| Oxford, the interior of Christ Church Cathedral, looking past the crossing and organ screen into the chancel, JMW Turner, 1798 |
I was speaking to a friend over the weekend and we started talking about a particular kind of deafness: a lack of listening in the world. At the time I wasn’t sure how I would describe this, and still I’m not sure. The best I can come up with is to think about the way I hear the building, the hall or church, when I listen to organ music. Or the way I hear the history of the USA when I listen to the outcome of the recent election.
It’s a way of accounting for effects, I suppose, and it’s how I listen to people. I listen out for space, time and intensity. Sometimes I miss the obvious things. I can never listen closely enough, but sometimes I need to listen distantly, as if I’m on the very edge of what I can hear. Wherever I listen from, I hear something different.
Considering separations can be a helpful way of thinking about many forms of alienation: experiences that leave us frightened, angry or ashamed. We might separate or be separated from who or what we feel offers us safety; we might feel separated from justice; we may feel unacceptable and unlovable.
The UK government’s simple message of ‘Stay Home’ is direct and clear … until the language around it changes, confusions and contradictions arise, and when we read or listen to the central message of ‘Stay Home’ we struggle to think of any real person saying it. Maybe in America, but not in Britain. ‘Stay home’ is a catchy phrase without a real author, or speaker. It is not ‘stay at home’.
A phrase associated with safety needs to be associated with a person – even a fictional character like the Green Cross man who used to lead public road-safety campaigns. When the author disappears, so does accountability and a sense of care. ‘Stay home’ sounds like a careless mistake, a word left out.
A mistake, not a misstep, which is another word slipping more frequently into everyday use, separated from any sense of … why? A mistake involves a far more severe judgement over something that has happened than a ‘misstep’.
| La Grande Jatte, Seurat, 1884: A Thought of the Future |
If you find a way of thinking about something it can be rather like finding the right sized envelope for a letter. Your thoughts become a message to someone or something who might understand you. Before that your thoughts might have an alarming tendency to race around in your head causing chaos, anxiety.
Finding that way of thinking means finding that addressee. I suppose when I think about things I might be writing to Bion, Bowen, Freud, Kafka, Reeves, or Van Gogh. Or I might say Athens, Bauhaus, Library, Paris. Places, institutions, these count just as much, if they can be found. If there’s a thought that I might, in my thoughts, be understood then there’s someone to read my letter.
Once there’s a way of thinking about something it feels as if life can go on. Traumatic memories are ones frozen out of thought. The future becomes unthinkable, and perhaps a fantasy or a vast frightening space, when the past is unreadable.
My memories seem to be appearing unexpectedly these days, and not as pictures to begin with. Most seem to start as uncertain sensations that I notice in their intensity rather than in their form, whether that would be a picture or a sound, or a feeling of touching something. I assume they are memories because they seem, eventually, to suggest something of the past – but I also feel they are ahead of me, whatever these things are that I am becoming aware of me.
Something about this picture by Vilhelm Hammershøi reminds me of what I am trying to describe here. His work is enigmatic. I’d describe it as ‘open’, though, rather than ‘closed’, which is how I often experience enigmatic art. Usually the enigma, the secret, is so apparent in its absence that there is little to be said. We all know there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s trumpeting. Hammershøi seems less keen than many to betray his secrets. You might simply say there’s a room full of possibility in this painting, even if we can only see a part of it, and the dust it contains. His ghosts may be ghosts of the future, things he is in touch with but which he hasn’t known yet.
I was reading the novel N.P. by Banana Yoshimoto and my mind seemed to find something helpful in it. She writes about those moments of intensity, surprises, shocks, that escape most writers.
I’m in the slipstream of something happening in front of me, like a comet and I am in the tail. I have no idea what is happening ahead of me, although someone like Freud might have spoken about it as unconscious, and others as something magical, and others still as something already written that I am simply following.
None of these things I shall ever know apart from in the way they come to me, which I imagine is probably delayed – from the face of the comet, where I am not, to the tail, where I am. Hang on.
If I’m visiting somebody I’m calling on them. I might be taking a trip, an excursion, or I might be working. Somebody might visit me. It could be anybody. A visit is always temporary and this painting by Félix Vallotton is an essay in impermanence. The liaison we see taking place might be between two people who with a private passion for each other, who may have known each other for a long time; or between two near-strangers. In either case perhaps this is the only place they can be together. A visit. They stand on something that looks close to a fault line and the way ahead is barred. To the right there is something exotic the; to the left there is something dark and shadowy – and these thoughts come just from reading the floor coverings. Ahead of them, of course, is an open door way (also barred). They do not look young. This is a liaison, a time that might be repeated, but not so many times. It’s a time that cannot last.
Rembrandt painted many images of himself from when he was a young man until shortly before his death in his sixties. I find these some of the strangest images of a person recording himself. I wonder what it was like for him as an old man looking at how he had noticed himself in his twenties? It feels as if he discovered an answer to: what is the meaning of life?
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn – Self-Portrait With Dishevelled Hair, 1628
He realised that it’s an answer, not a question. It’s an answer to another question: what’s the effect of life? The effect of life, an effect of life, is to drive us to look for meaning. A lot of the time this is a terrible distraction from the over-arching, and ever-dawning realisation, as life goes on, that we can know nothing at all for certain.
Life might be better served by paying attention and gathering what’s happening than breaking away to dream up explanations. Conclusions. I don’t see anything final in Rembrandt’s self portraits. There is a looking on, perhaps a looking after, in the sense of some kind of care, and there is a deep sense of presence. These are not surface pictures, even though they concentrate so profoundly on his appearance; nor do they only go deep. These are pictures from the outside and from the inside at the same time, which might also go on to suggest something to us about what life means.
