Who Knows Where the Time Goes? Making Art and Poetry at 39
Today I found a homemade photo book I’d compiled from a sketchbook with a blank cover, which one is encouraged to decorate. I had written with naive and stifled neatness the words, “How the years go by” in felt pen, and stuck a photo of treelimbs cutting across a red and purple dusk sky. These photos were taken over 20 years ago. The surprising thing is, I made the book ten years ago, and it feels like yesterday.
The book was unfinished, perhaps poignantly, somehow… room anyway for more experiences, but yet another project started and abandoned, but still some memories in it.
These images from my youth resonate powerfully now, particularly the perhaps over-dramatic line, under a shirtless photo, itself written so long ago, “I’m a stranger to myself now”. It feels like someone else’s memories. Supposedly all our cells renew every seven years, that’s something one hears a lot. But there’s meant to be a sense of continuity. Maybe because of the periods of mental ilness I’ve been through, and am hopefully coming out of the other side of, it is in a way someone else’s memories, given I am now some other being, born anew out of ashes or whatever…
Funny, I was thinking today about a poem I wrote in The Gambia. The line — “Awake and foetal,/ I am reborn/ under mosquito nets”. I had been praying, bargaining, pleading for my terrible thoughts to stop. Then all of a sudden, they did. I rushed out to the library and searched for a Koran. My intinct was to give thanks, to connect with my Creator somehow. And despite teenage existentialism (I was reading Camus’ “The Outsider” on this trip, Sartre’s “Nausea” I saved for a hiking trip to Kenya the following year, and read disrespectfully under a beautiful tree) , my upbringing had brought me up halfway Muslim and that instinct lived in me still. As I read the Koran, at the library in St Joseph’s Family Farm, the locals surrounded me, asking “had I washed my hands?” and “was I Muslim?” and “what was I doing?”. I was somewhat overwhelmed. I had also been taking Larium, an antimalarial that seems to cause psychosis, most notably, the entertainer Paul Merton seems to have suffered from the same drug, a comedian I have always liked and identified with. The sardonic acting, strange faces, and sporadic bemused befuddled hair ruffling. He’s among the people I like to do “face impressions” of. But I can do anyone in the world, I claim. I’m no good as a voice impersonator, but can (I’m told unreliably) capture anyone’s expression. I can’t really, it’s just a joke.
My friend is relaxing in the other room. We’re going out to a folk gig in Hereford tonight. I was a little rude and ruffled when he started moaning our other friend wasn’t coming and whatever else and I was very importantly and earnestly trying to write this blog post. I’ll sign off and make him a cuppa if he hasn’t followed my instructions to make himself one. He was very good company last time, though can be draining as some can. But he’s a gifted guitarist with a lot on his plate, personally. So I’ll cut the guy some slack. Or try to.
