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.

Elegy IX

Age must be loveliest

Empathy

I’ve been thinking about empathy. It’s something I’m not short of, I think – short as I am of so much that is useful for life in the 21^st century :-) - and this is both a blessing and a curse. Partly it’s innate, a matter of temperament, goes with being quiet, introspective, imaginative; partly, I think, the result of growing up the held-close only child of a mother who craved understanding and sympathy and cast me in the role of providing them.

Of course, a capacity for empathy is important, desirable and essential to decent, caring co-existence on any scale from the familial to the global. Of course, to a certain level, it’s entirely to be approved of and encouraged. But perhaps you can have too much. It can paralyse. It can make life too hard.

I can’t imagine being a nurse or doctor. Not because I’m squeamish about blood and entrails – on the contrary, a certain creepy fascination there. More because I feel I would absorb everyone’s pain and be incapacitated by horror and sadness. Perhaps this is not entirely true, and I could become accustomed. I suspect I could not become sufficiently accustomed. So it’s clearly a very, very good thing not everyone has the same temperament and susceptibilities. I know a woman who is a nurse on an acute psychiatric ward. She’s gentle and patient, but about as lacking in empathy as anyone I’ve ever known, seemingly without any capacity to imagine or curiosity to know what it is like to be another. I rather think this is part of what makes her good at the job, able to be there day after day, kind and present and gently interested and only occasionally overwhelmed.

I speak in extremes, of course, where there are only subtle gradations. I know that not all nurses and doctors, and others who live and work daily with extremes of suffering, are like that woman, that some, perhaps the best, do have enormous empathy, but have learned a difficult, blessed skill of standing aside from it when that’s what needed. I absolutely do NOT mean to say: I cannot do this because, oh, I am so sensitive! it’s harder for me than it is for someone else! How can I ever know (I’m not THAT empathetic) how anything feels for someone else?

I speak in extremes because I know why I seek empathy in others and value it – no question there - but need to focus on what is problematic about it.

Someone I care about had some terrible news recently, you see. I feel for them. Their face, their fear, are in my mind and heart all the time. So much that I am paralysed by my feelings, sliding away from them into depression, and scarcely able to function. This is hardly a state where I can be there for a dear friend just at the time they may need it most, is it? So my empathy, my sensitivity - which on the whole I do value, although they make life difficult – have been feeling like something I need to get a different handle on, in order to deal with this tough stuff, the kind of tough stuff that happens to all of us sooner or later.

I don’t want to be unfeeling. I don’t really want to be different from who I am – what a fruitless desire that would be, anyway. But to have a different relationship to these strong feelings of empathy, connection. My Buddhist teachers would speak, I think, of experiencing them in a broader context, a deeper container; that resonates, certainly, but I think I have grasped it only intellectually, not experientially.

There’s an oft-repeated story about the Dalai Lama that both moves me and makes me cringe. It is said that he once attended a peace conference in Northern Ireland; that, while the bereaved and maimed and the repentant gave their testimonies, he was seen to lay his head on the shoulder of an aide and weep continuously; that shortly afterwards, at a press call, sandwiched between two grave, white-bearded bishops, he laughed delightedly, reached up and tweaked their beards. No one who knows him thinks him superficial; that his tears, because they dissolve so fast, come too easily and mean nothing. Somehow he is able to hold both intense suffering and… well, and everything else along with it, so there is not just the suffering. This is so difficult, so foreign to anything I've ever experienced – I think that is why I cringe.

I cringe too, though, at my own inability to keep living in the knowledge of something hard and sad and terrible, except by numbing myself. I don’t want to numb myself. But I do want, and need, to keep living, not to only be in pain in sympathy with someone else’s pain. How did I get to such an advanced age with so little idea about this? Is it too late to learn another way?

Public space and the body

"I don’t agree with Louise Bourgeois's famous saying that art is a guarantee of sanity. For me it’s much more a sharing of anxiety than anything to do with catharsis. It doesn’t relieve, but amplifies and shares anxiety. By making objects that carry my uncertainty, I learn to hold it, as a vehicle for sensitivity.

