thoughts

return to the studio

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I have spent the summer tending ‘the studio inside’ after my one week residency in June. The communal garden has been a studio. And my neighbours’ apartment with their piano. But the days are getting colder and soon the neighbours will return to inhabit their city home full time.

I returned from holiday and two absences stared me sternly in the face. Indisputable and unmoveable. One was the absence of a studio.

I am a very joyful person and quite good at smoothing over bumps and being grateful where gratitude can reside, but somehow the absence of a studio is very stern, and immune to substitutions or platitudinous comfort. There is a joy in a studio which literally nothing can replace. This is a mystery to me. I’m somewhat reluctant to concede this ground.

But maybe starkly facing our absences has an importance? So I pondered to myself.

Into this absence I said a fierce prayer. If your commitment to existence is not to control your longings nor to detach from them, both of which constitute a harsh diminishment of human being, and if you refuse to despair, a fierce prayer is mostly what is left. I leave the deeper questions for another time, but in this case I was astonished to find, shortly thereafter, I was sitting in a studio again. A temporary arrangement, but astonishing nonetheless.

I reviewed the writing I did here at the start of the summer. I pondered the renovation of ‘the studio insight’ and now reflecting, this is indeed what has happened. Through piano, plants, play, seaside, parties, festivals and dancing, many of the old broken places have been substantially mended.

The day I heard I would have a studio, a project took shape in my being. Since that day, a series of disruptions have overwhelmed my daily life. This is a recognisable and now almost encouraging pattern showing that I am on to something.

This does mean however that some of the renovating got trashed so now I am attending to that.

But there is a deep thrill in the heart of the project, and its existence cannot be prevented.

Sing

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You, faintly beating heart,
wounds louder than
your loves, your hopes
yet beating still, yes,
although your sounds are drowned in
work and fret

I hear your fleeting glimpse
I hear your leaping hope
I hear the strain of aching long ignored
I hear containment creak its last captivities

You, voice
in secret humming hopefulness, yet frail,
weak from your hiding places
convenience, old stories, loss,
the places you elude
a confrontation

You, whose voice, whose heart
I know has power,
I call you, whole,
to open up the gates of hell
unlock the brokenhearted
retrieve the lost and lonely

Sing with me, you of heart, of voice, sing!
Sing heart! announce the dawn!
Sing voice! stir the fires of hope!

Sing future into our beings, our fears, sing wonder!

Sing, sing, you, lover of humanity
lead us in your tender songs
Let our cries heal hearts,
our whispers mourn
our laughter triumph

We cannot live our sorrows alone
sing what you were made for
sing what you are made of

Note: this is a poem in progress. Sometimes when I am writing it is like the poem itself is struggling to be born through the still-existing layers of patriarchal culture, and postmodern ideology; the heart of the poem is there, doing its best to be born full and whole, but in fact by the time the heart makes it into the voice, it is bedraggled and bleeding, showing signs of struggle. So this is best seen then as a draft or pr/echo, and perhaps something more resonant and whole will come soon.

the studio inside – rhythm

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All the while of la vie suspendue en l’air and la vie revenue à terre, I have been maintaining, more or less, my studio rhythm – piano, writing, documentation. So then something is going on in the studio inside, but to me, there is a kind of absence. An absence of expression. There is something about painting in particular that releases me into some kind of inner depth, while, mysteriously, materialising this depth into a visible form.

Is something preventing me from getting there?

Sometimes I just need to insist.

But as I write a recognise, yes, I’ve been doing immense works. Inner ones, in most cases, but also material ones of another sort – organising, unpacking, tending.

Perhaps now is time to try another intensity of insistence. Maybe I have a week before I leave for traveling to insist this into reality, to come home to water and colour, and to see what I find there…

revenue à terre

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As suspected I’ve come back down to earth, an event somewhat hilariously marked by the very material and grounding purchase of a new sofa. Although, excitingly, one with more space for a new season.

The change of seasons is always a kind of strange moment. An old prophesy calls the listener to ‘enlarge the place of your tent’, exhorting ‘lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes’. The image that always come to mind in this moment of a season shift is of the tent pegs disinterred, and the flaps of the tent flailing wildly in the air. Flailing, the perfect word for this kind of moment.

So now I’m not sure what the rhythm is. I’m aware that I have made progress in tending the studio inside, but I have not really inhabited it yet. I know this because I have not been painting, nor recently written a poem. Things are a bit flimsy.

There is no way to force this into a discovery, a moment, it’s a kind of waiting and that’s all there is to it. But in the meantime I take time to replenish all my stocks, feed my plants, shop for basics. I know that when the adventure arrives, I will be glad to be replenished.

perseverance – suspendue en l’air – testing

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It’s the last morning, I think, of la vie suspendue en l’air. Several things that felt linked to this liminal space are shifting. I’m not really ill. The absent friend returns today. I have to take up some work next week. And some other things. This week I have almost entirely completed the gathering of the journals of my self, decades of self it is hard to believe. And they are all stacked there, in boxes, a kind of double of me, made out of paper, or a self portrait.

I’ve been having such a beautiful time, and then imperceptibly, I wasn’t. Was it my beautiful garden being disturbed by drunken chatter while I ate my lunch, or a sudden host of probably very sweet teenage boys, but in a posse that reminded me of the ancient vulnerability of womanhood. Was it things suddenly breaking and being hard to mend? Was it hearing the disappointment in a friend’s voice that I couldn’t be there for her? Or looking back over old photos for another friend’s hen party and being starkly confronted with certain losses? Or, finding that, after all my efforts, in fact two journals had been overlooked and they belonged to the least accessible boxes of heavy books, that what I thought I had triumphantly accomplished, I hadn’t?

All of them, of course, accumulating unseen, many trivial by their very nature, but poking at a vulnerable spot.

I woke in the same bed with the same view and the same life as all the other mornings, and instead of being filled with happiness, I was uncontestably sad.

So began, as usual, a little digging through the moments of the day, turning things over, pondering them, on the look out for a deeper significance to the turbulence, or if there wasn’t one, how to tame the circumstances back to towards a collaboration.

And I found something, whichever one it is, from my memories of similar times, similar patterns of being and becoming.

Often, on the brink of some completion, small or large obstacles appear. It is a fact of all the completions I have ever accomplished. And I used to fret about it, because a completion moment is by its nature vulnerable, and often accompanied by the intense weariness of a long perseverance.

But now I am wiser: What looks like fretful and often personal obstructions can conceal an important opportunity. The need for one final, conclusive effort to overcome the hindrances, to insist on the completion is what makes the work truly complete. It is what establishes the work and the substance, its power and its resilience.

So I look courage from the appearance of minor upsettling events, and summoned a deeper intention. The completion and I will prevail. The discouragements will not. The old thrill returned from somewhere buried. I am excited for what will happen next. Yes, and grown enough to announce that hope.