I’m thinking about Isserley in Under the Skin. I’m going to the Scottish countryside, and I hope it’s exactly as it was in the movie: drab, gray, dusting with poetics.
I’m thinking about how we always start our sentences with ‘I’m thinking’. I know that’s bad essay writing; you’re not supposed to predicate a sentence with the fact that you’re thinking because obviously whatever you’re about to say entails thinking. But when we say it, it’s so erotic! What’s more romantic than conceptually fucking, moving my tongue around your brain entrails tasting bitters and bergamot.
When I went to my housemate’s house in the English countryside, I saw a different life for myself. One with simple pleasures. Not that they’re simple…maybe a more appropriate word is earthly. I convened with goats, with shrubs, with river and field. I didn’t bring sneakers on that trip nor on this one. Oops! I’ll hike in my clogs.
Everyone that meets me is like, you’re definitely not an outdoors person. But I do believe in the environment. That’s maybe one of the only things I believe in.
But I believe in the digital, too. Is that the opposite of environment? They’re both terrains, can both be traversed. They’re both ecosystems, encumbering a network of actors, actants, affects, and poetics! I think about it this way: the digital overlaying the natural, like a kind of fourth dimension switchboard cutting through grass. What is poetics? Poetics is that which is uttered, I’m thinking. It’s a kind of predisposition toward things, poetics. The poetics of this, of that. It works with virtually anything.
Let’s break it down. The poetics of this trip so far: yellow flowers dousing the fields overlooking the ocean, lone horses dabbling the landscape ever so often, the group of bridesmaids on the train spilling prosecco all over each other.
I babysat kids the other day and my friend asked me how one must conduct themselves around children. I said, tune into poetics! She didn’t get it. Nor do I, honestly. But they’re perceptive things, children. They notice the underbelly of the turtle, the way you can almost see light being refracted in action if you focus all your energy on it.
I’m so excited to breathe in fresh air and feel loose. I’m staying at a farmhouse owned by a painter and her husband, and they invited me to have dinner with them. I’m thinking I’ll buy them a bottle of wine. I’m thinking I’ll read them some of my poetry. I’m thinking they might even feel like a mom and a dad, that I might find a home, that this very trip might be a kind of homecoming.