Three notes on space and desire
Orbital by Samantha Harvey | endless earthly wants | an Italian verb & a volcanic moon
1.
As a writer reading, the best books for your growth are those that take you into the tension between collapse and elevation. You want to find books that inspire you in your own writing practice. You want them to feel in reach (or at least not too far beyond). You want your spirit to soar with a song that sings this is why I do what they do. This is true of any craft in fact.
But the opposing feeling of collapse can be important too, initially at least, and signifies that here the very best piece of work has fallen into your sweaty hands. When I find a book that compels me to put down the best tools that I have available to me, and betray everything I have worked hard to believe about my own humbler offerings, then I know I am in the presence of something that is going to matter to me far beyond the closing of the book. A book that makes you want to give up writing is a precious thing.
This is how I closed the cover on Orbital by Samantha Harvey. The precision of her writing as she fictitiously documents the 16 orbits of earth across one day on board the International Space Station. The scope that is both specific and cloistered, vast and expanding, repetitive yet revelatory at every pass over the Earth. The observing, omniscient, point of view (so hard, but so relevant here). The tangible, materiality of her descriptions. The way the whole compact, capsule of a book shimmered with fresh perspective, while remaining doggedly human and quietly circumspect about the role of space travel at all.
How can I continue when there is this in the world? I declared on completion, waving it in the air like a white flag, buckling up for a wild journey into my own darkness. Propelled, unceremoniously, into an orbit around my own core material: around my self-doubt. Around my passion. Around their negative-to-positive magnetism.
After hours (or was it only minutes), I took a deeper breath. Observed some more evolved part of me, keeping an eye on the tiny frantic self, hanging on by a tether in the great abyss. Waiting patiently for this new thought to dawn above the dark, frayed landmass of my fear: I want to learn from this. That hot spark of desire.
In the afterburn, I remember where my writing started. Alongside the moon-wet water’s edge in Silverdale. Waiting, science-worn, to be let into a community classroom. An evening class. That great, euphemistic term for things that emerge determined and defiant from the dregs of the day. How I wrote poems, and a novel outline about a women-lead mission to Mars. And later, applied for an MA, which turned into a collection – a thesis – called Line of Best Fit. A learning trajectory.
2.
My face is drawn into a frown and I pick at the skin on my thumb before turning a thread from my scarf around in my fingers. I am thinking about what I want to write with my eyes closed. I’m starting as I always do by asking my body. I am drawing forth nothing but a fidget. I am aware of a headache beginning to prick beneath the bone above my left eye.
New wants are always appearing on the horizon. Desire; that thin bar of light, expanding and pushing out the void. This week, a sudden yearning to finish all of my unread books. To be a person that has finished everything they started in this way. In all ways. And to be a person who makes space for everything like this to be possible. Because we all know that to finish things, we need to hold space for completion. And because this all has the whiff of an ‘end’ rather than a ‘beginning’, we don’t. At least not often. Instead, we rush past our unfinished fantasies and hope they will find a different trajectory. Or land on another person.
I want to want for nothing, but I don’t know how.
But every cold morning, I try new simplicities on for size, just in case. I allow myself to wake late in the winter, not often making vertical until 8am, and then I take Juno for a walk or run or combination of both. Today, the latter. I take no music, I make no measurement. I take joy only in the hard ground that has been sloshy and waterlogged for weeks. Where the ground isn’t hard, it is sandy – a satisfying remnant and out-wash from the rivulets that have braided the fields and flooded the pathways since December. There is a secret space in my heart for things that are easy to brush off.
Back home I make a batch of frozen yogurt, tinker with a course curriculum, and put on a wash. I have made decaf tea. Checked the news (it’s all still there). Crossed yesterday’s items off the list. These are the stability of known things in unknown times. The routines that support me, in a land that holds.
I have decided that for the rest of winter I will work no more than 5 hours a day. This will leave space for me to keep up with my Italian language learning, resume dance, and finish my unread books. It will give me time to strengthen my body (and mind) in time for the return loop of spring. More than all of that though, it will give me time to just exist in whatever quiet and shabby way the rest of winter wants of me. There is a lot to be observed beyond the bare trees at this time of year, before the enclosure of the canopy returns. Winter shortens the light, but lengthens the view. I want to see.
But this headache is a comet along my crown. I hold my palm to my forehead, which warms one and cools the other. What I want to write is about huge things like why do I exist and tiny things like my dogs eyelashes. About my desire for my own life. The trajectories that feel almost meaningless and incidental. The way I cry at a tiny photo of my mother on her first day of school, forced to take off her glasses to make her prettier. The way she is lost. The way I want to die peacefully on a tiled floor in a warm country after breakfast as I watch the jays bury their acorns.
3.
I can’t get past the verb to be. Instead of building my Italian vocabulary and learning useful phrases for the café, I am held in near-constant, contemplation by io sono.
I am.
It is the first part that obstructs me: Io. Subject pronoun and the innermost moon of Jupiter. The most geologically active object in the solar system. The moon with the strongest gravity (see how she pulls me in like this!). My favourite moon.
Its explosive, tidal heat stirred by the great friction of its interior as it is pulled between other bodies, other resonant moons. Its determination to stay an ‘I am’ in this larger sphere of influence. Individuated by its great desirous ferocity. Its belligerence.
But only just.
Behold the spacecraft Juno in her highly inclined and eccentric orbit; how she bends ever closer to Io against the best efforts of scientists and engineers. How she was cast off to spy on Jupiter’s polar regions, but nevertheless inches (kilometers?) closer to the Galilean moon with time.
On my birthday this year, as I point to the sky with my own satellite by my side, this spacecraft in her extended mission will make a new encounter with Io, who has not been seen up close since 2007. 17 years ago. When I was 25. When I chipped rock off my own planet for study and commendation, and claimed to be important (oh, hot head!). Shortly before I took evening classes to try and find a line. But long after I started wanting.
Io sono / I am.
lei è / She is.
To readers: perhaps you have your own thoughts on space and desire. What are you wanting for at the moment? Have you ever been derailed, even momentarily, by a piece of someone else’s work? What did you learn?
To writers: instead of writing my usual journal post, I took my journal and made it into a triptych, which is a delicious format for linking ideas. What experiments are you trying in your writing at the moment? How are they impacting your work?
This piece has me feeling for a moment the way you described feeling after Orbital. Just huge deep breaths and awe and wonder and appreciation, along with “What is there left to say when this already exists?” So beautiful, Ruth. Thank you.
Hello Ruth,
I really enjoyed this piece. It reminded me a little bit of my old mythology teacher, Martin Shaw (who I recently discovered has a Substack - House of Beasts and Vines) - he used to say “Nothing great has happened in the world without longing having something to do with it.”
But I’ll answer the other question.
What I am experimenting with is letting a piece just be itself, rather than always thinking of what greater opus it is supposed to belong to. This comes from my theatre days, I think, when writing was always somehow being done to be integrated into a performance piece.
Now I’m trying to say... maybe this vignette is just this vignette.