Malevich and me

At the Malevich exhibition half of me flies out of my body, leaves the Tate, London, and ends up, old, in a dark an sparsely furnished apartment in Genoa - an artist, finally, telling a story. My story, or my father's story, I am not sure. But something that seems to make a lot of sense. "However confusedly and meaninglessly our way may deviate from our desires, after all it does lead us inevitably to out invisible goal.", says Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday. Suddenly the tense muscles of exile relax and I feel the purpose, the continuity, the explanation for it all, for my journey, my suffering, my search. It's all very beautiful. Except for one thing. It's an impossibility. I cannot tell my story, or my father's story, or his father's story in a dark flat in Genoa. Because we are all dead. My ancestors, as they really are not here to influence or take part in the events, and I, because there is no "back" to go to. This is not how it's done. The only people I can talk to are the living or the not as yet living. While the only people I want to talk to, the only people I want validation from, are the dead. I want to be a Russian suprematist, yet think that the graph paper I am sketching on should be already tanned with age. It is, indeed, a senseless proposition. The game has to be played in a different way. But which? The past always makes more sense than the future. Anxiety flies out of the past. About ten years ago I was asked to translate Pirandello's Henry IV into English for Tom Stoppard. I read Pirandello as a kid, but found him claustrophobic. Something to do with his nose, while I had just discovered at the age of 12, that I had a nose between my eyes that blurred somewhat my vision. Pirandello came back many years later, this time in an apt text, because longing for home is often longing for our roots, in other words for the comfort of the past. "Whatever happens has happened, however painful the events and brutal the battles, they're history and nothing can change them... so you can sit back and admire how every cause leads obediently to its effect, with perfect logic...", says Henry IV. In the present, the past is safe, yet, when it was present it was uncomfortable and insecure and as illogical as the present is now. What we really want is logic, the logic that seems so clear when we look at the past - cause and effect - so linear. There is where home is, the comfortable place of logic. This whole exile thing feels more and more like Schrödinger's cat. I can only go home if I don't exist anymore. I can only go home if I am already there and have never left. But perhaps I should be grateful for that. The beauty of travel, the beauty of the present and the future is, ultimately, the lack of certainty. ZAUM = Beyond reason. ZAUM = Beyond logic. ZAUM. How peaceful Malevich's anxiety feels today.

Stuff

In my caravan I have no tv, no wi-fi, just a few books, old illustrated maps of the continents, and a couple of my jazz bottles with Queen Ida and a blue Miles Davis. I also have silence. A silence so deep, sometimes it's almost scary. But mostly beautiful. I can stare at the flowery curtains and drift away into a natural meditative state. I also have a few pens and colours and paper. Sometimes I draw, sometimes I just sit outside reading travel books and feeling the grass with my bare feet. Everything is perfect. Then I come back home, open the door, and I am immediately overwhelmed by... stuff. I've accumulated so much stuff, books, cds, gadgets, art supplies, cameras, nick-knacks, pictures, canvasses, art magazines, sketchbooks, full and blank. I sit on my couch, shoving some of the fluffy toys and cushions out of the way and I stare at the blank tv with a sense of dismay and anxiety. Why? Because every single object requires a decision - namely, should I use it or not. And it entails further decisions to make, such as how to use it and why. The other source of anxiety is the fear of losing what I've got. Apart from physically losing something, there is the retrieving form of losing. I flicked through a Tate magazine that had an article on Malevich, and when I put the magazine into the recycling bin, I thought, "Now I am not going to remember Malevich, his work, his theories, his sputniks and planits." And that made me incredibly sad. I write, sometimes I write a lot, in notebooks, in my computer, on my phone. But where does all the stuff I write end up? How do I archive it for retrieval? The simple caravan life is lost in the city, with its deluge of information and stuff that should be used, retained, accessed, retrieved, remembered. And a flowery curtain is not enough to induce meditation under the bombardment of phone calls, emails, post, bills, magazines, tv. And then there are art galleries, exhibitions, sketching and photography outings. A sea of stuff.
I often wondered why monks choose gardens, ponds, rocks, mountains or the sea to meditate. I thought that was cheating. Too easy to go to a beautiful place, sit on a solitary bench in the sun and watch kois glide by in the pond, perhaps with dreamy wind chimes and birds singing in the background. Because then you go back to all your stuff, and your heartbeat is raised, by millions of stimuli and a sense of guilt and powerlessness. But someone explained to me that the more you expose yourself to calm, meditative environments, the easier it becomes to access that state, to remember it when you are surrounded by stuff. So here is what I learnt in two days on my caravan. I don't NEED stuff. I don't need to retrieve or archive anything apart from what gets automatically stored and catalogued in my memory. I will remember Malevich when I need to. Or not, and then I'll do without his sputniks and black paintings, because I will be engaged in something equally valuable. As to my writings, it will be a constant journey of rediscovery, like a goldfish in a bowl swimming past a castle. Oh what a beautiful castle.