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Weeping in the temple of delight

11/24/2025

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If we could tame the gods

Mr Mulhern wore a three piece pin stripe suit. It was blue and, being the seventies, the lapels fanned across his chest to caress his shoulders. He was tall, thin and his black hair fell in gentle waves to his white collar. At the beginning of the academic year he would stand before us, his skin sautéed by a Hellenic sun, and sing a song of full throated ease. Mr Mulhern was my English teacher and he brought me a gift. I never thanked him for it but I have never let go of it.

The myth of Mulhern was this: when the bell rang to signal the end of the last lesson of the summer, he would grab the handles of his leather holdall and head for the airport. For the next six weeks, wearing two of his three pieces - the jacket slung over his shoulder - , he would voyage amongst the Greek Islands, clambering over rock, hill and the bleached bones of goats, to seek out temple, urn and the nectar of poetry. When the hammer was limbering up for the first clang against distant bell to signal the start of a new year, he would stuff the collected poems of Keats back into his bag and return for his first lesson on English poetry.

the poet weeps

My melancholy grew in infancy but how to sing about it came in adolescence. Thanks to Keats, the cockney scribbler, I discovered that the shrine of sadness is housed in the temple of delight. And, even if your head drifts towards despair, a broken heart plays the best tunes. Some prefer other frequencies, but there is where I am most alive. And this is where art matters most. Not whether it carries a historically relevant idea or is bundled into the stiff, theory-ironed sheets of Procrustes bed, but whether its elements marry, whether form and content are entwined in a way that enlivens you. You may not know why but the skin prickles, the blood zings in the arteries, you're lost in communion, trembling in the thrum of vitality.

My introduction to Keats, his chiming with something deep inside me, was the start of something. I was an outsider, within the family and without. At school I was the only boy from a council estate; at home on the estate, I was the only child who loved poetry. Mr Mulhern’s initiating me in to the ‘seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness' was the stepping stone to my construction of a personal pantheon of writers and artists. A lifelong endeavour to which new idols are added and some former favourites are shifted a little further from the light.

Diane Arbus (Stephen A. Frank)

Sanctom Sanctorum is a riveting and ravaging exhibition of photographs by the American artist, Diane Arbus. The agony of existence laid bare in forty five black and white prints. Arbus has been accused of voyeurism, of seeking out the ugly and then parading these grotesques before us for our revolted delight. I don't see it. When you stand in front of these photographs of fellow human beings, their isolation and rawness reaching beyond the frame, what strikes you is tenderness. A tenderness to shape and realise existence. A tenderness in letting their vulnerabilities see the light. A tenderness to give space and time to someone, someone who sure as hell doesn't look like you but deep down, well... how far are we prepared to look inside ourselves. The flaws that she was attracted to run through us all.

In many of the photographs, Arbus is in their bedroom, the inner sanctum of the house where dreams and desire thrive. And, she seems to be in the inner sanctums of their hearts, where the longing to be seen rubs up against the fear of what might be seen. Almost all of her subjects stare at the camera offering up themselves; the selves they do know and the selves they don't.

Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home - Diane Arbus (1966)

In one wonderful photograph, a former debutante of the year reclines into her fading youth. In bed, swathed in a white stole, her painted face, defiant and despairing, rises from her former glory. Lines invade but she inclines to elegance; her dark eyes belie the agony of beauty's composure. One slender arm rises from the whiteness, wielding a cigarette, gesturing defiance, decadence, resistance. Arbus captures the ridiculous splendour and the desperation of desire. Her look is beseeching - see me - and embattled - I am still what I once was. It is too easy to lob a dismissive chuckle into her fur rather than unlock the gaze of admiration, an acknowledgemnet of survival in an unbearable existence.

In an age of visual conformity, an age where the aches and blemishes of being are filtered out, Arbus's images might feel confrontational, threatening, difficult, grim or too slumped in reality. They might be, but... they capture the ambiguity, the ambivalence, at the heart of our lives. They are raw and tender and alive.

