I Can't Get No
Satisfaction
Mercury left retrograde a week ago. I’d been in a real spell, feeling halfway to an Elena Ferrante character, too smart and savvy to fuck with and too scary to talk to. Nothing could satisfy me, because nothing would. I was a bottomless pit of want, pointed and petulant.
I’m rageful, consumed, verging on feral. But I don’t embrace it. I won’t go all the way because I still have this godforsaken reason that won’t allow me to go all the way. And that makes me more rageful. I cannot be contained. Would I be better without this reason? Is this reason my safety or my salvation? Do I diminish myself by having it? Do I have a choice? I write this in the present tense because it’s still here, in my being, my psyche.
Mercury in retrograde is a concept I don’t always subscribe to ruling my life, I exist more in the grey areas of some control and free will, finished with a heavy sprinkle of fatalism. Yet still, I woke up on May 14th feeling like I had shaken the wrath rather than the wrath shaking me.
I have trouble producing. Right? that’s the word. Writing I can do, fragments fragments everywhere. Slips of paper, texts to myself, voice memos, scribbles scribbles scribbles. Utterances. I used to write poetry, so while the self-consciousness of this missive may come across as a bit too much it very much has a home in the land of verse. I’m so very careful, it verges on tortured. Here is Ann Friedman, who has published The Ann Friedman Weekly for ten years (!!!) on the matter:
Showing up to write this for 505 weeks (I skipped a few in the early days, but not a single one since 2016) has allowed me to embrace imperfection. It's provided both pressure and release. It's helped me accept that I often say the wrong thing, I say too much, I don’t say enough. It's reassured me that there’s always next week. To try again. To do it better.
In other words, it's a practice.
This acceptance, this wisdom both floored and comforted me. An allowance to make mistakes, that the sun will rise again. Humiliation, shame and self-loathing have often been my motivators, including the desire, the utter need, to be above reproach. I show up to work for other people but rarely myself. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s not going to propose solutions and it’s doesn’t have to be as involved as a thesis.
I never considered this space a newsletter, I wanted a place to be found, to be read. I realize what I need is a practice, a practice I need to practice. There’s a beautiful quiet to a practice, I spent years alone in a kitchen, listening to the same Gillian Welch album every morning making biscuits. I love the grounding silence of working alone, of working in another place of my brain that feels a freedom for its dexterity of repetition.
The following, along with the entire essay “On Research” by Alicia Kennedy, really resonated with me:
Mess has been my word for the last few months, maybe longer. It describes my approach to nearly everything: cooking, recipe development, identity, photography, and—indeed, perhaps most of all—research. By mess, I don’t mean something like a spill on the floor to be mopped up, nor do I mean an entangled mass of cords to untie. I mean starting from a place of curiosity, of unknowing, on one subject and following all the places it leads. I mean not trying to organize an approach from above, but leading with intuition toward any route that opens up and not worrying about what happens in the interim. I’m talking about something similar I’ve written about before, I realize, which I called gleaning—a different practice, one that is about being in the world rather than in search of answers to any specific query.
I am interested in being in the world, I always have been. There are consequences to this location, bad and good. The connections in life mesmerize me. This world, it’s not nearly as carefully organized as we’ve been told, it is not linear. Life’s weird. That’s the good part.