Dear Reader,
The length of time between this newsletter's first dispatch and now has expanded to cover a lapse of - at minimum - two seasons. It was seventeen degrees a few days ago, and yesterday there was a mannered and humid deluge, none of which has anything to do with the winter of 2023.
What this means for this letter is that I'm starting again, staking a new claim, making less of a promise, but hoping that if you are reading this, it's because you are interested in sudden arrivals, gusts of wind. Although I can't remember what to say beyond an excision of a dream, I do recall that this newsletter is my intended place of rumination. So onwards to the digestive and digressive aftertastes…
Today’s post is about details.
For as many months as I have been silent, notes for this particular letter have sat in the nowhere zone of devices, accumulating as 'The Details Essay'. I attempted to say something about observation but couldn't quite muster up the clarity to say any of it well. I would start and then give it up, then start again.
I wanted to tell you that one of my less existential, but highly recursive fears is that I am not observant. That I don't notice well. This noticing well is about perception. And it is also the initial and subsequent understanding and memory of situations, gestures, and events.
I had spent months strategising how I could make this simple confession of fear. The plan was to recruit some clever people who had thought about what it means to look upon another and look upon the world, and look upon them both well, who could do the heavy lifting of this confession for me. The hope was that I could quote them and then tell you how I had gone about changing this obscurity of perception in myself, and could therefore, offer to you something fun - and useful - about how you might go about exercising the scopic urge with a little more alacrity and skill, if that was your kind of thing.
To the detriment of good sense, in my mind, whenever I have a personal problem, it is always explained by a lack of clarity.
This little plan and design outlined above didn't transpire. Much of what I found in answer to my desire to perceive more was the banally encouraging dross you find on the internet, where people say nice-sounding things in boring ways. And almost none of it got at the sheer ball ache that seemed to be the act of turning my attention to experiencing an unmitigated field of vision.
An obvious question that arose was why did I think it was so important to be observant, enough to fear that I was not this at all? What did it matter if I moved around in a milieu of misunderstanding, perceiving myself as barely noticing anything? Was it as simple as the frustration of the writerly urge for capture? The desire – hiding in plain sight – to hoard the gestures of this world so that I might turn them into something poetic? Although it sounds exceptionally boring, I think this is one possible explanation. A slice of the pie, if you like.
My urge to write is strong. I have quit jobs because they demanded too much time and energy. I have gotten up at 4.30am to string a couple of sentences together. I have obsessed about the formation of sentences at the cost of the accoutrements of a very middle class that was in grasp if I had been less compelled by an urge for self-expression. I'm not saying this for reasons of pity – honestly, who the fuck cares if I don't have a mortgage?
The reason I have to cop to this being a part of the answer is that I think that it hides something else, something that is perhaps a feeling that I share with others, apart from those foolish enough to perpetuate the writerly urge.
I think that I fear that I am not observant enough because in fearing this, I affirm the belief that if I could just look, envision, gather, and recollect more of this world, then I would have more understanding. And in having ever-expanding amounts of understanding, I would never be uncertain. In fearing this lack of cognisance in myself, I choose to believe that if I could see a little more, gather enough details, and comprehend more of my sensate life, then perhaps I might have no fear at all. This is erroneous and yet compelling. The belief: I might feel differently; happier, when sad; a better friend when worried I am failing; less afraid and more full of love.
To see more in the way I describe is to make perception work in the service of certainty. It is a form of hypervigilance, of control, masquerading as a kind of beneficent awareness. It is the sweet face of surveillance turned inwards. A kind ofwish to become less human and more like a CCTV camera, constantly recording each gesture of myself and others in the hopes that if I could collect all of it, and wrangle it into something sensible, nothing would be lost. Nothing could slip away, nothing would disappear, nothing would be missed. I would obviously never be confused, or mistaken. I wouldn't experience occasions when I didn't know. As you can tell, there is some funky logic here, more than one fallacy.