The Little Pastry Chef, Chaim Soutine (1923)

Chaim Soutine, the brilliant Lithuanian painter, blast his way into my pantheon almost forty years ago. I stumbled across his work at the L'Orangerie in Paris, which houses the largest collection of his work in Europe. Standing before his contortions and colours, his rich slathering of paint, the twisted buildings and bodies, I was lost, quivering with delight. I had never heard of Chaim Soutine but he was about to become a lifelong companion.

As with the work of Arbus, it's easy to get lost in the torturous turnings of his work and life - they are there - but so is the rich celebration of life. The dense working of paint to capture something elemental, the raw breath of being human. His paintings - the portraits of cooks and choirboys, the writhing landscapes and the wracked beasts and beef - throb. They throb with the stabs and smears of oil. They throb with the unleashed energy of his hand. They throb with longing.

His stunning paintings also throb with the stories of Soutine; the myth, the sensational tales, the viewer carries to their encounter with the work: the brutal beatings he suffered as a child, the devastating poverty and hunger of his early years in Paris, the violent slashings of his own work, the ulcerated pain that stopped him painting.

Celeste Marcus, in her recently published biography, Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession and a Dramatic Life in Art, tries to dim the depiction of the painter as suffering hero: the romantic artist who poured all his anguish onto the canvas. She argues for Soutine to be seen as an artist driven in his dedication to painting and as a painter who ceaselessly sought to capture the energy he saw in the world around him. And there is truth in her telling, which adds another layer of complexity to our understanding of the artist. Sadly, the book is a disappointment: the writing often overwrought, full of vagaries and patronising lines like 'to the non-painters this won't mean anything but....' Marcus offers an early apology for the thinness of her portrait - Soutine didn't leave much in the way of letters and nothing in the way of diaries or journals - but after the epilogue, the most engaging chapter which quotes extensively from writers and painters, you are left wondering did it need a whole book to tell you his life is in the painting.

Smoking in Céret

Soutine and Arbus made sense of the world through their work. Both were dead by fifty. Arbus ended her own life; Soutine, his stomach bleeding, risked entering Nazi occupied Paris for surgery. It failed. Both left beautiful legacies: Art. Art that is complex, compulsive and invigorating;. Art which holds potent sway over my meaning making. The part that art - the creating and the appreciation - plays in sustaining a life worth living is immeasurable. The foundation blocks of that life were laid for me when I first encountered Keats, a shy and awkward twelve year old discovering something precious.

Recently, clambering over the parched hills of Sifnos, I found three goat skulls. I smuggled them into my bag with the poems that I carried and brought them back to London. Thank you, Mr Mulhern.

A blind couple in their bedroom - Diane Arbus (1971)

From the darkness

rectangles of light
bled by fragile net
hems licking up the dark

shadows linger
sulking in cornered retreat
the hulk of hope gathered

in the weight of their holding
its twenty to four
on the bedspread of afternoon

left in gravity’s dilemma
his black shoe hangs
in the liberation of air

lips lifting to sightless content
hands drape the folds of love
she nestles, nesting longing

against the bulk of his shoulder
his shirt smoothed to pride
for eyes celebrating this couple
in the unlit mystery of love

Simon Parker

I do not claim ownership or rights to any images posted unless stated. If you hold rights to an image that I have used and wish me to change credit or delete the image, please contact me and I will do so immediately.

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How could she...

5/20/2025

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Broken promises

I have an addiction: Last Thursday I arrived at Waterloo Station forty five minutes before my train was to leave. I had three books in my bag. Two I had already started. I was enjoying both. The third I was excited to plunge into. Three potential companions for the wait and the journey down to Portsmouth. I spotted a free seat and started towards it. The hankering stopped me.

