Borrowing this image and text from my instagram feed four years ago. We have entered the shadow land of the anniversary of my fathers death, he died sometime between the 5th and 7th of July , I found out via phone call on my 24th birthday in my house in East London, full of friends, having a party. I started taking antidepressants two years ago now, having never been able to face before the reality that I have inherited depression, depressive traits, manic traits, from a man I never knew. It’s a long and complicated story that runs through the veins of my creative life, my PhD and my ongoing state of mind. We continue to walk with grief, even if we don’t know exactly what it was we lost.
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Take care of yourselves, remember to vote.
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“My father died on my birthday when I was 24, I last saw him when I was 12, I just turned 38, it doesn’t get easier it seems.
I grew up in the ruined heart of a Roman Town called Caerwent in South Wales, the garden was littered with fragments of pottery nearly as old as Jesus, we lived there until my parents divorced, and I have this vivid memory, this clear determination, after a visit to Caerleon of wanting to draw something particular, a Roman in a field, set amidst a wooded valley, and so clearly having this image in my head and not being able to get it out, to represent it on paper, it was an early encounter with the problematic nature of reality and expectation in art making. The gap between myself and I, and subsequently thereafter the world, I knew I had this image but I could not get it out. I knew I had this life, but I could not hold it together in the world, the world tore it apart, my expectation, my reality, my self, and I.
This is from one of Da Vinci’s numerous notebooks, which often included to-do lists such as the following:
[Calculate] the measurement of Milan and Suburbs
[Find] a book that treats of Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cordusio
[Discover] the measurement of Corte Vecchio (the courtyard in the duke’s palace).
[Discover] the measurement of the castello (the duke’s palace itself)
Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.
Get Messer Fazio (a professor of medicine and law in Pavia) to show you about proportion.
Get the Brera Friar (at the Benedictine Monastery to Milan) to show you De Ponderibus (a medieval text on mechanics)
[Talk to] Giannino, the Bombardier, re. the means by which the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes (no one really knows what Da Vinci meant by this)
Ask Benedetto Potinari (A Florentine Merchant) by what means they go on ice in Flanders
Draw Milan
Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night.
[Examine] the Crossbow of Mastro Giannetto
Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner
[Ask about] the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese
Try to get Vitolone (the medieval author of a text on optics), which is in the Library at Pavia, which deals with the mathematic
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Now, what I most like about this to-do list, and I feel this is something that is utterly missing from my to-do lists, is how many other people, and other experts in such and such are involved in his to do list, how much of finding out was about talking to people, not about reading, or research, or going it alone, but about combining forces and forging collaborations through conversation. I know there’s the internet, and this is instagram, and I am talking to you in a certain way, but I fear it is killing much of what made us who we are. Give me a call. Come for a walk. The skull and its inner workings were not designed to work alone at the other end of a zoom call.
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I recently had a small fire on a beach with two good friends and my beautiful partner with whom I am to become a father in August. Apparently I assume some things are common knowledge when they are not, but it is certainly common knowledge that grieving is a slow and painful, unwieldy thing, and even though I, to some extent, have a PhD in performance and grief in the wake of my fathers death I am forever coming to terms with it as we forever become another ring of ourselves on the heartwood of the tree of ourselves, we change with the strange constancy of a horizon we can never reach, a life is a landscape walked across, and the footsteps are shadows in the mud of our selves, each of which is buried inside us somewhere in the noise and the bustle of life itself. “