Orbital

Notes on the book, Sara Bareilles, and recent months

1.

A friend asked what I’d been reading and I had no idea. For a while, I’d been picking up my reserved library books, reading them before the three-week loan phase was over, and then returning them. Once they left my hands, they seemed to evaporate from my memory. I don’t know if I was choosing forgettable books on purpose. A writer once told me that he is either in a period of writing or reading, he can’t be doing both. I wondered if this is what I was subconsciously orchestrating. But last month I started rereading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. It is stunning and singular—memorable. Every sentence is precise and deeply honest. Harvey holds a magnifying glass over the simplest words and light refracts truth, shimmering. It made me want to both read and write. Proof, then, that my personal vessel can float between those two places.

2.

On space: the book has made me think about satellites. All I really know of them is the song Satellite Call, in which Sara Bareilles sings to someone who feels they are floating alone in the cosmos. She calls it ‘a love song to the lonely’.

        This is so you’ll know the sound
        Of someone who loves you
        From the ground
        Tonight you’re not alone at all
        This is me sending out my satellite call

The live version of this song, performed at the Hollywood Bowl, is merged with another of her songs, No Such Thing. The latter is about a breakup (specifically: the end of Obama’s term), but there are notes of space and far-away-ness, too.

        Thin air, you’re out there in it, somewhere
        If I could only get there, I could breathe again

and

        Little white lights
        They perforate every night sky
        I say it to them every time
        “Come back in”

The performance moves, in every sense. In the first half, No Such Thing, the strings of the harp twinkle like a dream before quietly ascending into eerie stillness. The violin pulls long—heartache—and quivers frantic. Then, a pause in the music, and she sends her satellite call, projecting lunar waves that undulate towards something, someone. Her words of solace come after that. It’s the perfect combination of songs; both are spacious and sonic. Both are messages sent into the darkness.

In Orbital, the team receives satellite calls from ground control. They are requesting, take as many photographs of the typhoon as you can. They are joking, you’re not the farthest-flung humans now that a spacecraft is moving towards the moon. They are saying, someone cares about you, on the ground.

3.

I finished the reread in mid-November, a purposely slow engagement, but it’s still in my path. The writing and the story, but also how that month itself felt just like the conditions of the space station. Both drifting and hurtling. Some mornings, leaving the bed unmade, our cats rolled into the strewn pyjamas, all of us languorous all afternoon. Other days, the pull of life: wanting to jog around the block, edit old work, buy watercolours, learn choreography on YouTube. True for the weather, too. It drifted in and around autumn mildness, no coat, and hurtled into frigid rainstorms. It kept shifting, and it will probably shift again now the moon has spun us into a new month.

In her song December, Bareilles refers to the time of year as ‘a problem child’. It’s her birth month, I recall her saying at a concert in Islington Town Hall a few moons ago. I’m a spring baby, but this year I feel its rub, too. I used to understand the whole of December as Christmas, but now, not yet enmeshed in festivity, I can see how it is a fundamentally strange time. The month that marks the start of a season but simultaneously leads to a permanent end.

I must be feeling its limbo. I keep rearranging my small living room within its limited configurations. Areca palm by the window, chair at a new angle. Trying to find the congruent feeling, tune into the right frequency. I’m looking for consistency. During all of this, there’s something soothing about ruminating on the details of space travel in Orbital. Safe because I’m not actually up there and because I am also momentarily not weighed down or nicked by life on earth. I’m in a small, sturdy craft of fact and imagination. When the weather isn’t steady, and the season hasn’t clicked, and the world is still on fire, find shelter in consistencies elsewhere. Like sixteen sunrises a day, regular pulse measuring, repeated experiments on tiny plants.

4.

Chie, one of the astronauts, makes lists for comfort. An outlet for anxiety since she was a child, she does it without even noticing that she’s doing it. Lists about irritating things and anticipated things. Like a version of grounding technique when you’re spiralling or fading—say what you see, smell, hear, feel. Grounding might be what we all need, suspended in this strange season/world/time.

5.

Things that I’ve noticed in the sky recently
Fuchsia clouds across Princes Street
The symmetrical angles of Kengo Kuma’s V&A museum
Beaver supermoon, swollen, close and low, a reminder I’m tilted further north
Geese making their pilgrimage
Charcoal clouds—my own atmosphere—a thick flat spell
A constellation of major notes drifting from an open car window