We Have Always Lived With the Castle
From Christmas Eve till Boxing Day the castle looks on in this way, and I cannot help but feel I am inside a poem. Like everything we live through has some emblematic subtext, a feeling no doubt heightened by my background; visiting this country, and this coastline in particular, does feel like an overdue correction. A way of saying to the people in my line, total strangers to whom I owe my life, here I am against all odds, back in a place, or near a place, you once called home. Which is to say, my thoughts about the castle were never going to be neutral.
On Heraldry
Back then, as with this summer, we’d had the Euros, and England flags were flying as part of that. But it was clear from the racist abuse that England’s Black players were forced to endure for the anti-racist stance of taking the knee (and for missing penalties), that the national pride cited by some didn’t extend to certain nationals.
On the Bounty of Her Senses
The nature of those dreams was so marked I have come to believe I left an imprint of myself, a spectral proxy who could not bear to leave and so stayed while my body came to England. As if I had surrendered some integral shard of self and told her, Wait here until I can return. And she, in the meantime, communed with me in dreams, granting me the bounty of her senses.
On Holding the Flux
Having missed the welcome sunny spell of early April, my body was bamboozled by the cold. As I walked through the well-loved but all-too-familiar postcode of BS5, waving to the boozehounds skinning up outside the bookies, smiling at the DnB blaring from a hatchback, I felt the sensory markers of Ghana recede like a dream into the morning, growing steadily harder to distinguish beneath an overcoat of Same Old.
On the Company of Creatures
What the hell is it like to be a moth-eating frog? Or to grow a mango from your boughs? Or to spin a web from your body? Or be the thing that’s spun? Considering all the different sensory experiences happening in tandem is as humbling as it is incomprehensible, and also reassuring: attention renders loneliness an illusion ― everything belongs.
On Art as Natural Law
In the same way a single mushroom is fruit of a subterranean network, infinitely complex mycelium mapping the soil for information and food, so, too, it seems to me, do works of art spring forth from a similar source. An endlessly complex, unknowable network fueling each singular ‘fruit’ with the ‘food’ of inspiration ― creative energy.