There is a moment when you notice that light in your mind has changed. Part 2

 

“She lived her art. She looked like her art. She had the vocabulary of art." —George Lange on Francesca Woodman

I wrote a post much earlier this year (April 17th) with the same title and posted this photo of Francesca Woodman. Of course, I made some plans which went awry. And I am still trying to manage my house, this time as part of the CBT program. I am still unmoored and working to anchor myself. I am still recovering from a physical illness and also from an emotional one. Since I began the program, I have maintained a focus needed to do the things I need to do. The new room is coming along nicely, but I not only worked on that room, I cleaned up. I haven't really thought about my house much since John died, and even part of the house felt uncanny after he was gone, but now I am reclaiming it and I also am getting a bit more organized, something I lost in the years preceding John's death (but after his cancer diagnosis.) One serious problem was the arrangement of the house, how much of my stuff had been, yes, literally stuffed into places it had not been previously. I can't really explain how this happened without disclosure of things I would rather not write here. But I lost my old study, things were moved and just put in places, books too. In the last five years, I did not do anything about that situation and I also added a lot of books to my library. Too many. And I just had a mess. So part of the CBT program has been to clean up this mess, which worked well with my efforts to make a new art room at the other end of the house. In fact I am doing more than that. I am making another place to sit and talk. I want to move my TV out there, too. That is where it was originally.

I can see it all. In my mind.

In the last ten days, I have moved around 1500 books, dusted them, reshelved and organized them. I also started going through my papers. Yes, I have lots of paperwork everywhere. Crazy. We are talking decades of paperwork, and I thought while moving books, I would just throw away anything that I didn't really need or love. And I mean, it had to be useful to me in the next five years or it was out the door. Or it had to be something essential to my history, example, all the book contracts I have signed, all the letters for business, communications that I wanted to keep between teachers, students, friends, etc. I've had to move some furniture around. Jack helped with that Monday morning. I'd like to paint an old desk, too, now. I just want to downsize. But still keep some of the clutter I love. Just not too much.

Out of my therapy, other interesting things have happened. I made some changes on the WIP. And I have obligated myself, as part of habit making, etc. to keep working journals. That's been difficult but I am doing it. I also started working on the Brian Molko project in small doses since Album #8 is going to be released soon. (Probably bit by bit.) But only in very small doses until I have finished my program and made some headway with many of my other goals. I made a little discovery about Molko this week, quite by accident. It is completely coincidental to anything happening to him or me in our separate bubbles. No, I won't be writing about it. It's nothing to do with his music. But maybe his personality. But it is something so obvious that I can't believe I didn't notice it previously because I saw the information and just did not put "two and two together." Those things happen. And it was somewhere around sixty-something weeks ago, which is over a year when I first saw the information. But it's right out in the open for anyone to see if they look, if they take notice of what Molko talks about, when he talks about his life and his love of music, also some little habit he has himself. Habits tell us things about people. I think music does, too.

Moving on, I've had to think a lot about art, how I view art, how I live my art. What I disclose and what I don't. Not much, and my therapist wants me to disclose more. That's going to be the most difficult thing ever. It's not like some people don't know about it, it's just that I never really put anything on the Internet. I don't like the public gaze. Yes. we are talking about that. One of the things I want to do is do an art program again, to refresh my abilities, to work maybe differently, to socialize in a safe zone, to get out of my head, so to speak, to hear and see fresh ideas. Artists need this, it does not matter if they are writing, painting, or writing a song. They need new ideas and fresh ways of looking at art. Then they can go back into their creative caves and make it work with how they feel and work. All this takes time. It takes living and Covid is not letting us live as we did previously. Why do I have a feeling that Covid is going to change the world, that it already has? I collect a lot of images and thoughts on art and art projects that I have in my head, noted out in notebooks. Occasionally they make this page as part of the assemblage. But they are controlled glimpses. Isn't everything on the Internet sort of artifice? I believe the public gaze requires that artifice. I could never be a performance artist. Because artifice exist in the performance of it, in the persona that is really created in front of a camera or on a stage.

There is a psychology to this and I understand it completely. It's part of why Anthony Bourdain was so conflicted. He was a man encased in his own artifice and he hated it. 

