Hell and heaven

These are the hell weeks of too much work, too little time, so a stolen Saturday of much needed relaxation seemed a good opportunity to get inspired by Lorianne. I bought a small sketch book and went to the park on a perfect early autumn day of soft, warm light with a tiny bite of chill and damp at its very edge. Held between the leaves already crackling underfoot and a densely woven canopy of quiet birdsong, I sat beside the lake in Dulwich Park which hummed with even more birds and bugs than usual - humming their pre-death or pre-migration swansong, but no swans. Looking, drawing, looking, drawn close to every purple daisy, curling oak leaf and rosy crabapple, far from all the worries of the working world. It was heavenly. Now I'm back in the office.

Dream yoga

Woke at 5 today, then fell briefly asleep again and woke remembering my dream. It was a lovely one, of reuniting in happiness and complicity with an old friend from long ago (we were divided by love of the same man, though we tried hard, like the right-on little feminists we were, not to let it divide us). In the way of dreams, it was both the past and the present - her kids, now in their thirties, were small, but we spoke poignantly of the days when they were young all those years ago. This is a truth of dreams, isn't it? Both past and present are in us here and now. I don't have, or least don't remember, happy dreams. For years and years, not a single one. No exaggeration. Always the same tedious variations on being reviled and excluded, interspersed with the ones of feeling scared and guilty because I'm very late for something. How weird, then, to wake on this Friday morning of a horribly tiring and stressful week with a heart warmed by feelings of reconciliation and completion.

Settling into standing

A retreat was held in London last weekend with Ajahn Sucitto, a British Theravadin Buddhist monk and abbot of Chithurst monastery in Hampshire. I haven't visited any of the Buddhist monasteries in this country. They evoke, I suppose, less than positive feelings from my childhood experience of religion, so I tend to seek out Buddhist teachings in an environment without institutional or structuredly devotional trappings. But, anyway, having heard good things, I went along and was bowled over, really, by this gently forceful and uncompromising teacher.

He has a slowly growing series of Reflections posted on a blog site. Powerful stuff, some of it, especially a thought-provoking - not to say wince-inducing - account of what it's like to go out for alms in a small town in southern England (from which I couldn't cull an adequate extract - to get the full impact you need to read all of it).

Would Barthes have been a digital photographer?

Grafton Street, Dublin

"I am not a photographer, not even an amateur photographer:

too impatient for that: I must see right away what I have produced."

Roland Barthes, in La chambre claire / Camera Lucida, 1980

Framing

Framing is so ridiculously pleasurable. Existence contained, controlled, no longer overwhelming and ungraspable. Sweet magic. Caught that shimmering moment as it shimmered. Wheee.........pop. What was that?

And as for all those little frames here within the bigger one: even sweeter. Feels like a little kid squealing with joy through a long, indulgent game of "this little piggy...". "Again, Mummy, again... " Oh, but there's no again, or not for ages. No choice but to accept the fleeting manner in which pictures form and then dissolve.

Life is more poignant than we know

"Whether you like this moment or not is not the point: in fact liking it or not liking it, being willing or unwilling to accept it, depending on whether or not you like it, is to sit on the fence of your life, waiting to decide whether or not to live, and so never actually living. I find it impressive how thoroughly normal it is to be so tentative about the time of our lives, or so asleep within it, that we miss it entirely. Most of us don't know what it actualy feels like to be alive. We know about our problems, our desires, our goals and accomplishments, but we don't know much about our lives. It generally takes a huge event, the equivalent of a birth or death, to wake up our sense of living this moment we are given - this moment that is just for the time being, because it passes even as it arrives. Meditation is feeling the feeling of being alive for the time being. Life is more poignant that we know."

From a recent piece in the New York Times by Zen teacher and poet Norman Fischer.

The other day I walked eastwards along the Thames Path from London Bridge. It had been a long time since I'd been for a walk with my camera and I'd almost never walked eastwards from London Bridge, so everything was newish and oddish and caught my eye - corners, reflections, perspectives, fast-changing light on a day of patchy cloud. The path dodges behind river-front apartments and back to the waterside. The architecture, new and converted from former warehouses, varies wildly - neither buildings nor path quite gel yet, but they're trying, they will. Sometimes, bizarrely, you find yourself walking in a tunnel between building-site hoardings pasted with photographs depicting a glossy, peopled riverside-as-it-will-be-when-we've-finished. In my head at the end of the day, not so much a flowing path beside the flowing river as a slideshow of views, of moments. Click. Oh. This. And this.

