Icarus skywriting # 42

New haircut, old face

I have had a look at some stuff today, tidied up my study, tidied up my desk, re-kindled old ideas, replayed old songs and generally strummed my way through exhaustion that has been work. You don't realise how hard it is until a picture (see right) shows the bleary-eyed results. Goodness, I look a hundred years old and I look as though I borrowed that right eye from Abu Qatada and the left one from Ricky Hatton. Sadly the new haircut hasn't restored an old face, so that will have to come later. I am not ready for a requiem but I do love this Song for Athene, Athene and her androgynous compromise...

My Friend the Chocolate Cake

Bring me sunshine

It feels like it has been raining forever. London is not a place to be in the rain. I was there yesterday and while I had a good time, the no cars, Christmas shopping day was a washout: lah-di-dah as they say. Oh but on the train I read a great first line of a novel, 'I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so next morning I travelled down there...' I am still reading The Brooklyn Follies. But I have also been cheering myself up with my friend the chocolate cake and I post a track here because it reminds me of sunnier days.

Icarus # skywriting # 41

I am swapping glum for mulg because being glum takes too much effort. Actually, the truth is I should exchange the bad cold blues for the I am a lucky strikes, after all, illness can be forever but a cold is just for a smidgen of your time and its better to be philosophical. I am reading a book entitled, On Balance by Adam Phillips, can you tell? Balance, its as tricky thing to get right, but I am trying, "It is very stretchy." said Kay Ryan in the The Fabric of Life and I like that. The fabric of life being stretchy is a good concept, it covers a broad church of thought, a broad set of subjects, ideas and philosophical ideas. But this really took me, "Great outpourings of expressive feeling are not relevant to making art. Much more so is the both simple and complex fact of how you group things together..." Briony Fer, Eva Hesse: Studiowork. E. M. Forsters, 'Only Connect' is a kind of artistic cliché that gets bandied around but as Webb reveals in her upcoming exhibition, its the grouping together that makes the piece, whatever the combinations of words, ideas and effort that drives the idea forward. But that said, it can never be perfect, for how would we view perfection, can it ever be viewed, ever be seen, heard, touched, tasted or felt? Indeed how would we recognise it if indeed it did exist? Milton knew that when he was writing Paradise Lost, how he ever thought it could be regained is lost in the quest. So that is mulg - the swapped glum for something more attainable, an idea driving forward in a song, or a tune, or on a canvas, in a poem or implied by an installation d'art. The secret is not knowing when it is perfect but when it is finished; as Blake said, 'You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.' All an artist should know is when enough is enough and it is time to stop - come into the secret garden.

Icarus Skywriting # 40

Glum

Glum is one of those words that speaks how it sounds, I feel glum today, caught with a heavy cold that got worse and not better, a cold sore that arrived about 2am and is still growing and a fug around my eyes, is it nature's way of saying I am having too much fun (or not enough) I suspect the latter, what else can it be? All I know is that its making me tired but I have to go into town cos the lens fell out of my Ray Bans and I hate to be without them. So I will vaseline my nose, zovirax my lip, balm my soul and pull on a big scarf to see how far I get, then this afternoon I will wrap myself in a duvet on the couch and read the new McEwan which I am actually enjoying - ochone. I might also listen to this:

Icarus skywriting # 39

Well the nights are fair drawing in, darkness descends earlier and sleeping with the window open has its demands, I like a cold room and hot duvet - hmm, how does that read? Today I have been working on a Chapter commissioned for a forthcoming book and I came across this, Anna Freud once famously said, "in our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them." To which we could add from Siggy Freud, "Our desire is always in excess of the object's capacity to satisfy it.'' Which is essentially leading to the idea that we always want more than can have; but are more inclined to blame others for this failure instead of noticing how unrealistic our desires are. Of course, as Lacan says, 'the object with relation to which the fundamental experience, the experience of pleasure, is organised, is an object which literately gives too much pleasure.' Hah! I'm with Webb who says, '...you can't have everything, where would you put it all?' Indeed! And I have also been thinking about the photographs I post on this blog, especially in relation to Diane Arbus's far too famous quotation, 'A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.' A secret about a secret, strangely compelling; what is being kept secret in my picture (above) is that there is a secret. Two degrees of separation in one simple snapshot. Undeniably so, and yet how can I really know? I mean if other people see us in ways that we cannot anticipate; we cannot know ourselves because we cannot be everyone else in relation to ourselves. In other words, the person I see in the picture is not the only person I see, he is also your image of the person you see because he is not defined by himself alone - does my bum look big in this? Phew, its too late on a Friday for 'abstruser musings' to paraphrase Sam T. Coleridge. I might have a dabble of this instead - watch me sway: