learning to love you more /  by richard lambert

I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass until I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some sig that people do not totally regret life

Frank O’Hara

meditations in an emergency /  by richard lambert

wet plate

each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. you have to know yourself and fulfil the amount of untruths that your constitution requires.

for me, lying created just the right amount of problems, and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces - each real, each with different needs. the only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand.

Miranda July, On All Fours

the light eaters /  by richard lambert

garden time is not like the ordinary time in which we live.

it moves in unpredictable ways sometimes stopping altogether and proceeding, always cyclically, in a long unwinding spiral of rot and fertility to pay attention to the garden as a clock means entering a different relationship with time - as circular not linear, as well as the acknowledgment that one of its recurring stations is death I'd been resisting its lesson chasing the high of perfection, feeling a failure when things browned or died back it was as if my job was to maintain the visual illusion- as if the garden couldn't possibly look good unless I'd succeeded in excising any evidence of death this was the more sinister legacy of Eden - the fantasy of perpetual abundance.

I was beginning to see what a poisoned fruit it truly was. so many of our most ecologically deleterious behaviours are to do with refusing impermanence and decay insisting on summer all the time. permanent growth, constant fertility, perpetual yield, instant pleasure, maximum profit.

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time