Smell

(promising myself that during the long weekend I'll walk and think and look at flowers and art and absolutely no computer screens - posting this on Friday with a time delay)

The writer as wounded healer

"...I was born too early. My lungs were underdeveloped, and the doctor told my parents I might die. For two weeks, I lay in an incubator while my mother and father waited for my fate to be decided. In those days, the nurses didn't touch or massage babies left in incubators. I was separated from my mother in the first days of my life, and I now think that experience marks the beginning of a particular personality. When I suffered from convulsions on the day of my christening party, I scared my mother yet again. If I felt warm, my mother gew alarmed, and a single sound from my crib brought her to me. I was the firstborn child of a loving mother who lived in fear that she might lose me. We can't remember our infancies, but they live in our bodies, and had I not been frail at birth, I would have been someone else, and I would have had other thoughts. When I look back, I can't remember a time when I didn't carry around inside me a sensation of being wounded. The feeling ranges from the very slight to the acute, but the ache in my chest, dim or strong, has remained a constant in my life. "

This is from the first page of an essay by Siri Hustvedt, Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self, in her collection, A Plea for Eros.  She's one of my most beloved writers. I've read each of her most recent novels, What I Love and The Sorrows of an American, four or five times. I don't seem to tire of them, keep finding more to appreciate. Her book of essays, Mysteries of the Rectangle,  contains the most exciting and revelatory writing about art that I've ever encountered, and the novels too are wonderful writing about art (details of books are on the website linked above).

That this clever, talented, now famous woman of pale, haughty Scandinavian beauty and reserved demeanour, with her famous husband and famous daughter, chooses to break open the gilded image by writing about her personal experience of temperamental difficulties and disturbing neurological conditions is a gift, I think, to all of us who struggle and feel weak, a welcome affirmation that humanity's survival and creative flourishing require the fragile and difficult people along with the strong and equable.

This is not, of course, to proffer the illusion that all those who struggle are talented and lovely. Still, to know that among the talented and lovely are also some who struggle is important.

Emergency exit

Photo deleted: a young woman. Very, very blond. Dressed all in black - loose sweatshirt and trousers. The clothes strikingly plain against the bleached hair.  Squatting on the doorstep of closed double doors labelled 'alarmed doors',  face tipped downwards, half hidden, mobile phone pressed to her ear with one hand, the other hand holding out a lit cigarette. The comments made me feel that posting this photo was perhaps an undue invasion of privacy. I'm not sure about it. I'll probably never be sure. In the absence of sureness, better not. Better try to capture in words. Sometimes, of course, you can't: a particular stance and feeling, clear to see but very difficult to describe. And it's precisely the capturing of that, I suppose, that makes a photo seem an invasion of privacy, even if the face is not clearly visible.  So much easier with sheep.

Apparitions

It's the worst place in London. Well, what do I know? I haven't seen everywhere in London, but the Elephant and Castle junction, where I often change buses, is down there with the worst: post-World-War-Two urban planning disaster at its most soullessly, dauntingly, hideously disastrous. Hordes of the more or less dispossessed queue for buses on both sides of a multi-lane race-track, hard up against the tawdry stalls and kiosks and the blocks of greasy, grey concrete.  The occasional posting of artworks on the slab walls of the adjoining London College of Communication is therefore more than welcome. They've done this a few times, but nothing strong enough to stand too well against the poweful, bleak blankness of the place. So last week's appearance of some massive photographic prints that work amazingly well in this scattered space of dead, polluted air and poor sight-lines was a wonderful surprise.

click on all pictures to enlarge

Static, full-frontal figures set against a background of calm sea, they are pale and ill-defined, yet immensely commanding. Persistent burrowing on the Web eventually yielded the information that these are the work of James Russell Cant, a 2009 MA graduate of LCC who is already gaining deserved artistic and commercial success. (This show deserves better publicity, surely? I hope word of mouth, word of blog perhaps, will grow).

