"The playlist is a rare welcoming spot in the otherwise alienating landscape of streaming: overgrown and unruly, full of strange humanity in a place where slickness and predictability are the norm." Pitchfork, on Four Tet’s 155-hour playlist
You know what you get to do when alone on a 20-acre ranch?
Play music. Real loud. Like stand-in-front-of-the speakers-and-get-wind-in-your-hair loud. Sun Ra’s Twin Stars of Thence seemed like a good place to start the day’s endeavor as such.
I would tell you this ranch feels like the best parts of my own youth—it’s unkempt, rural, it contains multitudes of weird, intelligent old stuff, and it’s isolated and full of art. It’s pure imagination and space. I love it here.
Last year, I lived in the casita on the other side of the property about two acres away (and that’s where John is now) but for the next two months, I am living in the main house, where A. and N. normally reside, to dog sit.
A little on A. and N. — they are artists who have been in Santa Fe since the 1980s. He, a metal worker; she, a painter and horsewoman. The horses, which you have heard about, have been shipped to camp for the summer. The people, which you have heard about, have decamped for ocean breezes in New England until September. I have undertaken a job to property care-take til the autumn. But it’s so much more than that.
It’s a bridge to both the future and the past.
In the manicured and curated world of algorithms and technology, and the soulless enterprise that has become our mass online culture, I find myself remembering an ancient history at the behest of things like the cracked porcelain vase for the flowers, or a broken snake skin on a shelf, or cracked spine of a Carson McCullers novel. The house’s surfaces are dusty, sticky from pipe nicotine; shards of horse hair and dog hair co-mingle on the surfaces. The house perfume is Eau du Vieux Vie. I am ushered into the practice of wabi-sabi — the Japanese aesthetic worldview centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection.
I can safely say I am happier than I have been in a long time and grateful I had the resources and space to work out this long homecoming.
It’ll take time to still settle into a rhythm of task switching between my day job — and I also start a 12-week climate fellowship in August to start a broader pivot career-wise — and my artistic life of writing.
One of the assignments I have given myself came out of the essay “Swamped” by Annie Proulx in a recent New Yorker. Her style of naturalist writing — toggling between her memories of beloved swampland and the American history of swampland — reminded me that once this was exactly the genre of writing I wanted to pursue.
In my Stanford application essay, I spent 800 words considering a microcosmos of plants and bugs among the tussocks of the Alaskan wilderness. I guess it worked! (This was a typed essay, so alas no copy remains. Also does this fly anymore with admissions?) I was then enrolled in a freshman writing course focused on “nature writing” — Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, and the like. When I lived in New York City, I was always thinking to try and turn my “naturalist” eye to Central Park, but the muse was elusive and other things stepped to the front of the line.
It’s a memoir-adjacent genre that distinctly blends past and present — with a tinge of rue for the things that have been lost, or changed. It’s hard to talk about our natural world without falling into that pattern — it is painful and worthy of out-loud grief. But here’s my assignment — to write about the natural world as a blend of past, present and future. Can we imagine joy in our natural world 50 years in the future?
To get us back to the ranch and these 20 acres...
A. and N. are at the age where I know they are thinking about what to do with this big property — the working idea now is an artists’ and writers’ housing compound. It’s a rare island of land in the midst of daily development around us — a new hospital across the freeway, a storage unit complex, ‘for sale’ signs pepper the road. The future is hard to look at, to be sure, but I am thinking back to this unruly playlist of music I have been listening to for 18 hours.
The past, present, and future seem to coexist comfortably in the space of sound — a May 1965 demo by Lou Reed next to avant-garde Senegalese electronic next to Skrillex.
Can I imagine this morning view with something other than hummingbirds and cactus and open acreage? That in the year 2035, it will be dotted with solar-powered casitas and parked electric cars? It’s worth a try.
Keep listening and turn it up.
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