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The Body

~ ERWhittington ~ 2 Comments

What’s a four-month silence, between friends?

… I’ve been thinking a bit about bodies. I think this is going to be a bit of a wayward body of text (God loves a punner), writing as I think rather than with any plan, as usual, but since this is a largely secret blog, which I write primarily for myself, I shall hereby forgive myself in advance, as though there was ever anything to forgive.

I’ve been reading something mindblowing – the kind of thing that has you stopping to pause and recalibrate your world every two sentences – and one of the things I’ve been pondering is the body. The human body, is of course, always simultaneously a separation device and a means of connection, and this two-pronged potential for splitting oneself in half (we can’t serve both masters) means we have to make a choice, in most moments. In any given situation/setting/moment/mode, we can use the body either for love or for attack. Continue reading →

Dabbling in Crush-ville

~ ERWhittington ~ 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a drawing class. It’s something I’ve been wanting to try for years, basically ever since I had to choose between art and music at school aged 15 (due to timetabling reasons) and chose music. I’ve always suspected I’d love drawing and would relish the opportunity to have a proper go. I’ve modelled for countless artists over the last decade but have been keen to try my hand at the other side, and signed up to the mailing list of a local artist, planning to go when my diary aligned with his class, which happened a couple of weeks ago.

When I pulled up outside the artist’s studio for the group class and the door opened for me, I was startled by the artist who welcomed me in… He was utterly dreamy, twinkly and greeted me with what felt like possible excitement. The class was really fun. I was terrible at rendering the model’s portrait at first but got gradually better under his tuition; I managed not to faint at his biceps when he stood close to demonstrate (who knew artists had biceps?) and listened, rapt, to his not-from-round-here accent. We made shy conversation (well, he was fine, in his element, telling me about measurements and how to line things up on paper; I was shy, obedient, enthusiastic). The small class was mostly conducted in silence (pity the model who later told me he passed the time by counting) and so all flirting had to be minimal and understated; touching knees as he showed me what he would do differently, small questions about my week/life/interests, a slight bit of flusterment on his part when I asked about the paintings of his that lined the walls. Continue reading →

I promise I’m not high…

~ ERWhittington ~ Leave a comment

… But every now and then I enter, as though through some magnificent mind-portal, a realm of absolute wonder. That is, I walk around the place with a small, dippy grin in a dream-like state (though I suspect I am in these moments more awake than ever), in absolute amazement of the minutae of the world around me. Sometimes this happens after meditation (or, as I call it ‘mediprayer’, which sounds, fittingly, somewhat medical and if you ask me to explain what I do it will take ages and probably involve waffling anecdotes about decisive inner voices, feathers & moving jewellery) or just a really good writing sesh. The feeling of abundance is overwhelming and difficult to properly integrate; it’s a state so enormous it makes me laugh, and makes me feel so hilariously insignificant at the same time as (crucially) very loved/cared for.

The things I appreciate are often other people’s inventions, and those things (which are often everything) that make me feel particularly supported, lucky or abundant as a recipient, in unrestrained awe of everyone else around me or who has come before me.

Some examples of things I find particularly wonderful, now and then: Continue reading →

Sacred 21

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The notion of ‘self care’ is a booming, insta-worthy buzzword, and with great reason, even if it does reek of psychobabble; we all need to do more of it. It’s occurred to me on multiple occasions recently that the act of living alone soon becomes (wittingly or unwittingly, by choice or not) a grand exercise in self care. Every moment is a chance to either do it, and therefore benefit, or forget to, and therefore falter. I think of it as self management; little instances (first conscious, then automatic) during which one part of the self takes charge of the rest, to the end of higher degrees of sanity, happiness and security. When you physically live alone, it really is ‘me, myself and I’; you are both the mother and the child, and I suppose the bins aren’t going to take themselves out.

