The Sense of Loss

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A chair in a corner

 acrylic on hardboard, 6.12 x 4.5 cm, c. 2000 

The Sense of Loss

It was cold enough to see your breath billowing before you, with that English dampness that makes the chill so much more acute, and it was nine in the morning when that sort of cold affects one most. A fogginess made the world indistinct.

I was standing outside a furniture store on Essex Road, the sort where they put things out on the pavement for people to inspect: a heavy wardrobe, a forties wash-stand, an oil painting of Princess Diana in a Pre-Raphaelite style, an incomplete set of upholster ed chairs, a standard lamp, it's shade torn, a huge mirror in an elaborate gilt frame. I saw my face. "Hello,"  I said.

Now I was a lawyer, with a large flat and a pension plan, but in my youth I had been a rover, wandering from place to place, a pinball thrown from one temporary state to another, sometimes guided by gravity, sometimes by the will of others, rarely by my own volition.

Now I was another man. I had developed thought patterns, habits of feeling, methods. Had they merely allowed me to avoid the world? Had I become a subject of routines? Or were the routines a liberation, allowing action by delimiting it?

Yet I had not enjoyed my life as a drifter. I had wished to be settled. Ironical that now, when stasis was mine, I should regret the passing of those times. I recalled that back then I could sense very little between myself and something black and unending. But I had felt alive, compelled.

*

I looked at the wardrobe, which was made of oak, with art deco details. I opened the door and saw a low cabinet for shoes, and an urge overcame me -from where I don't know- I climbed into the wardrobe and sat down on the cabinet. The door closed on me. Inside: dark, the smell of furniture polish. I drifted off.

*

"Hey mate, you have to go home now, we're closing shop". The door was open. The street lamps had come on, a yellow light soft through the fog.

Blinking. "Oh, I must have fallen asleep. What time is it?"

"Six o'clock. We're closing up now"

He began to move the things into the shop. I had been asleep for hours. Stiff, cold, bleary, I went on my way. I needed something to eat.

*

Desk, acrylic on hardboard, 6.5 x 9 cm, c. 2000

I was on my own  all the time. Where were my friends? Why were they always away, or impossible to contact? 

So I sat alone in one of the booths in Fratelli's and ordered mushroom soup and spaghetti carbonara and a light Chianti.

There was a article in my pocket which I had intended to read about copyright legislation. The article contained assumptions and even base inaccuracies. Why was it so difficult for anyone to write anything in a newspaper without getting something wrong? I began composing a response to the editor in my head.

My thoughts were broken by the waitress. She held out a saucer with a note on it, "Join us", it said.

*

I looked across the restaurant and saw Alexander Ducloitte, a pianist friend,  dapper, smiling and beckoning. He was with another. I went over.

"Caspasian," declared Ducloitte, "meet Tadeusz Derȩgowski, the painter."

Derȩgowski smiled. We shook hands.  He wore a dark blue suit, cufflinks and a pink tie.  His glossy hair was slicked suavely back. I knew I was in the presence of colossal vanity. I had seen his strange pictures in a magazine: they depicted simple household objects which were imbued with considerable intensity. 

They were talking about money. Derȩgowski was very direct. "So, I hear you are a lawyer, how much do you make?"

 Ducloitte interjected, "Tell him to mind his own business, Caspasian, Derȩgowski's manners are atrocious." 

"It's okay, I said, I am on fifty five k." 

"Oh so, that's about a thousand a week, say seven hundred and fifty after tax," said Derȩgowski, "and you are a lawyer, not exactly the most esteemed profession, let's be frank- 10% must be to pay for the shame of it."

Ducloitte laughed, "not fair at all, not all legal work is quite so very disgraceful." 

"Well, anyway," Derȩgowski  continued, "what I mean to say is that we, who are artists and poets and whose work is taken as a yardstick to judge entire civilisations should be on at least double that, which would be roughly two k a week."

Ducloitte smiled. "No one with sense becomes an artist for the money. Anyway, we are boring Caspasian. Caspasian, how have you been? Here, try some of this, it is quite deliciously...sordid."

 He poured some wine into a glass, a vintage Sauternes: delicate, cool, sweet - and continued - "who are you passing your time with these days?"

"I am really just working..." I did not want to tell Ducloitte how lonely I had been. With a quiver of shame I remembered my sleeping earlier in the wardrobe. 

"Hmm, that sounds a bore," said Ducloite.

*

We finished and went our separate ways, the coldness reduced, the fog diminished.

Wardrobe, acrylic on card, 6.5 x 9 cm, c. 2000

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An episode in a woodland village

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An  Episode in a Woodland Village

At about four in the afternoon my train, already moving at an arthritic pace, stopped completely, and I could see that we were in a clearing with a low wooden station platform; a uniformed man marched along the train blowing a loud whistle.

