Back-to-school treats: 'The unknown before us'

Painted hills, a girl singing in the sky, boys staring out to sea, a man shrinking a tree

Ami·e·s*,

Folded into one of these painted hills below is a house some very dear friends of mine now own. It was, most recently, a philosopher’s. When they first opened it up, they found whole roomfuls of personal papers: hand-written manuscripts, unopened letters in franked envelopes, email print-outs, documents, records, diaries—in several hands and from several centuries—and missives. My father noted a particular set of letters, written by the last owner to a friend, whom he addressed every time exactly as such, “Ami”, “Friend”. I liked that too, so I’m stealing it, for you <3

Did you have a good break over the holidays? It was so wonderful to be back with my parents in Valleraugue. On our last walk, my kid announced that she now gets why I always feel so sad about having to go back down to the village, whenever we’re up there, and that she’d rather stay on the ridge too. (It was a particularly overcast day. She spent the entire hike up to the pass laying out a trilogy she intends to write about how people start fighting back against a dreaded toxic mist of intelligent plutrons, which actually isn’t toxic but is just trying to teach us something. That hike up took over an hour. She didn’t stop talking until the white cross of the Memorial to the Aigoual-Cévennes Maquis was minutes away. Below us, to the right, we spotted a mysterious ruin in the trees and took a different path to find it before giving up and just sitting looking out into the green and grey void, silently eating our quiches.)

Of course, in winter, “up there” is all the more magical, in equal parts foreboding and enticing, precisely because of the weather. It gets stuck on the peaks and forested ridges like sheep’s wool on old fences. Mists rise, fogs descend, cloud cleaves to the valley’s lows, hilltops emerging from the blur above like birds against the blue.

Valleraugue sits at the foot of the Mont Aigoual, elevation 1,567m. Past 1,000m, you walk through stretches of open rocky ground that feel like time warps, like you might actually not be a 21st-century digital Luddite but a 17th-century 11 year old sent by your mother to deliver a message or lunch to your shepherd uncle or a kid from the village taking supplies to secreted maquisards in the 1940s French resistance. I know mountains everywhere contain lonely places. And these aren’t even that tall. But still, the remoteness you feel up there, in the Hautes Cévennes, I find consistently transporting. It’s such a full, such a beautiful quiet.

Here then, a few people whose worlds are a bit like that. Hopefully they’ll make this return to life’s noise that bit more bearable for you.

1. Tsubamé, my old soul of a daughter, who just walked through the door saying that for an audition next week at school, she wants to sing Aoi Teshima’s ditty, Mori no Chiisana Restoran. The title translates as “the small restaurant in the forest” and it brings to mind so many things we started reading together when she was little:

   Iwamura Kazuo’s 14ひきのシリーズ (14 Forest Mice) series (numbered clockwise, 1); the Balthazar et Pépin books by Marie-Hélène Place and Caroline Fontaine-Riquier (2); Taupe et Mulot by Benjamin Chaud and Henri Meunier (“Taupe, lève-toi! Lève-toi vite, cette matinée est prodigieuse. J’ai préparé deux nécessaires de peinture. Allons peindre le printemps…”) (3); Rieko Nakagawa and Yuriko Yamawaki’s ぐりとぐら (Guri and Gura) (4); Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (5); and Arnold Lobel’s inimitable Frog and Toad (6):

   “But Toad,” said Frog.

   “I am happy. I am very happy.

   This morning

   when I woke up I felt good because the sun was shining.

   I felt good because I was a frog.

   And I felt good because I have you for a friend.

   I wanted to be alone.

   I wanted to think about how wonderful everything is.”

   “Oh,” said Toad.

   “I suppose that is a very good reason for wanting to be alone.”

   “Now,” said Frog,

   “I will be glad not to be alone.

   Let's eat lunch.”

   

   

2. Martijn Doolard, the bearded Dutchman whose videos my dad got me hooked on a couple years ago, is now on Chapter 145 of his limitless series about daily life restoring two Alpine stone huts amid the Italian Piedmont peaks. I interviewed him in September 2023 and still, I watch his weekly instalments every Sunday. I’ve begun to think of his work not as content, nor even just, as some have said, as a modern-day Walden, but something more like old-master-style self-portraiture, an ongoing study in presence and time.

3. Jake Grewal, whose solo show, Under the Same Sky, opens at Studio Voltaire, in London, next week, a masterful draughtsman and painter, another old soul and a new romantic. His latest body of work is presaged in this small etching below that he showed at Frieze last October. Figures clamber over rocks and look out to sea and you’re right there with them. You can feel the heat of the sun and the spit of the waves on your shoulders and your cheeks. You sense their yearning to be out in the deep blue. You delight in the painterly surfaces they stand on. Grewal’s studio is not too far from home, and I went to visit a few times before Christmas for a piece published this week in the Guardian. Now he’s wearing a pair of my mother’s knitted sleeves or wrist warmers, to make painting in frigid weather that bit easier.

