reading. The sweet-achey rewards of creativity; and, the always anxious slippage of time, the worry that I’ll let the month get away from me. The pressure of productivity always, somehow, manages to override rest and recovery—even here, amidst poetry, which itself is enveloped in its own strand of capitalism.
My desk faces hills and clouds and endless green. I love watching the sky move between murkiness and clarity. The clouds have perfect margins as they move across the peaks before dissipating into the grey sky.
First, I decide to continue Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe. When my own writing escapes me, I turn to work that instills awe. It is taking me a long while to read this collection of notes. It’s the kind of work I simultaneously can’t put down and can’t rush through. Each note, I feel, creates and/or needs its own nebulous kind of space.
I’m at the end of part ii. Ordinary Notes challenges me, my witnessing, my complicity. I take in each note, find myself entrenched in the ethics of entering this textual memorial (/more-than-memorial). I am afraid of letting even one word slip away into the abstract and vague, almost violent?, concept of knowledge—it's own kind of collecting. As if reading this needs to result in more than mere knowingness. There is so much labour entangled in these notes.
“I’ve been thinking about what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible. How we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds” (Note 51, Beauty is a method).
This residency is a special international programme held between Moniack Mhor and LIPFest, the Lagos International Poetry Festival. Today, about five of us writers have lunch together at Moniack’s long dining table, next to a window with a wide view of the now-clearish skies. We talk about art and politics, about joy, about salt, about the multifaceted nature of joy. One of the poets speaks in an incredibly poignant and moving way about trauma. I want to transcribe some of it here, as it resonates so deeply with me, but those are his words, his work (his work in progress).
I’m starting to feel self-conscious about this post, held together by a very loose linearity, by the sequence of events as they happen (or as they are disrupted by the past, by memory). Is it just me? Or does everyone feel like they only ever stumble into something worth pursuing by accident?
Somehow, in the late afternoon, I find myself listening to Yeh Mera Dil Ka Diwana, a song I haven’t heard for years and years. I arrive here by way of that strange, somewhat delirious, way of endlessly scrolling on the internet. And, automatically, I begin thinking of my father. I can almost hear him singing.
In the last few minutes, the rain has started again and I look out at the indistinct highland hills. I can still make out their shapes through the new raindrops across my window pane. The rain keeps up its indifferent, steady, accumulation.
The pipes are making strange noises on and off. Old houses have their wobbly bits, their creaks and charms, their unique soundscapes. This morning, I woke up to the sound of cows moving across the pasture outside my window. Last week, by chance, I picked up a draft of a poem about rural Alberta. I wrote this piece in 2016 and for some reason, I felt compelled to finish it the other day. The poem is about me and a friend being followed by a herd of cows while on a visit to a northern farm. While revising this piece, I googled what sound do cows make. For this blog post, in trying to relay the sounds I heard this morning, I found myself googling it again just now: what sound do cows make?
From my work-in-progress: thickest in the centre like a low bellow.
I love that I’m experimenting with writing into the in-between, into those potent spaces that emerge when genre becomes slippery. Creative, critical, prose, poetry. At times, it can feel overwhelming. Intuitively, I can feel when a thought or a desire wants to be prose or poetry. But, when I think too hard about it, that’s when I feel unsure—when I start to let assumptions and preconceived notions about genre slide into my mind. When I let myself be told what to write and how to write it.
Tonight, I’m reading Mrs. S by K Patrick before bed. I love the intwined simplicity, intimacy, and tension thus far held in the book, specifically in the symbolism of roses. The sun has barely just set. This far north, the daylight seems to promise never ending possibility.
I love this post (!) - I feel the same grind and pull of productivity and enjoyed the format of the way you've written here. It can feel exposing to share work in progress but this is such a tender and generous thing to do. Thank you x