You always came. Speaking of each us with pride. Not always understanding but present, always present. A good man, a dutiful father. Often mischievous. With eyes that twinkled.
I am awry. From whom shall I seek approval now? To whom shall I show my triumphs, small though they are?
I miss you.
Christopher John Bell 24.01.1939 – 20.02.2014
(photograph: Mo Henderson)
I am beginning the draft of the introduction to my thesis. I wonder if other artists meet the same wall of resistance when trying to formulate their ideas and ways of working through written language – so much fearfulness and expectation of judgement. I wish is to make the writing of my thesis as creative as making work. It has to be so, to be a valid form of expression. I am certain that much of my fear is based on an assumption that one has to write ‘differently’ for a research project and as a result I strap myself up into a rigid, uncompromising, unbreathing straight-jacket. Ted Hughes in his gentle book, Poetry in the Making (2008) advises teachers that ‘their words should be not “How to write” but “How to try to say what you really mean”. I hug such simplicity to my chest.
As with Raymond Carver’s short story, from which this title comes, my current research is looking into the possibility that it is often not what is actually said between lovers that carries the real emotional meaning and resonance but what happens in the spaces that occur between their words. I am interested in how to translate these pauses, these silences into physical matter.