I have time, time to slip into the bookshop - not buy anything - just see what’s lying on the tables for future days. I mumbled the mantra: You will not buy a book, not one book as I skipped towards Foyles. *

What’s it like to go through a life unloved: To live for eighty years, to have been a child, to have been married, had children; to have worked alongside people year after year after year; to retire to a community in the sunshine and sit with the same people night after night over a Cristal, and not once found the care, the attention, the valuing, the intimacy, that we clumsily call being loved?

Sien with a cigar, Vincent Van Gogh

In a letter to Theo - his brother, his confidant and constant support - Van Gogh tries to justify and persuade his family that he is right to marry Sien, a prostitute he was living with. In it he wrote something I have never forgotten: How can she be good when she has never known good? When I think of my mother, these words come back to me and I think, how can she love when she has never known love.

Didier Eribon’s rousing, pain-ridden, vital new book, The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working-Class Woman. which I bought that afternoon (a victim of seduction) brought images and ideas of my own mother in its wake. Eribon draws us close to the agonies of his mother's existence : her marriage to an unloving, controlling and violent man, "unhappy her whole life" as she trudges from domestic servant at fourteen, to cleaning lady, to factory to worker and ending with sliding into un syndrome glissement. (A beautiful French expression for the slipping into the arms of death through a sense of sheer hopelessness). He unpicks the ambivalence at the heart of his relationship with his mother. His yearning and education has taken him far from his family and the distance of deracination is difficult to bridge. He writes about their tempering of language in an effort to connect:

I changed my voice, my sentences, my words... of course
without being able to modify everything… I spoke to her
in a mix of her language and of mine, or to be more
precise: a mix of her language, which had also been mine
earlier in life and which I still knew, and the language that I
actually speak today. Did something similar happen for her?
Did she adapt her language when she was with me in order
to come closer to what she imagined to be correct usage,
which she didn't fully control even if sometimes she would
do her utmost to talk the way they talked on television?
Perhaps she did.
- Didier Eribon

Page after page could almost have been lifted from my own filial life, watching a mother blanked by the world and shrinking from enagement as I drifted elsewhere.
The omnipresence of the televison. The battle against its prattle, where conversations are smothered and die. Whether there is any interest in what the highly flexed voices from the television are saying or not is irrelevant; the television will be on and we must search for a response against the garish bonhomie of a gameshow. Our presence leads to no pressing of the off button.

The degeneration will not be televised

Is the television a comfort or the easy curtailing of thought? Distraction is the greatest defence against what we cannot bear to think about; and what we cannot bear to think about is probably what we should be thinking about. But, - and the saddest thing is how many - there are lives so raddled and ravaged by circumstance and society’s weighted indifference that the strength to think, and to think that you might matter, are shredded. The bleat of television dissolves the screams.

Eribon’s work, a contending with Simone de Beauvoir’s little known yet magnificent book Old Age, ends with a cri de coeur, a positioning old age in relation to political philosophy. De Beauvoir advocates a staving off of decline, at least a slowing of cognitive decline, through attachment, an active engagement with ideas, people, activities and remaining curious. (What health hangs in curiosity). Eribon wants to broaden the view to take in where the elderly sit or lie in the ideas that forge society.

There is no pioneering, provocative, demanding voice for the elderly. No transforming ideology encompasses them. They have no ‘we”. They have no future and futurist manifestos have no need of their fading hearts. Eribon demands that they need more: if they have no 'we', we must become their voice and we who become their they, must fight for their place in a society that must be shaped to care more than it does. We will, if we are unlucky to live long enough, become increasingly dependent, our lives increasingly impinged by physiacl ailments, our existence fade to invisibilty. Does it have to be?

