In the stillness of sunset, I read The Story of My Heart by the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies. The dappled evening nestles around me as I sit, cross-legged, on the roof of the porch, drinking in the old intoxicant, the ‘rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it rested, for pure colour is rest of heart’. My gaze sharpens, whetted against Jefferies’s words: I notice the parakeet vanish into the foliage like a photosynthesising magician, a tree blanched with speckles of light, one leaf pure white, as though it has been rubbed out, permitting me a glimpse of the blank paper onto which the world has been daubed with such loving detail.

The crystalline clarity of The Story of My Heart is almost unbearable. There is something psychadelic about looking through Jefferies’s eyes - suddenly the world is awash with wonders, and I cannot stomach it. I put him down and retreat into safety. The blur of poor sight (although my eyes are perfectly serviceable) is a balm against the teeming granularity surrounding me: I am so glad I can muffle my senses, wrap myself in the fog of the familiar to keep out the deluge of the sublime that lies, always, beyond my blinkers. I am reminded of a creature called the Hiver, a creation of the ever-wise Terry Pratchett, which lacks the capacity for such human numbness, and marvels longingly at the idea of boredom:

‘Do you know what it feels like to be aware of every star, every blade of grass? […] No sleep, no rest, just endless... endless experience, endless awareness. Of everything. All the time. How we envy you, envy you! Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless deeps of space! You have this thing you call... boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song — it went ‘Twinkle twinkle little star....’ What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!’*

I am reminded, too, of taking magic mushrooms. The chrysalis of normalcy unpeeled to reveal the unbearable richness at the tips of my fingers. I sat in the park with the collected poems of John Donne, thinking I’d need entertainment during the trip. I was naive: there is a thrill in simply looking. A terror in simply seeing.

As the trip surged into life, and soothing dullness was replaced by vertiginous clarity, I clutched at the one thing I could think of to give me comfort: IKEA. Out there, death blooms like an iridescent angel, and time slows down to a string of pearls, each second a single jewel, and I’m lost between the beads, grasping towards the future second, fearing never to return to time’s onward flow, to disappear into the cracks between the moments. But here is IKEA, galloping forward like a shining knight to save me from myself. IKEA, where there is no wonder, where gasps at the miracle of thirst are exchanged for grumbling about the impossibility of deciding between single and double-tapped kitchen faucets. IKEA, where angels fear to tread.

Such tenderness spread through me as my thoughts hooked themselves on the promise of a place that kept the sublime at bay. Now, in moments where life tilts, and the knives and forks of daily existence threaten to slide into the chasm of awe, I remember IKEA, and balance returns.

footnote: A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett.

Tomoko Kashiki, ‘Stuffed Toys and floral pillow’, 2019

mists,

and the mingling of days,

and the mangling of tongues,

and the fingertips which smeared the undergrowth of memory

to grey,

and the softness of the sickness,

and the pillowed ache of earth’s old women growing older,

and my guilt,

which is a numbness comparable to frost-kissed glass,

and the unseen crocodile that prowls with gaping mouth

between the lands of dusk and dark; all these

unutterable cavities

have been pierced through by the violence of your silence,

like the violence of ultraviolet rays,

on which the straying honeybee will sip

at supper-time.

Natalia Goncharova, Nature Morte aux Fruits

sketch in primary colours

on the rude red tongue

of the afternoon

joy dissolves like butter

windowpane reverie

the vagrant muse, like a balloon,

softly steals away;

the brain’s bright honeycomb saloons

falter, shiver, fray.

faster! higher! soaring, swifting

rise without delay;

leave behind the mazy listing

cogs which scorn to play.

Swirled in the city’s cacophany like olives in a cocktail glass, we begin to muffle our senses, to muzzle the nose which twitches with appetite for the olfactory swelling of elderflower trees and old clothes composting in lumpen piles on the pavements. We begin to dampen ears which once strained to hear faraway sounds, eyes which once squinted with desire to swallow the bright world before us.

I’m not sure of what I intend to achieve with this project. It has no goal, as such. A general sense of attentiveness, of attunement to the sensuality of the world which so easily passes me by; that, I think, is what I yearn for. But sensitivity prickles, it overwhelms. Here, in little snippets, I will become a lepidopterist, an aurelian, cupping these moments of world-tasting like fluttering blue butterflies between my hands, amassing them in my antiquarian’s curiosity cabinet, inky black letters displayed like insectile flecks against a blinding LED backdrop.

This is my corkboard: to its gleaming whiteness I will pin my precious butterflies.

I will begin with four specimens which have touched me in various ways. Beginning with an attempt to describe the swaying, tender feelings of listening to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A, I will move swiftly and not-very-dextrously to fumbling with the feeling of encountering trees without knowing their names, of living in a city of arboreal strangers. Thirdly, I will pour forth my love in gloopy swathes of affection for Phil Ochs, whose music calls for a listening that leaves welts of sadness. Last will come a discussion of the sense-thick richness of reading the startlingly under-appreciated poem ‘The Naked Surgeon’, by the Irish poet Michael Hartnett. Four butterflies to carry my chariot away from sensual apathy and towards communion with the tactile tenderness of the world.

Butterfly illustration is a Menelaus Blue Morpho Natural History illustration from 1810 by George Perry.

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