Tag: The Art of Looking Back

“I’ve written this somewhere before” (Nazim Hikmet)

theresakishkan2 Comments

bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Geredé
                                        when I was eighteen
apart from my life I didn’t have anything in the wagon they could take
and at eighteen our lives are what we value least
I’ve written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I’m going to the shadow play

I’ve written this somewhere before. I’ve written everything (it seems) before. What I love, and loved: the scent of rain when you wake in the night after a hot day and the edges of the linen curtains are damp where they’ve pressed against the screen (maybe they like the rain too); the first long beans picked from the vines you planted in spring; the skimming flight of the kingfisher yesterday morning as you walked down to the lake for your swim; a glass of cool wine in late afternoon; folding sheets you’ve brought in from the clothesline, stiff with sunlight; the lizard who has found a way into your greenhouse and who basks in the dry corner where you’ve laid some beach rocks over sand; the new arugula; the sound and then the sight of a male western tanager landing on a bare branch of dead cedar by the big rhododendron where the robins nested; a bowl of fresh raspberries, warm from the garden; the opening aria of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the 1955 recording (the year of my birth) so quick, a young man’s interpretation, and the later 1981 recording contemplative, yearning.

I’ve written this somewhere before, how much I love Nazim Hikmet’s poem, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”, a compendium of beauty and loss, actual and anticipated.

and here I’ve loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can’t wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you’ll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow

I’ve written about bread before but how can you not celebrate each loaf as it comes from the oven after its long rise, its time in the hot pan?

Or the perfect galette, made with several of those peaches and beautiful blueberries? You stop to admire it on the counter, wishing you could paint. Give it words of praise, then. Sing of its shape, how the fruit glistens, the casual pleats of the pastry.

I’ve written about summers before, the railings draped with towels damp from the lake, bees in the oregano, the astonishing stars. But why not say it again?

I just remembered the stars
I love them too
whether I’m floored watching them from below
or whether I’m flying at their side

This is a summer when I feel my life’s accumulated years as a harvest, unexpected riches. Maybe it’s because I’ve just published a book about a time when I didn’t value myself enough, when I thought pain was just something to get used to, when I didn’t imagine I’d see 25, never mind 71. At eighteen our lives are what we value least, he wrote, and I want to go back, brush the hair from the cheek of that sleeping girl, tell her, You will cut sweetpeas from vines you planted in the shade of the grapes. You will eat a piece of warm bread spread with butter. You will listen to Bach, quick-tempo, slow, and you will carry buckets of water to the tomatoes, gladly, gladly.

I didn’t know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
   heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop
   and takes off for uncharted countries I didn’t know I loved
   rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting
   by the window on the Prague-Berlin train

I was on that train once, in a sleeping compartment, tucked under a white sheet, and when the train stopped at stations in the darkness, I woke briefly to push aside the little shutter on my window, glad to be alive.

Note: the lines are Nazim Hikmet’s, from his poem “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk.

“What do you know about that time, I ask.”

theresakishkan4 Comments

After what feels like an obligatory delay in arrival (note left by courier on neighbour’s locked gate, several phone calls to clarify our location, courier promising to come the next day but missing the ferry, and finally coming up our driveway last evening as we were eating dinner), anyway, after that small drama, my copies of my new book arrived! The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. I love everything about it: the size, sort of hand-sized and discrete; the cover (hardback, printed on a canvas-y material to replicate a painting); the endpaper; the beautiful page layouts; and, in truth, the actual story it tells, one I took nearly half a century to meet on its own terms, to parse. If you visit the book’s page on this site, you can read recent reviews, news of events, and so on.

If you live on the Sechelt Peninsula, you can help me celebrate its publication on May 29, the actual publication date (though books will be finding their way into bookstores and libraries over the next few weeks), at the Sechelt Library from 1-2:30. I’ll be bringing cake! The wonderful Talewind Books will have copies available for sale and John printed letterpress keepsakes to tuck into them, though quantities are limited, due to the nature of letterpress printing. I will happily mail copies to those of you who buy copies in your own communities too. Just let me know.

This was a difficult book to write but I’m glad I met the gaze of the painting in the stairwell of our home, the portrait of me at 23, and I’m glad she and I made our peace with each other. It’s become part of my life’s archive — the painting itself, my feelings about it, changing as I changed over the years, and what it meant to reread the huge stack of letters from the artist who painted it. Who painted me, clothed and unclothed, who made me the centre of a story I was reluctant to occupy. And now the book is here, with its conversations and meditations and, oh, all the feelings.

She looks at me, fixed for eternity by the gaze of a male painter. Or actually, she looks beyond me. But she knows I’m standing near the bottom of the stairs, hoping for a sign. What do you know about that time, I ask. What should I have done differently? You opened the envelope, she reminds me. You took those courses in Greek mythology. You knew what a pithos was. It was a jar, I remind her, not an envelope. Let’s not quibble about etymology, she murmurs.

…the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds. But the rest, countless plagues, wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils and the sea is full.1

There were nights I walked from my apartment on Fort Street through the dark streets to the sea. What did I want, what did I hope for? That somehow everything would be as it was before I entered the gallery and saw myself, a version of myself, on a wall, wearing a hat. Was it red or was it green, and why don’t I remember? I—you—were wearing a hat. From that moment, I became the object of an older man’s gaze, in which he took me in, every part of my body, and put it on canvas with paints thinned with turpentine. A jar emptied of everything but hope. What did I hope for? (Can you remember?) His brushes were exquisite. (Sometimes you imagined them stroking your actual skin, not what emerged from tubes of pigment—mostly red and yellow, a little blue, softened with white; but sometimes the skin was olive, sometimes lit as though from within, soft butter yellow and pink.)

1 Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica.