Quiet aloneness & ecstatic solitude

This long post is a love letter to Rebecca Solnit. I love all of her writing, but A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Penguin, 2005) has been -- and I'm aware of the irony-- a wayfinder for me. Particularly the introductory essay to the book, 'Open Door' [1-25].

1. Quiet aloneness

Lockdown, for me, was never 'locked away'. I have enjoyed the break from real-life social activity, which, I must admit, stresses me quite a bit. If you have never worked out that I'm a social introvert, this is the proof. At the beginning, my night walks were born of frustration. Like many others, I was sitting for long hours at my desk, and needing more than just standing to cook elaborate meals (I did plenty of that). Living with someone that I'd only just met before lockdown was stressful too. So I just needed to get out into the evening, into the fresh air. I invested in some tracksuit bottoms so that I'd pass for someone trying to exercise, when actually all I wanted to find was peace and solitude. I didn't expect to find more than that. 

In the first couple of weeks I went out during the day, or just after dinner, and rang far-away friends, chatting to them as I wandered the winding streets and paths of my suburb and the neighbouring ones. I also rode my bike, but my body wasn't as quite as happy after a bike ride: my legs were good, but my shoulders, back and neck hadn't done much. During a walk, everything warms up. 

One night I went out late: I'd worked for hours and couldn't stand the thought of getting into bed without stretching my legs. Too late to talk, I listened to music as I walked, and paced through the streets, falling into a trance. The full moon was out and everything was a silky dark blue. My suburb and its neighbours are designed in looped streets, with paths connecting through, and it moves up and down hill around the edges of a... well, small mountain, I guess. I walked and walked and loved the sense of freedom that, as a woman, one doesn't get very often when walking streets, especially dark streets. Earlier in the evening, there were people walking dogs, and cars delivering takeaway, but around midnight there was no-one. Just me and the sky and the streets. 

It became addictive. I made a music mix, and found other mixes that worked for me. I'm not one for routines; they tend to last a couple of weeks, maybe a month, and then get changed up. 

I gave myself basic guidelines: try not to walk the same street twice in a night, take at least every second path you pass. Set off in a different direction each time, and walk for an hour in a loop that takes you home, looking up: at the wires, tree-lines, clouds, stars, falling space-junk (that was a stunning night ); and across: at the shapes of lit windows floating in the dark, the perforating lines of coloured twinkle-lights on eaves; and down: the things carved into concrete, the rhythm of my feet pacing the beats of my music. 

I mentioned the Red Robot Snail in that earlier post, but it became more than just a fancy: it became important to me.  Each time I got disorientated, its red feelers would appear in the distance, through the trees, and it would grow and shrink and change its expression depending on the angle from which I was approaching it. I would talk to it, and it would talk to me. It felt like a protector, sitting low in the horizon, and it seemed to have Kawaii cuteness that beamed across the valley at everyone locked in their houses. 

I built a narrative around it, and sometimes complete storylines: this, followed by this, was a wonderful night. But sometimes it's not a good thing to get too close to something that fascinates you. One night I thought about walking right up to the Red Robot Snail, so I did. Right up close. And what I saw sucked the magic right out of it. 

I mean, I know that it's an industrial site with cranes. But up close he had eyes that beamed GEOCON, a business that I have been protesting for many years. OK, I knew that this was a GEOCON building (my downstairs neighbour works on it), but I'd sort of let myself ignore that fact.  Being up close had a profound affect. The story lost innocence. Red Robot Snail went from 'it' to 'he' instantly, and his height, increasing daily, transformed him from jolly protector to Evil Overlord, looking across the valley (probably to his Evil Twin in Woden), scoping where to start the next project. 

This, by the way, was around the same time that the government was starting to talk about tracking apps and increased social control. 

My poor phone camera doesn't have the power to show the eyes to full effect. Here's a drawing I did later: 

This quote is from the second essay, 'The Blue of Distance'.  Each quote's alt-text gives the page number. 

I grieve a bit for the Red Robot Snail, but I always knew his time with us was temporary. 

