Gulp.

There's this feeling.

When you're about to tell someone something and you can almost taste the anticipation.

Like smog.

Polluting the atmosphere.

But then you buckle,.

You can't bring yourself to say what it is. And you gulp it all back in.

I have been experiencing those moments often recently.

There is a lot of gulping and a lot of hiding.

It's all too foggy and I can't seem to wave it away quickly enough before another gust overwhelms me.

The Seagram Murals.

Whenever I'm watching something, I'm doodling at the same time. I'm not quite sure how and when I developed this habit. I always keep a notebook nearby and I just doodle.

A week or so ago I began drawing random squares and colouring them in.  After the first time, I ended up with a page covered in small blue squares. Looking at them all immediately after, I recalled Rothko's paintings- "The Seagram Murals". Although- I didn't know them by name at the time. 

Let's go back in time. 

About four years ago, a few friends and I visited the Tate Modern in London. We went on a few guided tours and browsed for a bit, and then we came to the Rothko paintings. The "Seagram Murals" are in a smaller gallery that is lighted dimly. The room immediately has a sombre and almost heavy atmosphere. I remember walking in there for the first time and being hit by this wave of feeling. 

Art is difficult. I am no expert on art and what makes it good or bad. Walking around the Tate that day, following a lady who provided insight into all these wonderful paintings and their history, I felt the importance of art, but I definitely needed some basic knowledge to access the paintings she described. For example, she gave such a good background of some of Picasso's paintings which helped when I looked at his works. My point here is that getting to an initial response was hard for me. I had to look and think deeply at the paintings and installations I came across. 

Walking into Room 3 and being confronted by those deep reds was a completely different experience. I remember that room as being empty, although I'm sure it can't have been. According to my memory, I entered that room alone. My friends probably came in after me. I stared at the murals for a long time. The first ones I looked at were"Section 74" and "Section 5". Hanging together, these two murals evoked the strongest feeling I have ever had towards art. The colour, the ambience of the room, the scale and the beauty of the murals made me feel overwhelmed.With sadness, heaviness, memory. Everything. I remember that moment because the feeling surprised me. I didn't realise I could react to art so immediately. I didn't realise how much it could make me feel. 

Staring at my doodles of random squares, that experience is what I recalled. Now, I am not saying I am a budding Rothko-esque artist (is that even a thing?), but being hit by blocks colour reminded me of being at the Tate. 

I have been thinking about those murals ever since. 

So today, I visited the Tate again. 

Oh man, walking into that room. 

I cried. 

Not in a passionate, dramatic way. It was quiet, subtle. I brushed the tears away quickly before anyone could see. But seeing those murals again just filled me with so many feelings. According to Rothko, the best way to experience the murals is to sit and look at them, almost meditatively. I did that, and it was beautiful. 

Staring at these large mural, I was confronted by everything not in front of me. There is no drawing, no landscape, no figure. The murals give you a shape, almost like a frame, almost like windows. That's the way I see it anyway. The simplest (and probably extremely reductive) way of viewing the murals for me was to see them as windows or entrances into yourself- myself. The soul, if you will. Sitting there, staring at those murals, I would see certain strokes bleed into others. I would feel calm and scared all at once. 

For this one above- "Section 4"- I remember all the colours blurring in and changing almost. The longer I gazed at them, the more I grew to love and see the murals.

They have given me the most profound experience of art that I have ever had.

Murals in order:

Mark Rothko

Red on Maroon Mural, Section 74 1959

Tate. Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969 

© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998

Red on Maroon Mural, Section 5 1959

Red on Maroon Mural, Section 4 1959

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"

The Second Coming- William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;

    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Confession- I haven't read or analysed this poem properly. I provide it merely for context. That makes it sound like I don't like the poem or that I don't feel like it deserves to be read or analysed. This is not the case. I just really wanted to make this post.

I had never read or heard of this poem before I heard the phrase "Things Fall Apart". I read Chinua Achebe's novel for a class in my second year of uni. I wrote an essay on the book and I learned that the book's title was from the poem, but I never read the poem. I realise that this makes me a sort of poor English student, but as we have established from practically all of my other posts this month, I have little confidence on this front so why beat myself any more?

Fast forward to third year and I took a class in criticism and theory (one of the hardest classes I have ever taken). One of the critics we read was Joan Didion. She wrote a collection of essays entitled 'Slouching towards Bethlehem' and in her foreword she included Yeats' poem. I found Didion strange to read at first. I didn't really understand her writing until the seminar and until I re-read certain essays. Then, writing about her and Virginia Woolf for an essay at the end of the semester, I started to feel a sense of kinship with her writing and the place/s from which she wrote.

