Cadavre Exquis: would you have been still would I have asked you? Carol Laidler + Dolores Steinman

Living so far apart, we met over a few months by zoom. We wanted to discover what we had in common and consider how we might build on it. What followed was a series of exchanges both written and photographic, accompanied by the shadow of our own fatigue. We wove this dialogue into a meandering trail of thinking. “[…] cutting together-apart […] in a reworking of the spacetimemattering of thought patterns” (Ref.1). To extend this process of intertwining, when we shared it with the group we invited the listeners to write into the space created by the words, a responsive stream of consciousness. As each person read out their thoughts the layering of meaning and connection became richer and more powerful. We intend to continue our exploration of the territory between-and-across life perceived and life experienced, and offer our practice as a frame work and potential opening to others.

Voice 1
Would you have been still would I have asked you?
Rolls of celluloid
Lost images
Preserves in mind jars now broken
Ribs and breath on big celluloid panels
No more

Voice 2
spinning
my eyes fix on the ceiling as it slips around and away
I’ve learnt to surf the spins
relinquish the vertical
when I sit up the room continues its orbit
when I stand I am leaning,
walking with a slant
tilting
to avoid falling

Voice 1
Madonna or maternity
Interchangeable
Looking for answers to questions I never asked
Questions I was unable to formulate
Questions floating around
Never caught in my mind’s spiderweb
Are you still somewhere?
Are you the same?
Have I hurt you?
So cruel
So much?

Voice 2
the pyracantha and the solanum have died
the shed is grown over with honeysuckle and ivy
the pond seeps through cracks in the plastic
dulled by dead leaves
the bramble menaces
last year’s figs ripen on the branch
the soil has changed
no new growth
not a shoot
no bees on the lemon flowers
no worms in the soil
only snails

Voice 1
Tango sequence in a scene from a novel?
Rilke
Goethe
Apollinaire
If I only had those dromedaries
You always dreamt of the day when retired you’d walk through
the park
Umbrella used as a walking stick
Carefree
It never happened
You never had enough time
For yourself
And the time ran out on you
Abruptly
You were the last born forever the youngest
The one that everyone relied on
Related or not
People would still call on you long after you were gone
But did they really feel the absence?

Voice 2
I read up on how to kill brambles without weed killer – white
vinegar and boiling water. My gardening gloves are too thin to
protect my hands from the thorns, my secateurs too blunt. I buy
a new pair of light weight secateurs and strong rubberised
gardening gloves guaranteed against brambles. I chop. Each
day I go outside, clip through the tough branches with a
satisfying click. An hour, then a pause, another hour, another
pause, another hour. I bend over to pick up the woody stems,
clip small pieces into a bucket. Bend and twist until it aches to
stand up. I fill a bucket and transfer it into a bag, bucket after
bucket, bag after bag. I pour boiling water over the pruned
ends poking up from the root. Then spray with white vinegar.

Voice 1
Life seems to be a reverse onion
Or an inverse autumn
Was I a strong “composition” or just a facade
Bits slices parts
Not a cadavre exquis but a functioning body and mind that got a
late start
Falling leaves or teary layers, good times and bad experiences
Bad days and happy moments cling to our memory and then
fade
There comes a time for reflection; could it be too late?

Voice 2
Today I can’t face the garden
Not even to sit outside in the weak sun
Today I feel the heavy crush of a weighted vest or something
Deep in my bones
Today I feel stirrings in my belly shouting
Get on with it Do something Do more.
No grit no pearl
Today I sit my face turned towards the fig tree and do nothing

Voice 1
The great grandmother – is she the source of my cheerfulness?
My left side is totally broken
Dreams
Uprooting is a common thread I guess
How can they help and support
I’ve been made of broken dreams
My breath changes rhythm without me noticing it

Voice 2
There is a picture of my mother on my fridge door. I remember
taking it in her still living room. She is turning to look at me, her
chin resting on her hand, one eyebrow arched, one leg folded
over the other, gently swinging. In the darkroom my hands
spooling the roll of film in the blackness, the sour smell of
chemicals, exposing the negative, watching the magic of the
print emerge in the liquid developer. Tiny dots of dust, contrast
bleaching out the large window. She never smiled for the
camera. Her lips stretch crookedly but her eyes say something
else. When I look at her it’s as though I have burrowed into her
skin.

Voice 1
What were their loses?
What are mine?
What were their strengths?
Do I have any?
Deep sigh
Yet I understand my mother
I wish I knew or noticed
Her pain and burdens
And I became her

Voice 2
we exist
side by side
one after the other
born with all the eggs we will ever have in our lifetime
new life stirring in my daughter
from an egg that was once inside me
like a string of pearls
or back stitch
looping back before going forward
Russian Dolls

Ref.1. – Juelskjær M., Schwennesen N., “Intra-active Entanglements – An interview with Karen Barad”, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, Nr 1-2, 2012, p.13 

After we read our words we invited the group to write into the space created by them:

Anna Walker

Listening: to Dolores’ faint voice, Carol’s louder, strong. Inhale, exhale – wordplay, overlapping, layer upon layer. Images adding another layer, another dimension.

