{Keeping the very best company.}
Finding in a novel exactly what you needed to find is one of the joys of reading. There on the page, words that you allow yourself to feel are written exactly for you at that very moment. No one else, just you. A conversation between the two of you. A looking-glass. That frozen sea taken to with axe. Tove Jansson’s quiet tale, The True Deceiver (translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and published by Sort Of books in 2009), crept up on me much like the character Katri and her “big strange” dog. A haunting piece set in deep winter that has left me with a curious aftertaste. As with many of her books, this one looks at the link between art and nature, and as the elderly artist, Anna, waits for the snow to thaw before the spring when she can start her work again, I found my own process mirrored. I’ve a new body of work in mind. I’ve the paper cut and ready. I am, it occurs to me now, waiting for the snow to melt and the ground to be revealed. What was there all along but now shown as clean brown earth.
By story’s end, and here I give nothing away should you have it on your to-read list, the two characters Katri and Anna have shifted poles, a process neither easy nor quick. Nor painless. It takes a season. It takes some pushing. It is like the paths that fill “with snow as quickly as they are shovelled out”. Moreover, it cannot be undone. But a fixed way of being and seeing needs a shake-up. It is good to move this point, this footing, and it is perhaps from moving from this previously believed to be fixed point or standing that new things in all guises can come. Don’t get too settled. The inevitable shake-up.
At yoga recently, a leak in the ceiling caused a shuffling of place on a smaller scale. The space of the large hall was thus halved and we couldn’t all head to our usual fixed points. Instead, we had to go to different parts of the room to accommodate the leak. The yoga mats too needed to be placed in an arc shape instead of their usual ordered rows and columns. And we were now facing the opposite end of the room. Facing away from the window and the ceiling with the leak. We were facing the back of the room. We were staggered and stepped. The room with its leak made us change. Forced our hand. Forced our bodies. And afterwards we found we liked this shake-up. Don’t get too fixed. Bend a little or break. Learn to shift position.
Learn to adjust. Anna (who had previously lived alone) finds her house is not her own and the chance to vanish into sleep in daylight hours is not possible.
“No one knew, no one disturbed her, but still the simple and irresistible need to vanish into a nap became a forbidden thing. She would wake up with a start, open her eyes wide, grab her book, and listen. It was completely quiet. But someone had walked across the floor upstairs.”
...
“Anna Aemelin got used to having her house invisibly inhabited. All her life she’d been getting used to things until they no longer seemed dangerous, and now she did it again. Soon she no longer heard the footsteps overhead, no more than she heard the wind and the rain and the parlour clock.”
Yes, this is a book that creeps up on you. And lingers long after you’ve closed the cover. (A good sign, I think). “It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. No window in the village showed a light” it begins. It appears disarmingly simple but this is never the case with either her work or things frequently mistaken for simple. This simpleness is all of her hard work made to appear this way as we read. The swan’s legs whirling under the water’s surface to make for appearance of effortless glide. Things are understated. The simpleness or the ease with which we think we understand what is being told to us speaks more of her skill and knowledge. It was Einstein, wasn’t it, who wrote (and here I paraphrase) that if you couldn’t explain it simply you didn’t know your subject.
I can still see clearly the rubbish from the house that has been piled up on the ice waiting for it to melt. A giant monument awaiting snow’s thaw. All those discarded things, waiting.
“One morning, Anna went down to the fish pier and looked out across the ice trying to catch sight of the big pile of furniture that Katri had condemned to sink, but the light from the sky blinded her and she saw nothing.”
As Ali Smith explains (in the introduction), this is a book “very much about the way you look — and the double-take of what a phrase like ‘the way you look’ means: the way you perceive things as well as the way you are perceived by others.” It is about an awareness that cannot be undone once known. It is an un-romanticised look at the creative process. It is about the space between the imagined and the real, between wild and tame. About our place in nature. It is deceptively simple, and the true deceiver of the title is the author herself. It gave me much to think about, but most of all, it give me a kick. It has made me keen to start on the new body of work I’ve long had in mind.
Pastels. Paint. Collage. All straightforward. Illusions stripped. To my drawing board I go.
{This photo of Tove Jansson working in her studio reminds me that you can work anywhere and with anything. You don't need today's perfect white studio. You can always find a way.}
Saturday afternoon links,
+ Collage is brutal (NB: Background noise is actually Percy chatting not a penguin crying)
+ The two of us (here and here) on the local telly with Stephen Wickham, chatting in animated fashion about our work at Geelong Gallery as part of All breathing in heaven
+ Eclectic Array from the Outer Limits (Peter Fay's collection)
+ Kai Fagerström's beautiful photographic series The House in the Woods
+ Condors Released in Chile
