Yellow Irises

Persona

"...it's over regulating the thinking and imagining and feeling that causes problems. We should absolutely be able to tolerate thinking anything, imagining anything and feeling anything. The persona should help us in the environment, in the realm of behaviours. But the inner life should be radically free, whether or not we verbalise it to another person."

Joseph R Lee, Jungian Analyst, This Jungian Life 

The times they are a’changing

By Melissa Nolas, started sometime in April during lockdown 2020, at a time when her mind can travel where her body can’t go.  

“Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about.” *

About eighteen months ago my day started with a jolt. I bolted upright in bed with the most uncanny of feelings: Bob Dylan was dead. In those split seconds of strange unreality and before becoming fully conscious, I found myself in utter disarray, suspended in foreboding of an event I wasn’t sure had happened but which nevertheless, made me feel utterly bereft. Had he actually passed away and I had somehow missed such a seismic event? What was this amnesia mixed with disbelief that had just come over me? I was so shaken by the possibility of its veracity, I reached for my phone, an adult comforter if ever there was one, to re-establish reality. 

Bob Dylan, unbeknownst to him, has accompanied me in many a rite of passage. The first time I fell head over heels in love with a boy at the age of 15, he was there singing ‘don’t think twice, it’s alright’. I was lucky enough to see him in concert in Athens where I grew up, with said boy and his sister, in June 1993, the gentle strings of Knocking on Heaven’s Door filling the early summer air and floating down off Lykabettus hill, a soft cotton blanket covering the rest of central Athens. It was the opening act to what we fancied as a “summer of love”, 24 years after the original one. 

At university, Bob Dylan kept me company with his epic poetry to music as I gazed out my bedroom window over the gardens and rooftops, in that shared house off Elm Grove, one of the steepest hills in Brighton. Blood on the Tracks is one of my favourite albums. It has lifted me through homesickness, heartbreak, and hangovers. I have happily lost myself over and over again across the years in the lyric storytelling of Idiot Wind, Tangled up in Blue and Shelter from the Storm and, what in my mind’s eye had always been a monumental poker game in a cabaret between Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, but which I see now re-reading the lyrics, is also about an affair, a bank robbery, and a hanging. The meaning in Dylan songs, as always, tricky to pin down.

More recently, on the news of the arrival of a friend’s daughter, the words of Forever Young popped into my head; the song, as if a needle stuck in a track, stayed with me all day. I can’t think of a more sublime melody and more beautiful lyrics to be welcomed into the world.

May God bless and keep you always

May your wishes all come true

May you always do for others

And let others do for you

May you build a ladder to the stars

And climb on every rung

May you stay forever young

May you stay forever young

Songwriters: Bob Dylan

Forever Young lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group

In these lockdown days, as we are surrounded by death and its prospect, it is Dignity that comes to haunt me most forcefully. 

In mid-March as the death toll out of Italy rose rapidly, and the images of lined up coffins and mass graves reached our screens, I choked up with emotion. What does it mean to depart without a last rite of passage? We make meaning out of life’s regularity and unexpected twists and turns through these rites. In many industrialised countries these rites of passage are no longer as pronounced, or have changed in tune with the times, but birth and death and still very much marked collectively. Hello and goodbye. Entry and exit. Arrival and departure. 

Sick man lookin' for the doctor's cure

Lookin' at his hands for the lines that were

And into every masterpiece of literature

For dignity

Songwriters: Bob Dylan

Dignity lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Audiam, Inc

As I write the death toll in the U.K. is very close to becoming the largest in Europe. Frontline workers in health and social care are dying. Those who have died in hospital or care homes, have died alone, without a familiar touch or a last word of goodbye. Without a send-off. The lack of personal protective equipment, that thin plastic line between life and death, is in very short supply. Tell me, have you seen dignity? 

There is lots to feel bereft about. 

Which is why we have songs of praise, songs of love, songs of sorrow.

…

A chorus of many, shouting to heaven, or at it, or pleading.

