Leaping tree

Trees leap. Life moves on. Things change. And Blogger doesn't always work, which is why the badge is under the damn photo not above it!

I remember - I'm sure no one else does - that one of the first things I blogged about was the local pharmacist calling me Jean. It made me feel odd, somehow defined by chronic illness. Strangely, really, as I hate being called anything else and my instinct is always to use first names. Ms Morris? Who's that? Too much like Ms Mouse! But he's much younger than me, and everyone calls him Mr Patel. It felt wrong: 'ça cloche', as the French untranslateably say.

I froze him out, and he never did it again. Until today, when I went for the nty-nth time to collect my migraine medication (for which I daily thank god, or whoever), and the shop, exceptionally, was empty. Since the first time I mentioned it, the pharmacist's shop has been refurbished, extended, sells all manner of lovely homeopathic and organic everything from shampoo to handcream to insect repellant, as well as holding the repeat prescription franchise from most of the local doctors' surgeries. An exemplary independent business holding its own in the age of globalisation. But today, Saturday, at 12.15 pm, it was empty. The pharmacist emerged from behind the partition to serve me himself and said: hello Jean. Hello, I said. How are you? My goodness, how rare to see the shop empty! Ow, he said, do not tempt fate! That's what you get for having such a lovely shop, I said. It's lovely. Really. You sell such great stuff. He smiled and we were equal. I was not patronised. The shop is lovely. Two and a half years seems a long time. Sometimes.

The Curse of Gemini

I redesigned my blog banner yesterday. Twenty times, perhaps. Do not presume that minimal design means minimal effort. Oh, no. Then I put it back the way it was before. Then looked at a friend's redesign in progress, came back and tried again. Left the new one up. But I might not leave it for long.

My head was buzzing, not just with this: with the integrated blog and website I want to build, all the different sections, what they'll say; not to mention three different major life/work transformations I could aim for in the next couple of years. Great stuff, you might think. The trouble is, I'll have changed my mind by next week. The Curse of Gemini - changeable, divided, to put it brutally: fickle!

I don't believe in astrology. No. I think the interesting astrologers are those who use it as a hook for subtle description and analysis of character traits. If you identify with something attributed to your sign, of course you'll remember it, and forget the stuff that means nothing. However, I'm certainly in some ways the 'typical Gemini': twin - if not multiple - personalities, divided against myself, in/out, this today, that tomorrow. It's a curse. Aaargh!

Presents

I’m not all that keen on memes usually, but this one, from Udge, is just lovely:

The first three people to comment here and then post the same message on their blogs will receive a small (real, not virtual) present from me!

Isn’t that great? As Pronoia absolutely delightfully said, it’s the opposite of Amway.

STOP PRESS. And here's another BIG lovely present. One of the amazing, unbelievable things the blogosphere has brought me is the friendship of Natalie d'Arbeloff. That Natalie's a uniquely talented artist, writer and thinker is not news. The news is that some very clever and prominent women have just given her a well-deserved accolade. Read about it on her blog.

Browsing under M

Something satisfying about these. If I went back and lurked in the same place until someone went right through the print catalogue, I could make a flipbook... of a flipbook.

Under the bell

Last night was the last in a short course of Buddhist meditation classes I've been taking. Ten years now that I've had a meditation practice, on and off, more on than off, and fairly seriously. Still, I appreciate meeting new (and old) teachers and sitting in a room with others, new and old to the practice, many experiencing something that will change them as it has changed and continues to change me... oh those tiny, gradual changes in perception and response that make a huge, huge difference to everything.

This course was excellent, a strong impetus to fresh approaches and recommitment. I was drawn to it by the name of one of the teachers, John Teasdale. Now a teacher in the Insight meditation tradition, as a research psychologist in Oxford, London and Cambridge, he has been one of the UK pioneers of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy.

MBCT, which takes the precious philosophy and techniques of Buddhist mindfulness training, in secular form, into the mainstream health service, has recently been hitting the headlines with the publication of a wonderful book, The Mindful Way Through Depression, of which John is a co-author with Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and Jon Kabat-Zinn, but was already the subject of respected research studies (many cited here) and beginning to find a place in the National Health Service. There is far, far to go, but this seems like a real, small hope for our sick minds and sick society. Little of late has made me happier.

