Thursday 17 May 2012

Here and there?



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

4 comments:

lasuza said...

Yes, yes. Do blog in both places. Well, at least until I can register on the a-n site. It won't accept me at the moment. I love the three feet - I keep thinking of Murakami when I see this.

Erin Curry said...

I hope it's okay I still answer here for a little while yet, I don't know, this feels like the home I've visited you in for years and I feel somehow shy over there . . .

Something I utterly love about Bourgeois besides her work is watching her in videos, even at 95 and 98 she is in complete command of those around her. Completely certain of her self and her place in the world as if probing and searching all those years the darkest fears of her heart she had emerged triumphant.

I feel for you losing your mobility, the ease of deciding to go someplace in a moments notice, having to more than economize on when you can go, but accept staying where you are if need be and the kind of courage it takes to accept it even if reaching out the door with ones ears or through the window the internet provides. I think too about how the work you've made has an extra gravity to it, as I've visited here again and again, how your words are so often more careful than than others I have the pleasure of reading, my reading has to slow down with it or else I'm finding my eyes have flitted off the sentence before digesting what's there. Your words and comments have sustained me when I've needed it in ways I can't properly express. It would lighten my heart if you were to find a good treatment and move with ease. I feel so lucky to know you here.

frillip moolog: said...

I agree with Erin. Although I do read blogs on a-n I am much more reticent to leave a comment on an a-n blog. Always worried that what I have to say isn't worthy enough.

Marjojo said...

It's good to be in both places. a-n has extended my contacts and artist-readership a bit, which I'm grateful for. This blog here though, being my first one, my first step into the wider virtual world really remains important to me. It's almost something like a first love. Here I've found some really close, important blogger-friends with whom communication has deepened over the years. No way do I want to let that go.
But Kirsty, I'm surprised by your reticence - you've got so much to say/give and worthy isn't the point. You must know how important it is for an artist to get comments, I find it's good to just be generous when I have the energy to read/write.