Friday Blues

One day he missed a train and he suddenly remembered the story she had told him about Howard Hodgkin: visting Hodgkin's studio, an interviewer once asked the artist if he ever got lonely there, in those stark sourroundings with only a skylight to give a sense of the world outside. Hodgkin coughed and replied something to the effect of, 'Godamn right, it's lonely. It's the loneliest place I know.'







He loved Hodgkin. He loved Hodgkin, first, because of the work and its thickly layered, hungry melancholy. How it always seemed to him brimming over with emotion and luminescent feeling--but he also loved Hodgkin because she was the one to first introduce him to it.




She was the one who had first walked him into New York gallery and said, wait here, stop, look. She was the first one who had waited. Who had taken her time, knowing more than he had. (Though she never would have admitted it. Not then.) She told him, later--much later--about that interviewer's visit to Hodgkin's studio. Then one night as they were lying together in the dark, the clapboard shutters drawn and the fire dying down, she told him that she had a theory. She told him how she thought that it was because Hodgkin--he remembered Hodgkin, didn't he?--could share his paintings that he kept going back to his lonely old studio. That it was possibly the fact that Hodgkin could wrangle something shareable from his loneliness that kept him working.



It was only now, as the rain danced over his face and he watched the departing train, that he understood what she had meant by this. And he wanted, somehow, suddenly to run back to that gallery where she had taken him those many years ago. To challenge his abject, uncertain, and lonely surroundings and steal back that moment from the past. He imagined himself doing it, his heart racing, his shoes getting soaked--running back into that gallery and taking it all back as easily as lifting a frame off the wall. Clutching it to his chest.

When were you happiest?

Drinking bloody marys in New York before an opening.

What is your greatest fear?

Being alone.

Where would you like to live?

London or New York.

When did you last cry, and why?

I cry all the time.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

My work.

What keeps you awake at night?

My work.

How would you like to be remembered?

For my work.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

Keep moving.

--Howard Hodkin in The Guardian 10/01/2009

Confession

This is my father when he was younger than I am now. In England, thinking about America...


Now, I am in America thinking about England. Not for the first time in my life.



When I was a boy, I remember my dad always had this book on his bedside table and I would never miss an opportunity to duck into his room to take a look at it, wondering what the story was, mesmerized by the woman on the cover. Every detail was like a mystery to me, from the lettering to the dark orange of the spine, from that Peguin logo to the vast and rather daunting array of words inside. Those red stockings she's wearing. Also that canvas and those paints she carries with her. But most of all I used to wonder where she was looking and what shw was looking at. Who did she see in that unseen sunset? Always, it made me nervous holding that book in my hands.

Nightbloom

This came to me first in the night, later consolidated by a mid-day soak in the tub...

She had to run. She had to leave without shoes, the socks on her feet making her slide a little across the floor. She found herself crying in the next room because it was all too much. Not sad, mind you, but a relief, now, just to be standing there in the dark, in the quiet again. The room somehow enchanted, the streetlight glittering in her eyes. She wondered if anyone noticed that she had slipped away.



Music from the front room, her own music whispering down the hall. The sounds and the presence of the people she loved and whom she knew loved her equally, unconditionally, inexplicably. It was all too much. This play of love and light in the simplest of small gestures. She crouched down across her bed and hugged all their empty winter coats to her face, inhaling the wintry smell of outdoors. What to do, what to do with the knowledge that she could be bowled over by the slightest of shared things? What to do with the fact her heart trembled whenever anyone left her a handwritten note ('I came by, but you weren't in'; 'You and me: lunch, tommorrow. I've been experimenting with lentil soup'; 'Can I please, please, borrow your cat one day?'; 'Saw this in the jumble sale and thought of you.')?



