Category: Autobiographical

This Friday is the Rude Mechanicals midsummer gig!

Celebrating midsummer in a cavorting exuberant mayhem. I have a brand new dress, we have new songs. There will be music and masks and dancing and magic, and possibly possession, should the nature spirits wish to talk to us

Flowers and herbs were traditionally believed to hold extra magical powers during midsummer celebrations, wearing a flower crown harnesses magic and helps you have good health throughout the year.

Love can also be greatly encouraged on midsummer eve, try out one of these spells if you are after a fond caress:

1. If you roll around naked in a wheat field, your future lover will appear in your life within a year. Dew was believed to have a healing effect and rolling in it was supposed to make you beautiful and healthy. Dew was even collected in cloths and pressed into bottles for the year to come (I might try that).

2. Collect eight different types of flowers from as many meadows. When going to bed, put the bouquet underneath your pillow. You will see “the one” in your dream.

3. In the wee hours of the night, climb up somewhere high – on a hill, on top of a fell or a big rock. To a place where it is easy to hear surrounding sounds. Your future lover will come from the same direction as the first sound of the morning. If you hear music, it means an approaching wedding. If you hear a child crying, it is a sign of birth.

So, come crowned, rampant, wild and magical on Friday if you can, and if you can’t dance crowned, rampant, wild and magical wherever you may be, for this is summer and it deserves celebration!

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.”

Friday 21st June 2019

373 The George Tavern, Commercial Road, London. E1 0LA

Starts 7.30, £5 on door.

Quick note to anyone who fancies coming to the gig on the Friday 21st June, it is the Friday and not a the Saturday as I originally put in the poster. It was, of course, to test you.

My dad just hypnotised me. It was very interesting. He is trying to help lessen my epilepsy. He asked me how I visualise a seizure, I said it is like being a werewolf. He told me to visualise the werewolf getting smaller and smaller till it is a little obedient puppy. I couldn’t do that. I think this may be because I feel like I am a werewolf, the werewolf is me. Like a werewolf I am wolf only part of the time, and I can not control the change. If I view myself as having an illness then I am ill, four seizures a week is not easy to cope with, but if I view myself as a werewolf then I am a beast, and although this can be embarrassing, confusing and distressing, it is also strong and ferocious and very much alive. Does anyone get cured of being a werewolf? Usually they just get killed don’t they? I wish to go down howIng and growling and clawing everything nearby, not lying in a hospital bed.

( the comparison of a seizure to being a wolf is highly inaccurate!!)

Other parts of the hypnotism involved going down into a beautiful garden and sitting on a bench feeling good about everything, then going through a door in a tree and into the corridors of my mind. These were long thin corridors with red carpet and orange lighting, all very Twin Peaks. At the end I got to a big wooden door with a golden door knob. I pushed the door open slowly and inside was a large old office with wooden panelling and a musty smell. There was a big window at the opposite end to the door letting in very bright light, and a very large old desk running from the window towards the door. Lots of people were around the desk, preparing for some kind of meeting, they are mostly suited men and the whole thing feels very official and authoritative, bureaucracy. I walk across the room to the window and look out. There is a large court yard with large white Festival tents scattered around. One of the men preparing for the meeting sees me at the window and pulls a curtain across to stop me looking out.

I look round the office instead, there is a large abstract sculpture in one corner that looks out of place in the office, it looks rather like an alien space craft. Everything here has a slight sinister feel to it.

My dad asks me how I feel in this office and whether I want to spend more time looking around. I find the office is making me feel quite uneasy so i leave it, go back through the corridors and into the garden.

So, what is my subconscious trying to tell me? Do I want to go out to play but the authority figures keep me trapped in dark intimidating offices?

Should the werewolf eat the bureaucrats?

Woof!

The book on tidying has failed.

It was too harsh.

I was brought up not to throw things away. My family were very poor when I was a kid, everything could be “made use of”. This book on tidying has had an odd effect on me, rather than throwing things away I am making things out of the old throwaways even more. All rubbish has a history.

My artwork usually involves recycling old things, and this book has made this more so. I cannot throw a piece of cardboard away now, because it could make a good paint book cover, box, altar. Glue two pieces together and it makes a good paint board. Other rubbish inspires curiosity: What was it? Was it useful? Had it emotional connection for someone?Was it once loved?

