Strange and Uncertain
HD Video
2020
Commissioned by Islington Mill as part of Memories of Living - a series of artist responses to the pandemic.
Funded by Arts Council England and produced by Greg Thorpe.
Full transcription below.
During the lockdown you come home to stay at your parents house. In the evenings you take long walks around the town. The air is flooded with spring: a liquid clarity, clean, synovial. You leave the house without a jacket, without a bag, without even a house key, since your parents will obviously be at home all evening. It’s strange to walk around a town like this, feels both vulnerable and luxurious. Your hands swing outside their pockets.
You walk without purpose but fall again and again into the route you used to walk to and from school, as if years of repetition have worn into the space like dimples in old stone steps.
The new silence of the town is jarring. Even without the swell of rush hour traffic, you still find yourself crossing the street at the same familiar points, listening for the hiccup and purr of speed bumps before stepping off. You slow habitually at tight corners remembered for fast cars and blind spots, a muscle memory of these rhythms still held in your body. The emptiness feels unstable - marshy and tender, like the soft shock of negative space in a newly toothless gum.
~
Time runs on like a set of little wheels. The days rotating, small and uniform. Loops within larger loops. Cats cradle routine of the kitchen table laid and cleared and laid and cleared again.
At the beginning you tell yourself you will create a schedule, a structure. You will be diligent and regimented. You will use this time to tie all the ends of unfinished projects - make ground, expand, progress.
Each day, you set up at the desk with your laptop but you just end up nursing vague to-do lists. you transcribe the notes scrawled at wilting angles during long phone calls with friends, you collate lists from different notebooks; splice and suture the duplicates. you rearrange, subdivide; tracing and retracing the same outlines of amorphous, inchoate projects.
You question what it is you need in order to make things. You always thought it was just a question of time. Now, with months ahead, every day opens flat as an empty palm.
~
You're trying to work on a project with a repeating text. The text describes a short scene from a film, which you rewrite over and over, finding different ways to describe the same sequence of video. It’s a process of translating your own words, mining images for the language they contain.
You want the project to be something about multiplicity in a finite space, about the slipperiness and excess of language. The act of pinning down an experience in words feels violent, or risky. To make a selection is also to reject.
Sometimes the different versions fall into recurring sequences - phrases you can’t articulate any other way. But mostly you find the process expands generously beyond the container of its form: unfolding and mutating, endlessly generating new language for the same sensations, the same actions.
The three minutes of video are never exhausted. The abundance of language isn't correlative with accuracy or certainty of meaning; it’s like the writing only shades in around the edges of it.
~
You sit on the patio and squint at your laptop. Light fumbles at your eyelids like fingers in earth. You’re trying to work a compromise between making the most of the good weather and a constant, intractable urge to be productive. The laptop presses a deep red gaw into the inside of your thigh. Hot scream of crows overhead.
In the glare you become distracted thinking about the exact blue of the sky reflected in the black border of your screen. Through the smudgy patina of fingerprints, depth is illusive. You look at it with surprise and think, ‘that’s exactly the right colour’, without really knowing what you mean by that.
You sit very still until your arms unlatch themselves gently, incrementally, from your body and begin to feel very warm and large. Deep in the soft socket of your pelvis is a dull ache.
~
You begin a routine of walking around the park next to your old school. It has a shady circular path that loops around a wide lawn through redwoods, sycamores and monkey puzzle trees. Every day at about 5pm you walk two laps, sit for a while if the weather is nice, then head home for dinner which is now also always at the same time each day. When you were at school, this park was infamous for the fumbling adolescent trysts its bushes concealed, but these days the huge, victorian trees feel dignified and sincere.
You begin to notice a man who sits under the same pine tree every day to read while his black and white dog wanders around at a loyal distance. Every day, he’s there already in the same spot, even when it’s drizzling rain. He never looks up or acknowledges you, though you’re sure he has noticed the alignment of your respective park routines.
One day, you take your walk a little earlier, and he’s not there. It’s overcast but hot. Flies rise and fall at shoulder height like scales seeking a balance. You sit down under his tree and look out at the park. Whole families play frisbee, couples are laying out elaborate picnics, it is like an advert for yoghurt, or antihistamines, or life insurance.
There is a thick rising of air in the trees, a deep granular sound like ocean swell. You keep thinking the word ‘opal’, though it should probably be emerald. Ants seem driven towards the sweating folds behind your knees. You try to guide them away, but they persist and you misjudge and your thumb smears them across your skin.
Soon, the man with his dog is curving around the path, and he must have already seen you because he is not walking towards the tree and seems to be deliberately not looking. A slow guilt moves through you, and at the same time, a fumbling for an excuse. Did you hold some expectation? A gesture of affinity or camaraderie, nodded or winked? Instead you just feel bad. You get up, brush the needles from your shins, and walk home.
~
An exhibition you were due to curate is postponed indefinitely. The future slumps out in a soup of cancellations, flows blind towards a hazy lip and curls off. You receive several different emails which use the phrase ‘strange and uncertain times’. You spend the day leaving the lids off jars, moving clumsily from one hour to the next.
Everyone is asking everyone what we miss, what we are surprised not to miss. What we will change, what we will keep the same. You are surprised at how quietly and easily this new way of living has installed itself around you.
You think that maybe you miss the undemanding anonymity of strangers in a public space. Watching people watch themselves is not the same thing as people-watching. You tap patiently through the carousel of warped complexions / red-blush / puppy-tongue / a spinning crown of animated daisies. Coruscant lacquer blinks on and off at the edge of the face map. Which pixar character are you? Which british food are you? Which inanimate object?
~
Late afternoon one hot day you pace around the house with your phone in your hand, taking pictures of the way sunlight slants in orange angles across walls, floorboards, cupboard doors. Framing, recording, posting, is scored into the underside of each thought.
At night you scroll through these pictures, select all and delete. You defend to yourself the belief that you could experience these things alone; could let them pass undocumented, unshared. When did it come to feel like something to be defended?
~
In the yellow light over the sink you are freckled, older, violet under the eyes. Hip pressed against cold porcelain, lean close to the glass, pick at a blemish. You watch your arm turn in the light, run a finger along the ridged tendons in your wrist to the pale green throat of your inner elbow.
It is a game you often play: to walk around as if your perspective is a closed circuit camera feed, or the windows of a cockpit. Imagined spectators assembled in a darkened hall; you show them things as if they’re watching. Thrill of pretending not to know you’re being watched; sometimes playing that you know and they don't know you know.
~
You dream you are editing a google doc. In the dream you are not sitting at a table typing, you are inside - or are - the glossy membrane of a screen. You scroll flat across the blue-white surface, pixelated pulse of the cursor flashing.
In the dark you bare your eyes open. A thick, flecked dark that has no space in it, just presses close to the surface of your vision. The blood in your ear ticks against the pillow like a clock.
In a sleeping conservatory, in another house, chill of green slate and sock feet curled like a lip. Two disks froth white in a glass. A tumour crawls.
You fold yourself in half like a piece of paper, limb to limb pressed gently flat, and think about whether you could sleep a room like you sleep your laptop.