Briefly:
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Hello,
‘Next week, all this will break. That’s what I keep telling myself. That’s what I know.’
Here in the northern hemisphere, we have nearly reached the summer solstice. The days are long. It was light in my bedroom at 4am this morning, and of course I didn’t sleep after that. Last night, I went to sleep while the sky was still bright. The world around me feels relentless, unceasing, and I am relentless too, driven by some force that tells me nothing is enough. My brain is fogged with all the things I must do. The space between my desires and capabilities is almost painful.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m extremely grumpy. I’m tired and irritable, dissatisfied. I am writing this from my garden, where it is 5.30am and the sun already feels like it’s as high as it gets at midwinter. I’ve come outside partly so that I don’t wake Bert, who, like me, is primed to wake at some ridiculous hour in June. But it’s also because there doesn’t seem to be enough air to breathe in the house, and there’s hardly enough out here either. Everything is static. Nothing is circulating. We have reached a stalemate.
Still, at least it’s cold out here. My lungs feel as though they’re taking something in. The sun, that intent, insistent eye, is glaring at me from between the trees, every now and then flaring as I align with it. Its rays are falling in gauzy patches across the weeds that constitute my planting scheme, alighting on the foxgloves like a benediction. Restless shadows are cast against the shed. The wood pigeons percolate in the bay tree, and a robin hovers like a hummingbird under the greengage. It is lovely, all this summer, but it is also a hard taskmaster, and I am weary of it.
There is a repeated motif in Western culture of the dance that dances its subject, a torment that parodies joy. We see it in the Italian tarantella, the dance that supposedly arises from the convulsions of a spider bite, and in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, where enchanted humans are compelled to attend melancholy balls each night in the Faerie kingdom of Lost-Hope. I’m currently reading Gareth Brookes’ The Dancing Plague, a graphic novel that recounts a case in 1518 when the women of Strasbourg couldn’t stop dancing. It seems to me that these are compelling cultural ideas, not because they are peculiar, but because they are so familiar. We instinctively understand this dreary, grinding dance. We too often perform it ourselves.
Next week, all this will break. That’s what I keep telling myself. That’s what I know. The longest day will come on the 21st June, and as I sit outside and watch the last of the light fade away, I will start to travel back towards some kind of moderation. For a few days more, the sun will stand still in the sky, and then the mornings will grow a little more kind every day, and nights a little more settling. I will sit down and do all the work that I planned and promised in a fever as the days grew. I will be wise again, sensible, balanced. I will inch my way toward the despair of midwinter.
There is a particular madness at both of the year’s extremes. Each point carries its own depths of longing. Each point moves us on. Between them, we find a kind of unsteady balance. Over the course of a lifetime, we will live out long cycles of high and low, and we rehearse that in the cycle of each year. Such is the tough love we are given by the world. It shows us exactly what it means by living, over and over again, until we remember it.
Last midsummer, we waited on the beach for the sun to set. All the long evening, we absorbed its bald intensity, its burning scrutiny. The tide was low that night, and we watched the children follow it out until they could paddle. Everywhere there were barbecues lit, and chatter, and waiting. The sky was yellow. A heron swooped over, prehistoric, and landed to wade in the shallows. The little egrets came in too, emboldened by the long, golden night, the uncanny stillness. Everything was imminent. Everything was ready to be made new.
That time is coming again. We just have to wait, and watch, and learn. We just have to ask how we will fill the time before the next solstice, when summer will seem impossible, absurd.
Are you marking the solstice (summer or winter!) next week? Tell us about it in the comments!
Recommendations
Last week, Helen at Mythological Africans shared this lament by San man called Xaa-ttin. ‘When faced with things so heavy with pain they paralyse the tongue,’ Helen writes, ‘African peoples tend to respond with words and movement, song and dance.’ Read The Broken String here:
From you
I loved this post this week from Clare Lucy who runs the excellent Harbour Books in Whitstable.
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Patreon highlights
This month’s livestream takes place today, 16th June at 3pm UK time. Patreon supporters have submitted questions in advance - no theme this month, just a chance to ask me anything (within reason)!
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Warmest wishes,
Katherine
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All artwork by Iveta Vaicule
It's a relief to hear the 'particular madness' of this time of year articulated so well. I've had a similar feeling and been grasping for the words to talk about it. Thanks for this lovely reflection.
Thank you for this! Now with climate change I feel so much existential dread on long hot summer days and it’s hard when so many other people seem to love to soak in the sun. But extremes do send me off kilter, so this helps me give language to that feeling.