I do not exist

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each
other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

This is Part II of T.S. Eliot's poem, Ash Wednesday (1930) Faber Paperbacks.

The painting is a detail of a recent imaginary portrait.

Petrified Jellyfish

Petrified Jellyfish: a contradiction in terms.

You can find these by the beach near Campeche. When you collect them they are usually quite damp, and they take a couple of weeks to dry out, getting lighter in colour and weight as this happens. They are quite brittle when damp, but as they dry become less easy to break.

I recall as a boy a holiday in Denmark at a beach on Jutland. I remember somehow catching Jellyfish and taking them out of the water , and how they tore in my hands when I did that. I wince with a David Lynchean sense of the pain they might have suffered as their bodies ripped apart: I feel guilt about it now, though I wonder really if jellyfish can feel pain any more than plants can: I am probably being very sentimental.

As a child I sometimes did things merely to experience the moral sentiments that arose as a result of the transgression. I once stole a chocolate bar from a small shop on Seafield Road, Aberdeen, because I wondered what the sensation of guilt would be, and how I would tolerate this. I was cruel to other children too, simply because I might be.

All this serves to illustrate that moral feelings are learnt and not inherent, since I did not grow up in a household or society that accepted theft or cruelty.

Bird Skull

I found this over at Ribeirao on the shore. I don't know the species of bird. Do you?

Shells collect in amazing piles on parts of the shore. They grow oysters there and the water must be very clean. They sell shells in two little shops, though I saw none of a type that would have been new to my collection.

M.

Every Saturday she comes to the window and waves to me: I wave back. Our blocks aren’t that close. We arrange a special time to do this. We’ve been doing it for weeks. I am sort of in love with her, but then not quite. I don’t really know her that well, though there is that comfort you instinctively feel with some people. She is a doctor. She is taller than me and has dark brown hair which is cut short at the shoulder. She is chic: she has a beautiful black cashmere coat with a fur collar. I have seen her shoulder which is very white and coldly perfect. She laughs at my jokes. Sometimes after English classes we go for a glass of beer in a big old sad restaurant. We then go to her bus stop but she doesn’t want me to wait with her. She flirts but she never touches me. I don’t get it. I do not think she knows about the girl I live with but, thinking back, she must have guessed.

The girl I live with doesn’t speak to me though we are supposed to be lovers. I mean, we used to be lovers but the loving stopped so now we just live like shadows sharing the same apartment. I don’t know what’s going on there either: I think we are both ashamed of the fact that we no longer love or even like each other but neither has the guts to face up to it. I suspect she despises me: I no longer surprise her and everything I say is banal or conceited and her dog is suspicious of me though I take it for long walks. I think she blames me for getting mugged and losing her camera. I borrowed her camera one day and lose it to two muggers on the grassy patch only 100 yards from the block. One of them held a knife to my throat: he said “Dają kamerę”: the ground was icy and I slipped and fell to the ground and the dog barked uselessly as they took the camera. She says, “You think you know everything but you don’t.” It’s spring but there is snow outside. It thawed in March but then it snowed again in April. I put the money from my teaching job in a suitcase which was stored in a built in wardrobe in a corridor of the flat. I feel as if I’m drowning. Eventually I save up enough money to buy a flight to Washington.

Concision in Art

"Concision in art is a necessity as well as an elegance; a man who is concise makes you think, a verbose man bores you." -Manet

Discussing concision at length would be ironical, to say the least, but I'll add the following:

1. Lack of concision is a 19th century vice and and 18th century virtue. Industrial production in the 19th century and the inflated romantic ego both militate against concision.

2. Certain media are lean and encourage concision. This goes for performance arts as well as other forms of expression. Opera seems to a real culprit, as does the novel.

3. Concision requires self-assurance: if you are free to be economical, then you must be certain that your audience watches every word (contrast this with Christopher Hitchens advice in "Letters to a Young Contrarian" not to fear becoming a bore). Hence, concision is the virtue of the powerful, or those content with obscurity.

4. There has to be a culturally accessible "key" to unlock the artist's secrets or the work is merely obscure, as with much modern art and poetry.

Illustration - detail from Roundels 13

Trying to Sleep and Learning to Forget.

