Little Bombs

According to the notes app on my phone at 4.07am I wrote: lobbing grenades.

I have all my best ideas just before I sleep or just on waking, because of this, I sleep with my phone under my pillow. I’m not sure they are my best ideas, exactly - I’m not sure I have many good ideas - but I sleep with my phone under the pillow regardless. It’s probably bad for me. Sometimes I send the things I think as messages to myself. There’s a glitch in my phone where it never delivers these messages, instead they have a circled exclamation mark next to them. I like this idea of my phone censoring me, as if it knows they’re of less value than I think they are. Sometimes, I worry I send these thoughts to the wrong person, unwittingly giving too much of myself away. I never have, not yet.

I think lobbing grenades came from the book I am reading, it’s simply called Louise Bourgeois, and as the title suggests, is a history of her and her work. I’ve been researching her for a year, so much that my children now tell each other stories about her. Sometimes I worry they are taking too much interest in my work, whereas it used to be boring to them, which is the way round I like it, children aren’t meant to be impressed by their parents, as my 17 year old said, it’s the wrong way round. Then I realise they still care little for my work, it’s Louise Bourgeois who excites them, she did fling herself in a river, a fact my youngest daughter gleefully recounts, her eyes shining, I worry she’s found herself a role model.

On the book’s frontispiece is a photograph of Bourgeois dressed in a latex costume, one that leaves only her calves and feet visible, with her head popping out the top. It balloons on her, its spherical surfaces covered in numerous domes. It’s impossible to tell from the photograph how tall she is, Google is no help, instead it tells me how tall Maman, her 30 foot high spider sculpture is, the artist literally dwarfed by her work, obliterated by it, as I have felt and feel this week when I’m trying pull together threads of an idea, art at times feels like a snake poisoning the blood, I discover I wrote in a melodramatic fit two summers ago, finishing with the sentence, I am not always sure it’s worth it. In the book, no explanation is given for the photograph. She looks like a small hand grenade. I’m not sure if she’s meant to.

Last summer just before my first book was published, I spoke to a critic who told me what I’d written was like lobbing a hand grenade over a parapet, only I wouldn’t be able to run away. He wasn’t wrong. A book has its own power, a power that’s impossible to discern while you’re writing it. Before publication, its effects are private, it’s only post publication that you see the power it does or doesn’t contain, and you’re not there to stand in its place either. Reading’s a transaction, and not a simple one. A friend told me she found my book confronting, which I like as much as I don’t. Writing it made me confront myself in uncomfortable ways, I shouldn’t be surprised then it did that to her, but it still feels like a lot for a book to do. No, for my book to do. I am familiar with confronting books, these are the ones I often have to work my way up to, knowing they will demand something of me, and not just intellectually. Some books will save your life, some will ruin it. Some books are grenades, little portable bombs, detonating all over the place. I didn’t mean to write those kind of books, but I’m not sure how much choice there is in the matter of what you make or what you’re drawn to making.

When I was a child I stopped talking for awhile, just to see if anyone would notice. They didn’t. I kept it up as a private joke for a while but it was one that soon wore thin, like a self employed person striking, there’s little point to the protest if no one notices. I am thinking now of my mother who I write about, for and around, until everything is an elegy for her one way or another. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to Louise Bourgeois. Certainly in The Hayward last February as I walked her exhibition first once, then twice, then an embarrassing amount of times, drawn back, back, repeated, over and over, as a spider would its web, or stitched into the fabric of it even; I had the sensation my mother was there with me. My mother was a seamstress. She taught me to make row after row of orderly stitches. My ability to follow a pattern, later to understand the laws of the loom, pleased her. Order over expression. When I lost my mother (she’s not dead, I am not as careless as the phrase implies, it’s explained here), I stopped sewing. I carefully unstitches dresses we’d made together, I destroyed but systematically along the lines we’d sewn. As I did, I saw the puncture wounds of the needle in the fabric. Louise Bourgeois sees sewing as an act of repair, my unpicking, was this an act of war? I was scared of explosions, just as I was taught to be, we were not a family who shouted or argued, we bit our tongues; I bit the inside of my mouth, the synthetic fur of my teddy bear, stopped speaking before I starved myself. Internalise it, safer that way. No, I did not want to make grenades, did not intend to write confronting things, but seem unable to do anything else. This making of flares is not just an I am here but more an assertion I am still here, a detonation to call to attention the fact of my existence; lobbing grenades, it seems to be what I do.