sunday energy #30
the green knight, old, writing against time
I am writing this against time. My charger is fried, the cord has split open, all the wispy wires inside have begun to fracture and unravel, and I have about 30 minutes of juice left on my laptop. Somehow, this feels like a metaphor for something. Life, probably.
For the next couple of months, I’m living in an old farmhouse in a very secluded part of Georgia, a place with more trees than people. My time here is ostensibly about finishing some looming writing projects and reconnecting to nature and myself, but it’s also about contemplating time (and death). I think I’ve really struggled to create over the past few years because I have such a tenuous relationship to time and death. As a suicidal person I often crave death, but I also fear it, primarily because I do not understand it.
I want to investigate how to use time, and what to do with my time when it feels so finite, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. I want to excavate this constant anxiety I hold on to about not having yet created my most beautiful thing, the pressure I feel to create a life for myself in which I can thrive and be happy despite feeling like my charger is about to die. How to accept that everything I do, every relationship I have, every hardship and triumph, is thrown into stark relief against time?
Part of this investigation is going to consist of watching a lot of movies about death (if you have any recs let me know!), starting with a re-watch of the first two movies I saw after the quarantine was lifted: The Green Knight and Old. It was a rather appropriate double-feature for that moment, as the realities of the pandemic and growing climate crisis were becoming a bigger part of our collective consciousness. Both movies are about how, as Sady Doyle put it in a tweet at the time, “NATURE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU AND DEATH IS INEVITABLE.”
