Tuesday December 7th 1999
There’s a thrush in the elm at the top of the garden. I welcome it – hoping for its song next spring.
Another beautiful day – clear, cold blue stretching to a white horizon;
crisp bright sunlight spilling deep shadow. I feel joy in the goldth of leaf-light poised atop bleak-drab, pierced by bird-flit or sky-born black-flap crow-wing, otherwise still in the silent etch-light of the millioned twigged, the sucker-soar of reach sap, enfolding the goldth of the morning.
Wednesday December 7th 2022
In the RA ground floor cafe.
A visit to the Kentridge exhibition at the RA, on Sue R’s recommendation after seeing her at the Carolee Scnhneemann exhibition at the Barbican yesterday.
So writing this I immediately realise I am writing these notes purely for myself with no sense of heritage. These are just working notes for me. I sense an interruption as someone says they’ll sit together at a table nearby. I’m sitting at one end of a foursome and they are sitting at a single twosome so I immediately imagine as I always do that his comment is directed at me. I look up and realise immediately that I know the woman, she was a designer I worked with all those decades ago - probably three. She’s with a guy with a neatly trimmed ginger beard. I don’t say anything. Once I would have done.
The Kentridge exhibition is populated with a substantial number of elderly white patricians, singly or in couples. They are resolute in their movement, rarely step aside, or say thanks if you do. They ‘crowd’ in an entitled way, as if your body shouldn’t occupy your space or to put that more appropriately they are very confident in the space they occupy and exude that confidence in a colonising way. They wear black or dark blue overcoats with short red scarves, or expensive jackets with collars turned up and merino wool scarves knotted at the neck. There are tall patrician women with mesmerising knowledge and talent.
So Kentridge here is appealing to a captive audience. He’s talking to his people. I find the whole thing vaguely off-putting. He’s a fabulous draughtsman but the word ‘cartoonist’ keeps popping into my head. The work also seems monumental in a way I don’t find appealing, huge pen and ink sketches on paper, stop-frame animations projected at enormous scale. They are monumental by a white man.
Some of the exhibits inspire thoughts about my own work.
I think of recording my writing and filming my making and reworking a poem so that a film runs from first thought to final draft. all filmed from the same fixed position - or as near as I can get it.
I first thought of recording the writing and rewriting on paper but then thought, no, I use digital media for almost all my work.1
Then there’s my archive of audio and video and still images to go through and select, order and synchronise to create sequences of memory.
And then there’s the Life Book idea, borrowed from Carolee Schneemann - who had made many in her life, scrapbooks basically. But I have thrown away so many memories. All my old tickets from Venice or Istanbul. So much I have thrown away, sent to the dump. So I’m sad now at its irretrievability.
The couple intrude just below the level of audibility. I’m aware I feel inhibited by her squeaky voice, that seems to be weedling for something or complaining. She is also talking about text and diary as if echoing or prying into my own process here.
I’ll have to go. Find quietness.
I’ve also been thinking about writing a new story. Perhaps a story written as instructions for the self assembly of the shed.2 Self-assembly! The community of selves sing a hymn. I asked myself or felt a daydream question emerging beneath my consciousness beside her baby-doll voice but I cannot now remember what it was saying.
I imagine writing a story as a shed in a raspy woody voice.
But now homework from my MA course: a short story about winning.
I was on my way home from school on the Metro. It was busy on the line heading north. I witnessed two men have a kind of battle. Not a word was spoken but to me it was obvious what happened. It could be accounted for in manuals of Korean martial arts or handbooks of competitive board games.
(Her sibilant baby doll voice hisses through my thoughts.)
The first man got on at the first station. Tall. Perhaps in his sixties. He looks like a schoolteacher. He checked the placement of people around the aisle by the sliding doors and positioned himself in the free space beside the central pole, his back towards it, his left arm, swathed in the metallic texture of his silver anorak, holding the handrail above the open door. Through it we can hear announcements about train services not running from other stations, then advice on the next stations the train will be calling at, and finally a warning that the doors will be closing.
(She is saying ‘I am aware’, ‘like, you know,’ ‘I often’, ‘people doing lots themselves’.)
Just before they do, a second man steps into the carriage through the still open door which hasn’t yet started to close. He is dressed all in black with a black mackintosh and a peaked black hat pulled down almost over his eyes. He stops right in front of the first man in the open doorway. I can see from the look on the first man’s face that he feels his space has been invaded and the second man should move on into the carriage. But he doesn’t. He stays exactly where he is putting pressure, it seems to me, on the first man. The doors begin to close. The man in black has a dark grey rucksack over his shoulder which blocks the door. The door opens again and an announcement asks people to stand clear of the doors. The man in black makes a small adjustment to move his body and the rucksack further into the carriage, but in doing so puts further pressure on the first man’s space and position.
A woman wearing a face mask stands to their right and she is obviously feeling a need to stand away from the two men although she is right up against the glass partition between the doorway and the rest of the carriage.
The doors close.
Then something happens which moves the situation into a new dimension.
The man in black coughs a deep, phlegmy, repeated cough, as if dredging some unpleasant infection from his lungs.
The woman in the mask turns away and moves around the partition.
The first man holds his breath and turns to his right away from the man in black, moving his feet a few inches closer to the woman who turns away again.
The man in black eases a foot forward to vacate the space vacated by the first man’s foot.
The man in black reaches his left arm up to hold the handrail in the roof of the carriage above him, his hand only inches away from the the other man’s hand. As he does so, the man in black turns his back on the first man and stands squarely, centred in front of the double sliding doors of the carriage.
Check.
At the next station the first man has to say ‘Excuse me’ to the man in black, something the man in black did not say on entering the carriage through the sliding double doors and effectively encroaching on the first man’s space.
Checkmate.
On the train from Didcot to Paddington, Saturday December 7th 2010
An idea that has evolved into Poems talking here on A Patch of Sky
See shedstack.substack.com where my alter ego Shedman writes about his life and loves.
Smarties are so photogenic! 😁