For the Atoms

Silence, photographs, 'Shifty', and false promises

Silence is a puzzle piece we are yet to play. I play abysmally, even with sufficient practice. I do not shut the fuck up. I’m

tired.

It’s been a minute since I’ve written something on here, not for lack of writing, quite the opposite, but for the lack of energy to do it here. How here wants me to.

This space has shifted. I can sense it in the notes that regurgitate some iteration of ‘follow for follow’, or hold the particular nails-on-a-chalkboard quality that the statement ‘accounts with less than 50 followers’ produces. Influencers with an affinity for aestheticized forms of academia rush into Substack in droves and while I am typically not one to judge they have taken something in the process.

I’ve been stringing sentences together in the background: going to and from libraries, cultural centres, coffee shops. Sat under a canopy of trees hummed to by their psithurism. These paragraphs belong to projects that are not ready to be shared. It’s difficult for me, the silence of not sharing. As I said, I cannot keep my mouth shut. I am full of a naive trust in the enjoyment of sharing knowledge. I want to speak and to speak freely. I have been burned before, but no scars seem to form.

My relationship to writing has always been intertwined with communication, they are one in the same. To write is to read it among friends, to read it among friends is to feel safe doing so. Safety is fleeting construct.

I’ve found that the time and effort it takes to write a book makes this challenging. There’s something beautiful in reading the imperfect, the half-realised, the fragmented. I recognize, too, the importance of being able to communicate something that transcends the brevity of our conversation, of myself, of time itself. This is my attempt with this secret-thing I must not speak.

I am battling with these two impulses without the certainty of being able to fulfill either one of them.

So I’ve started taking more photographs in a way to communicate with you without sharing that which I must wait to share. They are the feelings that I am, otherwise, pouring into those works.

Recently I watched Adam Curtis’ new documentary series ‘Shifty’—there is much to say about it but not enough will power in me to say it, so I recommend reading what Sean said here—in it Curtis confers the term ‘atomized’ to hyper-individualisation.

Atomize’s literal translation pertains to the breaking up of a whole into smaller units, or particles. He attaches this to the idea that, as our society becomes more individualistic, we’ve remove ourselves from each other, become standing particles in a sea of atoms. This, in part, resonates with what I’ve sensed from Substack. This shift towards the ‘me, me, me!’ attitude that I am exhausted by.

There is so little in me at the moment, probably due to the emotional rollercoaster of the past couple of months: visa uncertainty, the false promise of a potential publishing contract, and an overwhelming (but largely positive!) body of work, that has shrunk my ability for rest and play.

Most of my writing has happened by hand. In re-reading my scribbled script I found I had, prior to watching ‘Shifty’, used the term atomization to mean the opposite. To refer to the gossamer film that connects one to the other, in spite of our lonestanding.

When I was learning about atoms, as a kid in school, I remember my science teacher explaining to us that all atoms were always touching other atoms. In my minds-eye, the visuals of this looked a lot like circles coming together and briefly pulling apart. As if tickling one another they would move one way and accidentally bump against another, and so on, and so forth, in perpetuity. Always connecting, always pulling apart.

As an adult I looked into this, in part because of Adam, in part because of Sean, in part because of the hollow of here, and found it to be somewhat true.

While atoms do not have physicality in the way we think of—a body, a blunt object, a solid surface—they do collide against one another’s forces. The atom in the air gently pushes against the surface of my skin, the atoms that make up my body push against the surface of the couch. If I get up, I disrupt the atoms that make the air in front of me, and the atoms that make up the blanket I cover my couch in (a habit I inherited).

If this is true, then perhaps atomization isn’t as doomed as ‘Shifty’s’ tone suggests. If an atom is always influenced by the atoms around it—the air, the couch, the skin on the body that is too hot in this London summer—then other people can still be influenced by those around them.

They come together, they pull apart, and so on, and so forth, in perpetuity.

I’ve been wandering aimlessly when taking these photographs. I have no theme, I have no intentions behind them, they are simply moments to be captured. They’re absences, emotions, ephemera. They are my love for strangers. I am connected to them, I am connected to you, too. And you, to me.

Substack feels like the next bot-baited shell, another internet space that seeks to support itself through the ‘branding’ of the individual.

‘Tell me writer, who is your target audience?,’ it asks me.

I roll my eyes at it. I write for atoms.