1.

My mum reading ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’

- one of the chapters mum’s been sending to me since I’ve been away in New Zealand. She starting reading the book to me in the summer and has now continued via this method. A lovely book to be read to you, a good way of communicating emotion (their words become yours). similar to this list-sharing, alternativ ways of staying (incredibly) close.

Video of my Birthplace - the start of the journey I took with my mum around new zealand, where she had me.
notes i made following it:

today I went to see my birthplace.
There it felt wholly peaceful, and I understood the need for the dea - how it feels you can only breathe with the sea.
Afterwards, leaving, felt like ripping. It was like I went through stages of my life again from the place that I needed and acclimatising to the new places, trusting that they would get back there, but perhaps as my needs weren’t being met it not being quite as good. I was having some bad thoughts that if I didn’t make my needs met in going back there or being close to the sea it was keeping that passivity in life, leaving instinct there. There needs to be a better word for instinct. But there, I felt so lucky and peaceful, that that was the first thing I ever saw! Maybe I’ve always wanted to be brought back there. I see why clouds on hills from a distance fill me.
Timeless, there!
And I stayed on my own a little and saw the green and pink fluorescent click pens and an A4 page of writing on their table, maybe a list - maybe a list to do with Christmas? - And I saw they had 2 big candles, and big art-like books on their under-table shelf, and I cannot imagine being born in that back room. It seemed spatially impossible too seeing the room from the back and then the entrance to it from the front, like the impossible feeling summed itself up in this not being able to get the spaces in my head.
the deck was so lovely you could see all the way left and right there were birds of paradise flowers on the right to the slope and beautiful smell glass window out to the front
Is that where I remember being left on my back while they were in the other room?
Is that where mum walked down the hill when there was a green sky of storm?

Knowing it was neither good nor bad it was just neutral understanding it was just being
Letting many contradictory things be true at the same time

A Place we drove through - the Desert Road

2.

The landscape we were in reminded me strongly of this scene from Jarman's 'The Garden' - In my head it’s from further away Jesus is small beneath the pylons. My remembered image is often different and I’m interested in the remembered one

Something about existing inside the landscape the time it exists in plants’ and landscape’s relationship to time other than humans
Their relationship to time
Pylons’ relationship to scale
Pylons giving sense of scale
Derek jarman’s films images inside the landscape

Leaving dream images behind from the work like bachelard and like the bed in the sea with flares around and Jesus walking under the huge landscape under the pylons

And work that doesn’t close its eyes to anything like Robert macfarlane and male history of walking the privilege of walking being free in the landscape queering feminising walking in the landscape
Like Tanoa

Why I like Donna haraway so much she doesn’t ignore anything even if letting something exist and not working on it still existing it

I feel so much better in the big landscape instinct return
Thinking about in connection with learning the first place I saw where I was born that huge landscape

Gravitating toward unfamiliar landscapes when back in trees and green I feel sick bored again

3.

Donna Haraway - Staying with the trouble

see notes from point 2 - not becoming thoughtless, thinking about the things even if they seem impossibly painful or too big to think about. (staying with them)

focusing a lot on seeing outside the human - beyond ‘human exceptionalism’ - ways to work with the world through this
looking for ‘purposes’, focusing on seemingly small projects as biggest purpose

4.

Ernest Hemingway - A Movable Feast

Hemingway on Paris fantasising about cities when I’m away from them
so opposite to Donna Haraway guilty pleasure male individualism

a way of dealing with groups at christmas, his fabricated social power and perception, like these thoughts are the ones accepted and respected by groups of people
thinking about truth, he talks of writing ‘clear true sentences’ with no frivolity, as time went on through the reading i started to realise he was talking a lot of untruths (both in perception of the world and in the movements of people), thinking of how through work it’s possible to build such whole worlds of belief and seeming clarity on such unbalanced ideas/ ideals

re membering idea of ‘mot juste’ - the only right word to fit the feeling

half like his work, half hate it

5.

Drawings and objects from ‘Japan Supernatural’

A christmas present from my stepmum, who saw the show in Sydney recently (history of the supernatural in Japanese art from 1700s - now).
She noticed the connection with the little objects and drawings i’ve been making recently - see item 1. from November list - Carrington’s anthropomorphic characters - small details - fantastic creatures - objects alive. In relation to Donna Haraway, thinking about the difference between anthropomorphism and seeing outside the human. - the existing lives in objects, plants and animals, but not through our point of view.

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space