10/365 and 11 and 12

cold snaps//AI choirs//Leonardo//herons.

(Three in one, because I’ve been having a nice time)

10/365

It’s gone midnight and they’re closing the gates at Tottenham Court Road when I remember I haven’t written this, my pointed patent boots threatening to catch on the escalator as I try to make notes on my phone before the day runs away. A cold snap, the coldest in living memory they’re saying about Scotland, -16 in the Highlands, but I am here in my strange self imposed exile. Crisp frost, white branches, birds unsure what to do with the ice on the pond and coffee, not hot enough. Later, zoom meetings with my headphones on and phone propped against the pepper grinder in soho before drinks, dinner, old friends and a crystalline day so perfect the worry is the slightest thing could shatter it, but nothing does. Over dinner we talk about mixtapes. Music as a declaration of love. Intent. Remorse. There was a boy on the school bus once, used to make me mixtapes. I thought he was just being nice. We’d listen to them on the way home, a headphone in each of our ears, barely enough to shut the noise of the bus out, but an excuse enough to bend our heads closer together. I should’ve known. I’ve never been good at knowing. After, when he asks me out and I’m surprised and say no, he gives me a final tape. This one full of song of love and heartbreak, he tells me he wants me to know how I’ve made him feel. It takes another 12 years before I do. There’s something telling about songs, you can see inside someone in a way you can’t if say they tell you their favourite film or some other cultural currency. A song’s different, something about how we narrate ourselves or how we want to be seen or how we soundtrack our lives, or like the boy on the bus, how spiteful we are at the end.

11/365

A day so beautiful it’ll do something to your heart, and mine, speeded up as I walk in Hyde Park, the Serpentine frozen sharp but not solid. A swan pushing through ice shards in the same way a boat would, using its neck as a hammer. I stand and watch for a long time, until the ice cracks and the bird lets out a sound of triumph. For a time last year, I worried my heart had become like a mended broken bone, the cartilage fused too hard and too strong, impossible to break again. It’s said there’s nothing as whole as a broken heart, I’m not sure I believe this, but there’s nothing so human for sure. Sometimes, I worry about my mechanical tendencies. But not this morning, when everything is so perfect I could cry and nearly do when ambushed by the choir in the Serpentine Gallery. In The Call, human choirs are used to train AI, creating a kind of call and response. Human and machine merge, and although I think I’m able to tell the difference, I’m unsure if I actually am, the sound becomes truly uncanny as the machines singing or mimicking or echoing, we show them their limits and they chant ours back at us. It’s beautiful, but the kind of unsettling beauty encountered when you see someone so beautiful they also seem other worldly, so rare they can’t be quite real or right. It is a disruption to an accepted order of ordinary. I’m not sure I like it. I’m not sure that matters, yet I struggle to leave, the machines have me in their grip. It makes me think of Brecht - will there be singing in the dark times - he didn’t ask who’d be doing the singing, could not have imagined surely machines choiring our obsolescence.

After, I stand at Moore’s Arch for a while watching the geese. As I’m watching, a heron swoops down on the goose sitting on the top, its wide, furiously beating wings making clear it wants the whole space for itself. The goose flies into the air, and I snao quickly enough to capture this fight. My German great-greatgrandmother was a Herron before she married. Last autumn, I watched one stalk fish on the west coast of Scotland. They are supreme birds, some ghostly hangover of a different time, not quite of now. Every time I see one, I think of her; how displaced she must have felt when she arrived in Glasgow, the rest of her family back in Germany. Something pulls and nags in my mind, there is some connection I need to be making but I can’t work it out. I look at the bonelike arch, the scratches deep in it, as if the Heron has attacked this too, and it’s the Heron that takes me back to Herron, to the 11th of January, but a different January in a different city, and just gone 1pm here, now/just gone 1pm then when, on the 11th January 1920, Louise Dun, my great-great-grandmother’s daughter, left their townhouse in Glasgow and walked the short journey to the Clyde. It snowed that day. The first snow of the new year. The papers reported the ratification of the treaty of Versailles. What was it like, to live that first world war as a German far from home? What was it like to be half German, half Scottish, as if a body can neatly be divided in two? She walked to the Clyde and the specifics are lost in the time lapse between her leaving the house, pulling her collar up against that cold, biting from the river. I have her sister’s fur coat still. Moth eaten and dust full, it makes me sneeze. I cannot throw it away. She is found, dead, in the river around 4.30 that afternoon. It would’ve been nearly dark by then, her body making an uncertain shape. The Heron, there on the arch, reminding me of this, and the near miss of my existence. Rumour is, she was engaged to my maternal grandmother’s father. A match so good he married her surviving sister. Without that morning, I would not be in this one. It broke my great-great-grandmother’s heart. They’re together now, buried in an unmarked grave, two people wide on the fringes of the city, away from the respectable people, dying their natural deaths.