What self care really means, in no particular order: Continue reading →

Mixed materials

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  1. I love it when a song comes on and my brain is AWOL enough in that moment for me to know I recognise it but not remember who the singer is or what they look like or when it was written or what it’s particularly about. It feels like a fleeting, second chance to see if I really like or dislike the music, with any possible preconceptions disappeared, and I enjoy it and I always hope to string out my not-knowing for as long as possible (always an image of the singer drops back into my mind, like a dream you try to remember by not looking directly for it, which then emerges as a surprise). Effectively, it’s an abrupt little test of my own tastes – the freedom of no context. Does anyone else experience this? It’s a bit like those occasional moments when I see a photograph of myself that I’ve modelled for and for a moment (somehow) don’t register that I am the subject, and so am completely free to see the subject (/myself) as another might, or without any attachment (I am often kinder to myself in these circumstances; more generous and open; perhaps modelling over the years has been a discipline simply in seeing what others see).
  2. Twice today my own reflection in a hotel bathroom in peripheral vision (the mirror is to the side of the entrance) has made me jump. I am wearing an embroidered, red, tie-dyed dress today, so am buoyantly alarming.
  3. Amusingly, a link to an article came in an email newsletter I looked at today: 18 Signs you have a poorly developed sense of self (+ what to do). It’s a gruelling list, and ‘scattered priorities’ is in there. Humph. If I’ve got a poorly developed sense of self (but developed enough to know it should be hyphenated), I’m open to that new identification (and I say this as someone who only wore one contact lens for a short period this morning, so don’t say I’m not open to new ways of seeing myself) but surely it’s only true to the extent that I acknowledge I have five million versions of myself. Enough selves, in fact, to have just re-read the article and realised my sense of self is actually pretty well developed. I’m still deciding which version of my self to employ in order to ascertain whether or not I think this is a good thing.
  4. A list I wrote on my phone here in Bangkok of possible materials for my latest idea (I’m going to create paintings with words from my own poems, paint images & compose objects; these mixed-media pieces are the absolute epitome of notes to self, and it’s been a while since I last did it):
    String
    Wool
    Crocheted pieces
    Broken jewellery parts
    Beads
    Buttons
    Paperclips, drawing pins
    My hair
    Coins/Currency/notes
    Ink
    Leaves/flowers?
    grains
    Letters/notes to self
    Metallic pen
    Ribbons
    Silver foil
    Bells
    Wire
    Washers/nuts/bolts
    Lace
    Shells
    Stamps
    Cut out words/pictures from newspaper/magazines
  5. I’m about to fly back in time, travelling from south east Asia tomorrow afternoon for an elephantine weight of hours, and arrive in the UK on the same day as though absolutely nothing is unusual here at all nothing to see what could be more normal. I still don’t know how planes stay up, though was once sent this diagram:

plane

The thing in the tree

~ ERWhittington ~ 1 Comment

‘Bon Bon,’ says my 4-year-old nephew, holding a plastic retractable dagger with a pirate ship depicted on the handle in one hand, and a red empty plastic saucepan in the other. It’s Sunday evening at my parents’ house and he is full of boiled potatoes and ice cream. He is about to start school next week.

‘Yes, Phin?’

‘Do you remember that time we made soup and we looked under the table?’

I have no idea what he’s talking about, though it’s true he’s made me soup of various kinds over the last couple of years (carrot and lemon, strawberry and apple, potato and orange; educational fruit shapes I make him pretend to cook for me, though he is still hazy on the difference between a lemon and a lime). ‘What were we looking under the table for?’

‘I made soup and we were looking for Tushka.’ Continue reading →

The stripy moon

~ ERWhittington ~ 5 Comments

One of the things I’m most proud of (other than my new excitement about running, which is something I never thought I’d enjoy, much preferring always dance as exercise, but suddenly find exhilarating – I am obsessed already – and that my aching, transforming body is as sensual as the feeling of my hair growing so long now that it tickles the backs of my elbows as I walk) is my ability to operate on blind faith. I don’t even know if ‘blind’ is the right word; if it’s about seeing versus unseeing, or seeing versus non-seeing, then any blindness is contingent and deliberate. It’s more about knowing, anyway, perhaps. Knowing is stronger than belief. I spent a whole term writing essays in epistemological philosophy, once, but the previous sentence was the crux of it (I think). I know that working on knowing is one of the bravest and most essential thing one can do, when so much is in contrast with what appears around us, and patience goes hand in hand, and I think it takes a sort of training (but the sort of training that can become complete just as easily in the blink of a seeing eye as it can by mantra/affirmations/sitting/self-convincing/listing/ritualising).

