Dear Eabha (feat. cousin Jenny)
medieval sleeping patterns, describing space
Dear Eabha,
What do you call a camel with seven humps?
…I don’t know, you big bully, leave it alone!
So nice to see you the other night and to meet cousin Jenny. Glad to know I’m saved as sammi davis jr in your phone, just looked up yours on mine and it’s also a banger:
Started writing this in the middle of the night — do you also sleep light after a couple pints now we’re old? Sometimes when i can’t get back to sleep I’m comforted by the idea that for Medieval people, two sleeps was common practice. The Canterbury Tales mentions ‘first sleep’, writes @ZariaGorvett for the Beeb, as does
the poet William Baldwin's Beware the Cat (1561) – a satirical book considered by some to be the first ever novel, which centres around a man who learns to understand the language of a group of terrifying supernatural cats, one of whom, Mouse-slayer, is on trial for promiscuity.
Apparently, it was perfectly normal to get up between first and second sleep and crack on with a full range of activities.
Apart from jotting down weird little notes for this between sleeps, I actually started listening to Material Matters — thanks for the recc! — but I was finding even the introduction way too interesting, the architect Nigel Coates simply describing where he’s calling from:
I’m in a place where I’ve been basically enduring the pandemic, a house that I bought as a ruin in 1987, and at this moment I’m sitting in a room with all the shutters closed to avoid the sound of birdsong and lawn mowers, all those country things that might disturb us. So I’m in a chamber, our sitting room has been converted into a sound studio.
I was getting too into it for circa 3am. Picked up a book instead, M. John Harrison’s Climbers was to hand, and I read, ‘We sat in curved plastic chairs in the Royal Infirmary drinking cups of coffee from a machine’ — and between my two sleeps, between the sitting room sound studio and the Royal Infirmary and my own living rom, the three places began to overlap as the passage continued
It was nine thirty and in the strong morning light everything already seemed to be too clean and sharp-edged. From one corridor you glimpsed another one like it at right angles — sun splashed across it to a notice and a yellow door opened on a tile room. A figure walked past from right to left and then from left to right again. Off the waiting area, with its blue carpet, were other waiting areas where other women gazed expressionlessly at you from behind hatches and dispensary windows in a meaningless replication of space. I felt dizzy, and as if my skin was more sensitive than usual to the movements of the air.
Eabha! If we were sitting at the pub, this is probably the part of the conversation where you’d make your excuses and walk away but we’re here on Substack instead and basically, I got really into M John during the pandemic, after reading Ian Paterson on Keston Sutherland in the LRB.
When Sutherland writes, ‘There was a desk or table here in what despite the space from which closeness had been torn out but was still streaming away,’ the complexity of the very idea of tearing closeness out of space lifts the reader out of their own space in an act of imagination that reminds me strongly of the kind of conceptual effort required by the only writer I can think of who achieves comparable effects, the novelist M. John Harrison.
I think the reason I like it when spaces merge or dislocate in this way — the ‘idea of tearing closeness out of space’ — is because it reminds that it’s all bloody made up anyway. I find it super easy to forget when it comes to architecture because it’s all so solid, not to mention it can be imposing, but somewhere along the line these buildings and places have been constructed, commissioned, designed by a team of people but for whom?
Speaking of spaces and their various functions, I reached out to Paper Dress Vintage about putting on an event — great shout! Let me know of anywhere else you think could be cool?
Finally, huge, massive congratulations on your work in the exhibition — SEND ME DEETS PLEASE. And hi, cousin Jenny, if you’re also reading this!
Hope to *bump* into you again soon at The Camel?
Lots of love,
Sammi x
p.s. if you like u can
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Thank you so much for your
I relish these posts. I really really relish them.