Natural light

the light through the leaves

is like a stained glass window

- worshipful nature

Riposte (re-post)

Sigh. As soon as I'd written the previous post, and even more when I read the lovely comments, I was overwhelmed by how much I love blogging and bloggers and don't want to stop being part of this community.

I want to write. I want to take photographs. After a distinct dry, tired period when I couldn't focus, literally or metaphorically, I took a few the other day that looked like something - and it felt good.

And then, I want to write that I saw a film of low-key near-perfection, 35 Shots of Rum, directed by Claire Denis, about an African train driver and his student daughter in the shabby Paris suburbs - laconically exquisite, wise and beautiful, a bitter-sweet 'slice of life' in the most deceptively simple and complex way.

I want to write that for two or three weeks I chanced to revel in exceptionally fine reading matter. Molly Fox's Birthday by Diedre Madden (spot-on review by Litlove. I cannot put it better). Illuminations by Eva Hoffman, a much less perfectly satisfying novel - she's a veteran and terrific writer, but not usually of fiction - but exciting, important, tackling difficult, shocking themes of life today in a deeply personal way, and along the way the most stunning writing about playing and listening to music that I remember reading. And lastly, clearing out my office (yegods, it had not been cleared for a dozen years and took a solid week!), I disinterred my copy of Siri Hustvedt's Sorrows of an American and that night began reading it for the third time. Each time a greater pleasure than the one before, such a deep and subtle novel - one of a kind.

I want to write of how Marja-Leena's recent mention of it sent me hot-foot to the National Gallery to gaze at the Lake Keitele by Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela. When I got there, I'd forgotten the artist's name and thought I might have to search for a while, but the strong, clear, cold Northern light drew me from across the adjoining room. That this powerful work dates from 1905 disturbs many preconceptions.

I miss, oh I miss, having somewhere to ramble on about such stuff. I need it. But I must find a way to do this that doesn't collude with my spinning in unproductive circles. Although I crave words, better to avoid words, avoid thinking, if words and thoughts are always being sucked down the plughole of self-enclosure, self-pity. So I'm giving it some thought (ha) and hoping to find a direction soon.

And now

1.

It's been, you might say, a challenging, productive, and interesting few months since I took a break from blogging. There was an extra work project, a sizeable, difficult job translating a set of articles from French for an academic journal. Pushing my mind to its limits and then a little bit further. Never quite sure if I was up to this, if a little bit further was too far. And doing it. Far from perfectly, but trusting my judgement of what was good enough.

Some travel, too. A chance to visit the university I work with in Shanghai. China: the colour of the air, the buzz of the people, in all its forceful good and forceful not good, and yes we are the same and no we are quite different, a too-brief taste that remains on my tongue and has set me on a journey through books and films and wanting to go back one day.

Another trip, paid for with the translation fee, was to the sparkly, damp, beguiling city of Dublin and to a house in the impossibly deep green Wicklow countryside, where I attended a workshop with a woman whose work I have long found compelling, Ingrid Bacci.

And after that amazing workshop, sitting in a busy airport, washed and rinsed and wrung, hung out to dry in the sunny, blowy, stormy Irish air, and gently put back almost where I was before - almost, but not quite - I knew that this wasn't it either, this past few months of working more, doing more, trying harder. No that isn't it. It isn't even what you do at all that matters most, but where you do it from, how alive you are to it. And I'm not. Barely alive at all, much of the time.

2.

Blogging brought me the huge pleasure and fulfilment of playing with words and finding that sometimes my words resonated with others. Completely unexpectedly, for I'd never before taken photographs, it brought the delight of making pictures. Most importantly, it brought contacts and friendships I would never have dreamed of. Precious, all of this. But it also brought a renewed and ever sharper realisation of my incapacity to move into those intimations of creativity, to open to those contacts and friendships. It brought me to the deepest and longest depression I have known.

This sounds pretentious, I know. But it's true. And now? Truly, I don't know. This playing around with something, this half-knowledge, half-sense, touched and pushed away, no longer fits the the bill. So I don't think I'll be resuming this blog right now. I think I will spend some time reviewing all my previous efforts, here and here, as well as here, pull together whatever words seem worth keeping, sort the photos into albums, see what it all looks like, and perhaps in the course of sorting find where I need to go next.

If all that starts to resemble anything, I'll put an link to it here. I have a feeling I'll be back eventually in some form, anyway.

Meanwhile, here are some more photos from China.

Unreal

click to enlarge

All in London except the old Chinese woman, who remains at the centre of my thoughts.
God, I miss blogging, taking photographs, playing with words and ideas!

Hoping to get back here very soon.