15.07.2021 - Or Perhaps
It’s been a while. Hello.
This is just a quick scribble to mark the launch of the second year of #WhoseFuture, a billboard campaign by Rising Arts Agency, the creative community to which I belong and of which I am extremely proud.
For four weeks, the art work of about 35 young artists (<30) is pasted up across the city of Bristol, accompanied by statements and demands. It’s all about Care and Wellbeing, and what that means under the oppressive systems that govern our society.
I’m very honoured to have some writing up and featured as part of the campaign. Since I’ve largely posted about it in photos (which are obvs unreadable by screenreaders) I have pasted the text below.
If you’re in Bristol and you see some of the artwork, share it ! enjoy it ! make some of your own !
xx
***
[text begins]
(keep going keep going keep going)
Or perhaps the pounding rhythm is an error of composition, is not even the right genre, in fact, and to disregard the bone-deep, lactic burning in the calves—lamenting, still, how unjust it is that the persistent maintenance of a heartbeat circling 90bpm does not also bring with it the lean muscularity of a melancholic literary aesthete, whose interwar diet of coffee, cigarettes, red wine and the sun of the italian riviera mysteriously carves a form bespokely poised to pen the perfect poem/essay/form-demolishing novella—is to ignore some kind of very important warning sign from a body that is fatiguing, fatiguing, fatiguing at the perpetual motion, the careening vacillation between Staying Alive Long Enough To Pay, Once More, The Rent and Is Everyone Alright, Is Everyone Else Alright, It Feels Like Everyone Else Is Not Alright; dual states of being that are less yin-yang-balance than they are two stray dogs caught in an endless, rotating snarl, each biting chunks from the belly of the other; and the threat of abyssal stillness snags horrid, gnarled fingernails into the soft, soft skin on the backs of the ankles, sniping whispers about the sediment at the bottom of the river, the fated upsurge if the flow were to ever come to a sudden, thunderous
halt.
The future spills out, oil-slick and viscous
Birds skirr
None of the cats in the street have jobs
The drop, when it finally comes, will be–
[end of text]
NB.
(what I’m reading:
gideon the ninth — tamsyn muir
pride and prejudice — jane austen
earthsea cycle — ursula le guin
and I’m on GoodReads, if it’s of interest)