Picture This - A F Harrold 'Just This'

During my recent spell of ill health I assembled a portfolio of images, Still Life. I invited some high calibre poets to respond to these photographs for a project called Picture This. I have been overwhelmed by the beautiful work I have received. I also worked with photographer and film-maker Craig Thomas on a short film containing a selection of these images. An empty chair has a poetry all its own. Today's poet, the highly esteemed A F Harrold, has written a touching and elegant piece that brought a tear to my eye when I first read it.

A.F. Harrold is an English poet who writes and performs for adults and children.

Just This

Autumn days seem longer when the low sun slinks,

before mists rise up and afternoon puts evening on.

There are spaces in them, crisp and airy where no bird sings,

which open simply into a long view of all that’s gone.

Picture This - Aisling Fahey 'Lock'

Since autumn of last year I have been unwell with chronic fatigue and have spent the majority of my time housebound. For someone who spent most of her days doing a hundred and one things (and now I realise a hundred too many) this has been a huge period of adjustment and not one I welcomed. As a writer and a photographer my creative expression has often given me stability in more fragile times. For the first few months of my illness I had little mental stamina and also suffered from 'brain fog'. My usual refuge of both writing and reading poetry was not available to me. I felt like I was stranded on a life raft with no sign of land. I finally had to learn to acquaint myself with stillness and silence. Previously my life had all been about movement and the constant preoccupation that I was not going fast enough. My fatigue put an emergency stop to all my frantic activity. In quieter moments I am grateful for this opportunity to stop and experience what being without doing actually feels like. Other times it is a hellish struggle and I mourn for the pleasure of being busy that, what is now, 'my old life' offered.

On better days I am able to pick up my camera and go in to the garden, or on short local walks. I have found the sublime beauty in repetition, something that I would have never encountered before. I have also began to enjoy getting really close to my subject matter, whether it be a dry twig in winther months or a brass hinge on the garden door. These forgotten details seem to say something about my current emotional and physical state. There is something very meditative about re-visiting the same subject matter and finding new ways to look at the familiar. I am learning that even when there appears to be no movement or change there is still transformation.

As the weeks passed I realised that I had created a portfolio of images on a theme. As any good hairdresser will tell you there is nothing like a good pun and so I entitled this portfolio 'Still Life'. I also worked with photographer and film-maker Craig Thomas on a short film containing a selection of these images. It was not long after I assembled the images in one place that I decided to invite some high calibre poets to respond to the images for a project called 'Picture This'.

The first poet to be featured is the inexhaustibly talented Aisling Fahey. Aisling has a way of telling the truth that breaks through the isolation of pain. I am honoured to have her take part.

Lock Perhaps you know where you are going, always have. Sceptics who call you lost don’t know that the ground is a map underneath your searching feet you will find your way.

Or perhaps this was all rushed - you left without a coat, keys in a heap on the floor, light catching dust particles through the slit in the curtain.

That is what makes me worry, that your compass is now a cross and you carry new destinations on your back like lead weight. You try to plan a route home, but the gravel gets caught underneath the heel of your shoe.

Seeking Balance

It's new year and whilst some are fortifying themselves with to do lists and exercise I feel like I'm trawling through the undergrowth. A murky place where, nightly, I'm taken back to the moment on October 7th last year when I was thrown off my bike and dragged 30 feet under a car in rush hour traffic. I feel the weight of the car's bumper and bonnet on top of me again, the blood streaming in to my right eye from the deep gash on my forehead. But mostly I feel the icy terror of not being able to move, of not knowing whether these moments trapped under the front end of a car would be my last. And then on waking more nighmarish thoughts, my skeleton crushed under the wheels of a bus, a delivery van, even a decapitation. Me in pieces scattered, limb and bone, across a morning street. Last night I gave my final statement to the City of London police. They took me to my bike, a cage in a damp underground car-park, where abandoned bicycles slowly rusted. One bright green, red and white frame was knotted in on itself as if it had been made out of wax and not an aluminum alloy. It's rider had not survived. The cop who took my statement told me that most bike fatalities are caused by lorries. He also told me that he'd only had to deal with two serious accidents last year. One of them being mine, and that he was amazed at how few injuries I had sustained.

