Postcard 008 - The Bronte sisters, by the Bronte Brother

The Bronte Sisters by Patrick Branwell Bronte
Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Bronte Sisters, sent to [E].

This card because Yorkshire (although not quite her patch, I don't think), and because Yorkshire Tea is the good and proper cup of tea, and because I was thinking of her recently.

She makes faery furniture while we video chat and knows that there is magic in the world.  There is delicacy in her, and joy, and deep, deep care. She is a person I felt I knew already when I met her, because with some people it is just easy, to feel comfortable, and know where the space for conversation lies.

I have seen her angry, and hold respect for the intensity of that.  I have seen her in grief, and know that that must sit until it becomes part of the landscape of a life; claimed by moss, and wind, and changing skies.  I ask her opinion because I value it, and she knows lots of things that I don't.

A fragment of my dream the other night escaped with me, or pulled me back, to the waking world.  I've been having slight hypnogogic and hynopompic hallucinations the last day or so, which is new; the dark behind my phone starting to move and make patterns, telling me it's time to put the thing away and sleep, or something appearing in front of me when I'm not quite ready to be awake yet.  This morning it was a face appearing from behind the bedroom curtain, the same face that had appeared at the pontoon that the boat we were sailing down a canal docked at, where I was laid back and couldn't lift myself up.  A man with a glow stick offered a helpful hand, I woke to a sliver of bright sunshine in my eyes, and the face still there.  I realised I was still dreaming, and closed my eyes, but upon opening them again he hadn't shifted.  I willed him away by waking properly.

This seemed like the sort of thing I would tell you, and I'm not entirely sure why, or what I think you'd say.

I got up early, and walked into town for the first time in two months, and was back at the house by 9.  The combination of boarded up pubs, and empty shopfronts that were empty before March makes for eerie viewing.  There is a lot of scaffolding about, and so many closed signs, and interesting bits of graffiti. A banner hoisted on a bridge above the M8 declares that "Glasgow Endures." The bright morning sun made the stone white and steel glass of the Clydeside somewhat oppressive, and I turned into the park on the way back for some green.  I was contemplating the deep enforced rest and the connection with a slower life that comes with being in a world that's largely staying at home.  The weekend was making bread and cheese and dandelion honey.  The May is out.

Interlude

I checked the postbox; no large letter stuck there, as far as I could tell. 

I sent some Scottish scenery to someone I thought would appreciate it.

Glasgow's cold and bright today and things are growing.

Copyright on original image most definitely someone else's.

Postcard 007 - Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley, send to [L]

Bridget Riley, Bolt of Colour, 2017-2019. Installation view, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.
Colmandavid, CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The picture of Bridget Riley that's on this postcard can't be reproduced here, as it's in copyright.  However, you can find it here, so that you can at least get an idea of what I'm talking about. 

There's something about the way that she looks out of the image that made me think immediately of the recipient for this card.  The eyebrow isn't raised but the suggestion is there; a cross between curiosity, resigned-to-slightly-pissed-off, and a touch of the world weary.  I'd bet she tells good stories, and I definitely want a pint with her.

A great deal of my friends live on the opposite side of the country to me; I have a community over there that I do a lot of travelling to see.  It's partly L's fault that I'm involved, and for that I'll always be grateful.

I miss my friends.

As would be expected during a global pandemic, the post is being a bit weird, deliveries are delayed, things get to different places in different orders.  This altered sense of time affects all things, postcards included.  I send out 9 envelopes last Monday, hoping that they'd arrive by Thursday, and some of them did, but at least one - going to the same city - arrived just yesterday.  One that I sent weeks ago still hasn't arrived, and I'm fairly sure that it's actually still stuck in the postbox, as it was a big envelope.  I'm half considering going back to the postbox and seeing if I can feel if it's still lodged in there, or waiting for the postie to arrive and ask them if they can have a root around and check for me.  This last thing seems like something that L would do, to be honest. 

We are far away in many senses from the people that we love, but this won't last forever.  The remote working / working from home thing is largely business as usual for me, and the social-digital ways that I have of keeping in touch with people are still going, so that's not exactly been a big change.  My day is often punctuated with messages from L, amongst other people, and that's still happening, and it makes me glad.  But last week had an important date in it for my community, and we all got together online to celebrate it, and I found I was crying a lot, and it all just kept coming, that night and the day after, because of a rush of the sense of lost potential energy, the stuff we would have been doing.  The parties we would have had and the in jokes that would have developed and the connections and memories that we would have made.  This baseline is fine, but it's the stuff on top, the stuff that is somehow extra but also essential, that I'm missing. 

