This blog is not going the way I want it to go. It started with the idea of palimpsest but I knew that was not quite right almost straight away. I liked the word because I liked the concept and I had come across it for the first time. The thrill of discovery. But I am not trying to scrape anything off and start again. Au contraire. Or maybe I’m trying to scrape through layers in places to recover what is underneath.
Originally, I thought the blog could serve to create a kind of “de facto mappemonde clignotante” – a set of master signifiers, nodes, the semantic/emotional poles I would like to capture/describe/put in place. The hotspots of my psychic/inner life. Here a colour, there a word, song, poem, or smell… what makes me me and not someone else, (and at the same time, perhaps, what prevents me from being happy about it).
I wrote in my analysis diary: “The other day I was thinking of one of them – duck blue (or teal) and I thought I could feel the energy blinking, like Christmas tree lights, they all blink and if one single bulb fuses they all go out, and how do you find which one it is but that’s not what I felt, I felt that once all my spots were blinking like a Christmas tree or map of some kind it did not serve any purpose, in fact it served a counter purpose, the only purpose it served was to fascinate me… and prevent me from actually making my way. Fascinate me in the morbid sense, like narcissus, keep me leaning over my own image my own self, my own ego, instead of engaging with the world or at least with the world of words other than in relation to my own pitiful personality or emotional problems.”
Then later: “The mappemonde clignotante is useless - it just flashes like a pinball table. I want to put a full stop on what I have been. And start a new paragraph, sentence, chapter, book.”
Tonight I toyed with the idea of letting this blog fizzle out and starting an anonymous blog to talk about analysis only, in a mixture of French and English, but that didn’t feel right either. It reminded me of all the files I have started and never finished. The line in A love of Swann where Alain Delon says to Jeremy Irons “Most people’s lives are like artists’ studios – full of unfinished sketches”. And of the painting above the piano, which I have not finished talking about. Or should I say writing? Or should I write describing?
It started out as an attempt to portray a particularly dramatic skyscape I glimpsed the first time I went sailing. I don’t like representational art, but the scene struck a very deep chord. The aesthetic “oh gawd I’ve just got to express how grateful I am for how beautiful that is in my own pathetic way or I’ll burst” theory. It was not clear, turquoise waters in the chalky Calanques on a sunny day. No. This was a symphony of grey. The sky was bulging with grey. The sea was stuffed with grey. The line between them was barely perceptible. It was an explosive kind of grey. Bright grey in places, with the Riviera sun trying to hammer its way through; dark, dull, menacing grey farther away. All of it was a very wet grey.
We were coming in to Marseilles and there was a catamaran regatta going on between us and the old port. We had to time it right to slip through among the competitors. That was thrilling in itself, because having no experience in sail-powered movement the timing involved seemed incongruous. We saw the catamarans at real close quarters, with the skippers leaning over so low they were almost in the water – and when they fell over they were very much in the water. All their sails were fluorescent. Once we were through to the other side, I looked out to sea and gasped at this huge expanse of bevelled grey, concave and convex, with slashes of fluorescent colour like flags in the middle. Growing smaller and smaller.
We parked the boat in front of the town hall and had a cup of tea.
When I got home I took the biggest canvas I could find – it had to be big to get that huge sky in – and painted it grey. I did my best to make the paint as thick and uneven as possible, and lavish on lashes of light and dark grey and bits of white, but it looked disturbingly flat. I didn't dare to touch it for a long time.
Then I tried to draw in the shapes of the sails. To be in proportion, they would have been tiny pin pricks. I can't draw that small. It looked ridiculous. I went as far as painting the sails fluorescent orange, pink, green and yellow.
The result was abominable. It didn’t kill the power of the image I had in my mind; it just didn’t seem to be in any way remotely connected to it. It stayed in the garage for many moons, where it could have been mistaken for a picture of the concrete garage floor with graffiti on it.
Eventually the summer sun reactivated, as it periodically does, my urge to express my aesthetic gratitude through paint, and I hit the canvas with all my favourite colours of the moment, and even some, for a reason unknown to me, that I didn’t like, and didn’t seem to go together.
As soon as I thought of the word perseverance, Persephone came to mind, and I googled her and discovered she ate p o m e g r a n a t e seeds. It’s a small world.
