daystar

notes on falling

The baby turns two this week. Approaching half a decade of parenthood. Settled into the distortion of time as fact, though the feeling is always destabilising. In a good way, mostly — a way that cuts through the myth of individual importance. Even when the fact is difficult to metabolise. Raising kids is a trip, and this one has been raised by more people than his parents. That’s been its own reckoning — failing to be everything, and in that failure finding something like transcendence. (Far from glory.) A fall — from where, to where? (Nowhere, just through.) A transcendence more profane than divine. A lot of shit and snot. Sublimity in its closeness to the mess and muck. The mundane. Something more is only ever something else. (Something, in itself, to metabolise.)

Looking at photos of Elizabeth Peyton’s exhibition in Ryosokuin Temple in Kyoto last night. daystar hakuro. In the Bible, the term daystar appears in conjunction with the fall of Lucifer. The light-bringer. How you have fallen from heaven, O Daystar. Son of the dawn.

(Karen O singing: in heaven, lost my taste for hell.)

The Christine Godden photograph I came across in the gallery’s collection records not long before the baby was born. Lynny and Raven laughing, Larkspur. How I printed it and pinned it above my desk and took it with me on parental leave, tucked inside a notebook that looks exactly like all my other notebooks. How it sunk into a loose kind of archive — an obsessive and disorganised catalogue of self. How I looked up the photograph’s collection page recently and saw that it’s on display. I went to find it on a quiet Friday. Took a photo of it on my phone, my own spectral outline reflected in the glass. So much more an object this way. How I’ve never framed my own photographs. Never even printed them.

(LCD Soundsystem: oh baby.)

Time as distance, geography of memory. (Gathering data.) Its compressions, corruptions. Kate Zambreno on Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary: how much those early months with a new baby feel like grief. Not in terms of loss, but tenderness. Elliptical fragments recorded haphazardly, repetitively. The way I wrote when I became a parent. The nonlinear, the everywhen. Falling light.

(oh baby: you’re already gone / we are already home.)

How you have fallen from heaven, O Daystar. How I have lost my taste for hell.