Siân Newlove-Drew

 Cygnus, TACO!, London, March 2025

Cygnus

A bird is universally soulful, sometimes celestial. Ascending and descending, fast and directional; steering into the sky. Cygnus is the name of the constellation on the plane of the Milky Way, deriving its name from the Latinised Greek ‘swan,’ and spans 60 degrees of the zodiac, in the signs of Aquarius and Pisces. I was born on the Aquarius-Pisces cusp. 

When my sincerity is bashed, and I feel sensitive, dysregulated or have too much energy, I leave home to walk alone. I am a headphone girl: amidst fleeting headlights and the gorgeous curt of the air, feeling. External sound is cancelled and each breath between tracks is massive and interior. I pace my coded, moody memory map, and I repeat it again and again, the same looping route, a relationship I return to; a procedural, consoling maze of city, and suburbia. I am totally atomic, emotional, and rebounded by my world, familiar brick and architecture, daunting structures, the elements, but silent in my secret music.

The walk carries a charge, as do moving feet, blowing hair and the spit of rain. Sometimes, the moon sings and is so orange and throbbing it could be Mars. I share moments with foxes that stare at and assess me and resent moments with the tumbleweed men on the street that, too, stare at and assess me. The cats, glowing between foliage and bins, have woman eyes that saucer with a funny empathy. I steal magpie glimmers of burnt-out numbers in the flesh of fallen leaves, spectral faces swooping past from alternate cosmos inside buses, a feather held up by cracked pavement, wedged, and wet. Glimmers as profound as a pea, under strata of mattress, under lapsing fuzzes of streetlamp and under velvet sky.

I’m the restless princess from the tired tower, pushing through the billowing rebuttal of fluorescent daytime, keeping concise and enclosed and presentable, in a chain of people who oscillate and link, strangers that pass me… or those known and notified to me by my headphones. I think about myself and money and having to go to work. I think about my relationship, and my friends, arranging them into an oscillating paper chain in my head-different colours, textures, material, sizes, feelings, neatnesses, scales. The parts sticking together and tangling, the ringleted paper tearing itself up inside me. I am just a kitten fighting a ball of wool. The headphone girl in her spiral.

A spiral is freedom and control and being in a spiral is like losing control. A spiral is also a shell or could be an ear, and an ear is a sort of shell. A shell is feminine and Venusian but brittle, tricky, and labyrinthian. The Labyrinth is the innermost part of the ear and is the part most vital in the relaying of sound to the brain. Holding a shell to your ear turns local sounds into ocean and thinking hard turns everything into ocean. My music is a personal deep sea, and makes the navigating of the night feel animated, intimate, and safe. 

I walk to the Thames, and the river coils away from me and into the city. Arriving at the water marks the moment in the walk where it is time to helix home. I go to the swans; they belong to the ‘mute’ species–the most common in London. S-shaped stems dip and chain into twisting opal love hearts, long recessed necks in the dark wet. I am an S-named person, and I watch them–mute. Teenagers on the foreshore let off fireworks and I watch the anxiety of the birds. The sky spread with agile, jaunty light and Cygnus above, veiled in heavy pastel exhausts of pollution and hazes of soft cloud. Colour tumbles the surface of the water. My headphones cancel the bang. I remove them to listen and take a breath, massive and interior.