elemental, issue #06
on the little things and the big things
Hello :)
It’s been a while since I sat across my screen with the purpose of writing a new issue of elemental. I’m currently in my childhood bedroom in Ankara, with my girl Kiki curled up right beside me in bed and my little brother Başkan (also in dog form) curled up on the carpet next to us. We went from summer right into the heart of autumn almost overnight here, and since this is my favorite time of year, I’m feeling especially cozy as I write these lines. I’ve also been watching a lot of Gilmore Girls over the last few weeks (my first time, if you can believe it), which has made me crave coffee a lot more than I usually do. So, to complete the picture I’ve been painting of my current settings, I’ll add a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee and a tiny bowl of dates and almonds into the mix. And there you have it.
The urge to write this new issue came when I realized I’ve been collecting bits and pieces of things (words, in particular) that have each made me feel inexplicably warm inside. And so, as it’s getting colder in most places where this newsletter is able to reach, I thought it might be nice to collect those bits and pieces in a single note that can be pulled out and referenced in times of need; sort of like a photo you go back to when you want to reminisce someone you miss or a childhood diary to take you immediately back to a moment, a feeling, a taste or smell that you might have long forgotten.
I hope you enjoy.
1- Although there are some poets whose works I love and whose books I’ve collected over the years, I wouldn’t consider myself to be a poetry person. Or I guess, put more accurately, Poetry isn’t the first (or second) section I would visit in a bookstore.
But there are certain poems that have left an imprint on me, ones that I have underlined in books, cut and pasted inside scrapbooks, printed out to keep inside random drawers or even have had tattoos inspired by them marked on me for good.
The below poem by Barbara Rass is one of them.
Each time I read it, I’m left in tears or a longing to be in tears — not because I’m sad, but because I’m moved. Moved and in awe of how someone could capture the little things and the big, big, big things and make it all make sense and feel so universal in so few words. And simply in awe of how life is a sequencing of moments and things, pleasant and not, like a string of imperfect, irregularly shaped baroque pearls lined up to make a beautiful necklace.
A reminder that we can’t have it all, but there’s this, and this, and this…
You Can’t Have It All
by Barbara Rass
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.
2- The much-renowned novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow had been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years (perhaps since it first came out), and I had been reluctant to reach for it for quite some time because of how popular it had become. I have a habit of avoiding books that become too popular too quickly, until no one seems to be talking about them anymore. I don’t quite know why, but have come to observe it is so.
But I had packed it with me this summer on my way to Bodrum (along with 13 other books, because who knows what they’ll be in the mood to read at any given time?!), and decided to go for it sometime in early September.
I don’t think it’s always the case, but I guess usually, there’s a reason why certain books become popular. I simply couldn’t put Tomorrow down once I started. Reading it became the activity I looked forward to the most in my day, wanting to get through obligations so I could sit down and return to the world and the people Zevin so masterfully created.
I always have a pen with me when I’m reading (fiction, non-fiction, doesn’t matter) and I’ll highlight anything that feels like something I would want to return to later: A life lesson, a beautiful bit of prose, something clever I wouldn’t have thought of, a style of writing that’s different than mine, a feeling captured poignantly… And I found myself wanting to share some of the bits and pieces that I underlined while reading.
If you haven’t yet read Tomorrow, I highly, highly recommend it. And then maybe we can talk about it :)
It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.
A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a fragment of an idea.
“How do you get over a failure?” “I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private.
To know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
If we did not mark the days, we would not know how much we had survived.
3- I don’t drink too much coffee (even despite Gilmore Girls), but there is something so euphoric about (both the ritual and the consuming of) the first cup of coffee of the day that very few other simple pleasures carry.
I feel — if prepared and consumed not as a chore or a mindless activity for the sake of waking up, but rather as a little pocket of a moment dedicated to oneself, it almost has the power to set the tone for the rest of the day.
This was my first cup of coffee (a flat white) the day I sat down to plan this issue of elemental, back in Bodrum, when it still felt like summer. I had woken up early, run a few quick errands, sat down at one of our favorite neighborhood coffee shops from this summer, and pulled out my laptop when this perfect cup of creamy delicacy was delivered to my table.
Joy really can be found in a rich, milky, delicious-smelling cup. Something to think about :)
4- Speaking of joy.
I turn to Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files from time to time, when I need to be reminded of how I’m not alone in my worries or emotions, how many different kinds of happiness and pain and how many different stories are out there, and how the right words have the power to touch and change the holders of that happiness and that pain and those stories.
On a recent visit to the Files, I came across an unusual post; a letter from Nick Cave, directed at his readers: Where or how do you find joy?
Dear All,
Last week I asked you a question. I was feeling a little out of sorts that day, so the question was for me as much as anything –
‘Where or how do you find your joy?’
I was entirely unprepared for the response. Over 2,000 letters arrived in the first few days and they are still pouring in. So many of your answers are extraordinarily moving, from thoughtful and eloquent treatises on the nature of joy, to a tiny voice from Limerick, Ireland, saying simply, ‘Golf’ – a response that, for some inexplicable reason, reduced me to tears. I said I would post my favourite answer, but it is impossible to choose and so instead I have decided to collate them all onto their own page called ‘Joy’, where they will permanently and defiantly reside as a resource in times of need. I’m trying to read through them all, but it will take a little time, so the first 500 or so are there for you now, and the rest will be added over the next week or so.
Regardless of what we may sometimes feel about ourselves or the hardships we may encounter, it is evident that people see this troubled world as a place of considerable beauty. Joy continues to leap up, unafraid to find us. This thought profoundly moves me, and I thank you so much for revealing this notion so powerfully.
This is the 300th post, and this week also marks six years of The Red Hand Files! The gods of love and mathematics are aligned!
Love, Nick
I spent quite a bit of time on the Joy page (you can too through the link above), and it made me realize (or perhaps, remember) that joy is in the small things as well as in the big things.
If you’d like to take this as an invitation to make yourself a nice cup of coffee, put on some music and make a brainstorming list of everything that brings you joy, please be my guest :)