Unbroken life

Everything feels the same but it’s different. Our house has had holes in the floor. Big chunks gouged out of it; rubble went in the black-top wheelie bin outside making it heavy to roll on to the street for collection. And yet, the floor is now smooth. Sanded down and varnished a rosewood colour, so that it is whole. Simply beautiful. No scarring. You wouldn’t have known we’d been through months of walking around damp wood, being careful not to tread on splinters because a mouse had chewed through a pipe (probably to sharpen its teeth) causing water damage to the woodwork beneath our feet. Having knowledge of something bad happening somewhere invisible scares me.

*

I have been on holiday to Japan. The itinerary was already planned, and we had bought our JR Passes in advance, so that we could shinkansen-hop all over the long island. Of course, I loved it, but it’s as if I’m still there – or never went there in the first place – I dreamt it all up. A few days before my flight I caught covid. They were the worst symptoms I’d ever had from the virus; it was my fourth time having it, even though I’ve been vaxxed three times already. I quarantined myself in my fiancée’s family flat in London which was empty. I ate crisps, cheese toasties and drank fluids, drifting in and out of sleep for three solid days. 

While I slept, I became covered in sweat, unbeknownst to me, so that when I awoke, I’d be lying in a puddle the shape of my own body. I would run one foot over the other and the sole would return soaked in cold water produced by me. I knew I was not well, but I had to be on that flight to Japan; there was the important death anniversary of my mother’s, which I couldn’t miss. I would wake up from my feverish sleeps in that foreign bed and doze like an inanimate thing. A slab of something half-alive, like one of the sarsen stones at Stonehenge. An unnatural blue hue was percolating through the blinds, and I could hear noises from the street, distant sirens, the shunt of trains, the soundscape of a city, and I believed for a moment before I fell back to sleep that I was in Tokyo. 

Soon enough I was. How I’d got there was a blur. I exited the airport and headed directly to a friend’s empty apartment in Tokyo, riding aboard a doll’s house aesthetic monorail with dusty pink carriage compartments. I sweated and slept in her bed too. The hue of the morning light was paler but still blue. The noise of the city dropped to a pregnant hum at nightfall, as if God the DJ had lowered the levels on the mixing board. Before I holed-up in her empty home, I had stocked up on crisps, onigiri and strawberry milk from the Seven-Eleven down the street. Days passed. I tested negative. Finally, I arrived in Japan.

It's like a fiction that I’ve visited some of these places because at the time I was sleepwalking. I would take naps at odd hours during the day. Covid made my mind foggy and I was always tired. I remember when I was in New York I was taken to a photo aura fortune teller in China Town. She took one look at my photo and said I was FOGGY: No direction, don’t know what you want, unsure of everything. I nodded like a child who'd had something explained to them they still couldn't comprehend. That was the last time I felt this foggy.

Where did we go? Kamakura with the large-scale statue of the Buddha Daibutsu, gazing serenely across the tops of tourists and buildings towards the glistening ocean. The weather turned lovely and summery, it was like July in England, but it was only April in Japan and the winds could pick and become blustery. We went to Izu Peninsula over winding roads through the verdant foothills of Mount Fuji. I peered into a bubbling pool of water, crystal clear, the colour of acrylic turquoise. Tiny fish darted to and fro across its shimmering mirror-like surface.

I remember fragments – not fully formed memories – but maybe that’s the way it is with holidays. I ate so much delicious food, there was never a moment I felt hunger. We stayed in Yamazaki and climbed a mountain where a famous battle had taken placed between the fighting samurai of feudal Japan. Up this mountain I made my first and only sighting of the uguisu (Japanese bush warbler) whose song had been following us up and down the country.

There was a daytrip to Kyoto where we met up with friends who were staying in the country for a sabbatical. My mother’s husband joined us here after having completed a walk over an ancient passageway through the mountains connecting the old capital Kyoto to Tokyo. We toasted his achievement with a clink of glasses, ‘Kampai!’ Then feasted in a brightly lit fast-food gyoza and ramen bar and drank our fill of tankards of ice-cold beer. The gyoza were pan-fried and crispy, the ramen broth salty and delicious. 

I was enjoying everything but also flagging from the virus. I held on tightly to every moment of happiness, but they would invariably melt away in my fog. Just before I fell asleep in a futon, a creeping worry would lodge itself that I’d wake up the next day in London.

*

The most unbelievable part of our trip was visiting the art island, Naoshima, set in the dazzling blue Seto Seas. To travel there we crossed a gigantic red railway bridge and caught a ferry. What can I say? My experience of the Benesse Art Site was wholly uplifting. I hadn’t expected the contemporary art to be so good.

