#133: The Love Edition
Hi there,
This newsletter was supposed to arrive in your inbox on Monday, but it is now Wednesday and I’ve just been away from my laptop these past few days. It feels great to be this busy. I’m in the thick of moving homes and have been busy cleaning cabinets, visualising my future and documenting this transition.
February has arrived, and brought with it new pangs of love and a river of love poems. Love is in the air, as is coronavirus. I’m falling in love all over again with the home that I’ve lived in for nearly three years as I say goodbye to it. I’m falling in love with the ritual of writing poetry, the nervous excitement of picking up the pen and waiting to see what happens on the page. I’m falling in love with Tishani Doshi's collection of people and pooches and everything Brad Montague creates.
I love how despite the universality of love, each person’s experience and magnitude of the feeling differs. Sometimes, we can feel it in our daily life through acts of kindness, found memories, old recipes, music and poetry. Sometimes, it takes the form of a touch, a hug, something palpable and dizzying. And it is when we start to allow love to flow rather than try to control how it meanders, something wonderful begins to happen.
Dear reader, I hope you get to feel love in all its purity and rawness in your life. In the meantime, here is a small dose of mid-week love poetry to enjoy:
1. Love Letter by Julio Cortázar
Everything I’d want from you
is finally so little
because finally it’s everything
like a dog going by, or a hill,
those meaningless things, mundane,
wheat ear and long hair and two lumps of sugar,
the smell of your body,
whatever you say about anything
with or against me,
all that which is so little
I want from you because I love you
May you look beyond me,
may you love me with violent disregard
for tomorrow, let the cry
of your coming explode
in the boss’s face in some office
and let the pleasure we invent together
be one more sign of freedom.
2. Words, Wide Night by Carol Ann Duffy
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.
La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this
is what it is like or what it is like in words.
3. The Year Everything Looked Like Sky by Noah Falck
Tonight I can’t remember
the specifics of our honeymoon.
You say typical, and turn
your eyes to our child
who clacks dolls together
on the living room floor.
I think of the photograph
of you on a balcony
in a black bikini
swallowed by all the light,
scattered storms widening
on the horizon, on your face.
Maybe the specifics
are more in how I don’t
remember the newlywed
conversations or the island air
rushing in and out of our lungs.
Rather, the room we are in now
and the meaning it seems to hold.
The patterns of the days we
spend together, apart, together,
apart. A sort of blueprint for
the weather we’ve become.
4. Decade by Amy Lowell
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
5.My words to you by Jean Valentine
My words to you are the stitches in a scarf
I don’t want to finish
maybe it will come to be a blanket
or a net to hold you here
love not gone anywhere
Recommended Listening:
1. Tree.FM
2. In Dreams by Xiu Xiu vs. Grouper + Slow Walkers - Slow Walkers (a project by Lawrence English and Liz Harris)
3. Wondrous Love - Josephine Foster
4. Something Within Me - Paul Owens w/ The Nightingales
5. Have You Ever Loved Someone - The Vocaleers
Links of the Week:
1. Must Love Art (inspiring love stories from art history)
2. Brené Brown on Empathy vs Sympathy
3. Sign up for 30 days of intuition + 28 Days of Black History
4. * Dear Fellow Humans *
5. Stubborn Praise with Naomi Shihab Nye
6. Le Petit Prince by Oamul Lu
7. Pandemic Graphics Archive
8. Gradations (so satisfying)
9. The Origins of Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleeve
10. ‘How have you been?’
Heartwarming Tales of Love and Friendship:
1. A look at Frida and Diego’s Relationship
2. This beautiful story of Magdalena Wosinska's parents' unconventional love
3. Amrita Pritam x Imroz (via Daak Vaak)
4. Christo and Jeanne Claude
5. Poet Donald Hall on falling in love and getting married to Jane Kenyon
Looking Inwards: Quarantine Self-Portraits From India
One of my favorite pieces I’ve worked on recently is finally up on Hyperallergic, featuring brilliant self-portraits clicked in isolation by Indian photographers. During the 2020 lockdown, these photographers explored the ideas of self, home, and belonging by documenting their own bodies and environments. They are not mainstream photographers but independent voices from across the subcontinent making ephemeral images behind closed doors.
Read what image-makers across India had to say about the creative process in their isolation here.
This is my newsletter: Namita Sunil
Namita Sunil’s takeover of This is my newsletter talks about how she survived the pandemic, falling in love with the process of learning and how she’s been learning to ride a bicycle. There's also a playlist and poster of her favorite artist - Enjoy + some wonderful Ira Glass and David Foster Wallace wisdom.
Read it here.
New on the Website:
1. My heart is a 1bhk apartment by Suhasini Barman
the living room is brimming with laughter, friends in arms, parents, young and shiny, watching over us. oh, how we laugh and cry at the same things.
the bedroom has this bully I fell in love with, his cheeky smile and twisted sense of humor but honestly, I'd sell my soul for this mad love of mine.
the washroom mirror has seen it all. the good days and the bad ones, smirking away to the quirks of life.
and the kitchen is our glorious stop gap. people rushing in, rushing out. some fills the soul and the rest, helped grow.
My heart is a 1bhk apartment.
2. Day 117 by Annika Taneja (excerpt)
I must confess:
I’ve begun to miss the dirt.
The fine, loose brown dust of my patch of earth.
The gentle waft that can only come from a stranger’s armpit.
The gurgling phlegm that claws its way up an uncle’s throat.
The red stained spit that soars in a long, graceful arc.
The musk of a thousand people that gets bottled in a cramped metal tube.
The stickiness of public floors that comes without warning or explanation.
Read the full poem by Annika here.
3. Feline Morning by Athira Unni
feeling mauve this morning
the sound of my cat heard
through walls is mauve in
color: his paintbrush tail
a remnant of a freer, longer
haired past, mine and his
wet-nosed thoughts enter
traveling via singing arteries
reminiscing Kishore Kumar
and his purring voice, I wake
to a round-faced furry sun—
there isn't much to do but stroke his fur: this, a feline morning
Ending today’s newsletter with this beautiful quote by Rune Cazuli:
“Be the love you never received.”
And some Mary Oliver wisdom from Don't Hesitate (Devotions):
Love and gratitude,
Rohini