So, to start with; I’m writing in the heart of the biggest global crisis since the last one. I really didn’t want to start by referencing the State Of The World Right Now, but it’s especially relevant.
Nostalgia, poisonous and delicious low hanging fruit that it is, has suddenly shifted a gear from cosy distraction to “what our current reality is actually made of.” Two minutes from my home there’s a main street, one that follows a track that’s at least two thousand years old; the locked and silent shops, trapped in a permanent Sunday afternoon still have their Mother’s Day displays up. Last year they wouldn’t have registered; now they’re poignant and surrounded by an aura of pathos and loss. That Mother’s Day never happened, not as intended. The Easter displays never followed, and we are suddenly walking a path in a world that seems dreamlike and likely to take unexpected turns at any time. Everything left after this all-too-known-event is just the fragments of “do you remember…” though now it isn’t NES games and flip-phones that we’re reminiscing over, it’s traffic, or going out for coffee.
The silence is incredible. This is Planet Sunday (I’m fully aware that this is not the case for key workers who are living out any number of nightmares at present) and it’s already forming its patterns and rituals. Its magics, if you like. You might not like. I tend to see the world in magical patterns, though I should clarify that for me, magic can mean painting, dreaming, music, ritual, or talking to cats and crows, all of which I try to do to some extent, with varying degrees of effect.
I see the magics of the world shifting. Perhaps not; perhaps what I’m seeing is the exposure of the underlying structures. A better image might be to compare the process to a tide going out, leaving driftwood. We are in a kind of beachcomber reality right now.
A thought that keeps coming back to me: what happens after? Do things go back to normal, or did the world just change right in front of us? And it seems like as good a place as any to start to consider my haunted futures. If – and it’s a colossal if – the World We Knew isn’t quite coming back to us again, what might we hope for? If I’m collaging and curating a new world, what ghosts do I want included?
And that’s partly what Crow Violets is all about. Yes, I know, right now the URL is singular, the site is plural. Whatever. I didn’t think it through. Violets plural, because I want multiple realities and viewpoints. And I like the imagery of violets growing, each one a potential world…
Also, Mollie Sugden. Don’t ask yet. You aren’t ready. I’ll tell you when you are.
Crow Violets 