25 / stock, blue violet, white carnation
What in carnation! 😘
Hello, hello!
How have you been?
I’ve been writing a lot about dance shows, recently—the latest in a review of Foster Group’s Double Goer, and back in February, covering two gems from the lineup at Auckland Pride: The Bloom (the proceeds of which went to Doctors Without Borders’s urgent Gaza appeal, to which you can still donate!) and The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave.
In other buzzy news, Issue 17 of Starling came out in early March. It’s full of great, exciting, thoughtful work by a selection of writers from Aotearoa under the age of 25.1
Or, hey, baby, it’s me. I’ve been surrendering myself up to events again.
The daylight hours are shortening, rapidly and with a shock. We’ve kicked, as many of you will know, out of another cycle of Daylight Savings. The result is, in some respects, the loss of languid evenings in which time seemed suspended, possible and unfurled, with hours to write and cook and eat and see shows and come home to some keen stretch of a day that still felt like mine, where I could carve out a plane that still belonged to me. Now, it feels, I look up and find twilight, always scurrying through the last vestiges of the thing. There’s an exhaustion that comes with the inertia of the changing clock.
There is, though, the matter of the mornings. With the perceived farewell to those expansive, optimistic ends to the day, I have found myself in possession of far more settled beginnings. Time for breakfast: sliced Angel tomatoes atop ricotta and a gentle spread of extra virgin olive oil, with flakes of salt and cracked pepper, on toasted mixed grain sandwich-cut Vogel’s; either an oat flat white or an oat latte, depending on how diligent I am about circulating air through the milk as it’s steamed. Time to sit and eat without multitasking; to drink the coffee away from my dressing table, rather than in gulps between harried strokes of eyeshadow and mascara. Time for the morning routine, inclusive of this and more, a litany of little rituals that remind me to engage in the act of caring for and valuing myself. Which, to be frank rather than saccharine, I need—and have needed.
There’s a reason for the relatively seasonal nature of these newsletters, documented last year, too, that wholesale annual whirlwind barrelling through New Year to March. I’m sure we all have points of our working year wherein we give ourselves over to something. Certainly it’s a fact I’ve become used to over the past two years, in myriad environments: the expanding hours of delivery, the sprint from venue to venue, the flow-on, the proffering of oneself as a called-for pair of hands. This is what means the rest of it—the thudding hearts; the percussive perfection; the flirting you turn down but pocket as an anecdote regardless; a script like the best lyric essay—can happen. That the connection between (in my case) art, artist, and audience can take place.2
To cut several paragraphs short, I’ve spent a long time feeling the same way I did back in September. I’ve tried to draft this newsletter for weeks, if not months, and it’s all boiled down to sentiments previously expressed there. Only now I’m thrilled to report that something between idea and action has caught up.3 Hence the mornings, and the breakfasts; the walks to Mission Bay and back on sunny days, or home from Ponsonby with a stock of shopfront flowers in my arms. The alstroemerias, in their gramophonic brushstroke blooming, are lasting well.
The thing about periods wherein a project demands a lot of you—all of you, really; especially when you’re at the oars rather than the stern—is that there will come a time you have to step out of that pattern. While you’re in it, it’s gruelling and exhilarating and the mechanism behind the ride means you’re strapped in; there’s a degree to which you don’t have to think, you just have to keep going. But when that isn’t the case anymore, whether the taper comes by choice or by imposition, you are awarded the gift of your time back. With it, you get to create your life.
When those demands have receded, and you are without the tug of consumption—without the option, really, and certainly without the need, to give into that most earnest tendency to overreach, which nobody else can guard for you—there’s immense potential. And freedom. You must grant yourself ease, where you can. You must set yourself up for joy, to live beyond the clamour of subsistence. The opportunity to do so is by no means universal, and it won’t be given to you; it’s not bestowed upon those most dedicated, you must grasp it for yourself.
Mary Oliver knew it, and tens of thousands—millions of us—have come to recognise it by her words, held like a talisman, repeated almost for the sake of them, until finally the moment comes that you realise, oh—this is it—this is what, and why, and how, she meant:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk a hundred miles on your knees through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.4
(I came across an essay along similar lines, ‘Good Girl’ by Michelle Albanes-Davies, which weaves a web of other writing that I really recommend.)
When these things hit you, the reality of them, it can happen all at once. At least it did for me. Sometimes someone turns around to you and articulates their observations of your life and you go, hang on. Hang on, that’s not true—that’s not what I’m doing. And yet you tally it up, and—oh. Somehow, along the way, those impulses you were happy to lean full tilt into for a time have expanded, the edges of them stretching like a tar-thick Dalí clock, to cover every waking hour, to colour your approach to everything, beyond any task that has been asked of you. The need has receded—or perhaps was never there in the way you imagined, some precarious overhang with its origins in school—and so you must place yourself back at the home of things. (And note I’ve gone with ‘must’, not ‘get’ here.)5 There is a difference between being dedicated and being beholden.