This could explain my flashbacks, I had a strong sense of being close to death. I wonder if for 35 years I was cycling on London's potentially lethal streets in permanent denial. Perhaps I just had an exaggerated confidence in my ability to avoid accident or injury. Not everyone is as lucky as I was. I wrote the paragraphs above before the tragic death of former British boxing champion Gary Mason in a cycling accident. I signed this petition today and I'd encourage you to do the same.

As a teenager I craved a sense of freedom and independence and knew that with a bike I could get to and from anywhere at any time of day or night without having to rely on anyone else. It was the truest form of feminist transport I could find. Riding across the Thames at night I was a pioneer, never losing my love for the sense of flying it gave me, seduced by a fluid dance of girl and machine. Cycling was everything to me.

A friend has lent me a 24 speed hybrid, light as a feather with gear changes that purr and breaks as quiet as a lover's whisper. But my heart shudders at the thought of riding it. I've been on it twice, along quiet local streets, nothing like the London-wide trips I was used to taking. My heart racing like a sprinter, every docile car I see chugging it's way over speed bumps is a dangerous tank. In truth my heart is a little bit broken, it's the first fight with a lover after the honeymoon has ended.

Cycling for so many years I had forgotten the silent joy of reading a book on the top deck of a bus, or a long journey on the tube. One of my favourite novelists is an Irish writer based in New York City called Colum McCann. I'm reading his most recent novel 'Let The Great World Spin' which uses Philippe Petit's death-defying tightrope walk between the Two Towers as a central image. Without even mentioning 9/11 the book is about the tangle of life and death, the collapse of the towers and the victory of the impossible against all odds.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAMZSpHfURg&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Petit is an exceptional man, his philosophy on living summed up by his comment "Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope."

In seeking balance one has to fall. Perhaps for all those years I was flying on my bike I was living my life on a tightrope. I just did not see it was there until I tumbled from it.

Less than Perfect

I am lying in bed at 430 am and cannot sleep. My leg is still hurting after the bike accident and whatever way I turn my knee lets me know that, for now, it's running the show. My thoughts are a shuffled deck of cards - there is no order here. It's been a few weeks since I have done any proper writing. Although I realise the term 'proper' may not help me get out my pen and address my journal. I am pretty suspicious when it comes to tending to my muse. I see it as a 'she' - one who ignored will go off and find her fun elsewhere. Elizabeth Gilbert's ideas on the subject of responding to the call of creativity are interesting.

I know that if I ignore this call then it may be weeks before it comes again. I also know that if I get up before dawn, enjoy the delicious silence that my sleeping house offers, I will experience a freedom and flight hard to find elsewhere. When I was lying in bed thinking about what I was going to write it wasn't this. I was ready to talk about the freedom of dressing badly and a day spent in the park with friends. Denrele and Gemma know how much I love them and how the day unravelled in to something quite special without really trying to be anything but itself.

This is not as easy as I thought. The birds are stirring outside and my fantasies of writing an awe-inspiring blog are slipping away. Perhaps what I should do is tell the truth. It is always better that way. Just over a week ago I was lying in Accident and Emergency in a neck brace. I was alive. It's still pretty much a miracle that I got away with a few surface scars and a limp. I was not unhappy or angry and was, unsurprisingly, greatly relieved to be still here. That is a somewhat new feeling for me.

Being thrown off two wheels and ending up under four has knocked the gratitude in to me that was missing. For a long time I was very ill with depression. I could not feel love in any form, for others or from others. It was like the mute button was permanently switched on. I felt hollow all the time and saturated with such loneliness that I could not distinguish between my personality and my pain. It felt like the same thing. Nothing seemed to make it leave. Not the pills, not the therapy, not the love from people who cared, not facing it head on, not ignoring it and struggling through it. Nothing. I wanted to die. And even today I cannot say that my extended depressive episode was a chapter in my life which I will not live again. But something has shifted and the accident was an expression of that.