This is all pretty suspicious. I am not planning on getting into the discourse about how technology is changing our attention spans, not because it is uninteresting how our minds are so malleable in the hands of our devices, but because I think so much of this conversation about eroded attention idealises a state of unmitigated presence in the manner of a lie. It is as though there was a time before the smartphone when people moved around the world and really took it all in, experiencing the complex social world and environment without any of the filtering of boredom, ignoring, disregarding that is the outcome of both the volitional and the not.
Instead, what I want to share is a paragraph that I found when paging through John Cheever's journals, where he is moaning about how little he sees when in a prolonged bad mood:
“I make no headway, and yet it seems best to come here every day and try. It is not easy. I have had winters before and will have them again, and do not seriously doubt that they will end - the winters - but it is not easy. I am reminded of the weeks and months in Rome when I saw nothing with the right eyes but a cobweb gleaming in the sunlight and an owl flying out of a ruin.”
The Journals of John Cheever, p192-193.
I love this paragraph, not least for how willing he is to express the tumult of yearning and his failure to fulfil this desire. He demands much more than he is getting, and yet he is also playing that game of soothing himself with pacifying truisms. Much like the online advice that I criticise, he offers a softening gesture, Don't worry you have had difficult seasons. It's not easy, but you'll make it through, and experience newly. This is the kind of urging encouragement endearing in the privacy of one's own diary, though the internet is replete with it.
But then he does what the deft writer can do; he lets the paragraph turn to the specific substance of memory. There is the sudden undercut in his complaint, the incision of those two details that unsettle the banality of the paragraph with their brief sureness; the cobweb and its gleam, the owl and its flight. I love this paragraph not only because of the dazzling strand of spider silk or the ancient owl escaping time but because there is recognition that feels honest. He is patting himself on the shoulder, telling himself that these clear shards are rare, and to not give up. To observe with attention, in this manner, is hard work, and there are seasons for acuity, and seasons for blur, seasons for focus, for its loss, of details and of vagueness.
Because I am tragically inclined to believe in the fullness of language, I looked up the etymology of 'detail', and because I am unembarrassed by the ploy of the root word, I will quote it here:
What I find most interesting about this silly etymological trick of the essayist is that despite it being a trick, there is almost always some relevant lurking notion. In this case, details - observations - are cuts. Twigs. Shards. Separations from experience. When one looks comprehends and recollects, one is removing something from the sensate and putting it into memory, language, culture, and the world of chattering other people. I don't know if this urge for removal is a good or bad thing. I don't think that is the point. It is just not something that needs to be done all the time, to the same degree. It is not always possible.
The months since my last writing have been difficult in different ways. I quit one job and found another. I finished the first draft of a project that I had been working on for two years. I turned 30, and my landlord decided that he was selling because he couldn't pay the mortgage, so he handed the flat an eviction notice. None of this is interesting to you, as it is merely the headlines of a normal life, but in a period I would have described as "challenging", I engaged a friend in a little act of transmission. Every day, we traded the details of our day, lists of extracted experiences, shorthand for our different lives. I shared my four small cuttings with her on WhatsApp as assiduously as I was providing evidence. And I was providing evidence. The aim was to convince myself that there was an expanse beyond the narrative determination of a 'difficult' time. It was a small act of observation, and a small intimacy, the kind of sharing that makes one vulnerable because it betrays the real nature of what is going on in one's head. Some days I had expansive and detailed recollections that I felt excited to share with her. Other times, there were weeks of dull thudding repetitions. I was sure that I had experienced nothing. One day I wrote, 'Sledgehammer day for the details' in lieu of anything perceived. And yet, even on the days when I thought I had noted nothing, the fact of noticing the absence of noticing was a kind of detail. The detail of nothing at all, a shard of the void of attention.
At some point in early 2024, I decided to review the collection of details gathered over months. I was surprised by the presence of themes. My eyes repeatedly attached themselves to the same things, while disregarding others; made obvious by the details which my friend's eyes seemed to attach to that I didn't attend to.
