The passing summer time and some thoughts on writing
Early February Musings
I’ve been pondering lately about what I want to do with my writing, here on Substack but also just generally. These blogged journals are one aspect of my writing, but I feel like I have a lot of room for improvement. I would like to develop this craft with more intention than I have in recent years. I also want to write Gothic-inspired fiction, something that I’ve attempted in nearly every single NaNoWriMo since 2013. Binge-reading paranormal romance with Gothic themes has filled my mind with ideas that build on my long-term love for classical literature. If the term ‘Dark Academia’ had existed when I was a teenager, you can be sure that I would’ve adopted the heck out of that subcultural label.
The kind of nonfiction writing that I most enjoy is often that which links the human spiritual experience to the landscape. I have quite a lot of books that intersect with this theme in my shelf (some I’ve read, some I’m yet to read): nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and university textbooks from my days as an Environmental Sociology honours student. The common thread is often that the landscape is in itself a kind of character, perhaps personified in mythic imagery.
The hills are the body of an ancient creatrix; certain stone structures represent gateways between worlds; the earth is a locus of emergent language; the seasonal cycles mirror the patterns of a human lifetime. Humanity’s notion of being separate to, or above, the natural world, is a falsehood. I want to emulate my favourite writers who are able to draw the links back between living ecosystems, our fellow sentient creatures, and the embodied experience of being human.
In Wendell Berry’s poem ‘The Porch Over the River,’ he writes:
In the dusk of the river, the wind
gone, the trees grow still –
the beautiful poise of lightness,
the heavy world pushing toward it.
Beyond, on the face of the water,
lies the reflection of another tree,
inverted, pulsing with the short strokes
of waves the wind has stopped driving.
The poem continues in another five verses after that, but I especially love that introduction. I feel that I know the very atmosphere he crafts here, because I have lived in similar-feeling places in my pre-suburban, rural past. I admire this use of language, somehow sparing, with each word carefully chosen and evocative. I do wonder what sort of magic this is, to see such a scene as a river flowing past some trees, and so cleverly conjure the entire feeling of such a place. I feel that my writing is still far-too-clumsy in comparison. It has too much of the journalism student still burned into the way I craft words, far-too-much who / what / where / when - and too little meaning.
If I were to write the same passage, it would be too blunt, too bland: it’s dusk, the wind is still, the river flows slowly, and it feels super calming listening to the birds and frogs. I’d blurt it out and rob it of the mystery, making plain things that are better spoken in riddles. Somehow this whole poem conveys that very same truth - of trees and rivers, birds and frogs, dusk on a windless evening - while getting at what it means to listen to the slow clatter of a river over stones.
I think also of the Gothic novels of the 18th Century author Ann Radcliffe, who I think effectively used the landscape to frame the characters’ journeys. Here is a passage from The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794):
She went to a window, that overhung the rivulet, and, leaning over it, with her eyes fixed on the current, was soon lost in melancholy reverie. The lute she had brought lay forgotten beside her; the mournful sighing of the breeze, as it waved the high pines above, and its softer whispers among the osiers, that bowed upon the banks below, was a kind of music more in union with her feelings. It did not vibrate on the chords of unhappy memory, but was soothing to the heart as the voice of Pity.
Whether it’s the dark, spiritual nature poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, or the detailed soliloquies about walking through an elven forest by J. R. R. Tolkien, or more modern authors writing from ecofeminist perspectives on the divine feminine as seen in nature, or nonfiction surveys of the geographical history of specific places, I am drawn to writings that embrace the human experience of nature. I just wish I were better at writing in that style for myself, from my vantage point here in south-east Australia.
Early February 2024 journal
I glance at the calendar above my desk with surprise. It has a beautiful gold foil-embossed design of a mermaid surrounded by stars - but it tells me it’s already February! How swiftly the summer passes. The days grow hotter, but shorter. It’s 32.3°C (91.1°F) as I write this from my suburban Melbourne home in south-east Australia. Tomorrow will be even hotter; it’s days like these when I feel especially my geographical distance from the beach, when in my childhood they were so close to home that my memories of childhood summers are of almost weekly trips to the Bass Coast.