He yelled something; on seeing my blank expression, he made a stopping gesture with his hands. Out train. 

Puzzled, I stood on the platform examining the timetable: no train out until tomorrow. 

My fellow passengers seemed all to have dispersed with magical speed. Alone, I saw the single road leading, unpaved, to a church, probably the centre of the village. 

Indeed,  it was so. The timber church, in a robust but elegant design, stood on one side, a cemetery next to it. On the other sides were houses, a grocery shop, perhaps a school. The houses were wooden. Many were prettily coloured while others were dilapidated. 

Beyond these buildings stretched forest and there seemed to be no life around except the occasional small grey bird. The air had a certain softness. 

I stood, hapless, with my backpack. 

Then, in a moment of wit, I entered the shop.  Hotel?

Yes. Small hotel not hotel. She made a gesture meaning almost. She walked out of the shop and pointed to a red wooden house with a little sign on which, when I approached, I could see a bed depicted. I knocked on the door.

Silence.

I saw a knob and pulled it. A bell. Then footsteps and a middle aged woman in an apron.

Hello.

Yes.

Hotel?

She made a gesture with her hand like that the shop assistant had, meaning almost.

Ok, I said

Her face was pinkly wholesome. I sensed she was a little shy. Come, she said.

 I went in.

A lithograph of a peroxide Jesus raising his hands in blessing hung near the entrance. 

And to my left was a front room where an old woman slumbered. There were cross stitch images bearing messages on the walls.

The woman pointed to a small sign with room rates. 

Ok, I said. 

She smiled. 

She pointed to a mat and I pulled my boots off. I followed her in my stockinged feet up the stairs.

 The house turned out to be larger than I might have imagined.  All was wooden, occasionally creaking agreeably underfoot.

She pushed open a door. 

My room.

Dinner, she indicated one hour with a finger.

Just me.

A springy bed with a patchwork cover. 

 The view of grey brown trees from the window, their endless growing and dying. My own breathing. The sad feeling that old silent country places have. Evening coming.

I lay down. An hour passed. There was a basin and a jug on a cupboard.

 I washed my face and looked at myself. Oh God,  why am I here? I started downstairs.

The woman appeared at the foot of the stairs. Come, she said, and we entered a parlour with a dining  table, and on the table a tureen and a stack of soup bowls and a basket of bread. There were four place settings with huge silver spoons. On one side sat the old woman. She muttered something but I don't think it was directed at me. 

On another side sat a man perhaps fifty years of age. Good evening, he said. Sit down. We can speak English.

I hope you like soup? My wife makes excellent soup. 

The woman- his wife- stood to serve the thick soup which did indeed smell most deliciously.  I was passed the basket of the heavy black bread. 

She too sat down and we began the soup eating. We ate in a silence broken only by the clink of the gigantic cutlery on the porcelain and the muttering of the old lady in between her slurps.

The man said, are you going to do some walking?

I replied, no, in fact I was on my way to the capital, but the train stopped here.

The man looked at me dismissively. I suppose you aren't interested in walking?

Well, you know, I hadn't thought about it, I hadn't planned to stop here. 

The walking is very fine...and you can also visit the church. It is 17th century.

There was a pause.

We continued with the soup, not speaking.

 I sensed something on my foot. A warm smooth rounded presence that moved from my toe upwards,  pushing a little inside my trouser leg to stroke my calf. I looked over and saw the wife lift her face up from her bowl and wink. 

The husband continued, young people are not interested in anything these days. Just sex and stupid pop music. No morality. 

Oh, I said 

Outside, night fell.

He looked at his soup then bending over continued to eat as if I had proven my inanity with my presence alone and would be better ignored.

The old woman muttered something. then sneezed,  and then began dozing. 

 More, said the wife? pressing my foot with hers under the table, and, without waiting for my response, giving me more soup.

I ate, finishing by wiping the bowl with a piece of bread.

The man sat back, also finished.  If you will excuse me, I must rest. He stood up and left. 

The wife also stood up and cleared the things leaving me and the old dozing woman.

I said, thank you. The woman said nothing, but smiled.

I went up to my room. 

I sat on my bed. Exhaustion.

I lay down.

I began to fall asleep. Then, I heard a faint knocking. I ignored it; it persisted. I went up to the door. I heard the woman. Let me in, she whispered through the door.   No, I can't. I whispered back. I am not like the other young people. I have morals.

I don't know if she understood, but I went back to bed and had a dream in which all the birds in the forest were weeping. 

Morning. I took my bag and went downstairs where I left it near the door.

 On the table in the parlour was cheese and an enamel jug of coffee, a hardboiled egg, and more of the black bread. I sat down to eat. The woman came and stood and watched me with her hands clasped, saying nothing. 

Then I got up.

 I put the necessary payment on the table. 

