Morshells

or, things I found in the sand

Hello.

I write this from the mellow warmth of my lounge, listening to the cresting intensity of Coldplay’s Politik whilst observing the cat sitting by the front door. She’s doing that unnerving feline thing: staring at nothing, as though glimpsing some other, darker reality embedded within the wall.

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I won’t pretend to have a seasonal plan for posts. Words come and go with the tides, driven not by a moon but this ravenous of weekly things that runs torrential through my mind: Thursday’s rush and relief, Friday’s creeping self-doubt, Saturday’s buoyant¹ calm, Sunday’s lament for days lost, Monday’s unknowing, Tuesday’s panic, and Wednesday’s furious edit.

The cycle repeats. The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end².

I say this because it’s not been all that long since spring sprung its sprorsels, yet the morsel tree does not abide by nature’s constraints. So here I find myself, staring down at the sand, feet surrounded by wave-lapped morshells. (They’re like morsels, only shell-shaped and with a questionable extra el.)

A collection of morshells, yesterday | Substack image generator

Here are a few such things:

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I wrote the first entry to The Sernox last week and it hasn’t left my mind. A false retelling of youth. A lake and a forest, Emmi and folklore seeping from the ground, leaves left crushed as seasons slip to darkness. Something unseen is in the woods and I want to follow the path.

The Sernox

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On Sunday we went to the cinema to see Past Lives.

I spent ten minutes just now trying to write a synopsis (pointless, given the trailer) before realising that such things already exist:

Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrest apart after Nora's family emigrates from South Korea. Decades later, they are reunited for one fateful week as they confront destiny, love and the choices that make a life.

What a gorgeous movie, mixing classic love-triangle with a twist of ltime, distance and language. A few pacing issues aside, I was captivated by the writing, dialogue and performances—especially that of the husband played by John Magaro. It was just so … real. So believable. The tension between Nora and Hae Sung, the words unsaid, the lives that could have been vs the lives that have been—ahh, writer/director Celine Song knows what she’s doing.

The ending was exactly what it needed to be. I thought I had my emotions perfectly in check up until that very last scene.

🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚/10

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Speaking of indie movies, my wife Josephine is producing a feature film here in Australia, set to shoot early 2024 in the stunning land of country Victoria. The Returned is a story about grief and loss and the complexities of family dynamics. I’ve read the—*cough* award winning—script. It’s beautiful and moving. Films are, though, inevitably expensive and in order to make this happen the small team are crowdfunding via the The Australian Cultural Fund.

There’s a page for their film here: link.

The short funding trailer is below³, which has commentary from the director Ben Pfeiffer and actor Louise Siversen, plus footage of a rather spiffing waterfall. If this speaks to you, or you think someone might be interested, then a share of that funding link, a restack of this post, or any spreading of the word would be tremendously wonderful of you to help bring this project to life.

(I posted a Note about this earlier in the week. A massive thank you (from myself and from Jo) to those who donated. We really weren’t expecting anything other than the word to be spread, so … 🙏)

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What is a solenoid? Something something wire-coil? Had I only paid attention in fysicks. Whatever it is, I’m going to talk about Solenoid, the book. Again. Written in 2010 by Mircea Cărtărescu, but only recently translated into English by Sean Cotter, this is a sprawling, surreal narrative of autofiction, retelling (is it?) the author’s life in Romania, his childhood and career as a school teacher, his hatred of doctors and dentists, the purchase of a house with a secret buried deep beneath the ground, the proximity of a strange disused factory. To talk of such things in detail not only treads into spoilers, it’s also impossible. I don’t know what this book is. I don’t know whether there is a story. And I’m 100% OK with that.

It’s a slow-burn read (there’s some other book I’m re-reading, which I’m Dune to write about soon) and it works perfectly as such. I like to sit and marvel at Cărtărescu’s prose.

I understood I must use my brain like an eye, open and observant under the skull’s transparent shell, able to see with another kind of sight and to detect fissures and signs, hidden artifacts and obscure connections in this test of intelligence, patience, love, and faith that is this world.

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This week I’ve been thinking about inconsequential things that I should know but eternally struggle to know. Do you have any? Mine is generations. Gen X, Gen Z, millennials, baby boomers—WHEN ARE THESE THINGS?!

Here’s a very common scenario for me:

Someone at a high-profile cocktail party, dusting lint off of their lapel: “Oh, well that’s millennials for you.”

Me [internally]: IS IT? When is a millennial? Someone born in the early 2000s, or who grew up (when does that mean?) at that time? WHICH IS IT?! Am I a millennial? Am I being insulted here?

*Googles the answer*

*Immediately forgets the answer*

A bit like the Krebs cycle, then⁴.

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I made the mistake of looking at the night sky through the new Euclid telescope this week. The BBC was flaunting images. Seems it’s trying to pull a Hitchhiker’s Total Perspective Vortex on you. There are so many, many stars and planets in every single galaxy and this is a mere sliver of space, from a long time ago, and you could keep zooming out and out and out …

The The Perseus Cluster. There’s over a thousand galaxies in here | ESA/EUCLID CONSORTIUM/NASA

Also, isn’t that the Star Trek symbol??

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Yeah, so probably clear how my week’s going. I realise this is a break from the norm. There’s no fiction here. Services will resume next week. I’ve been wondering on POV a lot, sparked by discussions with Caz Hart over in the post from last week. After ten (!) months on Substack, I begin to realise a few of my tendencies and preferences in writing. First person is one of those. I love first person. It’s intimate. It’s restricted. I like the limitations of exposition that creates. When I read, I want certain things to be kept hidden from me, to have to work for them. I think that’s why I also enjoy reading close third person. I will experiment with the latter soon, when Precipice takes a shift from Jisa (that part of her tale is almost complete) to that of Tess, Cloud’s girlfriend (yes, the very Tess he cheated on, tsssk)⁵.

A bee landed on her sleeve, drawing her attention back from thought. Tess watched it clean its wings before it flew down and over the railing and soon out of sight.

1. Induced by this most wondrous of communities.

2. How gooood was Dark? Can someone wipe my memory and let me succumb to Season 1’s brilliance once again? Also, forget Timothée, surely it’s all Louis Hofmann? Though, let’s not go there with All The Light We Cannot See. Exposition-bounce.

3. Testing suggests it doesn’t display in an email like a YouTube video does, but you can click on the video box and it should take you to the link.

4. Wheee, biochemistry meme joke that no-one else but my students-who-thankfully-don’t-read-this will get.

5. This all may be very confusing. If curious, see here.