Hammock girl summer

Motion capture, thought capture—and a book review.

At a wedding last weekend, an old friend asked me:

Why are so many Irish people great writers? Or so many great writers Irish, whichever way around you like it.

We were talking about Claire Keegan.¹

I said it’s because of a deep shared history of trauma, silence—and shit weather.

It makes sense. Think about it.

Ireland is the *perfect* place to be excessively literate. It basically rains every day of the year.² Who wants to be outside when it’s pissing down. May as well stay indoors, with a book, in front of your laptop (or, you know, your ancient lambskins and stone-ground inks).

I’m noting this from the giddy—albeit brief—heights of summer in the English countryside. I have lots of tumbling thoughts but who can be arsed to sit inside and record them. It’s sunny.

I’m writing from my hammock right now. We live in a cathedral of trees. Wood pigeons fly around the rafters and alight on the architraves. I can hear their calls, rustles and flutters. Sometimes, laying here in my hammock, in a thick stew of insects, languid summer heat, I close my eyes.

Time falls back and the heavens scroll. Houses, the whole village, melts away. There, in a high wooded valley saddling minor uplands, is me: for the briefest of moments, suspended in the fulcrum.

I expect that autumn will, as it always does, bring a surge of productivity. That’s great because this month I’m off to visit some archives. Come autumn, I expect to be flush with material. For now, it just circulates and percolates.

We are surely only decades (if that) away from live thought-streaming, as a more efficient mode of sharing the long form self. The longest form self is surely some clever behind-ear cerebral plug-in that sidesteps writer’s block and purges thoughts straight to paper, to screen, without this tedious typing interface.

In the endless drive for efficiency, this is surely only moments (historically speaking) away.

Or perhaps not.

Joel likes to talk to me about motion capture, like for characters in video games. Before I met him, I never knew they hired actual actors and actresses for this, wearing detectors, like when they filmed Andy Serkis for Gollum all those years ago.

Joel tells me mo-cap (you’re allowed to call it that if your boyfriend is a software engineer who calls it that) is hard because software doesn’t understand the impact parts of the body have on one another. Software still can’t map the physical reality of a human.

So, in motion capture, hands pass through each other if pressed or hair cuts straight through a shoulder.

3D models sieve each other.

I want to sink into and through Joel sometimes but I can’t. In this world, we remain solid and impermeable.

My hammock too holds my solid form, stops me slipping through a diamond gridwork of ropes.

So, maybe live thought-streaming is still aways off. Mapping thoughts still just a job for these typing, rattling fingers.

Thunderstorms are forecast today, to cut the heat.

Cycling into black clouds, an urgency to get home and beat the rain.

A flock of rooks jabber peevishly. I look up to them and a bug—small, black—flies straight into the juice of my eye.

I can’t stop. It’s about to rain. The bug swims around on the pool of my cornea, heightening the urgency.

Cow parsley against the black clouds tug at the sky like upturned parachutes. Sails exhaled to catch the swelling breeze.

For just a moment, it’s hard to tell what moves through what.

For just a moment, I will stay in the hammock.

I will rest in the fulcrum, stopping the quick march of the seasons, letting them trip me up, and pass through me, so I can luxuriate in them.

And now, a book review.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I’ve just finished this book. It’s a masterpiece. If you haven’t read it, go do it now.

[NB: All of my book reviews will start like this. This is because I don’t finish books that I don’t love. Life is too short to read shit books. If it hasn’t got me by page 40 (sometimes page 20 or even 10, in really dire cases), it’s gone. Also, this is a book review, so I will discuss the plot and what happens. Spoiler alert—obviously.]

Anyway, The Unconsoled.

Many people try and fail to read it, let alone love it. My friend who recommended it said some people really hate it. It makes them angry.

I can understand why. It is a stressful read.