Transits

Transits

As you passed you threw

Your shadow on my surface

Obscured every image save your own,

Occulted both my reason and my purpose.

As you moved on I felt

Reality returning.

I closed my eyes against the light

Which discovered me alone and burning.

The stuff of nightmares

The problem with insomnia is that by the time I actually manage to get to sleep (or get back to sleep as the case may be) my mind is determined to punish me for the 20 hours that it has been awake by presenting the most lysergic dreams that it can produce. The result is a groggy morning self strung out by the memory of fevered images.

It’s a good thing I’m not operating heavy machinery.

Just so you know, I don’t think dreams are prophetic. I think dreams are the result of shaking the brain’s kaleidoscope, and that various unrelated bits and pieces fall into focus. I don’t think dreaming of a tree means that I’m going to experience growth in the future. Neither do I imagine that repeatedly dreaming of a brimming wine goblet means that I will be repeatedly drinking red wine in the future (although now I come to think of it…)

There is red wine in store for me.

Dreams and nightmares are, however, excellent fodder for art and stories. If I can hold onto an image long enough to get something down on paper or into type, then I usually find the result oddly pleasing.

The ‘cosmic tree’ was one such image.

It wasn’t mean to look quite so mystical. That result was due to my limitations as an artist. In my mind’s eye, I saw a tree, quite bare of any leaves, with a very clearly defined root system and the night sky in its background. What I managed to draw was something like a branched glowstick, but it looked pretty enough so I left it as it was.

Then later in the week, I was at work and the conversation turned to Google Deep Dream. Deep nightmare would have been a better name for it judging by some of the images that I was shown. It’s a piece of ‘machine dreaming software’ that looks for similarities between an image you upload and images which it has stored in its database. It then morphs the former into the latter in a process called 'inceptionism'. There are shapes and animals and buildings.

And eyes. So many eyes.

So I put my cosmic tree into the dream and waited to see what would happen.

The results was beautifully weird.  More dream than nightmare. It was the fluid dynamics of Van Gogh meeting the surrealism of William Blake’s religious art meeting a Shaun Tan mural meeting Arthur Bocklin’s sacred groves. It’s Pan’s Labyrinth and The White Goddess rolled into one. It’s a vanitas, a memento mori, and a near-death experience.

I saw my tree had morphed into an arboreal/peacock hybrid. The stars had turned into eyes, like the feathers on a peacock’s tail, and, as if the reinforce that image, the tree roots had now sprouted peacock feathers that glowed like iridescent tubers in the dark earth.  It was the myth of Argus Panoptes – slain in a grove, his 100 eyes transposed post-mortem into the tail of a shrieking bird by the goddess, Hera.

And yes, yes, I *know* it’s just an algorithm and probably Google’s way of scoring a lot of free images for their database, but I needed a little weirdness this week (well, good weirdness over bad or weird weirdness), and this delivered magnificently. It wasn’t nightmarish at all.

The only scary thing about it was that the artificial intelligence had dreamed something that I could well have dreamed myself. Now, that's the stuff of nightmares.

Accentuate the positives

I want to write about what is making me feeling good right now. But this is not a “Pollyanna post”.

I don’t like Pollyanna posts or blogs– you know the ones I mean. Pages and pages of unmitigated, manicured cheer and affirmations. Those blogs with posts which are light and bright and white and all the food has been styled, or there are pictures of bedrooms with pristine bedspreads (organic cotton, of course), with votive candles on the bedside table just next to a carefully-constructed stack of books about positivity and wellness. If your blog is a constant stream of in-your-face-Pollyanna-I’m-just-glad-glad-glad-to-be-alive images and text, well, I don’t believe you. You’re not living - you’re constructing life and you’re putting your constructed life out there to show others how superior your way of (constructed) life is. As the hashtag says I’m #notbuyingit.

My bedroom is not a restful sanctuary. Even at its tidiest, there are mismatched sheets and covers; books on/beside/under the bed; shoes lie where I kicked them off when I came in; cables all over the place where I charge my phone and lap-top; cosmetics, creams, lotions and potions on all available surfaces; dust on top of everything, because dusting? Really? who can be bothered? I bet your bedroom looks more like my bedroom. There isn’t a single tulip flung artlessly on a boho comforter and nary a self-help book in among the book clutter.

Now, the Pollyannas among you will clutch your hand-knotted pearls and gasp “How shocking! She must be desperately depressed. A bedroom should be a sanctuary of BEAUTY and REPOSE. Let’s crowdfund her a subscription to Home & Garden, forthwith!"

But here’s the thing: sometimes the bedroom looks like a bedroom. Sometimes it looks like a war between books and bedding with casualties on both sides. Sometimes I’m in an upbeat mood and all is good (and I’m a bit glad, but never quite to Pollyanna extremes) and sometimes life sucks/blows/bites/your oral metaphor of choice.

I like to write about both. Because real life. Not constructed. 

