20 June 2024 Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year

 

 

My dear Elise and Fabien

 

It is gone 1am and I ought to be asleep. Tomorrow morning, Friday, John, my husband and I go to a singing group and I’ll be tired if I don’t get to bed and to sleep soon. However, as I was turning over in bed I was composing sentences to say to you both and so I thought the best thing would be to get up and write them down, then, once written, I’ll be able to get off to sleep. At least that’s what I hope.

 

Before I got to that point of deciding to get up and write to you I was composing ideas for the rug piece to go on the wooden platform on the ground floor of the Byre, the space next to the big rock or ‘anvil stone’ that was dug up when they were excavating the ground for the foundations of the new Byre building. I’ve not fully resolved that piece yet in my mind, but I know that I will. For a time now I’ve had it as a carpet, the same size as the top of the platform, with ‘C’est ça’ written on it, which is what Annie Ernaux says she thinks when she’s written something just as it needs to be (in ‘Le Vrai Lieu’), when she knows she’s got it right. This afternoon in my studio I began some tests on some carpet. I filled a wine glass with wine and then deliberately knocked it over, with a gesture of my hand, as if I were in conversation and gesticulating and forgot myself and knocked the glass over. It made a pleasing spill shape on the carpet and I was quite pleased with it. It felt transgressive to knock over a glass of wine deliberately. (Don’t worry, it was very cheap wine, Sainsbury’s Not Finest, £3.49 a bottle)

 

Then I made another addition to the carpet by unscrewing the top of a pot of red nail varnish and quickly pouring it back and forth across the carpet as if I were decorating a cake with icing in a Jackson Pollock style, trying to achieve a kind of randomness, which is always difficult. The red nail varnish looked good, a convincing scarlet, on the carpet, which is a light grey, just what they gave me in the shop to experiment on. Then I had been thinking of having the red drizzled all around the letters of ‘C’est ça’ so I was looking around for some shapes I could use as a kind of stencil to spill the red nail varnish across so that when I removed the shapes there would be just carpet with the red all around the outline. Amongst the heaps of stuff, tools and god-knows-what that is currently scattered all over my long table in my studio my eyes fell on two bags of unconsecrated hosts from the Catholic mass, one bag of small-sized ones and another of a larger size. I bought these at least fifteen years ago from an online Catholic supplies company. So I used them! It’s so strange, how often actions seem to take place by chance but then there is a kind of logic to them. The hosts laid on the carpet ‘pinned down’ by wavy lines of red nail varnish next to a spill of red wine seemed like the leftovers after some kind of teenage-party-cum-Catholic-rite-of-passage-ceremony, which all seems very appropriate.

 

Actually, thinking about that now it feels as if the tests themselves could become the work, as I initially conceived of it as a messy spillage, brought to mind by the spot of red blood evident in the otherwise clean bowl of every single one of the ladies’ toilets in the Byre Theatre, that morning of the whole day I spent there in late April. The day I met you both. Also, on my way to the theatre that morning I had walked along South Street and stopped to call in on an oriental carpet shop because they had one very like my family heirloom Persian rug in the window. I had a nice long chat with the owner of the shop and we discussed the recurring motif in the rug he had in his window and on mine and I had showed him photos of my rug on my phone. The particular recurring motif they both shared was the ‘gol’ or ‘gul’, from the Persian for ‘flower’ or ‘rose’:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(source of image: https://persianrugvillage.com/the-language-of-motifs/  accessed 20/6/2024)

 

An aside: as I was coming down the stairs to write this to you both, I had the thought that I could write to you in English but pretend that I was writing in French. I could say to you something along the lines of  “isn’t it marvellous how my French has improved since I wrote that piece for you in French recently about my humiliation at aged sixteen by the mean Belgian man. He derided my youthful French and gave me a complex ever since, which I have spent a lifetime trying to shake off. But now, since writing about that incident, my French has shaken off all its fetters and is so relaxed and easy that it just feels to me like writing in English. That I could pretend that this writing here, now, is French, not English at all.

