LAURENCE
Dear M,
Today I miss you deeply. Trying to gather my thoughts and myself. So much is happening, I’m hoping to rise again from the safety of a shell that I enclose myself within to finish my screenplay. At least that is what I tell myself and what has happened. It’s done now and all stripping back is happening in rewrites. I’m in the stage of reshaping the muddy mold of the first impression, knocking the rusty edges off and finding form beneath with finer rivets. Hope and faith guiding me further to some inevitable conclusion I'm not yet aware of.
I recently emerged from a dark night's sleep. I wrote a poem about it:
Concepts like moths in the sea of night, pass us by with the promise of faith in the wind. Our subjectivity allowing for all possibilities to be true and the truth waves its fragile flag above our circumstance, our desires stand in place of a mast. We catch wind of the future by standing strong for the morning light to come and carry us to adventure. Night you tremor in darkness with creaking planks hitting against shore, rock, whale or wasp. The presence of divine keeps us safe in the order of things and being lights up the imminent shadows of man.
I’ve learnt for one, not to loose that side of myself that feels to loose. To not loose loss and to gloss with fleeting moments. To stay connected to that quiet voice in myself even in the face of so much noise coming from the outside. To stay swimming in the stream of myself. Not like Narcissus standing on its banks watching reflections, but like a bear wading through that river hungrily on the hunt for a salmon catch.
That story I told you about provocative women, about loosing my virginity. I’ve realized now, how much of my life and relationships with women were defined by this and led me through all the same fires of that first lost love. My hope is that this latest flame licked me hard enough to put the taste for fire away in the recesses of myself, wash it back with great gulps of water. I want water now, water to restore me.
I threw myself into Martial Arts, in particular back into Muay Thai to practice the ancient ways of the warrior to restore my inner strength, discipline and sense of self.
Howling at the night, beckoning the wild, ravaged by dogs, cherished by wolves, I found an old master in the reeds and rubble of the crumbled bricks and iron bars, he told me; Warriors are a different breed tied to infinity they look for guidance from the courage of their heart and the dust off their knuckles as they push off the floor.
How are you? I miss you?
Love
Lxoxo
MARCELLE
Dear Laurence,
I printed your email out as it feels different somehow to read it holding it in my hand.
The struggle you describe, the rising from that imaginary safety shell wherein you create, to the stepping outside to critically assess what you actually have done is a hard one and naturally there is the longing to stay hidden because life can be too frazzling.
The irony of course is that in order to create you need to have thin skin, a constant intense empathy in which there is a freeflow, without obstruction,between the outside and inside, but at the same time the medium you create in; painting, writing, acting is about definition, bounderies and form.This contradiction feels quite isolating and from this a lot of other existential shit comes up as well. Feels like the dark night but it isn’t. This is what we are when all else is silenced.
I am really looking forward to see what you have written, I remember some of your storyboards like This Choir of Angels, you have great rythm of words.
I have been quite restless for awhile, I am struggling against not having a voice or the will to paint yet at the same time feeling that without it I will drown.
Have many questions about what I am doing and if like you say, isn’t it that we tell ourselves stories why we do or don’t things at that in reality we just try to avoid looking at that gaping hole? And then, I spend time with friends, other artists, my sister and I laugh and love and feel warm and connected and all those thoughts and feelings evaporate.
Re your provocative women story; all of our relationships are shaped by early erotic experiences and from that certain patterns, limitations, repeats are inevitable. And however exciting it is to return again and again to that wound it doesn’t do you any good. Round and round we go till the centrifrugal energy throws us out of that orbit.
Recently I was very attracted to someone and was tempted to let it develop till I saw I was doing exactly the same as I had done several times before and I walked away, felt very strong and victorious that I counteracted my default pattern even though it cost me the a very pleasurable affair.
We are each in are own way warriors, sometimes unnoticable and non dramatic. We are all tied to infinity as you say, but sometimes I prefer things on a smaller scale, like the feeling that we are all tied to each other, breathing out.
Wish you were here, right now.
Take care of yourself and keep the lines open
Love M
I feel about your work, that you are engaged in a healthy relationship with your demons, you control them and they bend to your will as the puppet master of the whole affair.
Do you feel connected to your unconscious? Not in the Freudian sense but in the emotional sense, do you feel these pictures come from inside you, beyond just your imagination or picture making. I don't just mean the quirky dark stuff but the portraits, the silence of your subjects when they are alone in thought, I feel there are speaking a lot in their silence, perhaps in the Lucian Freudian sense.