this too

CRAVING COLOUR

Here, then. Yellow. Deep, deep yellow. Dense, satin yellow with green velvet leaves.

SEE-THROUGH

In
place of
words
that grew
even
more tangled,
more
opaque than
this
- as if
perhaps
words were
only
clear or
unclear,
while pictures
can
be both.

THE SKIP OF MY SENTENCE

Virginia Woolf writing in the back room at the Hogarth Press:
Richard Kennedy

"Could I get my tomorrow morning's rhythm right - take the skip of my sentence at the right moment - I should reel it off;... it's not style exactly - the right words - it's a way of levitating the thought out of one."

from Virginia Woolf's Diary, 18 Nov 1924

Isn't that just... ooh? - makes you want to skip, along with your thoughts! I'm reading Lyndall Gordon's 1980s biography of Woolf, just issued in a new edition, and finding much intriguing and useful light thrown on her life and writing. I'm not a great one for biographies, tending to find an unrelenting flood of facts the opposite of illuminating. This one, though, is exceptionally subtle and thoughtful, steering with immense knowledge and sympathy the difficult path between the trudgingly obvious and unsubstantiated speculation. It's going to send me back to the work, which I've never really got to grips with, to read it in a new light.

The lovely drawing (badly scanned - it's a very fat book) of Virginia Woolf above, which I had not seen before, is an illustration from the book. Looking up the artist, Richard Kennedy, I discovered his fantastic memoir with sketches: A Boy at the Hogarth Press, which has been reprinted by Levenger in the US (click on 'excerpts' to see pages from the book).

ABSTRACT-ISH

coats hang in the hall


as above, so below


angle to the sky

CAN'T SLEEP

Deaf to the soft words, soft lapping waves
of the unwinding day,
rigid, watermarked,
beached in wakefulness, you lie
like some great log
clamped to the shore
of sleep.

MONA PATATA

R. Lee, 2007: paper, acrylic and Maris Piper potato

The copy of the Mona Lisa has just finished showing at Dulwich Picture Gallery.  Meantime, it has a rival just up the road.

THE THIRD MONK XI

A story in supposedly weekly instalments - the rest is here.

Delectable though it was, the food was not the best thing around that table. The best things were the conversation and, well, the love.

Here is another day. The midday meal is simple - hard, spicy sausages cooked long and slowly with finely sliced white cabbage and juniper berries. Louise, the cook, her arm pinioned close to her chest by the scars of surgery, asks Antoine to ladle everyone's portion from the deep pot. Steam wafts around the table, the heaps of cabbage glisten damply on our plates, hiding the dark chunks of sausage, nuggets of strong, satisfying taste. It is subtle, not to be hurried.  I get lost in the nuance of scent and texture and juices, but surface to notice the nuance of words and looks, how Antoine and Jean-Paul dive into the food, smacking their lips and full of praise, only the edges of their eyes betraying concern for Louise, only the tiniest flicker of fear and dread at seeing her flinch in pain.

Louise is telling Jean-Paul which Alpine foot-hills farmer made the sausage, debating the merits of various breeds of pig, the hardships of small farmers. They debate everything - pigs, parenting, politics - in the same tone of passionate enjoyment. They care, the thought comes to me - for the food on their plates, for each other, for Marielle and Laura's future and the future of France. Despite their smiling irony, their fierce awareness of how little difference their caring makes, they care. They experience themselves as part of a family, part of a class, a region, a country. In this they are utterly different from the people I grew up with. No wonder their food and their smiles taste so different.

They speak of strikes and factory closures, of protests against nuclear power. Giscard, they spit. Mitterrand, they spit, with a sadder, more intimate anger. The long shadow of 1968, the failed, receding revolution, overlays the shadow of Louise's cancer and the shadows of Marianne's breakdown, Jean-Paul's infidelity and guilt. So many shadows, but so much warmth and light too. Here we are, around the table in my memory, a scene in chiaroscuro. 

Here is my own pale, curious face, breaking into indignation as Louise points behind me. While Marielle distracted me with chatter, Laura has been picking out the chunks of sausage from her plate and feeding them to Obélix, the cat. His whiskers shine with grease. He looks over-full and slightly sick. Laura smirks unrepentantly.  I am chagrined. I'm a bad child-minder. I didn't see.  Louise puts her good arm around me. 'No, chérie, it takes a lifetime to grow eyes in the back of your head. I can see you love my grandchildren. Have some more sausage before that damn cat eats  it all. Antoine, give her some more sausage. You like it, huh?'

Marianne is smiling too, one eye on us, one on Jean-Paul and his father who are onto their constant bone of contention. Jean-Paul and Marianne support the mildly trotskyist Unified Socialist Party. Antoine supports no-one and nothing but the native cunning of the individual working man and woman. 'Middle-class,' he says. 'sectarian. Even if their hearts are in the right place.'

'Well, some of us are middle-class, yes, Papa. I suppose I'm middle-class now. Middle-class and workers together, and we see the need for organising in the Unions, for building consciousness, building a vanguard of support for change, even if it's going to be a long haul now, and perhaps a long haul to nowhere. You're becoming a nihilist in your old age.'

