this too

SLIGHTLY UNREAL

Not that I'm retreating into the slightly unreal world sometimes seen through the lense of a cheap camera. I can't do that when I'm moved and shocked and cheered by the reports of blogger friends like Dave or Tamar.

I'm so glad you're out there.

PRINCESS PEEVISH

MEETING IN MAYFAIR

Sunshine spreads the sky as we get off the bus in Piccadilly on Saturday morning and walk through the back streets. There are few people around so early, the glossy barbers' shops and merchants of very expensive shirts in stiff, bright piles not yet open. I try not to like the orderly London of the rich, the quiet, wide streets and swishing taxis, the heavy, regular facades and trim window boxes, but of course I do - it soothes me and I rub myself against it like a happy cat.

Inside the grand, old-fashioned club house, a surly girl stands behind the rows of shiny-white, upturned cups and saucers. Space and light and time enough for the murmur and dribble of tea and coffee before we start the day's short business beneath the high ceilings of another era.

TUESDAY 17 OCTOBER

Thanks to Stray, I heard about yesterday's One Day in History mass blog, and thought I'd join in - along with many, many thousands of others, apparently. The site is close to overload. I had several goes before being able to read the entries or upload my own. Anyway, here it is. A sobering lesson in the disproportionate fascination with one's own daily trivia - I had a really hard time getting it under the prescribed 650 words.

Last night we held a big celebration of my boss who died in July.  Hard for all who miss him so, but a great success, his posthumous book launched with worthy accolades and discussion. Surprised to find I slept soundly, the churning waves of grief a kind of relief from the day-to-day anxious resistance to life that is often what I feel.

A little late leaving for work at 8.15. I take the bus (no tube in Dulwich) from the stop outside the pseudo-gothic church converted to a hostel for asylum-seekers. Come to rest in strange, cramped quarters in this quiet Victorian South-East London suburb, what ever do they think?

The 8- or 9-mile journey takes an hour and a half at peak times. Often I, in my early fifties, am the oldest passenger.  Is London commuting a young person’s game?

It’s a coldish day of veiled sunshine, the first Autumn weather, after a long Indian Summer - escalating climate change?

I work in an old and gracious street of towering trees and buildings, try, and occasionally manage, to appreciate it, not bow my head and rush blindly into another work-day.

The side-streets seethe with students, their improvised stalls and plastered posters.  City-centre space is at a premium. The college is a huddle of disparate buildings linked by overhead bridges, gobbling up adjoining sites.

I love my tiny office in the narrow-corridored 1950s building. My last job was open-plan, which I found uncomfortable, distracting, tiring, altogether horrible.  No air-conditioning here, though, and Summers grow hotter.

I set my own rhythm, but it’s easy to sit too long, too still, before the computer screen. Many hours alone. Students coming in the afternoon, sometimes, with questions. Autonomy and isolation in uneasy balance.

A sprint to Gap in Covent Garden at lunchtime to buy a large, cheap shirt. On the busy corner of Aldwych and Kingsway a fat Elvis impersonator sets up his sound system and bursts into song. No one pays attention. I need an artist’s overall for my evening class. The City Lit has the best teachers, subsidised fees –  a privilege to have this so close.  I haven’t drawn or painted since school. Like so many I joined the digital camera craze last year and take it with me everywhere, learning to look harder, growing a visual sense, wondering about other kinds of visual expression.  So here I am wielding charcoal and conte crayon, wondering if I can get beyond nervous rigidity in the face of something I 'can’t do'.

Back in the office I’m wilting, gulp coffee from Starbucks (the nearest branch is almost within sight of my desk); feel emotionally 'hung over' from yesterday, plough on reluctantly with work.

The class is from 6 to 9. The Drawing 1 group is a dozen women. Don’t men draw? They do of course. What men don’t do nearly as much as women is take classes. As a very young woman in the late 1970s and early 1980s (this is the history bit), my life was overturned by the women’s movement and the moral choice for or against feminist separatism. Intellectually, I concluded it was justified, but my heart said no. They were turbulent, challenging times, and they formed me. So when the path I thought I was taking, back then, away from separatism leads me constantly to a mostly female environment, I always feel obscurely defrauded. 

Is learning possible when so tired? We’re drawing the same array of jugs and bottles again, but this time placed next to a strong light source and casting elongated shadows. A long three hours, feet and back aching, but becoming wholly absorbed.

I walk to the bus-stop with L, a young African woman, whose warm, painterly charcoal drawing I loved. The bus, at 9.30, is still crowded. Nearly 11 by the time I reach home and fall into bed.