On the good side it does mean I am making more stuff out of some of the rubbish I had stored in cupboards, on the bad side my house is still a cluttered tip and I can’t walk past a bin without thinking “ooh that would be useful”.

I’m very pleased with the sketchbook l’ve made entirely with rubbish, cardboard boxes and thrown out paper. It is Coptic stitched so easy to leave open on a particular page. It is blank but has my occasional doodles throughout.

Thought I might try selling some Coptic stitched sketchbooks from waste products in my Bric-brac Emporium , for yes I now have a small emporium ( that is intentionally contradictory) on this website. As you’ll see from the buttons at the top. I call it Bric-a-brac because it sells art and objects made from recycled and reused materials. Not that there is much for sale in it at the moment, but with time…

I might even take my Bric-a-brac emporium along to the gig with me on the 21st.

It will fit in the suitcase.

Cockroaches are a highly disrespected group, that is very true, and this could be why when I let the cockroach god enter my head and possess me there was so much anger there I had to stop. I was very surprised, hadn’t expected so much aggression to suddenly enter me, it scared me and I had to end the ritual before something dangerous happened, before I lost control of myself and hurt someone. Instead I lite candles on fairy cakes and gave them to the audience to give as offerings to the god, along with the moulding mushrooms and banana skin brought by participants earlier ( thanks to Dr Cos for the cockroach like sound track). I’m told cockroaches are particularly fond of slightly rotting sweet foods.

Cockroach’s are exceeding useful creatures in the wild. They are scavengers that eat almost anything. They are the dustbin men of the Forest cleaning up everything’s waste, transforming it so it can go back into the ecological system. Like dustbin men they are unappreciated. We all like to turn away from our own dirt and what happens to our waste, which is possibly why it is now causing such severe environmental problems.

I admit to killing cockroaches myself. I’d moved into a new flat which had concrete floors and no carpet. I couldn’t afford to buy carpet at the time, so a friend said he was clearing out his old shed and there was an old carpet in there I could have. Great, I thought, but I had not appreciated the wildlife that came with it. The cockroaches were huge! And it seemed they just wouldn’t die no matter what I did. I remember trying to wash them down the sink and flush them down the toilet, but they just kept climbing back out.

It is thought that cockroaches would survive a holocaust they are so tough. In tests they’ve been found capable of surviving far more radiation than a human ever can.

They have been around for millennia, they are well evolved into their job. But humans are very talented at laying waste to whole species and insects are dying off.

We all rave on about the bee now, and how she must be saved, but what about the humble cockroach? Without ’em to clean up the forests are in big trouble, and without the forests we are in big trouble. Yet I don’t want cockroaches wondering around my flat. Even though tests have shown they don’t carry all the disease popular culture bestows upon them, I still don’t want them crawling across my kitchen. Somewhat of a dilemma.

I remember reading once the writings of an anthropologist who stayed with a family in a remote part of the world. Every morning the family would leave food outside in a particular spot as an offering to a god, by the next day the food would have disappeared. Curious about this the anthropologist stayed up one night and watched what happened to the food. He discovered that ants were meticulously taking the food away. On further inspection he realised that the family home was in fact on top of an ant colony and that leaving the food out every day made sure the ants did not come into the family home and take the family food. Cunning.

Perhaps a similar solution could be found for creatures like the cockroach by giving them more forest to inhabit?

Yet as we all know this is an old request, more local woodlands would help solve many problems, but seeing as my council seems to particularly enjoy chopping down trees, even in parks ( to stop homeless people from sleeping there apparently, though me thinks finding them somewhere to sleep in, say, those very many empty buildings, might be a better plan) I can’t see this happening fast.

Last night I dreamt I was riding through a forest on the back of a giant flying cockroach. It was very good fun. Here is a poem/riddle that an anonymous blog reader sent me, in a further attempt to placate the Cockroach God:

little forest lord, 

                         

drunk on cochineal.

Like the wafer I am each and I am all

Indissoluble

In my kingship I like it here, to defile your homes with my russet.

