Familiar foreign bodies

Tomorrow, I leave Sweden for Norway. The simplicity of that sentence conceals how difficult it is to write. I feel sick at the thought of leaving. I want to stay here for longer; I want too to go further north, to go further into the forest, for it to be colder, harsher, more isolated. For a long time, I suspected I love extremes, I now know this to be true.

I will go to Norway and then I will return to the UK.

Tonight, I came out of the closing event I did as part of the residency just as the sky was turning to blue. Every night, regardless of the rain or the snow or the grey skies, this blue. I was talking about this blue in the event, and my year long pursuit of a blue I thought I had encountered but in reality had only imagined. I had imagined this blue before I knew it.

In the event I read from a work in progress about my obsession with Louise Bourgeois. It is a strange thing to admit you have perhaps fallen in love with a dead artist, that you have become obsessed with a dead person, that this dead person has become a kind of talisman you carry around, excusing or pardoning your worst behaviour. In the work in progress, I quote Adam Phillips, where he says; What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing — nothing comes of nothing — but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.

This reminds me of passage I read earlier in the week from Felix White’s Whatever Will Be, Will Be, when he recalls arriving at Fulham’s Craven Cottage for the first time, describing it as this: As if everything is familiar but ancient, everything showing itself in that strange way you sometimes meet someone and develop an immediate, unspoken feeling somewhere between infatuation and affinity without knowing anything about them. It’s not overwhelming. Instead, I just have an innate sense I might have known this place for a long time. I think I prefer Felix’s way of articulating this feeling, the innate knowing.

I felt this sensation of familiar foreign bodies when I first encountered Louise Bourgeois’ textile work and her lesser known written work. It cannot be true that I learnt to sew before I learned to write, but it also is likely that I learnt both at the same time. Certainly I learnt to use a needle very young, creating puncture wounds and exit wounds in the one gesture. Certainly I grew up playing under my mother’s sewing table, watching how hard she pressed the pedal of the machine, deftly running fabric through its teeth. There was a violence and a control in her actions I now recognise in my own work. This recognition both startles and reassures me. There under the table, was a world all of its own; a world of thread and pins, of scissors and needles, a whole world of colour and sound. It is not a surprise really that Bourgeois’ work presented itself as a familiar foreign body, or that the February morning I first walked around her retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, I felt the presence of my mother, her body once familiar, now foreign.

This blue has become similar. I am sure I remember this blue from childhood, but I could not find it until now; but as soon as I did, it became a familiar foreign body. We talk about this in the event, we talk about home, we talk about writers as homeless people without apartments, I suggest writers would be better born as birds - third person is the birds’ eye view, before you swoop down into first.

Just before the event, I realise it’s the last of the year, the first of a new piece of work, alarmingly early enough to create a feeling of snow blindness beforehand. I have come to love events in Europe, they have a kind of seriousness to them that suits my brain; this one carries on until the blue falls, and because it is nearly Christmas we drink glug, its scent mixing with tangerine oil, cinnamon buns, coffee, spent matches and newly lit wicks.

We talk about isolation and performance and the necessity of retreat and while we do, I try not think this period of retreat is over. I try not to look at the little girl drawing and colouring at the top of the table and how changed she’ll be the next time I see her. I try not to think of the brilliant insanity of my hosts and the wonder they are building here. I try not to think of the sauna up the road or the lake or the way the pines look early in the morning encased in frost. I try not to think of the walk I’ve taken every day, insisting on taking the same route so I can see how it changes every day; everything happens only once; no day is the same as the previous day; Larkin again, always fucking Larkin.

Out into the blue dark and half a moon, clouds scudding in front of it. I return to my cabin with tangerines, left over cinnamon buns; soon I will leave it for the evening and we will drink wine and try not to talk about things like train times and routes.

But for now, Pavlovian almost, I will sit as the blue fades and deepens to the kind of dark I am no longer afraid of and worry I will struggle to sleep without, another familiar foreign body, a dark remembered from childhood and rural Scottish skies. I will sit here and I will work, for a time.