In our dancing there is as yet nothing familiar. As a couple we wait for each other, we embrace to open a door to the future. Tango gives us a space in which to explore ourselves.
I ask and she responds. She indicates, and I in turn follow her.
We dance in the pauses, in the spaces that open between our worlds. And in those pauses we begin to see what is possible between us.
We are learning a new structure, a new vocabulary. We are learning each other.
As her extended foot slowly traces a graceful curve on the floor my world stands still – all time is suspended.
Great session this weekend with Wendy Ann Greenhalgh using art to inspire our writing.
Very enjoyable 3 hours – including three guided exercises as we moved on a journey from lyrical and figurative art to complete abstraction – creating drafts for a Flash piece and two free form exercises to develop further.
I really enjoyed this – in a basic sense this is very similar to how I work with my own photos to get creative writing started – but on a very different level in terms of the art work involved and the great guidance offered by Wendy.
Just need to turn those drafts into at least one article to publish – two weeks to go!
Exciting news – but poignant and sad – my Ménage à trois in the bathroom has been successfully brought to a conclusion – but sadly all of the magic – as well as the spider and much of the conversation – has gone.
This sounds a bit like a Burgessian introduction to a blog – so to explain.. I have always been bad in the bath. By which I mean I can’t stay in them for longer than a few minutes – which means my expensive organic muscle repairing whatnots are largely wasted. This is a shame, because my bath has jets and foam and all of those things. Plus music.
Recently – by which I mean months – the tedium – and hence the length of the bath – has been reduced/increased by the participation of a very large spider and a plastic duck, the former voluntary and the latter not so much.
I say voluntary – the truth is that the spider likes being in the hole where one of the jets is, so every time I have a bath I carefully wash him ( or her ) out, rescue it with tissue – and place the tired thing on a shelf to recover. This has been going on for weeks. For some unknown reason it will always slide back into the bath after a few hours ( I assume – I have never seen this happen ) and be ready to repeat the exhausting journey the next day.
The fascination for me has been that out of the corner of my eye I have increasingly been convinced that the duck is happy to be put in the water – it smiles – which of course is completely silly. I never really paid this much attention – just a peripheral vision trigger, sub conscious response kind of thing – but I have been gradually talking to it – like “Yay – there you go”… bob bob smile smile … “Too much foam? Jets on or off do you think?”
I did the other day have an extended conversation, asking it whether it was happy because it could see the spider and therefore felt less likely to be grabbed, although to the best of my knowledge spiders don’t hunt ducks and this spider I absolutely know is as even worse swimmer than I am..
So my point is that today I felt that this strange triangle of relationships needed resolving. The spider was easy – I carefully took it outside and installed it in a crevice in a garden wall. I will regularly check for updates. The duck, however required a more painstaking analysis.
And this is what I found.
The duck smiles when you put it in the water because it goes from eye level – on the shelf – to below eye level – in the water. And their beaks are cunningly designed so that when seen straight on they look a bit lost- but from slightly above they are quite obviously thrilled with life.
Here :
Bemused DuckHappy Duck
It’s the same duck [ Borges would love me ]
So what I desperately want to know is – did the toy companies plan all of this?
I am just 14 months into learning Tango and still trying to be acceptable as a social dancer by the end of this year. As I continue on this journey I am beginning to feel the sense of expectancy that dancers often discuss – that one day, in some as yet unknown place, I will have the perfect dance with someone.
My attention is more on this possibility, it seems to define a new part of this experience – a phase that now looks outwards as well as inwards.
It occurs to me that in a sense the journey that I am on, my slow progress, is gradually defining that perfect follower for me. By becoming clearer in my own dance I am also describing the woman that will be that perfect partner for me, in that undefined moment in the future.
At the moment everything is imprecise and lacking in definition, and so the follower is also one of so many possibilities.
But as I slowly improve so she begins to be clearer to me. My half of our embrace is defining hers, as in the future we must fit together in a precise but as yet unknown way. My musicality must compliment hers, and her energies should flow with my own.
But of course the reverse is also completely true – that follower, somewhere in the world, is on her own journey – and therefore she is in fact defining me.
I find this so exciting, that a woman somewhere is unknowingly defining a path for herself that will ultimately intersect my own, that decisions and experiences in her dancing and emotional life are gradually choosing me from all of her own multitude of possibilities.
I had such a great day in the rare London sunshine yesterday, and spent some of that in the wonderful urban space that is the Tate Modern.
I so enjoyed taking some images of people there.
There’s something so wonderful about people in modern art galleries. Their reactions, their juxtaposition against works of art, or in the setting of such an imposing space.
Decades ago I read Sartre for mostly the wrong reasons, like people of my generation did when we wanted to look cool. But this evening I remembered so strongly one passage from Nausea. The moment when Antoine sees the horror of something for what it is, without cloaking it in names. It is a root – specifically the root of a chestnut tree.
It made me feel physically sick at the time. I don’t think I ever really got to grips with Sartre but this particular passage caused a very deep and intensely physical reaction in me – wholly appropriate given the title of the novel and the general malaise of the main protagonist.
“So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me”.
This evening I took this photo, simply inspired by the spring evening light in my garden. The Willow tree is light and reaches outwards, by contrast my own mental images of the half buried root were entirely black, and squirming down into the earth. Apart from the coincidence of trees there seems little connection.
But then I remembered this other darker tree on a recent walk.
When I look at these images I just see so many patterns, so much I cannot understand without hiding behind the shield of language, smug in my elevated safety. There is so much energy, such different timescales, but so little that I truly understand in any meaningful way.
It really disturbed me again this evening, 30 years later, that familiar sensation that if my mind allows me to see things for what they truly are, without names, then I am simply lost.
Another short project – this time to take images that have interesting textures.
I really enjoyed this.
The walls of Seville are filled with texture, so that is where I found most of these images in a few hours of pleasant wandering about in this great town.
I never normally set myself a ‘project’ – but I have watched friends do this with great results and so I have set myself the challenge for the last two days to capture images that in some way reflect what we mean by a ‘conversation’
I have tried to interpret it broadly – some conversations look forward, some backward – I even allowed myself images where the subject seemed deep in an internal conversation, or just invited interaction because they were so interesting. I have also processed some in black and white because the bright sunshine in Seville seemed to distract from the topic.
The idea came about because on Friday before I left I was in a bar in Hove and was watching two profoundly deaf men signing with each other.
I know so little about sign language, but they were using a kind of miming of words to compliment the signs – perhaps conveying context or emotion? But the result to me was two men who alternately just focussed on each other, calmly watching every movement.
This was a conversation as few men experience it – listening, giving space, focus, patience – a calm and genuine donation of “all of my attention” that so rarely takes place and yet is so healing and wonderful when it does.
This started me thinking about ‘conversation’ in a much wider sense – so it was on my mind when I arrived.
And I have already asked if I just used Photoshop to create the couple on the balcony. The answer is ‘no’ – these kind of illusions are quite common in Seville – normaly exactly like this – figures on balconies – and they are called Trampantojos. As I now understand it – thanks Beatriz! – they are used frequently in Spain to create an illusion of something that perhaps people can’t have – for example expensive stone walls.