On March 26th Bon Dylan released Murder Most Foul, an almost 17 minute long song about the murder of J.F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. For an event that marked American history in the post-war years, shocked her nation and then captured Hollywood’s imagination for years afterwards, the song’s slow, soothing, reflective tones feel like a balsam; at the same time as the words narrate what much have, at the time, felt for some like a crisis without end. A world ruptured. 

I’m not sure if this pandemic is some sort of collective rite of passage to doing things differently, more equally, more sustainability. I can only hope. At the same time, that I can only hope to never know the answer to the question above. To depart without a send-off. What I do know in all this uncertainty, and what I worked out, that October morning 18 months ago, in those strange acrobatics and that only a mind just waking might get up to, that even if Bob Dylan leaves us, and for sure at some point he will, his music, his epic storytelling, his flare for ambivalence, and range of emotions will stay with us forever. These things don’t die. They play hide-and-seek but they are still here. Alive. 

Or that greatest of love affairs, a violin

and a human body.

And a composer, maybe hundreds of years dead.

I think of Schubert, scribbling on a café

napkin.

Thank you, thank you.

London, July 22, 2020.

*the poem that is weaved through the text is called AND BOB DYLAN TOO, by Mary Oliver, in her collection ‘A Thousand Mornings’ (2012, Corsair). A full version of the poem can be found here.

Everything is going to be All Right

Everything is going to be All Right (2019) Stuart Cameron

My friend Stuart Cameron, a local artist, sent me a postcard of this picture last year, as we were preparing for the Leytonstone Art Trail. It’s been on my desk ever since and has provided comfort during lockdown. The longer this has gone on, the more I’ve thought that a sentiment like this wouldn’t be so needed, but it is.

Instagram: @zen.whalesart

left wanting

by Daniel Payne

left wanting  

1

I have been thinking about how bored I am on lockdown. Perhaps I can write about how bored I am? But that sounds boring, and I think I am too bored to want to write it. So what do I want? Inside boredom, that’s all you can think about. What do you want when nothing will do? 

2

It’s a Monday morning on Coronavirus lockdown. Your son, eight years old, walks into the room. 

“Mummy, Daddy”, he says. “I’m bored”. 

What’s your next move? 

“Well, why don’t you watch something on television? Or paint a picture? We’ll be Zooming Nanny and Grandad soon. Or how about baking a cake? Or what if...”

You trail off, hoping one of these activities is the solution to boredom. Apart from the perceived slight on your ability to be an entertaining parent, you’ve got a theory here about boredom in your answer. You think of it as a black hole inside your child’s mind, or one your child has become. When he yawns you can almost see the edges of it at the back of the throat. He can certainly feel it. You know how difficult it must be for him to sit with this thing, to want something but not know what. You remember it well. In fact, it still visits you sometimes. Your strategy, as it has always been, is to find the right activity to fill it up. 

“Chocolate cake!” he says. “That’s it! I’ll bake a cake!” And off he goes to make a delicious cake. You are relieved. He is relieved. Your kitchen is a total fucking mess. 

Something has been filled up, kept at bay. Forgotten about or answered to. 

Resolved, until it comes back. 

3

It has come back.

You parse through a list of activities. You throw another cake at the black hole, a walk to Tesco, suggest making something together, watching an instructional YouTube video. Nothing sticks.

The black hole fattens in the face of nothing to do. It leaks, it spreads. It recruits frustration and anxiety and it gets everywhere. It’s all you can see. There is nothing to do. There is nothing to be done. All he can do is wait. 

Boredom is when you must wait for something impossible to come, like a letter from the future guaranteeing the correct activity that the black hole wants. Because that’s impossible, all you are left with is waiting for your wanting. 

4

It’s a Thursday evening in lockdown. Your son is having a conversation with the wall and seems fine. They are planning to build a boat and are talking about the sea. 

You’re working from home. The thing that you have always wanted or meant to do in life was to be a writer, but here you are on a Zoom meeting talking about business continuity or whatever it is that you do that isn’t being a writer. 

