On strange and elusive territories

Owls, madness and palettes again

The owl print is done, but not dry. Next week I will take the proper photographs and hopefully sell a few. This week, though, I hold the void, the interstitial place between all consuming projects. It is not rest. In some ways, it is where my mind is most busy, the most important space. I read a hand bound journal, crudely made from scrap paper and emphemera, the one I return to for inspiration time and time again when I meet the void. I’ve always kept a visual journal, a private affair, so this isn’t the only book I’ve made, but if I could only keep one, it would be this one. It nature makes it special, an I am gripped with the feeling it is time to make a new journal, one with good varied pages, ones that shape the work even before you start.  I find myself digging through collections of paper worryingly early in the morning, intent on the idea, but that before 11am I realise I have a thousand things to do and no time for this. I flee the studio, an overwhelming bomb site of paper sheets, to try and find some calm in the fields.

Once again, you have greatly misunderstood understood my inner nature. She cried her heart out, and her heart was a dangerous beast. She cried wolf. I will eat you alive

A visual diary is different from a sketchbook. I record the details of life, even when it makes no sense at the time, when it is ugly, brutal in its honestly. It looks inward, not out, it records feelings not form, sometimes words, sometimes pictures and this favourite book is a record of a breakdown; the escalating mania, the fury and transcendence, the slow recovery, a whiplash from  being so very high, to going so very low. I didn’t know it then, but retrospectively, there is a clear narrative, a journey peppered with painful observations and strange stories.

I think of mania as a life experience, akin to a gap year holiday, the sort of one where you do volunteer work in a difficult environment, learn a lot; an experience that gets you some great pictures and makes you a more interesting person, but was really hard to get through; gave you good anecdotes, but bad diarrhoea. A formative experience, but if someone asked you to do it again, you’d look at them like they were trying to blast you into the moon, because it was sort of awful.

If I don’t talk of it much, my madness, it’s not because I’m ashamed of it. I don’t talk about it much the same way I don’t talk about being born with a club foot much, except I am aware I am supposed to feel shame for the former. The trouble with psychosis is there is no common ground for empathy if you’ve not experienced it. Even my manic pages are incomprehensible to me now, and I look at them as I might the published work of another, fantastic works that I do not understand. That’s another thing that sets this journal apart; there’s a distance, I can enjoy it as something that is not quite my own.

People on this world are very obsessed with real, so broken bones and a broken pancreas are real, but broken minds are not, because they don’t live in the body or the brain; minds wander. So I asked her if she was real, as one is advised not to speak to hallucinations, and she looked at me with yellow eyes and says ‘real as money’-and then, ‘that rock is real, but it doesn’t make much impact unless it’s being thrown at you; ideas, however, they’re all in your mind but they change the world’

Word I do not remember writing. Sections of memory being wiped, the book is all I have of that experience, of being so very mad, things lost to me.

The recovery pages make up most the book, a slow deciphering of what it means to lose contact with reality, and how to regain it; how to navigate a world that does not value other ways of being. Endless drawings of waiting rooms, their dusty plants and sagging furniture,  the piecing of shattered fragments together, while still staying true to myself. Pages of maps for navigating the strange and difficult place I inhabited. The final entries are a record of wellness, as perfect an ending as if the whole book had been planned. How to paint a violet, the ordinary happiness of a nice day swimming and catching Pokémon with my young son.

It is time to make another book, because who knows what life I need to document? I have other things to do but they cannot be this important, so they will have to wait.

I find a puddle out in the fields, skimmed with iridescent grease; I hear an eruption of comical noise in the field, the child’s toy wobbling amateur radio call of a solitary lapwing. Things feel better. You can’t usually see the lapwings  hiding in the long grass, but today, I see his crazy flight. The time for large flocks of birds is over; after the winter, the spring. He will build his nest and I will nest paper sheafs of pages, ready to bind. I don’t have the time, but it is necessary. You will have to wait. Next week, I will have things to show you. An owl, a new book, good things I promise. I hope you can bear to wait patiently.

A book review

The night, like madness, is a strange and elusive territory I am prone to wander in, and as such I was given a book the subject. Creating things is hard and to be admired, and I’ve never felt inclined to be a  critic; glasshouses and all that. My son gave his review very succinctly however, saying ‘I think the author has been on very different walks to me, because when he goes out, the hedgerows are full of animals which come out to politely doff their hats, but in all my walks home I’ve only ever seen a fox, and it scared the shit out of me’. He’s not wrong; now the owls have quieted, there are only hedge rustles and the occasional squeaking of waterfowl that need oiling after the twilight settling in to roost.

Nature writing without any animals would be very dull, and I could tolerate a number of sightings being condensed into one walk. The writing seems somehow laboured at the beginning though, as if he were attempting to outwit, rather than captivate, show prowess using long words. He’s described a barn owl as an orb twice in a very short space; I’ve been lucky enough to witness their silent and ghostly flight of a several times and predatorial orb is not it. You know what owl looks like an orb though? This one:

I stick with the book, and find the writing to be more fluid and relaxed later on. I need to write a good newsletter, something profound that will intrigue followers into staying and lure new ones into joining. I’ve written such things before; the trouble is, it was accidental and I don’t know how to do it, especially on a week where I have very little to show, but perhaps even professional writers struggle from time to time with that sort of thing, when pushed on a deadline.

He does describe a grass snake ‘as black as evil’ though. Can we not? Black is not evil. Grass snakes are not evil either. Grass snakes have not decimated an ecosystem or caused a climate catastrophe. Grass snakes just snake about eating small mammals and doing their best. Leave the snakes alone. Leave black alone. Evil only dwells in the hearts of humans.

Good things

I know I said I found a palette I was happy with and I was happy with it till I found this one that is obviously infinitely better. It’s by Aysa Heffernan and if you are struggling to art it’s probably the lack of cheese palettes in your life. If you are not then she makes other good things but I think she’s having a little rest right now so I should probably plug her shop when there’s more in it.

Also, I’ve been trying for a few years to get a stripy hippeastrum and they always seem to come out solid red, but I finally managed it this year and it’s a glorious thing to behold. Last years neglected and starved bulb has also mustered up the worlds tiniest amaryllis bud so I might take a picture of them together if it flowers.

Findings

My son likes to remind me from time to time that no social media will ever be as good as twitter, where Stephen fry followed me, which is true; in fact the truth is I only joined Twitter because Stephen Fry was following everyone back, and one doesn’t let an opportunity like that pass by. Nevertheless I am delighted to see he has a Substack, even though Substack can never reach the heights of very early twitter.

That’s your lot for this week. Please stop by next week so I can show you some exciting new prints I’ve made.