We hired electric bicycles to explore the island, going up and down steep slopes cutting through luscious scenery. We got tickets to the Art House Project, a collection of old disused Japanese houses which had been renovated by architects in collaboration with site-specific artists, all set within a living village community. I walked into an unassuming house marked on the guide map, and inside it was as elegant as Ryoanji Temple with its famed zen garden. Huge cascading waterfall ink paintings were hung from the ceiling in a dimly lit room with lacquered floorboards, which had been polished to a shine to make it look like the surface of still water. 

We had a timed entry ticket to a place called Minamidera (the old site of a shrine) which was an artwork by the light artist James Turrell. Here I had my “Rothko Moment”. We entered a room that was pitch black. You slide your hands against the wall to feel your way to a seat, as the gentle voice of a museum guide truly guides you in. Then as a group we sat down and waited in silence. Minutes pass. There is absolutely no light. You can wave your hand in front of your face and not see where it is. The museum guide had told us all outside to turn off our phones properly (actually switched off, which I’m sure is a profound experience in itself, for some). 

We wait in silence for something to happen. After five minutes which feels like an eternity a hint of a white box appears in front of us. It is a soft white glow, like the ghost of a blank canvas floating in the near distance. The image grows stronger until we can definitely see a square of white at the end of the room. The guide re-enters the space and tells us in his sotto voice that this light has been here all along. Nothing has changed but our vision. Our perception of the space has changed but not the space itself. 

He tells us we can stand up and walk around the room now, as our eyes have adjusted, we shouldn’t fall over. We gather ourselves and wander about and walk towards the light. When I get there, I put my hand out to touch its surface but there’s nothing there. It’s pure air and I cry. The delight moves me to tears. I feel so stupid and worldly at the same time. This conceptual art has made me realise that if I just sit still and be quiet for once the world will reveal itself to me. I shall be awed. I feel shame and joy course through me, as I wipe away tears before anyone notices, even though they won’t because I’m crying inside a dark box.

*

I come back to myself in my Woolwich sitting room. Things have changed, so I must have gone away. The seasons have moved on and it’s May. The unknown plants on the windowsill have sprouted magenta pink flowers. The holes in my floor are fixed. I’ve recovered from covid, even though I’m still weakened by it. I have memories of a conceptual art island floating in the misty seas of Japan. I’ll believe that I’ve come back from a honeymoon to an unbroken life. 

Dance dance dance

I have been learning of late. Inexorably learning, which is why I haven’t been writing. I have been too slapped in the face by Learning New Things that I’ve not been able to write about it. I am sure everyone experiences this, in some way, sometimes your duty to [write/reflect/make sense of things] gets overtaken by your need to exist and live a normal-paced life.

I have learned of a dancer named Martha Graham who probably invented contemporary dance. She was an all-out American who was born in the Victorian era and lived through the 1960’s Free Love movement and them went on to teach the likes of Madonna. She basically lived for a century and her autobiography about dance called Blood Memory was so damn dramatic, emboldened and atavistic that I had to keep putting it down on the coffee table to take a breather.

Martha Graham dropped quotes like this, quite easily:

"A dancer dies twice — once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful."

“All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.”

“The only sin is mediocrity.”

So, I’ve started working at a dance school. I can watch students do mid-air acrobatics and a hundred push-ups before I’ve finished my morning cup of coffee. Dancers are something else. They have honed self-discipline by working-out (they call it “conditioning”) every day, but not pushing themselves too far to avoid injury. They have hyper-spatial awareness because in a room full of swinging galloping bodies no one ever slams into one another, nor even grazes another's hair by accident. They have immense physical control because I’ve learned from watching ballet that it’s actually the slower movements which are the hardest, rather than the back flips (who’d have thought?) Not shaking when you extend a leg way above your head like some slow-motion bucking horse is the height of balletic beauty.

Energy as you enter a space

Performative qualities

Musicality

These are all new concepts to me. I just didn’t know how hard it was to become a top dancer, and as a commoner, I do think it’s crazy. You work yourself so hard and then your career is so short lived. But can you imagine being able to fling yourself in the air with abandon and to sail through it with grace? No way. 

Also, all of the classes are done with live musicians. Pianists and bongo players. When I watch a class through the studio windows the rhythm being beat out by the instruments and the stamping of the choreography is felt and seen. The musicians work with the dancers to play with tempo and carefully arrange different movements. For me it’s the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing Live Art. Living art? Because the music is materialising through the dancers’ bodies, or the dancers’ movements allow the music to take on a new life. Music and dance are inextricable, and they likely co-evolved together.

