What do you know about St. Helena, the island that Darwin described as a “huge black castle” rising to meet him from the South Atlantic? While I’ve been aware of it since I was a kid (it’s where Napoleon was exiled; his tomb is the British Overseas Territory’s calling card), I can’t stop thinking about it lately. At more than thousand miles from anywhere, it’s just so remote. Go ahead and Google it. I’ll wait.
It’s not just that it’s remote—it’s also claustrophobically tiny. Maybe I just feel that way because I was born among a couple million acres of cropland in one of the biggest states of one of the biggest countries in the world. As a runner of 20 years, I tend to think of physical space in terms of workouts: It would take a strong middle-distance athlete 90 minutes to run between St. Helena’s southwestern and northeastern tips, as the crow flies. Sure, it’s an ex-volcano, so you’ve got to factor in the 2,600 foot climb, but still, an ultra-marathoner would eat that shit for breakfast—an international but heavily British-inflected cuisine that on St. Helena might be served with the 8th most expensive coffee in the world, a washed Arabica.
Even with more than one DAVID entry in the chamber, I can’t get this island off my mind long enough to focus. I don’t spend more than a minute or two on my drafts before drifting back its Wikipedia page, hunting for points of reference. Most Saints, as inhabitants are called, have nicknames because there are so few surnames on the island! The population of roughly 5,000 are descended from British colonizers, Indian and African enslaved people, and Chinese laborers brought to supplement the workforce in the 19th century!
When I discovered that St. Helena—the home of Jonathan the tortoise, the world’s oldest living land animal!—is roughly the size of Brooklyn, I had to go lie down.
I wrote a while ago that I don’t experience writer’s block, but I do get burned out. I’m only human, after all. What with New York’s reopening and the ever-controversial Pride month—which, regardless of your feelings about it, comes with plenty to do—the distractions are everywhere. I’m going to museums and beaches, making plans to visit my gay family, rekindling leather relationships, organizing orgies. My mental docket for DAVID is loaded with upcoming newsletters: dissociation as a trans technology, mind-controlling drugs, Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, not to mention a scrum of new Davids. A year-and-a-half into this experiment, I have more than enough material, but I’m running low on juice. The body is willing, the spirit is spent, etc. As much as I want to dive into the next thing, I can’t shake St. Helena. Appropriately enough, it feels like my Waterloo.
This is not a warning, just an excuse. The DAVIDs will keep coming as long as you’ll have them, and they’ll maintain the weekly schedule I’ve imposed on myself. But operating on the assumption that you’re just as sick of me as I am, there may be some space in between, just to give us all a chance to rest. A little goes a long way.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
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David Davis