I was thinking about how appropriate for this time of year — Fall, falling… the leaves dying; the apples, plums, pears dropping from their trees, leaving their homes. Gathering. Creating new ground to walk upon. Layers of foliage anchored into the soil, composting, feet walking on earth, pressing nature’s detritus deep into the dirt, feeding new life.

I was thinking about my mother, about her death, her ashes embedded into the soil of the Church garden in Wales. How all of these years later she has become the earth.

I was thinking about my hands in soil, of digging down – burying the dead mice the next door’s neighbour’s cat had left as a gift for my sister when she was cat-sitting. How, she like my mother before her, is terrified of mice, can’t bear to be around them. I was remembering both Cath and mom perched precariously on chair and sofa screaming at this tiny little furry being, who rather than be afraid – sat in the centre looking up at them. I remember laughing as I picked it up, feeling its tiny claws scratch at my enclosed palm as I opened the door to the garden and set it free.

They came back, of course they did.
It was warm inside.

Kamina Walton

The light spills across the paper, the images, my screen. A sharing – of noticing, pondering, embodying. Our connection with the earth and soil deepening as we age. The touch of leaf, of stone, both warming and affirming. Their fluid presence unlike our bodies bound in time.

I am lulled by the rhythm of your voices, the conversation of your images. Reminded of the power of dialogue in its various forms. A sense of beginnings and endings in their ever fluctuating flow. Circling, ebbing, churning and seeping – through our bodies, our skin. Our ever evolving existence.

Sarah Bild

Sediment and grit. What is left after working so hard? Working too hard. At what? What have I been working on? And for whom?
Does work give me energy or sap it?
Your mothers are present in this conversation and I would invite mine in. How does she feel about the work she did over her lifetime? What brambles did she try to kill? What is left?
Residue
What actually counts.
Who keeps the score.
Images creating feeling and I see how feelings led to images of melting words.
Exhaustion
Listlessness
Broken tea cups
Strange mushrooms
Precious plant life
Crisp
Clip
Click
That is work.

Bad days can bring happy moments. I can’t tell if we’re looking up or down at these images.
The funnel created by two skies drew me up upward. Crisp blue giving hope. Pulling you up out of fatigue and weariness?
So many landings and yet all related to the thread of a conversation. Making connections between feelings, hopelessness and matter.
Leaf matter
Paper matter
Art matter
Words, typed and spoken
Printed and torn
Handwritten and smudged
So many prompts, pulls and tugs.
So many reasons to get up and share and write and speak.
Thank you.

Davina Kirkpatrick

Seasonal shifts, our bodies feel it, my body feels it even before my head acknowledges. A turning inwards, assessing, attuning, dialling the notch down, movement becoming more economical, colour muted- one colour accented, sepia, monochrome. Melancholy quietude, gathering into my core. But even the dead season shifts as new growth happening out of sight, underground, begins the cycle again. 

Susanna Hood

Mushrooms, or are they roots?
Don’t they come out of the muck?
Today, you just sat,
bottom heavy like a stone,
getting soft among the dead leaves,
and stared at the olive tree.
I can hear your breath in my body
rattling.
It really does rattle… the breath
… in those last hours
and then gone.
But you are not gone yet.
Neither am I.
Wet seeping through pants
as we live through this choice
to just sit.
Behind, or underneath, the poetry
the actual muck and drudge
of  one endless-speeding minute 
after another.
The same mind,
turning its same old tiresome
tricks
a laundry list of grievances
against me
and my missed opportunities.
Now those fly in someone else’s hands
someone too mercurial
to have a garden.
To have a garden…
is that even possible?
Rather it has me
you
us
rotting ripening women
oh how I love you
when you are not
me.
The mushrooms adore us.
And then there’s the cold that begins to bite
at the fingertips,
nibbling its way to the knuckles.
My grandmother’s hands
somehow both soft cushions 
and worn tools
digging in the dirt
digging in the clay
immune, now, to boiling water and the cold from a tap in an unheated country home in April.
As all mother’s hands.
I remember her hands turning blue.
Yes, it’s true.
Not just a poetic metaphor –
actually blue –
again from the fingertips.
Where does all that heat go?
So fast it gets eaten up by the world
once the insides cease
to struggle and churn
and keeping keeping us
keeping on going.

Jo Milne

Tracing back through endless scans, spiralling in time, faces intermeshed without order or logic.  Traits extend back, weaving their way through distinct lineages. Smiles echo from black and white into Kodacolour.  

Each day a new arrival, a scan that places you somewhere else. We relive your life, tracing our semblances in the doffing of a hat, the tilt of a head or in your smile. Time loops back and forward, present and past point to future, but one in which you are only present in absence.

Even the garden aches for your touch, Tommy brandishes the spinning blade seeming to revel in an act that had until then been prohibited. Flower heads spin and fall, and order is returned.

It is only the orchid that resists, budding into flower across the kitchen window, almost in spite of the loss that surrounds it.