There’s a dance paradox, I think, which is that dance is universal. It’s probably the most universal physical activity. Children do it automatically when they hear something they groove to, and it’s more easy to grasp the concept of dancing than say, football. But then, if you come to a conservatoire you see dance as the most elite, peculiar and physically demanding activity people have ever done. So, what’s this disconnect between dance like we do it in our knickers in the bedroom Vs. dance as it’s shown on stage at Sadler’s Wells? 

Martha Graham

Berlin

19/5/22

Arrived late at night. Got on the S-bahn to meet Annina in Neukölln. I joined her and her choir (or who were left of them) sitting on the street outside a Lotto drinking store-bought beers. It was hot in the city and the tarmac still retained the warmth of the sun. Hearing Annina dip in and out of German to speak to me and her friends was a joy. She had bought me a bottle of pilsner with a bottle-top you pop open. After you finish drinking you should leave the empty beer bottle next to a bin, so that someone can come and collect it and get 8 cents from the state. ‘Never throw a beer bottle away into the bin Rimi, or else they can’t get recycled.’

20/5/22

We woke up in the spare bedroom of her cousin’s. It had a high ceiling with long white curtains that let the light in softly; outside I could see green treetops and blue sky and hear the hum of the city. We went to a coffee bar called Bona. The interior was decorated with wheat sheafs hanging from the ceiling, bare lightbulbs and raw wood. As with all of Berlin, their practical carefree attitude and cobbled-together cool aesthetic makes everything look interesting while simultaneously being nothing special. We shared a pecorino salami croissant and chimichurri avocado bagel, got two black coffees and talked about our parents’ generation. 

Next, Annina took me to a large disused airfield called Tempelhof nearby. She had brought her roller-skates and began drifting along the smooth tarmac of the air strip, while I mounted her bicycle which was too high for me and pedalled up and down. I returned to find Annina had done a backward somersault after crashing into a skater girl. We went back to Wedding where she lives and dropped off my bags and had a shower. For lunch Annina cooked me white asparagus with brown butter – crunchy, fried, wholesome – and freshly boiled potatoes.

I put her arm into a makeshift sling then we left the flat to go to Alte Nationalgalerie to catch a Paul Gaugin exhibition. There was surprisingly little of the modernist painter’s works on display. A few paintings of the sensual forms and vivid tropical colours of the Pacific, but really the exhibition was dealing with the controversy of the character. Gaugin was a French colonist who promoted an idealised version of himself as a native while continuously marrying underage indigenous girls (his first wife was 13, the second was 14 years old), contracting syphilis, becoming badly in debt and then dying. There were pieces by Polynesian heritage artists which off-set the white man’s cultivated image of Tahiti as a “primitive, pleasure-laden land”; contemporary video footage of women on the island remaining voiceless and a political poem that I liked called Guys Like Gaugin by Selina Tusitala Marsh.

We walked around the plaza of Museum Island with the newly built Homboldt Palace and heard the Berlin Cathedral bells tolling. There was going to be a storm, so we headed to where Annina works at the Kino Arsenal (an independent cinema) to watch a Frederick Wiseman retrospective. I met her cute colleagues who gave us bottled beers from behind the box office window. Before the 4-hour film was set to start we ran across the road to get the best fast-food burgers I’ve ever eaten from Burgermeister. The film called Belfast, Maine was a documentary detailing all the elements of an American town: church, school, healthcare, hunting, factory work, social care. It was a bleak and at times poignant long-ass film.

21/5/22

We woke up late and went downstairs to get food for breakfast. There is a fresh produce store on the corner of the street called Katofferladen, which translates to Potato Shop. We bought a punnet of strawberries, two sticks of rhubarb and homemade jam. Down the street there was a bakery where we got white crusty bread rolls, croissants and a pastry filled with spinach and cheese: Breakfast of Champions.

We visited a flea market where the stalls were crammed full of inexpensive wares. Mangled screwdrivers, phone chargers, chipped china. I rifled through some boxes as is my want and got two porcelain Chinese soup spoons for a Euro. Annina foraged a wonky golden candlestick and a beaten-up bell with stars like asterisks carved onto its body for me. It threatened to rain, so we ducked into a fancy Turkish café where we had sweet snacks and coffees and talked about what we feared the most.