Schools returned from the summer and Christmas holidays last week. I opened my blinds to let in the morning sunlight and was aghast at the traffic stuck at a standstill, which was banked up the hill from the red traffic lights half a kilometre away. It’s been over a year since that was my life’s story, driving to my children’s school in the heavy morning traffic; but it seems to me that it’s gotten busier, and the traffic jams are earlier than ever. Perhaps that’s what happens when once-spacious residential neighbourhoods are made more dense. Our own house, for example, is one of four houses that replaced the previous single house with a garden that was on this site for most of the last several decades. Multiply that by hundreds of houses, and suddenly a whole lot more people are stuck driving on the same roads.
We walked along part of the local rail trail this morning, before the heat set in. This particular trail is a wide path that runs in parallel with the trainline. Used by walkers and cyclists alike, it starts in the nearby mountains and connects with a large park further into the suburbs. Our particular walk this morning was a roundabout journey to the local supermarket, with a detour through local residential streets to admire the gardens. We stayed on the shadier sides of each street, trying to avoid the burning sunlight and admire a few lovely local elms and oaks. Lots of other walkers had the same idea of making the most of the warm, cloudless morning before retreating into the nearest available air-conditioned space.
We crossed over the railway line at a point we dubbed the ‘Frog Crossing,’ a silly little nickname our family came up with during the pandemic lockdowns, that has stuck with us ever since. During the extensive Melbourne lockdowns, when we first moved to this neighbourhood, local folks displayed toys and rainbow posters in their front windows, and created cute little characters out of wooden spoons, and displayed them in collections dubbed ‘Spoonvilles.’ While direct human interaction was a limited option, indirect human kindnesses became an important coping mechanism in those strange days. Folks were allowed out for daily walks, and so some locals created displays of toys for local children to enjoy. One of these was a large soft toy frog set up as a kind of guardian at the railway crossing. After enjoying his Kermit-like presence for a week or two, we one day came across the gutted toy, still tied to the railway signposts, the stuffing strewn across the grass like polyester snow. It was weirdly morbid and grim.
We’ve called it the Frog Crossing ever since, in memory of that long lost green sentinel who briefly brought some joy into our lockdown lives.
As we wandered along the rail trail, nodding to passers-by heading in the opposite direction, and occasionally pausing to admire people’s gardens, the sunlight glinted off the aeroplanes ferrying people to and from Sydney and New Zealand. As they followed the flight path from the north towards the international airport, they crossed the westering Last Quarter Moon low in the cloudless sky. A year or two ago, on a flight home, my husband leaned out the window to take a photo, knowing that he was somewhere above our neighbourhood. We found our house in his photo, a small dark shape whose location I recognized because the apartment buildings opposite us were clearly visible in the image.
Birds were few and far between as we passed beneath the shady avenues of swamp gums, cypress and she-oak. Perhaps they were already hiding from the heat, or there were too many humans about for the birds to make themselves known. The dry pine scent from beneath the trees was wonderful, as it was heated on the black bitumen path. At the shops, a few portly pigeons squatted in the shade under the empty café tables. We bought some fresh ingredients for tonight’s dinner: a bunch of kale, a pot of tofu, and some besan-and-seed crackers to enjoy with the beetroot hummus my daughter requested. We’ll make a simple stir fry with the kale, cubed tofu, sesame seeds, coconut aminos, and some quinoa we already had in the pantry.
On the way home popped into a local café to buy some takeaway drinks (a coffee, a mocha, and a chocolate – all iced in this heat!). The fresh ingredients for tonight’s dinner cost the same as the three takeaway drinks, which surprised us.
