Urgent and Optional
Ways of looking
May seems to have picked up the pace of our desires this year. Does it always - May? All the best blooms spilling the gardens out of their hesitance at once. Trees littering and pollening the city.
A surfeit of potential, a surfeit of flowering is how I feel now, most days. It’s 6am as I write, awake too early with surfeit. The mind not knowing where to put it all in the body, all these vases of flowers requesting to be arranged in the night. Easier to wake and lay them out here.
I have been gifted new ways of looking since I picked up a camera again for Swey. The world behaves differently with a camera in the room. People behave differently when you really look at them, or when they think you might be looking. There is a quiet power, also, in the doing-while-being with the camera, in that creativity is being collected, without output. And then it is stored for a while on the machines. And then you come back to it after a period of time, when things have changed, and you look at things again from a new perspective. And all these angles are like angles of light hitting the objects being viewed in a new way, so the next task is to choose which angle to settle on. And the fact of that choice is the great gift.
Wonderful things have been coming to me on the topic of looking. Here are some you may enjoy:
Peter Hujar’s Day. There’s too much to say about this film. Slow, thoughtful, beautifully shot. Those are the surface-level notes. All the things it made me feel and think about were, for me, the meaning of the film. So I’ll leave you to feel and think about it for yourselves.
Patience. This documentary about WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn is a little bit like the extended conversation I would like to have about Peter Hujar’s Day. Dozens of writers and artists talking about what Sebald’s work has made them think and feel, and how their own work has evolved because of it. The Rings of Saturn was written by Sebald while walking Suffolk, but the book is really a pilgrimage of recovery for the collective pain of the Second World War. It’s a long watch, but very poetically and delicately layered, with huge resonance to current global politics. And the sheer fact that so many creators (a very young, skinhead Robert MacFarlane among them) were inspired by one book enough for this film ever to have been made means that I would recommend it. If you have the patience (pun intended).
The Rules of Civility. Amor Towles might be my favourite fiction author at this point - living at least. I haven’t found another writer who can make me give up on life to sneak away and read with quite the same slight of hand. There’s nothing shouty about his talent. It’s the ease of the read. In this particular world he creates, you’ll find yourself in 1937 New York, held by the discerning and modest mind of an unassuming secretary. It’s a jazz era escapade, never quite what you think, and made me wish I could stomach a martini.
Music has been coming to me accidentally this year, mainly via the incomparable haven that is The Rose Hill Tavern - to which Mathew and I were gifted 12 months’ free entry after winning their fancy dress competition at New Year, so long as we carry a giant golden chicken (our award) into the bar with us. Top highlights were Pillow and Caenn Capaill, but a special shout out is due to the exceptionally weird performance from Ischio Romantico & Co, which I never want to hear again, but will always be glad to have witnessed.
Artist Open Houses in Brighton and Hove (and some near you too, I’m sure, this month). The best thing about Open Houses is always the conversations with the artists, and the spaces they inhabit. Each studio an ode to how differently we inhabit and express the world. Here is the thing I loved most, a pair of eggs that I now feel badly in need of owning (a rare feeling) by the, rightly, highly awarded photographer Andy Lo Po.
If you’d like to know how Swey is going, you can find the first monthly Dispatch newsletter here - with a debrief of April activities and the things I’ve been learning along the way.
The Monday morning First Light sessions have been an interesting process of reminding myself why I’m setting my alarm so early. By the end of the half hour, I always remember. The best thing about them for me is starting the week in ‘receiving mode’ - and increasingly, others are being kind and letting me know they find that helpful too.
Open Studio continues every Tuesday evening, 7.30-9.30pm, and is a truly wonderful thing. People dip in and out as they need, some staying for the whole two hours, others dropping off when they’ve chipped away at enough of their projects. It’s relaxed and rewarding. I’ve mainly been starting the sessions with drawing, and moving onto writing if the drawings don’t take over. The novel is coming along slowly and gently as and when. My subconscious responds well to little by little.
First Light and Open Studio are my own personal pillars, but they are also shared spaces for others to dip into whenever that might be helpful. You can subscribe for free to the Swey newsletter for updates too.
Everything feels fleeting and beautiful, and urgent, and optional. For which my favourite metaphor lately has been this bulrush, slowly shedding beside my desk, and changing every day.
Agnes you write so beautifully and with such an inviting enthusiasm for the details of life - I always read this email as soon as I see it ! Thank you 🙏🏽 I LOVE the bullrush 🤎