It never did rain. The stall-owners were packing up and Annina bought a ship in a bottle and a vase with a broken lip that had been glued back together. We walked home stopping off at a well-stocked Asian supermarket where I bought soba noodles to make for our lunch. Annina read me an interview with Frederick Wiseman and I watched her 17-minute documentary she had made about Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Georgia. A quiet, thoughtful, melancholic film. 

We walked through two large parks near her house: Goethe and Reheberge. Animals were being kept in the latter – I got to see wild boars! Dark and bristly fur, their bodies densely compact tapering down to tiny trotters, keeping themselves very clean. One was making satisfied grunting noises as it rubbed up against a wooden post to have a scratch. Small white tusks were visible above articulated snouts, a little longer than a pig’s and seemingly more dexterous. The three boars were happily rooting around and throwing glances at us humans who were watching them, while in the far distance we could all hear the thudding bass of a techno gig. The park has a beautiful lake with a fake beach on the other side. We sat overlooking the lake in the setting sun and talked about cultural differences in expressing emotion, as a businessman stripped off to have a swim in the lake.

We walked to Moabit where Annina’s friend Clara lives. Clara had invited us to a dinner party where she'd made the most delicious Syrian food. Stuffed roasted peppers, aubergines, courgettes with rice and meat, a rich red sauce, white creamed veg all served with helpings of olives, dill and lemon juice. The guests brought an interesting mix of heritages to the table I’d never experienced before. One girl was Jewish and had returned home to Berlin after living in Colombia for many years. An Iranian couple where the wife had lived in Tehran and Toronto. We spoke on the topic of strangers. How in some places strangers are suspicious or people in exile, while in some they’re welcomed or even seen as courageous for having boldly set out to find their own path. I realised that in Japanese there is no word for "stranger" only "someone you don’t know", apparently this is also the case in Farsi.

22/5/22

I packed my hold-all bag and wrapped my trinkets from the flea market in dirty socks. We had delicious breakfast and coffee again, then headed out to walk to Gesundbrunnen where I would catch my train to the airport. We stopped off at the Silent Green and enjoyed the summery garden there. We walked along the river and had an ice coffee in a café next to the flat where Annina used lived. At the station I bought currywurst sausages with a white bread roll and said ‘so long’ to my friend. It had been a real holiday from my norm and I'd been happy to see the city opening up post-Covid. I’d be visiting again while Annina is set to come to London in June. Good times ahead.

Middle class adult

 

I have spent so much time with myself these last couple of days, culminating in me thinking, ‘wow I am a full-time middle-class adult’. There have been moments when I’ve doubted myself, but really this is what I am. I have no qualms, I like who I am, but it is disquieting to catch your own reflection fragmented through many forms of media. You must know what I mean.

I have started to make sourdough. Not only does my housemate have his own bubbling culture, which I easily scooped off to make my own sourdough baby, but I have many people in my close circle / rule of six menagerie, who would let me do the same.  I am very grateful and inundated with tips. Sourdough is a bastard but it’s also a baby; making me set an alarm on my phone for half hour intervals, when it needs feeding or folding.

I started to research ethical home appliances. If you’d care to know Electrolux have this campaign called the Better Living Program with a concept-trailer which is basically aimed entirely at me. I love it, obviously. Although I don’t get why in the non-Anglo-American sites this scheme of machines is called The Green Collection and not the Better Living Program. I wondered why we were so lifestyle aspirational that we needed a continuous verb to bolster my purchase of a vacuum cleaner. Other countries are clearly on board with greener living, easy peasy – costs more but it’s cleaner – but for me, I need to know that what I’m doing is making my life “better”.

I watched a BBC Four documentary. It was about Black British artists and why they’re overlooked or get pigeon-holed, to be forgotten and side-lined by the art world. I did not know that the first Black Female artist to win the Turner Prize happened in 2017, Lubaina Himid, who was 65 at the time and had been making art for decades. Imagine, doing your thing for 30 years and then being the first of your kind to win the thing. I sat drinking my wine, shaking my head.

 

Simon's speakers

I took photographs of Simon’s speakers, which are downstairs in our basement/living room. They are very beautiful objects that he handcrafted with his friend, John, who is a carpenter. While I photographed them; getting the right set-up and focussing in on the warm wood grain, I was totally reminded of the Oceanic art-objects I pored over in my master’s degree. Specifically, malanggan from New Ireland, which are elaborately carved wooden beings that house spirits. These are ephemera that also act as agents in Melanesian society, which is what also made me think of the speakers. I mean, they’re beautifully crafted objects that house the spirit of music, and what has more agency than that? 

