Hunger

and losing it and finding it.

I am writing about hunger and denial. I have said before that I’m superstitious, and I am, so that’s about as far as I’ll go with explaining what I’m writing but I’ve been thinking about being hungry and what it means. In equating hunger to food, we’ve made it a problem easily solved. And yet. There is, at times, an insatiability to my hunger that scares me. Scared me so much I turned inwards and began to eat myself. For a while, this satisfied the problem of my hunger, no that’s a lie, it masked the problem of my hunger, it put it to sleep for a time.

In Ava Anna Ada, I write about desire, which is really the problem of hunger; both are an appetite for more, for something beyond the body, but also the problem of the body, its physiology and psychology, the tension between the two resulting in denial, a lost of appetite, which is what Anorexia translates as, a loss of hunger, which is to miss the point entirely, that while physically, the sufferer might not be hungry, but the absence of hunger only ever masks a more terrifying presence; hunger and its power is the force to be reckoned with.

I was a hungry child. I was known for eating anything, everything; for reading anything, everything; for wanting to know anything, everything. I devoured steak, strawberries, grabbed handfuls of raspberries straight from the bush, facts, figures, historical dates and details, spent hours making microscope slides with insect’s wings pinned in place, rode long distances on my bike; I wanted to eat and know and see and discover everything. Until I didn’t. Until I learnt the price of my hunger, the misleading desire of the flesh. And so I turned on myself, becoming cannibal, demanding I went further and further, devouring my kidneys, my liver, my brain, my heart; because this is what happens when you strip your body of everything, you turn on your organs, you begin to eat yourself to death. I have written about this in both The Last Days and Ava Anna Ada and I will continue to write about hunger and desire and the symbolism of the act of eating yourself until I know what it means, which is to say, I likely will not stop writing about it in one form or another.

This month, was a music book market, a friend’s gig, an art opening, an art book market, many late night drinks with friends, dinners, a misguided late afternoon in the French House, endless games of Risk and Uno with little people, being drafted in last minute to travel to Wigtown to interview Maggie O’Farrell and Ruth Scurr, it was also working on new things, the sheer cliff edged fear of it all, it was a poetry launch, it was the Mercury after-party, it was Bacon at the Tate Britain before noodles in a wet Soho, it was crying in the dark during Past Lives, it was finally seeing a Joseph Cornell birdbox in the flesh, it was being awed by Immortal Thoughts, it was a proof drop at some of East London’s best indie booksellers, it was a big birthday party, it was Jenny Holzer at the Tate Modern, and it finished tucked into a car, driving through the Scottish night under a near full moon after gin in a pop up bar in someone’s front room on the way to spend the night in a haunted Scottish castle. It was full. It was good. But woven in and through it all were the best conversations and it is this, alongside the experience of living life fast, that are the things I am the hungriest for now, because without them, it is hard to stay sharp. It is hard to stay looking out, and good writing (not that I’m saying I’m good but I’m passable) is that alchemic combination of the inside and the outside; the mind sharpened by other minds, work only with your own mind, and you’re in trouble.

Which returns me to my first hunger, before memories of eating, there you are, three years old and sitting at the bottom of the towering shelves, books balanced precariously and you are crying and still small enough for your mummy to pick you up and ask what’s wrong and you tell her there’s a world you’re shut out of, the conversations she and your sister have at dinner are not ones you can enter, because you cannot yet match the sounds to the letters on the page and so she pulls a slim book from the shelf and tucks you on her knee and she smells of wool and power and she takes your hand and lets you trace the letters as she tells you the sound each make and by the end of the day you can match sounds to letters and letters become words and words become the world and after that day, you do not stop reading.

This first hunger is still the one I feed the most. For a while I tried to keep up, reading the newly released, the contemporary, enthusing on Instagram, and while there’s a value in that, and sometimes it’s also part of this complicated, difficult to explain job, if that was all I did, I’d be chasing something I couldn’t quite fill, but worse, I wouldn’t be getting any better. A lot of people talk about a writing routine, more people should concentrate on developing it as a practice. It’s a hard edged discipline, not a performance.

The best conversations are the ones that push you the most; I love the challenge, the dance, of talking to someone more intelligent than me, reading it like that too. Now I read up, I read people beyond my ability and often my ability to comprehend until I can; I read the authors I want to grow into, I read hungrily: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art criticism, cultural criticism, academic papers. I read chaotically, I cannot keep to one book at once; I read until I’m full up and then when I have taken enough in, I work and work and work and do not read and then it cycles around and so it goes; hunger until it is satiated, abstinence until the hunger returns.

Whereas I was once afraid of my hunger, I now like it. The value. The function. The force it creates.