   

   Jake Grewal, Love Without You, 2024. Photograph: Dale Berning Sawa

4. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who also has a show opening next week, at Corvi-Mora, a show whose title is an entire feature film. Keep the Moon Amongst Ourselves (Should the Owl be In Absentia, And no Watchful Gaze over Night The Devil May Return for What's not His, Upstream and Out of Sight. Take the Gold, the Earth and the thick black water, Like A Magpie at large Between the Twelves We'll Break his Neck then Let Him take it All, But Keep The Moon Amongst Ourselves.)

   Yiadom-Boakye’s painting is superlative—see this old work below, from 2010—but I think her writing is a crucial element of the work too, the way it instantly thickens whatever scene she’s offering, with voices and places and smells and feels and feelings, disappointments, hopes, mystery, story, it soars.

   

   Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, The Counter, 2010. Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery

5. Patti Smith, with another figure staring out to sea. I just bought her wonderful Book of Days. It opens, as such a book should, on January 1, with the below image on the left and the caption: “A new year is unfolding before us, brimming with possibilities.”

   Patti Smith
   ’s was the first Substack I ever subscribed to, an bottomless well of belief in art, of dedication to beauty and remembering. I’ve always loved her music, but her memoir Just Kids occupies a spot even closer to my heart. That book, man. I wrote a song for her right after reading it**, the lyrics and melody and how to play them both simply falling out of me like sand in an hourglass.

   

   Patti Smith, The Book of Days, p1 (left) and Just Kids, p201 (right).

6. Ahmad Jamal whose live recordings of Poinciana I have had in my ears all week. This 2012 recording where he’s vibing with Reginald Veal on bass or 60 years earlier at the Pershing in Chicago. It’s like he’s playing the surface of a lake, just barely skimming the water, ripples catching the light, une fuite/suite de notes effleurantes.

   “I’m trying to figure out what the black and white keys do after 86 years!” Jamal said in an interview in 2020. “I first sat down at the piano when I was three years old, and I’m still trying to figure out what they do! I learn something new every time I sit down. I sat down early this morning, because what I like to do is get to the piano first. I finally learned that, because if I don’t, all this other mess — computers and this and that and Facebook and other junk — it drains you. So I have nothing left for the piano, especially at 89 years old!”

7. Ichiko Aoba, who, in an interview in 2021, said that as everything had gotten quieter and she’d spent more time at home during the pandemic, it was as if her senses had opened up. “There are too many sounds in the city,” she said, “and if I heard everything I would probably go crazy. So I think I have a system that automatically closes my ears. When it gets quiet, my natural ears open up. My vision and my sense of touch. Then I can hear the voice inside me that I normally can't hear.”

8. Jason Dungan
   , who performs as Blue Lake and has just released a new track, The Forest, from his forthcoming album, Weft. I love the floating, woven feel of Blue Lake’s music, the way it washes over you like pigment in water.

9. This yamadori artist, who you can find at work on IG and YT as Yamasibon KIWA: yamadori are naturally occuring tiny trees that you collect out in the forest. Watch the way his hands dance as he works, those deliberate gestures.

10. The person behind Mignonette Takes Pictures, who I really want to find and interview, because that’s a daily moment of perfect wholesomeness right there:

    mignonettetakespictures

    

    A post shared by @mignonettetakespictures

11. Rainer Maria Rilke, whose Book of Hours I read from most days too. This one (tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy***), I think about a lot:

    The poets have scattered you.

    A storm ripped through their stammering

    I want to gather you up again

    In a vessel that makes you glad

    The blind man needed you as a cup

    The servant concealed you

    The homeless one held you out as I passed

    You see, I like to look for these things.

    Notes

*Inclusive language: if you’re Elliot, you’re my ami, if you’re Zoe, my amie, if you’re the girls, you’re my amies, and if you’re the Melroses, well, you’re my amis, but if you’re listening to this sentence, each option will sound exactly the same.

**One Step Two Step (for Patti)

I loved you so
Piled up all of my things on a length of cloth, tied with ribbon
Cleaned out a dive
We were owls on the town, we were old, we were wise, we were nineteen

We walked a beat
I had sung to, I had known you, for ever
Out in the street
You pulled me in, my eyes closing, took a picture

You were there for me
We shared everything
Then the silence came,
And we couldn't see

I loved you still
When he called me, you were sleeping, you were gone, going further
Each laboured breath
Kept me wakeful and I waited, I prayed, I was still

You were there for him
Then you wrote your tales
And the music came,
And we all stood still

I've loved you both
For these pages, for the painting, of a life lived in the lights
Wrote you this song
So to tell you, to thank you, so you'd know

***My favourite English translation is by Robert Saxton, which also means I keep giving the book away, so I don’t have it right now. And it’s out of print 😳 But Abe Books has come to the rescue and my new copy will be here soon.