Surviving

On the 23rd of December at approximately 16.15 pm I was knocked down by a car when crossing a road. I, as you must have surmised by now, survived the accident, which left me severely bruised, stiff, aching and sore but with no broken bones or permanent damage to internal organs. A nasty bump on the back of my head, led to the need for a head scan, but again there was no sign of internal bleeding or fracture. I was lucky, wrapped up in layers of clothing to protect me against the weather, (it was dark and raining), I was cushioned as I hit the road, a wooly hat taking the sting out of the ground as it met my head, several layers of clothing protecting me from the force of the car as it hit me from behind.

I was though sidelined from many of the Christmas festivities, being confined to bed to recover and to give time for my aching muscles and tendons to heal. Reading and making notes, as well as scribbling small drawings kept my mind occupied and lots of visiting by my family reminded me of how important they all are to my vision of who I am and of how much I love them all. 

I was lucky. I am lucky, in that I am reasonably optimistic and was happy to be alive rather than fed up that this had happened just before Christmas. These events remind me how fragile life is, not just my own but via the wider interconnected net that links me to the rest of nature, I'm aware of how fragile it/we/everything is. But we can think about the thin threads by which life hangs in very different ways. Two of the books I have read during these days of enforced rest are Ali Smith's 'Companion Piece' and 'Strangers' by Rebecca Tamás. The Ali Smith book had been taken out of the library by my wife, she passed it on knowing I would enjoy it. Smith always gives me food for thought and in a way that brings things down to earth. She reminds you that a simple thing like taking a neighbour's dog for a walk, can have consequences and that our everyday exposure to whatever it is we are exposed to, is a doorway through which we can walk into a cosmic infinity. Like her novel's protagonist, I want to throw things at the TV as I'm forced to listen to second rate politicians spouting on about how good they are, whilst the country and the planet slips down into a Hell of their own making. Smith sees that the world is indeed hanging by a thread, but her grasp of life's richness, is the thing that saves the thread from breaking. Rebecca Tamás is a more serious writer, by this I don't mean that she is considering deeper concerns, but that her writing feels less happy. I had read 'Strangers' before, a book sub-titled, 'Essays on the Human and Nonhuman', and I re-read it because I wanted to see how I could use its focus to help myself move on and not become too dispirited by all the issues I see impacting on the world, especially in these days of what can feel like end times. Tamás had in her youth suffered from depression but had gradually found a way out of it. Therefore she writes from a very perceptive position. She reminds us that it is too easy to slip into a helpless response to climate change and successive governments inability to do anything about it; it is too easy to slip into despair over the Arab / Israeli conflict, to stick your head in the sand and not look at what is happening in the Ukraine, in Syria, in Yemen and all the other areas of the globe that suffer daily conflict. Tamás intellectually gives me a life jacket and Smith lowers me a rope knotted with chunks of human feelings to climb. As a survivor I have renewed energy, psychic renewal hopefully soon becoming physical, and want to put it to good use. I am an artist and this is where my skills lie. I have no illusions about my abilities as a political orator or community organiser, they are just not good enough, but no matter how small the effect, it is better to try to work towards positive change, than to accept the status quo or to just put your head back under the blanket and close your eyes. 

I have joined in with a local group of people put together and organised by my wife Sue, who are either artists or who like to hang works of art on their walls. Households agree to put forward an artwork that will be selected by a random process. After selection each artwork will go to another household in the group. We decided contribute a work of mine done a few years ago, 'Crows with crow cones'. There was you can imagine a debate as to whether it was suitable, but if images are made to trigger reflection, then at some point they need to be out there on a public wall.

Crows with crow cones

It was made as a reminder of how cruel as a species we can be. Crow cones were made of cones of paper, that were set into the ground. They had a few grains of corn put into them as bait. The inside of the cone was covered in a sticky glue, so that when the bird put its head into the cone, it could not get it back off; thus it was condemned to a slow death, as it was now both blind and unable to eat. We can only undertake to develop this type of cruelty if we can 'other' the crows. They need to be thought of as being not like humans, so that for instance we might lead ourselves to believe that they can feel no pain. We need to be able to ring fence our empathy. The analogy of course is that if we are prepared to do this to another creature, then we may just as easily do this to another human and unfortunately to the wider world itself. When I first read about this practice the most awful aspect for myself, was how it was regarded at the time as a source of amusement to watch the crows stumbling around in their confused panic. A book, meant for boy scouts stated, 'this simple device will often mislead the smartest and shrewdest crow, and make a perfect fool of him, for it is hard to imagine a more ridiculous sight than is furnished by the strange antics and evolutions of a crow thus embarrassed.' I wanted to at least give the crows back some dignity in how they were portrayed, but I also wanted to share the image as a reminder of our cruelty and ignorance when it comes to how we treat nature, a Christmas present tinged with the sentiment of Easter. I am also cruel to the viewer, the crow cones being drawn and affixed to the birds as if they are beaks, so at first glance it seems as if nothing is wrong. 

As soon as I could after my accident, I made a few scribbled notebook drawings of my experience of being knocked down. Very fast rough drawings, of the sort I wrote about in an earlier post, 'I Swear I saw this'. The drawings are not very convincing and in no way communicate the situation, but they do act as reminders and instigators of 'next stage' images. I.e. they are like a sort of grit around which eventually a pearl of an image might grow. 

Notebook drawings

I have tried working from these drawings directly, using photographed pages from my notebook which I have then drawn into and added colour and texture using Photoshop software. Working on a laptop has allowed me to keep working when confined to bed and I tend to use my previous experiences as a printmaker to help me structure the working process, often envisioning the image as something that evolves from a layering technique similar to silkscreen, especially when using inks that have had extender added. The image below being the one that most clearly represents my feelings about the accident. 

The glare of the car lights pass over me

I also had a classic lumpen bump that emerged from the back of my bald head, caused when my head hit the road. 

A reminder

I'm very aware that an event like this effects everyone else; people are worried about me and me being the sort of person I am, I tend to turn inwards, and reflect on what happened, make drawings, write about it and generally reflect on its meaning. Communication and non communication, wrapped up together seems to be my way of responding to the confusion of life experience. Being of my temperament can be hard for others, I don't show emotion easily. Finding it easier to make images and write about an experience than speak about it, which suggests that writing isn't just a way of writing down or recording speech but is another distinct technology of reflection. 

So the final post of the year is one whereby I find myself surviving. Anyone who reads this will have also survived another year, so well done. Hopefully we learn from our experiences, both about the strengths and weaknesses of our ability to engage with life and about what helps us to come to terms with that life. I need to make my thoughts external, by making images or writing in order to deal with them. But, I'm still trapped inside my head and so need to continue to sort out how to work more closely with people outside of the technologies of external reflection, (art), which is a continuing conundrum.  As Winnicott puts it in 'Playing and Reality', another text read whilst being confined to bed, we are all engaged in "the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated." 

Entering the CT scanner: A gateway

See also

Trapping and framing

I swear I saw this

Playing and Reality: D W Winnicott