The Art of Becoming Unstuck

Haitus

| View from the artist’s studio, Le Cannet, Bonnard, 1945 |

Bonnard’s work seems to suggest a hiatus. All of it: as if something is opening, a gap is appearing, something is forming but who knows what yet. I feel as if this is now, to me. So much is happening and so much of it feels unreadable. Impossible to know. More than usual, and life often feels indecipherable to me.

Setting aside a tendency to look for mystery that I have become familiar with to the point it now almost feels fun again, in a way it may once have, I think, when I was a child, I hope I can let this happen.

Meanwhile I am reading Edward St Aubyn’s Double Bind and finding it wonderful. I am incredulous at the Guardian’s news coverage (today lots of football and stories involving Australia. Ukraine? Russia? No. Not really). I look for something on television to make me laugh. Not a lot. Avoid the Guardian’s culture pages, they read like the inside of a sweaty young man’s sock.

Word

The language of computers is somehow annihilating. Words – viral, web, meme, seem to kill off the thing in the real world. Even ‘web’ seems to have less to do with spiders than a keyboard now.

Regrouping, Reforming

| Street Scene in Paris, Vallotton, 1895 |

Coming out of lock-down means for many people re-grouping: going back to work, or to some other kind of organisation where people need to get along with each other. Many people, I imagine, won’t. They will not put up with what they used to.

And what of the millions of people who had no time working at home, or isolation? Or the people who couldn’t bear who they were isolated with? What happens now?