This is, after all, the fundamental political question:
Who speaks? Who is able to make themselves heard?
And if this fundamental political gesture remains
inaccessible to so many people who figure among the
most dominated, the most dispossessed, the most
vulnerable, does it not fall to writers, artists, and
intellectuals to speak of them and for them, to make
them visibleand to "make their voices heard," to take
up Simone de Beauvoir's expression again? Perhaps
it is even necessary to "lend them a voice," the voice
they do not have, the voice they no longer have
-indeed, in the case of dependent older people, the
voice they can never have again.
- Didier Eribon

My mum, aged ten

My mother has never had the urge or the ability to take hold of her place in the world and fashion it so that she might fit more comfortably within it. She has allowed it to shape her. She has incorporated, interiorised, the way women like her are circumscribed by society. Circumstance and the hands of men formed her: her spirit squeezed and misshapen by an indifferent mother, an absent father, a mocking husband, a lack of educational opportunity, childhood abuse, post partum depression and that constant lack of love. Untended soil bears no fruit.

Now she is ill and facing death. Her body is blighted by swelling and disease and her response to it is the refrain of relinquishing which she has sung all of her life: What will be, will be. It is the defence of the impotent.

I have written many poems about my mother. She has never read them, she has no interest in reading them. When I'm with her I try to draw her into a space where she might shine: her thoughts, her feelings, her laughter. She steps into this space tentatively, unsettled by its strangeness. A son's love is perhaps too late. The die cast.

She will die soon and her death will mirror her life: she will die without valuing herself, without being valued. How could she have loved when she never knew love.

* Although it is now part of the Waterstone’s monster, I hold a memory of Foyles when it was owned by Christina Foyle. Then, they had no idea what books they had. Once you found a book you wanted, you would take it to a little wooden booth and receive a chitty to take to another wooden booth where they would take your money and send you back with another chitty to collect the book from the first wooden booth. Often, shuttling between the booths, you would lose your way and end up at a booth where they claimed never to have seen you or the book you have come to collect. It was delightfully slow pandemonium.

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One thousand ways of telling...

2/22/2025

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The Word is my shepherd, Rachel Clare

A little boy is in a lift. He is wearing red shorts and a soft yellow t-shirt. He stands close to his silent mother. So close he can feel the fabric of her coat without her noticing. He is a fearful child and, as they descend, each floor carries its own clutch of catastrophe. She doesn’t say much. He says even less.

When the door opens and the light comes in, he doesn’t race out. His younger brother does. His younger brother charges at the world, laughing, babbling, a fearless emperor of wherever he roams. He and his mother follow.

They are off to the post office to cash a cheque. The post office, also a newsagents, is squashed beneath the block next to theirs. On sunny days the overhanging balcony devours the light and you are dizzy as you enter the shop. His eyes, always watchful, adapt quickly. He knows what he wants, he doesn’t know why.

Whilst his mother approaches the man behind the glass shield, whilst his brother slaps at the colourful packets hanging from a rotating display stand, he steps, head down, to where the children’s books are layered. Glimpses of what lies inside drawing him in.

His small hand reaches out and plucks a book from this compendium of dreams. For a moment, his eyes follow the black marks on its cover. He cannot make out the words, he cannot make out any words. He opens the book and begins telling the story of the book. He speaks gently into the silent air of the shop. For a shy boy, this is a Herculean act but he is lost.

Clipping her purse, his mother turns from the glass and approaches his performance. Without looking up, without halting the fall of words, he sees her smiling. She stops next to him, listening. Then, her hand reaches out, takes the book from his thin fingers, closes it and places it on the shelf above the one he took it from.

He wants to tell her that he hasn’t finished reading the story, but, he cannot read and she is heading for home.

A boy reading, J.H. Dowd

We are born into a world of stories. Stories help us hoist shape onto a world that is chaotic, unpredictable, uncertain. Stories give us a place in the world and place the world within our grasp.

Each family has - if it still shares words with each other - its repertoire of stories. In the repeated telling these stories calcify. For some, they are clung to, for others they are claustrophobic. Some of us struggle to climb from the crippling family narrative. We limp from it, slowly finding a way to walk in a story in which we are a richly drawn, complex, uncategorisable characters existing in a world with others who share our full humanity.