Hard to tell at first, in these massively blown-up versions, if it's single photographic prints or photo-montages we're looking at. His website (see Projects: Divided to the Ocean - grrr, no separate link) tells me it's the latter:

" Using the sea and the tide as metaphors, this project considers the time, place and self as well as a potential for melancholy in the process of migration. These portraits of individuals who have migrated to England are composites, palimpsests of 24 images over a period of time punctuated by high water. The subsequent backgrounds are the seascapes of the waters they crossed on their arrival. Ebbing and flowing, they both connect and divide the subjects from their land of origin. "

Palimpsests. Hmm. Does this veer towards the pretentious, trying to make something complicated from something simple? The longer I look, the more I am moved and impressed, and the more I think not. The superimposition of multiple images has an extraordinary effect. It really does commensurately magnify the impact. The figures are quietly imposing and resonant, appearing to exist through time, through space, manifesting exactly what they represent. Moreover, these depictions of immigrants to London could not be exhibited in a more appropriate place, since the decaying high-rise public housing around Elephant provides cheap homes for many a new immigrant. The diffuse outlines of the figures chime with the grey diffuseness of the buildings, roadway, atmosphere. Their quiet, immovable contours stand in silent persistence alongside the dumb concrete boxes. Unlike their surroundings, though, they have soul and stories.

Meanwhile, much smaller prints of the series feature in an exhibition of recent graduates' work at the Photographers' Gallery. At the weekend I went to see them there and experienced the same powerful impact - images that compelled across the room. These snapshots can report, but not convey, how the pictures take one's breath away. Go to the photographer's website for a better look at individual images, and for details of each subject, but for the greatest effect you need to see them in situ at Elephant.

Amenhotep

While recent words have been bleak, exhausted and pointlessly angry and self-pitying (nothing, on some fronts, changes) and thus met with well merited self-censorship before they made it onto here, taking pictures remains as always a blessed refocusing of my energy on the interesting and lovely things that lurk around on even the worst days and in even the worst places. Not, of course, that the British Museum is one of the worst places - nowhere better to go with a camera, no better relief from the particular madness of the twenty-first century, no grander entrance to the pregnant dreams of history and imagination.

The more I look at this, the more I am in awe of the timeless, superhuman - and yet very human - beauty, the more I want to touch it, somehow access it...  Feasting with my eyes will have to do. And savouring the name on my tongue: amenhotep, amenhotep.

The street outside (heat rises)

The green copper trim, way up there above the street,

would burn your hand if you could fly up there and touch it.

Hot afternoon

Long week

Fairy tales and real life

This fairy-tale creature is staying at the city farm while appearing in La Fille Mal Gardee at the Royal Opera House.

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Returning to the subject I mentioned here, because I realise from the comments that I was less than clear about what kind of art-consumption experience I was thinking of.  It's not all art that I have qualms about.  It's mainly, I think, reading novels and watching films.

I overwhelmingly experience listening to music or looking at drawings, paintings, sculpture, or indeed reading poetry, as a here-and-now, joyful and fulfilling activity, and not as a form of escapism or gluttony (unless pushed to absolute excess, I suppose - if you were making or consuming music or paintings to the exclusion of all else in life, of course it would probably be a problem. But that would be true of such excessive focus on any particular activity). The Buddhist renunciation of music, which Dale mentioned in his comment the other day, persists as a requirement of Theravadin monastics, I believe, and I've always found it particularly harsh and shocking.

I have considerable qualms, however, about 'disappearing' into a book or a cinema screen, escaping so utterly into imagination, the imagined reality of fiction. I have serious questions about the value of expending time, energy and most of all emotions on a narrative that isn't true or on identification with a made-up character.  Like Lilian, I began to experience these qualms when I began a meditation practice, a conscious, focused practice of resting in and treasuring the present moment. Finding that the present moment could be so very precious, why seek any longer to escape from it?

At the same time, imagination - the mind's ability to lose itself in spinning a story or in a story spun by another, to meld with other, temporary identities - is obviously for many of us a fundamental, yet mysterious and indefinable, part of being human. So I'm not about to retreat from it. Anything but. It just seems important to interrogate my habitual behaviour. Escaping from - or, at the very least, adding to - the here-and-now is only useful and beneficial up to a point, and I know I often find it hard to identify that point.

Like

painting by A J Casson (via Wood s Lot)

photo of Dartmouth, Devon, 2010
click on pictures to enlarge