Everyone's soul is a little ticklish
Cry and you cry alone, laugh, and the world laughs with you
Everything is low.
The lights.
The chairs.
The vinyl.
The books.
All floor-mounted.
Like us.
Even the food in the fridge
scraps of what once was.
Nothing beyond
the bare essentials,
yet everything we need
all within reach.
Nothing too much.
No clothes too many.
Nothing above us,
No towering objects.
Stars,
separated by ceiling.
The candlelight flirts
between the analogue hum
of the dated speakers
and what little of the city
Can still creep in through the window.
Your hair folds beside your face
leaning over the candle
to light another cigarette.
I’m not sure
if you’re about to set your fringe alight
or dip it into the molten wax
currently bonding another bottle
of Petrus to your floor.
Nicotine for you.
Cortisol for me.
You see it before I do.
“Another bottle?”
I prepare to become vertical.
It feels foreign.
The rugs and stacked books
have become my home
floorborne and safe.
maybe they’ve kept me
too long.
maybe not long enough.
The music swells.
the room is full,
and now the street too.
the world outside murmurs in judgement
But it’s clear
No part of you cares.
I peek at you pawing through
old Scottish poems.
You fold into a page,
And a sharp twinkle cuts your eye.
I understand.
The trailers are ending.
It’s time to take our seats.
I fall back to the ground.
The flames dance in the rouge reflections of the wine.
The quiet before the storm.
She takes stage.
“Ye jovial boys wha love the joys,
The blissfu’ joys of lovers;
Yet dare avow wi’ dauntless brow,
Whate’er the lass discovers;
I pray draw near, and lend an ear,
And welcome in a frater;
For I’ve lately been on quarantine,
A proven Fornicator.”-Robert Burns ( The Fornicator , 1785)
The cigarette becomes a baton.
I’m not sure if you’re reading a poem
or commanding a ship.
But the smoke and your voice
begin to fill the room.
I can’t help but wonder
whether you’re enjoying the words
or the act.
The flowers giggle.
From bottle to vase
I see them excite.
“A performance!”
Is that all it is?
Or is this it.
Is this you?
I never know
if you’re playing
to have fun
or if there’s something
you don’t want me to see.
But
now is not the moment.
Because now,
now you are Burns.
I lie on my back
my head propped up by a book
that lost its dust cover
long before you were born.
You stand. You bow.
My hands meet
the applause fills the room.
The daffodils
in the cut crystal pot
lean over to agree.
They are laughing too.
“Encore, encore”
the flowers are shouting.
We all want more.
My mind clears
I step out of the act
I look around and see,
There is nothing
but laughter.
To lie here
and laugh
that is what I will never forget.
Every moment
a realisation that
that tiny place
outside this giant room
cannot win.
However hard it tries
It can never be as real
or as fun
as what happens here.
When I first met you
I thought this space was the joke.
That our little pockets
of candlelit time
were the pantomime.
But now I know.
Reality is not a serious thing.
Even if you want to make it so
eventually
everything becomes
a comedy.
Thalia
It’s nice when you meet someone who can laugh.
The laughers are the ones I like to play with.
Because tragedy comes, and it will always come.
When it does, we are faced with the two masks. One of the experience itself. And one of finding the humour in it.
Thalia holds both. She does not choose. She makes them dance together.
“Bad” things happen. But our perspective, our ability to find some humanity, some humour or irony in it, this is what keeps truth alive.
It is all too easy to become serious. There is an importance to it. A justness. Being correct. Being annoyed.
But it is a job half done. Thalia is the reminder that to laugh
is to complete the work.
Historically tied to flowers, to bloom, to humour,
she is the counterpoint to Melpomene - Tragedy.
Her name comes from the Greek thállō (θάλλω),
meaning to bloom, to flourish, to thrive.
She is the Muse of comedy, idyllic poetry, and festivity.
She embodies lightness, laughter, the pastoral life, and the human ability to transform difficulty into joy.
In classical theatre, masks, she is the smiling face, and Melpomene is the weeping one; together, they form the full spectrum of human experience.
In Greece, theatre performed the same role as modern media. It entertained, but it was also ritual, civic education, a shaping of behaviour and customs, and at its most elevated, therapy for the emotions of life.
Thalia represents laughter as medicine, comedy as critique, humour as survival.
Interestingly, in some traditions, she mothers the Corybantes, dancers of the ecstatic rites of Cybele, fitting, as laughter and dance are always intertwined neurologically
What is laughter?
Laughter is the body breaking tension.
It can be anxiety leaving, or pressure venting, or just the mind tripping over itself when two things collide in a way it cannot resolve.
Sometimes it’s cruel, sometimes it’s intimate, but always it’s a signal that something shifted.
You feel it ripple through a room, a chain reaction of bodies syncing to the same rhythm.
It disarms. It connects.
It reminds us that seriousness is a costume, and that even in tragedy the mask can slip, and when it does, we laugh.
I’m writing this from the corner of an airport restaurant.
If I normally feel a little out of place, right now I definitely do.
I’m low on sleep, heading out on an important work trip, and all of my clothes are currently somewhere else.
As always with the muses, I spent the week thinking and processing and making no progress.
Thalia, laughter, I spent the week with neither.
Yesterday I tried to break through.
An attempt to finish one of the muse paintings.
(I had originally planned to finish one a week alongside these newsletters—as you can see, I am behind.)
I felt most confident about Erato.
Carnal.
Clear colour palette.
I sat to paint at 4pm.
Nothing.
I sketched, I read, I pawed.
At 7pm I began
For five hours I toiled.
Eventually, I got somewhere close.
And then it began
the spiral.
Maybe it was the oil fumes.
Maybe it was the fact that unless the painting triggers me, it’s not worth showing.
But every three or four paintings this happens.
I realise I am going the wrong way.
I edit. I cut. I rip.
Until at 2am, I am the one covered in paint, and my canvas has been completely scrubbed of progress.
I wasn’t laughing.
I cleaned.
I unfucked.
I put myself back together.
Then I began the slow journey home, past the party crowd out later than they expected.
Night tube.
Enveloped in Oil fumes, reminding me of my failures.
Today I woke up in the same stupor.
Dejected.
I take my painting failures personally.
I couldn’t connect to Erato as an idea.
In fact, I felt lost.
Lost connecting to love.
I’ve been working with the muses for five weeks, and the project for well over six months.
And still, I can’t finish a single painting.
Maybe, just maybe, I should do something sensible instead.
Eventually I got myself together and sat in the taxi to the airport.
And it hit me. This is funny.
That sometimes you really mess everything up.
Why Erato this week? Why paint at all last night? I was already overworked. I was crazy to keep painting at midnight. All of it. So why?
Because sometimes we do stupid stuff. And that’s okay. It’s kind of funny.
I took a bit of time thinking back over all the moments where I’d really screwed up, and if I’m honest, they’re all pretty funny. Maybe if I shared them all here, you’d unsubscribe. But from where I’m sitting, life is funny.
And whether you agree or not is up to you.
But if I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that no matter what is happening to you, it can be funny, if you want it to be.
Poets Corner
Untitled Thalia
On an empty train
blading through grass
A mechanical vein
heading to Oxford
All of that England
passing me by
with fields I’ll never touch
and moss I’ll never rest upon
Interrupted by fenced-in cows
and little bricks of house
Is there a little patch of field
on this little patch of land
that isn’t somebody’s possession?
Knock knock, I call out,
but nobody’s home
to answer ‘who’s there?’
- Thomas May
Final words
Embarassment is a strangely underexplored emotion.
This coming week, I’m going to enjoy sitting in it when I need to.
love you loads
R
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