#2: On oceans, distance, and time
Some meditations on dreams, and belonging.
Hi friends,
Welcome to Cold Brew #2! Very glad you’re back. Let’s jump in.
I’ve often found that time, and the distance it spans, operates in strange ways.
I imagine it like the ocean. For me, perpetually living an ocean apart from various notions of home, these concepts feel inextricably bound. It is easy to see how to plumb the depths or expanses of the sea is to travel far back through time and space, to be transformed by the strength of its currents. Whenever I dream of elsewhere, from wherever I am, I awake feeling adrift: as if I’ve been abandoned on the crest of a wave and have been left to tumble my way to shore.
It’s such an endearing human tendency, isn’t it, the ways in which we categorise the passage of time? We all knew, hazily, about the coronavirus for weeks. But suddenly there appeared a binary. Months later, we can still identify inflection points: lockdowns, cancellations, headlines. Moments when it stopped seeming faraway, or improbable (like in the way that we may recognise that time zones exist but nonetheless find it difficult to conceptualise that to half the world it’s currently tomorrow morning). As I make it to shore, the saltwater — previously pungent in my mouth — evaporates. Its materiality disappears, the memory of its materiality with it.
I’ve had a recurring dream during these months (of home? Exile? Both?). In the dream I’m in Cape Town. I find myself walking down Main Road, through Salt River and Woodstock, toward town. I’m going somewhere, though I’m not sure where. I pass the garment factories, the strange and empty Art Deco building with the smashed windows, the furniture workshops, the steep hill at the top of which sit the Greek Orthodox Church and the housing occupation, the FNB with its Sisyphean queue snaking the block, that one funeral parlour billboard, the fish shops, the activist bookshop above the fruit sellers, my favourite coffeeshop, Zainab’s tuck shop, Akil’s tuck shop.
The important thing here is the tapestry of specificity that the dream contains. My subconscious recalls every piece of graffiti, shopkeeper, robot. I wake up, and in that liminal moment between dreamspace and consciousness, my granular knowledge of detail seems so obvious as to be inconsequential. Then, I remember where I am: on the other side of the world and seven months out from having walked that stretch of road. And suddenly it feels incredibly consequential that my subconscious has held onto this immersive world. The first time I had this dream, I mentioned it to a friend: how it was both disorienting and relieving, how it felt surprising in how unsurprising it was, how I had woken up and thought to myself: ‘Well, of course these details are embedded within me’. And she replied: ‘Because it’s your home’.
Salt River.
Here’s the complicated thing: I have many homes. Certain fragments of each are always a mystery to anybody else. And over the years I’ve learnt that living an expansive life actually often entails making your life small. Continually reckoning with what to foreground. Divvying up portions: possessions, time, space in the mind.
When I was younger I was enthralled by the prospect of exploring, in that I was interested in being a protagonist with a scenic backdrop. Though I never would have phrased it as such, I wanted deep down to colonise, and probably many of us do. It took me a long time to truly consider the systems that have enabled me, over many years, to be in the position I'm now in: torn between the multiplicity of spaces into which I've been so generously enfolded. As I get older, I’m less interested in collecting passport stamps for the sake of it. My personal marker of success has become the ability to fully unpack, to settle in — yet isn't that, too, the nature of colonisation? It is a complicated privilege to navigate a world that (until recent months) has always welcomed me in.
Speaking, I tend to refer to ‘home’ as the omnipresent elsewhere. Wherever I currently am is the axis. I am always going home — I am always leaving home. The ocean, in its constant roiling motion, is both the bridge and the distance itself. Through many choices over the years, I have forced my concept of 'home' to evolve into a problematised ideal. Even if I pick one place now, and stay there forevermore, these underpinnings will remain complicated. I feel this in my toes, a tingling, when I can’t sleep. It reminds me of the sting of saltwater on skin. Over time, what does this somatic recognition — of familiarity as dualistic, of home as a fictionalised third place — do?
There is a second recurring dream these days. This dream bears me even further back through time. I’m in Scotland: walking alone on West Sands in the lingering daylight of a spring evening. The tide is all the way out; the beach is vast and flat. It is the hour in which the sea and sky melt together, shimmering rose quartz and aquamarine into indigo. I can feel the windchill on my face, the lapping of white foam against my shoes. In this dream there are facts I know to be true: my house keys are in my coat pocket; just a few minutes’ walk away there is a flat that is mine; on the coffee table of my flat there will be a vase of cut peonies which my earlier self purchased for £3 at Tesco’s. If I haven’t woken up by now, I climb the wooden staircase over the dunes and emerge to the road that runs parallel. Seated atop a picnic table in the shadow of the Old Course, I watch as golfers take jubilant selfies on the Swilcan Bridge. Distantly, the chapel bells toll. All of what I’m dreaming is real. My dream is precise, accurate down to the very sensations. But this home I’ve dropped into exists in my past: I haven’t walked this beach in two and a half years.
West Sands, St Andrews.
