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(continuation)

…our boat didn’t sink, Ingrid, for he wasn’t called Titanic, and when you ranover the shivering gangboard you sneered towards the captain, named Stavros, “you don’t even know how to decently sink this old tub”, and Stavros grinned his row of white non-feta teeth and spit in the water.

About your driving, darling, i remember 3 things: one you were the lousiest driver i’d ever meet in my life, two you knew this, three you didn’t give a damn. And four: when you claimed the steering wheel the despair in your eyes was thus overwhelming that i, fool, could only nod, hand over the keys and put my life on the line.

-You came here on a motorbike?
-With my daughter for four days. Yesterday we drove to see the temple of Poseidon.
-At Sounion?
-You’ve seen it? You have been there?
(‘To the Wedding’, 1995, by John Berger)

... so you were lying in a Greek bed, Ingrid - on Hydra, Leonard-Cohen-island in the Aegean. And at night i quoted Eliot to you while you were half asleep, drunk, and those masts in the fishing port werd chinking, and the low Aegean sky weeping, weeping...

And the next day we were having breakfast in the early afternoon sun, and you started humming that song-

“Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free”

Leonard Cohen indeed. I reach out, my index on your left mouth corner, wiping away the feta, and you try to bite my index and then you smile the whitest feta smile i would ever see in my life. And with your tongue you try to get it off your cheeks but your tongue isn’t long enough so i finish the job and this time you don’t bite. You behave, for once. Then we kiss the longest pre-covid-19 feta kiss ever and i start loving you a bit. A little bit. Let’s say 0 point 5 percent. “I love you for the full 2 percent,” you answer.

Where was i? Yes, Leonard Cohen. Hydra. And you, Ingrid.

So that boat finally moored, it was almost night and it was raining over Hydra’s fishing port, and you had to pee, remember, and someone offered us a room under the roof and we kissed and in the dead of night you suddenly were upon me, dancing me to the end of love. And those masts outside chinking, and the low Aegean sky weeping, weeping, weeping. And then you fell asleep again.

But i couldn’t sleep, honey. The moon caught a glimpse of your face and so did i and i saw it was good and i lied awake for an hour or so and you were snoring. The rain beating the window panes.

I bumped upon this painting by Ben Smith: Leonard Cohen pouring that kid in his lap - Nick Cave - a glass of red. Life and death. Cave lives. Cohen died. Cave’s son died. Marianne died too.

I’m holding an old Cohen songbook, 1969. Scores and pictures. And quotes. “When I see a woman transformed by the orgasm we reached, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction. That’s the vocabulary we speak in today. It’s the only language left.”

Oft do I this strange and penetrating dream:
An unknown, whom I , who loves me well,
Who does not every  quite , nor yet quite dwell
The same, - and loves me well, and knows me as I am.

For she knows me! My , clear as a crystal beam
To her alone, ceases to be inscrutable
To her alone, and she alone knows to dispel
My grief, cooling my brow with her tears' gentle stream.

"It is the evening of the day
I sit and watch the children play
Smiling faces I can see
But not for me
I sit and watch as tears go by"

What a strange, wild, scary, exciting, challenging world we live in. Postpostpostmodernism, it keeps on surprising me. Maybe it’s me who’s the nuthead (i’ll be the first to admit) – but let me tell you what almost blew my socks off yesterday.

It’s about China. I mean- what a strange, mysterious country this is. And what a big jump they’ve made, they too, the last couple of hundred years.

Have a look at these analogue photographs... I was so lucky to find them, a couple of months ago, on a vintage market. 7 in total, actually. Last week i framed them, and… well, i think they’re fascinating.

Hi, i’m Jim. And this is…Well, i’ll let you guess. No idea? Really? It’s my wife Jody. She looks pretty, doesn’t she? And young.

I was too. 1956 it was, i had survived my first plane crash. At Jody’s left that’s the old Chevy, btw. Got a golden War Hero medal in 55 - sold it and bought the Chevy with it. You can’t drive a medal, can you? Well then. Man, did i like that car.

