ellen bell

I stole a quick walk in the afternoon after writing and drawing most of the morning. The mist was still heavy, the colour of the day distinctly gloomy. But the smells were gorgeous. Leaf mould, damp earth, moist air – I think I could even smell the mist. They filled me up and my head spun with unbidden memories of kicking my wellied feet in drifts of fallen leaves, of the smoky scents of burning wood, of melancholy weekends, of moping and happy to be so.

It’s a mystery. There’s always one. Just one. One of his T-shirts that is always inside out in the dirty washing pile. He can’t explain it. And nor can I.

At breakfast he started to read out the Met Office’s explanation for this glut of cloudy, drizzly days. It’s apposite weather. If the articles he reads out and the comments I see on Instagram are true, it’s an apposite reflection of the emotion that seems to hang heavy over the globe at the present moment. It’s hard to raise oneself above it. The sun is coming, apparently. But is it? We seem to have learnt nothing from our wars, our famine – poverty is still rife, people starve, meanness, cruelty and gross inequity abound. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons learnt. How can we change? What will bring this about? I am at a loss. Lost.

Someone posted a quote from Gandhi on Instagram yesterday. It said, and I paraphrase it here, that there has always been tyrants and murderers but that, in the end, they always fall. They always fall. I wait, as does the world. A breath held.

Another dream that I thought I’d lost on waking but one that came back to me about half an hour later in the bath. I was staying in a house, a stone cottage and several of M.’s sons were there. Water started to come in, it wasn’t clear from where, but it began pouring out of the fridge and cupboards. As sanguine as ever M.’s tall sons were unfazed. I started trying to save things, clothes, objects and so on. But I was calm. Calmed by their calm. I went around the outside of the house and from there nothing was awry. No water, no flooding. Had it stopped? Was the interior now dry? I woke without finding the answer.

I dream of journeys. Journeys on trains, on escalators, in cars and on foot. Last night I woke from one in which I was walking along a narrow isthmus. A sea haar hung heavy above and around it. My way wasn’t clear. I came to a house. It had been my mother’s. It was empty now and though I had been intending to stay there, I couldn’t bring myself to. The windows were too dark, too exposed to the elements. So I kept on walking.

A cat came and sat by me this morning as I draw in the Castle Park. I’d heard a noise, and thinking that it was some distant voices on the Prom, ignored it. The noise came again, louder this time. I looked down and saw the cat. I couldn’t see her very well in the still dark. I saw the white ruff of her chest, (I assumed she was a her, she was slight, too slight for a tom) and the dabs of light on her paws, but that was it. She mewed and miaowed at me. I spoke back to her and she stopped. And began cleaning herself. When I finished by drawing I called to her. She followed me up the hill for a while but stopped and sat down staring at a gate in the wall.

It’s a wall. A wall of fear, even panic at times. I want to get to the other side, give my work an opportunity to flourish and be experienced in unusual ways, but the wall stops me. I cannot visualise myself using the software necessary to make these, what are to me, huge technological leaps. What am I so scared of? Being seen as foolish, stupid even? Of failure, of messing-up? And if that is all, so what? So what? That is what I should be saying to myself. Who was the American president that the journalist was quoting yesterday, in the piece that he read out to me as I prepared supper? He was the one who set up the New Deal in the 30s – Roosevelt? Anyway, he spoke of trying something, anything, in order to find a solution. And, that if it fails, admit to it, and try something else. It sounds simple. I come a long way. Remember that. And be brave. If you can.

I lost last night’s dream but the one from the night before has stayed with me. I worked at remembering it, willing myself to catch it in my mind’s eye for those first few moments of waking. There were lots of elements to it, that fact that he and I had been living in someone else’s house and, on leaving, and packing all our things together I kept finding objects I knew in their cupboards, like my little white milk jug. Then we were on some sort of train that had no roof. We could see the sky. It was light, though we were going under a kind of tunnel. No, it was an arch, an arch of art. Anthony Gormley’s art. I even managed to just about find his name in the dream. I could see the Angel in the distance but overhead were zinc-coloured clouds with cherubim-like figures within them. As we sped by I saw the artist himself, on show, in a tableau, crouching and wearing a khaki army coat. I pointed him out to P. On arriving at a depot we were travelling down an escalator when I woke.

The town’s students’ windows are a mass of plastic cobwebs, ghouls, witches and ghosts. Pumpkins with their hacked-out smiles litter every step and front garden. One house’s various entrances has quasi Police Aware tape, stretched across each door, blocking entry and warning of what’s within. I like it. All of it. It makes me smile. Setting off on my walk this morning I encountered a pair evidently walking home after a pre-halloween club night. He was in a suit, though was jacketless. She wore a black corset with a skirt hitched up at the hips. On her feet were a pair of Doc Marten’s. I remember such dressing-up. Halcyon days.

They disappear too quickly. I wake from them and I have them and then another, living thought comes in and they are gone. Vanished. Vanquished by a lesser, existing reality. I rue the loss of them. I like to try to unpick them, to relive the hyper-reality of their landscapes and vistas. Perhaps they will return in those flickers of something other that mist through my thoughts from time to time, unbidden and unfamiliar. I hope so.