#31
In a sonnet, in a spell, I don’t know how to tell you. I sit beneath the deep-dark-blue, and wail.
Once again, babe, I’m in a stasis of sorts: an unsettled feeling I simply cannot let be. Thinking about the gallery and the studio, too – all those lies I’ve told you of risking it all for The Art Spirit. I’ve come away these past few days and weeks feeling fretful, angered, unheard. I find myself transported back to that first year, where all of this writing into the ether began.
Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939) dir. Victor Fleming.
I’m being cryptic, I know.
Sometime two years ago, reader, I started therapy. I’d resisted far too much for a very long time, in fear that that new-found-clarity would somehow negatively influence my work. I recall, briefly, referencing an interview with David Lynch. Here I sit, some years later, feeling that need to seek help again.
‘I don’t feel in control of my own life’, I’d say, or write, or think. ‘I feel like everything is planned out for me, and I don’t have any agency or free will.’ Two years later, the water washes over me, and I feel that burgeoning, churning rise once again in mine gut.
These love letters to you, pink, prissy, slathered in bile – confessions of the underworld, in many ways – have acted as truths which I hold myself to. If the written word is there for all to see, I feel beholden to it, bonded. What I fear most, now, is that all that progress I’ve made, all those steps taken, babe, are slowly slipping back into the abyss. None of this is easy or sensical, the superfluous quest of becoming Artist. Not noble nor brave, but imbued by vanity.
I don’t know how to stop feeling like this, reader.
I sit at my desk again, thinking about all I need to plan for in the coming months. A new show to curate, a new show to exhibit in. The silk I bought sitting in the studio, cold. Blood-red oil paint sat in the back of the cupboard, congealed. I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Britney Spears in Crossroads (2002) dir. Tamra Davis.
‘I’m going to apply for the Royal Academy’, I voice with mock-confidence. My Brother stares at me, while shuffling a frying pan upon the stove, egg whites curling up at the edges.
‘…but what about the gallery?’
‘If I don’t do this now, I never will.’
I miss my old work, before the grief. Crimson showgirls, feather boas and ‘tart’ cards. Markers of pain, sex and aggression. Synthetic hair piled high - close to God - pursed and curled as a filmic ingenue. A wedding dress to escape in. I’m working through the trauma, babe, down to the bone, hot-acidic-ash-swirling, and I promise I’ll get there. My heart hurts.
En route to work in the early hours, angel, I’ve sat and had a conversation aloud, to mine own self. ‘So, why do you want to apply to the Royal Academy?’, a distant figure beckons, ‘…and what could you bring to the programme?’ I look down, twisting the signet sat loose on my ring finger.
I’m losing it, again. Maybe I should buy a diary. Silken pink, lock-and-key. I turn the cover, and a looped soundbite of Britney Spears’ …Baby One More Time emanates through its perfumed pages. Until October.