I’m so sorry I didn’t write last week. I left my parents’ house in the Cévennes to go to Marseille by way of Montpellier where I ate peaches and handmade spring rolls and swam with my friends in the endless étangs. (Driving home from the beach, we watched two flamingoes fly away from the setting sun into a cloud as pink as they were.)
It was, of course, wonderful. But I arrived in Marseille with a nascent migraine, which, the following morning on a day trip with Laetitia to the Rencontres d’Arles, ballooned into something like a leaden planet poised on the crest of my forehead. And then it quite simply flattened me. Until hours before I was due to fly home to London, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to get on the plane. But then suddenly, it lifted. That uncanny balloon popped. I was leaning against the couch in Laetitia and Sylvain’s apartment and all at once, I could speak to them again.
I cannot wrap my head around these things, quite possibly because of how viciously they clamp themselves around it. There are times when they feel almost productive, or at least, when they are accompanied by a kind of manic state where my mind goes into overdrive and ideas multiply like fungi.
On March 15 this year, during another brutal episode, I filled four pages in my A4 Leuchtturm with all the ideas I had for things to write — or things I had already agreed to write — that I just could not stop churning in my brain. Looking through it all now, the list variously includes ultra-processed foods (read here), ultrarunner and activist Deo Kato (who is currently in Egypt, some 9,000 km into his run from Cape Town to London), Arthur Russell and Dilla, Shabaka Hutchings playing the shakuhachi, architect Kuukuwa Manful and architectural heritage in Accra, Armenian heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh (that piece’s coming out in the September issue of the Art Newspaper), an idea for a podcast, another idea for a podcast, an essay on the West Wing (which I file next week), and two pages of my novel in progress. It was wild.
But casting the migrained brain as fertile ground doesn’t really wash, if only because, for me, their frequency is inversely proportional to my ability to have another child.
I realise I’ve always experienced these kinds of feverish states, where there’s just too much going on in my brain and it feels like I’m spinning on every level. (In fact, writing this is a tool, I think, to manage that.) But full-on migraines — the actual dumptruck steamroller jackhammer irongripping pain of them — arrived in my 30s with early onset menopause.
It’s not that I wanted more children. But nor did I not. I was just living. And it’s quite a profound thing to really live, then, with a closed door like that. It’s the finality of it, twisted into a shape inside the marble of a migraine I cannot shake. I know lots of people who live with not being able to have a child, for all kinds of reasons and without ever ever having had a chance at parenthood at all. I know people who have lost their child. These episodes make made me think about that and about them — about you — a lot. To feel what that must feel like.
I’ve felt both more grateful than I can adequately express for my daughter, who is everything, and also, a kind of deep sadness. Some days it’s felt like I feel it all. I’ve often thought that if a single object described me, it would be a sponge.
Anyway, today. I woke up with a familiar knot above my right eye and a dread in my gut that another migraine is coming. I’m hopeful it won’t and so far it hasn’t, but I’m learning, as both my mother (and the excellent US artist and general motivator Halim Flowers) have recently emphasised, to look after myself. So instead of the deep dives I promised last time, I’m going to list some small things here: some recent finds, some old loves, some moments in songs or film that bring me instant calm/that I often obsess over (it’s an interesting overlap).
The moment in The Royal Tenenbaums where Bill Murray’s neurologist Raleigh St Clair tells his young bucket-hatted patient, Dudley Heinsbergen, to arrange his puzzle pieces as he has just done his. “Make yours like mine,” says St Clair. “Done,” says Heinsbergen. The overhead shot that follows is always in my mind.
In Leylands (British hardware store) on Monday, I bought some Farrow & Ball paint (forked out for two small cans of paint to do up my kid’s room as a birthday present. She hasn’t left it since.). The woman mixing it up for me took a photograph of the can before she put it in the blending machine. She does that every time with this particular brand, she says. The way F&B supplies its mixes is by having the vendor place the can of base colour under a computerised pipette, which then adds in delicate drops of the appropriate hues. On her phone she showed me all these beautiful abstracts. Where unblended Dulux is an ungodly morass of oily layers, like a gutter after a rainstorm, F&B is all flowers. One was like a pansy, another like a Georgia O'Keeffe in miniature. Mine, like a Cy Twombly cutout. I’m going back to find this special vendor. If she allows it, I might just have some pics to show you next time.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s house and these photos of her by Alfred Stieglitz. She lived to 98, you know. Look at that gaze.
