#8 'At the edge of the rain, I find five irises, and call them lovely'
So it's still raining. My raincoat has lost its integrity (as only a Mandalorian fan could put it) and I feel like even Victorian brickwork is liquifying, but it's all good, there are treasures afloat
It’s been hella raining these past couple weeks, drenching gallery openings, football matches and school outings with equal verve. In its latest report on rainfall and river flow, the Environment Agency reports rainfall above 40mm for most of England, with rivers including the Darent, the Lee, the Leach and the Ver, running at exceptionally high volumes. I’m not complaining though. When it rains, I usually want to head straight outside.
“In the night, in the wind, at the edge of the rain / I find five irises, and call them lovely,” writes Li-Young Lee in his poem, Irises.
Here then, a few irises I’ve found at the edge of London’s rains:
• Lygia Clark: The I and the You and Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation, two shows designed to go together, opened on Tuesday at the Whitechapel Gallery. They put the Brazian artist Clark’s neo-concrete experimentations from the 1950s onwards in dialogue with Boyce’s deeply moving and intriguing improvisations.
Among the early drawings, objects and instruction cards (“Gently hold the plastic bag containing ping pong balls between your hands; explore the sound they make and notice the relationship between weight and lightness”), there is a recreation of Clark’s 1970 performance, Corpo Coletivo, in which dancers wearing monochrome onsies (pink, red, lilac, yellow, black) are sewn together at strategic points (a shoulder to an arm; a wrist to a hip) and then must move in concert, stretching the fabric and their bodies as they morph, a living corporeal flower of sorts.
Boyce’s We Move in Her Way, echoes Clark’s work. Featuring dancers, mobiles, masks and exquisite vocal work, the piece is a seven-channel-video-and-sound reworking of her eponymous 2017 installation at the ICA. The space is furnished with her signature photo-tiling wallpaper and multifaceted sculptural pieces.
The sound in particular is magnificent. Dancers and audience members move around the space and each other, variously trailing or disturbing hanging structures of cloth and metal that tinkle and shift. Some wear masks. Other, silver leotards. One woman takes another’s hand and wraps bright pink chiffon fabric in and around it, closing her hand over theirs in a gesture as tender as it is constricting. All of it makes you think of relationships, of course, and of how we connect and accommodate but also of the depth of unknowing there is even between two people who know each other intimately.
Boyce references both Clark and Sophie Taueber Arp (of whom the Cabaret Voltaire and Dada founder Hugo Ball wrote in 1917, upon seeing her dance, that she was like a goldfish, “completely different”.) Both Boyce’s and Clark’s shows make you want to stay for hours too, just watching the strangeness and the grace at work.
•Last Friday, I went to a splendid chef’s table lunch at Aulis, in Soho. British chef Simon Rogan is at the head of an intriguing culinary empire rooted in Cartmel, in the Lake District. The OG, l’Enclume, opened in 2002 beside the farm, in a former 13th-century blacksmith workshop, and it sits right up top on my list of restaurants I dream of eating at. Since 2022, l’Enclume has had three Michelin stars. Aulis London, which has one star, is newly renovated but still tucked down the best tiny street in central London, St Anne’s Court. It now seats 12 people for a tasting menu that marries gem-like dishes (plated quietly by several people) with very pretty glassfuls. Look at this food!
OK, so from top left you’ve got:
A Gooseberry tart “with raw sea bream in coal oil” — on my phone I wrote “tastes like sinking into an armchair to watch the sunrise”
A leaf made of pure sungold tomatoes, sundried for three days, with no added anything. All candy should taste like this. Edible glass.
I think this was the lamb with kale, quite possibly the thing I loved best of all. It came with an accompanying dish of braised lamb belly with black garlic, served in a ceramic pocket stood in its own little wooden holder, like a toast rack, and together they were unbelievable.
This is called Red Wine Not Red Wine, which the restaurant describes as “A Japanese black tea cooked with beetroot juice, unfermented grape juice,
cocoa nibs and blackberries then finished with blackcurrant wood oil from Our Farm”. But I didn’t hear any of that when they told us — I just loved it at first sight.
An Orkney scallop I watched the chef cook right there in front of me, on a grill on the table; with squash, kelp and fermented borage honey. I need to try fermenting some honey.
A seaweed custard with Oscar peas. Don’t you love peas? These were firm and crunchy and oh so sweet and a dream with that roasted beef broth.