If you look out the window today, you may think what's the point: why tell stories when the maddest, loudest, selfist voices are filling the air with their howls. Or, as the writer Elif Shafak puts it in 'Writing Is a Dog's Life' and Other Thoughts:

What is the purpose of fiction, really what is the point of rolling
up your sleeves and labouring to craft a delicate sentence, carefully
selecting the ideal synonym, or perfecting the punctuation, only to
describe imagined events and invented characters when the world
outside is on fire?

In her playful and poignant piece Shafak refuses to rise from the retreat of her bed, refuses the role of writer because "the world has gone off its axis." In her funk, she is visited by three writers, Jalaluddin Rumi, Albert Camus and Anna Ahkmatova and bemoans how much simpler things were in their times. Perplexed, they each recite their litany of an era's suffering: From plague to purges, from famine to foreign invasion, from cesaseless violence to political malaise and personal sickness. Chastened, Shafak peels off the duvet because:

no matter how bewildering and debilitating our world, we write
poetry, we write prose, we write our resilience, hope, empathy,
and love for pluralism, nuance and diversity, we write our shared
humanity through the chaos of our times

1000, Rachel Clare

I have always told stories. I spent my childhood retreating from the world and constructing stories in which I could play a more active role than the one I had in reality. And, in which the world's axis may spin in a different direction. The impulse has never left me. Inside this ageing body, I remain a child, I remain a story teller. I keep returning to the playground.

Language is a playground: Digging into the mound of words and throwing or placing them together, trying to swing from one phrase to another, sliding through sentences to the whoosh of musicality is a form of absorption, engagement, of being alive.

This week I reached a milestone: One thousand daily poems. Every day, since the 26th May 2022, I have written a poem that explores something - an incident, an idea, a book read, a dream, an exhibition, an emotion - from the day before. When I told a friend last week that I was about to reach the thousandth poem, they marvelled at the discipline. It isn't discipline, it's a necessary delight. It's serious play.

In celebration of the milestone I have selected six poems to post below. Maybe there's something in there to delight you.

Maria or Maria
Friday 10th January 2025

She has two faces
one is revealed
in playful guise
after her demise

the other is dead
in her living
eyes breathe
voice escapes

yet the shape
is shot with
the desire for
history’s excising

there are no lines
in her flesh
to rouse the lines
she must speak

her collapse
is a calling to life
there she is
as credits roll

a real character
hurt and happiness
in a look
that flies caged

there she is
why was she hiding
behind a broken
ode to fame

Three days left
Wednesday 11th December 2024

We do not notice the darkening
we are crouched in to small comforts
laughter, the faces of others, another pint

death pulls up a chair with an offer
you’ve only three days left
with this fragile breath, what do you do

some say heroin is a house worth visiting
others want to plunge in alcohol’s pool
I would want more of this

this sharing of laughter, language dancing
between listening hearts, and us
not noticing the darkness when it comes

Life, Love & Death in Sicily

Tuesday 11th February 2025
After the Letizia Battaglia exhibition at The Photographers Gallery

The world does not exist in black and white yet it does
shade into the mastery of drama where good, evil, innocence
and a brown, is it, bag of bread, clutched close to a child’s chest
as she chomps on the torn crust offers some protection
from the troubles of complexity, shoot, if everything
could be parcelled up and labelled, knotted string
strangling the struggle beyond naming, then I wouldn’t be
such a mess, thank god for Letizia and the shadows
which sounds like the name of a band, she sings
bloody songs framed for us to sway before chapter and verse
fat feet, hard skinned, the patina of a fathered land soiling
her soul, there’s no easy ascension in colour despite
the martyrdom of mopping, slopping, sautéing, baking
raking through a child’s hair for lice and dreams
most dreams are dead, murdered in infancy, a nation
of ideology got there early, placing the gun in eager
boy’s hand, who doesn’t want to be like the swaggering
men who have stuffed death into a sack and dropped
him, weighted, in to the Tyrrhenian Sea, they are blind
to the constant pop of bubbles breaking the surface