I suddenly found myself being drawn to this line- "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". I can't express in full how much this line has come to mean for me.

It makes me think of anxiety, hopelessness, despair, loss, longing, helplessness, loneliness, desperation, exhaustion and generally, my third year. I have developed a love for this line and it's strange because I have heard people talk about their favourite poems and their favourite lines and I have never understood that type of collecting and treasuring of art. But now, I feel like this line is a piece of art that I am adding to a library or catalogue in my brain of emotions and feelings that I need to remember.

Throughout this year I have always come back to this line and it has become a sort of mantra- in a weird and morbid sense. A mantra is something one says to encourage oneself or psych oneself up but I have been recalling this line whenever I have felt anxious and confused- which has been practically my default setting this year.

I would like to read this poem and figure it our properly in my head but as I have been thinking about that one line, I needed to write this post. Something tells me I will come back to this poem.

Until then,

T 

Creatures on the prowl-

As it's the summer and I have no real need to wake up early, I have been staying awake until the early hours of the morning. This has introduced to the world of night-time creatures. 

I have spent too much time than might be deemed rational, thinking about mosquitoes, spiders, and other large I-don't-know-what-they-are-called insects. 

Every night, as my family slowly lulls into sleep, and lights are switched off around the house, I am attacked by buzzing flies and mosquitoes which lurk. Now, I keep old Asos magazines next to my bed so that I can swat them. Then I rip off the page and bin it,with the dead insects smudged against last season's finest fashion. Writing that down, I realise how morbid that sounds. What makes it worse, is that I have used several magazines by this stage. 

On a more existential and pretentious level, witnessing this influx of insects during the night/early morning has made me think of the nature of space and place. I have seen how these random flies, these tiny, seemingly insignificant things, find a little nook or corner, and settle, as if they have a right. 

I think that's why we humans are so terrified- irrationally maybe- of spiders and such like. As humans, we are constantly fighting to have our voices heard, to insert ourselves into the abyss that is life, to make our lives count, to make ourselves purposeful- to find a space. But these tiny creatures who we could crush with a small poke, a small step of the shoe, manage to determinedly settle and dominate a space. Spiders happily crawl over the bath, and you can't help but wonder at how they spin their webs, defying dusters and microfiber cloths. They don't care that we are larger and more powerful. 

They don't care about hierarchy. They just are. They just be. They plod along.

I saw a moth on the wall as I walked up the stairs to my room. It was so still. It completely caught me off guard. I stared at it. It was speckled black and white. It looked like it was trying to camouflage but at the same time demanding my attention. In that precise moment, I am sure I felt something akin to jealousy. This moth had found a spot and made it his/her own. It made it look so easy. Isn't that something to admire. In a world where we are forever trying to forge a way for ourselves, insects do not ask. They take it and damn the consequences.

If I had half the gumption of these insects which harass me at 3 am in the morning, I wonder what I would have achieved already?

To share or not to share?

As is evident from this blog, as much as I share, I hide a lot. I am the mistress of feigning openness and frankness whilst not actually telling people things.

Example:

Uni friend tweets- "essay deadlines.can't even".
My response-         *retweet* 

Friend messages- "Are you excited to start uni again?"
My response-       "Yup! :)"


I don't think it's lying. I just feel like a lot of the time, people aren't able to empathise. Why tell them?
The truth is overrated most of the time. And sympathy is not enough for me. I don't want pity or people knowing I'm stressed or worried. This makes me more anxious. I am always slightly jealous when people are able to casually divulge their biggest worries and insecurities.

I have been thinking about this because I recently (15 minutes ago) re-read an old story I wrote. I started it when I was 11. It was a story I developed from an English homework piece. I was in year 5 or 6 then. For some reason, I could never let go of that story. I finished it five or six years later. I didn't write constantly all those years. It was sporadic.There was a time when I even shared it with people-with friends and family. I was nervous but I did it.

Looking back on it, I think it's interesting how that is the longest I have ever spent on writing something. Not only that, but I continued it across a time period in which I changed so drastically. I think I felt this sense of urgency with that story. It had to be completed.

