Release

Catch

Open

To Have and To Hold

It feels good to be productive, again.

Perhaps because of the heat, and these long, open days, I'm reminded of last year's swimming at Bittangabee Bay. It presents a good analogy for my experience of a return to drawing.

I remember the first time I went to the cove on my own, before breakfast, and dawdled almost endlessly on the rocks, staring into the cold, ominous taunt of the lapping water. Ghastly fish remains - the careless debris of many holiday fishermen - littered the shallows in some places, and the deep threatened horrors. The whole enterprise became so unappealing that it was only pride, in the end, that forced me into the water.

Splash!

There can be nothing half-hearted, once you're in.

The shock of the cold caught my breath and my head reeled with instinctive panic. And then it was calm. No rearing sharks. An expanse of glittering morning water, and just me in it. The solitary plosh-plosh of my inexpert stroke announced to the silence my passage to the beach and return to the rocks.

After that, all the time we were camping, the cove whose waters had frightened me so much, now beckoned irresistibly every day.

***

I sent Lewis a Dorothy Porter poem, yesterday, and he surprised me, some hours later, by composing a poem of his own, in reply. So, I wrote one for him, late last night, and it was such a pleasure to play with words like that, again. I'm generally a little timid of writing poetry, but it's okay for an audience of one.

A theme to emerge in my poem - oddly it wasn't conscious - was the compulsion to have and to hold, to grasp and keep and present as proof. It's been haunting my drawing, with the jars... and it's inherent in the Lewis problem, too: though I can't quite pin down the thought (there I go again, pinning down!). But it's something about keeping and not keeping, and what worth I attribute to the joy of something when I can't keep it forever. I suppose I'm flitting around the notion of non-attachment.

I can rejoice in the secret wonder resulting from my failure to capture yesterday's blue-tongue lizard on camera. It makes the experience more intimate, more wholly my own... as though the very letting go allowed me to keep what was most precious. But my feelings on the whole are quite different when it comes to letting go of Lewis.

Does that sound ridiculous? To compare my love with a lizard!

But my mind insists on making a philosophical link between these two so disparate instances of joy and loss.

Can I reach a state of mind whereby it is possible to love and let go, serenely?

I don't even know if it's desirable. I have always prized passion and, in terms of love, to have and to hold are long-cherished hopes of mine. Perhaps the key lies somewhere in the question of what part of loving, what part of happiness, is one's own to keep. 

Ah... words confuse me further. I shall return to my drawing, and pay closer attention to the teachings of the little jar.

small jar

Tongues

For Lewis, Summer 2010 

While our eyes are cast down to our toes
Look!
The last being I expected on Earth
A lizard, basking on my urban path.

This prehistoric shape
in panic
scramble-slides across the tarmac
flashing a blue tongue.

Little wonder
I've known your name from childhood!
And yet
abandoning formalities, I say:
Hello! Little Darling One - wait!
searching in my burden for
the means to grasp this gift
with light

(beep

click)

I never get that far.
I sacrifice a last glimpse of weird tail
in the scramble-panic fumble
for my camera

gone

there is joy and worry
that this great event
will go unproven 

I'll go with joy. 

It's wheels and pedals again
until
a thousand red tongues
halt my course

(the breeze vanishes as I stop,
stoop in the thick air
loopy girl, looking at leaves)

There is always a just-right one.

Today, a tiny, scarlet wedding ring
- dust, should I grasp too hard -
pleases me enough
to cycle on

pretending my joy
is owed to irony.

search and rescue

Last night I dreamt of a large gathering of family and friends in the country. We were staying several days in a big ranch-style house. The landscape was open, brown like goldfields country, and quite wild. There was a large, dangerous-seeming, brown river a short walk from the house, and in this river much of my dream was set.

Part of the family-fun was a competition of sorts; we were each to create a sculpture or some sort of piece out of the things we had found. This seemed to be an annual challenge - a well-loved tradition - and throughout the dream it seemed to absorb those around me. I had won the competition previously, and felt that people expected another triumph of me.

I wanted to make this thing, but there were crises at hand that prevented my even beginning it... even as I write that, I realise that all my passions in the dream were focused on the central crisis, and all that is connected with my found-objects creation is a sense of panic, dread, shame, and the frustration of disparate pieces that would not come together.

All my attention was centred on my bunny-rabbit - a small, dark creature who had fallen in the river and, I feared, might be dead. Notwithstanding this fear, I daily walked past all the busy and productive people dotted industriously throughout the landscape, and jumped in the river, fully clothed, to look for my bunny. I didn't want to fail him. The worst thought was that he would perish alone, thinking that I didn't care. 

People were playing in the river: water-skiing, making noise and disturbing the surface of the water. I remember my uncle, the artist, watching me from atop an escarpment above the river. I remember banging the screen door behind me as I left the ranch on the third day, and realising I had still not changed out of my jumper and jeans and had on the same underwear, despite their being soaked, daily. I was particularly aware of the cumbersome nature of the clothing for swimming in - the jumper a heavy, rainbow, hand-knitted affair - but it did not occur to me to take it off. 

At moments I had glimpsed my bunny but had been unable to reach him. 

On the third day, I found him, under a drain but not yet sucked down the hole - just inches away from certain death, shivering and drenched. I reached and took his little body in my hands. There was a panic and a struggle during which he nearly went down the drain - I had to grab at him roughly, and worried that I would hurt him, but finally he was safely in my arms, grateful. I held him against my chest and we chatted softly like lovers all the way back to the ranch.


It's time I got some drawing done.


My dream has reminded me that I need to find my poor, beloved little wild creature again, and nurture it. I have been dangerously, wilfully neglecting it. So! On with the rainbow jumper, and into the murky water go I...