No edited highlights. More the positives accentuated to distinguish them from...everything else.

So here are the my positives:

Sunrise/Sunset

Not the song from Fiddler on the Roof (although I do have a rather good story about that – remind me to tell it sometime), but the actual diurnal events. As it’s winter here, the sun is rising as I am heading to work and then setting as I am coming home. So I’m outside, with my iPhone camera, enjoying the colours, and the cloud patterns, and the messing around with Instagram filters to up the drama a bit. I like the contrast of the natural and the manmade. You will see lamp-posts, powerlines, roads, and other structures in my photos.

Planets

Once the sun has set, and I have put my camera away, I go star-gazing and planet-gazing. There’s a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter this evening. They are less the 3 degrees apart in the Western sky so they will look like one big star. Venus is about 260 million kms away from Earth and Jupiter almost double that, so the fact that I can see them so clearly when I, say…go to put my rubbish in the bins at the end of the day, is incredible to me.I feel a poem coming on. (No, seriously, I do. Watch this space.). Venus is my favourite planet because it looks so glorious in the sky; yellow-white and diamond-sparkly; named after the goddess of wuv, twuw wuv. In reality, it has a surface temperature of over 400C, sulphuric acid clouds, and an atmosphere so dense that if a human were to land there, they’d be crushed to death before they had time to be incinerated or poisoned. There is nothing Pollyanna about Venus. 

Cocktails

Down-to-earth, definitely not celestial, cocktails are good at any time of year, but in the winter they take on a new quality that has to do with coziness, that lovely heaty sensation you get when drinking spirits, and glamour. More often than not, they are  delightful to look at. The Negroni will always be my favourite - it is a song of ice (occasionally hand-cut) and fire (all the red and orange) in a glass. That said, my recent experience with a Honeycomb Old Fashioned has nudged Old Fashioneds into my personal cocktail second place.  For what it’s worth, I don’t food-style – I don’t have props or a light-box or any of the bells and whistles. I usually push any clutter out of the way, but you may sometimes see the corner of a menu or a beer-mat in shot and that’s fine by me. It’s the  real deal, the drink I actually drank – moments after the photograph was taken, that drink was probably gone.

So that’s me at the moment – head in the stars, glass in my hand, mess in the bedroom.

Gladdens the heart. :D

The Turquoise Gate - a dream set down

I can't remember the last time I woke up because I was crying out in a dream. Mostly with dreams I forget. This one is clinging insistently. I decided to draw it & to write it. It's not horror exactly, but there was a sense of menace that was not easily shaken off. It was one of the few times when wished there was someone else in the house with me.

The Turquoise Gate

The gate at the top of the stairs is old.
Turquoise paint peels off the metal.
It's wet from the rain.
I fiddle with the latch & I think I have it closed.
I push to test it but it swings open.
I pull it closed & try again because I know what's coming.
The rain obscures everything in my field of vision. 
The rain bounces off the white marble steps that lead up to the house. 

The rain is a dense white veil. 

I can see nothing.

Then I can. 

The image is blurred but it is there.

A small dark form. 

It's closer than I thought because I didn't see it coming. 

And it's closer now. 

And the latch will not fasten. 

Narrenschiff

Otherwise known as "The Ship of Fools".

This has been a favourite image/conceit of mine for a long time ever since my first encounter with  it in W.H.Auden's Atlantis.

"Only The Ship of Fools is making the journey this year."

I come back to it every time I feel adrift. Now is one of those times.

This is my verse. Not as long as Auden's and, of course, not nearly as elegant.

The Ship of Fools is in dry dock.

They chip the barnacles off the hull.

They tar the wood, replace the nails,

And stitch the rents in all the sails.

 

The Ship of Fools is in dry dock.

When all is done, they let me board.

They float the craft, and hoist the main,

And then we put to sea again.

The shirt off his back. A story.

 

 

This week saw Youth Homelessness Matters Day. I'm not quite sure why it registered with me this year as opposed to other years but it must be a good thing that it is coming more into the public consciousness. The story below is about homelessness and youth, though not a homeless youth as you will see.

 

There’s a man. He’s homeless. I see him most mornings when I walk from the train station to the bus-stop. His territory is the area around the William street shops, across the road from the Wesley church, which is also the area where I have been catching buses for many years.

 

This morning when I saw him he was asleep, sitting upright against the wall of the souvenir shop and, as always, seeing him reminded me of my interaction with him which was over 8 years ago, and this story which I want to tell you now.

A winter evening on William Street. It was windy in the city as it often is. I stood in the queue for the bus, as I often did and still do. There was a stirring in the crowd to the side of me and I turned around. The man was lying on the pavement outside the burger restaurant. One of the many homeless, he was dishevelled, a bit dirty. His eyes were closed and blood pooled out around his head.

