I have news for you
A poem-of-sorts and (obvs) a story
I have news for you.
The stag bells, winter snows, summer is gone.
Wind high and cold, the sun low, short its course.
The sea running high.
Deep red the bracken, its shape is lost.
The wild goose has raised its accustomed cry.
Cold has seized the birds’ wings.
Season of ice.
This is my news.
— Anon, 9th-century Ireland
Dear community
Right now, Substack is teeming with words: with responses to the outcome of the US election by people who want to advise us how we should respond to it too (often, it seems, this is about breathing, which is definitely always helpful, or ensuring our vagal – vagus? – nerve is happy, however that might conceivably work); or to reassure us it will all be all right; or to shriek at us again and again that it won’t be and couldn’t possibly be, ever; or to lecture us again and again about what it is all right to think and what it couldn’t possibly be, ever. Just one more email that asserts ‘we need to’ just one more time and I’m sure I’ll have a conniption, because I just might not need to do that at all, even though the sender might very well.
For clarity: I am trying to be light-hearted. I know that people have urgent things to say, and I fully respect that. After all, that’s what Substack is for; that’s what we’re all here for, including me. But the first couple of post-election days felt a bit like social media during the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020. Like a cacophony – and all I ever want to do in the face of cacophony is hide. And all I ever want to do in the face of people telling me how I must respond to something, or assuming how I must already be responding to something – especially with the overly mannered and portentous language which tends to creep in, at such times – is hide. Inevitably, there will be some who see that as a failing, but it’s how I’m made, and I’m old enough that I don’t feel any obligation to change, and especially not if you disapprove of me, because I quite like being a crotchety, solitary old hag. It’s what keeps me sane. So I stopped reading posts and especially, dear God, Notes for three days and now I’m going to try not to add a whole lot to the ‘Here’s what you should know and what you should be thinking because you shouldn’t really be thinking for yourself in such complicated times, dear’ cacophony myself, four days on.
But there are three things I do seem to want to share (although I had planned this weekend, out of concern for your weighed-down hearts as well as your weighed-down inboxes, not to say anything at all) that neither tell you how you should respond, nor reassure you it will all be all right. And that don’t shriek. One of the three could, I suppose, be read as a short lecture, though it’s actually intended to express an ongoing concern. Another offers a poem of sorts and the third a recorded story, so all in all I hope this weekend’s post won’t make you roll your eyes and mutter things like, ‘Even Sharon Blackie can’t in the end just shut the fuck up about all of this, and now it’s getting really old’.