Raindrop - 2020
Each raindrop is formed in this way: water clings to microscopic debris, which in turn attracts more water, a convention of particles, until it becomes too heavy to be suspended in the sky and falls to the ground as rain. In the Southern Amazon, satellite images show a curious phenomenon: about two to three months before the start of the wet season, the canopy turns a bright, young green as trees put out fresh shoots, in anticipation of the coming rainfall. This new growth sucks moisture from the ground, and some of it evaporates in the air, causing it to swell with moisture and come down as rain, but this doesn’t fully account for the pre-wet-season rains observed in such regions. These young shoots also release tiny salt particles, which are carried along by the wind, seeding the clouds with tiny nuclei which forms the core around which water particles gather. In effect, trees, in their anticipation of seasonal rains, create their own rain. When I first read about this phenomenon, I was struck by the perfect way this metaphor encapsulates my own writing practice. I often find myself writing in anticipation of reading just as often as I read in anticipation of writing.
On my first day in Athens, I came across a large shaggy dog lying on its side on the footpath near the entrance to Attikēs Station. It was a warm day and the sun was high in the sky by the time I got into town. I emerged from the underground subway station lugging my suitcase and was completely dazzled by the brightness of the sun, the roaring traffic and streets choked with pedestrians who skipped over potholes and around low awnings with practice and purpose. The street, the cars, the people, the cramped restaurants and kafenios’: all of it blended into each other, such that it took me several minutes of standing in the middle of the small pedestrian plaza near the subway entrance before I got my bearings. The dog was in the middle of the footpath, an island in the commotion, and almost instinctively, I gravitated towards it. I had recently begun reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which takes place in Athens. There is a scene, early in the novel, where the narrator is walking the streets of Athens and notices that ‘there were often dogs lying collapsed across the pavement, big ones with extravagant shaggy pelts. They were insensate in the heat, motionless except for the breath faintly moving in their sides. From a distance they sometimes looked like women in fur coats who had fallen down drunk.’
I stared at the dog in wonder: it looked exactly as described. Seeing it, I had the profound pleasure of directly comparing my experience of the world with a scene described in a novel, which, as anyone who has ever seen someone they know on TV or watched a movie set in their home town can tell you, is a profound and unique pleasure. It doesn’t always work out this way. To return to Outline, there’s several scenes which nearly ruined the book for me, because I simply could not corroborate them. The narrator, a writer who is teaching a class in Athens, runs into one of her fellow teachers at the summer school, and she remarks on his handsome features but notices up close that ‘there was something uneasy in his appearance, as though he’d been put together out of unrelated elements.’ I found this description highly disturbing: I had no idea what it meant to look ‘put together out of unrelated elements.’ I was in Athens, on the A8 bus to Irakleio when I read that line, and I put the book down and spent the rest of the journey scanning faces. I examined everyone—people outside, in the bus, sitting in traffic, riding scooters—searching for someone who matched that description, but I had no idea what I was looking for. It had never occurred to me before that moment that a person could look as if different parts of them didn’t go together. I feared that I was missing a vital aspect of the imagination that allowed me to extrapolate alternative features to go along with, say, a nostril, or an eyebrow. Later that evening, I stared at myself in the mirror and tried and failed to imagine what I would look like with a flatter nose, or wider lips, or a narrower forehead.
I think this instinct to personalise an outside perspective, to test an observation, speaks to an anxiety that I have around reading that comes from the part of me that is always writing: namely, that reading often leads me to question my own capacity observe the world or a scene in a way that is not only valid (i.e. that it checks out) but that it is useful or interesting or novel, a quality that is invariably easier to locate in the writing of others than in my own. There are some writers whose powers of observation I find so keen, so startling, that I have assimilated their writing into myself completely. I don’t think I’ve ever sat under a tree the same way since I read this line in the CA Conrad poem, ‘Glitter in My Wounds’:
I met a tree in Amsterdam and
stood barefoot beside it for twenty
minutes then left completely restored
And it’s not only the line in the poem that has affected me so deeply, it’s also the ways in which my relationship with a formerly loose concept such as ‘feeling restored’ has now gathered itself around another notion, ‘standing under a tree,’ such that the trees that I have stood barefoot beside have, in a very real way, restored me, and I have become receptive to their gifts of restoration through this poem. And now, when I sit under a tree, I feel my whole sense of being gathering around that initial mote, that loose concept—restoration—like water molecules forming around airborne particles high up in the energetic innards of clouds.