Was there a time

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

(Was There A Time by Dylan Thomas)

Reading Roald Dahl

You were just a four year old. Tiny, almost too small for your age. At night you slept dreaming of Hanuman and Durga. And Mahishasura. By day you killed Ravana and Raktabeeja with your pencil strokes, a million times. And in between you heard stories of Roald Dahl read by whoever gave into your relentless persuasion.

First there was Charlie and Mr. Willy Wonka and the amazing chocolate factory with the eccentric grandparents and the hapless parents accompanied by your enthusiastic approval of all that followed. Then came Matilda, the child prodigy with her exceptional reading skills, something you are in awe of even today after all these years. The horrid Miss Trunchbull and the voice that read her part still echoes in your mind when you hear her name, making your blood boil.

The Witches profoundly affected your life. You went searching for them armed with the telltale signs described by the grandmother. For you were heart broken at the end when the boy gets transformed into a mouse. In James and the Giant Peach you met your doppelganger albeit with horrible aunts. Yours were charming, loving and everything you wanted aunts to be like. But you wouldn’t have minded to swap places with James for a bit of a surreal adventure with insects. You could never brush off a spider ever again without thinking about it’s young ones.

Fantastic Mr. Fox you simply loved. If you hadn’t been living in Delhi’s concrete jungle you would have definitely laid out a feast for hungry foxes ever night. Instead you fed the stray dogs bread and rotis. But most of all like Sophie you needed to find The BFG. For being friends with a friendly giant would have made the long, dark nights so much more exciting.

One day inevitably you had heard all the stories ever written by Roald Dahl and you hadn’t even turned five yet. Ah the life long regrets it would give rise to.

Eight years later you bemoan the end of childhood wishing you had never grown up. Wondering if life would ever be so delightful. I laugh at your words, echoing the usual platitudes but lacking the courage to reveal the bittersweet truth.

(Afterthought on books: part 7)

Joan Eardley

(View some more of her work at National Galleries of Scotland)
If you want experience and understanding of beauty envy me now but if you want happiness then don’t envy me because these things don’t bring happiness - Joan Eardley (1921-1963)

Who was Joan Eardley? Even the introduction to the book accompanying the exhibition Joan Eardley held at the National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh, begins with these words. A woman, a painter born in England living in Scotland, a social realist, Scotland’s answer to the Cobra artists or Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Where does she stand? As part of the London Kitchen Sink School or as an exponent of pure abstraction. Ah well! Let others well versed in the nuances of painting pare though this bewildering heap of categorization. For us it’s just another Sunday afternoon at the Tate Modern Bookshop. So lets simply indulge in the pure joy of her art.

Lets start with the children. Immensely engaging portraits of children residing in the poorest tenements of post Second World War Glasgow. Like sublime photographs discovered among old family papers. Look at their eyes, their expressions, their fragile beauty as they lean against graffiti scrawled walls and windows of derelict apartments. Look these are two friends. Look at this one’s right arm around the other’s shoulder, look at the other one holding her fingers, look at their smiling eyes. Look here are three children leaning out of the window with the two little ones covering their mouth with their hands. Here are Pat and Anne Samson with astonishingly distinct personalities for one so young vividly portrayed with chalk on paper. This little girl with a squint sucking her fingers lost in deep thought. What is she thinking? These children at play in the back street and these standing in queue for the Saturday Matinee. And look here is Andrew reading a comic. How did his life turn out? With a few brush strokes the life and times of an entire generation gets captured and reproduced here in these 96 pages.

Of course there is more. The shores of Catterline with the raging waves and the sky barely hanging in and one can almost feel the wind sculpt and transform the entire scene. Fields with birds, fields with daisies, fields at harvest time and something almost always giving away the presence of the wind. And the Sleeping Nude, which “was subjected to ‘shock horror’ headlines in tabloid press. One newspaper published her address, whereupon various men turned up volunteering to pose for her. Eardley never again painted a male nude.” The city councilors too weren’t keen on her depiction of the tenements in a rapidly modernizing Glasgow. In the last year of her life Eardley began painting flower studies.

There are also photographs by Eardley and others documenting life in Glasgow. And of Eardley herself. As a young girl, with her sister and a piglet, in Italy, at Catterline, on her motor scooter, in her studio. Joan Eardley who died aged just forty-two with the contents of her house at Catterline valued “…just 25 pounds, the paintings in the studio were valued at 1000 pounds...total sum of her estate was 19,881 pounds.”

There is enough in these pages about how she lived, painted and died to answer the original question. But as you turn the last page you know her art is answer enough, but now other questions all starting with ‘why’ suddenly appear to be more pertinent.

For Spiderboy, stay happy and stay safe

We often talk about Cambodia. For undoubtedly there must be no person dead or living who has been to Cambodia and then never thought about it again. Cambodia is always there somewhere. Possibly stored and neatly catalogued in some recess of your memory. And then on one grey, melting winter afternoon as you sit with a cup of coffee and look out of the window it resurfaces unannounced. And a small little voice starts to sing, “Lady, lady 3 for 1 dollar.” Thus scattering the catalogue, throwing all neatness off course. Leaving you with a rush of memories that your brain tries to unsuccessfully restore to some semblance of order. And with a shake of your head you wonder how do you deal with Cambodia.

How does one gather all these strands wandering off into numerous directions and reconstruct the web of experiences that is Cambodia. When all the while your mind replays the voice and it’s hypnotic refrain of something, something, something one dollar. And all you want to do is sit in some small restaurant under a gigantic banyan tree with the voice and listen to it going on and on till we are all transported to that safe place which exists only in our childhoods somewhere between before the light is turned off and the prince and princess lived happily ever after.

Thus you move onto other things and other memories but the unresolved question about Cambodia gently nudges you. And you promise to one day gather all the threads and weave together a befitting portrait. But until then you let this little voice of innocence predominate the narrative as it chants on and on that every childhood should be safe and all its memories sweet.