Becoming Blue XVI - Forget-me-nots GRIEF

To be read to Agnes Obel's 'Parliament of Owls' in B Minor

My screen is smashed, like the walls of my heart. Both were smashed this late August. Dropped. Both the phone and I were dropped in unison and yet peculiarly, like the phone, the pieces stayed together, like a kintsugi bowl, nothing was lost. My body was still whole. Broken things can be mended. I tapped the screen together with sellotape and got to work on healing the cracks on myself. I am trying to be as graceful as a swan. Faithful, loyal, mute and pure. I saw in my vision swans coming out of the orange antlers I had been dreaming about since last year and sketched out this piece as a trial run. Eight swans for eternity and the looped nature of time. Mute swans for my silence. Antlers for Leda's fecundity and Forget Me Nots for remembrance and the passing of time on Swan Lake.

Swan Song, (2020),Watercolour on paper, 100 cm x 50cm, J R Shepherd
Work in Progress

To feel betrayed is a terrible feeling. Loyalty seems to be a thing of the past these days. Now, it's a rare thing to see a human not out for himself, but I guess you have to love them anyway, we're all fallible. As 2020 rolls on, I have downed brushes. I find my energy is needed elsewhere. I used to paint pictures for people to look at, but now I feel that people just want someone to listen to them during this exceptional time, so I am talking to a lot of people. 

The phone can't be replaced until March, and even then it's a push. With new borders springing up from nowhere and I am feeling cut off. I feel like the universe is pulling me away from the mothership. The cords are still there, I am still tied, but only just. Once a month something else happens and another apron string is yanked out of my navel. It's a terribly painful process for me, because it is not out of choice, but necessity and survival. This wasn't my choice. It's something higher and out of my control. For the past six years, I have been learning the art of letting go. Now, I feel I am inside a lighthouse, all at sea. Flashing my light, in a raging storm, letting everyone I know that it is going to be ok. It's perilous out there. Some are winning, some are losing and many have been lost. But the light must continue to flash, even if my window is smashed.

Swan Song, (2020), Watercolour on paper, 100 cm x 50cm, J R Shepherd
Work in Progress

This has been the hardest year of my life. Not from a stressful point of view, but more just the level of soul searching and coming to terms with myself. It was necessary. More transformations, transitions and shifting through the silt. 

'A summer of a hundred visions and revisions, the almond's armour is finally starting to split' - J R Shepherd Facebook Update

There is nothing more destabilising than finding out that you really don't know someone you thought you knew and the sense of betrayal that comes with that. As the almond husks cleaved apart mid-July I intuitively knew what was happening. Summer was waning and there was nothing I could do. Someone was going to cleave away and disappear and they did, in the most deceptive and painful way. My painter's block started mid-July and is still very much present, reaching an all-round halt on September 4th with confirmation of the cleft. My block is all tied up in this. What I thought I knew I did not, and yet I did instinctively. But I did not want to see it. I saw what I wanted to see and not what was there. I feel fooled as a person and as a painter. As a painter, you should always be able to see through the illusion. So now I don't trust myself.

Swan Song, (2020), Watercolour on paper, 100 cm x 50cm, J R Shepherd
Work in Progress

As I painfully chip away at my swans, there is an outstandingly beautiful Autumn unfolding outside here in Granada. I missed the Spanish autumn last year - the first autumn in my new home - as I was in England folding newspapers for a month. Seems so strange looking back on that time and not knowing what was coming. I have since forgotten all my pin numbers it's been so long since she used my cards. I occasionally fumble an English note with Her Majesty's head on it. It feels strange. I have forgotten the stations on the London underground, and I've forgotten that you can't get a pick-a-mix from Woolworths anymore as I also loose track of timelines and I feel like I don't know anything anymore.

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Yeats

Swan Song, (2020),Watercolour on paper, 100 cm x 50cm, J R Shepherd
Work in Progress

As the painting block ticks on I am doing all I can to remain hopeful and ready, remaining as faithful and devoted as a swan in a cloud of Prussian Blue. 

When I hold you, I hold everything that is–swans, volcanoes, river rocks, maple trees drinking the fragrance of the moon, bread that the fire adores. In your life I see everything that lives." 

Pablo Neruda

There is the Romantic medieval tale of the Le Chevalier au Cigne or Swan Knight, which is a story of a mysterious rescuer who comes in a swan-drawn boat to defend a damsel, his only condition being that he must never be asked his name. The earliest versions (preserved in Dolopathos) do not provide a specific identity to this knight, but the Old French Crusade cycle of chansons de geste adopted it to make the Swan Knight (first version around 1192). At a later time, the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach incorporated the swan knight Loherangrin into his Arthurian epic Parzival in the first quarter of the 13th Century and a German text, written by Konrad von Würzburg in 1257, also featured a Swan Knight without a name.

The phone screen might have smashed, but maybe there will be a renewal in March 2021 in not only the phone contract but also the bond with the invisible Swan man. The man who visits me in dreams with antlers on his head and box of Swan Vestas in his back pocket.