Sleep-drunk I dance

Now to the art! Although I fell into a tired slump afterwards my artist-self, that part of me that lies down last, felt renewed, refreshed, re-energised on a deep level. That I did not see what I expected turned out to be a good thing, made me think harder. I only know of William Kentridge’s stop-motion animation work, put together from charcoal drawings in a kind of obsessive palimpsest process as he keeps reworking the same image (one per scene), erasing parts, drawing into and over. It’s a fascinating and poignant way to investigate memory: each new image carries within itself the previous, more or less visibly so. The stories he tells are rooted in the history of South Africa (he doesn’t shy away from the fact that as a white South African he is implicated in the country’s apartheid-stained past) – they are dark and unsettling, and the telling is beautiful, haunting, intimate. It moves me.

I am not me, the horse is not mine, his eight screen video-installation in Tate Modern’s Tanks, is very different, huge in scope and scale, much more abstract and impersonal (although he appears in it). The piece, while clearly situated in the Soviet Union in the 1930s under Stalin, has no straightforward narrative thread. I won’t even attempt to describe all its elements (performance, drawing, snippets of film of the time, collage, dance, text, sound), or its scope. The work assails you from all sides, disturbs, disorients; and although there are little breathing spaces when the mood momentarily changes you daren’t relax. This seemingly chaotic but tightly organized sideways look at history, with its mix of the real and the fantastical, makes for a much more pessimistic work, and the viewer can’t ever settle – not least because you can’t revel in (or escape into?) the beauty of the medium. Even if fragments look beautiful, or funny, the ground under your feet keeps shaking because of the execution and context of the piece. I may have forgotten more than I remember, but I can still feels its hysterical, hypnotic grip. In the middle of it all I watched a little girl, 2 – 3 years old, running around in the space, trying to touch the flickering images, and envied her innocence, her lack of knowledge about the world, about what we are capable of.

WK’s talk centered around Gogol’s short story The Nose which has fuelled a multitude of explorations in various media (WK directed Shostakovich’s opera The Nose at the Met/NY and seems to have gone at it with everything he had – drawing and painting, improvisation, performance, writing, said video-installation and the talk itself), each maybe yet another stepping stone in this terrified and terrifying scrutiny of a historical moment. It was demanding, at times over my head, and illuminating, and I wish I’d had the energy to go back and look at the work once more. What proved most meaningful to me in terms of my own, very small-scale, intimate art-practice was how he talked about the absurd as a form of knowledge – at this point my heart started beating faster as I’ve been hesitantly, cautiously thinking about the absurd in relation to a new, also history-based project (part of the Grants for the Arts-application I’ve mentioned before). Maybe now I’ll have the courage to play with something I’ve felt unsure about, while staying unsure about it, if you know what I mean.

So you see how rousing my well-planned outing turned out to be. And what a relief to be able to sink into the auditorium’s deep red plush seats, rest my tired body while my mind tried hard to scale intriguing heights.

PS. Click here to see WK talking very movingly about drawing

Reader, I went there!

Yes, early Sunday afternoon (11/11) I took a taxi to Tate Modern for a talk by William Kentridge whose work I have long admired. I’d booked an electro-scooter – as far as I know Tate Modern and Tate Britain are the only museums in London who provide this invaluable service – it enables me to go independently, no-one needs to push me in my wheelchair. The usual slow-motion flurry of preparations was behind me (for the day itself and those post-outing challenges) and off I was, with my trusted light-weight blanket slung over my shoulders in case horizontality called and no sofa in sight.

I can’t begin to tell you how emotionally charged these rare museum-visits are. Actually, I was close to tears, partly from the excitement of finally going, partly from the need for this to be great, to be memorable, to be worth all the effort before and after, to last me a long while.

