A more formal intro after last week: I’m going to use this little channel for field notes, fragments, longer thoughts when they arrive, and news about music — a place to keep in touch more directly.

I have two London shows approaching:

Thursday 27 August — Ron’s, Peckham
A solo set. You can just show up.

Saturday 17 October — The Sherriff Centre, West Hampstead
I’ll play a short set with Mosaic Ensemble joining me for the choral renditions of a few Tendertwin songs.

I would love to see you at either.

—

I played at the beautiful Wild Canvas Festival last week.

“Maybe this is why we feel like a child of the Earth,” is what Charlotte told me there as I leaned onto her desk by the river, stacked with books she had salvaged from the shelves of her gone parents.

She separates her entourage into two schools: those who knew her before she lost her parents, and those who met her after.

Prior to this interaction, I had not shared much of what I had been thinking lately with Charlotte. No hints except reciting a Mary Oliver poem I found in one of the books on her desk: Thirst, a collection. Charlotte didn’t know her mother had owned that copy, even though she herself had one too. (The poem was Cormorants.)

So, how she located this groove in my radio of selves — I’m not sure.

Books have spines. Books perhaps remember being handled. One copy of Thirst had crossed a distance her mother no longer could. They’re meeting again beside a river after death. I only read The Alchemist long after my dad died, despite him recommending it to me (a ten-year-old) for months. An unpremeditated bridge.

There goes this spatiotemporally fragmented existence we pursue, washing up on different shores. Some people watched you grow but never stepped onto your new meadow; those standing in your meadow today never knew the first language you loved in, etc.

I have always felt a reverent envy towards olive trees of multimillennial standing, and towards humans who know their place within their pocket of childhood friends into old age. My own experience is closer to that of a houseplant — or, less possessively and less domestically, a fungus.

When I realize that the most consistently familiar is, and will always be, nature withstanding— Charlotte’s words come alive: “Maybe this is why we feel like a child of the Earth.”

—

A few days later, I began reading the wonderful Maria Popova’s Traversal. The first chapter (Space Takes the Time It Takes) opens with a mariner who chooses the sea but marks the passing days until his return ashore. He curses its tempests and its stillness, its very sea-ness. Sails on.

The contradiction of leaving, to only then long to return.

Soon after publishing last week’s Ritornello, I remembered (or was returned to) the vast rectangular sign at the entrance of my childhood town, Bodrum. It rests at the top of the hill where the highway meets the peninsula. Beneath the jovial capitals “MERHABA” stands a passage by Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı:

“When you reach the top of the hill, you will see Bodrum. Don’t be fooled into thinking you’ll leave as you arrived. Those before you were just the same; they all departed leaving their minds behind.”

Cevat Şakir was exiled to Bodrum in 1925 for publishing a story about the trauma of war upon soldiers, he was found not-patriotic-enough for his times. Bodrum adopted him tightly. He then gave himself the alias Halikarnas Balıkçısı: the Fisherman of Halicarnassus.

Halikarnas is the most ancient Anatolian name you’ll encounter for Bodrum — it pre-dates the Greeks, and originates from the local Carian language. The inscriptions date back to the late 2nd century BC. Something about a fortress, something about high places.

The name “Bodrum” enters history around the 15th century, and is an evolution of the word Petrium — renamed after St. Petrus. If we keep excavating, Petrium leads us towards petros (Πέτρος): rock.

Skin of the Earth. Forward and back in time.

The sign stands at the precise point where space becomes time. You (or I) arrive at the same hill, look down upon the same peninsula, and discover that neither the town nor you (or I) has remained one thing.

Imagine what it would mean to remember every version as pristine.

In Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious,” Funes cannot forget. Every leaf has its own irreducible detail, every glimpse of a face is distinct from the next. He struggles to understand how the dog seen from the side at one moment could have the same name as the dog seen from the front a moment later. He thinks there should be an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, since no number is ever the same. Much like 17th-century Locke, who imagined an impossible language in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch, would have its own name.

