Cloudy skies with a high near fifty degrees. The snow is melting quickly, leaving behind grey-black slush and patches of dead grass: a scene like the bleary-eyed aftermath of a really good party. The sun goes down at 6:01 tonight, and the moon is in its first quarter. We’re leaving for London in two days.
Anything I know about London comes from detective dramas, so I imagine it as a city of CCTV cameras and well-fitted coats. Thirteen years ago, I was in London for an eight-hour layover while trying to get home from Helsinki to Detroit, where my mother was dying. I only remember riding the bus in a daze, my disorientation compounded by the reversed traffic. I sat there for hours, orbiting stops with fairy tale names until the bus was empty and the driver was kind to me and helped me find my way back to the airport.
Continuing this thread of grief in Britain, here are some beautiful lines from Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies:
He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief . . . but the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
And that’s the trick, I suppose: avoiding that fucking stone. One morning I woke up in the grip of those tangled dream-thoughts that have the force of revelation: After suffering loss, the soul can go one of two ways: it can harden into something spiky and guarded or… I’m not sure what the other option looks like, but I want to find it.
Detroit is heavy on the hi-fi this week. This live set from Ectomorph has been playing around the clock, and it’s a perfect hour of bare-bones electro sleaze.
