Instant Analogue by Cecilie Harris. Special thanks to IMPOSSIBLE.
Extracts:
As soon as I sit down in the incredibly comfortable sofa in Jackson Hale’s family home in London, I question if I will ever be able to get up at all. Surrounded by beautiful art and the perfect amount of daylight, my conversation with Jackson immediately flows as if we have known each other for some time.
I jump straight into suggesting we talk about his feelings, and he sinks deeper into the soft sofa. “I think my problem is that I have too many feels. I genuinely feel other people’s emotions too, which is not always a bad thing, but can end up quite unpleasant and painful. I would rather feel a bit too much than not enough though”. He makes a good point, and singles out music as one of his emotional triggers. I look down at his records stacked on the floor amongst collections of old magazines, and imagine the hours spent behind closed doors with nothing but music and his art. Jackson talks about cutting things out from magazines and piecing them all together again. The calm. Retreat. I can relate. To see things in new ways, and create new purpose - this is the vision.
I ask him to describe himself in three words, a task he takes incredibly seriously, and we get a second cup of tea to ponder over it. He kicks off with obsessive; “If I’m interested in something I get quite obsessed with it. It could be a picture I have seen, a line of poetry or words from a song. I’ll listen to the same song like twenty times in a row for days. It makes a lot of people angry with me, but I don’t feel like being that obsessive is a bad thing. It can be quite good in a way, because I think about it from so many differentangles. My second word is scared. At the moment I’ve been quite scared of doing a lot of things. I think this feeds back into the obsessive thing, because sometimes I over-think things to the point where it’s a bit paralyzing and I end up not doing it because of all the ‘what if’s’. I put a lot of pressure on myself about things not being good enough. Sometimes I don’t show anyone what I have created, because I’m scared of someone turning around and being like ‘what are you doing, is this meant to be serious? It’s so terrible’. At the moment I am trying to do things simply because I want to do them, and not think about others so much. The last word is coy. I’m always being a bit inappropriate and making a bit of a joke of something. I just love the word, it’s my favorite. Coy.”
Read the full feature in issue 9, where he continues to discribe his personal oasis and what makes him tick.
Issue 9 words by Cecilie Harris.
Intro by Molly Rose Baker.
