Alastair Creamer & Jess Rahman-Gonzalez
The Reveal
Alastair
What does it take to stay in touch, to be connected despite distance and distraction?
Early on in our online conversation, we discovered a shared thread: “I love this”, was Jess’s response to the idea of My Body’s Seasons. We would each write a thought around how we were feeling in that precise moment: what was happening to us? What was our micro-season, and could we give it a name?
The garden designer Dan Pearson, in an interview in the magazine Rakes Progress, talked about the Japanese gardening calendar which has not 4 seasons but 72, each one roughly 5 days long. It compels you to focus on the here and now, to be present. If your head is in the clouds for a week, you’ve missed a whole season. What a thought.
This became our thread, our piece of string. We would tug it, a twitch on the line, and the other would pick up this faint movement. This was our process – a tug here, a twitch there. Because how do you write when your whole being is crammed with shape-shifting experiences? Both of us were roller-coasting through the days, not knowing when the other might be able to tug back.
We had a breakthrough. I wrote a series of one-line descriptions of 5 of my seasons and sent them to Jess. There was a pause, a silence. No tugs. Then Jess sent through their response – five paragraphs of breathtaking writing, honest, revealing, painful and beautiful. They made me re-think my, now, tentative descriptions and to speak more openly. Jess’s writing made me look at the smallest thing – a cup of water – and see a reflection. Was that me? Was that all of me?
And in that moment of diving into reality, it was as if we had known each other a long time, now connected into a history.
Jess
Hospitals breed loneliness. No-one is their social-butterfly-best in an inpatient psychiatric setting. Disinfectant sanitises the edges of everything. But in this place (my fluorescent-lit empire) our email exchanges became a form of intimacy. Who knew technology could feel so incredibly human?
What a gift this project has been; to know Alastair by the blue light of my phone screen. What a gift to have a body; to move through its seasons. May the sun always shine on the horizon of our rising chests.
The poems are being displayed as part of the 26 Connections exhibition during the Bloomsbury Festival and until mid-November. The exhibition features interpretations of the poetry by artists from the Lettering Arts Trust. The exhibition is free at the Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT