Sunday 15th November 2015
G mentions what he had been through and how amazingly it opened up lots of new opportunities. He suffered a severe physical breakdown with alcohol abuse, falling downstairs and breaking his shoulder, having kidney and liver problems. A real mess but he was unconscious through most of it, so doesn’t remember how traumatic it all was, especially for his family.
He’s made an amazing recovery but now his partner C is suffering with cervical cancer. She had clear smears but started bleeding and told M when they were out for a walk one day. So M said you must get that checked out. She’s having chemotherapy, with radio therapy to follow.
She’s a bit manic, on steroids and she says she had a vision of a finished piece of work that she just has to do. She was dozing when she became aware of herself lying on the bed, and saw a flash of brilliant light, followed by a continuous flow of images of different designs and patterns.
She accepts this was like an acid trip, triggered by the chemo. But the image of the finished piece – like a solid circular glass column with intersecting dots and lines, based around a grid – so seized her, she said ‘I just had to get on and start working on it straight away.’
And this liberated her to work on something she wanted to do, to stop preparing something for a local exhibition (‘you always have to think what people will want’) and to work on something for herself, purely what she wanted to do.
She is manic but in positive, creative way that’s probably good for her. M and V talked as we were leaving about C needing to take it easy, not to do so much, to let her body rest.
But part of me thought, she’s feeling the compulsion to create. Isn’t that good?
Monday 15th November 2021
I’ve just been very struck by a comment from Adele in The Guardian. Her new album arose from a long period of introspection and commitment to sitting with uncomfortable feelings. ‘Whenever I noticed how I was feeling I would sit down and I would sit with it,’ she said.
And another quote from Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? One of the characters is remembering keeping notes: ‘my only aim was to get the image down clearly and simply so that I would later remember how it felt.’
And now. An attempt.
Don’t tense yourself; take it easy.
Look at the flowers there in that bowl.
These lines are from a poem by Anthony Hecht,1 Behold the Lilies of the Field2 which seems to me to refer to this process or ‘sitting with’. One critic said the poem’s about torture - which it is, the horrific torture of Roman emperor Valerian at the hands of the Persian emperor Shapur I.
But I also read it as being about a therapy session. It’s about holding the gaze.
Look at the flowers.
Yes. I am looking. I wish I could be like them.
Amongst other things, Hecht said:
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch’s brew.
Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.
It doesn’t seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.
Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.3
Video and photo of teamLab Planets, Tokyo ©2025 John Davies
In her Anthony Hecht: a review essay, Victoria recently described him as ‘a much more rebarbative and unusual poet than I had realised.’
The Hudson Review, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1961), pp. 368-370 Via jstor.org
I don’t know exactly where these quotations come from so I hope they are genuine. I think I trawled them off the internet without noting the sources.