For me, the more benign: I liked to look at flowers. I often remembered the sky. I loved the strange gestures of self-comforting that people made in public. These were the more flattering. Then there were some aspects of my perception that I liked less, which didn't have to do with an appreciating gaze. There were details derived from judgment. Disgust. Despair. Fear. Details that came out of being pissed off, were disagreeable, though I didn't like to admit that.
Writing the details and sharing them was both an exercise in noticing and exposure, one of those games one can play with looking and being looked at that seems to make it feel fun and slightly scary to be a person perceiving in front of others. I wondered how much could she see of what was going on behind the screen of my gaze? Would she recognise the person she knew or see this as the recollections of a stranger? I had enough faith in her generosity, whether or not what I said I saw betrayed something unflattering.
When I came to writing this, I realised that some of those sentences, the shards, the twigs, the detritus of days, are some of my favourite things that emerged from hard months. They are not a justification of time, but something stranger, less substantial, more fun. They are the effluvia of living, the stuff that is so obvious not to be worth mentioning to others, but once collected and recollected have the heat and weight of one's own perception recast into a lasting fragment. The details are evocative because they are lacking narrative drive, so unsure of their purpose other than being a texture of life.
I intended to compile some of my favourite details, and below I have included a couple. I said I would not suggest a simple method of noticing more, and avoid the banalities of becoming a giver of homework. I am not a teacher. I don't need to pretend that I am. I also said that I was suspicious of my urge to see more. I am still all of those things, and I am also telling you that this collection of details was one of the most wonderful things from 2023 in my little experience of the world.
6th August
The soft blur of the Vuillard paintings hinted at so much. I want to read about him and his hinting.
The smell of piss in the overhang by the Sainsbury wing at the National Portrait Gallery. The semi-private affront of urine fills these empty rest spaces of a city.
The darkness and sudden pater of rain on the skylight. P's look of irritation and annoyance, her anger at the heavens.
The warmth of my mother's hands.
8th August
A mouldy grapefruit that has been sitting in the bin for days. The resplendent fruit flies copulate inside it.
The thick coating of bleach that covered my hands and didn't seem like it could wash off. It feels like it will always be on my skin. I should probably not do this.
The smell of washing drying. The emission of cleanliness.
The pain in my lower back from the uncomfortable divot in the memory foam of the mattress.
1st December
Frost.
The cold was unilateral and unwavering, which was soothing on a day that felt like there were no borders.
The heated blanket.
The futuristic Michelin man that I become when I put on the sleeping bag suit.
16th December
The point where the conversation became lost with the woman at the flea market when she wanted me to know that she knew what she was talking about, and I wanted her to know something she didn't. We slipped into the misunderstanding of each other.
The periodic intervals where he slipped out of the pub, new drink, new cigarette, new exit.
The woman turned to her four male friends and demanded cash from them to help a crying woman. None of them produced cash. They all refused and said they had none. Then they got into a debate about money and the cost of living crisis.
The imposition of Jeanne Dielman on the scene, particularly silence. I walked down the road to the pub, without headphones, and all it took was the blush of purple in the sky and the lack of electronically near sound to make me feel her loneliness, the striving and the pain.
5th April
In the roughened face of a man on the train, I saw the boy from school; recognising him from a very specific tell. His tongue darted to the left of his mouth, like a dog, the joust so particular that I was recalled to the classroom in which as a child I examined what was now the hidden face of the young boy, engaged in what was even then an infantile gesture.
The man's body rocking laughter, his chest full of voltage.
The older people call the gaggle of the young, 'The Rugrats'.
The reddened and worn face of the pretty man who was slouched in the seat on the train, his pout full of a rich deliberation, his clothes covered in dust, his hands coated in the effort of a long day as he scrolled on his phone, pensive, dirtied, full of an unspent beauty.
No promises, till next time…