First Bristol wine bar c. 1976, Park Street: bare boards, coal fire giving off its gritty industrial smell. Sartorial choices made that evening almost identical: black flares, boots and polo necked sweaters – seriously cool.More spectacularly both in fur coats.
We drank our wine, suavely picking tobacco from our lips with thumb and fourth finger as we exhaled our Gauloises into the glow of candles, fire and our own self-love; talking with hands and eyes. Soundtrack?: As time goes by - atmosphere set for a dramatic evening and in an instant both consented to play.
Next, to an empty club – drinking and smoking on the mezzanine, talking dirty we took in the club’s centrepiece, a glossy black grand piano.Soundtrack?:Well the staff could see as well as us how the night was panning out so they helped things along with Je t’aime.Laughed of course, savouring the music.
From there wrapped in furs, walked the streets silently to Floyd’s Bistro rounding a corner to the suspension bridge twinkling in mid air.
Gasping with delight entered the restaurant, ordered our food and looked at each other over the glow of yet another candle; recognising how special the evening was, how incredible the coincidences, and how absolutely wasted they were.In the complete absence of frisson, we shared only the delight of superficial stage management played on us by the gods that night.What a tragedy but what a great memory.And oh the music and the night and the youth …
So here’s to you Mr Floyd, thanks for the sorbet, frozen solid in half an orange skin and thanks for the memory. Just about summed up the evening – looked great, smoked steam, tried hard but couldn’t get into it…
Off to Bristol this evening to a friend's exhibition preview; 'all we do we do for you' www.centrespacegallery.com Then I came across mention of Sarah Moon, who, unbeknown to her, was part of the bricolage of my youth.A poster of her hung in my Bristol flat, with her smoky eye makeup and a look that said, ‘I’ve been there, I know’.
As a photographer, Moon's work is as haunting as her image and I quite forget my original thread as I lose myself in its labyrinth.
Appealingly she says about her fashion photographs:
"Of course, if something is really bad then I will retouch it but only very little and never trying to make a woman more beautiful. I don't need to do that. They are beautiful and it is my job to work with the light. I don't feel it is my place to make any sort of moral judgement on people who choose to work in that way, but I suppose it does falsify the approach to a human being."
What I like about this photograph, (not Moon’s work) is that the soles of the model’s feet are dirty.Well of course they are she’s been walking on dusty floorboards.Souls become dirty too when the protective
layers of religion are removed.But I think we see our humanity better with bare feet.
Choosing music to accompany this post is easy.Hot summer night in that city flat, full of youthful yearning, leaning out of my window listening to this song waiting for life to start, a voice in the darkness spoke, expressing the same feelings.Spiritual experience?Nah, the bloke in the flat next door, also leaning out, yearning into the night and loving the moment and the music.I wonder if he remembers…
I started out imagining reality and fantasy to be some kind of linear trajectory, where we traversed from reality into fantasy and back again; maybe palmate, branching out but always returning to a central core in order to preserve our integrity.After all, there’s evidence aplenty of those who fantasise and don’t return.One or two have been found with oranges in orifices and who wants to be remembered like that?Laurence Sterne describes the narrative of what we know about ourselves as a wiggly line, so a narrative for life then may be a synoptic process with our forays into fantasy enriching and developing our thoughts as we travel along in life but always anchored, rooted in what’s important: family, friends, people. But a journey nevertheless.
More recently trying to describe to a very dear friend how things were going (in response toa question that sprang from kindness but wanted reassurance) I said I felt I was hovering on the surface of life trying to keep it all together.That notion of hovering (feels more like hoovering sometimes!) took hold: skating on the surface, gliding, sliding but not breaking through the surface tension of life to the depths below, not really feeling because that would be dangerous.Is that what it is then, to be an adult; to lose our emotions? Over-investment in the superego - because the id’s gonna take us to places we can’t go right now - the ego too perilous to trust - may not provide enough stability.And certainly not enough balance.
Fantasy then takes a hierarchical place way below in the depths where we want to go but can’t afford to in case we don’t climb back out. Placing it below in that hierarchy implies it is inferior and I don’t believe it is. For a very long time, I’ve been trying to reconcile the attractions of Enlightenment and Romanticism which could easily fit such a structure, be it vertical or horizontal: height / depth, left / right or, more sensibly, co-existing in a mutually beneficial relationship.Acch, this needs scholarship.There was a woman centuries ago who knew the perils and benefits of both and if I’d been a smarter, braver person, I’d have found a better way of expressing the double dialectic but it’s been done by others so that’s alright.
So how do we reclaim fantasy when it becomes elusive?Well there’s music, poetry, wine, food, friends and love…Here’s Baudelaire’s La Musique having a similar problem between spleen and ideal:
On the abyss
Rock me.At times dead calm, a vast reflection there
Of my despair!
So when a beautiful butterfly embroidered silk kimono comes along - that slips and slides, billows and floats- well, the id takes over and despair is banished.There’s only one piece of music that could possibly do justice to this silky piece of fantasy and that’s Puccini’s coro a bocca chiusa from Madame Butterfly, which is the first opera I ever saw live and is currently entering the public’s consciousness as the Asda supermarket music.Ah well, at least more people get to enjoy it…
Waiting for an old friend to arrive for lunch so no time other than to say I found this little poem yesterday while I was working. No, really, it was work - research in response to an evaluation brief for a national literature project:
... a creative investigation of ‘place and its accrued layers of meaning in the twenty first century - whether personal, aesthetic, social, historical, political, ecological or spiritual - through a number of artistic commissions in a variety of media, contexts and environments across the UK. It is anchored around the importance of ‘place’ to the enhancement of identity, belonging and creative possibility in life and art, both individually and collectively.
