15/100, where the light makes sense

Five days in Scotland. Lots of walking, much reading, but mostly, so much light. I know I’m home when the light makes sense. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but even nearing the border as the hills change, levelling out to become undulating instead of forbidding, the light shifts, alters just enough to be Scottish. But mostly, there’s a settling, a just knowing and the skies are suddenly much, much bigger, sometimes greyer, sometimes a startling blue.

In Glasgow the tenements are made from red sandstone. It’s a soft material, reflects a soft light. The people are soft too, mostly. They laugh easily, become your friend quickly, would possibly stab you when you leave a bar. I like it. In the west, the sun sets in ways it doesn’t elsewhere. It takes its time. Doesn’t feel the need to show off. Maybe I was 19 when I stood on the roof of a multi-storey carpark, my boyfriend behind me with his arms wrapped around my waist and we just watched the sun as it soak itself into buildings, made it’s way in the Clyde when it finally went down. I didn’t know the way the sun set that way until then. We went to Loch Lomond a lot that summer, messed around, the way you still can when you’re on between school and university and nothing’s serious.

I was born on the east coast. It’s different there. The light’s colder. Whiter. The people too. I never thought of myself as being from the west coast. My mum would tease my grandmother about being Glaswegian. Turns out my whole maternal line is from the west, my mum born in Helensburgh, my grandmother leaving the island they lived on just long enough to give birth. I say my whole maternal line as if it’s fact when it’s not.

It stops at my great-grandmother, then the thread turns, runs in a different direction away to Heidelberg and back, I don’t know where. But the rest of my grandmother’s ancestors, all west. And my love of the light the last few days maybe exists to suggest that these maternal lines work in ways you can’t underestimate.

A thread’s a line pulling us back. I can’t think of thread without seeing my mother’s hands. I saw Victoria Adukwei Bulley read the other night, in the poem she read she considers what the work of the body might be. I kept thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about it a lot for my next book. After, I tried to find the poem, instead I found a this one, and these lines from it will be the epigraph to my next book, I knew as soon as I read them they would be:

Tell me, I said, about what has survived.

Tell it with only two threads & your hands

swimming over & under

& over again, until the fabric speaks,

& the textile is a text.

I cannot think of thread without thinking of my mother’s hands and I cannot think of my mother’s hands without thinking of thread and I cannot often think of thread without thinking of the umbilical cord, our first encounter with textiles before becoming the site of our first loss, that first severance marking us forever right in the core.

I have not yet worked out what the true work of the body is. I likely never will settle on one idea, but the work of thread is to repair, and the work of this light here, seems to pull me back to the maternal bodies who used their hands to stitch, to knot, to sew, a long line of them, heads bent, until me when textile became text.