ellen bell

'Everything hurts'.

She couldn't get comfortable. Her face contracted with the pain of something, everything as she shifted her tiny frame to and fro in her bed. A carer came in talking too loud, too cheerfully. She drew the sheet back and I saw her shrunken form, winceyette nightie rucked to reveal thighs, calves emptied of fat, of flesh, just bones. Just bones: straight, angular, without. Without the soft, curving of womanness, of sexuality, of vitality, of life. She was falling into the mattress, lost, being lost in its too bigness.

'I'm wetting myself.'

The carer returned bringing two paracetamols and a plastic beaker of diluted cranberry juice. She succumbed to it all as a child.

'I'll throw these two out soon and then we'll give you a shower in the chair and clean your bottom. That'll be nice won't it?'

A kind woman but too loud. I understand. A coping mechanism against so much dying, so much muteness, so much sleeping in those warm, airless rooms. The carers are good women. They bang and clatter, fighting the silence that threatens to descend even with the shouting TV in each and every room. They talk as if to children with words like 'bottom', that land clumsily, awkwardly in our presence. And she acquieses, too tired to demand a privacy, a dignity that was her right when she was strong, independent and herself.

Her eyes go their different ways. One is still sharp. It watches me and smiles. The other is lost, it falls to the side, sorrowing.

Last night there was a call. She had thrown a tantrum and then fainted. Anger, defiance sparks up - she is not herself. What is herself? That tiny-ness, those eyes, those hands, that pain.

'She has never been stoic'. He tells me. No, perhaps, not. Are any of us? This is endurance. Each breath felt. Will it all stop soon? Will this particular life stop soon? An ordinary life in so many ways. And yet, the family stories are too large to contain. So much love.

What can I say? Ease her pain.

Being waxed - unwanted hair removed. Strip, strap - wince, contract.

'Everyone has a different pain threshold, we have to be sensitive to that.' The beautician retorted, a little too brightly, to my pass-the-time-of-day questions. A round, curvy girl, thighs rubbing noisily against each other. So full of expectancy.

We walked out of the strip light, too yellow, cheerfulness of the home into the late afternoon dark. Tears came more quietly this time.

Life, I suppose.

(image courtesy of www.guardian.co.uk)

The forest has gone. I now have the sea. I walk the whole length of the prom each morning at 7am. I kick the bar, three times for luck. The rain was unrelentant this morning. My impossibly expensive artic coat was not waterproof. It hangs in my hotel room smelling like a wet dog. I am back. Not home but safe. Safe, and yet not knowing what is next. What is coming? If I stop moving, planning, shifting will something come anyway?

I visit my dear friend's mother in the old people's home. She is a tiny bird, eyes darting cautious, sharp, uncertain, guarded. Her hands worry away at the custard yellow blanket. We bring little cellophane-packed victoria sponge cakes, green seedless grapes, marie biscuits, photographs of the Mumbles, anything to spark a momentary delight, an appetite, a memory. Her hands are skinless, deep red, blue with veins. Her legs are a shock, the muscles atrophied, wasted, they are sticks. The TV is a constant mumbling noise, snooker, Emmerdale, Coronation Street, Deal or No Deal.

'His hair is a mess.'  'Those men in orange are beginning to really irritate me.' She spits out barbs at the screen and then laughs, tittering to herself, her little frame shaking with the sudden joy of being able to be as rude as she pleases.

I draw her: sunken into a chair, hands darting out to grasp at a grape, a cake, a tissue. Crumbs scatter down the front of dark blue dressing grown, tumbling down her chest, bosomless and hollow.

He holds himself together, cosseting her, plumping cushions, prompting songs, voice a little shrill, too cheerful.

We leave the little room, pink and echo-ey, too warm.

He weeps later, in the car, a clumsy low howling.

A dying in the rain.

(image courtesy of www.flickr.com)

I spent the day going from cafe to cafe. I sat and watched mothers and babies, friends chatting, old men reading papers, lovers with lap dogs. I sketched the old men, wrote of my sadness and day dreamed of other people's lives.

