Clearing the Decks — Part II
Twelve more perceptions from the year 2024.
Bored of cultural lists and round-ups, but cherishing the thoughts and the writing and the lives of the people I care about, I invited a bunch of people to tell me about a sharp moment of ‘perceptual awareness’ that stuck out through the fog of a grim year. Here’s the first half of those contributions. We hope that you enjoy them.
James Vincent
It was just a conversation. And I mean that in the way one might say, “it was just an apple” or “it was just a tree.” It was something simple and familiar, but without which the world would not make sense. More specifically, it was the first time in years we’d spoken with clear air between us.
In the past, the wreckage had been too much. It happens sometimes, that one day you open the door and find every inch of your home filled by debris, so impenetrable and overwhelming that you simply walk way. Then, much later, you pick out a piece, maybe just a small one, and think: “I know where this goes.”
We didn’t talk about anything important that day. There were no revelations or insights, no accusation or promises. Yet it felt like we were two angels, the last in the world, strolling along a clifftop on a bright and windy day, and that it had been some time since the disaster.
Jennifer Soong
What I found out this year is that my life could be very good and very bad at the same time, and that often the bad things stayed, even when I cut the good things loose, because they themselves were turning bad. Things could feel muddled and then appear totally separate and unrelated, in that way. Responding to your generous prompt, Ed, I realize the thing that struck me most was the unrelentingness of this kind of presence. There can be such a thing as too much of it. Maybe writing is my way of trying to get rid of something by using it all up, but I learned this year that there are some things, like physical sensations, that can’t be sublimated or ejected like that.
Jethro Turner
At some point in the spring, in the depths of grief and a heartbreak, I stopped dreaming. Literally. It sounds like a metaphor like all the usual ones, like “the sky was less blue”. But actually I just stopped dreaming. I think I went to sleep at some points, but I didn’t do a lot of that either. And in the space between waking and sleep, I had vivid lucid dreams, giant shifting visual architectures like a scaffold for all the rushing thought. But I just couldn't dream if I tried. Not that you can.
By the end of the year, I was in Paris, riding the metro between gallery visits, well-slept and thinking things like “call me Saint-Placide”. I went back to the Musée de Cluny for the first time in about a decade to see a series of medieval tapestries called ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ (La Dame à la licorne).
We become hyper aware of the movements of bodies in these near silent spaces. I sat down before going in to see the old Dame in an old cloisters, in front of some fragments of statues. They are on display with the missing parts illustrated behind, suggesting unbroken beauty, intimating wholeness. Perhaps like all of us.
In the dark room where they live, there are six tapestries: five of them each devoted to the senses, all moments of perceptual awareness. I settled perhaps for longest in front of the sixth, which is not. It is called ‘À Mon Seul Désir’.
Everything figurative floats in its rectangular space: flowers, fruit-laden trees, a monkey, hunting hounds, a lapdog, lambs and rabbits. The lady, her female servant, and some of her coterie of beasts also seem to hover on a platform of bright vegetation. Above them, what seems to be a heron, is pursued by a domesticated falcon, its jesses dangling in the non-air.
The only words on any of these works are ‘À Mon Seul Désir’, emblazoned on the tent behind the lady (its entrance held open by a lion and the unicorn). I looked it up on Wikipedia as I sat there, which told me that ‘It is variously interpreted as "to my only/sole desire", "according to my desire alone", "by my will alone", "love desires only beauty of soul", and "to calm passion"’.
A gang of kids interrupts the writing of this as I sit in the public library. They are boys and they must be about 12 or 13, that age when girls have become serious and hilarious amounts of hormones are coursing through your veins, and you play games where you all pretend to all be asleep, snoring loudly in the library until the security staff come and shout at you and chase you off. Which is what happens.