So, as the time has swung back around, I am committing to the breakfasts. To the breakfasts, and watching the sun come up; to music as I walk, to the walks themselves, to the mundanity of ironing at night; to retiring the shoes so worn they left the impression of a screw head on my heel; to saying no to the occasional evening invitation; to dedicating myself to that next book, which is now taking form, having been awarded space, and which now has life in it.
There are so many factors that exist beyond our control, yet bear material impacts on our day-to-day lives—a ‘day-to-day’ that quickly expands to shape the whole of them.6 Where we can, we owe it to ourselves to exercise agency over the building blocks of our experiences on this planet. The having of the belly laugh, the slow afternoon. The allowance of, and demand for, it, alongside the striving. As Jenny Holzer’s STATEMENT – Truisms + (2015), currently housed in Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, proclaims:
TURN SOFT AND LOVELY ANYTIME YOU HAVE A CHANCE.
That ‘softness’ isn’t the perceived softness of self-denial—instead, it’s the relief that comes once you’re over the hurdle of shimmying into whichever gap will leave the most profitable, or least inconvenient, impression.7 The softness of Mary Oliver, and of Jenny Holzer, is an unfettered, loving, relaxed, human thing.8 We have to safeguard, and demand, those chances. It’s our duty to ourselves to lean, each day, into what makes our hearts swing open.
The Way We Were (1973), dir. Sydney Pollack
Luke George and Daniel Kok’s outstanding Still Lives: Auckland, presented by the team of greats who make up F.O.L.A. [AKL]
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Transposium by Dani Yourukova
The Dolly Alderton episode of Changes with Annie Macmanus
Stayaway by MUNA
Kowtow’s glorious Botanic Trip print
One Day (Netflix)9
Beyoncé’s COWBOY CARTER (structural masterpiece, incredible execution)
Jean Teng and Sam Low’s podcast Ate Ate Ate
RUBY’s Raffia denim skirt
Jamie Bell wearing brown contact lenses to play Andrew Scott’s father in All of Us Strangers10
‘we can’t be friends (wait for your love)’ by Ariana Grande
Annie Crummer’s transcendent cover of ‘Green Light’ at Hear Me Roar!
There we are—bouquets are back in season.
I’m also on Instagram, if that’s your thing; and I have a website (including exactly one [1] Succession Easter egg, if you can find it).
My poetry collection, Short Films, is available directly from Tender Press and in bookstores across Aotearoa. You can also read Starling, full of wonderful work from New Zealand writers under 25, right here.
Hope you’re keeping well as the world unfurls. It’s so lovely to do this again.
🍒 T
We’ve just jumped into the reading period for Issue 18—lovely as ever.
Just anecdotally, it’s also always wonderful to turn your eye away from the multi-Grammy-Award-winner onstage toward colleagues you know have been working for two months straight, not one day off, and seeing them go, This is why we do it. This is what it’s for. Ecstatic, relieved; dancing along amongst the crowd on a rare slip into a concert. Alchemy.
Finally!
From ‘Wild Geese’, a poet’s poem, a hit of all time. Also the kernel of a brilliant series among poets in Aotearoa, the latest of which has culminated in ‘WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD BY REBECCA HAWKES BY JOSHUA TOUMU’A’, a poem we had the honour of publishing in Starling Issue 17.
And note how hard the second person perspective is working. 👀
Even if this were ‘the meantime’, before whatever you perceive to be your proper life kicking off (babe, these humid, bag-full-of-receipts days are it, too!), wouldn’t you want that meantime to be pleasant? To be treasured? To be great?
You don’t realise how deeply and insidiously these things burrow until suddenly your eyes are opened to them. Oh—you can simply change the conditions of your engagement with this task, or this person. You do not have to bend over backwards to make life easier for every person except yourself. Would you devalue anyone else’s time and energy this way? Is this the advice you’d give your little brother?
And here comes Fiona Apple’s great distillation of love from the legendary track, ‘Hot Knife’: you can / you can / you can relax around me.
I watched this in batches after holding the novel very close to me as a teenager. Having not reread it in years, I was surprised—while watching the show—to reencounter (lots of res here) parts of it that had been foundational to me, deeply engrained in my thinking and approach to the world since, and going, oh, of course it sprang forth from this. A gorgeous show. (I think the casting department and I may have shared a social media algorithm in 2020/2021 [positive].)
Lots I could say about this film! But for the sake of those who haven’t seen it, I’ll keep it to that detail. The eyes. They anchor Adam within—and between, and as being of—both of his parents, and cover for just how extremely large and brown Andrew Scott’s eyes are against Claire Foy’s extremely large and blue ones. Not everyone will understand caring about it, I suppose—but an essential touch to me. (Brilliant performances abound.) (I love Jamie Bell!)