Big cloud, small world

I am grateful for - an ever changing world, powerlessness, exhilarating people, friendship, sunsets, breeze, LouLou snoring, coffee, The Guardian and Observer, academics, writers, technology, experiences -
My life has never been dull. That is certain. Difficult at times, dangerous even, but always a string of adventures. I am thankful when I am more detached from the immediate emotions. Emotions overrun me. Now is this usual or am I in a small number of people? Perhaps I am one of the greater number of people who are very sensitive souls and it is the minority who aren't ? Is it they who have got "life"sorted? Maybe we are all different so that there is balance in the Universe? Some who are very sensitive and some who are not at all and some who are in the middle. Some who can manage their emotions some who suppress in various ways and some who gush with emotions.
Well whatever the reason it is how it is. No one is more right than any other, so long as it is not causing that person damage. If people are content then surely that is good enough.

Day 2.
I am worried that I really do not feel able to go back to work but I cannot take afford to take any more time off sick. I will try and make an appointment to see my GP this afternoon.
The guilt that washes over me for letting the team down and some of the long standing clients (not the curent group) can overwhelm me and is almost as difficult as the idea of facing going in.
Being a long, long way from where I am right now would be the ideal. It's horrid that I am so self focused when there are 1000's dead or missing and even more homeless and devasted. in Japan. And equal tragedy recently in Christchurch. And then on a more individual basis, LT, dying. Her 3 little girls, her husband, her mum and dad. And yet I ................




GP. Study. All other chores otherwise are on hold.

Bliss
X

p.s. http://www.drwaynedyer.com/blog/latest
Not recommending it as have only just taken a look. Initial glance and it looks heartening.

Subversion

Mother and Baby
Nancy Spero

Apparently an influence in her life was Antonin Artaud

POEM from The Nerve Meter by Antonin Artaud

An actor is seen as if through crystals.
Inspiration in stages.
One musn’t let in too much literature.
I have aspired no further than the clockwork of the soul, I have transcribed only the pain of an abortive adjustment.
I am a total abyss. Those who believed me capable of a whole pain, a beautiful pain, a dense and fleshy anguish, an anguish which is a mixture of objects, an effervescent grinding of forces rather than a suspended point
—and yet with restless, uprooting impulses which come from the confrontation of my forces with these abysses of offered finality
(from the confrontation of forces of powerful size),
and there is nothing left but the voluminous abysses, the immobility, the cold—
in short, those who attributed to me more life, who thought me at an earlier stage in the fall of the self, who believed me immersed in a tormented noise, in a violent darkness with which I struggled
—are lost in the shadows of man.

In sleep, nerves tensed the whole length of my legs.
Sleep came from a shifting of belief, the pressure eased, absurdity stepped on my toes.
It must be understood that all of intelligence is only a vast contingency, and that one can lose it, not like a lunatic who is dead, but like a living person who is in life and who feels working on himself its attraction and its inspiration (of intelligence, not of life).
The titillations of intelligence and this sudden reversal of contending parties.
Words halfway to intelligence.
This possibility of thinking in reverse and of suddenly reviling one’s thought.
This dialogue in thought.
The ingestion, the breaking off of everything.
And all at once this trickle of water on a volcano, the thin, slow falling of the mind.
To find oneself again in a state of extreme shock, clarified by unreality, with, in a corner of oneself, some fragments of the real world.
To think without the slightest breaking off, without pitfalls in my thought, without one of those sudden disappearances to which my marrow is accustomed as a transmitter of currents.
My marrow is sometimes amused by these games, sometimes takes pleasure in these games, takes pleasure in these furtive abductions over which the sense of my thought presides.
At times all I would need is a single word, a simple little word of no importance, to be great, to speak in the voice of the prophets: a word of witness, a precise word, a subtle word, a word well steeped in my marrow, gone out of me, which would stand at the outer limit of my being,
and which, for everyone else, would be nothing.
I am the witness, I am the only witness of myself. This crust of words, these imperceptible whispered transformations of my thought, of that small part of my thought which I claim has already been formulated, and which miscarries,
I am the only person who can measure its extent.
 
There is an exhibition of her work at The Serpentine. Anthony McCall is also there so next month I will be heading there with JM.
Initially I become quite downhearted at the thought of another female artist fighting for equality for women. Bit of course reading more and appreciating the era's that she worked through it makes sense. I get more motivated the more I read about the person and it encourages me to look further at their work and then I see what I like.
In one article there was a comparison made with Marlene Dumas. Now she I was immediately attracted to and I think she really tackles subversion and difficult subject matters. But I don't think she is stuck in feminism at all.
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
  I think an artist I recently met might have been influenced by Marlene Dumas. I saw in her workshop what looks like the starts of a gallery of faces. I will try to remember to ask her. I thought this the first time I went there but feel too ignorant really to comment.Anyway I will pluck up the courage.
If there was a Marlene Dumas exhibition I would go without hesitation.
Anyway Nancy - I will go although I realise as I am writing this I am not entirely invigorated by her. The war series looks interesting but again there's sort of nothing new. Perhaps it's because Dumas captures something of the soul, tortured, dying, alive, emotional. Whereas, Spero seems all message to me at this time. I will decide when I have seen something close up.
 
Ha ha - look at me - art critic extraordinaire. What do I know?
 
Bliss
X