You finish the meeting, close the laptop, and enjoy a few moments of quiet. You can’t bring quiet to Zoom. You can’t sit with it. It gets filled up too quickly by are you still there? hello? hello? The connection keeps cutting out?

You think about the social contact Zoom pretends to offer you, yet instead ends up reminding you of everything you have lost, and that it does this on purpose. You wish you could pack it all in and be the writer you always suspected you might be if only the right circumstances would align. 

Why weren’t you being a writer when you weren’t on lockdown? Probably you had a few excuses you believed in. You’ve got a very busy job, a long commute, time consuming children, sick relatives. As soon as everything becomes less busy - as soon as you have time - you’ll start being a writer. 

And here you are on a Thursday evening in lockdown and all you have is time, time and time. 

5

You open up your laptop, start a new document, call it “writing project.doc” and you stare at it. You wait for something to happen. But you’re bored. You’re too bored to write. 

If you wanted to write but you’re not writing, did you ever really want to write? You’ve been tripped up by your own wanting.  You’re lying down on the ground, beaten to a pulp. “I want to be a writer” stares down at you, laughs at you smugly. It says: I thought you wanted this? What are you left with now? It walks off and makes somebody else a famous novelist. You’re left there, guilty and bored. 

You go to the kitchen and cut a slice of bread still warm from the oven. You slather it in thick salted butter and stare out of your window at the quiet world. You Tweet about how nice bread is as if you were the first to discover it. 

Perhaps you’ll come back to this? Perhaps you won’t. 

6 

It freaks me out how the river becomes the sea. 

A sudden seamless transition. No hope for a badly-made boat like me, barely holding it together above the waves.

Lately I’ve felt myself speeding towards this terrifying place with no edges; the great yawning mouth of the river. One foot wrong and I’ll be sucked along a current and spat out into the infinite sea. Lost forever in the constant blue. No way to get back to the beginning, where I imagine the rain once fell on that lush green hill. 

And what if the current should take me out? I’ll relax my shoulders, unclench my fists. Sail out into the deep and boring sea with no trace of a motive. What’s left after all that sailing? Some things start to move around the boat. I’ve never been bored enough. When I lower myself into a hot bath I get a weird feeling. I love my mother very much.

Copyright Daniel Payne (2020) 

Hands

text by Emma Pizarro, images by Nancy Graham

Hands are one of our most expressive body parts, second only perhaps to eyes in their ability to silently convey what we think and how we feel. Hand gestures augment our speech, adding emphasis like punctuation and helping others to decipher our meaning. Our hands weave into the ways we intentionally use our bodies to express ideas about ourselves, but they also act as inadvertent conduits of our personal stories. Callouses and scars, quick-bitten nails and weathered skin can all lay clues to our work, lifestyles, habits; our past traumas and misadventures. 

It may be trite to observe the clench of a fist or busy, fidgeting fingers and interpret these as suppressed frustration or nervous energy, but I think we often channel our emotions through our hands, revealing a fair amount about our inner states. Without any words exchanged, hands can tell stories about their possessor’s relationship with the world and hint at the acts of effort, compassion and pleasure which they might engage in.

The potential of hands to be equally creator and destroyer, carer and tormentor, seems to mirror the teetering balance of our nature as humans. They are capable of lighting up another’s skin with languorous caresses as with strikes that smart with a stinging injustice. Our hands serve us in our everyday activities; they are functional and mundane, allowing us to navigate practical tasks without thought. And yet they also delight with their playfulness, in the ways we can choose to use them for indulgent and superfluous means.  

There is a particular fascination with the physical form of hands which I reserve for no other body part in isolation. The attraction which other parts of the body might hold is likely predicated on their context: the gentle suggestion of a ribcage protruding from a side-stretched torso, the well of a collarbone giving way to the soft curve of the neck, or the tensed contraction of a calf muscle anticipating motion. I have no such qualifying conditions for hands. In and of themselves I find them beautiful; strong and soft and firm and gentle all at once. 