One week without social media, and counting
After reading How to Break Up with Your Phone by Catherine Price (2019) last month, I felt inspired to take a month-long social media break. Granted, I’m still here on Substack, but I don’t find that Substack drains my brain the same way that other social media sites do. Substack at least encourages deeper thinking and longer-form writing, so when I read pieces on here it feels more like reading an academic article or ebook chapter, than the emotional rollercoaster of Facebook or Instagram.
One week of life away from social media has been good. I do take a few social media breaks each year, so this isn’t a new experience for me. But normally I wait until Lent. This year I felt more desperate than usual to get away from the internet noise. I wish I could be a bit more balanced in how I use those sites, like some of my friends who have mastered the art of using social media without becoming engulfed by it. I miss the old days when Facebook was less politics, more mundane daily life stuff from real-life friends, and I could only access it via my desktop computer. It’s too easy to get caught up with doomscrolling when it’s all right there in the palm of one’s hand. All it takes is for me to have a more anxious than usual kind of day, and I can easily lose hours at a time jumping from site to site.
This past week away from those apps has allowed my brain to clear, a little like a lifting fog. I’ve been listening to more music, engaging in daily movement (mostly walking, but also yoga, cardio, and weights), and drawing or sewing nearly every single day. My screen time has dropped by 17% relative to the previous week. Now it’s merely the equivalent of a full time job’s worth of screen time. Still not ideal but an improvement.
As I reclaim my days from the internet, I’m prioritizing time spent with in-real-life friends over coffees. When I feel bored, I’ve been reading, journalling, embroidering or drawing. If I’m desperately bored, I clean the house instead of staring at the endless blue abyss of Facebook.
I cooked some new recipes that I hadn’t before tried: beetroot and shallot onion tarts with homemade cashew ‘cheese;’ peanut satay tofu served on kale, broccoli and crunchy red capsicums; roast sweet potatoes with brown lentil salad; and a big pot of baked beans in basil passata, cooked with herbs and spices, and served with rye sourdough sprinkled with dukkah. I never used to enjoy cooking, but practicing plant-based, vegan, wholefoods cooking has been a fun and creative practice for me over the past two years. I use it as an opportunity to try to create a visually pleasing and sensorily enjoyable meal, full of fresh flavours, while listening to music or educational podcasts. Or even just making food in silence, the birds outside my only soundtrack. It feels good for the brain.
I’d be lying if I said it was all calm, though in each of the past week’s dramas I had no control over the situation. A typical example from our neighbourhood is our being awakened at 2 am this morning by someone shouting and screaming outside our house. As much as I appreciate owning my own home - with a profound level of gratitude deepened because of the desperately difficult 18 years of renting that preceded it – I must admit that if my circumstances change, I would like to buy a home further away from a major road and the constant noise, chaos, beeping of the traffic lights, roaring cars and trucks, emergency vehicle sirens, and random shoutings of drunken folks staggering home from the pub. At least last night’s scream fest – that had me in an adrenaline-fuelled shaky state for an hour afterwards – was one of the more benign scenarios. Some young bloke had fallen off his bicycle and hurt himself, but when I looked outside to see what was happening, folks were already out there helping him. It was still a preferable scream fest to the previous one, which resulted in six police officers and two paramedics on our driveway trying to calm down a woman having what appeared to be a drug-induced psychotic episode.
Random screams outside our house are, unfortunately, quite a common scenario in our particular neighbourhood. I’m grateful for my own home; but I confess that I envy the folks in the quieter, leafier parts of this suburb.
Add to that having to confront a stranger on our front yard taking photos of our house (who turned out to be a lost real estate agent mistaking our house for being the property she was supposed to be inspecting, despite the clearly signed address plate on our front door showing that it was a completely different house), and the most unexpectedly complicated saga of trying to sort out our rubbish bins with the local council, and I could do with some calmer days between now and the end of summer.
References
Wendell Berry (2018), The Peace of Wild Things and other poems, London: Penguin Random House, pp. 18-19.
Ann Radcliffe (1794, 2008), Oxford World’s Classics: The Mysteries of Udolpho, Oxford University Press, p. 100.