I should really go to bed. The last post I wrote did what those listy things always do - it started a whole lot of inner monologues which in turn set up little crumbs of something that a piece of writing can accrete around. Do you remember a couple of years ago - coming off the Canning St jag - (I must remember to tell you about the sequel to my Canning St endeavours, it doesn't reflect well upon me) I claimed I would not no longer be Diane Arbus and Joan Didion but instead I would become Henry James? I hope you do remember and I hope remembering makes you laugh, because it was funny. I hope you laugh at me and not with me. Best kind of laughter / medicine, at least if you don't count cocaine as medicine.
Anyway I thought for a couple of days of what it would be like to write about sex, I suppose Henry James did his share of that although I did not think of writing about sex in the Jamesian manner of a person who thinks about it a great deal but never does it, because of some mysterious disability he is anxious to keep in the background and also be perpetually bringing forward. No, I thought I would write about sex probably more in the style of somebody truly awful, a female Charles Bukowski maybe, or someone else you would get off the tram four stops too soon in order to escape from. After a bit of time spent thinking about it while going around putting dishes in the dishwasher and eating mandarines etc I concluded it would be undignified and in poor taste to actually write it all down. It's a pity in a way because I may never feel as unbeholden to anyone else's sensibilities as I do now (I certainly never felt I could write about sex while I was married). But it also doesn't matter.
I finished that drawing I worked on for a couple of weeks. It is not successful as an exercise in night colour and there are a lot of things about the intersections of shapes that really make me shake my head at the clumsiness. I really enjoyed doing it though, I worked on it every day and looked forward to the long and undemanding Zoom calls when I knew I would get it out and work away while listening and saying something occasionally to prove that I was. I would enjoy another drawing, if I start on another one too soon it runs the risk of being a variation on this same idea, ie a set of Arcadian figures in relation to each other under a moonlit sky. The second a formula seems like it's taking form thats when I stop this for another ten years.
Like everything else right now, there is no urgency to press on headlong. So that's something.
Here's my cats. Some readers will know them already and others will not. Pompey is on the LEFT (not right, as I said last night when I was three quarters asleep) and the other lad is Chanticleer.
I named this post 'Dreams' because what I did sit down to write, after all, was something about a dream I had about those cats and the interpretation of the dream which my shrink offered me.
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Okay. I dreamed that the two cats spoke to me, not clearly or well (this is really obviously a use of the fact that I binge re-listened to about a year's worth of Tony Martin's Sizzletown podcast last week) and they told me that they were reincarnations of different parts of Basil. In the dream they thought that between them they comprised a complete return of Basil, but sleeping and waking I think they are kidding themselves, for while they are really good cats and it's true that their personalities are complementary in a way that is lovely and funny, Basil was one of those rare cats who you can just look into their eyes, and you know that you understand each other, and you think the same things, and the gulf of no shared language and different kinds of consciousness really doesn't matter, and these cats are not like that. Undoubtedly they share that soul connection with each other, though, and I love to watch it expressed in small ways a hundred times a day, although once or twice I've felt sad too, seeing them enfolded in each other in complete intimacy (and of course I then also feel very uncomfortable that I'm jealous of the bond between two silly dear little cats). Being near them has been the single real pleasure of staying home. There have been other good moments but few enough and very far between.
So my Dr said to me on Tuesday morning that she observed me looking away from her on the screen, as if distracted by things in my house which she does not see and she invited me to tell her what I notice, on the same principle that the matter dreams serve up is useful because it serves a purpose. I fought a little with this suggestion, saying (what is true, but also a rebuke) that I make a conscious effort to not look at people on the screen unless I need to, I find it easier on the mind. I also didn't tell her what I had been looking at, which was a plant with drooping leaves which needed watering. Instead I told her about two dreams. In the one I described first, I was roaming around some small settlement, like a rough-hewn Alpine village, on my bike the whole time whether inside or out. In the dream I had not yet left Dorian though I was about to, and I felt both furious and terrified and desperately vulnerable. There was a woman with long brown hair lying on a sofa in one room. I know this woman in real life, she is twenty years younger than me and like me in enough ways to be someone I am quite annoyed by. In the dream (though definitely not in reality) I knew that she had been having sex with my husband and I was really angry with her about this and spoke angrily to her but she laughed. I expected to receive back a strong interpretation of this dream but the Dr didn't seem interested, so I told her the cat dream, prefacing it by saying 'you'd be hard pressed to make an interpretation of this.' Throwing down the challenge, you know, in that unconscious way. And she rose to the occasion.
What she said was the dream means I am grieving the loss of a dream of perfect connection but in the death of that idealised wish for love some parts return with fresh real life, and they are good, limited and with limitations, distinctive, freshly seen, and very present in my life right here in this room. I felt more than a bit staggered by this interpretation. Whatever made the dream isn't recoverable and doesn't matter; it gave me something to bring to the session and the interpretation elicited by what I brought is what spoke to me, it resonated, and that's psychoanalysis. MAKES U THINK RIGHT
For what seems like hundreds of years I have been receiving excruciating text messages at all hours of day and night from the US Postal Service to inform me of the tragically slow progress of two highly impulsive online purchases I made a long while back and which have been inching their separate ways toward me on a journey which once took, like, three days. The five LPs I decided Fuck it, I really need to own these, have been in transit from New York to here since 16 April and just at 9pm tonight I was informed they were put onto a plane which has departed Miami International Airport. No turning back now, my little records, you must think only of the future and of the better life away from the US which awaits you. I called you, and I am here, waiting. Come to me soon
Ok so the other impulse purchase done on an exchange rate of one dollar Australian = 56c US was a beautiful new book about Dorothea Tanning who deserves to be better known; this arrived on Monday. I was lying on my bed last night looking at the plates and I saw again this glorious painting
and I remembered again the teacher at VCA who said 'don't show me any pictures of your cute little kittens or I'll throw up on them', because, of course, that's Tanning's own dog in the painting.
There's something in all this which I have got to some time get the better of, it's now or never; what was it about the dynamic of that education and me intersecting which resulted in a conviction that what work I do is fundamentally not good enough? Look, the studio system at VCA was abusive, like all studio systems are, with 'crits' and deeply mixed messages and the rest, but why have I made a fetish of blaming it for me not feeling good about working? Like all educations which are both thoughtful and technical it gave with one hand and took away with the other.
I'm not interested in making sourdough so in the approximately six to eight weeks remaining of working exclusively from home, now I've adjusted to the fear of death and disease and I seem unlikely to imminently lose my job and now I've transitioned from raw and bleeding heartbreak to garden variety grief and regret, I can probably find time do something for myself. I have been thinking about drawing some cats as large and unfriendly as trees. I also thought I might try to really learn something substantive about the weird strands in English folk traditions.
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