We split into small groups last night to discuss our practice. "I think I know you! Aren't you Jean?": a woman I met 12 or 13 years ago, perhaps the very first to speak of me of Buddhist practice, a good while before I tried it for myself. Long lost sight of, she had moved away and has only recently returned to live near me. We will meet, perhaps try to start a local sitting group! In the great amorphous city, the crossing and re-crossing of paths with like-minded people feels very precious.

Before leaving, we sat for one last time. The power of silence and forty intent minds in this beautiful space. The exquisite medieval church of St Ethelburga was destroyed by an IRA bomb in 1993 and rebuilt as an interfaith centre for peace and reconciliation.

At 9 pm, in the middle of London, the bell chimes right above our heads.

My own private...

... sketchcrawl. Even if you haven't a clue, it's a nice thing to do, makes you look differently, spot the main lines and the small things that sparkle. The sky was extra blue behind the white house, the leaves were red, red, the flowers were purple and floated on the air, the water rippled and the feet were silhouetted in the strong sunlight under the table.

II - A few words of admiration

Slightly disappointingly, my sleep was not disturbed, after seeing the Louise Bourgeois exhibition, by figures with vaginas where their heads should be. If the work does not disturb does this mean it's not as powerful as it thinks it is? No, it does disturb, but in a way I found profoundly positive. It felt like walking into an alternative world defined by women. Perhaps that means I'd like it whatever she did, out of the sheer relief of identification? In fact, though, the identification is general, but not specific. Her deepest preoccupations - the too-powerful, betraying father; the sheltering, industrious spider-mother; the crowded, incestuous siblings of 'Seven in a Bed' (see below): these are not my own primal scenario at all!



Like giant fungus growing in damp woods. My reaction to the work above, and other oozing, enclosing organic shapes, reminds me of how I relished Angela Carter's Heros and Villains for its powerful evocation of the simultaneously repellant and alluring filth of post-holocaust forest-dwelling 'barbarians'.



This early painting I felt I could be rocked in for ever - scared but lulled. The lines and colours of the figure like Picassos of the same period. The bed recalling Frido Kahlo. The whole like nothing but itself.



These are not my photos. Neither is the one in the previous post of the seven figures in bed. All these works were in the exhibition, but my fear of of attendants with wagging fingers, not to mention technical ineptitude, stopped me sneaking shots inside. Others were braver, and technically up to the challenge! No problem with Maman out on the riverside, of course - the whole world has been photographing her for years. This last picture - found afterwards on the web, like the others - shows a composition of the artist's old clothes similar to that inside one of the famous 'cells' exhibited here, but not the cell itself, of which I found no photo.

The 'cells' were my favourites: intricate, enclosing, troubling dolls' houses for grown-ups where I could have lingered, playing mind-games, for hours. Again, I asked myself: is this stuff too easy, too fun? Is the appeal of antique clothes and mirrors in amongst distorting modernism anything more than the charm of the lovely house of a friend of mine with its pleasing mixture of Victorian pieces and Scandinavian modern? They do have something of the same charm, I think. But here it serves to lure you into deeply troubling places.

Later: this short radio piece dates from Bourgeois's 'Stitch in Time' exhibition a few years ago in Edinburgh. I found it a bit reductive and literal minded, but it focuses interestingly on the 'old clothes' piece above and on 'Seven in a Bed', below, which were featured there, and also has some wonderful clips of LB from the 1994 documentary film on show at the Tate which I mentioned yesterday.

I - Wordless admiration

The Louise Bourgeois retrospective.

Sated. Delighted.

I need to sleep on it, expect amazing dreams.

this is in the exhibition, but it's not my photo!







In the foyer, an 'Arena' TV documentary about Louise Bourgeois is on constant show. Sitting entranced before it for an hour, even after several foot-sore hours inside the exhibition, I suddenly noticed through the window beside me that the film was also being projected in mirror image on the brick wall of the balcony outside. So the blurry stills of Louise and her reflection are my snapshots of a reflection of her filmed image. Layers upon layers, as the exhibition shows layers upon layers of her long working life...

