Links…
Some more about #Twecon here and here. My thanks again to organiser Matthew Dentith.
Artist, Matthew Couper and the sacred spleen – springing in part, from a Facebook conversation about me wanting an ex-voto for neurotic suburban housewife (who me?) . I am a bit of a fan of Matthew’s work.
Other…
Every weekend our family troops down to the school pool and I read while the rest swim. Yep, I am the mum in the stands with the fogged up glasses reading Proust. Anyway it reminds me of Helen Holm in John Irving’s “The World According to Garp”. Helen was the wrestling coach’s daughter and often sat in the stands reading while her father coached Garp. Helen told Garp she will only ever marry a writer (silly girl) and so Garp decides he will become one. Like me, Helen wore glasses which fogged up while she read. Helen was a key figure to me in the 80s. She made it ok to be A READER.
A bit of a pointless story, but I’ve been reading a lot about memory (hence Proust) and echoes from the past. Today (at the pools) I found this:
“it is fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida Chapter 16
It seemed so applicable as more and more often I come across passages in writing, and visual art that has this effect. I think this might be the key to why I especially like some art.
I read Helen Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of The Medusa’ through my fogged up glasses at the swimming pool a few years ago while my youngest daughter swam.
I cheered into the page:
‘Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past…In women’s speech as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating, which once we’ve been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptible touched by it, retains the power of moving us – that element is the song: first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman. Why this privileged relationship with the voice? Because no woman stockpiles s many defenses for countering the drives as does man. You don’t build walls around yourself, you don’t forgo pleasure as “wisely” as he. Even if phallic mystification has generally contaminated good relationships, a woman is never far from “mother” (I mean outside her role functions: the “mother” as nonname and as source of goods). There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink. ‘
And there you have it Pauline: we women, ‘housewives’ all, we write in white ink.