Simon’s speakers are what give life to parties – without them people wouldn’t want to stay downstairs, into the small hours of the morning. Whenever he plays his vinyl the housemates congregate to listen, unwittingly sometimes yet the timbre and resonance hold us there. While I took close-ups of Simon's speakers I kept in mind the story of makers in Inuit society, who extended their personhood into art-objects as they crafted them, so that the maker and the made are part of the same thing. If you didn’t do that, they said, the object would never become true.

Simon said this about making his speakers

It took me about five or six years to get all the parts, from eBay – searching online; the drivers are from America. The design is from the 1960s, these loudspeakers were the ones used for public speaking. Lots of people get the parts and make their own speakers. Once we got everything (just before my thirtieth birthday) we decided to build them. Building took about two weeks – it was quick because John ran out of space in his workshop, so for a time the speakers lived in my clinic. My patients would ask, ‘What’s that?’ when they came in to see me.

The wood is walnut and valchromat, an environmentally friendly MDF that’s coloured all the way through. Ours is yellow, so we put wood oil on it to enhance the colour – at first, we used the wrong type of oil so it went really brown, looked like a turd. We had to sand it back down and then this time we used yellow oil and it worked. It wasn’t my first choice to go for these expensive woods, and the walnut weighs a tonne, so I can’t carry the speakers around like a sound system, but John wanted to got for the aesthetic choice. Even though the speakers are really heavy they’re beautiful.

They became the object they wanted to be, I guess. They’re never leaving this room though – we got them down the stairs with about an inch to spare.

HEROINESWAVE EXHIBITION // The Enclosed Garden

I am part of an online feminist exhibition called The Enclosed Garden. It is a very intricately crafted website, so take a  s l o w  look around.

My essay and audio piece which is about alienation is called "Seeds Of" and is in Room 2.

Shadows

I am interested in shadows because they are the presence of something absent, which is light. I have in my time taken some good pictures of shadows. I can’t find them right now, but they exist digitally backed-up in an archive I’ll never dig through, probably with a filename composed of a string of numbers.

The other thing about shadows is that they represent the present. (I’m talking about time this time, not light.) The reason I’ve got lots of photos of shadows (somewhere) is because I couldn’t capture them any way else. A shadow doesn’t hang about you have to either capture it, or let it go. There’s the third option of appreciating it, but then you try telling someone about a good shadow. It’s a bit like describing cloud formations to someone who wasn’t there – it looked like an elephant or the boot of Italy; its not that interesting or impressive without the morphed cloud.

This reminded me of cognitive evolution and the origins of art. When did humans start producing art? Great question – no definitive answer. Something like 300-100,000 years ago. There was this all-encompassing theory that academics called the Palaeolithic Cognitive Revolution, which occurred at this time; when homo sapiens developed tool-making techniques, started burying their dead, evolved speech and began making art.

One of the questions that jumped out at me was what on earth possesses a being to make a living breathing thing you can see into a two-dimensional image?

It’s true when I see a dog, I love them and would play with them for hours, but I would never have thought to draw one. Why would I? I can’t draw shit and I’d much rather make the most of my time with a dog. However, there are some people in society who have talent and may be able to draw the dog pretty well. Even if you had the talent, what would it really take to make that leap of inspiration: to see the dog then draw the dog… it had to happen for the first time somewhere, but how?

Another thing learnt from my archaeology and anthropology degree was that most things that survive in the archaeological record are the rarest things. Isn’t that ironic? The majority of stuff made or used by humans is lost over time because it’s either rubbish i.e. detritus (like our takeaway containers), or not important enough to keep (like the stuff in our shed.) Also, they’ve got to last! You can try and hold on to your favourite blanket, but that’ll be gone in 300 years because it’s a dirty piece of fabric. So basically, barley anything survives from 300,000 years ago.

Can you imagine? No, because it’s too darn long ago. Could a rock survive that long, maybe, if it wasn’t being bashed against another rock for 1,000 years and turned into sand. It’s kind of stupid thinking about stuff that far back, but people do and Good on ‘em! What great guys and if you want to do some extra reading go for it here and here. (Although I’ve lost the reference to whatever I’m about to say, so you can take it or leave it.)

We have some cave paintings that survive from that far back, but they were painted on the inside of deep cave systems and that’s why they’re still intact. There must have been other art made by probably not-so-good artists drawn on the outer side of rocks and carved into tree trunks. All washed away or decomposed. Like artists today who make sketches to practise, there would have been the Palaeolithic equivalent of sketching going on on organic materials.

Maybe some being saw a shadow on the sand and quickly sketched around it

TA-DA-

Could it be the first ever 2-D representation of something in the world?