I'd normally be out and about all over the country, but I haven't left this city since the middle of March.  This is... very unusual for me.  Last year I did too much travelling - it was rare that I spent 7 nights in a row in my own bed - and this year, well. 

I miss you, love.  I know that you have people you miss terribly.  We'll be sat on a beach or in a forest or both soon, I hope.  And you can tell me what you're making and what you're reading, and there will be fire, and cider.  And send me more pictures of your art, because I like it. 

Postcard 006 - Henry Moore

Henry Moore, sent to [Dad].

Henry Moore in workshop, by Allan Warren, CC-BY-SA 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons

I just came back to this blog, because it's lockdown and I like sending things to people in the post.  I found this post in draft; I'd not touched it for four years or so.  

I picked this card out weeks ago, the day I was running a training event at the Glasgow School of Art.  I thought I'd find inspiration, amongst years of history of world renowned artists, and across from the slowly-rebuilding Charles Rennie Macintosh building.  But the only thing I know about Henry Moore is something that my Dad told me, years ago, about the holes in Moore's sculptures being something to do with his wife not having children, or miscarriages.  I don't know if that's true.

Since I wrote this bit of draft, the Art School has burned down, again.  

Today - lockdown's made me appreciate the post again.   I like letters, I like the longer time period we have for reflection that the ink-written word allows.  And I say that as someone who spends a lot of time at the computer, for both work and play.  I like the digital world, I like its immediacy and the possibilities it opens for connection and discovery.  One thing that lockdown has changed for me, since the beginning - in what already feels like the long, long ago - is our sense of time.  I'm busier than ever, whereas some of my friends, now furloughed, have rather too much on their hands.

I'm drawn to Baudrillard's writing, Simulacra and Simulation, and The Perfect Crime both got a mention in my PhD.  In the latter (IIRC, I'm not in front of the right bookshelf to check), he talks about how time gets shorter with electronic communication, and I think about that a lot.  I like writing.  I've dug out my fountain pen again.

These days I find that writing a letter with pen and ink is a more intimate experience than that of email, text, phone, regardless of content.  I'll not think twice about long and emotional and hearfelt Whatsapp or FB messages, but it can feel that I'm crossing a boundary, somehow giving myself away, when I write a letter.

This feeling is made more intense because of an experience a few years back, trying to mend a friendship - although in hindsight it was really probably just what Captain Awkward would call FEELINGSMAIL - and the ink-written word was fine, but when we got to email, it went downhill.  Too immediate, perhaps.  But also, that friend did not value the same things I did, and felt judged by me, and deflected by telling me that I was being hyperbolic, and too black & white.  All stories have three sides.  Our friendship had run its course.

None of this is about my Dad.

I got stuck on this entry partly, I think, because I didn't think that he'd like me talking about him on the internet.  We see things very differently, and very similarly, depending.  I haven't been home for a long time; that's not unusual because I live in a different part of the country, but lockdown made me more aware of it.

I miss the trees, and the thousand acres of sky.

Hey Dad.
x

Asia > Amsterdam > Glasgow

A collection of postcards that me & B picked up in the Rijksmuseum last year, part of tribe Asia > Amsterdam exhibition.  Glasgow finally feels like winter is over. Time to start.. Something .. Again.

Well, quite.

Postcard 005 - George Eliot

By Sir Frederick Burton [Public domain]

George Eliot, sent to [Lynda]

Smart and determined lady who gave no fucks.  Now who does this remind me of?

I struggled with this one, to be honest.  I have promised myself that I will write these cards in the order in which they appear in the box.  No one jumped out at me, at first, and much of the biographical information that you read on Eliot concentrates on her physical appearance, the unkind things people said.  There is a degree of internalised sexism that stayed my hand a few times before addressing the card; would the recipient think that I was being similarly unkind, in some way?  But George Eliot, she was a lady who gave no fucks.  Whose great love was technically still married - he and his wife weren't able to be divorced as he allowed himself to be named on the birth certificate of her children by another man, thus making him complicit in adultery.  Eliot called him her husband anyway, convention be damned.  And I know a few folk who similarly have no time for rubbish.  Who do not suffer fools.  Who are damn good at what they do.  One woman in particular, in fact, whose determination and dedication to her work, to her life's goals, is steadfast.

Her job is hard.  Emotionally draining, but she does incredible things.  She helps people in the most severe of need, and she is good at it.  May she keep on doing it, because we need more people like her.

I never did read Mill on the Floss, or Middlemarch, or Adam Bede.  That era of literature was one which failed repeatedly to grab my attention, despite being lauded as classics.  I think perhaps that's why I didn't want to read them, I'm not wholly sold on the conventional.

And neither, really, was Eliot.  Perhaps I should re-visit...