The thing I can’t show you because my phone died: a Malwina strawberry desssert, served on a bee pollen cake (that I’m pretty sure was frozen, or at least chilled) with warmer lemon verbena cream and sweet herbs and OH MY WORD the journey this tiny mouthful took you on. Actually epic. I’m still thinking about
•A few new books: The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin with illustrations by Paul Klee. I really love this letter he writes to his friend the painter Toet Blaupot ten Cate about seeing Bertholt Brecht and Helene Weigel in a dream as two towers swaying through the city. “The flood of this sleep, which broke forcefully against the day,” Benjamin writes, “is moved by the power of your image, like the lake is by the pull of the moon. I miss your presence more than I can say — and, what’s more — more than I could believe.” Imagine getting that in the post. (a point
made in a recent note - if you’re on Substack, you should follow her and subscribe to Rent Free too, she’s brilliant.)Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson and Wrong Norma by Anne Carson, which I’ve bought but not yet received and frankly, time just can’t move fast enough.
And an amazing wallchart, by designer Edgar Walthert, of Hildegard von Bingen’s Lingua Ignota: the secret language and letters this fabled Benedictine abbess, born in 1098 (!), invented. It comprises 1001 words (for things like tools, flowers and devotional objects), but no grammar, and its purpose remains largely undeciphered. I’ve listened to von Bingen’s monophonic compositions for ages but had no idea about this side of her polymathic activities. Goodness.
•Trần Anh Hùng’s At the Height of Summer, a beautiful and disquieting film that I love for its French title, A la verticale de l’été (how beautiful is that phrase? The US version was released under a more literal translation, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, but I don’t think that works as well, either. I wish I could understand the Vietnamese wording from the inside, Mùa hè chiều thẳng đứng; I wonder if it carries the same amount of light and water both as the French does; feels like you’re drifting upwards like a free diver coming up towards the surface, only the sea has married the sun and you’re breathing in light and water at the same time).
When this film was released in 2001, Peter Bradshaw said its sheer passionate seriousness made everything else look “a little lightweight and a little shallow”. To be sure, it is not shallow; it is steeped in the humid heat, the washes every shade of green and blue, the drenched skies of a Hanoi summer, soundtracked by Tôn-Thất Tiết, Lou Reed, Arab Strap and Velvet Underground. “Tran has created a film that is at once dream and real,” Lawrence Chua wrote in his own review. “In it, the relationship of surface to content, the way we see and the way we are, bitterness and complications of daily life are part of a lush and truthful harmony.” (Chua started that review saying he wished he could write novels the way that Tran Anh Hung makes films. Me too. )
•A propos the rain, at the end of the summer, I interviewed, for Plaster Magazine, the Indian painter, Sosa Joseph, whose show, Pennungal: Lives of Women and Girls, just closed at David Zwirner (see the lead image up top).
The paintings were all new and all of them awash in a pearlescent riverine light. Like “liquid dreams,” my editor said.
Sosa was born on Parumala, an island-village in Kerala. Her father was a ferryman and her family lived right on the banks of the Pamba river.
In Starry, Starry Night a woman stands on a bridge with two children. The land beyond them melts into the sky. Houses look like they’re floating. Sosa told me this wasn’t just a dream. It was the landscape she’d grown up in: “You cannot separate the land from the sky. You can’t understand it. It’s a dreamy atmosphere. But when I see that, it’s real, it’s a real experience.”
What I really loved was how Sosa said she’d been trying to paint rain. It wasn’t a metaphorical difficulty. It really is a really hard thing to do. “If I were an accomplished painter,” she said, “it would be very tough. And I’m not an accomplished painter.” But then she pointed to this bit and that surface and that stretch of water and this basket, saying how different the rain is on each thing, and of course, that highlights, to my mind, how good of a painter she really is — she’s looking. She’s seeing it all. She’s searching with everything she has for a means to capture that which you cannot hold in your hand.
The kind of thing you need a secret language for.
Notes
More flowers in the rain here, from a poet I’ve loved since forever:
Rain Light
by WS Merwin
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burningPull up a memory
From my friend and colleague Avery whom I miss by the actual hour, in response to my last Treats post: “Treeeeats! Dinner/tea/cake and swapping slang with your little adult housemate is existential joy. Also, repotting my basil, getting my hands dirty and seeing it actually grow.”
World of Echo
Been compiling a playlist titled Hildegard for you, of the things I’ve listened to this week. So I have a question: would you be up for a Spotify playlist I share? Right now, I’m only on Apple. But if you’d like this, I’ll figure it out …
Kronos Quartet - Hildegard von Bingen, O Virtus Sapiente
Robert Glasper - Over (ft Yebba)
Caminhando (Walking),1963
Another instructable from Lygia Clark, that former MoMA director Glenn Lowry once described as one of her most important works: a Möbius strip cut out of paper, that is meant to be cut over and over again by each participant. “What's very beautiful about this work,” the curator Connie Butler writes, “is one can think of it as a kind of walking, or activated, line.”
Here’s a custom DBS instructable for my godson Arthur: could you walk a Möbius strip/figure of eight around Chicago’s Loop (without going for a swim, obvs — taking in the park and the shore, but not the water)?
Yes please to a playlist!