'I'm no nihilist!' Antoine waves his fork with a piece of sausage on it. 'I believe in the hearts of men, the strength and humour I've seen them show in the face of hardship. If you'd seen what I've seen, on the docks in Marseille... ' Louise is nudging him. 'Mm? Yes, yes, have some more sausage.' He puts down his fork to serve me more sausage and take a deep draught of wine. 'You must eat, my little Laura, not give it to the cat. Eat and grow big and strong to make a revolution!'

Impossible to know where laughter, pain, sincerity, performance meet and blend.

'Revoloo... shoo... shoo...', Laura sucks on the syllables, hungry for long, spicy words, if not yet for spicy food.

IN TURKEY AGAIN: NURI BILGE CEYLAN

I saw his photos first, on exhibition in London to coincide with the opening of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's new film, 'Climates'.

click on photos to enlarge

You'd think they would be filmic, and the panoramic format, as he acknowledges, is like cinemascope, but these are above all painterly. Horizons, pattern, predominantly black and white with thick daubs of colour: clouds, walls, people. Figures dwarfed by landscape. Silhouettes of men, women and children of a size with those of birds and animals. The tiny figures, often against snow, reminded me of Brueghel. In one photo of pigeons in a snowy Istanbul square the flock of birds in the foreground are the same size as the people in the distance, and a flying bird's outline magically fuses with that of a girl so that she has wings as well as dancing legs. Full of dark and full of light, both brooding and airy, such resonant and moving photographs.

Ebru Ceylan as Bahar and Nuri Bilge Ceylan as Isa in 'Climates'

And then, the next day, I went to see the film, a sensitive, subtle, beautiful film, set in Istanbul, by the sea, amidst ancient ruins, and in a town of Eastern Turkey in mid-winter (like walking into Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow). And a bleakly, brutally realistic depiction of the hurting, hating side of love, wherein the male protagonist, played by the director, takes photos - the photos in the exhibition, surely, for as he went about his work, on location, was when he took them. He takes photos instead of relating to his wife on holiday, instead of finishing his doctoral thesis. He poses a young taxi driver, his strong, young face against the landscape, a shot like several in the exhibition. The youngster, with eagerness that contrasts touchingly with his macho pose, asks for a copy to give to his girlfriend, writes his name and address on a post-it note, and in the next scene we see the photographer pull it from his pocket with his cigarettes at a cafe table, screw it up and toss it in the ashtray.

I left the cinema disturbed and upset, not from sentimental identification with the characters, who are not particularly sympathetic, but by the powerful portrayal of the pain and frailty and dishonesty of an intimate relationship, so like what I have known. An old-fashioned film, one London reviewer said, harking back to Italian neo-realism. Not the film I saw. I'd never seen anything at all like it. The actors include the director, his wife and his parents. Some scenes are surely improvised. And it's more often intimately harsh than intimately gentle. A powerful experience.

I went back to look again at the photos, and found them tainted. What was only overwhelmingly and intriguingly beautiful now seemed perhaps more contrived, more questionable.   My discomfort, though, means they will surely linger with me longer than mere beauty would.

TELLING SOPHIA

She'd seen a few psychotherapists over the years, never in doubt that something was wrong with her and she ought to do something about it. They were helpful, yes - she learned things about herself, the way her mind worked, that were useful. There were blocks, though, vulnerabilities she never touched. Paying someone, in the end, to give her attention was something she couldn't stomach and it made her hold back. Until Sophia.

Sophia was a counsellor at the university, a solid, gentle woman of about sixty with lovely, austerely elegant clothes, large eyes in a face so plain, strong and wide open it was beautiful. They liked one another, and sometimes, in the midst of a conversation about coping better with the workload, she'd surprise herself with what came out of her mouth.

"Ach, what's the point of cultivating more effective habits, when at heart I don't believe I deserve a better life, when at heart I find myself evil?"

"Evil?"

"Evil because I stopped loving my mother, and then stopped seeing her. It all comes from that."

"Why did you stop loving her?"

"Because...", she looked into Sophia's questioning face, scenes marched through her mind, and her mother's voice.

"When I made a good friend in my early twenties, a woman ten years older than me, when my mother saw that we hugged on greeting and leaving and our eyes smiled to see one another, she said I was a fool, my friend was obviously a predatory lesbian."

"and?"

"When a man friend of my mother's groped me in a corner at her Christmas party and made creepy remarks about my not wearing a bra, and I complained to her, she said 'Oh, grow up dear! Where's your sense of humour?' "

"anything else?"

"When I went out with a Turkish man, she said, 'I hope you're being careful not to get pregnant.' (the only time she ever mentioned contraception to me). 'You don't want a brown baby.' "

Sophia winced, but her gaze was steady.

TIME SUSPENDED

On Monday morning, a random miracle. We arrived at work to find a big notice outside the main doors: Power Failure - Closed for the Day! So I did what I don't do nearly often enough, went up the road to the National Gallery and hung out for ages looking at old Dutch paintings, and was especially entranced on this occasion by Catarina van Hemessen's portrait of a plain, tired little woman.

"In art museums we come upon the visible of other periods and it offers us company. We feel less alone in face of what we ourselves see each day appearing and disappearing. So much continues to look the same: teeth, hands, the sun, women's legs, fish... in the realm of the visible all epochs coexist and are fraternal, whether separated by centuries or millennia. And when the painted image is not a copy but the result of a dialogue, the painted thing speaks if we listen."

From John Berger's essay, 'Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible', in his book,The Shape of a Pocket, 2001.