Beneath starlit skies, I come to thee.
Everything has hit me with a heavy, sweeping blow, babe - a Hammer horror to the heart, pipes bursting. As these dreary nights draw in I, too, feel seasonally affected. Deathly-restless, I trudge the woods a spectral girl-thing. Lightening strikes, charred cherry-black tar, and we must never be apart.
Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1991) dir. David Lynch.
As Spring sits softly at the horizon, I meet the dawn of two years ‘post death’ - an inevitability I never dreamed to face. It never comes and goes, and if I’ve told you so I’ve lied. I think of him in brite-white flashes. In a song in the distance, a line from a page, a joke from a friend, in cry-singing the refrain of Ava Adore in my car, alone. We must never be apart.
I feel perpetually that something is missing - a bottomless bog - and I cannot solve that bellyache with a buried head beneath the covers, nor a cat I do adore.
I have to talk to him.
I have to find a way to conjure, seer, know.
I have to make something. I have to be busy, now, quickly.
In the late hour, when I’d ordinarily comfort the sleeping body of a beautiful man by knitting softly - needles tapping together in staggered patterns - I instead lay awake staring at the ceiling. I cannot remember the last time I longed with such urgency to fall into the ether and deliver my affection one final time. The blue lights, my face hot-wet and trembling, him, unable to look at me.
Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar-wai.
I have to write it out, paint it out, take it out on something. Paint Casablanca five-foot-tall, like I told you so. I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear in red Snell Roundhand on silk, weeping.
Conclusions have often been drawn, by tutors and peers alike, of the Feminist praxis which underpins my practice. I sit here, now, and wonder whether that can be true at all. My Father’s favourite colour was red, and I only know this because I asked him, amidst sickness, knowing he would otherwise never tell me.
Since his death, I have become entranced by the colour red. I wish for everything I paint to be red.
I recall sitting with the eulogist, Brother and Mother either side of me in the sitting room. Holding a mock document within his hands, bound by ribbon he asks aloud “…did he have a favourite colour?” All eyes turn to me, as I say “Red” compulsively, without a single pause. I look to my red stiletto nails now as I type, and solemnly vow to never have them any other colour.
This is definitively patriarchal.
My Brother fell a few days ago, and there was blood everywhere. Red corn syrup staining birch. The gaffer walks by, and doesn’t notice me.
In piecing together the shards of glass in darkness, a ring fell from my finger. One of two my Father bought for my Mother, which she in turn gifted to me. A thin, gold band of three diamonds. The only thing I have of his that’s mine, lost. I yelled, cried and slept, for my Brother to walk towards me, ring between his fingertips.
I will never wear it again.
The red nails must suffice as consolation.
Sissy Spacek in Carrie (1977) dir. Brian De Palma.
As the days pass by, staring out the window, I feel that burning ache again - that caustic ball in my throat, triggered by chronic boredom. I cannot waste my life. I cannot do that to him, nor myself. It feels, somehow, dishonourable.
“If only I’d have learned guitar”, he told me.
“If only I’d have known better, I would have-”
At present, I can only remedy this pain with two things: bleach, and more work. He loved when I was blonde.
I am making a magazine, angel. A journal, a periodical, scripture to be known as Seed - the seed of an idea, the seed of life, ‘seed’ as something filthy-horrific, covered in mud. Essays, poems, spells and love letters. Maybe recipes, too, for good measure.
Black-and-white and red.
I want to read the work of other artists who write. I want to embrace it, share it, illustrate it with love and anger. I want something distinct from the online world, a Toynbee tile to disintegrate without a trace. Tangible, valuable, light as a feather, stiff as a board. Something you can only hold within your hands. A first, I hope, for Tentative Press.
I’ve been thinking much about the natural world, romantically, and disappearing into it. Occult practices, Druidic tradition, the Celtic calendar. Seed as a quarterly offering: Imbolc, Beltane, Mabon, Samhain. Until January.
We must never be apart