Time Passing

I am back to work now - had a day off yesterday - a wedding anniversary which only rarely co-incides with Good Friday...
and I suppose I should report on how one celebrates when you can't go out to dinner ( or anywhere else) - enough to say I transformed the studio/kitchen/dining room with posters of enlarged alchemical engravings, which I originally made to decorate the 17thc Grange in Lewes for our wedding party, once home of John Evelyn, latterly the Registry Office,
and Alexanders from the garden, weeds my neighbours despise but are the essence of Green Spring (edible too if desperate - wild celery but a bit tougher)....
being surrounded by green lions devouring suns and hermaphrodite figures, flickering in the (red) candlelight was magical...

I felt a bit uncomfortable about mentioning my decomposing beasties in the last post, but like anniversaries they are all about time passing, and beautiful and poignant. My bluetit in his plastic box is my own Sleeping Beauty, proving birds aren't really made substance at all as one always suspects...I think he froze to death one cold winter...

the dessicated mouse, more a creature of earth, is still so comfortingly mouselike in its decay; and the crow on my desk a very comforting and inspiring companion, all beaky-eyed crowness, mercurial messenger, keeping me on my toes....tempus fugit.....

When writing Voyaging Out I really identified with the artist Elsi Eldridge, wife of poet RS Thomas;  her house was full of bones and decomposing animals she hung up to dry. She remarked of her dead father in his coffin 'Everyone looks rather lovely when they are dead ...I hope that even I might make a lovely skeleton'. She called one of the panels in her extraordinary mural The Dance of Life - The Beauty of Natural Decay.

Decomposition is metamorphosis, growth of a kind, and watching it gives an edge to living, in the sort of way described in Dollomore's book ( see back) a sense of vastness, immensity, proportion, infinity.... and it is also often very beautiful. It is the subject of Alchemy too of course - putrefaction, sublimation, lots of black crows - all in such glorious metaphysical images....

Further volume for Covid ( not Corvid) Library - Lincoln in the Bardo - a good graveyard read (tho we are supposed to be exercising), funny and poignant in all the right ways.....
I have just finished Silbury Hill by Adam Thorpe, a non fiction Little Toller book, a lovely meditation on the hill and his life around it...I have worked a lot with archaeologists at certain points in my life - sharing a love of decomposition with those licensed to enjoy it...