Spring Sadness

Some thoughts of the melancholy of April (& welcome to my Substack)

Hello! I wrote a whole other, less intense introduction post but I didn’t like it so I deleted it and wrote this instead. Welcome to my Substack.

April is the cruellest month, says my grandad every year, quoting somebody else. A poet. Who was it? I can’t remember. I always laugh at him when he says this and put my hand on his shoulder, but I know he means it. And I know what he means.

Mercurial weather, great promise of lighter days and sun tempered with thick grey skies, shock hail, and bitter North-Easterly winds. Early flowers bringing joy! but also a sense of unease. The pervasive feeling of not quite being able to relax. One cold but bright afternoon in the garden my dad points at some gorgeous, vivid Primula that have sprung seemingly out of nowhere and remarks that they are a month early. I can’t bring myself to engage so I just say “hmm” and walk away, adding something about needing some time alone to be quiet.  Lambs and hail. Cherry blossom and the hedges in some cases completely covered in some kind of white blossom this year. Magnolia. Fear it will all go too fast and be missed. Tentative hope as the winter starts to recede. Something pressing and disquieting and kind of acrid bubbles inside me. Cortisol. Sun on my face and a cup of Earl Grey, looking at the blanket of soft daisies that’s appeared and is interspersed by bright pops of Celandine and Dandelion.

I am still deeply held by the urge to hibernate. By May this feeling should be fully dispersed, shaken out like a dusty rug until autumn, but I’m not sure. It feels simultaneously freeing and nerve fraying, this uncertainty. It encompasses everything. The human world is an angry volcano spitting out rivers of molten lava and noxious fumes. The news is just relentlessly and completely heart-breaking.  It is overwhelming and incomprehensible and reprehensible and flabbergasting and hope- eroding and meaning-dissolving.

Things continue to happen, in my own small life, even if it feels like somewhere along the line over the last few years something in me sort of calcified. I feel confused a lot of the time, but I am slowly getting better at accepting uncertainty and fragility. Many good friends have dissipated, old emotional wounds still smart in the cold some days and I am feeling unmoored. Untethered. But I also feel quite good a lot of the time, like I have shaken my life out and like I have started an engine, even if it is in need of some oil. There is movement and it is exciting and galvanising as well as scary. It took a long time.

I like spending time with my cat, Elton. He looks at me with big eyes and doesn’t ask anything of me, except occasionally to sit on my lap. I do not currently enjoy talking to most people (new or old) and find myself shy in a new, bizarrely potent way. I feel exposed and vulnerable and meek. I seem to have lost my ability to speak in a group. People refer to me relentlessly as ‘nice’ or ‘sweet’, and I get secretly annoyed, both at them and at me.  Mainly at my inability to show my true self- whoever that is, really.

I spend a lot of time thinking about poems and the poets that wrote them, when I’m not scrolling on my phone. Craig Arnold, Molly Brodak, Adrian Mitchell, Frank O’ Hara, Ada Limon. Reading their words and about their lives gives me solace in the form of immersion and focus. I read Viv Albertine’s memoir ‘To Throw Away Unopened’, after borrowing it from Ellie three years ago and forgetting to read it (sorry Ellie). It is about many things but mainly I think it’s about family. I cry a lot and laugh a lot and tell my mother to read it. She loves it and buys six copies from World of Books to give to people. She now wants everybody to read it.

I look at lambs in the fields and can’t quite bring myself to feel the way I used to about them. They used to make my heart swell, a symbol of hope and renewal, but now I just feel sad. I just see the inevitable violent conclusion of their short lives as I pass them gambolling in the fields with each other/ suckling on their mothers/ nibbling grass.

I see a lot of dead squirrels, lying soft and intact at the side of the country roads.  

I pick purple flowers on leggy stems and take them to my father’s birthday lunch. I intend to give them to him but I have no string with me and lose my confidence at the last minute, they seem too wild somehow, so I leave them on the bonnet of the car and walk into the pub. When I come back a few hours later they have wilted and I drive home feeling guilty for picking them. I drive past hundreds and hundreds of their unpicked friends who are standing alert on the verges, swaying and sucking up water from the soil.

