Hi! Not a huge amount to say today but I thought I would share some of my writing (at the bottom of this post) which is being published this week in the Arcadia Missa journal How To Sleep Faster. It’s a collection of written fragments picked up around London, mostly from 2004/5 but also from now, and also from way before that. I don’t think it’s poetry, honestly I don’t really know what it is. But to me it’s how it felt to be here then, and a bit about how it feels to be here now too.
I have been writing a lot for work recently. Writing for work is an interesting experience as so much of it is actually just writing around writing: emails, messages, justifications, retroactive explanations. It’s a lot of filling up pre-determined containers of space with words, as opposed to carving out or creating shapes. When you write for yourself you build your own container, that way writing can feel like sculpting with essence, creating an object that is the opposite of material. Copywriting does not feel that way. Regardless, I am happy to be working as the year draws to a close.
Anyway, I wanted to share this piece because I think - along with an extended piece of prose in 2 magazine which I’ll post here at some point - it’s the writing that I’m most happy with this year. I write in so many different voices it can feel jarring, it can be difficult to figure out which voice is the most authentic, or even just to find yourself in the streams of language we constantly generate. As someone who writes urgently as a means of escape and explanation, but also writes absurdly and laboriously to pay rent, I often get trapped in habitual ways of using language. It is genuinely difficult to go from writing optimised copy lines flat out for weeks to writing pages of, for example, formless poetry. Why would I do that? It is impossible not to ask. Without a client, who is it for? On the other hand the work I do for money can be amazingly useful, when considering the tightness of commercial language, the necessity for precision – these things all inform on one another. What I’m most pleased with in this Arcadia Missa piece is how many voices I think it manages to contain, and in a way, to conduct. There are the tiny flames of memories, whispered in half a line. There is the weight of bricks, then the lightness of footsteps. The voice of history as ancient and alive, young and old, mine and not mine. And the environment as at once deeply subjective, exclusive, split, breaking, regenerating and constantly moving.
I love writing about London, it is a place and an experience which holds the immensity of myth easily alongside the immediacy of getting up, opening your window and breathing in. My body seems to play a deep note, maybe something like a cello, when I write about it, even when I think about it. Listen for the note when you read this piece, I tried to bury it in there. I really hope I managed to.
Side note, everyone please raise a glass to Luigi Mangione this week. I will try to write something normal and interesting soon. All the best goodbye.
xxx
I am in awe of your writing Bertie.