January 4th 2019
When I spoke to Sparrow about this, about what I should do this year as last year I journalled daily my thoughts about her, she suggested this blog as she saw what I was doing as, "An exchange of ideas". I never thought of it that way, never saw it as anything other than a performance in her direction, a document that her absence is present and informs how I am in the world.
She's right, of course: she's rarely wrong. Changing the form from a dramatic monologue, the words of one framed by a silent other, to a dialogue, a transaction in equality to draw out the meanings that isolation mutes, is an end in itself, a way to maintain the presence of the other that develops the self. The journal was a record, notes on experience. This, I suppose, is an experience in itself, another thread of growing, a rapid prototyping of the self to test and revise and try out again. It's not just having someone to tell it to, it's a collaboration to make what there is to tell.
Then there's the hiding, the obfuscation built into my illegible script that I can't help thinking is a graphic signifier of my own self doubt: the sense that I disguise having nothing to write worth reading by making it impossible to read. I don't think I could have done this a year ago, but I trust her now. I trust her enough to accept she accepts me, that when she says what she wants, all she wants, is to know what I think, what I feel, she means it. I trust her enough to not be frightened of disappointing her. I trust her enough to accept that who she is now- "an artist with a body of work"- is something to do with me.
Now the fear is not that my words are not worth reading, but that they are. That I can reveal, that she can do for me what I have done for her. She showed me the value of exposing the authentic self to gaze and to comment by demonstrating what that gave her.
I hid in the armour of illegibility and irony. Now for nakedness and the gaze, the caress and the response. Blow, wind! Come, wrack! At least we'll live without harness on our back.
When I spoke to Sparrow about this, about what I should do this year as last year I journalled daily my thoughts about her, she suggested this blog as she saw what I was doing as, "An exchange of ideas". I never thought of it that way, never saw it as anything other than a performance in her direction, a document that her absence is present and informs how I am in the world.
She's right, of course: she's rarely wrong. Changing the form from a dramatic monologue, the words of one framed by a silent other, to a dialogue, a transaction in equality to draw out the meanings that isolation mutes, is an end in itself, a way to maintain the presence of the other that develops the self. The journal was a record, notes on experience. This, I suppose, is an experience in itself, another thread of growing, a rapid prototyping of the self to test and revise and try out again. It's not just having someone to tell it to, it's a collaboration to make what there is to tell.
Then there's the hiding, the obfuscation built into my illegible script that I can't help thinking is a graphic signifier of my own self doubt: the sense that I disguise having nothing to write worth reading by making it impossible to read. I don't think I could have done this a year ago, but I trust her now. I trust her enough to accept she accepts me, that when she says what she wants, all she wants, is to know what I think, what I feel, she means it. I trust her enough to not be frightened of disappointing her. I trust her enough to accept that who she is now- "an artist with a body of work"- is something to do with me.
Now the fear is not that my words are not worth reading, but that they are. That I can reveal, that she can do for me what I have done for her. She showed me the value of exposing the authentic self to gaze and to comment by demonstrating what that gave her.
I hid in the armour of illegibility and irony. Now for nakedness and the gaze, the caress and the response. Blow, wind! Come, wrack! At least we'll live without harness on our back.
I'm getting good at reading your handwriting!
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