The Heron’s still there when I leave. What must it be like to be British, to simply be only that. To be able to tick a box easily. To not be half everything. To not hold two continents in the one body. To be simply, explicably, from here. To tick the first box on the list. To have a box even. To not have to tick other every time you need to explain yourself. To not have to explain yourself. I don’t know. I have been half all my life, so half I came to think of myself as wholly nothing. I missed these things out The Last Days because my South African, Jewish, money laundering, philandering, psychopathic father complicated the story. This is a beguilingly simple sentence for someone so difficult. Although some of these adjectives might seem startling, they don’t even begin to cover him. Because I missed this out The Last Days, people have had people recently said, well that’s not in the book, as if because it’s not in the book I must be mistaken about both my father and my halfness; as if a person is only ever one story. How nice it would be to be contained neatly in 320 pages, 84,000 simple words.

12/365

My hair smells of woodsmoke. Last night, minus -6, and we sat round the firepit as the thirsty flames licked scraps of dry wood, burning fast with all the cold air surrounding it. Some days, it feels like luck’s been allocated unfairly, I find myself with a surfeit of it. Because I’m superstitious, I worry about saying this, as if even in saying it, it might being to run out. Another white morning, and I’m in the RA, having forgotten the Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence is about to end. I’ve loved Leonardo since I was about seven, maybe because my father’s family have a long tradition of leonine names, my middle name one; or maybe because he was also left handed and wrote backwards and sometimes, when you’re a strange kid, you cling onto any ally you can find, even if they’re from the 16th century. His drawings have an energy that Michelangelo's and Raphael’s lack, as though he’s trying to draw many images at the same time, almost pre-empting animation, a horse with several possible necks and facial positions would be perfect sped up. His drawings seem evidence of a mind rarely fully focused or still, one sheet of various studies with a horseman, cogwheels and lever action, enchanting in its disparate nature. With Michelangelo’s focus on muscular male anatomy, Leonardo’s depiction of animal anatomy and Raphael falling between the two, it’s impossible to leave without thinking of the technical ability of the three men as draughtsmen and experts in depicting the body. Since a recent conversation with an actor, I’ve been thinking about the body and its connection to art. Acting is all physicality, and a good actor possesses a heightened awareness of their body, both inhabiting and exhibiting it. It seems a good artist is the same, with many of my favourite artists returning to the body as subject, object, and preoccupation, the resulting work an interplay between these three, as well as something produced in relation to their own physical strengths and limitations. We rarely talk about the toll art takes on the body of the artist. I remember a late night conversation with an artist who told me how their fingers bled before becoming callused because of stitching every day. There’s something of the devotional in this, something of madness too, in the way the devotional nearly always is. And yet somehow the body seems to escape the writer, as if writing is purely an intellectual opposed to a physical pursuit. I don’t think it is. After prolonged periods of writing I often feel as if I’m absented myself. I find I write better when I’m cold and hungry - there’s a sharpness that wouldn’t be otherwise. Perhaps this denial is an exploration of the physical, a way of creating an embodied writing by being somewhere outside of my own body. I’d like to think more about the body and where it sits with writing - a character I’m writing is making me think this, I need to be looser than I’ve been to write her. I need to move differently to know who she is. Method writing maybe. This perhaps makes no sense and certainly seems nonsensical to be thinking in the corridors of the RA, but also makes perfect sense, walking past anatomical models still used for teaching. Out into the cold and Fortnum’s has its 2025 down the side, the Sunday street quiet, unlit angels hanging still over Piccadilly, my breath, white in the air.