Category: walking

the direction of time is continue: sumer is icumen in

Lhude sing cuccu. A brief catalog of early summer: its speed is instant. It arrived pretty much in whole cloth around the first of May, with bluebells everywhere and the sword-shaped leaves of the irises in the canal. And now the irises are open and the swans are on their eggs. I drop peanuts onto our windowsill in an attempt to coax the magpies to befriend me, and they do come, but are not tame. The humidity drops, the rain comes in sudden heavy bursts, the humidity rises, the uilleann pipers’ school lets out for the long school holiday, and friends text me their travel plans. Teaching ends.

The form of the song “Sumer is icumen in” is a round. A round is a kind of composition where voices sing the same melody but begin at different times, so that the different parts occur at the same time in their different voices. Singing a round tells time both cyclically and overlappingly: it tells time by cycling through it (singing the entire melody from beginning to end, and beginning again) and it tells time when one voice crosses another (here, here, here; here, here, here, says the overlapping melody). Things come back, they cross and recross, and they resonate with one another over time, and they repeat wholesale. Like seeing flowers in one place and another, summer in one place and another.

This haze of speedwell catches my eye from a dozen yards off. At the university where I work the groundskeepers mow only part of the grass, which means that all kinds of plants flourish in the uncut sward. We are now in the season of greenness, of expansion, of lengthening, of lightning and thunder.

(In the part of Iowa, where I lived last year, I felt a visual drought when faced with the weedlessness of that place. There were so few plants in general, and almost none “out of place”. There was a lot of grass, cut uniformly short. Along fences, where weeds are hard to control manually, there were swathes of dead plants that it took me a while to realize had been sprayed with weed killer. To be surrounded here by the variousness of the plants here feels restorative.)

I love the flower shape of the primulas, especially the tall primulas. Traveling in Japan in 2017 I noticed many candelabra primulas in pots outside houses, especially in cities. Cowslips are the closest I’ve come to them on this island. Apparently these flowers are protected in Northern Ireland, but not here, where they still appear in the landscape. The captive primulas in Japan were mostly magenta, pink, orange-pink, and white, and stood upright on slender stems. Some had their flowers arranged in spheres; others (the candelabras) in wheels, one above the last. I do not have a garden—not even a city garden like the Tokyo gardeners who made excellent use of the narrow space at their doorsteps with pots and risers of all kinds—but when I do I would like to grow primulas. So the flower is in three kinds of time for me: the present (where I see the cowslips in the grass); the past (where it sends me to the synonym-formed Primula beesiana); and the future (where I imagine, one day, being able to grow these flowers myself).

welcome to this new place

The title of this space comes from Fanny Howe’s essay “Bewilderment”, in The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life. In this essay, Howe writes that bewilderment is “an ethics and an aesthetics”, or “a way of entering the day as much as the work”. Bewilderment has been a guiding question for me since first encountering Howe’s essay almost twenty years ago. A process that interrupts established ways of navigating, bewilderment inverts value systems, breaks our compasses—not only in writing, but in our daily lives (as if we could ever really separate the two). Bewilderment is also an effect: for me, the effect of close attention that can result in a radical subversion of my assumptions about what matters, what can interest me, how I’m connected to what’s around me, and what “around me” even means.

I have always been a person for whom writing is one thing among others: a part of life that goes on, like breathing, during the everything else of my days. Washing dishes, walking to the bus stop, buying groceries, being with others, teaching and other paid work, sewing, doing philosophy, caring for my family—all these are threaded through the part of me that writes, and the writing part is threaded through all of these. Howe’s idea of bewilderment has led me to think about writing and living (making clothes, meals, rooms; working for pay; relating to other beings, to ideas, to objects and texts and images, and to places) as processes where questioning my received understandings—my pictures of a world that “just is”—is primary, the groundwork for both writing and living.

So in this space, I’ll think about—and invite others to think about—what Frank Bidart means when he writes that “being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal”. Our ordinary lives, where the biggest questions of meaning—what justice looks like; what liberation is; how to live together; what art means—show up in patchwork ways. Our work: to live them and to make art of them, to bewilder ourselves in the living of them, to make (in Toni Cade Bambara’s words), “revolution irresistible”.

Posts will go up on Sundays, beginning March 5, 2023. Here’s what you can expect:

• Once a month, a new piece of writing from me: thinking about art, writing, ordinary life.

• Once a month, an older piece of writing from me, sometimes republished from elsewhere, and sometimes drawn from a stock of drafts.

• Once a month, a feature called [while washing the dishes]: notes on things I’ve encountered that you might like—music, images, bits of text, objects, places. Short reviews, possibly.

• Once a month, a feature called [while walking], a collection of photos from my transit through Dublin on the way to work and my passage through our neighborhood while doing errands or just walking.

• Every so often, an essay from a guest contributor. More on that soon.

Bewilderment (every sense of that word!) is free. Eventually, what’s posted here will be available as a print quarterly, and older essays will be hidden as they appear in print. Information about the print quarterly (cost, subscription details) will be available later this year. If you enjoy what you read, please feel welcome to share it with others.

And finally, a little about me: I’m a writer and an artist working across performance, installation, and social practice, all of which draw on a longstanding practice of observation and drawing. I’m especially interested in time: duration, seasonality, repetition and cycle, and time itself (what it is, how it’s made or measured, how we know, how time and culture cross). My work is attentive to and deeply curious about form—social form, literary form (received and invented), botanical form (plant structures). I link both time and form to place, especially hyperlocal place, and the way patterns of time and form can lead us to knowledge and wonder in our most near-to-hand places. Finally, I’m interested in the human scale: the hand, the foot, the eye, and how this scale can teach us about living with one another and in the world.

Thank you for reading—thank you for being—here.