Katie Ebbitt
I gave blood in the morning. I walked off the street and into the municipal building. Went through the metal detector and up to the top floor with panoramic views of New York City. I was newly in love and thinking about the past love which had brought me into existence. My grandparents were born, met, lived, and died on the same small lake in Michigan. Both donated pints of blood equaling gallons. I was registered with the nurse, and placed on a bed, playing Duolingo beside a cop, fireman, government worker. Another cop. I was asked to give my profession. “Social Worker.” The blood came out fast. I got off the table. I left before the observation period was over. Walked the mile westward home. Later that day, just before night, I got off a train in Brooklyn and encountered a small creature fragile in the middle of the sidewalk. Convinced it was a squirrel kit, I picked up the infant animal, forgoing the evening’s plans, and went home. I expected the creature to die during the night, as small things so often do. But the baby lived, hydrated by sugar water. In a shoebox, we rode Uptown to the wild animal rehab. "One second," they said at the door, "this may not be a squirrel." Rat Reddit helped me to raise my friend for the next three weeks, its baby eyes opening, and ears unfurling. Its coat comes in brown. On the eve of my rat going to its permanent home to reside with a wild rat enthusiast, a professor of astrophysics at West Point, the creature disappeared from her cage. Little love going out and beginning some other life in my building’s walls. The way that we all crawl away from our families.
Lamorna Ash
I was going to tell you about seeing moon-made shadows for the first time in a forest on America’s east coast, or the single solitary minute out of the millions of minutes I must have spent inside my current flat during which no cars passed by on the main road below us; I thought I might explain how amazed and how unlike ourselves we all felt for that brief moment of spectacular silence. Those were both experiences that jolted me out of orbit this year – only for a few seconds, but that’s all you’re asking for, and all I ask for myself so as to prevent all my days from congealing into one meaningless, undifferentiated substance. But then there was this one other example from this year, which felt so highly pitched that I would swap out a hundred small alternative experiences of renewed attention or awareness just to feel it again. How can this be the case but it is in fact the case that until this year I thought I was someone fated never to experience a shattering, full-blown, knock your socks off orgasm – that I had one of those faulty bodies which could only reach a sort of long nice plateau of pleasure. It took thirty years but it was worth it and I doubt anything better will happen to my body in cahoots with my mind this year, or next year, personally.
Matthew Holman
On Seeing Louise Giovanelli’s ‘Entheogen’ (2023):
Perhaps mostly for reasons of hygiene or simply ease of jaw, it’s rare that we keep our mouths open for longer than we need to. Rarely more than a few seconds. We speak, we eat, we kiss, and then we purse our lips back together. Maybe you’re in a community choir, I guess, or maybe you speak in tongues. It can be striking, then, to find a contemporary picture of a young woman with her mouth wide open and held there in stasis by the thinned materiality of a painting. I see her: she’s awash in Scheele’s green, like arsenite, like neon, as though it’s projected onto her face from an exterior light source. Her eyes are hard closed, her mouth agape. Our lady in green has cropped eighties fringe, clearly elsewhere, in another place, in another time. I wrestle with the idea that we hold our mouths open for extended periods of time only in those scarce moments when we feel released from the threat of shame that otherwise we are always guarding against with a heightened sense of composure. I guess it’s our hyper-sexualised age, amongst other things, that makes me believe our lady in green is enraptured in the throes of orgasmic abandon. But what if she is merely waiting to consume the blood and body of Christ?
Misha Honcharenko
My year beckoned anticipation, a strong tremor by virtue of continuation living after wounds of the past years. War in Ukraine, caretaking, mother’s death, losing friends due to war, ongoing genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, world collapsing. This certain feeling of horror did not leave me. Due to the interrupted end of life. Relocation to West Yorkshire from Cork, from Ukraine. Instant—was the first trip to London, albeit alone or with someone, just rubbing my feet until they bleed considering the shoes I bought are unbearable. The beauty was the air of sudden homesickness. Regarding delineations of love for a mother that I can no longer see. Made me feel electrified, to be in love, to be needed, also that my body is able to revive. Paralysis—that carried me back to Yorkshire. This is my next stop, open mouth said.
Molly Pepper Steemson
It is easy to make a fennel salad.
At the start of the year, at the start of our relationship, when we were hungry for one another in that relentless, insatiable, untenable way, we worked from home together. It was cold and sunny and I made lunch.
Five eggs, boiled—two each, one to share; toast, buttered; fennel salad. I sliced the fennel on his mandoline, which was the same pale green as mine—like the colour where the frond meets the bulb. We ate outside.
I have made more fennel salads since. With soft herbs and without, with shallots, with capers, lemon zest, lemon juice, no olive oil at all (I forgot). It is a side dish, a snack, a little lunch. There is often a browning bulb of fennel in the fridge, that can be revived by pulling off its outer layer.