Capturing a moment to record it; to possess it; when the figure who’s shadow it was moved away, was that the leap in human cognition which made it possible to create art?

Yayoi and Georgiana

Took myself on an art day today. Woke myself up early for a Saturday, the earliest in a long while. Made myself a milky instant coffee with a sturdy helping of sugar and then out the door in to a murky grey morn, it’s supposed to be summer.

I woke up fully on the train. Saturday morning carriage still surprisingly filled with hipsters holding caffeinated drinks in flimsy white cups.

The queue when I get there is massive, it’s about an hour and half wait until the front and it’s only just gone 10:00. What a sensationalist exhibition, or populist because it’s free but I don't mind because I have been wanting to see this. Yayoi Kusama that Japanese New Yorker internationally famous pointillist feminist artist, the one I saw one of the best retrospectives of at the Tate a few year’s back is back in London, with some of her walk-in pieces. I had never been to the Victoria Miro gallery and I had wanted to ever since I lived on the boat. What’s an hour and a half on a Saturday morning when there’s nothing else to do but wait? 

The grey clouds had broken apart and turned into moving wisps. Seagulls dipped round and round about a tall skyscraper. 

A well-to-do family joined the queue behind me, they were fine apart from the son who must be at whatever parents call ‘a difficult age’ because he couldn't see the point of waiting for something (anything I assume) nor did he like art. As the line progressed I saw taxi cabs pull up and drop well-coiffed males with expensive sunglasses who looked perplexed at the idea of waiting. And aghast tanned belles who strutted up and down the queue surveying it whilst on FaceTime whilst taking a selfie. 

Once inside it was over in a flash. Upstairs there’s a walk-in box room with mirrored surfaces that contain some of the light-up pumpkin installations. They are not beautiful but striking and have that hallucinogenic appearance about them especially when seen close-up from inside a dark reflective box, but as I say, it was over in a flash - 20 seconds to be exact - because of crowd management. Apparently someone had fallen backward and smashed one of the pumpkins during a busy time (insert joke about the band here) whilst taking a selfie, amazing, so the staff had to limit numbers and duration inside the walk-in box. 

But there was more. The all-mirrored and slightly larger walk-in box downstairs which held a revolving flashing chandelier was more alluring. The infinite depth of reflections, you know that trick of facing a mirror to a mirror and getting an optical illusion happened, so the artwork called Chandelier of Grief sort of felt like that. Eternally spinning and superficial aka. ennui. 

In the outdoor garden a pond displayed an older installation by Yayoi, hundreds of silver orbs floating on the surface of the water called Narcissus Garden. It was all very her and I admired the space. Victoria Miro blows Damien Hirst’s new gallery out the water for sure. It’s the elegant use of light and form, concrete doesn’t have to always look like slabs. There’s this long narrow staircase wide enough for two slender maidens to ascend up like waifs, to hit a window pane. Even mortal me can walk up the stairs as through a tunnel to a bright surface. Then sky.

I headed on the 243 towards central London, the red buses completely inadequate for the heat. Sure you can open a window here and there but the seat covers are made of what looks like industrial velvet and you feel suffocated just looking at them. 

Dogs die in hot cars, is a thought. 

Ding Ding! off the bus at Somerset House which holds the Courtauld Gallery. Another space I’d never been to for no good reason at all. I’d been hankering to see the artworks of this Victorian spirit medium called Georgiana Houghton, because frankly they looked weird as hell. 

Ironically she drew most of her paintings about God: the father, son and the holy spirit mainly. White feathery veils were the spirit and the tiny dots something else holy, I remember reading, on the back of one her horrifically detailed paintings. These looked like the product of someone who was not only mad but concentrating really hard on being mad - but she wasn’t remember - because she was a Victorian who conversed with ghosts.

Spindly incessant lines evolving in to swirls

that erupt in to bloom.

Brash irrational colours 

all sensing impending doom.

No salvation

The artist said her hands were controlled by dead spirits like that of Titian’s or St. Luke the Apostle’s, it wasn’t her painting but these dead people and God using her body as a vessel. And you know what, the exactitude of her fine lines and fastidiousness of her scribbles do look like they were made in a trance state. Sure, these even reminded me of heinously close-up variations of Aboriginal DreamTime paintings which were often produced in ritual trance sessions. Yet Georgiana’s paintings were gory and fragile. Precious and atrocious. A bit sick to be honest.