A practical madness
Tuesday 17th September 2024

The morning begins
with murderous thoughts

I know nothing
about the drosophila melanogaster

only my desire for destruction
of the hordes hanging

on the sherry bottle, sleeping
on our painted angel

investigating the cool enamel
of the sink, they creep from damp

sponge, like most battles the scent
of futility seeps into the bloodlust

in last year’s staging the whip
of the towel splattered hundreds

against mirror and white wall
before the triumphant flick

brought our source of light’s shade
clashing with a fragile bowl

under the drunken direction
of a swaggering war god, both lost

their shattering a sure sign
my mettle wouldn’t shape a warrior

rampant zeal has been swallowed
by researched stealth, patient hands

glugs of wine are shared amongst
the jars, sugar sprinkled with spells

a drop of washing up liquid
to clog their tiny black pads

the vinegar fly, the pomace fly
the banana fly will die

their fifty day stay cut short
sozzled in the red of my Rioja

When the moon darkens
Sunday 30th October 2022

Madness dances next to us all
sometimes in murderous dress
sliding along the platform
before possessed arms
thrust out and push us to unguarded rails
others have brothers who run naked
their chakra leading the third eye
a merry dance amidst the traffic
& then there are those whose
silent descent is witnessed behind
the closed doors of intimacy
where lethargy & lunacy
take turns at the sticks
to drum the beat or let it fall
fearful screams of the paranoiac
slipping into silence, rigid, catatonic
until the final chaotic outburst
from where no one returns
frightened shrieks score the quiet
& hell is let loose until
the ambulance arrives & dancer
is bound in a jacket, straightening
them out for a drugged absence
there are no jazz hands in this farewell

A sketch
Friday 8th September 2022
After Ferdinand Hodler

His wife waits whilst he watches her die
a model lover lying in death’s slow sheeting

anguish is drawn in to the bed’s penciled grid
as looking is dried into detailed drawing

twenty times he renders her to stiff paper
little flesh left, thin legs end in the heft

of patent leather shoes, rosary beads snake
the clenched hands that hold her weightless

frame from flying to a final disappearing, tears
cannot come, they will smudge the artist’s eye

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How to build a shelf

12/6/2024

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Buster builds a shelf

Andrew Huberman is in my kitchen. His voice, thick with certainty, booms from a body he has spent time building. Huberman, an American neuroscientist, is a how to kind of guy. You know the type: thinking about people in the same way you think about putting up a shelf. Drill a few holes, screw in some battening, lay down your wood and, hey presto, you have a beautiful borderline personality shelf or an easily manufactured mahogany narcissist. He is talking to Bill Eddy, a man of gentler mien, before the blade of conviction cuts through. Having mounted the pulpit from the gleaming steps of data, he recites the percentages for paranoiacs and histrionics who are out there in this dangerous ol’ word these guys are gonna tame.

A friend had sent me the Huberman Lab podcast on How to Deal with High Conflict People. Not, I think, or hope, because she thought I was one, but that I would find it interesting. I did. Not, perhaps, for the reasons she imagined.