 

Would you buy that, I wonder?

 

Before I switched off my light to go to sleep, before I tossed and turned and then decided to get up and write to you, I had been reading ‘Anna Karenina’. I’ve only just started to read it and it’s the first time in my life that I’m reading it. I don’t know why but I feel slightly ashamed of that fact. Ernaux mentions Anna ‘Karenina’ more than once in her work as being significant to her, particularly in forming her fascination with Russian culture. I’ve read – and studied – some of the other major novels of ‘female experience’ by male authors: Madame Bovary, naturally, Effi Briest by Fontane. I bought this edition of Anna Karenina in a charity shop last month for a couple of quid. It’s a really nice hardback edition from 1977, pleasingly heavy in weight, still with an intact dust jacket, published by Heinemann and on the back cover there are some photographs of a BBC TV production of  ‘Anna Karenina’ starring Nicola Pagett. I was thinking about them, as actors playing characters from a fiction created by Tolstoy. And I was thinking about acting, about fiction and about pretending in general and then I started thinking about all those activities in relation to Catholicism and confession and the messages I picked up as a child about not lying, as if that were a sin in itself. Actually – I’ve just googled what the cardinal sins are and lying is not one of them. The comedian Paul Merton, whose humour I love, once said when I saw him on stage, that being raised Catholic had been quite an obstacle to him when he started in drama because he’d confused making stuff up with lying after an angry nun had told him off for spinning some kind of fiction to her when he was very little. And so of course, I got thinking about Ernaux and her ‘truth’ and the need to get to the truth in relation to memory and experience. And her Catholic, though seemingly not particularly religious upbringing.

 

So, yes, anyway, I’m still writing in French. It’s good isn’t it, how fluent I have become. It’s as if there is no difference to me between English and French. I have just morphed as easily as breathing into this completely natural French speaker (in my dreams . . . ). But, importantly, I have also been noting that since the piece about my ‘Verdruß’*, I have been writing to you less, which has also been partly on account of being so busy with the practicalities of making the work for the exhibition. And I don’t want to restrict what was previously a very free-flowing line of communication with you both.

*  a German word from Goethe’s youthful novel ‘Die Leiden Des Jungen Werther’, The Sorrows of Young Werther, denoting the humiliation the young eponymous hero suffers at court.

So maybe pretending that I’m writing in French, while actually writing in English gives me a way to write everything I want to say to you both in an unfettered and less guilty way than if I just speak and write English all the time?

 

That was all an aside. The point about calling in on the rug shop on my way to the Byre is to bring in some of the reds from the carpets I saw there and see in my own ‘gul’ patterned rug, in combination with the spots of blood, into the carpet piece to go on the wooden platform.

 

The significance of the ‘Persian’ rug being that it forms a link to my Father’s side of the family, his Father’s, my Grandfather’s Armenian heritage and a host of stories I don’t have access to, which have got lost and are now untold.

 

Uncovering. Perhaps that’s a key word for this project, this wonder-full, fascinating, all-involving investigation about Ernaux, sculpture, languages, cultures, writing, connections, relationships, global histories, diaspora, images, palimpsests, materials. Everything.

 