She could hear laughter now, and dancing. She tried on a coat, Jeremiah's, with the hood, with the whale bone buttons she had, once upon a time, toyed with playfully until he realised what she was doing. She wrapped the coat heavily around herself. Then she went to the window and looked out on the street. She imagined herself slipping down the fire escape, becoming somebody else. A stranger. He would have an invitation in his pocket, something secondhand, her address scrawled there in green ink. He would buzz her front door and be let in by one of her gorgeous notegiving friends. Coming up the stairs, hearing the handful of voices, he would begin to feel slightly awkward, wondering if he should have taken this invitation seriously. Then he would remember the green ink and curiosity would get the better of him. Yes, he will continue the climb up to the fourth floor. He will have brought a present, a little cake bought from a pattisserie that had only just closed for the night but on whose door he had kept knocking, nervously, until the baker had let him in. He carries the cake openly in his hand as somebody, one of her friends, directs him to where he should leave his coat. Then he will apologise profusely, noticing that there is a girl standing there in the dark of the bedroom, maybe crying, maybe not. And he will say her name (all of it, first and last) for the first time. Her name as a question. And she will nod. And he will offer her that little cake, not as a sign of his love (of which he now perhaps feels a glimmer, a foreshadowing pang), but as a sign that he knows just how loved she truly is. Yes, if she were that person, this big-coated boy, she would have done just the same: held the door open, inviting herself back into the light again.

Gardening for Love

I met her, not at her front door, but in her back garden. That was the first thing she taught me: that people could meet like that. That you could get to know people, not in the usual, expected, pre-arranged ways, but spontaneously, creatively. With a sort of calm, summery patience too. I had rung her doorbell and, instead of inviting me in, her voice came hollering out, asking me to meet her around the back of the house. She already had a picnic blanket laid out. A book there, lying on its face. A cup of tea. A half-eaten bowl of salad. My heart was singing. Hello, I said.



She used to write to me, even after she finally invited me inside. Writing to me of all people, just a rather glum postgraduate in art history. I'd find these little epistles hiding around my apartment with my name on them and addressed to 'The Bookshelf, Right Hand Side, Between Van Gogh and Matisse' or 'Atop the Fridge, beside the Apples.' I used to love it, but because she never mentioned writing these letters to me, I never asked her about them. I just wanted her to keep them coming in their secret and furtive way. I wanted her to have a reason to come visit.



So, I never said a word: just collected whatever she wrote me inside an old shoebox, taking it out from time to time. Anyway, seeing her outside, writing with such intent, with such attention, I always felt so desirous of her. Turned on by the scenario. The sexiness of her absorbed in her work. As if she were very far away from me and this vision I was seeing was just some tantalizing dream. As if we were distant lovers with a whole ocean between us.



She would sometimes steal my jacket when I came to visit and slip into the garden again, even if it was raining--something, again, I never bothered to have her explain. It was just one more bizarre, surreal, lovely thing which stoked my desires for her. Only now I wonder if she wasn't actually trying to teach me something, the way she had that first time I met her. Her ongoing lesson. You see, looking back, picturing her there in her garden again, what I see is this startlingly young person aching, just aching for love. And perhaps this was what she was trying to get me, always, to realise. Maybe, this was what she was always trying to teach me...One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't just go out there with her, for god's sake, just throw open her french doors, and dance with her in the rain.

Ms Bronte

Courtesy of 19th Century Lit

What could they be attracted to, I wondered? I was tall and gangly, a plank rather than an hourglass. That I looked smart, not pretty, was something that had been beaten into my head early on. Precocious was the word everyone always used. As well as being that girl who was all but oblivious to the male gaze, I was also that starry-eyed specimen you sometimes found on trains, flipping through the scrappy pages of thin, second hand copies of Françoise Sagan and Anais Nin. Yes, I was the girl who once answered ‘become a French Poet’ when her father asked her what she wanted to do once she graduated high school.

I look at my beaming, innocent face in photos from those years and want to slap it. Braininess was something I’d been told—without anyone actually ever telling me—that I had to live up to. I certainly wouldn’t have looks going for me. None that I could see. Gamine was not yet a word I thought applied. All I knew was that I still looked like a boy from certain angles. That these non-attributes should one day becomes the objects of anyone’s desire was, to me, unthinkable. Even when I started finally getting hips, I was still decided: one could either be well-endowed with boobs or with books, and I thought I knew which way God was prodding me.

Who knew my Bronte-obsessed bookishness could end up being what one boyfriend would later assure me was ‘sexy as fuck’?


Courtesy of Green Card, pt. 1

Rom Com

She told him she didn't like pie, she liked cake, but he tried making her pie, getting all the ingredients wrong anyway, one rainy day, as a suprise. It was the measurements that got him. Too much of this, too little of that. It had gone downhill from there. He didn't work well against the clock. He felt like a mad scientist trying to get love and marriage and happiness just right. Waiting round crazily for that bolt of lightning. Too long, maybe. He ended up throwing the fruit of his efforts away in the rubbish outside before she had a chance to see it. Coming home, she looked around and asked him, 'is something burning?' Her clothes were damp and hanging, her poncho soaked and probably ruined, her face red, her hair in tangles. He wanted to say how pretty he thought she looked like that, but he thought it might upset her--she might take it the wrong way--especially now that she suspected him of burning things.