I don’t have the urge to listen to much music at the moment. My ears keep getting tired. I talk about Neil Young in a Sam Smiths pub in central with Craig one afternoon, and listen to “A Change Gonna Come” with my mother one day in the car in Biddenden. She says, I love that lyric, “A Change Gonna Come”. She turns it up, sings along, and then tells me she has listened to the song eight times already that morning.

The days get longer. The birds seem louder. We lose an hour of sleep. The sky is often beautiful. The news is so terrible that for a short while I stop looking and I am ashamed. Death seems to be suffused in everything. Everything is full up with death and it is protruding out, daring us to ignore it, to not think about it for a second. It is stultifying. But other things keep happening too, tentatively unfurling. Endings and beginnings seem inextricable. I am not entirely sure which way is up.

I miss my friends, but I do not want to talk to them. Time feels short and long.

I am in chaos mode, relentlessly losing and breaking everything I own. I’ve always been like this to a degree but right now it is particularly intense. Phone, bank card, scarf. My friend Ollie’s nice guitar leads at a gig I do in a church. A kind of shedding, maybe.

I read The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’ Farrell and I feel again the deep gnawing sadness I associate with spring. Of wild things captured, of inevitable death. Of power imbalances and struggle. Of people living against their will because if they resist they will be punished. Of tigers captured and stolen away from their place for the sake of novelty and status. Of the pervasive, patriarchal desperation to leave some kind of legacy.

I want to write more music but I feel tired and I am very discombobulated. I do not have a proper home right now, somewhere to be unwound and solitary. I fantasise about a solo trip writing in the Spanish mountains above Granada. (I have been fantasising about a trip to the Spanish mountains for the best part of a decade). I know now that I need a lot of time to myself. Time to defrag my brain and work through thoughts. If I don’t do this I tend to become brittle and can’t stop crying. I am ready for a home. I’ve resisted it for a long time, but I really am. A return to London after four years. I’m not sure if anyone who reads this will want to live with me-- I promise I’m less depressing in real life.

I did some co-writing the other week with a friend and a line came out about a tightly coiled spring. “I’ve become a tightly coiled spring”. I do feel like that. That could be bad or good I suppose. I suppose the early stages of Spring are not dissimilar to a tightly coiled spring. There is tension. There is movement, or the potential for movement, even if it’s erratic. Springing out of the darkness.

I may re-read Maggie Milner’s Couplets: A Love Story, it’s my favourite thing I’ve read in the last year. I devoured it it in a day/night and accidentally cut off the side of my finger with a breadknife the next morning because I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I was tired from staying up to read it. That’s my review. Highly recommend.

The other day I came across a poem called ‘Wait’ by Galway Killner. Then I watched a video of him reading it in the eighties. Grainy film, him leaning against a door frame and looking to the camera, sage and piercing.

It was TS Eliot who said “April is the cruellest month”, in The Waste Land. (I Googled it).

Things to be glad about:

• The song, Mother|Sober by Kendrick Lamar, featuring Beth Gibbons. From his last album I think? Sam showed me this in Brighton at his studio and I’d never heard it before and I sat and wept with my mouth open for the duration.

• Eating a lot of hot cross buns, toasted, with lots of salted butter. I think they are the best thing about Easter.

• Last week I went down the lane with Ted and picked some wild garlic to make pesto. I made four jars and instead of a blender I used a pestle and mortar. I enjoyed the process. It got me thinking about the etymology of Pestle, and if it was related to pesto, which it turns out, it is. To crush/bash. The pestle is the crusher/basher. The mortar is the vessel. Pesto is technically, anything crushed together to make a sauce. I liked rolling up my sleeves and grinding the leaves in a wide circular motion, the smell of the wild garlic swiftly filling the kitchen. The leaves take effort and time to break down, because of the long, supple sinews. I might write a rough recipe in my next post. Not that you really need a recipe for pesto. Just bash.

• It’s Getting Late is out in the world, doing its thing, which makes me very happy.

• I went to a watercolour class with my mum this week. I enjoyed myself. Taking the pressure away from making something was a good feeling. I lost my inner critic, I had no expectations of myself. I enjoyed mixing paint with water and putting it on the paper. I ate a mint club biscuit (00’s throwback!) and drank milky tea in the break. The whole thing made me very calm. Also it was in a village hall which I was comforting. I felt like a safe child.

• This poem: ‘Wait’, by Galway Kinnell:

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion

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