Quality, not just quantity

Not listed yesterday, but high among recent pleasures: the many rewarding hours spent with a big, fat novel by Almudena Grandes. I’d resisted her books without too much difficulty, although the English translations are all over the UK best-seller lists and the 3-for-2 bins in the chain bookshops. ‘More Iberian ardour’ [!!], said a Financial Times review of the fat novel in question, Los Aires Difíciles - The Wind from the East, in English translation by my favourite literary translator from Spanish, Sonia Soto [no link for Sonia Soto – bloody typical], while The Guardian described it as a ‘classy blockbuster’. Tssk, it’s so much more than that! A friend brought this back for me from a recent trip to Spain, and what a long, slow, delicious read it is. Now I've finished, I want to start right over and linger longer in this gentle, deep, detailed portrait of sorry, twisted but ultimately endearing psyches.

Detail: so difficult to sustain without being boring. This is so detailed it takes 800 pages to tell the tale, and every word of that, to my taste, is worthwhile. Long, deep back-stories building up into a meticulous tableau of people and place. It’s like a slow build-up of paint, a group portrait in oils. Extraordinary really that it is maligned as a ‘blockbuster’, impressive only for its size. A novel of serious ideas is not supposed to be this rivetingly readable?

It's a very still book. Still figures in a landscape - the broad, sandy beaches of the Cadiz coast. Still figures pondering the stories, the inexorable patterns, of their lives. Can the levante, the hot, dry, sometimes maddening East wind that blows on that coast, scour out the patterns of the past and make a space for new beginnings?

I’ve been flicking through the book in search of a paragraph to quote in illustration of what I liked so much. But I’d be quoting from just one layer of this long, patient build-up of pigment, and would give no indication at all.

Perhaps that passage where Maribel has been stabbed by her vile ex-husband? Where Sara, throughout their motorway dash to the hospital, see-saws between angry disbelief and despairing resignation?

No, the whole impact of this fast, dramatic scene is that it bursts upon a long, quiet stream of story. To understand how good this novel is, you have to read it, plunge right in and spend some time.

So I gave Andy the idea of trying this - worth it already then!

Commitment issues

leaving London on a Friday night - should do this more often!

So, since this new blogging space remains temporary and ambivalent, and I’m not especially happy about that; and since I always feel more real, more centred, more purposeful, when I’ve written or photographed something; and since Udge made me aware that as well as NaNoWriMo there’s now November National Blog Posting Month: why not give it a go?

There’s a major reason why not: because I’m such a raving commitment-phobe. The very thought of saying I’ll post something every day for a month is enough to put me completely off blogging for the duration.

And am I happy to be a commitment-phobe? Resoundingly NO. I guess I’m signing up, then. And if it turns out to be a really bad idea, there’s always, as a fall-back, National Sweater Knitting Month (I have one I started earlier – a wide, simple shape in grey-blue cotton-silk mixture by Rowan). Hoping, then, to produce something in November; perhaps even two things, but that’s probably pushing it.

Here in London, it grows chilly, the soft Autumn light still breaking out, but more and more fleetingly. In recent days, a renewed flurry of tourists clogging the footpaths – school half-term holidays in England, and perhaps elsewhere in Europe. The film festival is almost over, but still more films, plays and exhibitions than I can ever hope to see, or even to be aware of before they’ve come and gone. Too much to see, too much to miss. Better to just savour what comes my way, look out for certain things, but also leave it to serendipity. I’m tired, from too much work and some hard stuff to deal with – the usual hard stuff everyone meets from time to time. Social engagements find me tempted to cancel and go to bed, but afterwards very glad I didn’t, needing always the reminder that people and activity are nurturing as well as draining.

Recent pleasures in between the sad, tiring bits: reading Sebald, whose work did not appeal when last I tried it several years ago, but now delights me; Depardieu’s return to form in The Singer – capitivating, troubling, light but touching something deep; snatches of orquesta típica (click on 'photo gallery', also for audio links) from Peru, evoking a long-ago, never forgotten visit to a country that still, all these years later, calls me back.