In the cafe of Edinburgh’s gallery of modern art
I work hard to make a female infant smile
Repeatedly hiding behind my hands and suddenly revealing who I really am.
Pram belt unclipped, the podgy, pink-white face stares at me with astonished seriousness
As I drink and eat: salad, soup and fresh bread, coffee and pecan pie.
‘It was all they had available’, I might say (but don’t) to give a reason why.
Her mother tells me the hard stare comes from her
Says ‘Thank you for trying!’
And, of this inheritance, lovingly confesses
‘I’m not sure if it’s a good thing!’
The baby starts crying
As her body is strapped back in,
But it’s just a clever ruse and when we least expect it
This little everything delights us with a gummy, toothless grin!
And in that moment’s synecdochic peekaboo,
I see…
What? Is it God? No, not God, surely…
What, in God’s name, is it then?
How can it be that I never spied it before now?
Or if I did only caught a glimpse
Out of the corner of my little eye
As I marched forward in time, metronomic,
Blindly impelled towards
The places I was trying to get to
Without knowing:
Freedom, wisdom, love?
How can it be that as I chased down
Abstract nouns that melted like clouds when they seemed close,
I hardly noticed, hardly felt my own breath,
Hardly even felt my feet touching the earth?
They were, admittedly, well-insulated by ideology, socks and branded shoes.
When I see and feel things now, the light is blinding, its heat burns.
Could any of it have been any different? It’s taken so long to get here!
Did I have to be for so long deaf to the heart’s sweet, sweet love song?
Not completely deaf, of course, not always, don’t get me wrong…
There were snatches of a melody,
Always fleeting, carried on the breeze,
Unread messages,
Cassandras telling truths cursed never to be believed
Until almost too late.
Is this how it is everywhere always for all of us? How it just must be?
Or am I, are we, among the luckier ones in the sense that everything that went before this point
Puts us a little further down the track
Than is the case
For many others’ random points in time and space,
Not because of anything we’ve done to deserve it
But in the sense that centuries of intergenerational trauma have played out in the way they had to –
An infinite number of just so stories, not one word out of place,
And among them vast hordes of human beings, each one unique, each one an implicit universe, that try and try and try and never win a chubby smile,
Who for all their efforts receive just an impassive stare,
A blank look
As if they were not there?
And how much do we owe them for their hidden labours?
Are they, they are surely, the heroes of this song?
It all seems so clear, so, so clear suddenly to me,
Or is that ‘all’ true?
Can one ever see everything in its entirety?
No, not ‘all’
‘Nearly all’ then, or just ‘clearer’, maybe less than that.
Let’s stop trying to quantify truth -
This ‘all’ is a feeling of the heart,
Not a picture of the eye,
Not a sound of the mouth.
It is a beat skipped, a sudden delight.
Peekaboo!
Surprise, surprise!
Why now? Why?
It almost seems a cruel joke
Like the exhibition here of the art of Everlyn Nicodemus,
A Tanazanian woman, painter, writer, poet whom I did not know until today.
Before its ‘discovery’ by a London gallerist,
Her work sat patiently in storage for years
While she took everything she had to hand,
Everything she could afford,
Used it to create more Arte Povera
Binding things together with nothing but love:
Love for all those who went before her whom she had not known
Love for all those who are to come whom she will not know
Love for all those whom her hands and eyes had known, and whom her heart had also known.
When her husband, Kristian, died, she told an interviewer, ‘I was nearly giving up’
But her best friend, Jean, made her promise on his grave to carry on
And then Jean died too but still she kept the promise and carried on.
She kept going. She did not stop,
By night transforming junk into beauty without pecuniary reward,
By day working in a care-home to pay the bills.
Why? How? What was she on earth for?
She has no children but compares the labour of bringing forth art
To a mother’s unconditional love
Wonders if this not money is what saves us,
What heals us of our many wounds,
An energy that makes the infinite weight of a human life possible to bear.
What to do in the face of the implacable mystery,
The total lack of explanation
What to do in the face of the infant’s unrelenting stare
‘I am not sure if it’s a good thing’ the baby’s mother said.
At 70, the artist’s joy at belated recognition is offset with sadness -
Ironic, the ones she loved most ‘are not here to see it’.
I am not sure it’s a good thing either.
When did certainty become so important? Who knows?
God? The child? Everlyn Nicodemus?
Perhaps love is always a leap in the dark which we take
Fully knowing it will both complete and end us.
Saw this artist's work in Edinburgh while visiting a dear old friend and was captivated by her story as well as her art. We have a tendency maybe to see things teleologically - i.e. the effort is worth it because in the end recognition comes - but maybe the outcome is actually less important, and true heroism consists in courageous acts of faith that we hope may shape the world but that no one ever sees and that are never rewarded. As something of an applause ****** myself, this seems heroic to me.