“To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”

Maybe some forgetting is what allows us to recognize anything as continuous. To call it the same dog, the same town, the same person, the same river, we must allow its changing moments to gather beneath one name.

Charlotte’s two schools each know something true and incomplete. One knew the person before, another knows the person after. The inherited book remembers something through touch. Bodrum remembers its layered names. Everything (yes, identically) is committed to change.

The pace of that transformation for a river here, or a tree there, the rock yonder is possibly ungraspable through my human experience — and maybe this is why we say things like “you are my rock,” maybe this is why we feel like a child of the Earth knowing that the saltwater held many tears before ours.

Sail on.

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“And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”

—C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaka”, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

There I go again, approaching shores that fill me with despair and molten passion.

As aereated salt hits my skin on the open deck, I wish for it to peel the metropolis off of me. I greet the ghost of myself from ten years ago on an island not far from where I spent what I then thought were my best years. A few familiar things: squeaky wooden doors, corridors reverberating, the lonely sound of the tide.

I am learning to love again without a plan in my head, because—

Infinite blue moves me. Blue infinitely moves me. So does this carpet of green, at times yellow, dry and pale: copper, gold, moss. In the small hotel we stay, an old white radio is installed in a nook carved into the stone beneath the bedside counter. It plays distant, obscured music. At first I think it is wind chimes, or a grand piano in the hall, or somebody’s morning alarm. But it is a radio.

I arrive in Patmos for the salon aptly named Living an Examined Life, to spend ten days gathering around music, storytelling and myth with Neko Case, Ani DiFranco, Anaïs Mitchell and Ann Powers. We’re sixty strangers who eat, swim, listen, write, sing and slowly become less strange to one another.

In a cave above the port of this island, John is said to have received the visions that became the Book of Revelations. But apokalypsis does not originally mean the end of the world. The Greek word combines apó—“away” or “off”—with kálypsis, a covering or concealment, from kalýptein, “to cover.” It means an unveiling.

I think this often frightens me more: not that the world will end, but that it will reveal itself. Perhaps I fear revelation because it exposes what I might already know — the submerged truth around which I have arranged my life as one doing the concealing.

Listening lately to Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones discuss Homer and Christopher Nolan, I’m struck by their proposition that the Odyssey: the archetypal story of movement, is in fact a story about stasis and the desire to resist time. Odysseus crosses oceans to stop travelling. He moves, just so he can return. Displacement zero. He’s tied to something else, is I think what I’m trying to sing.

It’s no surprise to me that every spark holds its opposite inside it. Movement runs towards stillness; departure manufactures the desire to return; old age circles back into childlike wonder. Jung (and the ancients, too) call this enantiodromia: the emergence of the opposite from within an extreme. The word suggests running contrariwise.

But who is permitted to move, and who is required to wait?

Well. Women keep time. The Western canon recognises male movement as plot and female endurance as its backdrop. Penelope waits. Dido waits. Medea waits. Eurydice waits in the underworld for a man to complete the conditions of her return? Their waiting becomes the negative space in which the hero’s movement acquires meaning.

Still, Penelope unmakes the conditions of waiting with her hands — in circles, in tactility. The weaving of textile becomes a technology with the needle as its smallest unit.

This premise always reminds me of a work I came across some ten years ago, and still cannot really shake off: Faith Wilding’s performance piece Waiting, where a seated woman rocks and recites an entire life passing through anticipation — growing, becoming desirable, marrying, mothering, ageing, dying. The chair, as well as the domesticity of the space, make that suspension achingly visible to me.

And yet waiting is not one thing. It can be digestion, gestation, preparation, attention. The body may appear still whilst in metamorphosis. Odysseus waits for seven years on Calypso’s island.

Let’s talk about another chair to Faith Wilding’s. Let’s talk about Ani DiFranco’s:

When you sit right down
In the middle of yourself
You're gonna wanna have a comfortable chair

—Ani DiFranco, “Back, Back, Back”

I guess revelation needs somewhere for the body to arrive.