This laboratory, like most in science and selling, is in the business of exploration only as a path to the solid house of solutions. Proofs or predictions to trim the world. I lasted thirty two minutes and five seconds. The two and a half hour podcast, like the world it inhabits, is broken into manageable bite size chunks that can be labelled, packaged, consumed. At 38:54 you can chew up Negative Advocates; at 1:37:27 you can spit out a Combative High-Conflict Individual and the gobs of Blame. After, both men have painted the past in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer technicolour, they tell all of their listeners, children be warned, how the world has gone Bergman black and you must never get engaged, or marry, until you have known the person for 365 days. Huberman then does a snake oil routine for one of his sponsors who produce the only vitamin he ever lets into his temple. I snapped. The shrinking of complexity coupled with the brazen selling of a better self, had me broken. I was about to hurl the speaker into the oven with my Friday night fish, when I thought What Reason Could I Give. Not to the destruction of certainty or the certainty of destruction for the speaker, but the beautiful Don Cherry duet with Bobo Stenson. I usually cook with musical accompaniment and Huberman had remninded me why. Music rescued me from the madness. I switched from the attempt to straitjacket the world into explanation, to swaying in my kitchen not knowing where I was. If you don't know the track, give it a listen, it might take you somewhere.

The Crossing II (Famine Horse), Ken Currie, 2024

Artists work in their own laboratories, but - unless it is within the technical, material or formal elements of a medium - they are not in search of certainty. Certainty chokes. For artists, - and some clinicians: Oliver Sachs, for example, who once said, I would have to know someone's whole biography before I offer a diagnosis - there are no answers, only explorations, questions, playing. A path to who knows where. This is why art - poetry, music, painting - is such rich terrain and the threat that it faces from the explainers and quantifiers needs to be resisted. We must not let the rationalising mind erode art's "tendency to celebrate the purposeful purposelessness." as Jed Perl wrote in The New Republic, back in 2014:

This process is reflected in the ever-growing obsession with polls, surveys, and sundry forms of bureaucratic analysis, which threaten to reduce all art’s unruly richness to a set of data points. Instead of viewing life’s unquantifiable artistic experiences as a check on quantification, the well-intended impulse among many liberal commentators is to try and quantify the unquantifiable. But the power of art, which is so personal and so particular, is finally unquantifiable — and therefore a source of embarrassment to the rationalizing mind. What is at stake is art’s freestanding power. - Liberals Are Killing Art, Jed Perl

Artist, Ken Currie, one of the so called "New Glasgow Boys", has just exhibited his latest paintings, The Crossing at Flowers Gallery, London. These are pictures of terrible beauty. There is not much light but there is life. And one of the joys at being at a smaller gallery is there is no text on the wall. You have to look, take time to engage, think, feel and travel across, and into, the canvas. All of the paintings, tender and unbearable, are exquisitely painted, full of rich detail and a fine application of paint. Currie has turned his brush to create a world that is hard, unforgiving, absurd, fascinating, ambiguous and unsettling. Having stood before them once, I went back for a second looking and wrote this:

The Crossing

I return to Ken’s tenebrous turning
of paint to relentless gloom
where white hope is dead, haunting
the basement with its filleted light

stiff legs and arms lift from boat’s stillness
in prayer or naked despair, watched over
by stern executioners, eyes resting above
penitent dresses, suits stitched with night’s thread

I tread through his world, keen dread
presses my gaze into the blackness
a murk made in mans’ mastery
where I must look but never live

Ghost cod, Ken Currie, 2023

Ghost cod, an almost two and a half meter high canvas, illuminated the basement, its glow, pulling your eyes towards it. This butterflied cod is luminous. You know and don't know what it is a painting of. The lines and light of its caudal fin are intricately rendered. Currie’s use of white captures the solidity and fragility of its flesh, dense patches of colour against lighter strokes and featherings of white fluttering into the darkness. Yet, even what first appears to be a mass of greyish black is dusted and scraped to reveal a pulsing lightness. It is fish, angel, light, it is plummeting and hovering, it trembles and stands solid. It is a wonderful painting without meaning. Unless, of course, it finds its way on to the slab in the Huberman Lab. Then you'll know it's a manic depressive angel trying to escape heaven disguised as a fish.

Some people yearn for explanation, I want to hold on to wonder. But, what reason could I give...

I do not claim ownership or rights to any images posted unless stated. If you hold rights to an image that I have used and wish me to change credit ordelete
the image, please contact me and I will do so immediately.

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Weeping in the temple of delight

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