Poetics of Death

I keep killing the lavender, although it was rampant previously. I pulled up the lavender we had as it had become so tangled and rambling, which I now regret and feel immense guilt about. I have bought several varieties and they just don’t survive the winter so I will begin again in pots until established. Meanwhile I can’t wait to draw my poor victims and their beautiful roots. I inspected their networks and found clumps of feed all hoarded and saved for later in the centre of their cocoon like root clumps. I don’t know the proper names but I will look them up. They look like spiders and stags and beetles and anything really with antlers or antennae. I am reminded of Louise Bourgeois’s scale of work, Spider and Maman, which I remember seeing when I was at Camberwell in the ‘90s and it was one of the few exhibits at that time that didn’t leave me utterly disenfranchised and disappointed by the state of art. I notice as an aside that in my previous post referred to the scene in My Octopus Teacher of the mother’s ultimate sacrifice and Maman, motherhood, birth, cycles seem to be swirling. My grief journey all began with my own mother. Serendipitously, I see Maman is being returned to the Tate Modern this very month - will add it to the list to see next week. Funny timing.

An aside, just noticing where connections and echoes occur. The echoes in form here are fascinating and I imagine these dead lavender like stag heads on a drawing room wall.

I have been musing on the idea of continuity of drawing, ongoing natural cycles and by contrast the blunt cut of storytelling - what is included and what is edited out - and of course death as the ultimate blunt cut. Or is it… The poetics of life and death seem to portray consciousness as definitive but I am not so sure, perhaps this is another example of Anthropocentric thinking. All these ramblings about natural processes, made kin and interconnectivity seem to be speaking to a continuity of much greater weight… If the story is the continuity then the blunt cunts seem to fade and wither, they seem to be much less blunt all of a sudden, soft perhaps, soft cuts: weavings, meanderings, rhythms, sequences and patterns that are edge-less and hungry.