Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
I mis-timed it all and got up at the usual hour. However, I caught up with myself and am sitting at my desk at the usual o’clock. I’m tired though. It was a a restless night, probably brought on by the huge half-gibbon moon, that yesterday glowed red. The news brings word of more misery, more uncertainty and more madness. How to be in all of this, that’s the question. I don’t know, do you?
There’s to be no Saturday morning visits to the coffee shop or cafe this month or next, or possibly even the next. Deadlines loom and I become anxious about missing them. He says that I never have. And he is right but I worry nonetheless. I always have. She used to say that I was a worrier. It touched me that she’d noticed and acknowledged it. How I loved her.
I often try to read things in my dream, letters, books or signs, but it is an impossiblity. I see the marks, the graphics of the words but I cannot decipher them. I appear to accept this, though generally the note, or as in last night’s dream, the hand-written letter is given to me or arrives just before I wake. What is its import? I will never know.
Outside it rains and rains. A mist clouds all. Though according to BBC Weather, the town is due to reach 27C today. That’ll be nice.
I often dream of them. I think I read somewhere that in dreams they are meant to represent the soul. I’m am usually sharing them or moving from or to them. Nothing is ever static. Last night I was in a doorway, then I was up close, feeling and looking intensely at a wall. Stuck. Is that it? Hemmed in? Stone close to my face, like the Rilke poem?
He was scumbling along a pavement at the bottom of Bridge Street, just beyond the Trefechan Bridge. A man who was standing on the corner pointed him out to me. He was huge. A magnificent beast. And yet, there was a vulnerability to him being there, exposed, as he was, too exposed in that urban setting. A car came round the corner and he scampered across the road and into some undergrowth. As I turned to make my way home I could see his form, cast in shadow, making its way along the bridge. Just for that moment, I had forgotten the wind.
The last few days have been trying. Was it the effect of the new moon? Who knows? I’ve felt unstable and out of control. He has been patient and forbearing, while I threw tantrums. Will such whirling ease? Will it calm? All I can do is bring myself to this desk and keep writing. I dreamt of being stuck in a train station during a gas leak, with a phone that didn’t work. Dark tunnels going nowhere faced me at every turn. But I don’t remember panicking. Can I take some comfort from that?
Georges Perec claimed to have remembered every room that he ever slept in. If I put my mind to it, I could probably do the same. I ingest space deeply. Possibly in an attempt to impose some control on it. I certainly do this with hotel rooms. I both love and dislike them. The offer such possibilities and yet are so lacking in home-ness. Which they can, of course, never be. What about their wallpapers, can you remember those?
It is when I am working, that is, when I am in the work that I feel the least stress and anxiety. I am at it. I am doing what I am supposed to be doing and things, though not always being solved, are being dealt with. It is when I am outside of this architecture of productivity that I flail. Like yesterday and like the other weekend mornings when domestic travail insists on precedence.
Learning to yield to what is lifelong. I have moments of it. Moments that are easier when one is away from the humdrum of the everyday. And yet, this is the true arena in which to learn it. Here, plodding along day-by-day, writing. It is without glory, or much intrinsic reward, just a little peace, sometimes at the end of it. A sleep, earned.
I written about the notes before, the post-it notes that he leaves on the stairs for me to find in the wee small hours when I am awake (and invariably fretting) and he is asleep. They are mini pep-talks, expressions of love and a snapshot of the weather. I love them. They are my solace in those dark, solitary hours. I use post-its too, for those thoughts that come post-writing. Yellow squares. Just like in his old office. Yellow squares everywhere.