From an old city by the sea #1
Studies in minor details: Feeling fragmented, I try to find my moorings in everyday rituals and the ordinary in the extraordinary.
Before we begin, a passage of fiction that evokes something of how we inhabit the world. Play above for an extended reading.
The suspense, partly mitigated by Adam’s reasoning, and thinly spread across the days, then even more sparsely across the weeks, heightened our appreciation of the daily round. Mere ordinariness became a comfort. The dullest of food, a slice of toast, offered in its lingering warmth a promise of everyday life – we would come through. Cleaning up a kitchen, a task we no longer left to Adam alone, affirmed our hold on the future. Reading a newspaper over a cup of coffee was an act of defiance. There was something comic or absurd, to be sprawled in an armchair reading about the riots in nearby Brixton or Mrs Thatcher’s heroic endeavours to structure the European Single Market, then glancing up to wonder if that was a rapist and would-be murdered at the door. Naturally, the threat bound us closely, even as we believed in it less.
—Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me
How’s everyone?
I’m safe, and well, sheltering amid this ongoing pandemic in the company of W.C.—as in the Willing Companion, haha—after being separated for a year amid restrictions on travel and the suspension of longer-term visa applications.
As some of you might have guessed from the photo, we’re in Dubrovnik. I know it’s hard to believe—seriously, the Adriatic?—but coming here honestly wasn’t, at first, an entirely enthusiastic decision on my part. I was torn between warring wants and needs that only different places could satisfy. Hoping to do some writing or reporting while away, I thought Dubrovnik might feel like too much of a tourist bubble in the summer season, even amid a pandemic, to live in for more than a week. For extended stays I usually prefer a metropolis of some kind, where people’s stories feel more readily discoverable, with different communities being more enmeshed in each other’s lives, trying to reconcile each other’s wants and needs. But in these times, a big city’s density of population would be limiting were a lockdown imposed, and we thought it best to go somewhere with ample open spaces where we could safely social distance. Croatia is also one of the few countries that W.C. and I, being of different nationalities, could both enter—with a negative coronavirus test—that we also agreed on. Now that I’m here, I realize what an immense gift it is to be here, especially at a time when the usual crowds are so significantly reduced. We really are, to paraphrase Cheryl Strayed, putting ourselves in the way of beauty.
Still, I’ve had a difficult time being present. Someone, somewhere (I can’t recall now) recently pointed out that, where we used to be able to change our outlook on the world by simply changing where we physically are, it’s now impossible for us to do so because the only place where we truly reside is online. This feels deeply true for me, and I’ve been re-evaluating my use of social media—how it affects one’s mental landscape, how it takes you out of your current place and time depending on the community you’ve predominantly oriented your feeds to. Naturally, mine are inclined heavily toward Malaysia, which is going through its third lockdown and its gravest period this pandemic, having surpassed India in the number of infections per million people. And as I’ve followed more journalists in Myanmar to keep up with the crisis there, it’s become harder and harder to reconcile the contrast in human experiences in different places when you can see it all—calm and chaos and joy and tragedy—unfolding simultaneously from your online perch, and harder and harder to care about something in an effective way when you feel you should care about everything. In Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan noted how the act of consuming the news can often be counterproductive: “Reading this material was a way of not contemplating the event itself. I blanked the screen and sat for a while, thinking of nothing much. It was as though I was waiting for the next event, the decent one, that would undo the event before.” As someone who also writes about—or rather, around—the news, this can feel dispiriting.
Being away from home, I also feel a little guilty about the stories I’m not witnessing in person. People my age were recently able to opt in (for a time, not anymore) for the Astra Zeneca vaccine in Malaysia before it was officially our turn; at the same time, I’m not sure how far on-the-ground reporting would be feasible anyway considering the spike in infections and the reimposition of a strict lockdown. Sure, some stories can be—has to be, in this pandemic—done remotely, and I’m working on them, but the constant hum of anxiety in my brain tells me I’m never doing enough. I schedule calls with sources in Malaysia to suss out potential longer-term projects I can dive back into when I’m home, continue to learn German and research a few stories in Germany I might want to look into when I’m back there. I’m already trying to prepare for what happens after Croatia, while trying to complete several due stories that have nothing to do with Croatia. In a way, it feels as if I’m trying to bookend this time in Dubrovnik as a blip on my radar, a time-out without consequence, instead of engaging with it fully. Physically, I’m here; but mentally, I’m often elsewhere—not just in place but also in time, simultaneously languishing in the past and racing towards the future. In a text to a friend, I wrote, “Happy to be here but feeling a little fragmented. Hoping to make the best of it.”