Looking back on it, I feel a sense of embarrassment. I'm proud of finishing the story, but- it's a strange feeling. I realise how vulnerable I made myself in my writing. I doubt other people noticed, but me being me, I see how in my characters, I was writing about myself. I think that's why I couldn't not finish it. Reading certain parts of the story, certain conversations between my characters, I say to myself,"why?". I berate myself and the characters in the story, but I am not sure in which order I do this? Did the characters come first or did I?

Looking back on it, I don't agree at all with some of my sentiments in the story, but I think that is just me growing up and learning. The biggest thing I have learned is that I have never written that way before. Never so honestly. I never realised that I was writing about myself, so I don't think I hid anything.

And thus, I realise, that in hiding things, I will never be able to continue writing a story past 100 words.

I never thought honesty was something you had to work on, but I'm learning that it's a skill, like riding a bike or making a cup of tea. Trivial and commonplace, you think it's easy.

But it is so easy to do it wrong.

And when done wrong, you feel its absence.

The Problem-

I don't want to tell you.

And I do.

I am close, all the time.

I begin, and then I sto-

-p. 

               mid-way

If I tell you I will regret it.

A problem shared is not a problem halved.

The greatest lie.

It only means that now two people know and 

one person is more vulnerable.

trust. the greatest lie.

I definitely don't want to tell you-

but I really do.

Please- 

do you see the problem?

I-

I-

I

.

'Throwing it all away'

"Don't throw it away".

Josh jumped slightly and turned around. It was his neighbour. A young boy was sitting on the doorstep. Josh remembered- a new family had recently moved in.

"Seriously, dude. You've been staring at that thing for ages".

"You've been watching me?" asked Josh, peeved.

"Yes".

"Why?"

"Why what?" The boy got up and leaned casually on the fence which separated them. He was dishevelled and unkempt. Josh suspected that was why his parents hadn't invited them over.

"Why have you been watching me? That's weird".

"Look, I'm waiting for someone to pick me up- I'm not being nosy if that's what you're getting it. It's just- you've been standing out here for the past ten minutes with that stupid bag, putting it into the bin and then taking it out again. You clearly don't want to throw it away. Why don't you just keep it?".

"Sorry, who are you?"

"I didn't say".

"Okayyy".

Josh put the bag down on the ground. It was heavy. A battered Fiat approached and parked abruptly.

"That's me", said the boy. He locked his front door then walked towards the car. As he opened the car door, he turned. "Hey, whatever is in that bag, must be important to you. Don't do anything you'll regret".

He climbed into the car and the Fiat crawled away.

Shaking his head, Josh reached down and picked up the bag. He lifted the bin lid, threw the bag inside and walked back into his house.

Things to tell my younger self

Keep reading. Don't use school as an excuse to stop. It may take time away but you are organised. You can fit it in. The best part of reading is learning something new. Don't lose that.

Keep writing. Yes, most of what you write is terrible. But why is that so bad? Keep trying. Keep doing. Keep on.

It's okay to have an opinion. Some things swim in a grey area. Some things are black or white. If it's the latter, it's okay to choose. Being compassionate and open is good, but don't let that stop you from being definitive and exact in your expectations and principles.

Some people will not like you. This is life. Deal with it.

It's okay to be vulnerable. Try it now please, it'll make it easier for future you.... Future you is struggling a bit with this. 

Be kind. Be honest. Be open. This is important to you. 

Things get better..... They get worse too. But you get better at it. 

It's good to be witty. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. 

Be creative. No project is stupid. Follow through and completing it will be enough. Don't worry so much about whether it's good or not. Fear of failure is a poor excuse. You can do it. I believe in you.

"That moment"

It's been a tough few days.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with someone and I feel like it has changed everything.

It has changed the way I see myself with respect to others.

It has made me angry, hurt and sad all at once.

It has made me feel like there is no going back.

There are certain things said, things done and conversations had, that you can't return from. That's what I've experienced. I feel like my world has changed.

I don't like it. I don't like not being in control of my life. It's debilitating and painful.

I am in one of those moments which I think I'm going to remember as "that moment". You know, that feeling when you are experiencing something epic, life-changing, heart-wrenching, moving.... anything big, really..... and then you recall this memory that you randomly have of something once insignificant but now so essential. The past few days, the process of me writing this blog post, they will both be something I look back on. I will be thinking one of three things:

You didn't know it then, but things were going to get a lot worse. 

You didn't know it then, but things were just about to get better.

Nothing has changed.


I don't know which one it'll be. I don't know which one I want it to be. All I know, is that right now, I feel like the earth beneath me isn't as steady, and I'm slowly losing my balance.


Here's to not falling over.


T

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