Writing as a tool.
This past week I've woken up most mornings feeling pretty flat an that's been mainly fuelled by sadness. I miss the contact with G and when I think of him, I think of his sad demeanour and that at times we had really fun and happy times. There was a problem though in that being the norm. That was the exception. I have to keep reminding myself as otherwise I have those "gaps" when there is nothing to do, nowhere to go and I'm just sitting with me ad guess what? I don't sit in that spot too easily very often. I haven't taken quiet time for an age now. I find all sorts of reasons as to why not.
And then L. Well having sent him the message as follows:
This past week I've woken up most mornings feeling pretty flat an that's been mainly fuelled by sadness. I miss the contact with G and when I think of him, I think of his sad demeanour and that at times we had really fun and happy times. There was a problem though in that being the norm. That was the exception. I have to keep reminding myself as otherwise I have those "gaps" when there is nothing to do, nowhere to go and I'm just sitting with me ad guess what? I don't sit in that spot too easily very often. I haven't taken quiet time for an age now. I find all sorts of reasons as to why not.
And then L. Well having sent him the message as follows:
"Good morning L.
For some unaccountable reason this week feels as if it's going by so slowly. It's only Thursday. I only work 4 days a week at the moment and it still feels too many.
Oh good news and quite a shock, I got a first in both of my last 2 assignments. I certainly didn't expect that! That probably means very little but to me it's amazing. I do everything at the last minute and I give very little time to my studying really. I could be quite clever I reckon if I applied myself. That's what my teachers used to say in so many words. I was never really disciplined at school or at home with this sort of thing. And yet expectations were high. Strange combination really.
I wanted to say something quite serious now ..... are you sitting.
Ha ha - for me it feels intense and then I think what the hell am I talking about how can this be so intense???
Fumble fumble for words to say things that are then actually very revealing about me the person.
As you will probably know by now I am interested in sex. I like to play, I like to enjoy sex. HOWEVER (there's always a but huh?). It's not enough for me to just be sexual.
Now here's the weird bit okay. I am very very aware that you're there and I'm here but to me this sex play is just a prelude to getting to know you. Despite the distance and plastic between me and you there's just a little wonder in me as to whether you are someone I would like to know and have time with. It's impossible so goodness knows how or why I should even entertain the idea.
And so then why on earth would I be entering into all this sexual play. When actually I don't want to do that with anyone other than a person I am in a relationship with.
I enjoy what we've been doing. It's a lot of fun. I like your adventurous spirit and I like being pushed as actually I am very shy especially with sex and yet not really - what a combination!!
It's not enough though really. Without all the other levels of intimacy even with adventuring it becomes simply sex.
This I guess is where men and women are so so different. I can play and adventure but I also like discussion and experiencing other things and so on.
It's impossible for you and I to do that together.
I was going to write that if you were here or I there or just together and going out and talking and stuff from time to time and then getting home and then making love with gusto and adventure - that's great!!
But as days have gone on I just wonder what I'm doing. Coz the other problem is that I am loyal to you despite the distance, the plastic and the not really knowing you at all.
So then I am investing myself in distance, plastic and cyber sex which is only partially fulfilling a sexual desire.
Intensity over.......
No doubt I'll get horny again. But oddly if I don't entertain that it doesn't become a longing and passes quickly.
Anyway I'm going off to work now. Boo hoo. I love it when I'm there it just seems too much this week. Why does that happen?
Well of the real content of this email.
I'd be interested in your thoughts. I enjoy the liaisons with you but ....
I would like to continue being "penfriends/telephone friends" but I'm not quite sure on what basis - I know I don't want it to be on a sexual basis.
Better than running off to consider what the fuck I am doing here. I thought I'd just be honest with my thoughts. "
So he replied saying he understood and he would telephone me over the weekend. Well he hasn't so far. He has respected my sexlessness though but also barely been in contact, unless I've initiated a chitty chatty nonsense text. I have stopped as of last night. I was demeaning myself and thinking it just confuses the issue. He is not someone I know to be chit chatting about my day to day experiences. An that's all I want really. Someone to just share the days and experiences with. Otherwise I have these experiences and ..... and what? They are experiences for myself not because of others. Sometimes I do wonder if I have them to show off. And sometimes as I'm say walking around a gallery learning and viewing I start questioning why bother with all this life experience when I'm going to die and the "knowledge" dies with me. What's the point?
For example I'm doing all this studying and may achieve my degree eventually. So what? I die soon. What benefit will it all have had?
