I keep wondering whether I should post here and at a-n, as I miss my little blogspot-community. Maybe I should just
try it out? What do you think?
Some of you may remember that I posted about Louise Bourgeois
before – I just went to have a look, and burst out laughing: on 22 October 2007 I wrote about seeing her show at Tate Modern and I posted the same pic as
the one chosen (without checking) for my entry on the a-n site a few
days ago!
(Beware if you've read the a-n post - I’ve only changed my text
incrementally):
I had long been looking forward to a rather special
art-outing with a friend, to visit Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed at the Freud Museum. As you know she is one of my favourite
artists and the idea of her work presented in the rooms
where Sigmund Freud lived with his family and analysed patients is tantalizingly
interesting to me. In this environment her work will be charged anew and I
crave to see it.
In her last decade (she died at 98) she
seemed a little husk of a woman, but was still fiercely at work. Memory was her draw-well. Night
after sleepless night that cyclop eye roved back in time. Greedy for their
stir, their prick, the quickening of her, she probed old wounds, laid
fault-lines bare, right ‘till the end.
Well, I
can’t go. Body says no. Another ‘if only’ on the scrapheap. Am a tiny bit
better, and with some help managed this week’s medical appointment, but that’s
it. Thought one morning (you see, I’m finding it hard to let this go) – if I
went, maybe I could rest on Freud’s couch for a few days and then slowly have a
look around. Quite like the idea: during the day I’d be part of the exhibit (I
won’t move much, promise!), and at night, when all is still, I’d hear the
ghosts of Freud and Bourgeois arguing in German and French-tinted whispers
about the place of woman in psychoanalytic theory.
M.E. can
seem like a thief. Its booty is your energy, half a sackful of cognitive
functions and whatever else it can find. Out goes your profession, your social
life, the way you were in the world.
The
strange thing with M.E. is, that outwardly you’re hardly changed at all. I’m a
bit paler, a bit thinner, and not so much in the vertical, but without obvious
marks on my body: no operation scars, no open wounds, no bits missing or
growing where they shouldn’t… But to myself I am changed, physically, mentally.
Looking at this drawing earlier, made in a different context some years ago, I
thought: this is a bit what it feels like, as if one moment I’m looking down at
my feet and all is well, and when I look next there’s an extra one and I have
no idea how or why. And then that becomes normal too and has its own beauty and
you make art from it.
Untitled pencil drawing (2001)
A4