My new relationship is not so new. We have arguments, we have sex, we have lunch—a fennel salad.
Richard Porter
Standing on the shore as winter darkness fell with the waves crashing and a lighthouse in the distance and some kind of rig at sea possibly something to do with the nuclear power station emitting its strange red light as if some visiting spacecraft floated there soon to depart and everything around it squeezed of blue into grey into black but for a tiny silhouette of a man and his dog who on passing said “looks like a storm coming” and disappeared
Roisin Agnew
The first time I drove on my own I went to a portion of the lakefront, pulled in, parked, and got out. It wasn’t a particularly scenic part of the lake or a place that held any sentimental value to me. It was late afternoon in early May, a few stray cars, two men with fishing rods, a “foreigner” wading into the cold water, but mostly it was quiet, too early in the season. I had done this road a thousand times, but now it was as though it were a place I’d never been to before. I had got myself there and I could get myself out of there whenever I wanted. I looked at the lake until I noticed that the bus I had parked next to wasn’t empty and that the driver was staring at me from under his sunglasses. I got back in and drove home, elated.
I got my driving licence in London this year. I had done driving lessons and taken tests in three countries (Italy, Ireland, Britain) over almost 15 years and given up or failed at different times. When I finally passed in March of this year it was thanks to Amdi, a forbidding Kosovan driving instructor I’d inherited from my friend Orlando, who I was often compared to unfavourably. Amdi was determined I would pass because he couldn’t bear to keep teaching me, he said. His main way of interacting with me was to point out mistakes I’d made by asking rhetorical questions. When I’d sheepishly give the obvious answers he would bellow, “Thank Godz!” I loved Amdi.
There are very few material markers of my independence and hard work despite how real they are. I don’t own a house, I don’t have children, I don’t earn a high income. Getting my driving licence took on an outsized importance and urgency, maybe something to do with the new-found price I put on my autonomy or maybe just because I’ve always loved driving.
This week I experienced my first Rome traffic jam. I spent forty minutes making my way around Castel Sant Angelo, the star-shaped medieval residence of the pope, a drive that would normally take a minute. It was not unusual, construction work for the jubilee has made it one of Rome’s severest bottlenecks, but I felt giddy sitting in my car alongside other drivers. I had got myself there and I could get myself out of there.
(Photo by Roisin)
Orlando Reade
Last winter, police tape appeared across the street that runs between my apartment and the studio where I write. Later, I read that a woman had been killed. An attempt on the life of her son had claimed hers instead. The article called her a pillar of the community.
The next day, the street was open again, and tape across one doorway identified where it had happened. A house with a back garden, out of which music had once floated on summer nights. Flowers, candles, and liquor bottles appeared on the wall outside.
One night, there was a car pulled up outside the house. The driver’s door was open, and a person – it could have been a man or a woman, I couldn't tell, or a boy – was standing in the gap between the door and the car. A ballad was playing on the stereo, and the person was rocking back and forwards. A private ceremony I had intruded upon.
Last week, there was a gathering outside the house, with music on a sound system. I guessed it was the first anniversary. ‘Candy’ by Cameo was playing, and people were turning in unison in the December rain. Seeing that made me cry.
Zoe Guttenplan
This gallery’s floors are polished concrete. The walls are vast. In the ceilings, high above, joists and beams map space, painted white as the heavens visible through the skylight. Pitched pains are perfectly clear, perfectly clean. We’re in the main room, which has been populated by moulded plastic chairs – not Monobloc, those cheap seats you are just as likely to find in Chicago’s greenly manicured front yards as on the side of a goat track just outside of Athens. These chairs are not diagnosable sameness or mass production. These are bespoke. Three sans serif letters, the gallery’s logo, have been stamped out of the back of every chair, as though a hot brand has plunged into plastic, melting the dead space away. In the front row, a woman leans back, crosses legs, lifts chin. She is nodding at the speaker who is winding up to tell a joke and her earrings are swinging in broad magenta circles. At the punchline, her laugh is cavernous and round in a room full of corners and hard edges. Her flesh, wrapped in purple gauze, presses through the holes, undulating.
A massive thanks to everyone who sent me something for this. Hopefully some more posts from me in 2025. Bis gleich — Ed.