EK Myerson: what happens when a list takes on water?

for klh

i sent my friend klh a photograph of a Liberty print armchair – datable to 1988 from the care label sewn to its wicker woven base – which i had found on the side of the road, upended on top of a green sofa with its seams burst^[1]

klh: now this is a list with legs (list: ‘a nautical term to describe when a vessel takes on water and tilts to one side’)
–08:52am, 5 June 2024

i had been writing lists of words on and off since i was a teenager, and more diligently since i had a mental breakdown in 2023 which prevented me from writing in full sentences. The text which follows was the first piece of writing i managed to do with something like actual syntax, through my desire to speak back to klh’s question:

Q: what happens when a list takes on water?
–08:58am, 5 June 2024

A: the apparitions of the miraculous medal: between July and December 1830 Sister Catherine (of the daughters of charity) saw the heart of St Vincent in three different colours (white, red and black) on three consecutive days. On 18 July (the eve of the feast of St Vincent) Sister Catherine prayed, and at 11:30pm a child came before her and told her to go to the chapel, where Mary was waiting for her on a chair.
________ _ On 27 November 1830, the Virgin came to Sister Catherine again, this time at 5:30pm. Mary’s hands were uncharacteristically dripping with jewelled rings. The apparition appeared within an oval. Sister Catherine understood that it was the Virgin’s desire that sacred merchandise should be made: a chic oval token with Mary’s image, circled with twelve stars recto and, verso, the letter M, beneath which should be engraved two hearts (one crowned with thorns and the other pierced with a sword).
________ _ And the next manifestation was a limited edition of 2,000 (made in Paris in 1832). Following the initial run, the church approved the mass production of medals totalling more than 2 million between the years of Our Lord 1832 and 1836. By the death of Sister Catherine in 1876 more than a billion medals had been made.
________ _ At 16:45pm on 25 May 2024, I found a silver-plated miraculous medallion on Ashburnham Road, Kensal Rise, NW10.

Q: what happens when a list takes on water?
–08:58am, 5 June 2024

A: Aleppo soap, 30% Huile de Laurier. 7.05fl.oz 200g.^[2]

Q: what happens when a list takes on water?
–08:58am, 5 June 2024

A: a thin metal laser-cut flower with engraved design, which I discovered on the pavement, shortly before I found my very own miraculous medallion. This morning, I placed it in a shallow porcelain bowl (a gift from my sibling). The bowl has a black metallic glaze, so that the flower casts a reflective shadow from its ragged tips. Near the bowl, I have kept a receipt from Panzer’s deli, underneath an oyster shell.

On receipt of this photograph, Katy posed a follow up Q: if a shell is a paperweight for the receipt then is the silver-leaved flower a weight for the bowl, rather than being held by it?
–11:57 5 June 2024

A: yes, definitely.

Q: what happens when a list takes on water?
–08:58am, 5 June 2024

A: a small white armoire glued with shells (scallop, whelk, limpet) made ca. 2011 following a visit to Glandford Shell Museum, Norfolk, in which can be found, for instance: a series of spooky Victorian dolls made of conches and clamshells; a fragment of mosaic from the floor of a house in Pompeii, excavated in 1748.

Q: what happens when a list takes on water?
–08:58am, 5 June 2024

A: a bearded ram’s head with neck extending from an ammonite shell. A pale-skinned figure wearing tight white trunks and nothing else, tipping water from an upturned urn balanced on their ripped shoulder. Two pointy slivery fish, facing 69. A bent-necked bull. These images appear in quatrefoil gilt miniatures at the foot of the calendar pages for December, January, February, April, in the Très Belles Heures of Jean de Berry.^[3]

Q: what happens when a list takes on water?
–08:58am, 5 June 2024

A: take on tortoiseshell camel’s back final
strawberry fields wasteland anchor in haste
newfoundland ponytail fail safe
lock & quay Piers Morgan election cake
walk milkshake talk show small boats
sink float evacuate scorpion hidden in
Iraq snakehead true crime drama people
trade weight freight night train dark
Atlantic human cost family legend 1960
escape exile political refugee^[4] coastal route
Mediterranean soap opera^[5] NHS ward corridor
care waiting list trans panic hormone test^[6]
restless blanket statement statistical Staten Island
ferry statue of Liberty print mattress
springs real estate shipwreck modernity^[7]

