A DROP MORE
HIGH DRAMA?
One fine June day a couple of years back I looked out of the window and saw a man mending a section of the roof opposite. Thinking it made for an interesting photo, with the sea in the background and the cloudless summer sky, I grabbed my camera and started to snap away. As if he knew he had an audience, he made his way to the peak and walked along the ridge with his hands out for balance like on a tightrope. My body flooded with adrenaline and cortisol but I was not worried, I could tell he had done this before. On reaching the opposite chimney stack he resumed his work, casually collecting up broken tiles before disappearing out of sight.
Kerry
THE SPIRIT OF NEW BEGINNINGS
In the spirit of New Beginnings I picked up a paintbrush this month for the first time in years.
For inspiration I used two books - Martha Beck's Beyond Anxiety, which is all about how we can reduce anxiety by being creative, for which we use the right side of our brains, and the classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, which helps us to paint or draw what we see rather than what we think we see.
The timelapse video here is the result of that. I hope you like it.
Kerry
EARLY BEGINNINGS
The theme for our first issue of Millpond is Beginnings and we’ve been thinking of little else of late. In her letter, Kerry focussed mainly on beginnings that happen later in life, so she has also written this short story about postnatal and prehistoric beginnings to even the balance a little.
Saltwater
He is here with me now, positioned on my chest so that our hearts are perfectly aligned. It’s the only way I can get him to sleep. While he is briefly consoled, I lie exhausted but wide awake. Partly because of his constant twitching, partly out of fear that if I drop off, I’ll smother him to death.
I spent the first 2 years of my life crying. This is what I’m told, not what I remember, though it feels accurate enough and certainly explains the lack of photos from that time. The story goes that no one could get me to stop, but I doubted this and felt certain I’d have settled if they’d tried a little harder. Until I had an inconsolable baby of my own.
Jeanette says I should get a Tiny-Tot-Tracker which monitors baby’s pulse and respiration rate so that “there’s absolutely nothing left to worry about.” The device also emits gentle white noise and an ambient glow conducive to a peaceful and restorative night.
There is an alphabet poster on the wall opposite the bed and with my eyes accustomed to the dark I can make out ABC on the top row, XYZ on the bottom, and 4 rows of 5 letters in between. While my baby sleeps, I keep myself awake by constructing words out of the gridded letters, with the rule that they have to connect across, down or diagonally. This little game soothes me. It is easy compared to the emotionally and physically draining work of caring for my baby who even while briefly consoled still makes huffing noises as if he’s been short changed. It’s mainly 3 and 4 letter words that I find because of the way that the vowels are clustered in one corner, but then out of nowhere I’m able to spell SALTWATER.
SALTWATER!
I blink hard and search for the word again. But it is has gone. I must have fallen asleep and dreamt it with the limited imagination of the sleep-deprived.
I pick up a book from the bedside table. The one about the octopuses and cuttlefish. Peter Godfrey-Smith. He has it that human beings evolved from single-celled organisms that grazed on the sea floor, organisms that worked cooperatively in groups by sensing and signalling to each other. Over the millennia, these organisms merged, and their sensing and signalling continued within the semi-porous membrane that bound them. When, in the Cambrian period, they developed the ability to self-mobilise they needed to distinguish between sensations arising from their own actions and those caused by external phenomena; between what was them and not them. According to Godfrey-Smith, the human sense of self can be traced back to this mutation. Our cells continue to signal to each other, sending electrical charges and chemical emissions between neurons within the nervous system that determines much of our inherently private subjective experience.
Jeanette’s Tiny-Tot-Tracker produces a rich stream of data which reassures her that baby is developing well ahead of his peers. He is already in the 98th percentile for head circumference and height. The tracker also accurately anticipates “nappy events” and alerts Jeanette when he’s starting to get peckish.
I misunderstand my baby at least once a minute but I know that he is happy in the bath because that is when he gurgles and smiles. I wonder if it reminds him of being a foetus inside me, when he floated in an amniotic calabash that constantly modified its temperature to please him. In those halcyon days, his cells sent signals to my cells and my cells recalibrated accordingly. Sometimes I got hungry, had cravings, felt lightheaded, needed to sit down, take a nap, but otherwise I didn’t register the signals, it all happened at an unconscious level. He was no trouble at all.
And then, after 9-and-a-bit months of companionable co-existence, we became two multicellular organisms, with separate nervous systems and our own membranes. At night when he clings so stubbornly to me, it's as if he’s trying to find his way back inside, to the place where all his needs had been catered to instantaneously. I interpret his high-pitched wails as, “I didn’t used to have to explain, you just got it.” He sobs with grief for the undivided attention that he experienced on the inside. There had been no tension between us then. Now tension is everywhere. But when our hearts are lined up perfectly maybe it feels to him like we are signalling to each other again. Maybe we are.
When deciding which breast to feed baby from Jeanette always consults the Tiny-Tot-Tracker which tells her whether the left or right was last latched onto and how long for. When she came round for coffee (decaf) on Monday, there was a Wi-Fi outage and she did not know if baby needed feeding, never mind from which breast. For a 30-minute period her baby joined mine in the 98th percentile of inconsolability. “He looks like he hates me,” she said in a tearful panic. Then the Wi-Fi came back on and normal service resumed.
My baby looks like he hates me on a regular basis, and I’m sure that, on some level, he registers my resentment and frustration too. But my amateurish efforts to understand and comfort him, my ability to tolerate the inconvenience, albeit with bad grace, are apparently sufficient. (After all he hasn’t gone elsewhere.)
I’m starting to think that it’s meant to be this way. Salty tears, urgent cries, warm milk, lining up of hearts just so. Slowly, clumsily, imperfectly, humanly. The type of two-way signalling and sensing only possible, says Godfrey-Smith, between “water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea.”
ENDINGS & BEGINNINGS
In the final weeks leading up to our launch we spent a great deal of time exploring what we felt about Beginnings in general as well as about our own beginning with Millpond.
It felt exhilarating and a bit overwhelming, but most of all it felt exciting.
At this time we were also exploring the kinds of ways we wanted to represent Millpond visually, and an online image produced by a design group called Uzual Sunday really caught my eye and captured the feeling of being about to dive into an exciting unknown.
I wanted to respond with my own art, so I made a couple of minor tweaks to the original image to suit the mosaic medium and had a go.
As you will see, not having a new canvas I had to remove the tiles from an old piece before I could get started.
It wasn't lost on me that I was therefore experiencing what so often happens with a new beginning: something else has to end first!
Jem