Fingers

OK, we’re still in ‘here is a nice but unrelated photo’ territory. In part because I went to the British Museum last weekend and had a good day for photos; in part because there’s a break coming up, so this week is surreally busy. I did try, without success, to think of something to say about fingers… 

At the BM I was reminded that there’s really nothing better than very ancient stuff for taking you out of yourself – it comes from somewhere very far off, so I guess it quickly also takes you to somewhere very far off, or at least to a level of presence that is timeless and different.

Dark in the park

Dark, muddy earth with gold crocus nuggets. Dark, rainy sky with cartoon crows in bare trees.
Behind me, heavy footsteps in the gravel and a dog panting. Shrieks from the distant playground.

Wrap me

Friday afternoon. So bloody tired. There's something* I wanted to write. But after a couple of paragraphs it stalls. Fruitless engine-revving. Broken down. And broken up, the fragments of thoughts crushed and scattered. Somebody, wrap me in plastic sheeting, rebuild me.

*and I didn't mean to post it, of course, barely started... if anyone has that in their feed-reader. sigh.

The second, and more coming...

...another two, three, four buds waiting to burst.  A new bloom makes my day: their lush, gentle softness, so like young human skin.  Having these on the office windowsill reminds me of all that is warm and simple and unforced, all that is lacking in computers - much as I love them, in bureaucracy - much as we need it; that ultimately people are more like orchids than like computers - well, I hope we are.

Well, I think I hope we are. Gentle and fragile isn't always good. If I receive one more email today with a subject line: 'Help!' (oh, no, look, the latest one says: 'HELP!!'), I may delete it unread.  Alas, I don't mean that - there is a hypothesis that only some of us, like me and my helpless correspondents, are orchid types.

Muttering to myself

Was it the wind?

Was it the wind?  Or can I just catch their shadows, here outside the bar, if I narrow my eyes against the biting cold? The bare knuckles of their white hands holding cigarettes to blue lips. Warming herself on her own temper, she fizzes, shouts, jumps up and knocks over her chair, walks away unsteadily on high  heels.

Shift

The astonishing urban chaos is more tolerable if you shift your focus from any purported meaning or wholeness, allow what you see to separate out into pattern, colours, shapes, signs. (all these within yards of my office)

Bare

Bare trees by the Thames

Lined up like shivering kids beside a swimming pool

Waiting for Spring to come with warm, enveloping towels.

Norwegian things

The first Norwegian thing is Martin, my moose with the endearingly worried expression.  Here he is in a video of his natural habitat, in that mysterious 'dark light' which also characterises my other Norwegian things.

If the long, morose muzzle of the moose always makes me smile, it's perhaps for the same reason that Ǿrnulf Opdahl's dark, dark paintings fill me with light and joy. The rush from work on Friday evening to see this exhibition before it ended was worth it: I thought I'd like the work, didn't know how much. His paintings are like polished marble shot through with mineral colours.

Ǿrnulf Opdahl exhibition at Kings Place - click to enlarge

Opdahl lives in the landscape, by the seascape that he paints, knows them, treads them, breathes them. The writer of the exhibition catalogue finds a contrast between this daily material knowledge and immersion and the spiritual quality of the paintings. I don't. He's just there, deeply there. There is such subtlety, and the light - the deep, dark light. It's this dark Winter light that seemed perhaps to go out for me this past grey February. So I exult to see it in these paintings of Norway, even farther from the sun.

photo by me:mo, via GoodMorningLight.com

(the website of another wonderful young Chinese photographer)

I chanced on the same dark Norwegian light a day or two later in some pictures taken in Norway by a young Chinese photographer known as me:mo. The dark light, the blue verging on black. It's present too, if more diffuse, in the Norwegian novel I've just read, my first by the much praised mystery writer Karin Fossum. I happened to start not with one of her well known Inspector Sejer series, but with a slight and touching one-off novel, Broken.

Slight is the word that occurred to me recently as a criticism of The Winter House. My problem was not with its slightness as such, though - I like novels of all sizes and complexities. I found The Winter House too slight to bear its broad, heavy themes. Broken is a simple tale, pared down, cool but affecting: not really a crime story, more of a wry look at the failngs and redemptive qualities of character. The lonely, inhibited protagonist works in an art gallery (synchronicity). Spare prose evokes a sparse life. There's space enough to comfortably hold the novel's second strand, a low-key conceit of dialogue between character and author. Slow and spaciously atmospheric, it all feels muted, but not snuffed out - quite the opposite - by the dark light and intense cold of Winter in a small Norwegian town. The somewhat unattractive characters, unemotionally dealt with, are nonetheless, through the force of telling detail, engaging. This was a quiet novel that worked beautifully. I look forward to reading more by Karin Fossum, and feel drawn to Norway every time I look up and smile at my moose.

February is the hardest month

The first day of March is a shock. February, for all it's the shortest month, seemed eternal. An even greater shock is today's blue sky. February is the hardest month. The British winter isn't cold or long, compared with many, but yegods it's grey! This year especially: the grey skies low over rain and snow and death. Like four months shut inside a low-ceilinged room with the curtains drawn.  The sky's grey has been just the grey of those inert plastic curtain linings that bar the light in the bedrooms of soulless chain hotels, and suddenly today the curtains are swished back.

So, blinking, noticing in the new light that this was a season of getting older. I've noticed before that I don't age gradually, but chug along for years much the same, then a shuddering shock and abrupt tipping over into older, falling into new folds of inelastic flesh. This winter I tipped. Daft to take aging personally, and on the whole I don't. But I could wish it was a steady, gradual shift, not these sudden falls. It wouldn't be this way, perhaps, if I wasn't so clenched against life.

Time for a bit more sunshine!