Notebook, String and Hope in a Rucksack

On finding, and cracking, the edges.

I’m sat on a sofa alongside my co-host, and we’re having a conversation in the hope of starting a conversation. It’s a residency: One that encourages a pause from everyone’s everyday. A pause in expectations, and rules that usually apply. K has turned to me and asked: Can you describe a time you felt particularly hopeful? I’m expecting the question, we agreed it as a starting point over the lunchbreak, but I’m still surprised by my answer. It’s weird how that happens sometimes, isn’t it? You don’t know what you’re going to say, and there’s no guarantee you’d say the same thing on another day, ten minutes later, or with different people listening. But here we are, and here I am, talking about packing a rucksack.

I have no idea how old I was, but small enough for excitement to prickle over my entire body in a way that felt uncontainable. Four, six, something like that, maybe. My fingertips tingled with the minute vibration from the rucksack zip; a sure indication that the whole landscape was fizzing with the same electricity. With laser focus, I scanned my bedroom for essentials: A pencil, a notebook, some string. A pair of safety scissors. A book. A bobble. A fulfilling sense of purpose swelled in my belly. Sliding down the bannister, rucksack on board, I descended onto the plaine. I turned, grabbed the reins, kicking my heels to encourage my horse to gallop. The land was golden and the sky was blue and the wind was in my hair. We were covering a lot of ground and it felt like freedom. Eventually, I saw the edge of a forest. I dismounted, and clambered over rocks before finding a sort of doorway into a clearing. I had permission to head for the bottom of the garden by myself, but there was still a flicker of deviant rebellion in my feet. I tread carefully around the perimeter of a mossy pool, hopping between flagstones, before landing on grass. It was lush here. Glossy shrubs framed the scene, and giant, crepey poppies swayed gracefully in the breeze. It was warm enough for bare arms. A knot in the trunk of the apple tree asked to be leant into, so I crossed by legs and sat, gazing at the endless sky. Birds dashed between branches. A bumblebee hummed and bimbled. I gawped, as a whole activity. An involuntary sigh escaped and I sank more deeply into the ground. It was a while before I broke into the rucksack, lying the notebook, pencil, book and string on the dry earth next to me. It just felt right that they would join the scene. At some point, filled right up with magic and possibility, I began to write a story.

Memory is a funny thing. I remember this day so clearly, for no clear reason. Particularly how it felt in my naive, delighted, little body. Perhaps I’ve conflated several garden trips. Perhaps it happened just like this only once. Perhaps it only half happened at all, and every visitation of the memory has added new filigree. It hardly matters. Personal mythology has its place. It doesn’t harm anyone for me to carry it as I do, to return to it as I need to. Hope is a word I apply to this scene in retrospect. It wasn’t a conscious thought at the time. It wasn’t a conscious association until a week or so ago, sitting next to a friend in front of a room full of people, being asked a wonderful question. Where does the hope live in this memory? Somewhere between the delight, imagination, clarity and ease. It sits next to freedom and holds hands with possibility.

On the colour wheel, clashing colours are also complementary. That is to say that the colours opposite from one another, completely differing in their properties, attract visual attention when put together. If Hope was a colour, what would be its opposite?

Recently I listened to Hannah Proctor and Ajay Singh Chaudhary speak to host, Eleanor Penny, on the Verso Podcast; an extension of the independent, radical publishing house. In it, I learned that exhaustion runs through history as a common thread denoting times of rebellion and deep shift. It’s been documented widely, by poets, politicians and psychologists, for centuries. Exhaustion of individual bodies and spirits, but also of ideas and possibilities.

[Exhaustion] wasn’t actually the thing initially I thought would be the hook, the anchor, the connective tissue, the obvious choice. The goal was to synthesise and generate a politics particular to this moment and, in particular, the contours of climate. I just kept coming across the ecological sense of exhaustion people talk about. You find these accounts of exhaustion that map almost perfectly onto every hot zone of ecological and social distress.

We are separated, but seemingly connected by these other forms of ‘running out’ or exhaustion, things feeling very spent, which stretches all the way from , y’know, the classic sort of ‘I am physically exhausted, I am mentally exhausted’, but stretching also to ‘we’ve exhausted our aesthetic forms’. Literally, ‘we’ve exhausted the way we live.’

Whether we like it or not, the growth curve is bending down. We’ve exhausted this system. Zombie capitalism is not a terrible phrase for this. I always want to cover everything beautiful and fun, but these are not beautiful or fun things!

This idea of exhaustion stretching from those physical and mental health questions, but all the way into the ecological, and also these political, economic and aesthetic dimensions, social dimensions; The exhaustion some people have that they never got a chance. My people never had a chance to build our cool little semi Utopia. All these little things to me add up to what is to me the key feeling of this moment.

- Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Executive Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, specialising in social and political theory

For as long as the feeling has existed, it has been more and less the concern of medical professionals. While a ‘nervous disposition’ or feeling of being ‘worn out’ were, and are, reasons to be signposted towards treatment and medication, the associated melancholy, nostalgia and disconnection fall into a more amorphous world of energetic depletion. Who will help with that? What’s the medicine for an attack on curiosity? For the symptoms, and causes, of having ‘exhausted our aesthetic forms’?

One essential response, says artist and writer Jenny Odell, is to do nothing. My instinct is to do something; (almost) anything. In the end, I think we might be reaching towards similar visions. In her book, ‘How to Do Nothing’, Jenny shares her own secret garden; a rose garden she began to visit daily around the time of Trump’s inauguration.

This wasn’t exactly a conscious decision; it was more of an innate movement, like a deer going to a salt lick or a goat going to the top of a hill. What I would do there is nothing. I’d just sit there. And although I felt a bit guilty about how incongruous it seemed - beautiful garden versus terrifying world - it really did feel like a necessary survival tactic.

The function of nothing here - of saying nothing - is that it’s a precursor to having something to say. “Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.

- Jenny Odell, Artist, Writer and Academic

I read this and reflected on the gulf between sitting under an apple tree with an open notebook, and an imagination suspended in fight, flight and freeze. ‘Redemption preserves itself in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe’ said Walter Benjamin. ‘There is a crack in everything’ said Leonard Cohen, ‘that’s how the light gets in’.

Two days ago, I packed a bag: Notebook, pencil, book, water. I pulled on my boots, still muddy from the last adventure, and turned right out of my front door. I pass Heron, and Cormorant, and Swan. Kingfisher shows up just beyond the bridge, and swifts gather overhead at the widest point of the river. On the other side of the wooded stretch, the view opens out to fields and big skies. A mile or so later, I approach a concrete temple; the underbelly of the M62. An unlikely spot to love, but I do. It wasn’t exactly a conscious decision to visit as often as I have, more of an innate movement, like a root reaching for water. Cars roar above, the river rushes below, all magnified by the huge bowl created in the space between. On bright days, a line of sunlight falls precisely on the ground: A serendipitous byproduct of the gap between the lanes, designed for draining away rain. The first time I saw it, I laughed. Every time I see it, something lightens and the edges loosen. There really is a crack in everything.