I've had a few more heart flutters. The worst was on when? Thursday I think. P was in group and one started. Whereas usually it is a brief moment. This one went on beyond the brief and I didn't worry as I thought it was a slightly extended brief moment. But it continued. I was starting to consider getting some help. My first port of call was to go and get P. I didn't though as he was in group and I wouldn't want to disturb that process. Anyway it passed. I've noticed a few sensations since but actually not as strong and fleeting. I've mentioned it to AB and she wants me to phone A&E if it reoccurs but I don;t think it's serious enough for that. I'm moderately perturbed at this stage.
AB is drinking a lot. And bloody hell I'm feeling so irritated by her. I feel her trying to control all the time. She is over thinking everything and worrying about everything. And as a result she is infuriating. She is over intellectualising as well. She is rude. I keep entering into the affray with her and then realise I'm getting fraught and short with her and so step back out again. She is SO controlling. The thing is I can then see myself controlling to match and survive. It is so annoying that she will not do anything about her drinking. And actually it's annoying as GB won't do anything about hers either. She and AB then enable each other. GB drinks just as much but isn't the same in her manner with it. The family is riddled with codependency. I couldn't live there and understand why RB gets away so much. It's into the arms of D thought and there is something about him that is not trustworthy. I can't put my finger on it. He wants to rescue the world but has this sort of arrogance. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he wasn't still drinking in secret.
Anyway with AB I know my feeling swill pass when she reduces her drinking again - goodness knows what's triggering this bout of nastiness. Menopause I wouldn't wonder and fear of the future.
Yesterday going to London was lovely. I qualified at the FA meeting and it was a real uplifting thing to do. 90 days again yesterday. Hoping that I do not have to go back to day 1. The return to day 1 can be over silly little things. I talks about the relapse because of fear. Fear of saying what I needed and ending up eating food that wasn't enough and so ate bread as it was on the plate. It was like eating razor blades with every mouthful, knowing it was relapse. And then of course thinking well I've done that I might as well ... I didn't thankfully. I managed to sit but wasn't really that attentive. And then I did eat my evening meal as usual. Thank goodness I had prepared it all.
K looks great and S is blooming with her pregnancy despite being so unwell with Lymes. What a worry for the unborn baby too. Yet she looks serene and getting on with whatever is ahead of her with projecting too much. I wonder though if she is just covering up and yet knowing that with all my emotions and situations I really am okay overall. And I know it's all just feelings and even with projections about the possibility of the business not working and me being out of a job I am not agonising. Not like last year when I was desperate to get away from the situation with LK but didn't know what I'd do for work. I thought I'd do anything until I actually started looking and felt the life drain from me when considering office work. What would I do other than this? I love being able to work with people.
I I could see 11 people per week at £50 per session equals £550 would be about £28k per year. Hmm less tax. Not so much really but more than a lot of people. The problem is getting 11 people consistently. People are not consistent and then where do the referrals come from which is the exact same problem we have now.
And where the hell do I get a room cheaply enough. You see the costs haven't even been deducted from that. I can see myself doing that eventually though if this doesn't work out.
Oh I start my modelling career this week.
Lowry at Tate Britain.
Interesting. I really liked one of his paintings on the beach. It was a rare different setting from industrialised cities. It was different colour scheme as well. Most of his paintings were white skies and white ground. Lots of browns, greys and olive greens. And uplifted by red clothing on the matchstick men and dogs.
"I saw the industrial scene and I was affected by it. I tried to paint it all the time. I tried to paint the industrial scene as best I could. It wasn’t easy."
GB asked if I had a bundle of money whether I would buy a Lowry for the aesthetics. I'd buy one for the collection.But for aesthetics. Probably not, maybe the beach. They are depictive of the industrial city of Manchester. I hadn't realised that the scenes were not real but a cobbled collection of places. Like collages really. And apparently the people were really images of himself in a general way. Everyone looks busy, heads down and leaning forward. Unhappiness. That's what I generally got from them. It was an interesting viewing from the point of seeing his skill in perspective and being quite unique.
Influenced by the French impressionists with his colours apparently and taught by Valette and others. I see and influence of Pissaro, whom I like very much actually. His use of night lights especially.
And most were painted as if out of a window from a top floor. How could he have got those views. Did he just take away the memory and a sketch. Now AB says he was quite a strange man and had painted some sexual life's with a theme of bondage in some. It's a pit the curator hadn't given the fuller story of him. Curators probably play safe huh? How snobby the art world is but how limiting. I'd like to have a fuller picture of the artists. It's then coming to life more.