So maybe I’ll manage to pitch a story on Dubrovnik to better immerse myself here. But also, I thought: Why don’t I just do something myself? Doesn’t this newsletter exist for this very reason? That’s when I decided to write a series of essays during my time here—once a week all this month, beginning with this. There’s no pressure, I tell myself. Each letter could be as short as five hundred words, if that were all I had. It wouldn’t even have to rally around a coherent theme. The point would just be to observe my immediate surroundings—pay attention to the small delights—in order to root myself deeper in it. I’m just trying to make myself remember: there’s a time and place for everything.
So, here goes. The first.
Finding our moorings in everyday rituals
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We’ve been here a month now, and beyond paying a surprisingly hefty entrance fee to walk the old town’s walls (which, lamentably, you can only do once with each ticket) and engaging a tour guide for a historical walking tour, we’ve not done very much by way of conventional travel. I guess the fact that we didn’t come here primarily to travel, and knowing we have some more time ahead here, has made us more relaxed about ticking off our to-do list of sights and experiences, and I half worry—half seriously—that we’ll leave regretting we haven’t explored enough. You put off doing tourist things long enough and you might never end up doing them. I spent my university years in England and I can’t remember ever having been on the London Eye. I have never been to Oxford or the Cotswolds.
To be fair, it’s not my first time in Dubrovnik. Years ago, I came here with a group of university friends—I think we were nine in total!—for all of, I think, two nights, before Game of Thrones was ever filmed in Dubrovnik. And to be honest, I don’t remember all that much of the city (not without old photographs to jog my memory), though I did slip into a few deja vu moments now strolling in and around the old town. I remember us splashing around with a volleyball on a crowded pebble beach, straddling a canon for a cheesy photo op overlooking the old port, and just strolling through Stradun—the broad, light-filled boulevard that paves the way in through Pile Gate. Otherwise, I’m really seeing Dubrovnik anew. And what has helped me do that, especially, is the routine W.C. and I have grown into as the days roll on.
Many days we tinker all night—W.C., conceptualizing imaginary worlds; me, writing and researching and pitching or trying to do all three, sometimes taking Zoom calls at 3 a.m. to catch other time zones. We’re both freelancers, but he is better at compartmentalizing and has a healthier relationship to work, and really has been an immense support to me in recalibrating my relationship with “productivity”. I mean, I’m somewhat self-aware and know what needs to be done, I just have yet to do it!
When the day starts to break (around 4:40 a.m. these days), after the garbage truck has come to collect with its familiar beeping, we throw open the kitchen windows of our attic apartment, perched just outside the old town, to watch the slow warming of the sky. W.C. insists we do this every day, in part to coax me out of whatever mind maze I’ve lost myself in. He has a painter’s eye that catches the tiniest differences from day to day, and often records himself describing the scene before him for better painting reference later because the camera is incapable of picking up the subtleties. For a few moments, we let the cool breeze waft over our faces before crawling into bed, leaving the bedroom shutters angled open so that the afternoon sun’s rays would induce us to wake up when our alarms ring.
Seven hours later—or sometimes just three or four, if a scheduled call or deadline beckons—we wake up and throw open all the windows again, letting the airflow through the rooms. We put a Moka pot on the stove, waiting for its comforting gurgle. It’s a routine we’ve grown into in Berlin, and luckily this apartment came with one, since we didn’t bring our own. As the smell of freshly brewed coffee fills the kitchen, we make bowls of rolled oats with berries and bananas, or slices of rustic bread from the local bakery toasted in a sandwich grill, topped with margarine and rucola leaves or ajvar, a red pepper spread. Sometimes we warm up rice or pasta leftovers from the night before. When our tummies are warm and full, we check our phones and emails and social media for anything urgent that needs to be dealt with. And if the rest of the world can wait, we pack our day bags, lather on sunblock, and head outside with our hats.