#25

On love letters and gravestones

Dear darling-baby, O how I trundle through the bracken-bramble in search of God! Mine heart is a heavy red rose and, mud at mine feet, I yearn, bittersweet.

Ana Raquel Satre in Bluebeard’s Castle (1963) dir. Michael Powell.

Now, somehow, marks two entire years of love letters to you, flung deep into the ether. The paper singes and smokes. A thin whisp dissipates into the nite. So, so much has transpired within these years, reader, and I cannot thank you enough for caring. For a kiss, a hand held, a warm embrace. I feel closely healed, part-whole, while that ill-famed grief still stalks behind me. That grief, ugly and unforgiving, rears its head when I least expect it, still.

Ambling through the countryside en route to work, angel, I see a vehicle - well-worn and well loved - emblazoned with baby-pink vinyl lettering, sans serif. Three lines, running along the back window, boot and bumper which read, staggeringly so:

MY DAD WILL ALWAYS BE WITH ME

IT’S OKAY NOT TO BE OKAY

NO STORY SHOULD END TOO SOON

I felt maddened by this insignia.

This lingering loss two years on – drip, drip, drip – as I’m sure you now know, has permeated every living aspect of my work. It’s in the oil, the satin, the granite, and marble. The stained hardwood and the soft, matte paper. There is the Girl Before, and the Girl After, and we are not the same. I still wish to honour Stephen in daily practice. In coquelicot fingernails and blond- a Harlequin ladybird stops me as I write. In singing Tems in the darkness of my car, sun-setting. I want to be good at this, I do. I turn and see that crow atop the fence, again. Sunlight sings along his feathers.

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows (1955) dir. Douglas Sirk.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stone, lately. Gravestones in particular. Sites of solace, ritual, memorial, commemoration. A thing to touch to connect me, “Sugar”, to the great beyond. For few weeks and months now, reader, I’ve been working towards a new stone piece with Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Slinking through their much loved and neglected collection, I was drawn to, clearly, typography. Hand-painted enamel lettering, decorative script engraved into copper and marble stone. Churchyard angels chipped and broken; canvases torn in two.

As I walk through Wolverhampton, I see a compact menagerie of architectural heritage. Grand, 17th century Palladian structures, post-war Brutalist shop fronts and flats, and Beattie’s before me in all its Art Deco beauty. I see stone, too. Memorials commemorating monarchs, members of parliament and landed gentry, exquisitely gilded. I feel a loss, a pain and anger in seeing such celebratory affection, for the workers who built this city – carpenters, ironworkers, coalminers - are not bestowed that same grace.

Seventeen-ninety-one, the earliest date I can trace in our English ancestral line. Beyond that year, dear reader, all information ceases to exist. We must come from somewhere. I think about the Dark Ages. I imagine a girl of mine own age in squalor and strife. What would she have looked like? Where would she have lived? How did she survive, through all of it, for me to now sit here in silence, and write this letter to you?

I imagine her name. My face contorts, lips not-quite-wrapping around the words, tongue curling against the roof of my mouth. I can’t get there. There are no records. No gilded certificates or stones, only death, neglect, abandon.

Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948) dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

At the gallery, on a brite Spring afternoon, Bag Lord and I began to speak of regional dialect, of colloquialisms. ‘Wench’ as a Medieval term of endearment. I think of terms of endearment often and speak them aloud, write them to you, to Ishmail, to close and distant friends. Sugar, angel, little one, he’d say. Darling, without the ‘G’. In producing this stone, here and now, I’ve kept thinking about this girl, this work of Middle Age fiction within my mind, and so I’ve called her Darlin’. Darlin’ as a placeholder for a name I’ll never know. Monument to an Unknown Girl will be unveiled soon, in Summertime.

Incredibly, I’ll be working soon, too, with the New Art Gallery Walsall for an upcoming group exhibition. I’m thinking, again, of looted churchyards, of Druidic gifts to God in running water, of signs from the heavens fallen to Earth. Charcoal black, powdered, matte, white-gold infill like a lightening strike. It is far, far too early for me to divulge completely, as I am still working through these ideas as I write.

To commemorate these here two years of love letters, better late than never, babe, Emotional Outbursts: Year Two shall soon be available for you to touch via Tentative Press. A weighted, baby-pink screenplay complete with heavy-metal screws. A testament to my love of cinema. I realise, now, that I often aim mine bow and arrow too high – promising works I can’t quite fulfil. Paintings I now hate, techniques which get the best of me, but through it all Outbursts has remained a constant source of comfort. I’m proud of her.

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