Lo! A New Year! Happy 2021 folks!
Apologies that this is a slightly belated issue of Lo! - I would love to say that the tardiness is due to us all being exceedingly busy kicking ass and taking names, but alas, very few asses or names have been booted or looted. I can’t speak for Jack and Will, but I (Ben) have spent an inordinate amount of time staring at Twitter on my phone, standing half-dressed, often in a towel, just out of the shower, in my own bedroom with the light off, mid-way through another task, just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, like an idle robot. Reading slightly heated, tart, politically-charged Tweets has become like a kind of outrageous, screwy ASMR for me, and receiving notifications (of literally any type, it genuinely doesn’t matter at all!) feels like someone is gently running a bleeding biro over my hypothalamus, weeping ink and dopamine all over my lovely clean brain. It’s perverse. Some of you will know I only invested in a smartphone for the first time this last summer. Now, 6 months in and I have the attention span of a baked potato, which ironically is not enough attention span to actually complete a task that requires a morsel of patience, like baking a potato.
So! To remedy that (for me, at least, but hopefully, also, for you) here is something long-form and joyous! This issue also marks the debut of Jack Chisnall’s excellent cartoons - marvel at his wit and penmanship!
For your New Year’s resolutions, remember to set yourself small, achievable goals!
BEN’S TO DO LIST 2021
Invent perpetual motion machine
Lose weight (all)
Be first woman in space
Roll that rock up that hill
Find yourself
Lose yourself
Express yourself
Win argument w/ bouncer
El Dorado/Atlantis mini-break
Train dog to complete Rubik’s cube
Pull sword from stone
Win The Game
Have fun!
A few weeks ago, on December 21st, Earth was given a front row ticket to The Great Conjunction. For the first time in about 800 years, Jupiter and Saturn appeared in the sky at the same time, miraculously close to one another and crucially at night. The photos taken of the event are astonishing, obviously - but I was also shocked by my reaction to them. It was kind of scary. I was unnerved, like a dog during an eclipse.
I tried to stargaze as much as was possible in 2020. It was comforting. But actually not in the way I was expecting. Often we’re told that whatever trials we go through, it is a ballast to return to observing Nature, where things run like clockwork, where plants open and close, obedient to the light, and the seasons spin with the regularity of an art student rolling their eyes. But looking back at my diary entries from Spring last year, the opposite is true. Heading into the garden at night with my Dad, I found the particularly bright presences in the sky - Jupiter, Mars - quite mesmerising, almost threatening. Uncanny, I suppose is the word: they don’t look right. It’s as if you’re getting a glimpse of the flickering life down on their surfaces or as if they are burning, roaring intensely and they’ll expand or set alight the rest of the sky. It feels like staring at the beginning of a cosmic disaster or a UFO or an anomaly of space. The match with which the inferno is lit. There is a real fear in the unknown-ness of it. In the same way that Nature documentaries often remind us that real life on Earth at all times has the potential to be a cartoon of a nightmare - lizards laying eggs in volcanoes, flowers growing teeth, bugs living inside birds’ eyes, whales exploding - looking into the sky can be terrifying.
Coming in from the cold, we consulted my parents’ night sky guidebook but the 2D panorama is so hard to read, representing the infinite bowl of the sky in no way. It’s just so feeble as a map, precisely because it’s a teeny tiny map of unteeny untiny Space, which, let me remind you, goes on forever! It’s not like the ocean; it doesn’t have a bed! It’s just void forever! Happy New Year, by the way :)
In that context, it becomes sort of funny that the stars were this font of knowledge for our ancestors. A hundred years ago, these glimmers in the sky were used as signposts and landmarks and calendars. Now we look at them like they’re in a museum case. They’re like a bag of glittering antiques we keep in Earth’s attic with all the TV antennae and rubbish we don’t want anymore. We try to join the dots to make constellations from memory, doing sky homework, revising the Heavens like they’re a GCSE textbook. But that always feels like missing the point, like trying to find the wifi password written on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Look, it’s a lion! No, thank you, it’s a rhombus with a crooked dick. Come now. It’s not a crossword clue, it’s the Abyss. You’re looking at a thousand suns! These lights are balls of gas a million years away bellowing at you through the frozen molasses of space and somehow, somehow to us it looks like the bejewelled inside of a winking velvet satchel. To look at that scary miracle and say, ‘that’s a plough!’ makes me feel like an absolute piece.
And there lies the comfort. When faced with the weird, uncanny randomness of, say, two planets reaching the climax of an 800-year-long game of Chicken just outside our planetary window, we’re reminded that the terrible universe is brimming with other, much Greater Conjunctions to gawp at than our own private hostile orbits. In a time of crisis, there’s a release in looking up and seeing how much weirder the sky is than you.
Unless of course you live in the UK, where the Great Conjunction was, obviously and entirely, obscured by clouds.
Wanna see more of Will’s cartoons?
Trebuchet your eyes into Will’s website here!
Wanna listen to Jack’s music?
Frisbee your ears into Jack’s album here!
Wanna tolerate more of Ben’s nonsense?
Airlift your brain into Ben’s website here!
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
SYCT - The Streatham Youth and Community Trust are a local charity in South London who provide activities, support and help for children in the area, particularly those who have been disadvantaged by the COVID crisis. They’re running socially distanced activities, 1-2-1 sessions to help children who are struggling with isolation and they’ve just had a Christmas appeal to send gifts to deprived families. They didn’t quite hit their target BUT if you go on the website now you can help make up the shortfall - they’re so close! I just donated now, you should too! Get them over the mark!
Parkinson’s UK - Parkies provides care and support across the UK for people with Parkinson’s, and fund research into a cure. They do incredible work! People with Parkinson’s tend to be 50+ and depend on regular contact with others, so have been hit really hard this year. Please consider donating!
If you have a charity close to your heart, however big or small, and want to include it here - just send us an email lomail@substack.com or Tweet at us @LoAnEmail
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