There is much loveliness in the bone and sinew of hands, in the strain of skin pulled taut over knuckles, in deep-furrowed lines and papery skin peppered with liver spots. Watching the flow of hands in motion can be mesmerising: their graceful contours as they shift and contort; the delicate eroticism of lithe, reaching fingers. There is a real tenderness in witnessing another using their hands for you. 

I love photographs of hands where they have been manipulated into almost unnatural positions to create precise, rigid shapes and cut off from their bodily context, or where hands have become the unexpected focus of the composition, conveying a feeling or detail which might otherwise be lost or at odds with the scene around them; images by surrealist Dora Maar and hands captured in the street photography of Vivian Maier were the visual prompts which led to these recent reflections. 

Our ability to use touch to communicate and relate to the world around us, and how innate and fundamental an action this is for many people, has been brought into sharp focus by how restricted our physical interactions currently are. We lay healing hands on the ailing and we squeeze the hand of a loved one to comfort, reaching with empathy into the pockets of sorrow which lone words struggle to penetrate. Feeling the physicality of another through hands joined in unity can assuage fear; a vivid recollection of hands clasped urgently together can generate the same hot flush of electricity as at the very moment when fingers entwined. 

In extreme anxiety, our sense of touch can anchor us to reality, confirming the continued existence of the material world when a cacophonous rush of thoughts distorts our perception. As small children we are taught that adult hands represent safety and security, that they will protect us from harm. To twist free of the clutch of your parent’s hand was an act of rebellion, at once an immediate breaking of a physical bond and a defiant assertion of premature autonomy. Hands permitted to touch another allow us to push up against the delineation of personal space, to signify allegiance or symbiosis, and to reach toward transcending the boundary between self and other. The aesthetic appeal of hands has always seemed evident to me but, in our present situation, I have found myself reflecting increasingly on the symbolic significance of hands and the beauty inherent in touch, and how we are missing their subtle promise of connection. 

Garden

by Nancy Graham

(This is a work in progress and will be regularly updated)

This photograph, of a weed pushing up through the space where a drainpipe descends into concrete, was taken in the back garden of the house that I grew up in, and in which my dad still lives.  There is no other plant life visible, except maybe the small collection of rotting leaves behind the pipe and the green mossy/lichen growing on the surface of the concrete. I came back to this picture recently as I’ve been thinking about when I will get to visit this garden, and my dad, again.  

The photo above is of the framed print on my living room wall (hence, the reflection). The print has given the green an iridescence. Some of the leaves are almost bleached out with overexposure, which makes the plant stand out even more. 

“Weeds”, we are always told are just unwanted plants; they are anything but. 

The weed in the photograph is a vivid green collection of delicate and beautifully shaped leaves. The vividness stands out against the grey of the pipe and the concrete, asserting its will to live even in a hostile and seemingly infertile environment. Why, how, is it daring to grow here?

The answer doesn’t matter, it only matters that it is there, existing as a beautiful thing, in and of itself, against the drab background. 

As a jumping off point at the start of the lockdown, this photograph made me think about my dad and his garden. But there’s also something about the plant’s vibrancy (so incongruent with the background) that’s so in keeping with how I see the world. That life is often about adapting to new and imperfect realities, and the ability to retain an essence of something beyond the quotidian, the necessary.

A recurring discussion at the moment is that life as we knew it will not return. And that change isn’t just inevitable but necessary. What gives me comfort is the reminder that we are all adaptable and will redesign our lives to be whatever they need to be. 

I see that capacity for change in the photograph. That bright little plant sprouted up in the most unexpected place, and is thriving. We can find beauty even at the bottom of a drainpipe. 

This was all brought to mind when watching Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.  