Anyway. I went early so I could see WK’s work in the new Tanks, then had an unobtrusive (I hope) lie-down rest on an upholstered bench on the side of one of the other, thankfully dark, installation spaces – need to make it up to the artist another time and study her work…

Both WK’s art and his talk were very different to what I expected, startlingly, thrillingly so, but I’ll leave that for my next post, as I’m slowly re-assembling myself after having been swallowed whole by the subsequent fatigue. (Jonah? Really? Well, if fatigue were a whale I’d say I was currently crawling up its gullet. Unfortunately I don’t seem to ever get further than the beast’s broad tongue before a new wave thrusts me back into its dark and stinky belly.)

Back home later, my day was over before night fell, too exhausted to … anything. For once not much pain, the opposite actually: I could not feel my body, and ended up lying tightly coiled for hours, without moving, body in a knot. (It is funny and a bit disconcerting: since I’ve started writing here about how M.E. affects me I’ve come to observe my sensations closely, make lots of notes. All of a sudden they seem to count for something). Speech was beyond me. A silence spread in my head, heavy and cold like a watery snowball. My eyes seemed yanked open (this kind of fatigue does not easily yield to sleep), stuck in a still gaze into which everything around me fell flat as an image. My brain was stuck too, on an alliteration-loop: null nay not knot not-knot node notification knotification next of kin next of skin no none nay nary, and so on and so on. Is this me? This feels alien and yet I utterly inhabit this state of extreme fatigue – there’s no way around it, just through it.

The limpness of limbs M.E. brings is one thing, but everything else – spirit, purpose, connection, cognition, goes kind of limp too, and for me that’s close to unbearable. Even wanting dies, temporarily.

The chasm between having my whole being animated, challenged, nurtured by my visit to the Tate, and the time after, when fatigue furtively seeps into each and every cell and shuts whole chunks of me down for days on end, is huge. Being in the world for a few hours without sofas in attendance devours a much larger time-period in terms of energy – the days before, during which things need to be put in place for the fallout/after-effects/cessation of activity (unwashed, unkempt, in every way diminished and often painful days from which I slowly surface). And all the while I know that time still flies away from me.

But if I manage it at all it feeds my soul, lifts me out of my daily grind, the difficulties and indignities of life with M.E.: the point is to hold on to the joy of having been out – seen/breathed art for real, and even, very very briefly, chatted to Shelley and her son Ryan – as best, as long I can.

Fleur Ubu, da-da-daughter, flays a dream, a winter dream, wild, proud and proper, such slurry notions, the heat of carpet burns and dizzy turns, she sways, she sways, pray no-one sees the skins she sheds, the hair that curls and coils and catches fire; bones crack like match-sticks, her hungry fingers tear the flesh away – naked, naked she dreams her core

Thick, heavy-textured wool for a bit of fun (polemic überpants?), begun last year, found in a bundle of throw-away pieces and taken up again as the season turned, when I, forgoing subtlety, crocheted a trim, singeing little tale – how far we have not come. Yes, our bodies fail the magic mirror on the wall and in our heads: they sag, slump, assemble bumps and folds and creases. And, but, though, whereas the hair, the hair, our body hair, pinpoint of crisis, crudely charged gender zone, grows rampant: go pluck, shave, shear, razor, laser, erase! Let the ideal ageless maiden make the creep-free grade while the bristly willful one prances in the attic, gathers her years about her, lets it all hang out

Fleur Ubu (2011/12)
Materials: crocheted from wool/mohair/wool mixture
Dimensions: 63 cm x 34 cm

It was touching to receive your comments last week – thank you. There’s something sustaining and transformative in writing and having one’s wounds (in the widest sense) and worries witnessed and acknowledged.

And the art appreciated, of course. Look here – my newest foundling. Four done, three to go! You can begin to see how the shapes evolve from and relate to each other.