I keep seeing women woven into waiting: older women with golden rings, encircled by wrinkles. Their curiosity, warmth, awe and wonder feel everlasting. I want their wisdom without the old lie that oppression is what makes women wise: wisdom that has passed through suffering without mistaking suffering for its source.

I am learning to love again without a plan in my head.

One morning near that cave, I stare for hours at faces of agony, faces of redemption, faces of suffering, painted generously onto ancient stone. Rigid palimpsests, unshaken and unfazed, chiselled with conviction through the Hellenic, the Roman, the Byzantine in layers of devotional ceremony: veiled, yet remembered over and over.

I gather my trinkets, my pendants, my relics, my lore, my philosophy, my years on the planet. I purchase two crosses—three, if I count the bracelet—one of them for Joy. A cross, I think, is a surprisingly comforting shape to hold: just enough corners and edges to define a perfectly graspable form.

Human fingers across the spine.

Rock is the skin of the earth. Palm to palm with its surface, I feel deep time. The painted figures survive by attaching themselves to stone, even as one civilization covers another. What does it mean for something to be veiled but not erased? How much of the self remains legible beneath its later inscriptions?

I want to dive headfirst into the volcano like Empedocles and become fire, water, earth and air consecutively. I am shelled out and filled to the brim all at once. I want a library of water. I want to study the archaeology of water: myth, fog, artifice, all the forms through which something refuses to keep its shape.

Anne Carson, writing about pilgrimage in “Kinds of Water,” gives an instruction: “Don’t come back the way you went. Come a new way.”

The Ship of Theseus paradox asks whether a vessel remains itself after every one of its parts has been replaced. I wonder the same about the body that returns. If the planks of skin change, if the remembered self becomes a stranger, what then recognises the shore?

Our bodies are ships repaired at sea. Continuity may just be the persistence of a pattern: a rhythm, a scar, a story, a name to which the changing body continues to answer.

I remember how in “My I.Q.”, Ani DiFranco sings:

My body is borrowed
Yeah, I got it on loan
For the time in between my mom and some maggots

Sometimes I cannot narrate what happened, yet my hand knows the shape of the object. My feet recognize a certain rock. Mnemonic topography.

A revenant is not simply someone who comes home, Anaïs teaches me.

I must have been someone different in every circle of my life. Daughter, sister, lover, immigrant, musician, stranger, familiar. The projected self, the transformed self, the legacy self, the body. Sometimes the selves recognize one another; sometimes they pass like ghosts on neighboring islands.

T. S. Eliot knew all along:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

On Patmos I enter a new year of my life. Four cakes, one for every seven years of my life, found and arranged by Weezie, Dan, Rossella, Sofia, Stefanos and Regan. Sixty of us establish that time moves in circles.

We jump into the hotel pool only to be escorted out moments later, following a secular ritual of baptism in salt water where a choir gathers around me. Mothers and brothers and fathers and daughters and sisters of the bond.

There the dance is, as Eliot would have it, “at the still point of the turning world” —not arrested and not moving, briefly held on an island while time turns us over as pebbles on the shore.

I am at the centre, and someone here said the centre cannot hold grudges.

I speak to the old self, the future self, the transformed self, the projected self, the legacy self and the body—retrospectively, bravely, knowingly, cluelessly, apprehensively, courageously, blindly, foolishly, underwater, swimmingly, out of temporal linearity.

Time costs me nothing now.

On our final night, Dan recites Cavafy’s “Ithaka.”

By then, the poem no longer sounds like advice about arriving at a destination. Ithaka does not restore the person who departed. It permits her to recognize the shore.

Around me are people who have crossed oceans, marriages, parenthood, illnesses, cities and selves. Someone is always returning, trying to invent a place to come home to. Perhaps the destination is only the container that allows the journey to occur: a cross held in the hand, a chair in the middle of the self, a shroud unwoven, a familiar motif altered.

So, we wait—

I know the place will surprise us.

I know that place will surprise us.