[2] Lonely cricket
Friday, 10th January, 2025, written between 15:00 - 16:00 in the afternoon. My hands are too cold.
My brain’s been a bit off lately. A bit numb, lacking response to both good and bad. It’s nothing that will last. This sort of thing happens regularly for a variety of reasons and I’m sure fellow depressives recognise the description. It doesn’t feel like a depression, to me: it feels like a muting, the tops and tails of a sine wave compressed into the slightest undulation.
My partner’s good at detecting this in me, and yesterday he looked at our whiteboard, where we keep lists of important things. Mostly me, as I’m forgetful.
Here, take a look:
I always find this sort of thing fascinating in other people’s homes. Tells you a lot about their lives and how they live them. For instance, you can deduce that we have a neighbour who smokes a lot of weed. Also, underneath ‘feather duster’ is the word ‘extendable’, because the few spiders we get like to knit their webs up in the far corners and I am 5ft 1”.
Yesterday, under ‘TO DO IN HOLIDAY’, we had:
Go to Rinko Kawauchi exhibition
Eat out somewhere new (from list)
My partner declared ‘tomorrow, let’s go to the Kawauchi exhibition and then find somewhere off our list to eat afterwards’ (we have a list of local restaurants we want to try because I have lists for everything).
I hesitated, because I always hesitate when leaving the house is suggested, especially spontaneously. Home is safe. Home is predictable. Home has Path of Exile 2.
He was totally right, though. He knew better than I did that I needed to get out the house and do something good for my brain.
I saw that Kawauchi was exhibiting in Bristol’s Arnolfini late last year. She’s my absolute favourite photographer. I was so excited to go. I booked tickets to the exhibition’s accompanying music performance on the opening night, but never went. I can’t remember why, now. I might’ve had a headache.
Either way, we’d put off going for months, then Christmas happened, then suddenly it was January, with the exhibition closing end of February. We’re now in the last couple of days of our annual leave, and having the energy to do something in the evenings while working a fulltime job is a tough balance for me to achieve. So I said yes, and we went today.
It was mostly wonderful. There were some gallery twats at the gallery but that is their natural environment so there’s not much you can do about that, and I’m sure we were someone else’s gallery twats, too.
Kawauchi’s nostalgic work, as always, was very special to me. As an autistic person whose senses feel far over-tuned, I’ve always felt that I perceive the world differently from most. And I mean that literally, as in, the world looks, smells, and sounds different to me. Everything is too crisp, too loud, too intimate. The world demands my attention whether I want to give it or not.
Kawauchi’s photography embodies how I see the world. Her work is crisp, loud, and intimate in perfect balance. And it’s not bombastic in its loudness; it’s far from aggressive. Her work is loud in the way you might hear a single cricket singing. He’s objectively loud, annoyingly so, to us. But in his world, he’s quiet. The cricket sings because that’s what he must do, even if his song has no purpose when he’s alone. Kawauchi’s work gives even the lonely cricket a moment in our spotlight where his song is appreciated for the art it is.
Her work helped me see my senses as a positive, and inspires me to keep a camera on my person that isn’t a fucking smartphone.
Anyway, I took this photo of our ramen lunch on my smartphone. It was good.
I’ve popped some of my favourite moments of the exhibition below.
Thanks for reading.
‘Tokyo’ ramen at Tonkotsu Ramen, Bristol, UK
Images two and three depict a controlled burning in the Aso region, known as noyaki (野焼き). A darkened room hosted soundless footage of a fire slowly creeping across the grasslands and cresting the hill shown in image two. Viewers sat on cosy bean bags before the video, silently observing its progression.
I felt guilt as I watched. I thought about the wildfires burning through LA at the time of writing, and humanity’s general disregard towards both the literal and metaphorical fires it’s set in motion. Our planet is dying by our hand. If it’s not you today, it will be you tomorrow.
