On my wall I've written in black marker across a poster of architecture in the Redland High School for Girls these words by Jenny O'dell:
'The artist creates a structure...that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of familiarity that constantly threaten to close it.'
More accurately, I wrote those words all in capitals:
THE ARTIST CREATES A
STRUCTURE... THAT HOLDS
OPEN A CONTEMPLATIVE SPACE
AGAINST THE PRESSURES
OF FAMILIARITY THAT
CONSTANTLY THREATEN
TO CLOSE IT.
- Jenny O'dell
Today in a brief half hour window between a meeting at the church for A Night of Jubilee and a craft session to make thank-you cards for our supervisors, I lay on my bed and read a few chapters of Autumn by Ali Smith, trying to re-create a reader comment on this blog about summer: “I love feeling tired on a hot summer evening after a day in the sun, putting on a loose T-shirt and comfy underwear, lying on top of crisp, clean sheets with a fan on at the foot of my bed, reading a delicious book.”
In other words trying to establish a contemplative space, to let words roll over me with their un-punctuated narrative (as I have realised is characteristic of Autumn so far - speech is never distinguished from description or thought by quotation marks, everything exists on the same plane of novel-language). The odd thing is, this posture - lying in bed, reading - is essentially the same as what I'd been doing to revise for exams. When books are your examinable medium, you need to read and reread them in preparation, and I spent hours holding them open, mouthing quotes to myself, trying to remember the names of critics.
But the reading I've been doing after exams is different - more contemplative, resisting the familiar pressures of speed, criticism and necessity that accompany reading for revision. I re-cultivated that habit in Amsterdam, where Alex and I lay on the grass outside the museumplein, reading. Alex read Barthes' essays on wrestling and steak and I read The Festival of Insignificance, a not-good book. (But how wonderful to read a not-good book after reading books that I am compelled to insist are good sometimes for the sake of an essay, even when their sentences cause me grief because they are so complicated)
Museumplein was where we spent most of our time, because the idea of Amsterdam was to go and look at art. So we went through the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Stedelijk museum in two days, each so different, but it was the Stedelijk museum which really got to me in that breath taking, heart wringing way art sometimes does. We walked into an exhibition called Studio Drift, and the first piece that caught my eye was a little light, made of a dandelion.
How odd, I thought, I've seen this before.
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But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. ― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
-------------------------------------------------
And in a Proustian madeleine moment, I was transported to a moment in 2015 (or maybe that moment was transported forward) in the Victoria & Albert museum, when Wei Xin, Ellis and I looked at a dandelight. Here it was in front of me, a single dandelight, and then in the next room - miracles upon miracles - it was filled with them.
In another room, there was a tree, with leaves that lit up and glowed in different colours. And the madeleine moment happened again, and suddenly I was alone under that tree in the Armenian Church in 2016, and I'd just finished first year. Grandma was alive, I didn't know Jacob, and I was trying to reconcile myself with myself - who had I become, one year away from home? If I could turn back time, would that moment under that tree be where I'd go? It was a threshold moment, in between travel and stasis, beginnings and endings. But no - I wouldn't lose what I've been given to regain what I've lost. I've been grown so much, blessed beyond measure, felt a trinity of physical, emotional and spiritual sensations that I perhaps imagined in theory but never grasped in reality. Despite the madeleine moment of bringing the past and present together, it also reinforced just how past that time was, that self was. I was different, and I was good. I am different, and that is good.
I realised the untethered feeling I'd been having after exams had ended had been in part because I didn't know who I was without the structure of work/working towards. And the museum reminded me that structure doesn't always have to be structured and progressive - it can be still and gentle, a structure that is contemplative and questioning. Who am I? That 2015 question I still ask in 2018, but it is a relief to realise that I ask it with less need to fix myself to a single answer, but to relish the contemplation (and the ability to contemplate). To admit that to myself broke the hard knot of fear and confusion in me that I'd been carrying around for a little while. I had a little cry over the tree, leaning against the cool white walls of the gallery, and then walked on to see more art.
------------------------------------------------------------
At the English dinner on Thursday, Leo asked me how Amsterdam was.
'Oh, it was great - really cathartic.'
'Ah,' he said, and gave me a funny look.
Amsterdam - catharsis - w e e d, oh dear.
'Not like that.'
(Oh for a void to swallow me)
But the reading I've been doing after exams is different - more contemplative, resisting the familiar pressures of speed, criticism and necessity that accompany reading for revision. I re-cultivated that habit in Amsterdam, where Alex and I lay on the grass outside the museumplein, reading. Alex read Barthes' essays on wrestling and steak and I read The Festival of Insignificance, a not-good book. (But how wonderful to read a not-good book after reading books that I am compelled to insist are good sometimes for the sake of an essay, even when their sentences cause me grief because they are so complicated)
Museumplein was where we spent most of our time, because the idea of Amsterdam was to go and look at art. So we went through the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Stedelijk museum in two days, each so different, but it was the Stedelijk museum which really got to me in that breath taking, heart wringing way art sometimes does. We walked into an exhibition called Studio Drift, and the first piece that caught my eye was a little light, made of a dandelion.
-------------------------------------------------
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. ― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
-------------------------------------------------
And in a Proustian madeleine moment, I was transported to a moment in 2015 (or maybe that moment was transported forward) in the Victoria & Albert museum, when Wei Xin, Ellis and I looked at a dandelight. Here it was in front of me, a single dandelight, and then in the next room - miracles upon miracles - it was filled with them.
In another room, there was a tree, with leaves that lit up and glowed in different colours. And the madeleine moment happened again, and suddenly I was alone under that tree in the Armenian Church in 2016, and I'd just finished first year. Grandma was alive, I didn't know Jacob, and I was trying to reconcile myself with myself - who had I become, one year away from home? If I could turn back time, would that moment under that tree be where I'd go? It was a threshold moment, in between travel and stasis, beginnings and endings. But no - I wouldn't lose what I've been given to regain what I've lost. I've been grown so much, blessed beyond measure, felt a trinity of physical, emotional and spiritual sensations that I perhaps imagined in theory but never grasped in reality. Despite the madeleine moment of bringing the past and present together, it also reinforced just how past that time was, that self was. I was different, and I was good. I am different, and that is good.
I realised the untethered feeling I'd been having after exams had ended had been in part because I didn't know who I was without the structure of work/working towards. And the museum reminded me that structure doesn't always have to be structured and progressive - it can be still and gentle, a structure that is contemplative and questioning. Who am I? That 2015 question I still ask in 2018, but it is a relief to realise that I ask it with less need to fix myself to a single answer, but to relish the contemplation (and the ability to contemplate). To admit that to myself broke the hard knot of fear and confusion in me that I'd been carrying around for a little while. I had a little cry over the tree, leaning against the cool white walls of the gallery, and then walked on to see more art.
------------------------------------------------------------
At the English dinner on Thursday, Leo asked me how Amsterdam was.
'Oh, it was great - really cathartic.'
'Ah,' he said, and gave me a funny look.
Amsterdam - catharsis - w e e d, oh dear.
'Not like that.'
(Oh for a void to swallow me)
