Sunday morning. Gospel radio playing. On board the yacht No Regrets at Port Annapolis Marina. Beautiful morning. SunLight streaming through the windows, crisp and chilly outside. Dreams last night were restless, falling through scenes of destruction, loss, movement, restoration and contact. As is usual for me at these critical points of movement, heading for NYC tomorrow, unsure of the future, a pillow for me head. Speaking with Greg last night at a noisy restaurant in Annapolis. I hadn’t seen him in many years. We spoke of the Apocalypse and the theology of living and the mysteries of the progression of being. Surrounded by noisy midshipmen from the Naval Academy celebrating a football victory that afternoon.
sleeping with fame
Spent most of the day out in Oxford first to meet with the Master of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Stephen Farthing, and after a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, we had a few rounds with Brian Catling and Kate Davis. I was meeting with Stephen to find out more about an interesting position opening at Ruskin — as part-time Tutor of Fine Art with a specialization in IT (Information Technology) and Electronic Media. As I am under-employed except for occasional visiting artist gigs, I have some responsibility to job-hunt where-ever I go, right? Brian is a well-known writer (see March 26 entry with a short quote from a book of writings of his…), performance artist, teacher, and Head of the Sculpture at Ruskin. Kate is a Tutor in the Sculpture Department. We had an enjoyable tête-a-tête for a few hours before Joanna decided we had better get on the road heading north for her parents place. Good thing, as traffic was already getting to its usual crawl-state on the M1 — the rats of London streaming outwards for the week end. The car decided to begin coming apart, something we had to deal with immediately. At that very moment it begins to sleet, making the subsequent traffic even more dense. (We never did get to the Pitt-Rivers Museum — it was closed. But we did make plans to get together with Kate and Brian again on my way back through the UK in late May.) After a long drive we finally arrived in the town of Disley, Stockport, in northern England near Manchester now, where Joanna’s parent’s (Jim and Margaret) live. That evening, while I stayed home hacking, everyone went out to see Geraldine McEwan in her renowned performance as “Jane Austin”. It turns out Geraldine had earlier in the day napped in the same bed I slept in, and the sheets hadn’t even been changed! How’s that for a brush with British FAME? And I can’t tell you the DREAMS that I had that night.
Anyway, looks like I won’t be uploading this until the First of April at the earliest. So I stop for now, with burnt bread pudding on the sideboard and Albinoni playing in the next room.
Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle. Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become. — Michael Ondaatje