I like birds too: swallows, coal tits, pelicans: you name it and, as long as it flies, i like them. I even like pigeons, can you imagine? Nobody likes pigeons, but i do. Just because they fly. It’s crazy, i know. But that’s how it is: i simply cannot dislike anything that is flying by. One summer evening, at dusk, i started crying when a bat was passing. Just a bat, nothing more. Black claws, black wings, ugly face. Started crying. Just because it was able to fly. And i wasn’t. When i was a kid my role model was Batman. Or Robin. Difficult choice. Both could fly. Right, Batman drove the Batmobile. Sorry, Robin.

When you’re a genius, you need to be strong to be happy. Of course i’m not talking about myself; hey – even when, in a couple of years from now, these Stockholm guys finally put me on that Nobel Prize shortlist, i’ll stay completely modest. No, i’m talking about people like Murakami. Or Prince.

“The essence of fiction is solitary work: the work of writing, the work of reading,” Jonathan Franzen wrote in 2002 in his essay Why Bother?. Can’t agree more. Although please add ‘painting’ too.
     Reading, like writing, is creating, says Franzen. That’s what distinguishes it, for example, from going to a movie. Jonathan Franzen: “I’m able to know Sophie Bentwood (the main character in Paula Fox’s novel Desperate Characters) intimately, and to refer to her as casually as I would to a good friend, because I poured my own feelings of fear and estrangement into my construction of her (my italics).” ‘My construction’, while reading. So, basically, reading is indeed a creative act. If Franzen would have only known her by the on screen version, in 1971 with Shirley MacLaine as Sophie, “Sophie would remain an Other, divided from me by the screen, by the superficiality of film, and by MacLaine’s star presence. At most, I might feel I knew MacLaine a little better.” (Knowing MacLaine a little better, however, is what the country mainly wants, Franzen adds.)

I think coincidence – some might prefer to call it ‘fate’ - is strongly underrated. When i look back into my own past, i find at least four occasions which could have ended tragically if not fatally. When i was 6 we visited the Han grottoes, on a school trip. Coming out of the grotto a huge piece of rock, some 50 kilos, came down, missing me by an inch or two. Nobody had even seen it. A schoolteacher turned around, shouting, “Hurry up now boy, or you’ll miss the bus.” I’d almost missed my life.

Sixteen years later we had been painting the walls all day in the youth club i ran. It was almost night, we were exhausted, we were going to have a last drink in the pub some hundred meters down the street. For one reason or another i had to shut down the electricity. My friends were already waiting outside, the lights were out. My hands were wet, i had washed them. In the dark, i was stupid enough to go into the electricity closet. It was an old style handle. I grabbed it. It shot up my shoulder. When i came out of the door, someone asked where i’d been so long. “I’ve had a near death experience” wasn’t exactly the answer they’d expected.

Fate. Another 10 years later i run out of my office to go and have a sandwich. I’m in a dreamy mood (that’s no news: i often am when walking the streets. Actually, strike out ‘walking the streets’). I hear a loud TING TING TING.

If you’ve never seen these words in all of your life, you’ve never been to hell. Good boy. Or girl. But hey - what hasn’t been is yet to come. So, as a matter of preparation, you might be curious to know about how things evolve down there.

Fortunately, we’ve got Dante. He’s been there and wrote a book about it: La Divina Commedia. Been there - well… passing through, that is, on his way to his beloved Beatrice, who was waiting for him in Heaven. And as the way to heaven, at least in those old days, happened to be leading through hell he didn’t have much of a choice. Yes: true love conquers all, but - he was in fine company: as you can see in the marvelous accompanying painting (1850) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (pic 1), Virgil, the Roman poet, was guiding him.

When i had a look at Sarah Stefanutti’s pictures of her grandma (see preceding text), i thought instantly of Jacqui Kenny. She’s the woman behind the Instagram account ‘Streetview Portraits’. She’s highly agoraphobic too. She’s afraid to go out, so she travels without leaving her front door: she travels via Google Streetview.

What i like about her Streetview Portraits is that, through the eyes of Jacqui, functional images that were taken by the passing Google car become art. Look at her sense of composition, colour, her empathy filtering through.