Unlikely meeting points & unlikely collaborations 🌗

Hello friends,

Here in Stockholm the weather is changeable, and right now it is raining. It always feels subversive to enjoy the rain in July, but here I am feeling cosy as the drops patter on the balcony. Sometimes it’s the unlikeliness of things that makes them special.

So this month, it is unlikely friends, unlikely collaborations, that take the focus. We know that opposites attract, but perhaps the cliché underplays the alchemy of unexpected harmony. Perhaps it completely overlooks the divine architecture of the whole of life – not a random combination of light and dark, sharp and smooth – but a beautiful, balanced whole, where light is at the heart of darkness and vice versa. Not little slices of order, but an expansive entirety, everything connected.
I come back to this by Virginia Woolf again and again:

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end…”

Read all about it

In an attempt to stoke up waning popularity in her bookclub, Oprah has launched a podcast version of it, in collaboration with Starbucks, so now you can listen to her talking about reading her latest recommendation with a cup of liquid cake! How nice. But if you don’t enjoy curated book choices with tenuous links to iced coffee, then try my potluck book recommendations instead:

I May Be Wrong by Björn Natthiko Lindeblad (non-fiction): a beautiful, down-to-earth autobiography of a Swedish man who became a Thai forest monk for 17 years. Wise and genuine, it’s a poignant conversation around the most important questions in life, told in a pragmatic voice that’s easy to relate to.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (fiction): a labyrinthine exploration of the mind and how identity is created by memories. Elaborate and strange, it gets off to a slow start but it’s worth persevering to the second half where it all picks up.

I read one after the other. Jumping from biography to fantasy feels like a leap of genre – yet these two held hands in a touching way, one helping me to peer deeper into the other.

After his experience as a monk, “Natthiko” explains that the most valuable thing he learned was: you don’t have to believe every thought that comes into your head. “We feel that our identity and thoughts are inextricably linked,” he writes, but when someone tells you not to think about a pink elephant – guess what you think about? Thoughts are really responses to and reflections of the world around us.

Meanwhile, Piranesi’s entire perception of reality and identity is revealed in reverse. We’re dislocated as a reader, and challenged to find a character to connect to, despite the narrator not having a solid sense of selfhood. The bones of his personality are there, and perhaps those are rather like the bones we all have – deeply human, deeply vulnerable and yet incredibly strong and enduring.

Image by Hannah Lock

Beyond sunflowers

“Sag mir wo die Blumen sind”, or “Show me where the flowers are” is a line from an anti-war song by Pete Seeger, famously covered by Marlene Dietrich. It’s also the title of a new exhibition that sees Ansel Kiefer’s expansive textured landscapes side by side with his idol – Van Gogh.

In an interview on Radio 4, Kiefer explained how he was born right at the end of the Second World War, and his family home was bombed to the ground while his mother was in labour with him at the hospital. Perhaps it’s no wonder then, given this prophetic beginning, that his works celebrate the touching point where destruction and new possibility meet. The show will be at the Royal Academy in London until 26th October.

“It’s so unnecessary”

I am late to the party here but isn’t Cynthia Eviro wonderful? She has a gorgeous speaking voice, an incredible singing voice, but above all, she is one of those rare people that really listen when people speak to her and really think about what she’s saying before she opens her mouth. Just see the clip of her gently, yet earnestly, answering Annie Mac when she asked why singing exists.

A couple of weeks ago, Eviro did an interview about her favourite vocal performances of all time. It’s a brilliant singer’s-singer insight into vocal performance – so generous and descriptive without being fluffy or pretentious. In this interview, she credits Sisqo’s Thong Song as one of the greats. I loved and enjoyed Thong Song as much as the next Millennial tween when it came out in 1999, but I truly hadn’t appreciated the prowess of the performance until I watched her gushing about it. 

Until next time,

May you be well, happy, whole and free.

x

~~~~~~

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