| The Water Lilies: The Two Willows, Claude Monet, 1915-26 |
Last winter, in early January, I found myself in Paris. Now I find myself living in Oxford. By chance I visited the Monet exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie: The Water Lilies. I almost didn’t go, having set my mind on the Bacon show at the Pompidou Centre, or just on walking about the city, which as ever was having its way with my heart.
Now, in Oxford, I find another city which, with its hawkishness (something shared with Paris), its money (the same) and its brutal divisions (more of the same), opens itself to me like a work of art. I love this honesty which is usually so absent in life. Far too often I have found kindness and care to simply be covers for the darkest kinds of folly and violence. It’s better to be able to sense it all, the whole kernel of a place, on one walk about. Or as with a person, on one encounter. Freud said not to forget first impressions, which is probably a good way of trusting them.
I have found too many places and people like Boris Johnson: a hearty scruffiness on top of an angry and frightened heap, a way with language that flashes only to give to an impoverished sense of surface-clinging.
In Oxford, as with that last trip to Paris, I notice something about water. This is one wet place. Everything seems to be under its influence: rainwater, the unendingness of mists and fogs, and rivers and canals that suggest those divisions I mentioned before.
The academics go about their work like agents of estates, literary or scientific ones. That’s not to say this is a place lacking writers or scientists. There may be a few. But Oxford’s a place that makes money, which is something an author rarely sees.
Keats’ tombstone reads: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. You may find him mentioned here, in Oxford.
I’m looking at the light fall on the wall opposite me. It feels like something out of time, in me. It looks like a familiar patch of light.
Yesterday I watched some old cine-films of members of my family and me from fifty years ago. I still feel the way that we moved and the intensity, but only if I don’t reach for it. It has to come to me, helped by music on this occasion.
What am I saying?
What a strange gift from my mother and her camera, no more secret.
| We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold, Jeremy Deller, 2013 |
After we have realised something about ourselves we feel different. Our sense of who we are changes. Time, rhythm and intensity feel different to us. Our proprioception changes as we find our place in the world, physically, emotionally: a relationship to the ground beneath our feet, and to who or what we love or hate.
When I work with people, especially using EMDR, I find it so important to try and recognise how different life feels for them after treatment without lapsing into treating this change as something metaphorical, or purely psychical.
It’s a real thing. We feel ourselves occupy space differently, less affected by past experiences of space.
There is nothing, of course, peculiar, about DH Lawrence having worked in Croydon Library, or Wilfred Bion having thought his thoughts in Croydon, or Camille Pissarro painting streets in Norwood and Sydenham, or Vincent Van Gogh living in Canterbury (or for that matter his describing falling asleep under a tree on the outskirts of Canterbury) – apart from how peculiar it felt to realise these things when I discovered them, while I was living in those places. I grew up just outside Croydon, and have lived for many years in Canterbury. Finding these things out brought them oddly close to home: they landed, peculiarly. They stopped being instances of other people living out their great lives in the world and somehow located them in relation to me.
Such is narcissism. As long as one remains with the odd feeling a lot can grow out of these wayward discoveries. Thriving on the energy of a supposed connection, an imaginary one, can be a driving force like no other. Reading a deeper significance is a problem. As soon as ‘meaning’ creeps in, and a movement occurs from the imagination to what might be real – what something means; its ‘real’ value – we take a step towards a very unpleasant form of control. The relationship was meant to be, and so this means something special for me … so it might go.
The peculiar feeling of coincidence means nothing, but can make much happen. It’s like the energy from a smile meant fo somebody else. These coincidences I have described, the events they contain were lived out by people who no doubt had someone special in mind: a reader, a looker, a thinker, a lover. There’s no doubt love and meaning in these events.