I am ending with giving myself another deadline. I am hoping, feeling confident, that by the end of September, house will be organized, and yes, decorated for Halloween.

I am decorating inside with the hopes of seeing Colin, Oliver, and Miles, maybe Lydia, too. That's the plan. 

And yes, I am still on meds.

There is a moment when you notice that light in your mind has changed.

“She lived her art. She looked like her art. She had the vocabulary of art." —George Lange on Francesca Woodman

So, I am moving my writing stuff to a working studio. I have ordered a desk for the computer. It's an art studio, too. It's at the other end of the house. I bought a bookcase for the books I will need while writing, and can rotate them accordingly. I had two working studios when Johnny died and then I moved into my bedroom after that. It's never really felt right. But I think I was comforted by it, because Johnny was gone and the house was empty and I was so damn alone. (And very sick. Emotionally and physically ill for nearly a year and a half after Johnny died.) Johnny died. I keep repeating that. And I came unmoored. The house was uncanny. Only one room felt safe at the time. I had to slowly reclaim myself and my house. I had to look to the future, too. I could not look back. It made no sense to look back.

I already knew by the end of 2018, that I was never going to remarry, that I was fixed in my desire and need to create things and spend the rest of my years working on my art and writing. One of the things about grieving is how we build solace and attempt to comfort ourselves. We will go the path of least resistance. That's okay, but at some time, we have to face what is really going on with us. I might have made this step earlier if Covid-19 had not struck. Or not. I will never know. But I have made it now. Being alone is not going to destroy me. I have my muses and inspirations. I have my work.

Other things I ponder, that I am no longer depressed. I am no longer a victim of any trauma, and I have known many traumas. Of course, depression will return at some point and I will be disappointed but I will deal.

Today I thought of Francesca Woodman as I made the decisions and set in motion these plans. I have been studying her work. I have been thinking of art and how best to do it. Yes, plans, plans, plans. They had been rumbling through my mind since the end of January. I became fascinated with Woodman a few years ago, her art, her use of low light and the few resources she used to do her art. That she started so young. I was once very young and an artist. I had a scholarship to college for art and instead studied Anthropology and Art History, later Biology and Psychology. I read myself through the entire 19th Century at the same time. My mother was always slightly disappointed that I did not go to Art School but she never made a plan for that. But that's another story. My sister did go to Art School and is a beautiful artist, but she also read herself through the 19th Century, too. How we both love 19th Century Literature. For much of our lives, that was our art.

Woodman's art is still very relevant. This is what I have discovered. Her low light, her delayed or long exposures are still curiously current. She captured time in a way that bothers people I think. I want to replicate her desire for the image of time. But I also want to do some photography work related to my themes. But I want to know things, new things and the things she knew.

Woodman was not a writer or storyteller in the traditional sense of being a storyteller. Her art was her "talk" and in that art, one sees trauma, too, but one does not know exactly what it is. She was vague on purpose. But I am interested in her trauma. It eventually killed her. A suicide at 22 years old is not normal. She suffered from depression. She suffered from rejection and strangely the idea that she would not succeed, all at 20 years of age. There is something odd in that predicament. She had experienced a failed love affair. But looking at her in this photo makes one wonder how such a beautiful creature could throw herself off a building.

I often look to Francesca Woodman. Because I remember being 20 years of age. In some ways, I have had to embrace my 17 year old self in order to reinvent my life and move into the future that I have left. I call it the "Wildflower" role. It's worked very well, and was born out of my CBT sessions. Before Francesca Woodman died, she experienced many good years of creating good art. My sister and I have been exchanging long discussions on art, writing, social media, politics, history, the past, and even regret. We made a list of words that we hardly ever use in our work, our diaries, and even our letters. Shame was one. Boredom another. Regret, too. I've always found regret to be a waste. Even failure is not a word I use a lot.

Art is about choosing. I've had some bad habits on choosing. It always led to delays and procrastinations. And anxiety. But it never led to self-loathing. I suppose this is why I write about Brian Molko and am interested in Francesca Woodman, why I study them outside their gorgeous creative work. Depression runs in my family. But I need to understand their self-loathing, their pain.

I am moving out of this bedroom and corner this month. By May I will be in the new rooms.

There was a moment when I noticed that the light in my mind had changed. The thing is I noticed.