 

From the bulb a golden rain,

and a black one.

The colour black absorbs all.

It is hungry.

It is the god of darkness and death, but it is not bad or good, it is just itself

and it has a dark sense of humour.

( yes I’m getting a lot of seizures at moment)

It is in the carpet and the wallpaper, in my mouth and under the bed.

I think the colour white reflects all and is the god of life.

(I’m talking as a painter, don’t ask me about physics!)

Everything I see is given from it

Life rejoices in its presence

It is not good of bad, it just is itself

It is in the wallpaper and the carpet

In the emulsion paint covering my bathroom walls

And the white of your eyes

It has a very innocent sense of humour

(My head hurts)

Today I’m finishing a book sculpture called Metamorphosis. It’s done on paper I made out of old bills and bank statements. I imagine the papers forming a pupa in the filing box and then bursting out as a new art work. The piece has pictures of plants and butterflies apron it. I was struggling with painting those last night, difficult on recycled paper.

Metamorphosis fascinates me. Biology, in this state, is a very magical thing. What is going on in there to make this big change? Now with new technology we can see inside the pupa and know that the creature entirely breaks down and reforms. To me this makes it seem yet more miraculous.

It is science that thinks it knows everything that irritates me, because we don’t and hopefully never will, for that would take the magic from life. I think we will never know everything because the more we find out the more mystery there is. Science thought the deep oceans couldn’t contain life, turns out they are full of the stuff, science didn’t think trees could communicate with each other, turns out they are constantly “talking” through networks of roots and fungi underground. Such amazing discoveries and the new mysteries they unearth, along with the sheer beauty of, say, a butterfly feeding on a tiny blue flower, are what allow me to love life even when politics makes it seem grim, and my bank statements make me cry.

According to Maya Deren’s book I’m reading on Voodoo, 1+1 does not equal 2.

1+1=3.

This is because you need the 2 ingredients and then you need the catalyst to get it going. The magic. I think it is common to make the mistake of taking things apart to find out how they work and then assuming that’s it, it is just the pieces. As I remember my Nan saying to me when I was little “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

I tried to get the blue colour for the flowers by oxidising copper in a jar of vinegar (as instructed in a beautiful book given to me) but so far no luck. I must be lacking a bit of something…

I’m in Wales visiting my family, leaving my flat and cat in the faithful hands of Dylan and Cos.

This part of Wales is very beautiful, and it makes me wonder why on earth so many of us choose to live in grey pollution ridden cities. I will move one day.  I’m a little limited as the epilepsy means I can’t drive so proper countryside is out. I like the idea of a boat, they’ll let me drive a narrow boat so I could just take myself off.

Today I’m going to wonder through the woods and walk across the cliffs, talk to the trees and sea. They talk back sometimes, it is a matter of being in a state to listen.

I’m reading Maya Deren’s book the Divine Horseman at the moment. It is on Haitian Voodoo, it is fascinating. Ancestor worship seems to me a very practical thing to have, I think perhaps we  miss something in our culture by loosing our personal ancestors so quickly. I have only the vaguest notion of my great grandmother who read from a crystal ball, concocted herbal remedies and talked to ghosts. She sounds like she would be a fascinating person to know and could help me deal with the hallucinations I get in a more imaginative way than the GP.

We do tend to disregard the wisdom of the elderly in our culture, always looking for the new and exciting. Although this has brought us great developments in technology it has also placed us rather on a cliff edge in terms of the environment.

i was pleased to discover yesterday that my little niece Violet really likes the book I brought my brother on herbs and herbal remedies. I’ll have to actually learn more myself so l can talk to her about it. I got her a children’s book on witchcraft a year ago and she got really into that as well.

i find visiting my family very difficult, as I’ve written about before, I think part of it is because I can’t have children myself and the family is very family orientated.  It cheers me up to think that one day I could have a role passing on knowledge to my nieces and nephews. When my nephew Ernie was younger, before he became the hidden-away teenager he now is, I taught him perspective and drawing 3D objects. He loved it, drew lots of 3D furniture with arms and legs. I don’t suppose he remembers me telling him now, but I think the basics have stuck, which makes me feel… not totally redundant.