The Body Keeps The Story
A Tattoo & A Villain Origin Story
“Even if I am too weak to fight them, I am duty bound to try.”
An old man is on his knees, gazing upon a beautiful, ageless witch. They’d been partners, a long time ago; he’s grown old, a human being both fickle and fallible, while she has remained eternal. Their son had died, they parted ways as such a reality was too painful. His anguish anew is loud enough to be heard between the curtain of this world and the next, a call out impossible to ignore.
It’s a line that remains ringing in my ear.
His Dark Materials, a trilogy of books by Philip Pullman, was adapted for screen by Jack Thorne. While delayed by a pandemic, the line was logged in my phone’s notes app. Quotes are a calibration device for writing, or even journalistic ethics at the best of times. A good story you carry always, in all of its multi layered artistry - and you choose what it means to you, in all of its abundance. That’s something I want more of - the cherry blossom trees, the light of a thousand suns, laughter at a birthday party among friends with good food, live music aplenty. The intangible experiences that mark a life.
2024 has been spent travelling across the U.K, to kind of realign and recapture that, to watch a world in action. Whatever books, whatever cultural event, whatever thing was in motion would be met with an affirmative “I’m in.” Be it flowers in Amsterdam at Kukenhoff and a trip to a bookshop with a pen pal, or seeing London Grammar and a morning at the British Library, it’s been a varied way to live. It feels like an emergence, to try and work out where I place myself in the universe.
of expressed this eloquently recently, in another line that spoke to me:
“I hunt everywhere for a life worth living and a knowledge worth knowing. Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go.”
She also wrote about tattoos and their meaning, especially when they are lines from her books, on the body of other people. You can read the piece here:
Black Milk, her memoir, has been my book of choice recently - she nominated me on a list of Substack newsletters to read last year. (And I’d love to interview her one day.)
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