---

^[1] I found the armchair on the pavement outside an apartment block in St John’s Wood on the corner where Finchley Road meets Grove End Road. I had been to Panzer’s deli to buy my father a birthday present of tinned peas, edible flowers, gefilte fish and papaya salad. I was on my way to an appointment at the Institute of Group Analysis when I saw the armchair and couldn’t resist taking it. My friend Shahin used to live with her mother in a block of flats in this area and it was almost unbelievably opulent. I went to hers for a sleepover once when we were 16 and she had a glitter tattoo kit which impressed me as much as any of the Chanel furniture; I glittered my hip with the outline of a tiger. Anyway, I began carrying the armchair away on my own, but a couple soon approached me and offered to help. It wasn’t that heavy but because I was already carrying so many tins of peas I gratefully accepted. They each took a leg and we set off down Grove End Road. They were going to see Abbey Road, but I was going a little further, so we carried it over the famous zebra tarmac, creating an unusually good photo opportunity for any tourists who happened to be standing nearby. They were a couple in their sixties and were visiting their daughter and 2-year-old grandson who live in Tufnell Park. She was a retired microbiologist, and he was still practising as a doctor of internal medicine. I told them I was an academic and for once was pleased to be able to say I teach at Cambridge, since their medical careers combined with the NW London location to trigger an ancestral instinct to present myself as a good Jewish boy. They looked appropriately approving and left me with the chair on the corner of the street near Lord’s cricket ground, at which point I ordered an Uber XL to take me the rest of the way.
________ _ I arrived at the IGA inappropriately early and carried the armchair into the foyer, where I set about sponge cleaning it with kitchen paper taken from the staffroom. I was highly aware that bringing my own chair to analysis would look mad in a satisfyingly retro way and was glad that the aesthetic of the chair was in keeping with the practice of psychoanalysis; it so obviously could have belonged to a therapist.
________ _ The Liberty print of green and yellow leaves and flowers – William Morris-esque – has its roots in the Orientalising designs of medieval millefleurs, the tapestry backdrops which were copied by European weavers from Islamic floral borders. In Stranger Magic, Marina Warner compares the Persian rugs with which Sigmund Freud draped his couch to the magic carpets of the 1001 Nights. Lying on these prints, Freud’s Viennese patients could talk about their dreams, freed by the liminal space of these Eastern marvels. On 4 June 1938, Freud’s rugs boarded the 3:25 Orient Express to Paris. Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of Napoleon and one of Freud’s patients, had paid the Nazi officials approximately $12,500, or about £200,000 in today’s currency to secure the escape of her doctor and his belongings, although unfortunately she did not pay enough to release his sisters Rosa, Mitzi, Dolfi and Pauli, who were subsequently murdered in the Holocaust. The IGA is just a few minutes down the road from the house in which Freud lived on his arrival in London, before he passed away from oral cancer, most likely caused by his heavy cigar habit. There is a statue of Freud on the corner of Belsize Lane, which we passed in the taxi as I brought my less dramatically salvaged armchair to safety.

^[2] Bought in Kettle’s Yard gift shop on 24 May 2024 after visiting Issam Kourbaj, Urgent Archive. I went round the show with my friend and collaborator Emii Alrai, whose beautiful ceramics and ink drawings would also be a good answer to this question.

^[3] I spent yesterday afternoon drawing these images in biro on a sheet of spare paper, which I had torn and folded into a rough fortune teller. Origami fortune tellers were very popular when I was in primary school but I hadn’t made one in years, so I had to google the template. These are the hidden fortunes of my Zodiac square:
Pisces I: “reality is…the skin of an egg” – Etel Adan, Surge
Taurus II: “the spread of unscheduled eating as an aspect of modern life” – Sidney Mintz
Taurus III: “the committee of management have, in one act, labelled their course both philanthropic & cosmopolitan” – Frederick Douglass
Capricorn IV: “Resonance is a biscuit / snap it into / and dunk it in your tea” – Bhanu Kapil
Capricorn V: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience” – Edward Said, Reflections on Exile
Aquarius VI: “processes of substitution, opposition, replacement & transformation amount to the very mechanism of industrial capitalist modernity” – Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds
Aquarius VII: “Should the novel that is never published still have been written? Of course it should” – Phyllida Barlow
Pisces VIII: “To make matters worse, I’ve never been able to keep my glasses clean” – Fred Moten, Black & Blur

^[4] In 1943 my great-uncle Hosea Jaffe co-founded a Trotskyite anti-apartheid party which he named the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). In 1950 the Nationalist government of South Africa made Communist political activity illegal. My grandparents Cliff and Sybil Myerson had already left for England in 1949. Since they were born in Cape Town, they could travel to Britain under the 1948 British Nationality Act which made all (white) citizens of the former Cape Colony eligible to live and work in the motherland. Cliff was a qualified doctor and got a job as a GP in Kilburn, NW London. Panzer’s Deli was Syb’s favourite shop. Hosea stayed in South Africa until 1960, at which point he became a political refugee, leaving – according to family legend – on a boat in the middle of the night. He travelled first to Ethiopia and then settled in Italy. Hosea died in 2008 but due to the long-term estrangement between my father and my grandmother, I did not meet him before he passed away.

^[5] The iconic British soap opera Holby City aired its final episode on 29 March 2022.

^[6] I decided to get a private blood test to check my hormone levels. These are my results as of 14:57pm on 3 June 2024:
Oestradiol        390.0 pmol/L
FSH                 5.0 U/L
LH                   18.1 U/L
Progesterone    21.50 nmol/L
Prolactin           197 mlU/L
Testosterone     2.250 nmol/L
SHBG              90.50 nmol/L
Free Androgen Index 2.48%
I was curious to know my T levels, which I had secretly hoped might give a biologically essentialist basis for my ongoing scepticism about my gender. No such luck. The Randox Health report gives the optimal reference range for female T as 0.29–1.67, with >1.67 marked as ‘high’. According to Randox then my T is affirmingly above average. However the internet burst this brief masc bubble since google told me that ‘most doctors agree’ that 10–25 nanomoles per litre is ‘normal’ for men while 0.5–2.4 nmol/: is average for women.

^[7] Steve Mentz (not to be confused w Sidney Mintz), Shipwreck Modernity: ecologies of globalization, 1550–1719. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.