There you are lying on the bed, unable to sleep, your head is filled with remorse, sadnesses, regrets, baleful memories.

Is it possible to erase memories?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) advocates argue that it is possible to control memory. What you do is try to imagine the thing you are remembering as a sequence of images, like a film. Then you practise speeding up this "film footage" in your mind, viewing it over and over at greater and greater speed until finally it is nothing but a rapid blur and then disappears.

I tried this with the hectoring face of a former boss but I didn't manage to earse them from my mind.

Some advise "just don't think about it" as a method of dealing with unpleasant thoughts, as if experiencing a thought is like seeing something, and all you have to do is turn your head for it not to appear in your minds eye.

I wonder if the people capable of that have ever experienced anything really unpleasant or if they are so simple minded that when they think of one thing, all other thoughts disappear (I recall here F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function)?

Another school of thought (which extends into cognitive psychotherapy) argues in the opposite direction, believing that memories cannot be erased and should be seen as resources. In this school of thought the memory of my appalling boss would be used as the basis of a series of discussions. We would discuss what I might learn about myself from the memory, and how I might gain from the knowledge it brought me about conflict situations, choices, my sense of responsibility to myself and so forth.

I tried reasoning how the memory might be useful to me: a warning about how to stand up to bullies, for instance, but the truth is that I could find no lesson. I dealt with that dreadful woman fairly well: she showed me that having a boss is an appalling business. But it did not really need emphasing - only a masochist could desire a situation where their every movement is clocked, where they are scolded for arriving at their desks a moment late, or where the clothing they wear is monitered.

You don't need to eat shit to know it tastes bad: I resign myself to the accepting the uselessness of that memory and that my tossing and turning are in vain and regret the failure of NLP to have helped me erase it.

What does seem to have happened though is that the memory simply fades. So what I think might help make this fading process more efficient is to avoid the triggers that sustain specific memories, so that more recent experiences and memories can more easily obscure the old.

Kim's Game - work in progress 2

Pen drawing of an aesthete.



Below: Kim's Game Oil on canvas, 59 x 65 cm - stages 4 (above) and 3 (bottom)







For previous versions see:

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/09/kims-game-work-in-progress.html

and

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/08/work-in-progress.html

What has happened? I've cleaned the background, making it more uniform. The broadly triangular shape to the bottom left above he maroon oval has been refined. It reminds me of both a salt cellar and a phallus. The pink oval on the top row has been given a brown edge, which makes it seem 3-dimensional.

I am not sure if making everything sharper was really the right way to go: the gentleness of the previous shapes was part of what was appealing about them. But it is incredibly difficult- impossible, I'd say- to "go back". Paintings become more and more focused, shapes become more and more defined; insistant as you work on them- it is unavoidable.

A picture which was meant to become suggestive becomes less is as it is elaborated. And, so it seems to me, that I am best at artwork which denies equivocation.

*

I am good at ink drawing because this technique has a knife-edge quality about it: there is no half-way point between failure and success. If it is good it is excellent; if not, the drawing goes directly into the bin. It isn't really possible to correct an ink drawing because you cannot erase the ink.

Oil painting of the sort above is difficult for a personality such as mine, because oil paint allows endless tampering: it can be scraped off, overpainted or wiped away, and I am unable to resist the temptation to make endless the little corrections which seem necessary but actually serve merely to reduce the force of the image.

My happiest style is akin to the quip, to an aphorism, or a rebuke. It denies regret. My paintings are like over-elaborated jokes, they are laboured: they miss the point of a quip which lies in its rapidity and surprise in a given context and not necessarily in the profundity of what is said.

Lost is concision, that much underrated quality in art. And critical here is the notion of "the gesture". There are oil painters for whom "the gesture" is an intrinsic to their vocabulary- Kokoschka springs to mind- but even so this element is less apparent in his painting than in his drawings and is more prevalant still among the draughtsmen such as Kubin, Belloc, Lear and Beerbohm who are my true companions: ironists and satirists mainly.

This sort of work is sarcastic and slight: it has wit, but sometimes lacks substance and one can become trapped in irony and that is why I shall continue to try to make oil painting work for me.