And the new idea for the carpet piece, I’ll just briefly try to write about that here before I head upstairs and try to get back to sleep so that I’m not nodding off too often in our singing group in the morning. It is images of objects from the first image I started to work with, which I found back in December or January in the online archive of the Byre Theatre. It’s a faded photograph of what looks like a storeroom or props room. “Memory is a lunatic props mistress” one of my favourite quotes from Ernaux from ‘A Girl’s Story’ (just tried to look up the French in ‘Mémoire de Fille’ but don’t think I’ve even got a copy of this in French, must rectify.) Some of the key objects in the image are cut out, printed onto flat, inflexible card or thin plywood, over the top of a soft pocket, like a sock or equivalent, sitting on top of the carpet on the platform, which is now a black carpet, for the darkness, I presume, out of which ideas, memories, experiences emerge as they are recalled. Each is weighted down with a small cobble or rock, contained inside the pocket so that the images of the partial or indistinct objects do not all lie flat on the same picture plane but are at slightly different angles to it and will reflect the light coming through the treads of the staircase differently. I’m thinking, the carpet could be an enlarged ‘gul’, the same reds as my own carpet. A rose or flower through which the objects emerge, like their neighbour, the anvil stone. I can see this piece now, so clearly. It is asserting itself. It’s better, more mysterious, thus more evocative and allowing for more imaginative interplay with the viewer’s mind than the simple statement ‘C’est ça’, which becomes, of course, its title.

 

I hope you don’t find this rather long and in-depth ‘going-into’ of some of the processes of how ideas for a piece are developed too indulgent and that instead you enjoy reading them. Writing this gives me a way to let you into this fertile and intense making period, to share it with you, allowing me to let those mental conversations with you, which I’ve been having for a few weeks now, be actual conversations, conveyed albeit with a delay but shared nonetheless.

 

 

Finish 02:35am Friday 21 June

 

 

 

 

Mon français se trouve – si je peux emprunter une analogie à Ernaux – sous un rocher au fond d’une rivière. Je vous raconterai une histoire triste qui finit bien. J’ai choisi de vous révéler, vous Elise et Fabien, ce qui s’est passé, parce que vous êtes les facilitateurs de notre projet qui m’a offert l’occasion de pouvoir réunir en ce moment de ma vie mes deux grandes joies, les langues et l’art. J’espère, en relatant ce qui s’est passé, d’être libérée de ses conséquences et renait comme une personne qui peut parler français avec plaisir et plus d’assurance.

 

Quand j’avais seize ans mon école m’avait recommandée aux autorités locales pour un prix en allemand parce que j’avais fait de bons progrès en ce sujet. Le prix consistait en une somme d’argent pour passer un mois entier pendant les grandes vacances en Allemagne pour suivre un cours d’allemand. C’était une bonne opportunité et je jouissais du sentiment d’avoir achevé un peu de reconnaissance pour mes efforts. Ce serait la première fois que je voyagerai seule à l’étranger et c’était pour moi une grande aventure.

 

Munich. Le commencement du cours. Après un matin d’introductions, nous élèves se rassemblent dans McDonalds au rez-de-chaussée du bâtiment où se trouvent l’école de langue. L’atmosphère est maintenant plus informelle que pendant la classe et nous partageons entre nous des informations sur nos vies.

 

Il y a un étudiant qui vient de Belgique. Il est un peu plus âgé que les autres participants et s’appelle Antoine. Il parle français avec les autres du groupe. Enthousiaste pour pratiquer mon français ainsi que mon allemand je l’adresse en français et lui raconte un peu de ma vie et les circonstances de mon logement pendant mon séjour en Munich.

 

Quand je finis de parler il me regarde d’un air qui m’est peu connu. Il rejette la tête en arrière et rit d’une façon moqueuse: « Mais Suzanne, votre français est horrible! »

 

Le rocher descend sur moi et m’écrase. Depuis ce moment-là, il y a quarante-quatre ans, mon français a souffert sous son poids. J’ai fait ce que devais faire pour obtenir mon diplôme mais je n’ai jamais retrouvé la jouissance en français que je possédais avant cet entretien avec cet Antoine.

 

Jusqu’aujourd’hui. Avec votre amitié et encouragement, avec le démontage méticuleux de la honte dans les œuvres d’Ernaux, avec les possibilités que m’offert ma propre créativité, la pierre lourde sur ma langue se dissout comme un bonbon amer.

 

Peut-être que je puisse rentrer dans le monde des parleurs de votre langue si belle et si miraculeuse . . .

 

 

Merci beaucoup Elise et Fabien !