today

I am back just now from a long walk in the mist - following my street directory toward a bit of green on the map - a very civilised park and very beautiful on this damp and misty day. I walked further along the waterside, over the Erasmusbrug, which is my current marker for known territory in Rotterdam …
I’m thinking about a friend’s comment about travelling – that one of the things that they like is the absence of personal experience implicit to objects and sites … and that somehow with that absence comes a clarity of thought

When I walk about here I feel like a blind person - and it makes me realise - for good or not so good - that my sense of being at home (which is different from being in one's home) has allot to do with the familiar. So I am feeling or experiencing a sense of the uncanny. I’m not well versed in the debate around the term – but I do have a feeling that the word is usefully ambiguous, and is often used as a matter of convenience or politeness by critics or curators – as a means of abbreviating or avoiding complexity. Anyway, at the moment - It is a sense of being un-homed, which is not quite homesickness (yet) or loneliness, not quite. Part of this uncannyness is the awful suspicion that I have no centre or soul, no personality apart from that which is continually enforced through the feedback loop of the familiar.

Also on my mind is the rhetorical question put to me the other evening by my friend Annelys over a beer and a snack consisting of croquets on bread (a particularly unfamiliar form of Netherlands cuisine – these are basically a crumbed deep-fried bolus of ragout, served with buttered white bread; you squash the croquet onto the bread and then spread it with mustard and eat the result with a knife and fork) … the question, How can you be an artist if you don’t like change? ... I guess the extension of this is the question of how can you be an artist if you are not willing to unbecome yourself, to loose your bearings, get lost in the mist...

Part of me reacts against the idea that, as an artist, you are duty bound to actively seek out and experience disruption, the unfamiliar, or the unknown. It seems a little outmoded and romantic. But then, one of my favourite bits of writing at the moment is this, from Thoreau – in the chapter titled “The Village” in Walden

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighbouring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Which I think I should one day embroider in coloured silks and hang above my studio door.