But if you see one of her drawings you’ll think it’s a lot more modern than it is, even the curator when he got shown one of Georgiana’s paintings at first thought it was from the psychedelic period in art i.e. the 60’s. The cool thing is spirit medium or not, this Victorian woman artist managed to preempt the Abstract movement in art by about 40 years, Georgiana’s stuff in the Victorian time looked a bit like a completely-bat-shit Miro before Surrealism had even been invented. So how does that happen? 

That’s what I was interested by, anyway. This glitch in time in something so boringly linear as art history.

Nothing like it had been seen in the sitting rooms of Victorian houses or imaginations before. Yes, even at a time when seances, ouija boards, magicians like Houdini, and Arthur Conan Doyle type stories were prevalent. Even at a time when machines seemed to be superseding the human race à la Industrial Revolution with steam power and the light bulb. Even when Charles Dickens’ most popular Christmas tale conflated Pagan spirits with Yuletide morals in a Christmas Carol, did the people of Victorian England have the capacity yet to cope with the avant garde. It was way too early, far too avant.

Her downfall?

She puts on an exhibition of all her best work at a prestigious and probably pretentious art gallery in Bond Street in the 1870’s and it was a successful spectacle but ruined her financially. After that she didn’t get another chance and was forgotten about until now when post-modern art critics are looking at Victorian Georgiana’s spiritualist pieces with newfound admiration.

The Little Man In The Lights

The first time I learnt her surname was from the back of an identity card for the Film Biennial. That’s where they had met. Story checks out I thought as I hunkered down in to her wicker armchair shoes off legs swinging idly. I watched Annina move around the room silently like an insect with a headache whilst Layla got (un)dressed in to clean clothes. She had stayed the night on the flat floor on a semi-thin mattress and her knees were well-swollen in the morning; we had now completed the hunt for aspirin for Annina’s aching head. It was Sunday.

All our clothes stank from the night before of stale cigarette smoke. The bars in Berlin still allow people to light cigarettes indoors, and what’s nice is that most seem to be smoking and enjoying it rather than vaping in consternation. I felt more relaxed there than here, maybe because of the lack of language skills I possess around Germans (less pressure to be understood) or maybe because they do generally have a more relaxed attitude about city stuff. They ride a lot more bikes and everything is graffitied but runs on time. That’s cool efficiency for you: muck without stress. Amen.

Saturday we had been on a hunt for sauerkraut. Annina, my ever dear host and mythical shapeshifting cat moved to Berlin months ago and yet still we are on the hunt for sauerkraut. I can’t pronounce any of the stations or street names so have to make up an anglicised-equivalent to etch a trace of where we have wandered in memory. Once at Hamburger Hobanof [sic.] art gallery each of us wondered about the Manifesto exhibition with most sides agreeing afterward that it was post-ironic-pop-art-wank that involved Cate Blanchett thirteen times. I thought it was worthy because it was funny, Annina thought it was a bit much and if “new companion” Layla had been given the task to take it of leave she would have left it. Not a barge pole.

We traversed a street called Shoos de Yunga [sic.] where a traditional restaurant supposedly lay but it was closed because it was the weekend; and the story of its name goes something like a young man who sold or cobbled shoes did something with the shoes and that was it. The morning after when Annina had told me this shoe-based history she had felt sickly and I was still blurry from the beers the night before that we had drunk amply from the bottle in a bar that Layla called Bar (Untitled Two). 

I found the sauerkraut of my dreams! Jumping off and on U-bahn carriages - an urgent blinking red light like eyelids - snap to. This one word I’d learnt: ampere menschen (the little man in the lights).

One, two, three weeks on and the memory is so disparate. It has been squidged inelegantly between northern parts of England, fireplaces and chocolate eggs. Easter has come and gone and although it is a completely forgettable holiday for me each year, these last two I have been spoilt by a newfound family. I have to apologise to Annina for being so tardy in my writings and being so ineffectual in my rantings. Yesterday I celebrated 6 months of having stayed in one place, yipee! with my lodgemum whom everyone tells me to call my landlady but I think that’s not what she is because she’s more that that. The wise words from this woman were, ‘You should know it goes by in an instant.’ It rings in my ears as love laced with fear. This goes by in an instant. O no.

My favourite part is Prince Lower Berg [sic.] which is where Annina grew up and it feels somehow familiar, perhaps my subconscious pretends to be her in Berlin to steadfast itself. That’s where we found the sauerkraut and after the slap-up meal us three drank smooth beers in Bar (Untitled). The super-bar-man served us by sitting at our table and chatting whilst not really taking our orders but occasionally returning full-handed with delicious pitchers. There's old moustachioed men in the corner laughing and bellowing and sometimes sniffling; smoking cigarettes that looked like they had no filters and one big dog and a jaunty navy blue cap atop a brush of hair. Some women joined them and they sloshed about baring teeth to laugh and cry and the night had set in and I was still highly dubious of this thing called Spring. 