(Arts bollocks some have called it.) It involves the work of a number of writers, artists and photographers including W G Sebald and that chimes so well with my interest in the legacy of war, families, loss, identity, stuff. And going to see I Am Love this evening. How exciting is that? Not exciting that I might win the tender and get to do the work but that there are people out there who are involved in this work and, tangentially, it comes into my sphere. And to be invited to the party is nice too.
Here's the poem...
Who lives only for oneself Deprives others of oneself Deprives oneself of others Atrophies and dies
This today because sometimes life is harsh. But despite its harshness it's beautiful too as, inexorably, it goes on. Dancing, prancing madly onwards likethe slightly sinisterWaltz 2 from Jazz Suite by Shostakovich. For me this music evokes waltzingmarionettes - or the dancing mechanical doll from The Tales of Hoffmann - or even the twelveenthralled dancingprincesses unable to stop.
In life new dancers join, others retire; sometimes with grace, sometimes flung madly out on their tangled strings. One thing for sure, until our music stops wemust keep dancing. So in this glorious season as wesmile at familiar spring flowers breathing gentle sweet renewal, and even before the warmth of the sunchillson our faces, we feelimmediatenostalgia for our loss.
It’s Easter and notwithstanding personal feelings about organised religion it lends itself to a timely celebration of Spring with all its sense of renewal.The family is still happy to reunite around food, around the table and around Granny.Family.
Tilda Swinton talking about the making of a film about family: I Am Love, with Luca Guadagnino describes this about the film; the lonely journey and the relationship of love to loneliness, as:
‘…the last great taboo of modern western civilisation.Capitalism is built on the idea that one can go out and buy another scented candle and get less lonely somehow.But I think the deal is that you are fully lonely, and the sooner we accept and embrace our loneliness, the healthier we are.And that real love has nothing to do with that romantic idea of oneness, of distracting and healing each other from our loneliness; it’s about witnessing each other as individuals and saying: I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’
As Swinton says, ‘finding any sense of individual identity is always rather challenging’.So while Guadagnino sees the idea of the energy matrix going through every family as a control issue (well, being Italian one can understand that!), Swinton calls it inheritance.Whatever the legacy, there will always be one.Even the abandoned child creates a parent.
In talking to R about family we get onto the subject of blank spaces in our backgrounds, blank spaces that emanate from cultural alienation, born from seismic historical shifts leading to pan-European migration.In describing the personal impact of these shifts it’s impossible for me to lose sight of the fact that much of mainland Europe shared similar experiences during the last war.
And so we sat in comfortable surroundings listening to Granny tell us about her youth, when, as a teenager crossing Italian farmland on her way to ride her uncle’s horse, she was fired upon by a passing German aircraft.Being seventeen, young and naïve she had no idea what was happening until she later described the green leaves falling from the trees above her head as she ran through woods.She tripped and fell accidentally, the aircraft flew off.Needless to say her wild roaming was quickly curtailed as she received the wrath of her family’s fear.More than sixty years later she recalls how, in her youthful innocence, she said, ‘But why would they want to kill me I’m just a girl?’
Why indeed.Youngsters, who just want to have fun, maybe go garlic picking with their friends in the woods, a trip away from mundane village life, a lark in the woods.Why would anyone want to kill them?
Then R recounted his grandfather’s flight from Czechoslovakia as a seventeen year old boy entrusted with the care of his three younger siblings, the youngest of whom was only a toddler.To England he came and set about finding work and raising his family.His parents did not survive the war.
Then there came the story of Mrs W, a woman I only knew as my parents’ friend. She had a number tattooed on her arm and her husband was so tenderly protective of her.She was a naïve teenager once, living on a Polish farm with her family the day soldiers came to take young people for forced labour in Germany.How did she ever recover from the sight of her mother cleaving her two sisters to her side as she herself was pushed forward?The last words she heard her mother utter were ‘take this one’.
How can we ever know these people, our parents?Their separateness from us is so vast; it is created by them for what parent would want to pass the burden of such pain to their offspring?And yet they do.In every denial of their own painful experience they distance themselves from their own created selves. In every protective carapace they manufacture for us to wear against the world, they distance themselves from their own created selves.When they were young they didn’t know they could be victims that would experience the shock of isolation in a perilous world.But they thought they could stop it happening to their own offspring.
Our own children don’t tell us the things they know will hurt us but we know anyway, we sense their pain with a parent’s instinct. As we instinctively sensed our parents’ discord.But not knowing the nature of the injury our role is to stand by helplessly and wait until they feel whole enough to come to us.Maybe food surrogates for feelings, the physical manifestation that says, ‘I see your hurt and I cannot heal it, it is your labour alone but take this nourishment, it is all that can pass between us in safety right now.’
First Bristol wine bar c. 1976, Park Street: bare boards, coal fire giving off its gritty industrial smell.