"The negotiation of gazes in the city.

"Finding our places in the context of looking and being looked at.

"It’s reality gazing back at you. They make me uneasy. They create a story. They express a prohibited anxiety, a search for certainty.

"The figures are not me, but places where I once was.

"They’re not statues, since they represent nothing and no one in particular. They are… declaratory vehicles, a reinforcement of a form of objectness.

"To what extent do we own our bodies? To what extent are we just passengers?

"The body declares its redundancy. It is a trap for our empathy.

"Their lack, their stillness, call on our feeling.

"They suggest the possibility that our bodies are deeply embraceable.

"To collapse uncertainties about insideness and outsideness.

"Is anxiety negative? Can it be positive? A way into choice? Yes. And also neither positive nor negative, but our condition, a sharpener of our perceptions.

"To approach an almost unbearable anxiety may be what we need and gravitate towards.

"Perhaps it takes age to experience being this raw and not flee it.

"The picture that looks back at you in an expected way is part of the prevailing symbolic order. Here he’s concerned not to reinforce the prevalent representational order… art as a space where we can familiarise ourselves with the unknowable, escape from the prevailing symbolic order.

"I am trying less to deal with personal responsibility than with where human imagination fits into a space/time/cosmic context.

"The isolated perilous figures on rooftops evoke empathy, concern and intense feeling. They evoke perhaps the common enhancement of feeling when in a perilous place.

The horizon as a limit of humanness – only imagination can transcend it."

Roughly, inadequately culled fragments from a discussion: Antony Gormley with Renata Salecl, Susie Orbach and Darian Leader.
But how wonderful - there's a podcast!

Green Park in black and white

(verbatim)

Where are you now?
Yes
Now
Where are you now?
So
Yes
Come back
Come back
Right now
And call me
When you’re near
Yes
When you’re nearly here

~ ~ ~

Where are you now?

Hyperlink - Gallery

Photo taken at the Frith Street Gallery, visited on the recommendation of Planethalder, whose enthusiastic, discriminating consumption of a wide range and huge number of our city's cultural and culinary attractions daunts me, and sends me to seek out some lovely things. This lovely thing was an exhibition of work by Tacita Dean, impressive and beautiful wall-size photomontages of trees and a couple of works on film - her usual form in recent years, and most especially her film of poet Michael Hamburger in his East Anglian domain, as visited by the narrator of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn.


This, and still below of Michael Hamburger, from Tacita Dean's film

It is a haunting, meditative evocation of the old poet, who died a few months after he was filmed, the light and the wind through his house, garden and beloved apple trees. I sometimes wonder, in my literal way, what makes a film a piece of visual art rather than a work of cinema, but not in this case. Lacking any narrative arc, it's edited to play as a seamless loop. You only know you're back at the point where you parted the heavy black curtain and groped your way into the viewing room when you recognise an image already seen - a long shot of an old-fashioned lamp in silhouette that slowly impinged as I shuffled towards a chair.

A slow-keeps-coming-at-you-on-a-meandering-loop-that-you-can-enter-anywhere, like Sebald's writing.



Standing out against the quiet: the strong, declarative tones of the poet, reading a poem he wrote for his friend Ted Hughes not long after his death, which evokes the tree he grew from the pips of an apple from Hughes' garden. A link with a friend now gone. He strokes the apple, reaches for the book to read... achingly present, and now he too is gone.

So glad I saw this, followed a link and liked what I saw and went to see. The online world of endless hyperlinks, the time you end up wasting by following just one more: it's frightening and depressing, but also often leads to unsuspected riches. And the habit of persistence in following just one more link overflows into off-line life. To find the gallery - so tastefully minimalist that its name is only to be seen carved in the wall, well above eye level - took two turns and more around the square, then entering a cafe and asking.