He was working in a cinema when he met her. She came out into the lobby to say that the picture wasn't in focus and they got talking. He didn't know it, but she still had the ticket from that film and sometimes she wondered why he never suggested, in a sentimental way, that they rent it out, watch it again, knowing it had brought them together. She imagined them wrapping up in a blanket and eating cake together, watching. Something inside of her wanted him to propose they do this together, but she never said so. Sometimes she wondered if he really loved her as much as he said he did. It had been a crap movie anyway.



She also wondered if his obsession with the early 1970s was, at least in part, an excuse to imagine himself in a time and place in which she didn't exist. For this reason, she bought herself a poncho one day--something straight off the cover of that Incredible String Band album he was always going on about, listening to while he cooked and fucking up the recipes because he would get too distracted. She started wearing the poncho as frequently as she could, hoping it would be her ticket into her husband's fantasies.


Image courtesy of Nicholas Haggard

He went to get her the big towel from the bathroom and, after helping her pull her favourite poncho off, he wrapped her up and sat her down in front of the oven (which was still warm from his ill-fated pie-making). As soon as he handed her the cup of tea, which he had already made--which he had managed, surprisingly, to time perfectly with her return home--there was a clap of lightning outside and the electricity in the house fizzled out. The Incredible String Band died out mid-song. He got down and wrapped his arm around her, and she threw the rest of her towel over his shoulder, so that now they could both be under it, beside the big warm oven. Then she started singing right where his music had left off, right where the album had stopped playing. And, very faintly, with yet another clap of lightning, he felt tears welling up in his eyes, making his vision dimly go out of focus, so moved was he that she knew the song by heart.

Won't you lay down dear sister,
Won't you lay and take your rest?
Won't you lay your head upon your saviour's breast?
And I love you, but Jesus loves you the best
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.

Folk Blues

Listening to Bert Jansch and The Incredible String Band and Vashti Bunyan a little too much lately perhaps. Fits of melancholy behind the mask. If I still smoked, I'd be doing so now, on the windowsill, and wishing there were a friend or two here to share my cigarette with. Pretending I was lighting up for them too.

My mother has me stuffing endless envelopes for dog and cat registrations in the county. Thousands, literally thousands. At one point, today I had to escape. So I went out in the on-again off-again drizzle to walk beside the rolling meadow beside the reservoir and have a chat with the deer...All scarved up, it felt a little lonely. But lush in between the breaks of rain. Peaceful. Eminently shareable. I'm glad I thought to take myself out there again.

What else? Lemonade (not the British kind, but organic, fresh-squeezed) is becoming a new habit of mine--this, I offer you, in the way of news...

Also a cat I saw was named Juicy...

Also a sudden desire to send and receive some post that doesn't involve pet licensing. Maybe a nice postcard just to say, take a breath, and that everything will be fine. A hand-squeeze or a knee-squeeze in handwritten ink.

The stony shore beside the restless reservoir (storm clouds rushing overhead) was completely empty of anyone. Even the birds weren't lingering. So I took the oppotunity to hum as many good old outdoor folk songs as I could remember, one or two more loudly than was necessary...One evening fair, as I took the air, by Blackwaterside...

Yellow roses may be all that he can bring you...

Before you go, back to London Town...

Letting my Anglophilia run rife. It looked a little like this, but without the horse. Then again, maybe he was there in spirit. Yes, I'd like to think so.



I'd definitely invite him, as I would you, anytime, around for tea, if I could. Or easily for lemonade. In my own room or rooms or flat or house somewhere, sometime in the hopefully very near future. Sparse furniture and teathings and having to make do with sitting on the floor, or course. I'd like that...Just to make this clear: I'm talking about you now, not the imaginary horse.

There's also a good chance I would put this amazing ISB song on quietly in the background, the first verse of which goes like this (ahem):

Baby come tell me 'bout your treehouse
And your candy-striped pet mouse
And your car that has feet
Hey, come tell me 'bout your eyebrows that meet
And, my baby, won't you tell me 'bout your chilblains
And your right eyeball's growing pains
And your purple tractor that sings
Hey come tell me all of those things