Published in The Guardian
Lowry's dark imagination comes to light
Behind the familiar images of factory workers and northern industrial city scapes that have made LS Lowry one of Britain's most easily recognised and frequently reproduced painters, there is a much darker, sadder group of work rarely seen by the public. These bleak sketches and paintings include a series of disturbing and sexually deviant drawings that remained hidden until after the artist's death in 1976.Today the novelist and Lowry enthusiast Howard Jacobson is to give the annual lecture in honour of the painter at the Lowry Centre. He will argue that ignoring the bleak side of the artist's imagination has led to him being under-rated and misunderstood by many art critics. Jacobson is to call for Lowry's fetishistic, private drawings to be more widely shown.'I don't feel we are prying. I don't think there is anything prurient about it. In fact, by avoiding looking at this work we are just shielding Lowry from imagined disapproval. It is pathetic,' said Jacobson.He will suggest the public do not yet appreciate the complexity of Lowry's work, partly because they see such a limited selection. For Jacobson, the secret drawings of women in outlandish outfits and strange bondage positions are just part of his melancholy and tortured view of the world.'I am not somebody who thinks we have a right to know about everything in an artist's life. There is a line, of course. But when it comes to the work itself, then it is not like that,' said Jacobson.'It shows what a serious modernist Lowry really was,' said Jacobson. 'If he was French, after all, there would be no fuss. In fact, people would probably expect him to have made work like this.'Many of the erotic sketches show single female figures in bizarre and restrictive costumes and they commonly have either a hinted or an explicitly violent content.Jacobson's call has prompted the Lowry estate to reveal this weekend that one of the erotic sketches held at the Lowry Centre, will be loaned to the Netherlands for an exhibition this autumn. The sketch is to be sent out along with three other more conventional works by Lowry.'We would always consider a request to show these works,' said a spokesman. 'It is always simply a question of context and of the level of scholarship involved.'The work being loaned for the show in Ghent is reproduced above by permission of the estate. The Lowry, which was set up in 2000 to commemorate the life and work of the painter, has also responded to Jacobson's plea.A spokeswoman for the gallery said that the group of erotic works, which are sometimes referred to collectively as 'the mannequin sketches' or 'marionette works' were, in fact, available for visitors to see on request and that many of the images are also brought up into the public display area according to a rotation system.'I am always happy to show this work on request,' said the Lowry's collection adminstrator, Ruth Salisbury.The arts establishment has frequently denigrated Lowry, who worked as a tax collector, and classed his work as part of an anodyne, heritage tradition. Dubbed a 'Sunday painter', his familiar paintings of factories and 'matchstick men and women' have been dismissed by some critics as a straightforward celebration of the northern industrial experience.Jacobson sees this as a major misunderstanding. The work is a brutal consideration of the modern world and the lack of communication between people, he argues, and is reminiscent of the work of the playwrights Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. As a fellow Mancunian, Jacobson will suggest in his lecture that Lowry's habit of running himself down has been counter-productive. Many critics have been taking his work at face value.
(I'm always impressed at the information AB manages to store in her memory)
Some of the paintings I saw .... And there were 6 rooms so this was just a very small selection. Some of the more well known city scenese were there of course. AB informs me that the Tate has a large collection that are never shown. Why?
(I'm always impressed at the information AB manages to store in her memory)
Some of the paintings I saw .... And there were 6 rooms so this was just a very small selection. Some of the more well known city scenese were there of course. AB informs me that the Tate has a large collection that are never shown. Why?
Just one last ting to get off my mind. As I was walking across Lambeth Bridge towards Millbank and the Tate, a man approached me. Well dressed and shaven, he tried reassuring me that he wasn't going to snatch anything or mug me but wanted £2. He explained he had lost his wallett. he had not phone having decided to leave it at home. He was supposed to be meeting friends. He said he needed £24.50 or something to get a train home. I was suspiscious and offered tog et some change. But as he was walking and he was clearly needing the money so much I just gave him a tenner. I don;t really have moeny to be able to give away to strangrs who I didn;t really believe. But it didn't matter whether I believed him or not he clearly needed it so much to ask starngers and so I had it and gave it to him. A little bit of me is hanging on to the idea that i was conned but the other part of me knows I made a choice because he clearly needed it more than me whatever his reason.
I just hope he uses it wisely and it wouldn't contribute to his downfall. Happy days for him I hope
There is an irony somewhere in there that I can't wuit connect with - the poverty depicted in Lowry's art, cities, unhappiness and this man - well dressed and that desperate for money.
Bliss
xx
