-> continued from above
I remember how, in the first weeks after he died (my mother, brother, sister-in-law and I were with him) I could not recall his life-face. It was overlaid by the face the dead share: gaunt, concentrated, unknowable; almost impersonal, while still being his. During a meditation class the face I knew came back to me, to my great relief. And now his young face, also unknowable to me, has emerged from the shadows. We were never further apart and yet, here and now, I feel great tenderness for his unfledged self. Maybe this is where instances of joy (and a form of healing?) come forth – just between me and him, daughter and father, in a deeper, more compassionate connection. It’s a source of sadness that this can only happen now. And while I write these words something whispers in my ear: compassion – how dare you, when … and my eyes burn and his dear face disappears again in a sea of images, of crowds raising right arms as one and faces lit by elated smiles as Hitler passes in an open car, of mass graves and mounds of shoes, men’s, women’s, children’s, and I know I can’t save him, nor myself, for more than an instant.
A while ago a friend, who was due to give birth as her sister lay dying, wrote to me about Rilke‘s double kingdom. Rilke considers Orpheus, poet and musician, who enters the underworld to find and bring back Eurydice, his wife (he fails). It occurs to me that I occasionally inhabit that double realm when I investigate the photos of my father as a 17year-old Wehrmacht-soldier. Rilke’s words bring me intuitions of art as a restorative and stimulating medium. I think in a strange way, through this haunting, hopeless, often hapless and unhappy exploration, my voice is slowly coming into its own. And so I take the liberty of adding to Rilke’s words a woman’s
Only the man who has raised his strings / she who has spun her threads
among the dark ghosts also
can sense it and give
the everlasting praise.
Only she who has eaten poppy
with the dead, from their poppy,
will never lose even
her most delicate sound.
Even though images in the pool
seem so blurry:
grasp the main thing.
Only in the double kingdom, there
alone, do voices become
undying and tender.
(From Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Robert Bly. All she’s are mine)
Three simple pieces (work in process):
1. I held against lamplight a photo of my dad in PoW-uniform and one of myself at approx. six years of age. Strangely I recognise the face resulting from the overlay as mine, today (minus wrinkles), whereas the photo of my child-self seems almost alien to me.
2. Collage from photo of my dad in RAD (Reichs Labour Service) uniform and a shape cut from a page in an embroidery journal.
3. Cursed calyx, 2014, crocheted from a silk/wool yarn, dimensions: 19 x 20.5cm
I’ve started to put it through the wash with other clothes, want to get a ‘real’ hand-me-down feel. Questions again around pathos and authenticity…