2. Ecstatic solitude

Over time, with the easing of lockdown, my need to escape got less urgent, so I tend to go out now a couple of times a week. Every time I walk, even if it's overcast, or raining, there's something that takes my breath away. My friend Zoe (old bloggers know her as Crazybrave) and I have discovered a mutual love of the Suburban Sublime. I am still trying to work out how to fully process my feelings for it creatively, but she is doing fantastic drawings and glazes on pottery. We've started an Insta feed as a kind of sketchbook: @belcosublime, with the tagline quiet aloneness and ecstatic solitude.  She walks at sunset, usually with the dog, and just enjoys the sounds and feels of the evening. I walk with my headphones, and I've rediscovered (because so many times over the years I loop back to it) the magic of Trip Hop music. If you have access to Spotify, tune into a playlist called 'Trip Hop' by Record Club. The only thing it's lacking is my ultimate walking song: Atlas Attack: Goldsworthy Remix, by Massive Attack. That just gets my legs pumping up the hills, stride after stride, feeling all the feels. 

 

Everything is colour in the night: Paynes Grey, navy blue, yellow black, red black, blue black. It's like that painting in the NGA that everyone jokes about: all black but when you stand in front of it, there are nine squares, and they are all different shades of black and completely distinct from each other.

Trip Hop is a UK invention from the 1990s: dark gritty sound over thumping beats and often politically-charged lyrics mixed with sublime vocals. It's a style famously associated with slow, mellow drugs, like dope. But it's also, I realise, literally music for walking around suburbs at night: walking to a club, walking home from a club, going between houses. The music is stuffed with small observations about suburbia and walking. It's gritty and textured, and has that wee-hours sense of tired wonder. 

When I caught the ferry from Santander in Spain to Portsmouth in the UK in 2018 (heading to Bristol), I sat right at the back of the boat and played Massive Attack for hours through my noise-cancelling headphones while watching the backwashed water, and I thought that was sublime. This time, I'm walking through the streets feeling the emptiness of a changed social world. And then I can be stopped in my tracks by a moment in the music, or a glimpse of the Black Mountain Tower, or a sudden peek into the new Molonglo valley construction, all the little new houses forming a web of twinkling lights like Industrial Light and Magic face dots. 

Hell is round the corner where I shelter

Isms and schisms we're living helter skelter

If you believe I deceive then common sense says shall you receive

Let me take you down the corridors of my life

And when you walk, do you walk to your preference

No need to answer till I take further evidence

Massive Attack: Euro Child  (also iterated in Tricky's Hell is round the corner)

Just before this all broke out, I went to see Kate Tempest in Sydney, and I crammed into a venue called The Factory Theatre with a mass of other people in a way that is unimaginable now. She got us swaying in ecstacy, simultaneously webbed dots, each out of body yet each deep in our brains. When I'm walking through the night, steadily, one foot in front of the other, surrounded by these deep dark colours, infiltrated by these deep dark beats, that's exactly how I feel again. I like it best when a Spotify playlist runs out and it starts to add songs that you've liked. The song that usually comes on is Metronomic Underground, by Stereolab, which I love very much. It's great to do that last bit home with its joyous understated rhythm and gorgeous French accents weaving the lyrics over and over: 

Crazy, sturdy, a torpedo
Crazy, brutal, a torpedo
Who knows does not speak
Who speaks does not know
Keep the mouth closed
Rounding the sharpness
Untie the tangles
To be vacuous
To be infinite
Leap into the void

Walking in the daytime has none of the romance of my night meanderings. The houses look either drab or overblown in the light (especially all the new builds). Over the last few months I have felt absolute freedom. I've bathed in moonlight (not literally, all clothes remain on), trudged through cold wind and rain, pirouetted on empty intersections and stopped to marvel at how exotic every mundane thing becomes in low visibility. The everyday, transformed into the sublime.  

If you're interested in seeing more photos than I share here, many are on @belcosublime but most of them are on my own feed: @poeticnegotiations.