Cat Power, in Willie Deadwilder (from Speaking for Trees), singing about a Georgia which I always heard as Georgia O’Keeffe but now am not so sure. But I still like the idea that she might have been.
The spiral of stones, the plants in the window and the fresh lemon in the pewter dish in Kettle’s Yard, that echoes the yellow dot in Joan Miró’s Tic Tic on a nearby wall.
The bit in Nanni Moretti’s La Stanza del Figlio (The Son's Room) (2001) where, in his blinding grief, he repeatedly rewinds a bit in a song. Also, this bit where, before the accident that triggered that grief, they’re all in the car and they sing, together.
The harmonies and the lyrics of the extra bit Watchhouse added to Zach Bryan’s Pink Skies, on the album version that launched last month.
You used to let her cut the ribbons on all of her own presents
It made me nervous, but now I see we just taught different lessons
Listen from 3:052:11-2:40 of Anner Bylsma playing Bach’s Cello Suite no. 4 in E-flat Major, V. Bourrées I & II.
The entirety of this, Robert Glasper’s You Outta Praise Him intro, but specifically the chord sequences: 2:50-2:58 OH MY WORD how can eight seconds have such an impact on a person’s life.
Walking through the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in 35+C heat was a bit much to begin with. The migraine pushed me over the edge
, so I failed miserably in taking down proper details about the artists whose work I was looking at. UPDATE: I DID MAKE NOTES! I just found them. So I’ve corrected some names. (You might still spot errors. You know what to do:)And yet, some images pierced the fog (to number the images, I’m counting clockwise from top left):
First, from the All in the Name of the Name - The Sensitive Surfaces of Graffiti exhibition: 1. I love this portrait, titled Fly Girl, by Jamel Shabazz: a pose and a look and a skirt as red as William Carlos William’s red wheelbarrow. 2: Romanian artist André Cadere took a painted stick around New York in the 1970s and photographed it in situ — the dialogue this gesture starts with the city’s textured surfaces is excellent. 6: a boy aloft. I don’t know who shot this, but isn’t it wonderful? It makes me think of Francis Alÿs’s Children’s Games series (see below).
Then, from the I’m So Happy You Are Here - Japanese Women Photographers From the 1950s Until Now exhibition: 2 is by Ichiuchi Miyako, from a series documenting her deceased mother’s belongings. I loved this embroidered bag. And 5 is my favourite, by Tamiko Nishimura. I need to know more about her work. (Also, I need to know more about pioneering Japanese photographer Tokiwa Toyoko).
Lastly, 4 is from Vasantha Yogananthan’s amazing show, Time Frames. It tells the story of an unnamed protagonist in a beautiful house, carrying branches and cats and writing and wearing patterns and having a full head of hair and just the feelings, the lonesomeness, the elegance, the quiet. (I love Yogananthan’s work so much; I interviewed him about his epic series, A Myth of Two Souls, when the V&A opened its new photography gallery).I hold all of Mexico-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’s work dearly and wrote about it in June. I love him walking up to a tornado and painting a line through a landscape and pushing a block of ice around a city. Mostly, I’m always thinking about his 1999 film, Rehearsal I (Ensayo I):
I’ll be back next week.
Notes
Art historian and critic Hettie Judah has a most excellent new book out, titled Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood. I love her writing. Also, and relatedly, in 10 days time I’m interviewing Britsh performance artist Bobby Baker on stage at Greenbelt festival, about her seminal and very funny piece, Drawing on a Mother’s Experience.
World of Echo
Cat Power, the whole Speaking for Trees film is an undying treasure.
Erik Satie, Gymnopédie No. 1 (bc my kid discovered it this week and is entranced).
Max Richter, The Poetry of Earth (Geophony)
Yo La Tengo, Aselestine (Bunker Session)
Meshell Ndegeocello, Thus Sayeth the Lorde
Watchhouse, Take This Heart of Gold
Post Malone + Swae Lee, Sunflower (bc this is always on my playlists and I wrote about why this week, here)
The Shadows, Walk Don’t Run (those opening drums; also my father schooled me that, in the guitar sound I love so much, this is where it started)
Pull up a memory
<3 <3 <3
What a map
I can’t seem to be able to insert Kato’s IG post, wherein he maps out his journey from Cape Town so far, with the hurdles, milestones and utter determination it’s encompassed. Just go look at it. It’s an incredible undertaking. The man commands our attention.