The latter part of the film shows the Austrian protagonist, Franz Jägerstätter, being held prisoner by the Nazis in Berlin. During one scene, very late on, when he has been sentenced to death, Franz wonders around a small prison yard, and as he approaches a wall, he looks down and sees a plant in a similar setting to the one in my dad’s garden. It’s a nondescript weed, poking out of the stone and concrete. Franz lightly and tenderly touches the plant with his foot, the camera pans up to him looking down, and then we cut away to another shot.

This, in keeping with the final film, is from the original script:

[171 EXT. YARD, TEGEL] 

The inmates are allowed half an hour on the yard. They must keep a distance from each other and speak not a word. 

When he walks in the yard he gets pleasure from watching the ants on a small ant-hill, from the bees in the linden trees, from the swifts and swallows that dart between the buildings, chattering gaily. 

It strikes him that nature carries on its simple, open life without interruption. It makes him feel sentimental towards the world, though not toward the flies that flit about his cell; they only seem eager for him to die, so they can carry on their business unopposed. 

He stops to look at the remains of a barn swallow nest that some wretch has knocked down and left on the ground.]  

We take nothing for granted in this shot being included. Franz is a farmer and devout Catholic and the early scenes of the film show him and his wife tilling the soil, planting, weeding, hoeing, scything grass and tending to living things. There is at least one shot with them hands in the soil, fully present and communing with God’s earth. There are many other shots in the film with characters physically connecting with (playing with, holding in their hands, picking) plants, vegetation, trees, flowers.

Franz’s passing connection with the plant in the prison ground holds weight for the viewer. This isn’t just an establishing shot, a prisoner kicking around the yard, it is someone whom we have learnt feels a spiritual connection to the earth and here we project onto him that connection. He touches that tiny plant and we know he sees beauty, order and vitality, despite the horror and chaos that surrounds him. 

The capacity for us (and in Franz’s case this is due to his faith and his life as a farmer) to recognise and commune with natural beauty, however fleeting and seemingly incongruous, is more important than ever at this time, when opportunities to be outside (whether in private gardens or in wide open communal spaces) have a new resonance. 

Another source of comfort during lockdown has been in poetry, and I reached first for two female American poets, Mary Oliver (whose writing about nature feels essential at a time like this) and Emily Dickinson. Dickinson spent a lot of her life living and writing in her room and so she seemed particularly relevant as I adapted my own room for working at home. 

Her poem ‘There is another sky’, dated 1851, imagines the natural world as a garden, and gives us concise but vivid images of forests, fields, flowers, bees and green leaves as part of an invitation home to her brother, Austin. 

I read these lines and they instantly coalesced with the little plant “Whose leaf is ever green;” in my photograph, and Franz in the prison yard reflecting on nature. They now form reassuring companions with whom I am navigating and settling into this new, imperfect reality.

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields – 
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

Copyright Harvard University Press

The Noise of Time

Melissa Nolas. The Noise of Time, collage on mixed media paper. A3. Realised on her living room floor on April Fool’s Day, contemplating lockdown, using headlines from old copies of the London Review of Books.  She fell out with the LRB when the publication refused to review Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire. You can read about what happened here. Until that point she hadn’t realised quite how male and white the LRB was. I relish these moments of reveal. As much as possible, all attempts were made to preserve the original titles from the LRB; sometimes that wasn’t possible and like life under lockdown they have also been truncated. I wish that I had come up with the title ‘The Noise of Time’, it is delicious. But I haven’t. She borrowed it from Julian Barnes, who borrowed it from Osip Mandelstam, a Russian/Soviet poet and essayist of Jewish heritage who, on his Wikipedia page that he didn’t write, is also qualified by the woman he was married to: ‘he was the husband of Nadezhda Mandelstam’, a Russian Jewish writer and educator whose mother was amongst the first group of women to qualify as a doctor in the Soviet Union. It is not often that men are qualified by the women to whom they are married. But we are all defined by our relationships. The poem has nothing to do with the original reviews those titles were once attached to. Like a lot of headlines, which are misleading of the story that follows, their meaning has been re-written. All refractions are the poet’s own. Naturally. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License