stars

As suddenly as it had imposed itself upon me, the will to make drawings upon the squared paper of my notebook vanished, leaving me high and dry, as it were, without direction or motivation. I pitch and yaw like a rudderless vessel embroiled in high seas with little hope of gaining safe harbourage; indeed have more or less abandoned hope with regard to ever attaining a stable state in terms of my relationship to my work. 

Instead of drawing in my notebook, and in my ever present desire to write and to write well, I read, devouring Anne Truitt's autobiography, and W G Sebald's Vertigo, from which I shall herewith quote a passage:

...."Peter did not come down from his observation post for weeks. It was said that he spent a large part of the first years of the war up there, sleeping by day and watching the stars by night, drawing the constellations on large deep blue sheets of card, or alternatively perforating them by means of bradawls of varying sizes so that, when he attached the sheets to the wooden frames of his glasshouse, he could actually enjoy the illusion, as in a planetarium, that the star-lit heavens were vaulted above his head." 

I have yet to draw the actual constellations as they appear in the night sky, and, not having recourse to an observatory, shall have to use found illustrations for the purpose. Instead, I strew sheets of black, Nepalese paper with fields of stars in imaginary configurations, delighting in subtle inclusions or imperfections in the body of the paper which sometimes appear like myriad infinitessimal groups of stars at great distances from the stars which I draw with white pencils. 

The process of making small white marks upon the jet surface of the beautiful, fragile paper is all absorbing; I deliberately avoid analysing why I choose to make drawings such as these, I do not wonder about their reception, I just draw. Each morning I find  Minos, who has now adapted his outdoor life to include the domain of the house, sprawled across my drawing board, where he has taken to resting; my first task of the day is to brush with care the cat hairs from the surface of the paper. He has lost weight with age, his supine body looks so defenceless whilst he is sleeping, that I do not have the heart to move him, instead I draw on as much of the paper that is available to me before he gets up of his own accord and proceeds with his singular business of the day. I find that with Silas's death, my bond with Minos is ever stronger; I am conscious of the fragility of his little life and of my own mortality, although the despair that overtook me during the days following Silas's death has somewhat dissipated. 

Yesterday morning, up early, and having to go outside to move the waste bins into the street for emptying, I stood for a moment, my face upturned to the bowl of the sky. The West was yet ultramarine, the firmament to the East banded subtlely with palest lemon; the sun had still to broach the horizon. The stars were out, two heavenly bodies among them shining with such vigour that I supposed them to be planets; it was so beautiful a sight that I found myself upon the verge of tears. It has ever been thus; as a child I would spend lengthy stretches of time watching the stars by night, the clouds by day, although I never experienced a moment of near levitation as did my mother. Towards mid August each year, my partner and I journey by car on a clear night to Salisbury Plain, not a great distance from the market town of Frome where we currently reside, and watch for 'shooting stars', as the Earth passes through the seasonal meteor shower of the Perseids.

My piano lessons with Mrs Hilda H Price used to be on a Wednesday evening; my father and I would take the bus into the town and walk the remaining distance to her house. One evening is set fast in my memory, it may have been Autumn, it may have been early in the year; that much I do not remember, I do remember the profound frost that edged the fallen beech leaves with glittering rime and thickly coated the pavements beneath our feet. Above our heads the vault  of the heavens was ablaze with a multitude of stars and seemed to my childish eyes to extend forever and ever. What passed between us by way of conversation I no longer remember; I must have only been very young, but the image of the jewelled bedecked reaches of the sky, the reassuring warmth of my father's hand holding my own remain deeply imprinted upon my memory. I cannot ask my father whether it is the same for him, cannot convey to him how much that time spent alone with him meant to me, how, many years later as a deeply frightened adult I took comfort in the clasp of his hand over mine, but when the night sky above me is crammed with stars, and the air is honed keen with frost, I think of him.