philosophy

mid-point

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Maybe I reached the mid-point.

All hell broke loose anyway. Trained as I am to look for symmetries in literature, I look for the same symmetries in the stories of my own life.

Often there is a turbulence around the most important point.

Something is trying to break in or out and something else is resisting it.

It’s exhausting and my own choices will be the flap of the butterfly’s wings that make completion or collapse.

Or at least my own choices are all that I can affect personally; destiny, other people, circumstances are not for me to decide.

In the middle of the turbulence I must summon everything within me to hold steady to what I know is most true, most full of hope, most kind.

If I hold steadier than the resistance presses on me, the depth of something else will break through.

I will be past the mid-point.

I still may not know what the something else is until much later.

The turbulence will persist for some days.

a bare place

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In my artist summer seasons there is a pattern which seems to recur but is almost impossible to prepare for.

I arrive to it, exhausted and colonised by work.

I’m simultaneously ravenous for, afraid of, wrongly orientated for, unable to reach the freedom I have longed for for months.

The muscles of artist living and freedom enjoying have atrophied, replaced by obedience to structures I had no say in making.

I start playing the role of the version of myself that most recently inhabited the freedom, but without the inner substance all my attempts are flimsy and I feel vulnerable and frail and ashamed and disappointed that what I have longed for I am not enjoying, if even I can admit to feeling disappointed or ashamed, which usually I can’t because along with the obedience to structures I’ve lost the power to feel or speak my feelings.

I cast around for rescuers and they all disappoint me because I can only do the work myself, but this disappointment makes me feel despair.

I make indirect appeals for encouragement and validation but those too get ignored.

I feel pain.

With the wisdom of having experienced this pattern I have often pre-planned a container event that will preserve me through this turbulence. A visit to a museum, a favourite book.

This works well to prompt glimpses of the joy that will be there, but usually it’s so flimsy that one tricky conversation or unnecessary appeal for my time, responsibility or energy will distract me and the cunning plan will disintegrate.

Somewhere in here I might see an early sign of true substance.

This gives me the hope to persist.

The turbulence starts to become more manageable. The loops of disorientation repeat but their power starts to diminish. I am building the muscles of artistic practice again. I start to gain confidence. I start to remember who I am.

Eventually I will reach the mid point and all hell will break loose again.

dawn

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The dynamics of artistic retreat, resurgence and renewal mystify me.

I went on the artistic adventure, now over a year ago. I had a breakthrough.

The something happened and it was as if the breakthrough was entirely crushed. Buried underneath a weight of pain (someone else’s, which became mine) and some kind of gasping defeat.

And now a year has gone past.

I had a studio for five months earlier this year but the work was wintery and although luminous, also arduous.

Now I’ve been in a summer studio for a month and for most of it I’ve been in a long wrestling with existence.

And then suddenly there was a loosening and something is emerging, returning.

And I find myself here with you.

beautiful interlude

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It’s extremely beautiful in the garden today.

My life in this country has been fraught with existential friction. I was going to write difficulty and then I thought of the true difficulties of others who are trying to settle in an unknown land and I felt hesitant about attributing the same word to my own feelings of struggle, fear, loss, intimidation, and weariness.

Yet mysteriously, however harsh the feeling of – for me – difficulty has been in any given season, there has been a place of extreme beauty alongside me.

For a while it was the botanical gardens, or the balcony. Now it is this beautiful tiny communal garden where I found myself literally transported while needing a home and where I knew the moment I stepped into it that I would live. Not literally, fortunately – I discovered an apartment nearby – but almost.

Today the woodchips of the smaller paths have been replaced. I am not in the group responsible for paths so it’s as if a path angel has worked overnight. And this in addition to the sheer affectionate indulgence of all my flowers growing for me, flourishing, scenting, and my tiny wild strawberries, spontaneous and delicious, and someone else’s beautiful grey cat, who runs along to greet me and occasionally be stroked as long as I demonstrate no interest whatsoever.

Without these places of beauty, as if gifts from a divine hand, I would never have been able to sustain the adventure of this existence. Yet with this wild unfathomable joy, I am able to reach places I never would have believed, to dig into substance in myself, in the world, to pose stark questions and sometimes insist that they be answered, and to stretch myself fully to the far extent of my capacity and to see what happens when I try it, to elude or conquer intimidation, fear, dread, despair, the giants always set at odds with the expression of a deep and true self.

One day, I hope, this will all have more meaning, but for now, the meaning is that I am doing something true, and when it is very very difficult, I am soaked, drenched in beauty, and become healed and able to try again, to keep going, to give.

digging

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The process by which one unearths oneself from one’s life is highly mysterious to me. Is one’s life not oneself, for example, what self is being unearthed and from what other self? Why does one self feel like digging up another self? Why is it hard to do it? What happens if that self is not dug up? Why is there this sense of an unheard appeal from a self that to all intents and purposes is the same person. Who’s to say that what is being dug up is any more authentic or meaningful than the one who is, apparently, persuaded into digging.

Mysterious, and for the most part, unanswerable. There is some kind of appeal and it is somehow appealing. The one who responds to the call to dig is also mysterious, then. Why does she dig?

This digging is what I am spending my days on, so it seems, mining myself for something that is not certain, really to exist. I am so used to it that it feels certain to me. But I never know quite what I am digging for and sometimes when I have dug it up, whatever it is, I also don’t recognise it until later.

But nonetheless, the digging is part of me and so is the apparent regularity of sensing an appeal, often after weeks of performing at a high level other tasks and jobs that I actually do enjoy – I really don’t think I’m faking it. So then how does this part get so buried?

I am unusual in that I keep a daily journal and one of the very interesting elements of this practice is that one can visit oneself in any previous era of one’s life. Sixteen? I’m there, with my sixth form self, questioning the universe and pondering boys with my best friend. Twenty four? I’m there in a corporate job being appraised and wondering if I can get a mortgage on a flat in an aspirational area of a capital city, despite my frail pecuniary beginnings.

This week I have been revisiting selves of seven, five, and and three years ago, a year ago. It’s like digging in various layers of substrata and somehow I feel like I am getting somewhere, but where? It’s like lining up my younger selves in a row and interviewing them as witnesses to an event, the event of me, that I am somehow not quite able to grasp, and I’m relying on them to shed light on things.

Of course I talk to other people too, but almost none of them keep a record. Their thoughts are memories of memories. Mine are of their time.

I don’t know why it felt important to capture this thought in writing, but there is something that I’ve come to recognise as relatively unusual in this process, and this is on my mind as I continue it.