Here I am nursing my melancholy with milky coffee in a cafe in Oslo and at just the same moment my dear, dear friend in Wales is anticipating the death of his mother with a hollowing despair, while other friends in a little village just outside Bath are feeling something like real joy with the advent of their marriage next month and my sister in Surrey is glowing with love as she feeds her new baby boy. Life in all its potency. The difference a day makes. There is no room for complacency. Life will take over.

'Live' she said to me last night. 'Live'. I wish I knew what she meant.

I was to meet my great aunt for lunch today and decided to take an early bus into Oslo. I wanted to sit in a certain cafe in Frogner, to draw, read and think.

It was a cold morning and I drank the hot, milky coffee gratefully. The cafe was busy: the door continually opening and closing, letting in the sharp, bitter air. I had taken a small book with me - Ted Hughes' Poetry in the Making. A slim volume, written for a young audience, in which Hughes' shares his thoughts on writing poetry. He writes clearly and openly without a trace of condescension.

I have been thinking much about what it is to live a creative life. How it can be done? How one can live authentically but well? In her book Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 (Penguin, 2003) Virginia Nicholson wrote:

'Fifty years on we may judge that Dylan Thomas' poverty was noble.....but a minor artist with no money goes as hungry as a genius. What drove them to do it? I believe that such people were not only choosing art they were choosing the life of the artist. Art offered them a different way of living, one that they believed more than compensated for the loss of comfort and respectability.'

I am not completely convinced by her argument - particularly as I now approach my fiftieth year. I think most creatives would be more than happy to welcome in wealth, abundance and security as part of the deal - after all, in our society such things are measurable symbols of success and appreciation, and ones that are recognised by even the most philistinic of us to be so. Poverty is only noble in the abstract. Those discomforting pricks of shame that accompany the artistic practice that goes unrecognised and unpaid for grow more and more distinct as time moves on, those family comments about 'proper jobs', 'real world' and 'being realistic' becoming ever more strident. Financial success becomes the only thing that will hush the clamour.

My aunt was an opera singer. She gave up singing in her forties and became a doctor's secretary. She wasn't strong enough, she told me today, to stand up to her family's resistance. She was lauded for her voice by the Head of Covent Garden, and yet her father only went to see her perform once, her brothers, never. There is no bitterness. She is proud of what she achieved and retells the stories over and over again and with each retelling a flame ignites somewhere behind her eyes.

No, poverty is not noble. Nor, do I believe it is ever consciously chosen over abundance (unless part of a religious quest, I suppose). There are many stories: the science fiction writer Philip K Dick who at times didn't even have the money for the 'late fees' for a library book, or Edgar Allan Poe's wife who, at her death only had his old army coat and their cat for warmth, the artist Gwen John eking out a meagre living posing for Rodin and of course Van Gogh, infamously only selling one painting throughout his lifetime. We live vicarously through these myth-ridden creatives. There is no glory in such scrabbling.

Hughes writes about the 'nobility' of the process - though he doesn't use that word. It is all and it is nothing. Such is life. To write, to create, is to announce that one is alive, one has a voice and wishes to connect, to communicate with another. I am. I exist. I feel this, I have seen this, listen to my story. Tarry awhile with me. To Hughes it was 'vital'. To keep this 'vitality' breathing when one's time is taken up with 'a proper job' is a tough thing. Some can do it - T. S. Eliot worked as a teacher and a banker before becoming the editor at Faber and Faber, Philip Larkin worked as a librarian, whereas others, like Gaugin, who gave up his life as a tax inspector, need to throw off the outer skirts of respectability.

I don't think that there is a right or wrong answer. We are more often than not at the mercy of our histories, our own inner romances. I certainly am. Maybe it is about managing the constant see-sawing - the up and down, the flying and the clunking down (I still have such a vivid memory of the smell of metal on my palms after playing on the see-saws in Knutsford playground). Artists, I think, most want time. Time is so precious and it is that which we battle with - to give up time to something, to work, that is not using the best of us well, that is a sacrifice indeed.

The Norwegians are such a practical race. The forest has street lights and I so wanted to experience it in moonlight.

I am fearful of the dark outside. And entering the forest at night was, in the abstract, a big deal. Fears magnify in the abstract. Moving into the reality of them, more often than not, reduces their potency.

