philosophy

descent

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I find myself
long ago,
remains of memory
scraps

What were you to me?
I ask him,
whom I never saw again.

And you, who meant so much to me
at the time
what were you? a vanishing?

I pick my way between the
haunting presences,
strangely comfortable and familiar
they don’t answer
neither did they

passive
controlling
hiding in their baggage
I poke at them a final time
what have you to say for yourself?
you?

silence, their ancient
language, patrolling my
invisibility, eliminating me
slowly
colluding,
familiarity chokes me

Who did this to you?
they don’t reply
I forgive them.

the studio inside, a discovery

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This morning, at long last after the wild month of June, I recovered my sense of myself and the poetics of my year (my explorations of the poetics of existence and what this means for me will have to wait til another time). It was a moment of delight. I found my other self, the one that I had been severed from by difficulty, demands and distress.

What was it that made me see into it? I am not quite sure but it was something about my July clearing and it made me look back to the last large event in my life (moving home, another longer story). Then I noticed that it was exactly nine months since this moment, a period of time which always speaks to me in a deep way, and lo and behold, yes indeed, as I started to map the timelines of this season, insights and memories emerged that I had completely forgotten and the poetic significance they have in my story suddenly re-emerged.

Perhaps they are not linked but in close proximity to this I made my discovery: There were rhythms in even my short studio week that made a path into my creativity. And what I noticed this morning is that, while the physical studio is not longer mine, and the studio inside is (as I noticed yesterday) somewhat vulnerable, there is this studio of the rhythm.

Perhaps I had already felt this lurking, but to truly alight on it felt splendid. And quickly I recognised: I can live the rhythms of the studio day into my no-studio day, and somehow I will have created some room of my own within the wilds of existence.

Of course I am not so naive as to think a studio rhythm will replicate entirely the emphatic (and political) reality of material space, but there is something in it, and I know it is going to make a space for something. A pathway to and shelter for the studio inside.

the studio inside, reflections

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In the morning I wrote about the studio inside and afterwards I went to play the piano downstairs (in my neighbour’s empty apartment) and I could feel it, a cavernous beautiful space, brimming with beauty and wholeness and a kind of truth.

I will live my summer from this feeling, I vowed to myself.

Then I went to help a friend move house, caught up on work matters neglected while I was busy and ill, arranged things, visited the still-packing friend, keeping her company while I dealt with personal emails, sent birthday cards to people (late) and wrote thank you notes and thinking of yous to friends in turbulence.

It is very much easier to respect the reality of the studio outside compared to the studio inside, I notice. I become invisible to myself and then my reality slides in a direction that is at odds with my true feelings.

Yet I feel an insistence that something is alive and important that I must tend.

It requires gentleness and care. Faced with looming to-do lists, it goes to ground and takes me time to coax it back into the open. I would strengthen my resolve but the very attempt at self-mastery likewise deters this tenderness from appearing.

I need to allow for the reorientation of my being.

the studio inside

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The week long residency in the heavenly studio came to an end. I cleaned, tidied and locked up.

I went to the Watercolour Museum on a pilgrimage and I was too tired to relish it (although I had enough energy to be annoyed by patriarchal posturing and no women’s voices.)

I came home wondering:

What next?

My weekend has been full of sweet social moments, a hiatus of grace.

But something in me is alive. How do I make space to create, what should be the rhythm, what happens in the hush. I have business work to do, but a distaste for harshness and discipline, which in my studio week, I escaped.

At the end of the week I was so tired I felt like perhaps the one week’s output had been enough for a whole summer.

But it hadn’t.

There is something in me and its precious and needs to be tended.

Yes, there are canyons of chores awaiting my attention, but there is something more… an insistence.

And a thought occurs to me:

Maybe the time in the studio was renovating

the studio inside?

unfinished

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It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, Central European Summer Time.

I have had a beautiful time in the studio today, the last day, but it feels unfinished.

My contemplations of two more large works, finishing triumphantly and emphatically, have not materialised. Maybe I should blame the hush?

A visitor came to see my work and she stayed longer than I expected. Longer in a good way, but it meant that my last hours are curtailed.

Perhaps I would not have painted triumphant works anyway.

There is always a pull in me to pour everything out to the last drop, to the death.

But what happens when it’s a moment for birth?

I am swooshing a bit in my own uncertainty, in my own interrupted cadence.

I think this is where I am meant to be.

So then I will start to clear up.