It’s impossible to “let go” until you have fully understood. “You can’t let go until you know.” It’s time to dive deep, and take stock. This is an intergenerational task, not one for faint-hearted time travellers. I am seasoned by despair so I can take the punishment that would repel the less conditioned. What I can’t do is talk with family and friends about this because nowadays they just don’t want to know.
They don’t want to LISTEN.
It’s BORING,
As for me I still want to talk about many things. And I’m not ill, I’m perfectly fine. For a man who lives with a mental illness that’s as good as it gets, crois moi. It’s nevertheless funny because today as I read through old letters dad had saved to his PC – in a folder labelled 2008 – I felt a kind of instinctive jolt as if, years having passed without any knowledge of this correspondence, I had come across something I was meant to find at exactly this point in time. And it’s not just dad. I will go through the letters in their digital form, preserved in zeroes and ones, when I have the inclination to, but in the meantime I can plan a new series of paintings for execution.
Love that word, it’s so sort of “police procedural”, “spy novel” and crisp like an establishing shot above a city just before the next scene in which the detective will come into the operating theatre to talk with the pathologist. In this conversation the pathologist (with access to a computer file, a ZIP file, labelled “Computer 2008”), will be able to tell the detective that not one but two people were involved in the death of the victim.
The victim being me.
You see? Anyway while I’m faffing around summoning up the shades of Endeavour Morse, I can refer back in time to a Facebook Messenger conversation with an overseas friend – a friend who point-blank refuses to talk to me about my father – and to a comment made by my first gallerist when I was getting ready to leave on the last day of my first solo show. No, I stand corrected by memory. It was on the day I went back to visit her and drop off a painting I’d made to commemorate the show, I’d been so grateful for her support (my father never did anything to further my artistic career, or even say a single word about a painting or drawing I made) that I promptly scrambled up two artworks about showing art. One is on the wall above my desk as I write.
What it looks down on is a man who said to his overseas friend, “I’ve got a new series of paintings planned.” This was back in December, in the lag-time before Christmas, when life sort of slows down so that it almost entirely stops, I’m not sure what mechanism keeps it running but it takes the Jolt of the first Monday two weeks after New Year to get it running smoothly again.
This seems like a digression but bear with me.
So, the gallerist said “Why don’t you make them bigger?” in November, then I said to my friend “I’ve got a new series of paintings planned” in December. It’s now January and it’s at precisely this time that I find the letters in “Computer 2008” ready to be plundered for gain.
What Poppey creation can come out of this confluence of thangs?
Which reminds me that the man whose name dad chose for his first-born, Jim Donald, was married to a woman commonly known as Pop. I can put that in an artwork, too. Funnily enough in the past couple of days I’ve come across two family members online. I didn’t find them, they found me. One through Ancestry and one through my website.
The website where I posted dad’s memoir. Ha.
I posted it back in 2010 and it’s been rewarding as a honeypot, drawing distant people, both family and strangers (sometimes family ARE strangers, you know what I mean), to my Inbox. Like the emails I answered today and yesterday and the day before. I usually at this point send copies of spreadsheets dad made when he was retired and travelling around the world spending money like a madman pretending to be Coco Chanel. I mention my plans for newspaper clippings saved from the jaws of oblivion by mum and dad’s propensity to CONSERVE everything.
Except some of my most notable artworks of youth. Paintings now sadly lost.
But while some things were lost other things were retained in the family. I’ll write more about it in future when certain contingencies arise. For the moment I should get back to m y painting project, which is why you’re still reading this far. Well I won’t say another word. I’ll keep it under my hat as the saying goes. I’ll CONSERVE it for future use.
So farewell.