 Goodbye, I said. The woman didn't reply. 

 I put on my boots and took my bag and made my way to the station.

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Read to the River Writers' group, March, 2021 and The Edinburgh Creative Writers` Club, April 6, 2021

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Looking up a little

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Looking up a little, Rio Vermelho

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A shell on a table

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 A shell on a table

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A blue bouncing ball; a mug's game

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A blue bouncing ball

 

This was bought a few days back in from a vending machine at the ice cream parlour (perhaps to use the word parlour to describe this humble shop is to engage in flattery rather, but it is so evocative that couldn't resist it). 

You put in a 1 Real coin in a little slot, then turn a handle, and a ball, the specifics of which you have no choice over, gently tumbles down a spiral chute to a little shuttered container where you pick it up.

I had rather hoped for a marbled one, but I can't complain: that blue is the purest deepest most delectable Matisse. The ball had, and still has to a lesser degree, an exquisite smell, utterly intoxicating. It also bounces incredibly well.

 I did offer J. one, but he refused, somewhat churlishly, I felt.

*

I began to mess with this in the photo-editor but in the end left it more or less as it came out of the camera. Part of me feels uncomfortable about editing, as if photography should have some rules relating to truthfulness. 

For me, in part, this means that if editing is done that should be apparent, plainly declared in the final piece. There is a responsibility in the artist to be honest. This idea is analogous to that in western theatre design, which eschews illusionism and magic trickery.

This idea derives somewhere from the notion that: truth + goodness +beauty = art. 

But I happily accept that finding proof of these qualities in specific artworks is a mug's game.

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Inspiration, concision

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Flowers

 

 Mostly when I write best I write quite fast, about a thing. Or I tell a story with a very A to Z narrative. Or I just describe things or places or experiences.

 I think the weaker stuff I do involves analysis of  a culture or history and indeed that is why I do very little of it. I am not much of a researcher as I'm too easily distracted.

And I don't care enough about facts anyway. I had, as a child, when relating an event to my parents the tendency to exaggerate incidents at school, and my parents would cross-examine me to discover that really I was melodramatising for sympathy or attention. Getting a reaction was more important than truth. It probably still is, which is why it is best that I focus on trivia or fiction.

My mode of writing is based largely on inspiration, a sudden electrical charge. Or a sense of fun. It's a commonplace that a lot of ideas come when the mind is relaxed and one is engaged in some other, usually undemanding, activity such as bathing, walking to a shop, or driving on a quiet road, and this is often the case for me. 

The ideas that come in those moments are rich or curious, and its always a good idea to note them down. 

I usually write in two stages. The first is exhalation  -brainstorming- when I write down with a minimum of equivocation  the things I want to say. Then usually I wait a few days to return to this with another mental set and greater objectivity for the second stage. This is a sifting and/or embellishment stage. Occasionally there are additional digressive thoughts which I add to the main narrative.

I find having an image to anchor the piece very useful and I like the possibility that the image sets up alternative narrative chains in the readers mind which they can contrast to mine.

I try to write short pieces. Concision is a virtue in art. 

 I'm suspicious of big works of art in all forms. It's rare that they have been properly edited and thus usually contain repetitions, verbosity and sloppy craftsmanship. 

Moreover, bigness in art implies and suggest megalomania on the part of their makers or patrons. Double albums almost always contain filler tracks. Proust needs editing. Let's  not talk about Wagner.

 The cathedrals of England are fabulous exceptions to this rule. 

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Pink spoon on a blue background

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Pink spoon on a blue background

The pink spoon was in a rack in one of the local ice cream places, which I went to with J. 

We agreed that it was the best ice-cream place so far that we had been to, because of the ice-cream itself, although the flavour range is more limited as is the choice of weird sweets, condiments and syrups.

I had a forest fruit ice-cream scoop and one with mint and chocolate in a cone. The forest fruits flavours are glorious- a little sweet but a little acidic too. Wow! The mint chocolate is utterly amazing, the taste sophisticated like an discreet corner of Kensington, and the colour is divine, a visual victory. 

However, the combination was not ideal, the mint chocolate rather overwhelming the forest fruits. I think the solution is either to choose more complementary flavours or to add at least a mini scoop of vanilla as this might act as neutral bridge between contrasting flavours.

J., in the meantime, had found a plastic bowl and in it built a chocolate ice-cream hill from a phenomenal number of scoops. He said he had to try all the different chocolate flavours. He bent over the bowl and, shovelling , ate uninterrupted for thirty minutes to finish.

Anyway, this spoon is one of a sort you can take from a  rack- it`s in a little cellophane envelope, which also contains a serviette, folded very neatly and almost useless. 

Next time I`ll get a spoon in another colour- there are yellows and blues, and maybe even a green. I very much liked the bubble-gum pink, it seemed so fifties, so utterly unselfconscious.

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