Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
It’s a small, modest ambition. I used to have larger ones. Not now. Not now. I work to distract myself from the inevitable, and yet I am not scared of it. In fact I welcome it, whole-heartedly. It’s the living that I struggle with. What to do with all that which I can have no effect on, that I cannot change. That is the struggle. I am trying to learn how to yield, to accept what it is. That is my real life’s work. But how long do I have?
His friend is eighty today, and they are to have lunch together. He told me yesterday that he’s known him sixty years, that’s almost as long as I have been alive. They used to make each other laugh, though less so now. Perhaps that is down to the lack of proximity or age, or both. I am glad that they are still connected though. So much of that has fallen away. Though I shall miss him today.
My dreams do intrigue me, and, on waking, I try to capture their essence before they fade. The last few mornings I’ve been making journeys. Usually in the daylight, though recently, at night too. The landscapes are mostly urban, as it was this morning. I heard music coming from the buildings I passed. I was going to meet DP and yet I was there at his house with P. at the same time as I was journeying there. Time is never linear, everything melds together. I wanted to tell him about the music I’d heard. And now its gone. Gone.
She got them to send me a batch of paper samples. It was a nice thing to do. I felt special. Of course, I cannot decide upon which one without her guidance, but the opportunity to feel them, to test the weight of them and think about how this book is to be constructed is a pleasure. It’s an unknown world to me but I am open to learning. Always.
Another dream. More travelling. I wasn’t alone, there was at least one woman with me. We were pulling our suitcases along a very long and winding path towards an airport. It was light and sunny, and the path was dry and sandy. But there was no airport to be found. We had to turn back, though the path had got narrower and narrower. I wasn’t distressed. There didn’t appear to be any hurry. Later, inside the departure lounge, though in a dream this is debatable, the same woman told me or was it us that she’d sold the contents of her suitcase but intended to buy them back. Was this so that she could travel without it? I don’t know.
He writes in his note that I make him feel safe. I am glad. Though I find it hard to see how this could be so when I am so profoundly unsafe. He says its about the fact that there is no artifice to me, that I am true. I understand that. I would say dependable. I try to be. The rest? I just don’t know. He calms me. Trying to talk me out of this perpetual unravelling. Stop it, he says. Just stop it.
I’ve come a long way with my drawing. I never thought I could do it, was always scared of it. I still am but I do do it. And now I write about doing it. There is pleasure, or at least satisfaction in being in the writing of it, though it is hard. Is it nearly mine? I don’t know. There is some way to go yet.
Woke from another unsettling draam. He’d bought me some fish. It was due to come through the post. I’d felt bad about this. I didn’t want to eat it, after all I was a vegan, but something made me want or was it need it. I was eating some white fish as I woke. I was horrible, it tasted metallic, unhappy, dead.
I walk in the night in search of shadows to draw. I like the closing-in-ness of the dark. Much of the detail is lost. I want lines, simple lines. But, as Berger says, all drawings, and possibly intentions, fail.
Sometimes I catch him midway through a dream. This morning he was both in and out of one. It was something to do with a washing machine cycle and how he had wanted to time his sleeping with it. It was clear and yet it wasn’t. It’s a liminal space, that just-after-dreaming-land. Sometimes I never want to leave it.