One silly example: I booked a holiday to a Greek island the other day because I knew I needed to go, and I knew a recent foray into sadness needed some respite and a clash of something nonsensically right. I can’t (if you consider my bank balance as evidence) afford to go. I can (if you consider my absolute intention to make this work mixed with my denial of current facts) afford to go, however. Continue reading →

Hot Air

~ ERWhittington ~ 4 Comments

There’s something deliciously arrogant about going up in a hot air balloon. I’ve thought about it quite a lot, recently. I think hot air balloons have slightly been haunting me recently (a little more whimsically than the haunted feeling I had yesterday, when a man was following me; I’ve never felt so eerily looked at and visually pierced, and been so unfeasibly well-followed through the streets, though my racing heartbeat, albeit in a crowded place, quickly turned to rage and the content of his garbled words remain a mystery); I have seen them a lot, and not just in the sky.

Imagine the boldness of simply deciding to go upwards and leave all your friends and foes miles below (miles? I really have no sense of how high they go; my understanding of distance is roughly as lacking as my understanding of volume, which during my time spent mixing skincare products in jugs and decanting into containers, has been revealed to be alarmingly off*). You’re not even pretending to fly, or to be in anything particularly technologically robust; you’re just in a thing which floats, bigly, and drifting. You both marvel up there, I imagine, and are marvelled at; it is impossible not to look up when you see a hot air balloon dreaming its way through the sky. I have to admit I had an overly romanticised view of it, though; I thought they would be Continue reading →

How to get dressed (and be novel)

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There are at least 200 ways to dress a novel. I’m quite sure the one I’m currently writing already exists as a fully-formed, gorgeous thing glittering in the ether – yet not glittering, more shimmering, catching the light as it moves, that’s all – and my writing of it is one of many ever-changing, fallible potential attempts to grasp some grounding down of it. It’s a hot air balloon whipping around in the wind, deafening me with its mechanisms and about to leap away at any moment, but utterly mesmerising and I want to jump fully in and sail away with it, even risking a shudderous drop down into the canopy of a hardwood tree, if it comes to that. It is already a thing quite happily, thanks very much (my novel would say, if Platonic Forms could speak). As a papery manifestation it might not exist yet, but the novel in the purest sense is already exactly its own self, complete and self-satisfied (though I like to believe it needs me) and my bringing it down to earth through fingertips and the sensations (being drip-fed its relative epiphanies – but who is the character thinking of and what is the sound of their voice? But what exactly is at stake for the protagonist and what exactly do they fear?) is only the experience of leaning closer and closer in.

Percolation. The shimmering thing, which I picture hovering playfully about the air above me, now free of its weighty balloon paraphernalia but magic and light as air itself, glowing, sometimes close by, perhaps in a field I’m walking through, other times more majestically, a cosmically colourful thing in a dark universal, star-lit sky, allows itself to be revealed by a heady mix of me concentrating very hard on it and forgetting about it completely. Continue reading →

Posture; Turnip Seeds

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If you’re bored of reading The Enormous Turnip to your nearest 2-year-old, you’re bored of life. The Read It Yourself with Ladybird, Level 1 series of books includes an absolutely stellar example of storyline: if the mouse pulls the cat, the cat pulls the dog, the dog pulls the girl, the girl pulls the boy, the boy pulls the old woman, the old woman pulls the old man and the old man pulls the enormous turnip, can it be wrenched from the ground? YOU LITERALLY ONLY FIND OUT ON THE LAST PAGE, which may or may not include gorgeous illustrations of turnip soup, pickles and jams and an absolute abundance of this exuberant but slightly wan-hued vegetable (which I personally can’t recall ever having tried, but have known since childhood that sometimes they grow enormously, and that mice think they go very well with holey cheese, if there’s a celebratory banquet going). On an early page, the old man is planting seeds, faithfully, and as such, his very old back is bent halfway so that he is completely inverted, his nose to the ground, as he delivers hope and potential to the just-raked earth (I may have invented the order of events slightly here as related to the rake, riffing off the images and, more crucially, pointing out the red-breasted robins, which I think I can take credit for my niece knowing the name of; she doesn’t need to know that I lack gardening chronology/confidence). So that sets the scene. Continue reading →