Hello! Two caveats before I start:
I no longer really use this space primarily for music updates which is what I initially created it for, so if you would no longer like to receive these letters I will not take it personally at all if you unsubscribe now – the option to do so should be in blue at the very top of the email, or in grey at the very bottom.
I recently set up the option for readers to become paid subscribers which I am envisioning as a kind of virtual tip jar if you like receiving my writing sporadically in your inbox and feel like you would like to send me a tip – thank you! I am planning to write more frequently but also planning to keep all the writing free and unpaywalled for now. Anyway thank you for reading!
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A street near my flat, the one that takes me to the supermarket, is completely coated in grey dust at the moment because of the endless construction sites, it was so intense today that I had to put my sunglasses on to stop it from getting in my eyes, and the leather on my sandals went from black to white-grey. Half of the street is derelict or in the process of being reconstructed. Walking home from Tesco, I was trying to remember an Old English word I learned when I was an undergraduate and haven’t thought of since. Dustsceawung, a quick google search reminded me, is a word that literally means ‘contemplation of the dust’ and is used to describe the prevalent notion in extant Old English texts of the sense that all things, people, buildings and empires etc, will eventually, inevitably turn to dust. I wish I’d paid more attention in my Old English classes, but at the time I had no interest in learning what I perceived as a dead language (a dust language?) rife with clunky grammar and words I had no intuitive sense on how to pronounce. Still something must have lodged into my brain because out of nowhere surrounded by traffic dust and construction debris I had a version of the phrase Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon going around in my head like when you phonetically sing along to the sounds of a pop-song before you register what the lyrics are actually saying. Again I had to look it up; it roughly translates to ‘wondrous is this stone-wall, crumbled by fate’, (I love that word for fate ‘wyrd’, it’s transmuted over time to the contemporary ‘weird’, which is an evolution of weird in its archaic sense, as in Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters based on the Three Fates, and which overtime began to be used to be described all things deemed unearthly.) Anyway: it’s the opening line of a poetic fragment ‘The Ruin’ from the 11th century manuscript known as the Exeter Book.
The poem describes an Anglo-Saxon speaker’s encounter with the ruins of a Roman city (likely Bath) and is perfectly demonstrative of early Medieval dustsceawung rumination. What is double-poetic to me is that the poem seems to anticipate the fate of the manuscript itself, which is in itself a ruin that has been partially destroyed and some of the text is missing, so that what survives of the poem at all is only a fragment.
My own dustsceawung took me out of Dublin then and into Cyprus, one of the dustiest places I have ever been. I thought about dust a lot when I visited Cyprus, dust as a fragment of a whole, something that lingers or gets lost, dislodged, dispersed. I got dust on my fingers when I touched the sandstone walls of the house my grandfather and his siblings were born in. Dust clung to the soles of my shoes when I walked along the barbed wire fencing that flanked the road out of Nicosia when I walked to meet my teenage cousin in cafe next to one of the many DANGER DO NOT ENTER zones, demarcated by posters of gun-bearing soldiers. When I crossed the Green Line for the first time, about three weeks into my stay, I went to a small art gallery where an artist was collecting stories from members of the Cypriot diaspora about their experiences of returning to or visiting Cyprus for the first time. I told her my story about arriving, meeting my family, trying to communicate with zero-Turkish, hearing about ancestors, family trees. As she listened she turned our conversation to another kind of dust, a big yellow dust cloud that had, a few years previously, migrated (her word) from the Syrian desert and coated the surface of everything in Cyprus in a layer of yellow dust. ‘We must have swallowed grains of the desert here, on our tongues’ she told me, an ecological migration-anxiety that to me immediately echoed a public rhetoric on the migration of people. Diaspora is a word which I think first appears in the Bible, that basically means ‘dispersed’, or more literally, ‘scattered across’, like a handful of dust across the continents, which is of course exactly how it feels sometimes.
Back in 2013 I recorded some songs in my teenage bedroom, and uploaded them to bandcamp grouped together as an EP which I called Dust. Aside from the teenage poetry blog I kept (die) I think that was my first time scattering work I made into some kind of public space (void.) I’m not sure why the urge to make something exist in public / outside of myself persists. I think then it was because I lived in a very rural isolated place and I thought putting something intangible of myself out in the ether enabled a sense of freedom and connection that my bodily experience disallowed. Back then my boyfriend at the time was really into astro-physics, particles and quantum mechanics – things I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now but that I’m sure must have influenced the adolescent dustsceawung in some way. He understood the world to be magical in explicable scientific ways and I understood the world to be magical in more whimsical fated-encounters and signs-found-in-bird-feathers kind of ways but we more or less ended up in a similar place. (Do I still find the world to be magical? Yes. Does magicality preclude the senselessness of violence, cruelty and suffering? No. Do I still reach for the magical? I hope so I hope so I hope.)
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Before I sleep - dusty weird magic of the world I never expected to see in Dublin. Sun storm particles dispersed into Aurora Borealis. Even with the city’s too-much light pollution, I could see it, I could swallow: great streaks of purple stretched across the sky.
Tender and needed xx