Of eggshells and feathers

An odd and lovely boyfriend in my early twenties once told me a fact that has adhered to me like psychic Velcro: that Venus’s environment is so hostile, if you stepped into it, you would be simultaneously poisoned, fried and squashed.

I wake some mornings and I’m on Venus.

Seriously, where is the love?

In law there’s a concept in tort of the person with the ‘eggshell skull,’ and debates about whether one can be liable for damage to a person who is peculiarly vulnerable when an ordinary person might not have been quite as wounded by the negligent act.

I have more of an eggshell heart than skull.

While the world has been hurting, and watching it hurt, I’ve been hurting, I took a six week art class with Jody Graham, the Australian artist. It helped me get out of my head for a few hours a week. Our first exercise was to pick an ordinary object and draw it in 30 different ways.

The Japanese artist Hokusai painted Mount Fuji from a hundred different views, offering that one couldn’t claim to ‘know’ anything unless you’d looked at it from a hundred different views.

I fell in love with this exercise.

Surely everything we think we know, is more faceted, fascinating and peculiar than our perception?

In a world which squashes complexity, and demands binary responses and displays of selective outrage, I offer you the humble feather.

The Russian formalist critic and theorist Viktor Shklovsky wrote in his 1917 essay, ‘Art as Device (also translated as ‘Art as Technique’):

Estrangement gives us the sensation of being alive.

Art can hold multiple ways of being in this world: writing, painting, drawing, music, dance, theatre …

My dear friend Ilze reminded me of the Buddhist teacher Seung Sahn who taught, ‘Go straight, don’t know,’ in all circumstances, inclining us towards humility, openness and curiosity.

If you are celebrating or observing Easter or Passover over this time, I send you blessings for resurrection, freedom and an exodus from everything that fries, poisons and squashes your heart. And doesn’t art help us to live through what is otherwise, insufferable?

With love

Joanne