art

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…

la vie suspendue – interrompue

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Toujours là, kind of.

Yesterday in a pinnacle of irony I found myself panic-stricken that the very cough I’d previous resisted, denied, been in a bad mood with etc etc before I finally accepted that I was ill might be actually be nearly better.

Suddenly it was clear that I wasn’t ready. Whatever was being accomplished by the enforced quiet of being ill-ish (very different from actually ill) had not actually been accomplished yet. In a kind surely-this-only-happens-to-strange-me moment I found myself relieved when the cough reappeared. Relief. I was still protected by the circumstances from emerging back into whatever demands I associate with being well.

But there is a turbulence, nonetheless in this unfinished mid-air living. Last night a friend visited with a variety of provocative thoughts and imaginings about my situation, which despite being sweet and light, shook the depths of myself in places where, so it turned out, I had already settled into what might become a staleness. This morning the inhabitants of the piano apartment announced an imminent visit moments before I expected to play. And there is torrential rain so my beloved garden is out of bounds.

I lean in, listening to my own music, my own heart… what do I do with this, with this ruffling of the still depths, obstacles?

And I hear the answer, ‘deeper’, the kerfuffles of the small disturbances can be allowed to herd me into deeper places, deeper depths, the music of my own being. I elude the obstacles with a deeper intention.

The turbulence of suspendue en l’air, echoes the turbulence of the water. I let myself be carried; I swim deeper. These paradoxical realities do their work with me, within me, wildly. I am sky, I am sea.

la vie suspendue en l’air

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Je suis toujours là.

(Why do I want to express this time in French? It’s so particular; a form of linguistic escape, I feel, from the everyday. And sometimes you cannot live in the same linguistic air as certain politicians; a factor perhaps in my emigrating).

Je suis toujours là in this liminal space of mid-air suspension, a mid-air that is also a depth. And stripped by illness and everyone else’s holiday plans and still being a relatively recent inhabitant and not entirely speaking the language and the violent convulsions of the pandemic of everything pressing and usual and demanding. There is a certain quality of silence. And, it turns out that this silence is allowing some deep places of myself to make themselves known.

The day is almost excessively mundane – well, perhaps ordinary is a kinder word, as playing the piano and writing are hardly mundane for me. I’m hemmed in by my depleted energy levels. So there are only quiet activities going on. Yesterday: writing, lunch, listening to a friend, pondering aloud, reading, dinner, quiet conversation with a friend (quiet as I’ve almost lost my voice, alongside the other diminishments.)

But in that quiet space something is stirring. I am encountering my own deep substance, a being of myself that I have had so little chance to be in these last frenetic months. I have reached, it appears, a truth, a tenderness of self, a deep substance of my own being, a home of sorts, perhaps. It is a work of some experimentation to capture the texture of this encounter, the purity of it and its luminosity-with-substance quality. It is perhaps – suddenly it comes to me – the substance of the ‘eternity in the hearts of men’ that we cannot fathom, written about in Ecclesiastes.

So then my silence is making a space for this luminous goodness – the luminous uncanny I now remember I once called it – to intensify. I also know that in my personal history, these moments of imposed stillness are often of great import, places of gathering ahead of some unknown moment of vast renewal.

Je suis toujours là suspendue en l’air.

And in only a few short days I have moved from wrestling to treasuring, feeling this moment as something precious to protect and defend from whatever might disturb it before it is ready.

So then here I am, writing, playing music, attending to the ordinary, trying to be humble to my humanity while eternity does its work within me.

shift, nearer

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Yes, I went a little bit silent. Despite the sweet encouragements of the wordpress world (‘you’re on a [insert number here] day streak!’ I got absorbed into another direction.

I have been making a rhythm path into my creativity, but also, I notice now, my living.

As my creative practice is continually also an investigation into the nature of existence, the living and the art are closely intertwined. Deep shifts have been going on in my own deep life, old stories have been moving to take up new positions, new stories may or may not be being born, but they will only be able to be born if space is made for them.

Such a work is one of great tenderness and almost perpetual bewilderment, perseverance yes, and perhaps this is why this has been such a focus.

But now the shift has completed, or is completing, and then a new space is opening up. As usual the space comes with a sense of dizzying exposure alongside the delight. What will fill this space, what discoveries will get made, who will arrive to commune with it, how to protect it? It is a space for tiny flutterings and glimmerings yet as with all tender spaces most likely the giants of the land will be waiting to sneak in forbiddingly.

So I go gently and write and try to inhabit peace and trust. And to soak up and reveal in the creativity of a moment of blossoming freedom that comes rarely in life and is a gift of great power and beauty.

the studio inside, threshold

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Persevering with the studio rhythm as a path to the studio inside is starting to pay off I notice.

Something that I did in the real studio rhythm was to record my morning piano playing, and then later to play it to myself. I am not sure what made this idea occur to me, because never before have I listened to my own playing, still with mistakes, hesitations and an overly long pause needed to turn the pages, as a source of joy. It took long years as an adult to recapture any of the delight of playing as a child, so painful was the décalage between my old competence and new ineptitude. And to actually record and listen back to myself was excruciating.

Yet here I am, and there is something in my own music. It’s mysterious to me.

So yesterday for the first time I played my music back to myself in the more ordinary setting of the apartment. I was a bit disconsolate and needed something to soothe the mean fears that had crept in to try to nibble on a new joy. And this playing filled the apartment with fully-human-with-all-her-errors-being. There is something in myself that is trying to tell something, to offer something to myself. What is it? Mystery.

But this, I realise, is part of the perseverance of the studio inside. And the playing of this yesterday made me feel today like I am on a threshold, and that soon I will be able to more fully live my creativity into the summer, even without the much longed for material studio. The elements are nearly all in place.

(I will know I am there when I am able to paint.)