LESS IS SOMETIMES MORE

It's currently on show at my local gallery - a copy, one of many, almost certainly traced, probably French, probably 17th century. But exquisitely beautiful, showing much colour and detail that the original has lost: the lapis blue of sky and distance, the narrow frill of under-bodice, the transparency of draperies. No shame to Joshua Reynolds that he took it for the original, especially since the French Royal Academy assured him that the painting in the French royal collection was a poor, brown thing and not considered likely to be original.

I love the way the Dulwich Picture Gallery deliberately goes for the second best, the copy, the small-scale, the less well-known, but still wondrously beautiful and interesting. The big London exhibitions I often find too big, too much, would rather see one painting than fifty, a minor masterpiece than one whose cliched, coarsened representations irrevocably permeate my unconscious (well, no, not in all cases - I'd be very excited if the original Mona Lisa was on show in Dulwich, but still...).

The golden light of an Autumn morning falling across this softly beautiful face in all its own subtlety and evocative of the greater subtleties of the original, of the mysterious intangible that lies between them - a sweet moment. I shall miss having the gallery up the road if I move away.

LAST BLOOM

   

The last flower, blurred but

vivid, clinging still, alone,

to the churchyard fence.

LEARNING

 

Inspired by my happy, uncompetitive play with this and huge delight in this, I'm taking a drawing class. it's far too early, two classes in, to say whether this will lead anywhere. I'm committed to sticking with it until December if I can, to practising not having expectations and not exercising paralysing judgement of my fumbling efforts.

This is my teacher. I love her work - she cites the German expressionists, in most of whose work I exult, as a strong influence. Perhaps loving her work may make me more ready to persist and believe she has something important to share. Perhaps, also, it may make me more likely to harbour unrealistic expectations.

Determined as I am to get the hell out of London, this is part of the campaign to take more advantage of the many privileged opportunities on my doorstep while I'm here. The City Lit, which attracts the very best teachers of arts, languages and health/personal development, is five minutes walk from my office.

There are many reasons, of course, apart from general apathy, for not having explored such opportunities earlier. One is that I learn - anything - with difficulty. Rigid with nervousness and impatience, I find it really hard to 'get beyond myself' into a space of openness to learning. I can do it, but it takes a while - longer, often, that it takes my classmates.

Then there's a sad personal history of doing effortlessly very well at school and therefore being allowed to specialise very early, never being encouraged to extend my skills and interests or to cultivate effective learning and study habits. When I encountered subjects and environments in which I did not excel (and it didn't take very long), I became disaffected, bitter and lazy - a state which it has proved a lifetime's work to identify and recover frm.

And then there is sheer exhaustion, the deep physical lack of energy for spending a week-day evening on anything demanding.

In the circumstances, the fact that I did start this week to find some of it fun seems hopeful!

Oh, I see that Beth has written something eloquent and pertinent - I love how that happens!

LIGHT FOR CANALETTO

click on photo to enlarge

Really stunning light just lately - more like Canaletto's Venice than Canaletto's London.

MISBEGOTTEN

I went to the theatre the other day. To see a play. Not something I do. Ever. Too much a child of film and television's close-up, intimate naturalism, I've never been able to relate much to actors on a stage. Well, good to do, sometimes, what you never do. It was Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, with Kevin Spacey and the wonderful British actor, Eve Best. Spacey, the reviewers are saying, here finally delivers on the promise hitherto unfulfilled since his defection to the London stage. My friend S gets priority booking through her workplace theatre club and we had terrific seats in the middle of the third row.

Intense and intensely odd, uncomfortable, I found it. Simultaneously, "oh, this is far too actorish, I can't be doing with it", and deeply moved, disturbed even, by flesh and blood people emoting violently a few feet from my face.  I came away with a confused sense that here was something powerful and poetic that I don't know how to open to, that perhaps I'd like to see it again with a different mind-set, an expectation not of naturalistic identification, but of classical catharsis.

UNCURLING

Click here to look out through the window

Spending the weekend in a beautiful, gracious place, working, feeling harrassed, overstressed and wishing I wasn't there, yet beauty worked its spell, nudging in between the tensions and the wanting not to be. Slowly I began to breathe and look, calm down and open up - slowly began to see the infinite shades of green and red and blue, slowly appreciate my immediate surroundings, and slowly remember the wider, wide, wide space that dwarfs personal rigidities, resentments and weariness, really, if you uncurl and look around.