There are many reasons why I was so unhappy. I can now say with some confidence that one of them was because I did not have children. I think my breakdown was a crisis of mourning. I had always pictured myself having one child, perhaps even outside of a relationship, but one quiet and solid little soul who would make their own mark on the world. Like all the griefs I can almost live with this fact although it is still hard to talk about without feeling raw and frayed.

This week I met an old friend who is in a long and enduring relationship. His partner never wanted children but at some point my friend did. As we drank coffee and looked back over the 30 years we have known each other he said "In a perfect world I would have had children. But I do not have children so I live a less than perfect life." It struck me as profound and simple and what I have grappled with for so long. Some of my depression was a craving for perfection that is, of necessity, illusive. To mention a well worn cliche, it's the itch and grit in the oyster that births the pearl.

On our way back from the park, and just outside my house, the setting sun shone gold. I took some photos of Denrele in these fleeting moments. I know, like the sunlight at day's end, this uncharacteristic calm will leave me. But I hope to live a life less than perfect, but no less full for it, and never want to end it by own hand again.

What's real ?

On Thursday 7th October I was on my way to a posh poet's breakfast, to celebrate National Poetry Day when I got hit by a car and thrown from my bike. I spent the day in hospital, left in the evening rush hour with stitches in my face, a limp, cuts and grazes, and I now have a black eye.

It got me thinking about photography and self-portraiture. As a photographer I am usually happier on the safer side of the lens, the one where I enter the story from a distance and where I capture and freeze the rapid skidding moments in front of me. My portraits are often posed but I like to think there is a moment when the sitter settles in to his or herself, the precise time when the personality expresses itself in the relaxed musculature of the face.

I knew I needed a record of my damages as a result of my fall. Here's another image before the bruise fully came out. Am I happy in it or just smiling for the camera ? I include both photos here as although the wounds are real the feelings I experienced are complex and it needs more than one self portrait to express this complexity; the immense gratitude at still being alive, the terror at being trapped under the front of a car, the sorrow I felt at seeing my mother's desperation when she walked in to A and E, the total joy at being loved and looked after by old friends, the extensive appreciation I so very seldom feel for the beautiful broad expanse of life itself, my anger at car drivers in general...the list goes on.

One of my favourite photographers is Nan Goldin whose work is an exciting and challenging mix of autobiography and voyeurism. An image of hers that has always stuck with me is Nan, One Month After Being Battered. It was taken a month after her then boyfriend assaulted her as both a physical and emotional reminder of the cost of the relationship she was in. My injuries do not compare to hers, however needing to keep a record of all the changes and chapters we live is something I do share with Goldin.

There is something quite special about being forced to do nothing or very little. These few housebound days have helped me realise that being a photographer means to be in the constant process of writing a story continually re-telling itself.

Saving a Life

Greg and his lopsided family are moving out from the sodden flat in the basement. “Fuck” I hear him say in an exaggerated voice below my window, taking his last cardboard box to the van double parked on the street “A bit of this house has fallen off” he shouts to his son, and like those clutching to life in the boats that saved the shivering travellers from the Titanic he smiles from the car window as the van finally moves away. I have been meaning to move out for years, the chic wooden shutters that make this flat seem so elegant from the street have the reverse effect when you are the one shut inside during the winter months, it’s like being sealed in. I don’t mean to sound churlish or ungrateful, it’s just that it’s time to move on and I am not sure yet how I can, how I will or what to do.

I never thought that I would find myself at a workshop on a blustery autumn afternoon called ‘The Phenomenal Women’s Program’ and believe the possibilities to be true but that is where I was last weekend. After far too long being anchored to a stubborn depression, brought on in part by sustaining an unhappy relationship and partly by its end, I saw what it was like to be part of something. That something means more than the warmth of my ex lovers embrace when the love has gone sour. There were no lightning flashes or emotional outbursts and in its place just a quiet and sustained kindness. I felt what it was to care and be cared for again. The truth of it was gorgeous in its simplicity and it enabled me to see some of my more difficult relationships anew.

This understanding is what will save my life.

There are still bits falling from the hulk of me, some big enough to hold up a house, but sometimes the only thing to do is to hire the biggest van possible, pack the most valuable items and move on from what is crumbling and start afresh.