They serve a tofu sandwich. Shops are closed on Sundays. Emergency pharmacists speak through locked glass doors (port holes to peer through at little cuts and bruises). Bikes are ridden everywhere, cycle lanes on pavements.

Whilst scoffing gherkins and pre-cooked wieners larking about on the streets in the nighttime we heard a bicycle bell and then something - boof - turn around to see Layla on the floor she'd been crashed in to by a cyclist who looked like, it doesn’t matter what he looked like, he stood up apologising to tough sweet Layla who had cut her hand. The sausages were poking out from between his spokes. No severe damage done, at least. The next morning after the successful aspirin hunt and the unsuccessful bandaging of her hand the pair took me to a covered market filled with East Londoners serving me eggs benedict. I must have had 5 or 6 oysters, Annina examined, tasted and deliberated over some chocolate and we had coffees that sparked thoughts off about the future. 

Still Winter / Contemplating Displacement / Thinking of Growing Up

After Christmas you forget how long winter lasts; but it is a long, laborious, languorous time. No more falling leaves just frost then wetness that is harsh and a misery to deal with. I keep getting minor chilblains in my toes because my shoes are too thin and the heating inside buildings is too high and outside we all know it is cold. Outside. It’s out there. Where we all want to avoid, for now, until the light lasts longer and we start to stretch not huddle, shout not cusp.

People I work with are ill. I got ill but then kept on getting better to a point of getting worse again. Old age must feel the worst in the cold. I don’t know how they do it when I, in my late-twenties, feel lethargy upon waking up. Get up. I have to coax myself up and then I fall back asleep again like a flimsy blade of grass. Four alarms I have to set for myself, on Fridays I set seven because the time I have to technically be up by is 6:30 but I could push it back to 6:50. Any time past 7 is a disaster. But then again, I don’t have an active life style.

I work on a computer interacting with a cursor that floats around the screen all day. It’s all virtual anyway. Facebook’s started greeting me with ‘Good Morning’ and I can’t tell it to go away. I tap some buttons and wait for things to load or happen or both and then it becomes darker and the shadows become masses and it’s night. I go home the same way I came. I actually don’t consider this drudgery, which might sound surprising to an alien, but it's true. I want to be doing this. I picked it and worked hard to get it. But the actions really don’t imply the feeling. I don’t have to scrape my knuckles on hard surfaces to get a wage, I don’t even have to move off my squashy bum bar the times I get up to make some instant coffee. There are cats in the office and I produce comedy. What’s the big fuss in all that? Nothing. Nada. Nout.

I don’t want life to disappear though and for me to fade away. But I do want to be worn out and characterful like a familiar leather case - a doctor’s bag, a kid’s favourite satchel. The essential pair of shoes. I want to be one of those all-purpose all-weather handy things that granny couldn’t live without. Best thing since sliced bread etc. etc. I want to be creased and smudged by love, and sometimes dropped but I’m washable and sturdy, I’ll survive. There’s been talk of displacement theory around me.

Paul told me on a hangover that I was feeling this way because ‘You're paying back for all the fun that you borrowed last night.’ Borrowed, I guess, from the alcohol (fairy). It could be true. It could be true I pondered because I tend to do the same in the limited space I inhabit. I started to use a new glass recently for the water by my bed. It is a special grey glass made by Iittala. By making this change I had to move the coaster that used to lie beneath the old glass because the old glass left marks, my Iittala does not. The coaster now takes up the same space as my necklace and the two together on one surface is too crowded and so the necklace had to go. I’ve folded it in tissue paper and I will take it all the way to Richmond on a train. That particular necklace has had its time on my bedside table, I have more in other places, and I’m sure it’ll resurface some other time. And it's not forgotten just displaced by the movement of other things. A reshuffle.

Friends are the same. Ones I used to see all the time have become ones I see occasionally. Ones whom I never had the chance to see are steadily creeping their way back to me. But most notably, the ones I didn’t even know existed I see quite often now. More often than not. I check my online bank account more than I watch YouTube videos. I boil the kettle more than I open a can of beer. I sit around thinking a lot more than I do running around. All a steady shift and displacement of things. Not noticeable enough to be genuinely perturbed by, but you have an inkling later, retrospectively: a rupture.

Ash Dome by David Nash