RACHEL CATTLE
Strings 2
‘about lighthouses not having to move to save a ship’
September 2024
All Tomorrow’s Parties
I told her I’ve never really known my own edges. Said I felt as if I were porous. I feel connected, I said. To who? Well everyone. But actually, I’m as connected to trees. Well, more connected to trees, but trees are okay because they seem permanent or not as fluid and messed with as we are. Anyway I don’t know what the problem is, but I need to find my own edges otherwise it leaks into everything
she wishes she was a performance artist, or a dancer, she says. Or the kind of artist who makes collages and took photos of bands back in the day and she wishes she was in a band called Ludus, they would do elaborate dance performances or maybe it would be just her doing them. She would wear these great extravagant costumes and it would be all colour, all noise art dance, loving this. This kind of thing. This way of putting things together
then she says she’s been thinking of writing a play lately and when she says a play what she really means is something live. Something she could spend time inside, with people, not like in an art gallery but where she could be in a space with people and where something might happen. So maybe she doesn’t want to write a play because then she would be putting words into people’s mouths and actually what she’s looking for is the ineffable that happens when people get in a room together. But. She doesn’t mean a party. Parties are too loose, too much pressure she says. Why? She doesn’t know, she hasn’t articulated this to herself yet. So she’s looking for something with boundaries perhaps, because you’re not creating something with a party. No that’s not true, some parties do create something. She loves a party with an atmosphere, she’s just never been to one. She imagines the parties held in New York in the nineteen sixties and seventies, she bets they had an atmosphere. But she wouldn’t have enjoyed them, she prefers imagining them
Night, I say, by Edna O'Brien. I started reading it years ago and didn’t get far. Why not she says, can’t remember. I will try again
will you? When?
I probably won’t. (She might)
(she watched a French film last night. Cried for a long time over the closing credits and kept going)
her voice is the part she lets loose most often. Or she doesn’t let, it will let loose of its own accord. Finds it has a mind of its own and speaks out, I am here it will be heard quite confident sounding when the rest is in hiding, would rather cower under a blanket
she knows quiet. The need, she says
fallen inside, inside the colour
no, not the colour, the way the light hit
(she has found you must look things in the belly, not in the eye)
there is something in her voice, though, the way it travels through the air in this particular space, in the particular mood she’s in. Melancholy perhaps, and it’s raining outside. Almost as if the song touches her arm and says it’s okay really it’s okay
and always either too hot or too cold. Like my aunt and uncle, he was warm she was cool (I reach over and close the window). She got me that terrible job at the gallery, she says and that was thirty years ago and now this room is the same
she has two bottles of moisturiser on the shelf in the bathroom. She has turned one into its lid as it is almost empty in the vain hope that the remains will dribble down inside. It wobbled and slid over and the sound reminded her of how the cat used to knock things over on the shelf all the time, particularly if it was hungry. She says she feels as if there aren’t enough people - she counts the cat as people - in her flat anymore. There used to be him plus the cat and people would sometimes come over and now there is just her and she doesn’t like people coming over it seems like too much. Too much what? Bother? Energy
she says she’s been out that evening for the first time in what seems like months. It had been raining all the time, all the time and then at last the sun had come out so she had painted her toenails that blue and she went out
(the play’s language should have a recklessness, I think)
out of the window everything is still, hours of nothingness, like so much of life. Like a huge gap of waiting and wondering and not being sure where you’re going or if you’re ever going to get to there even though you don’t know where that is. And now she thinks that the long gaps of not knowing are of course, it. The day upon day hour upon hour. The doing things are not the thing, they are a distraction perhaps but the real thing is going on inside, in her body, in the staring out of the window. In the way the trees sometimes blow, just slightly, so that the pale underside of the leaves jostle among the darker leaves that she can’t see from the window, but can feel them, the way the rain is making a lake outside, the lake is more real than the room, than her. Maybe the lake is her. Maybe the lake is everything
RACHEL CATTLE is an artist, writer, and co-editor of JOAN Publishing. Her writing has been published by Pilot Press, Tate, (Playground) and Juxta Press, and her book Uh Huh Her, published by MOIST in July ‘24, is a Frieze Magazine ‘summer read’. La a dybird was published by Ma
Bibliotheque in 2019. She was a member of experimental sound collective BxNT, and publishing collective We Are Publication.
