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.

Divenire

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So I was in the studio and then I wasn’t and then I was trying to find the studio inside and to get to it I found a studio rhythm and this is indeed helping me to dwell in the reality of the studio inside and even though I have not got to painting yet I am in something, definitely.

And all the time, every possible day, I have been playing Einaudi’s Divenire on the piano that I have been given the keys to in the neighbours’ downstairs apartment.

In the studio week I finally linked, for the first time, the bits I knew with the mysterious bit in the middle, and suddenly I had a whole.

But it was a kind of scratchy, awkward, patched-together whole, because my fingers had not been accustomed to playing music for such a long time, nor my brain for concentrating so continuously on something so precise. The piece is nearly ten minutes long and it is a work to hold my attention in the exact present without having it distract somewhere else – and in fact usually this distraction does not totally affect the flow, but what does affect it is the jolt of realising that you are elsewhere and then trying to relocate yourself in the music, which usually causes a stumble.

So each day of the month since I left the studio I have been playing – of course as part of the studio rhythm – and then often recording myself to hear how the piece is feeling. It has taken time to ease out places of complexity and to smooth the trickier jumps of hand and the release the tension of areas which require more skill and concentration, which is all very well, but until the skill and concentration is mastered, there is anxiety that makes itself felt by the listener.

Over the month, I have become aware that somehow the piece was also taking me somewhere; in losing myself into it, I am finding a self, I am becoming – divenire – a self that I have not been for a long time, perhaps ever.

There are different elements in a journey of allowing music to form you; some are intellectual, some physical, some emotional, some deeper. There is an integration that has to happen which must be then somehow anointed with a grace from somewhere else. It is work and mystery.

Yesterday I had a very important insight: I had been working towards a recording that sounded accurate; each note in place, sounding beautiful. Yesterday it was sounding often beautiful, but still, there were occasional, sometimes jarring errors. But suddenly it came to me, listening, that I’d forgotten the fundamental fact of live performance; that there is a humanity in it that cannot and should not be eradicated, the eradication of which, in fact, would substitute a kind of overworked tension, and anyway would only likely be possible through mechanistic means.

But this insight had a follower, as if hidden behind its back. If it already was (almost) beautiful, and there would always be some humanity left in the beauty, then the moment I had been waiting for might be arriving sooner than I’d expected.

And then yes, this morning, I was there, in a beautiful completion of piece and self. Divenire.

And now I am waiting for what happens next.

la vie suspendue – time

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In la vie suspendue, time is running through me, or to be more precise times. I can feel them, some of them streaming through with no thought of clinging on, some ferociously disputing ownership, claiming my desires, my thoughts, my imaginations, my frailties.

Perhaps it takes this enforced slowness to truly notice the other forms of speed swirling. I am poised in some kind of eternal time, and despite the continuous risks I feel of slipping off its axis, this eternal time, now that I have returned to it, is steady, more steady than I realise, and I don’t seem to slip off as much as I fear.

And so then the other times are making themselves felt, the slow slipping time of summer tempo days punctuated occasionally by the panic of the end time, when I will have to return to the demands of work. So then business time and the seasons of my clients – holidaying for July or holidaying for August or holidaying for a two week scrap of childcare before swapping with the other partner to return to work, according to culture.

His time, how long will it take him, what is he thinking, does he have a time with me in it, should I reach out time, no probably not, patience, time.

Biological time, googling statistics, pondering depleting likelihoods.

Ageing, in a way the same, but felt differently, eyes, hair, skin just a little bit different from last year’s summer photos.

Divenire time, Andante, one dotted crochet = 60 beats per minute.

Ontological time, such a very very long time it takes to manoeuvre the human psyche into new orders to wholeness, always a shock.

Capitalist time, now, immediately, preferably yesterday although then you didn’t actually knew the offer existed, or the deadline.

Poor pitiful modern time, no depth, no heart, no soul, no allowance for grieving, passion, healing, compassion, renewing, also known as ‘according to my personal convenience time’, and ‘validate me! validate me! Entertain me! Feed me! before I pre-emptively reject you’ time.

Nature time, everything in its season, can’t be cheated, nature of reality time.

Sometimes when my younger friends are fretting about how Long everything is taking, I remind them; remember, you were raised in a culture of timescales for the insubstantial. It is a hard lesson, and I have to learn it again.

The eternal time is helping soothe the pains of this emancipation.

suspendue en l’air – gathering

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In the airy depth of suspendue en l’air living, a development has occured. Perhaps it was the intention towards depth that I harnessed in the turbulence of obstacles. Encountering this deep substance of self has given me a confidence and a question: Where next? And since I am often asking this question, I have tried, by sitting with it, to let it answer itself.

And yesterday it did. First it occured to me that having somehow been reunited with this luminosity of being, I should now collaborate in its strengthening, intensifying it but also clearing a space for it, gently. As I allowed these thoughts to order themselves, I pottered about, paying reverent attention to the ordinary: piano (listening), writing, lunch, and, as I am still a little ill, resting.

And then there it was: Reading an old-favourite work I heard the creak of an inner shift and I knew it was pulling me into the next movement of this strange summer: The boxes. Four years after emigrating I finally moved into an own home last autumn and the boxes housing my former life caught up with me. The work of sorting boxes is a particular kind of work, appearing practical but concealing endless emotional and spiritual work. It took a phenomenal organisation even to get them opened and arranged in the attic, and to deal with the wildness of the encounters with multiple former selves. At the point I had undone, unravelled everything, and placed things into their new positions, I landed into a work project that took all my time and energy for months. The unfinished work of tidying and sorting the boxes has been looming over me for months, totally inaccessible in terms of time, yet dauntingly apparent.

And so yesterday I started the work of arranging things into their new homes. Starting with the journals that I have kept since I first heard a boy liked me in senior school – ‘I am at an interesting time in my life…’ – and so yesterday this accumulation of substance took the form of setting my journal/selves in order, sometimes glimpsing a me here, a me there, in Paris, applying for a graduate job, commuting, wondering about some new love interest, off to a consulting project in Russia, praying.

And pondering how little those selves knew where I would be now, and wondering what it would have meant to know it, and now I sit again in the beautiful garden ‘a garden on a mountain is the human ideal’ so I learnt on a podcast yesterday about ancient scripture.

What does my life mean?