Wait

Red

The peerless Irène Jacob in "Three Colours - Red"

Some recent very cheap offers on DVDs led to my acquisition of a boxed set of Éric Rohmer films and all three of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy. So the other night I watched Red for the first time in many years (I couldn't find a trailer with English subtitles, but the dialogue is, I think, the least of it here).

So beautiful, deep, attentive. So detailed, but spacious. I felt as though I'd been given something: gorgeous, affecting, lasting images; deep perceptions; new, provocative thoughts. So different from the way films tend to make me feel these days - that my time, attention and emotions have been taken for an hour or two, leaving me depleted.

I love the way the film is full of patterns. The patterns of repeated views and intersecting trajectories in the city, evoking foreshadowing, repetition, familiarity, surprise meetings and converging paths in life.

I loved it the first time, more than a decade ago, and was surprised by how many scenes were still vivid in my mind and felt familiar when I saw them again. At the same time, I was able to appreciate the skill and poetry of the camerawork even more, having learned in the past few years of taking photographs a bit more about visual images and looking.

That sense of being enlarged, rather than depleted, by a work of art is something I want to think about more and be guided by in my consumption of books and films. I think it already guides my viewing of paintings and photographs.

City sky

I like this photo, taken on the busy main road through the part of London where I live, because it symbolises in a small way what has made me come to terms somewhat with the din, filth, chaos and constant overstimulation of the big city, against which for so many years I held myself tense and rejecting - and the significant role that photography has played in that process.

If anyone had told me, down all those long years: "but, look, there is also so much in the city that's quirky, interesting and beautiful - many people just as sensitive as you find as much here to love as you find to hate", I'd have known what they said was true in theory, but it just wasn't what I perceived every day.

Nothing has changed, except my perception. Maybe age and maybe cultivating inner stillness, and almost certainly looking through the camera's lense, have finally brought me to see more - more details, different meanings, different perspectives from the obvious. Not all the time. There are still days when I feel overwhelmed and angered by the crowds and the mayhem. But enough to make a difference.

Small things, mostly, like this off-kilter detail above the busy street, are enough - if I really look at them - to stem the furious onslaught of ugliness, to break open the stiff rejection that only serves to strengthen and solidify that ugliness. Just a crack to see out of is sometimes enough to change the whole view.

Gothic

Soft, bloody fallen petals cling to the damp gravel

like curling flakes of scraped-off skin. Somewhere nearby,

a flayed and thorny creature stumbles in the rain.

Remembering

Recently I read a book about Sissinghurst, the country house much loved and admired for its garden, created in the early and mid twentieth century by Vita Sackville-West, the talented, outrageous, androgenous aristocrat who inspired Virginia Woolf's novel, Orlando. I've never been to Sissinghurst. Must go. What also riveted my mind, though, was mention of another thing Vita is famous for. She grew up at Knole, then the largest privately owned 'stately home' in England, set in vast acres of the Kentish Weald. Much gossiped about for her 'open' marriage to Harold Nicolson and both their many gay love affairs, her greatest love was probably Knole and the tragedy of her life -perhaps what made her such a questing, creative, promiscuous soul - that when her parents died the great house and park passed away from her to a male relative.

Whilst I don't find the thought of such wealth and privilege endearing, this thwarted love affair with an ancient and beautiful place does touch my heart and, after I read about it, long suppressed memories surfaced of leaving Yorkshire as a young woman and moving to London to get away from an impossibly difficult relationship. Painful and mutilating though it was, that was probably the right decision, but it also meant leaving the city and the grey-green post-industrial landscape that I'd come to love very much. I missed the place as much as the man.

There were return visits in the first years, but then there was a weekend, with my friend C, when we drove out to the countryside and walked along a canal. An Autumn day, low sunshine, broken mill buildings through the dense foliage dappling the water. A quality of light and colour utterly characteristic of that part of the country. It took me unawares. Beside the canal, I sobbed and sobbed and couldn't stop, had to be driven back to Leeds and put to bed with migraine. Shocked at myself and embarrassed, I got up and went home earlier than planned - and did not return to West Yorkshire for, oh, close on twenty years.

Since then other places have touched my heart, and I've gulped and blinked and not gone back, pushed them from my mind. There was a visit to France, especially, a few years ago. On the train back to Paris, still wrapped in a blanket of the cool, dreamy greens of that place, I fell into a deep cave of fear inside myself, terrified by so much wanting, such an impossible compulsion to embrace a landscape, cling to it, stay in it - a compulsion sure to be thwarted, and how would I bear that? No idea if I was sitting there normally on that train or unconscious on the floor for hours. I haven't been back to that high, clear, magical corner of the Jura, not even in my thoughts.

Thinking of Vita and Knole, I remembered these experiences. For many years, I think, this same emotional energy of passionate relationship with place fuelled my 'hate affair' with London. That's over now. We reconciled. Perhaps this is why I let myself remember. Not sure, really, whether it's a significant reclamation of something or just a bit of exaggerated, self-indulgent sentimentality.

Photo: Vita Sackville-West in her garden, 1958 - John Hedgecoe, National Portrait Gallery

More figures at the museum

I keep swapping these over -

photoshop sections of the two together

and it wouldn't be a bad photo. Bah.

So why not make the effort to learn something about light

and shutter speeds instead of pointing and hoping?

No better place than a museum for people-watching. The visitors loiter and linger - one of the rare contexts, these days, in which this is a morally approved activity. The light inside is often lovely. (Last week the light outside was pretty good too). And then there are the guards, whose job it is to sit or stand in watchful stillness.

Even Kooler Kwan Yin

Mmmm. Very subtle level of discourse on Buddhist iconography. S/he is reelly kool, though, no? I can appreciate, but not articulate - when I stop working, I'm sadly aware of this empty, crackling space between my ears! For intelligent and moving commentary, see Antony Gormley's article, which Marja-Leena spotted on the V&A site. No surprise to know that ancient Buddhist figures are very meaningful to him. The deep pleasure and satisfaction I find in much of his work, and especially the Iron Men, is certainly akin to what these provoke.

Cool Buddhas on a cool day

Oh my, I could see my breath before me this morning - so much chiller than a week ago. And, as the season turns, a lovely day out this week to see the timeless figures in the V&A's new Buddhist Sculpture Gallery.

In a quiet place

This past weekend I was in a lovely place. Elegant and spacious within, natural beauty all around and quiet, quiet... more horses than cars passing picturesquely on the horizon. Even though I was there to work and barely looked or went outside for the first twenty-four hours, the heart expands, the pores open wide to take in a tangible breath of calm. The skin of humans is so much more porous that we like to believe. Supposing my life had not been in the city, how very different it and I might have been - not so feeble, maybe, on a lifelong larger oxygen supply, not so roughened and carapaced.

Mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror

Rather like the inside of my head, in this first week or two of the new academic year.