Month: June 2022

patient stars on a passion sea

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I am a sea for you, and all my
other realities, hang
longingly, waiting

an intensification of the waves, tender pink,
growing moody, faint mauve hues, rose absolue,
crimson interdit
almost red, almost dark, almost night, almost
dawn

roiling, I lurch another night
unknowing, other
to myself and to those who know me
daytime

a restless wakening, a dreamless
depth, a haunting utter knowing
beyond, beyond

the stars arrive,
intensification of light
patient, delighting
eternal, vanishing,
shine singing

vanquishing
the sea the sea, it wrestles
warm, hot, cool, chill within me,

I hope, I pray

Note: This poem was written in response to an abstract watercolour painted to a recording of myself playing Einaudi’s Divenire. I played this for the first time this morning having had no access to a piano for the previous three years. It was full of mistakes, hesitations and interruptions, but beautiful.

loop

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Something is looping it seems to me. Here I am, after all, in this blog again, suddenly drawn to it, unexpectedly. What is there for me in my earlier self, I wonder. What is there for me in this representation of a me that you, by being there, sometimes liking, create? It’s mysterious.

I have a week in a space that completely transformed my life, over five months in the summer of 2020. Yes, that summer. Perhaps I will write more about it another time but I knew then and knew even more later, that a fundamental shift had taken place in my perception. Perception of the world, perception of self. I had joked that 2020 would be the year of seeing clearly. The joke had me.

So then here too is a loop.

And I find myself rereading the stories of my childhood.

I’m so much older that when I began this blog. I feel it. I can feel the resonances of greater substance, ontological weight, density, weariness, power. I have ‘made my bones’ but they are heavier to carry around, whereas surely there should be a more expansive freedom?

The true lightness of freedom, the true depth of well-formed substance. Another mystery.

So then there is this younger self. I recognise her and I feel triumphant. The self she was wondering was there is me. Her innocence touches me and I wonder if I can rediscover that. Surely that is a treasure? It is not-knowing and it is, I realise as I write this sentence, fear. I am at risk of an idealisation. It was terrible to be that vulnerable, continually not knowing if there was something there, risking everything with the possibility of nothing.

Something was there.

Perhaps though this is the rediscovery and the loop. That vulnerability recurs. The sight of an old tree in spring always touches me. All those frail sensitive quivering leaves on those full grown sturdy branches. It strikes me how rare it is to see those qualities in a person. Fragility is for the young, it seems, the full grown branches necessitate a kind of firmly-enforced self-protection.

I’m getting nearer some kind of reconnection and when I do I will know what it is. It will be a freedom and a lightness. It will be a reunion and an intensification, an expansion of substance.

And in the meantime, I will write this all to you, who carry the me I might become.

rim

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I am teetering on the rim of hell.
Can you feel it too?
A certain kind of danger.
A lure.
A vat of swirling hate; all the discouragements of my life
kept
Waiting, rotting, writhing.
Clamouring.
L’appel du vide.

I am teetering and it will take only the most
infinitessimal inner shift to fall,
I gasp.
Precarious in my very breathing, existing fraught with
concentration.

It’s calling to me now, I hear you,
‘Oh poor you’, ‘no change’, ‘it always fails’, ‘what a
pitiful and lonely unreality; you continue to delude yourself’.
Perhaps you are what is most true?

Hell, I tell myself.
I WILL NOT GO IN THERE.
I will not keep company with dread, defeat and deep
disillusion.

My story will be different.
Only I can make it from another thread.
Those voices lie.

I am teetering on the rim of hell.
And I will not fall in there.
I steady myself.

hovering, waiting, writing

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I’m here but not quite there. I can feel the jumble of myself, from working working working. The truths have got entangled. What I know I believe I can’t quite remember, can’t retrieve.

Yesterday an old thought stole into my pondering, as if it had dug its way out of the weary piles of tasks, remnants of the last months, and as if entered by another door, catching me off guard: ‘What if I lived as if the central truth of my romantic life is that I am living an epic love story? Preposterous, if the evidence is assessed, past disappointments lined up, absences annotated.

We are all living an exhaustion it seems, one we didn’t entirely see coming, because even the pessimists did not really predict it.

What if a greater beauty was still left? What if it was our choice of position that will unleash new hope. What if the story was wilder?

The thought had already made itself at home with startling nonchalance. Did I let it stay, or barricade it back out? If it stayed, it was going to require some rearrangements to the inner terrain, the inner furniture.

Do I let myself be vulnerable to hope (again)?

Suddenly, certain glimmering memories, surfaced, becoming fuel for dreaming.

And if I allow the preposterous to become the obvious, how do I then live?

still

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I am still here, it seems.

Maybe you have noticed the dates petering out, as if I was on my last legs, a disappearing, but no.

Somehow the me that is me, is an insistence, more, perhaps than is convenient to myself.

She arrives and takes charge and all the other mes acquiesce.

It is a long time since I started writing here. I am older. She is a mood, and often that mood is weighed down under Responsibilities.

I wriggled out of the skin of my old existence. I left everything and moved, for this self.

I had artistic space. And then I didn’t. Then I did, then not.

Everything takes longer.

I am in a struggle for the existence of a self almost no-one cares about except me.

Except I think you know the feeling.

I have a week in a studio. A week. It seems short.

I have decided to fill it with eternity; love and fire.

Watch me.