In a 2016 speech at Santiago’s Universidad Diego Portales, Chilean poet Alejandro Zambra said:
‘They say that there are only three or four or five topics for literature, but maybe there’s only one: belonging […] To be part of or stop being part of a family, of a community, a country, of Chilean literature, a football team, a political party, a rock band, the fan club of a rock band, or at least a group of scouts. That’s what we write about when we’re given a free topic, and also when we think we are writing about love, death, travel, telegrams or suitcases with swivel wheels. That’s what we always talk about, seriously or in jest, in verse and in prose: belonging.’
He’s right. And perhaps out of a desire to see my own preoccupations of home and belonging reflected, I have a soft spot for journalism which touches, unexpectedly, on these ideas under the guise of something entirely else. This week I came across Leslie Jamison’s piece in the New York Times Magazine called Is It Strange to Say I Miss the Bodies of Strangers? On the surface, it’s about Turkish baths. But just days after Jamison’s February research trip to Istanbul, the world shifts. And so the article shifts, too. Looking back, Jamison sees this trip — and the communal space of the hammam — as a relic. The accompanying photos, by Sabiha Çimen, become a time capsule of glistening sweat, laughter, skin on marble. ‘Other people,’ Jamison writes, ‘weren’t yet seen primarily as potential disease vectors, but as subjects of pleasure, tender animals, hungry for care and touch, all of us lying side by side in the radiant heat.’ Even so, she notes, by the time of her travels in late February, the wheels were already in motion; Istanbul Airport was papered with Covid warnings, though Turkey had not yet been stricken.
One recent weekend, I was sitting in a city park with a friend. We had taken off our masks to sip tea in the sunshine. Strangers approached us from time to time, as they do: seeking spare change, a lighter, a buyer for their crafts. Each time, we reached hurriedly for our masks and I felt slightly embarrassed: both at the selfishness of having taken masks off at all, but surprisingly also at the sharpness with which we grabbed for them. How to tell the difference between concern for others’ wellbeing, and fear for one’s own wellbeing? It goes against animal instinct to look out for our communities by avoiding them, even when intellectually we understand the necessity. After the third or fourth time someone came over, my friend chuckled in quiet frustration and asked me: ‘How much time after this is all over do you think it will take before I stop having that little moment of panic when a stranger approaches me unexpectedly?’ I recalled this question, much later, as I read the hammam article. When will we enjoy the luxury of no longer seeing the people around us as potential disease vectors, per Jamison — as risks to calculate and manage — and be able to return to seeing people wholly as tender animals, as subjects of pleasure? In this amorphous meantime, how do we hold both truths at once?
In early March, Jamison visits her local New York hammam for what would be the final time:
‘In retrospect, I’m sure the virus was down there with us, in that warren of saunas and steam rooms […] This was no small part of the holiness of the baths, for me, the way they brought together strangers, past and present. […] A few weeks later — once the virus filled our hospital wards and the city plunged into quarantine — everything about that night would come to seem not only impossible but unthinkable: that closeness and casual touch, all that mingled breath and sweat. That night would eventually seem like the distillation of what we lost. But back then, it still belonged to us, our bodies shrugging and sighing, our toes curled and our foreheads beaded, our bodies leaking tears of ache and release. We were part of something together, something big and silent and many-headed. It held us all.’
I’m both startled and comforted by Jamison’s acknowledgement of that uncanny shift in thought — that the virus was likely already present, but one day we were unaware and the next day we were aware. The temporal change is entirely constructed. Yet we cling to it. We use words like before or since. Words like after.
I constantly wonder how to hold multiple realities at once — how to accept that other places, where I am not, are equally real. How to accept that across a vast ocean, several man-made hours ahead of me, it truly is night and people are truly sleeping. We build these categorisations so that we can imagine order in unruly time and space. It is charming, and nonsensical, and pointless, and devastating, and necessary. It depends on our collective willingness to engage. Suspend disbelief, be absorbed into a current of magical realism. Maybe the notion of home is the same way.
Some stuff I’ve appreciated lately:
I just finished reading No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, a breathtaking memoir by Kurdish-Iranian refugee journalist Behrouz Boochani, which details his harrowing sea crossing and imprisonment by Australian immigration authorities. Boochani is a remarkable storyteller and the translation, done with great care by Omid Tofighian, is painstaking in its conveyance of the lilting poetry and mythology of Boochani’s Farsi into English. Maybe this is what got me thinking about the ocean this week - the way he writes about the sea, it’s like a character unto itself. Has anyone read it? Can we discuss?
My family and I have been binge-watching Kim’s Convenience and look, it’s not quite Letterkenny, but as far as offbeat Canadian comedy series go it’s pretty damn funny.
Concept art meets Zayn Malik, all wrapped up in one surrealist meme. (You are welcome !!!!)
If you made it this far, a big THANK YOU. Leave a comment or send me a note if this resonated for you? Not used to this whole one-way pontificating thing, and Substack makes it so I can’t see who is liking my posts (@substack web dev team: pls get on this, I have an ego to stoke hey).
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See you next time,
Maddy