It was magical. I lingered, walked slowly, not wanting to go home. But my senses were none the less alert. Pricking. I saw something red, heard a rustle. Two people walking a dog. A mother and a child. Was it a child? I walked ahead and my heart leapt in alarm as someone suddenly ran past me. It was the child, a girl. She ran into my space, too near. Her running was chaotic, clumsy and flailing. She clearly had learning difficulties. A powerful body, singing to herself, stopping a dead stop and then jerkily running forward again, arms flapping. Her mother, or carer, trailed behind, calling to her now and again to slow down. Had she chosen this time of the day on purpose, to let her run free, unhampered by the need to behave appropriately?

Fairy-tale interpreters see forests as motifs of the wild pysche, a place in which we meet our feral selves. As we left the forest (my fellow walkers and me) the child slowed down, stopped running and began to drag her feet along the road. The large breath of freedom gone.

(Image courtesy of www.storytellersunplugged.com )

The other evening I watched a film called 'Frozen River'. It had been another random choice from Sandvika Library; for some reason the title resonated with me.

I had put off watching it, sensing a bleak story. And indeed, I wasn't mistaken, but bleak can be potent and this was. A mother of two boys is abandoned by her husband who absconds with the money she had saved for the delivery of a new mobile home. Set in Canada, this is real winter and the new house offers warmth and insulation. Poverty is real and survival a question of ingenuity and courage. Necessity forces her to begin assisting a mohawk girl smuggling illegal immigrants across the border. They drive across the frozen river.

The movie is taught with held breath, suspended judgement and memories of trying to sleep comfortless and cold. A remarkable narrative. And so little conversation. The silence of what is trapped, held, under those brittle layers of solidified wateryness.

(image courtesy of www.randalitt.wordpress.com )

I need to nurture my blood. Feed my blood. As a vegetarian this is a little of a challenge. Blood needs blood - that metallic, sticky burnt brown red substance. What shall I replace it with? A syrupy claret, warm beetroot juice, treacle, melting frozen blueberries, hand-picked blackberries, blackcurrants - all staining the lips, teeth - unsweetened cocoa chocolate. Redness, red against the skin, under skin. Coursing. Needing to flow. To allow life. To live, life.

Yesterday was a shining day.

Some days are just like that. It is a kind of opening up inside, a willingness to greet every moment with joy. Details shone: a troupe of kindergarten children stepping on to the bus kitted out like plump-bottomed ducklings in snowsuits and yellow reflector bibs (one, Matthias, sat next to me and chattered away happily the whole trip), reading over two cups of scented earl grey tea, sharing lentil soup with a friend in a retro cafe, visiting Norway Designs and buying a blood-red moleskin notebook, coffee in a corner cafe and walking home from the bus stop in the falling light.

Shining.

I walked out early this morning, into that time between the passing of night into the breaking of morning. I watched the sky grow into a clear turquoise blue. The moon was white and full. A heavy, frozen mist enveloped the valley below.

A stunning day.

The air is freezing - unmoving, held, trapped in a coldness that bites through gloves, boots and socks, finding bones under tender, vulnerable flesh. I walk through this rapt stillness. The snow is a perfect powder. I greet the neighbour with the retriever, she is ambivalent about the cold - 'It's not so bad' she replies in Norwegian. By comparison I am a 'southern softie', unused to such extremes. I greet the cold with dread, all the while knowing that it doesn't deserve such knee-jerk negativity. It is just what it is. It heralds a kind of dying and yet also a kind of preserving - it is the waiting room before spring. To have one without the other would cancel out the precious qualities of both.

I think one's perspective is indelibly linked to feeling secure, accepting of, and grounded in, oneself. If warmth is available then cold is not so dire. That needing to know that abundance is there. Watch a newborn baby. It is simple. Warmth, a full belly, blanketed sleep and love. It is simple. Babies are easy to love. Nature is clever. That floppy-headed vulnerability. That smell of sweet sweat and milkiness. If we are lucky our needs are met. A good grounding for later. All too soon the mind takes over - doing its stuff, unravelling, mixing up truth and untruth.

And yet, even in the state of being unwrapped, exposed in one's obvious failure to obey the rules, to meet the middle-class expectations of wealth, house, car, marriage, family-life - I have to admit to a tremendous capacity for joy.

It is and shall be enough.