I seem to have a fondness for words ending on the suffix ling: changeling (you can see my series here), foundling, fledgling, gosling (oh, I love a gosling, how it feels in my mouth when I say it loud). Not so much because of its diminutive, endearing aspects, but because it denotes beings in process, in growth. The other day I wondered what I would call my M.E.-slammed self – lieling tireling snoozeling dozeling groundling wakeling layling artling… I decided I wasn’t ling-material and was ready to settle for woman who lies (not quite The Spy who came in from the cold, is it?) when the verb’s devilish forking in two directions brought me up short. What at first seemed suitable – after all I am in the horizontal for much of the day -, suddenly flung its second meaning of ‘tell an untruth’ at my supine form. Interesting that this split should disappear once you get to past tense and past perfect (as if looking back could clarify and settle conclusively) – the present tense however catapulted me straight to the bias permeated by government and some of the media where people out of work/on benefits are indiscriminately disdained and distrusted and called scroungers. Sticks and stones, yes, but names too, I say.

Still, I’ll stick with woman who lies for now. During the last year or two I’ve been lying indecorously in all kinds of public places when my energy ran out, mostly on floors (where’s a sofa when you need one?): in a seminar-room, a gallery, a pharmacy, various hospital aisles, the library…

I am fervently hoping that an art-outing will be possible this week-end. Can’t wait, art-starving again, last life-viewing in May! Preparations in full if slow swing, incl. for the ensuing non-days. Is it too much to ask for floor-heating? I dream myself there, now: draped on a bright red divan on rolls, with a purring engine… Eyes wide, ears cocked. Notebook at the ready, drinking it all in.

Next foundling in hand. Lifeline really – so good that I can crochet and write lying down, at least some of the time, and that my artist-self is as upright as can be in the circumstances. Gosling, gosling, gosling

Foundling 6 (2011/12)
Materials: Crocheted from cotton-thread
Dimensions: 19.5 cm x 30 cm

M.E.: While I feel overpoweringly held in place by fatigue, pain can make me weightless, strangely untethered, my own tissue paper effigy, floating under the ceiling. The fatigue I hate with a vengeance, because of the passivity it forces on me – as if I was lying under a sack filled with lead pellets. With the pain I mostly accommodate myself, depending on its severity. Lying immobile, too tired to budge but beyond the worst, I can observe it, register it with interest, esp. as it keeps changing, moving about, playing catch-up (ketchup?) with me. By the time I get home from one of my ‘outings’ I tend to feel battered, with fatigue and pain fighting for dominance. The following day just needs to be gotten through, exhaustion all-encompassing (to myself I call these days-after non-days and then admonish myself – it’s still a day of my life), but the next morning may yield something. Last week, two days after … I was relieved to find on waking that those stings in my skull did not greet me first. I was lying in the dark, still too tired to rise but hopeful. Time to assemble my body into a coherent, functional whole – feel my chest rising and falling, my limbs stirring. Bit like a roll-call. All there. As had. Only a small area, slightly larger than a two pound-coin, at the back of my left hand where it narrows towards the wrist, felt different, unknown: sharply, icily painful, as if my skin was being pulled away from flesh and bones. When after a while I slid my fingers across I was surprised to find my hand’s surface unchanged: soft and smooth, warm to the touch, alive. For a few minutes (after the sharp intake of breath when it first flared up) that acute sensation became my centre (though it didn’t claim me, as the fatigue often does) while the rest of my body was in abeyance, almost an appendage to this point of focus.

When the pain goes I half-expect to find my flesh marked, transformed. I almost want there to be a growth of lichen with its warm tumeric tint; a layer of cool, silvery fish-scales; the glacial burn of chain-mail melting into my skin. But there’s nothing, not a wound, not a bruise, not even the flushed tone of a limb pressed against a mirror in an attempt to slip elsewhere.

Both pain and fatigue affect the perception of my body – and often distort it. While I’m not-up, not-out, I have to wring a little song from my most basic experiences, although often enough there’s nothing but hush. I guess that’s part of the reason why memory has become such an important subject to me – I fall back on myself. It occurs to me that memory is subject to similar distortions: its object at the same time diminished through the distance from now to then, from here to there, and amplified by pulling it close, be it by choice or unwillingly. Peering intensely at this one detail, losing sight of what else there is/was.

I’ve finished another foundling, will post pic next time. For now I leave you with my

Figure with extended buttocks (2004)
Materials: paper and masking tape
Dimensions: 32 cm x 17 cm x 25 cm