People stepped away. Others, having seen what was going on, either gawped at the spreading blood or turned back and continued waiting for the bus. Then a young man stepped out of the crowd. And he was very young, maybe 19 or 20, no older than that. He knelt beside the wounded man and gently shook his shoulder to see if he was awake. I could hear him saying “Are you all right, mate?”

I went to help because my teacher-instinct kicked in. I see a situation that needs managing and if no one else wants to take charge, I’ll do it. I can’t help it. As the young guy cradled the man’s wounded head, we eased him into the recovery position. The blood continued to pour. Later I found out that head-wounds bleed a lot, but in that moment it looked very serious. As I got out my phone and called for an ambulance, the young guy took off his t-shirt and used it to stanch the blood-flow.

Three things I remember about that occasion. The first was the wordless communication between the young guy and me. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. There was a job to be done and we just got on with it. The second was the image of a skinny youth kneeling shirtless in the winter cold, in a pool of blood, tending to someone who was injured. The last was the odd sense that the three of us existed in a bubble of a world – the people who didn’t stop to stare kept on walking; the staff inside the burger restaurant all came and stared through the window, but none of them came out to help or offer the use of a First Aid kit which they must surely have had inside.

The ambulance came eventually. I can’t remember how long it took to get there. The paramedics took over. We stood and watched as they lifted their patient onto the stretcher and got him it into the ambulance. Reality began to hit home when one of the paramedics came over to us. He offered hand-sanitiser and then advised us to look into testing for blood-born diseases as soon as we could. He looked the young guy up and down and then produced a thermal-blanket. Then they left.

And there we were, two strangers standing in the cold street. A school teacher with a blood on her skirt hem; a young guy with a silver thermal blanket where his shirt should have been. Dazed and smelling of hand-sanitiser, we looked at each other.

“I’m Snowy,” he said, and held out his hand.

I shook his hand and gave him my name.

“You did a good thing today, Snowy,” I said.

He smiled.

“Yeah, well, better go and get myself a shirt. Can’t go on the bus like this.”

“Yes, of course.”

“See you then.”

“See you.”

And he walked off.

I think it was a couple of weeks later that I saw the homeless guy again.  He was better, though bandaged.He was asleep in one of his usual spots. As I mentioned above, he is still around to this day. His situation hasn’t changed.

When I see him though, I think about Snowy. Just an ordinary young guy but one who I remember as noble and compassionate in the midst of the indifference crowd. Someone who would literally give the shirt off his back to help a fellow human.

 

Imprimatur

 

I have put some of my art online. Dipping a toe into the critical waters, if you like. I made a conscious decision to start drawing again. I made this decision in January. I went out and bought a sketch pad. I bought pens and pencils. Nothing happened for a while though. The sketch pad sat on my coffee table and was ignored. 

At one stage, I made myself pick it up and I made myself draw. The results were contrived and banal. I dropped it back onto the table and left it there. But one night, when the house was too big, too empty, too quiet for one person, and just being in it felt oppressive, somewhere around midnight I found myself holding a biro and the rejected sketch-pad. The pen moved in the familiar anticlockwise oval that I’ve been sketching for years. Around and around and around – the lines not even, not clear, a blurry edge that becomes a face. I say ‘face’ but there are never any features – these are the old friends who exist in the margins and end-pages of my books. The people of my annotations.

A person’s art is as distinctive as their handwriting. Possibly your art says as much about personality as handwriting is said to do. I wonder what mine says about me. The leitmotifs occur with regularity:

The faceless people.

The classical drapery.

The arches and fan-vaults.

Steps.

Poppy-like flowers and aspidistra-like greenery.

Swirls, spirals, scrolls, volutes, and swashes.

Spheres, cones, pyramids, and boxes.

All manner of strange craft.

Go ahead, analyse me. It’s probably all deeply significant. Or not.

Through the years I have decorated journals and notebooks with these images. As I grew older, they made their presence known in my work diary, on the edges of the minutes of meetings, and in the spaces in seminar handouts. Rarely, however, have they existed in a dedicated space. Neither have they been a focussed task, more a valve to release the pressure for a brain that was elsewhere engaged.

The sudden space and silence that has come into my life seem to have encouraged their renaissance. The florescence into colour has been enabled by the new digital dimension. A sketch becomes a photograph which transforms through applications. I have a pixelated paintbox and a whole range of effects. Finally, I can realise (if that is the word for digital art) the ideas in my head. The technology makes it possible for me to achieve the effects that I intend.

 

 

There’s a certain level of acceptance as well. A colour, selected unintentionally, is allowed to remain. A shadow caused by photography in the wrong light is turned into a feature of the piece. It’s my ‘imperfect stitch’ though not an intentionally introduced flaw, rather an uncorrected error.

 

 

It’s a new thing for me to be relaxed about imperfection. It’s a new thing for me to put my creations out there for other people to see. A couple of samples risked on Instagram brought the approval of actual artists. The virtual imprimatur was unexpected and thrilling.

I may do more of this.

Also, it has brought me back to this blog.