Inward Sight, Outward Seeing

He had his fair share of common sense, too, and he measured time as ruthlessly as he did space. Five minutes to go, Four and a half, now come along girls, always early for appointments, getting us to stations with enough time left over for us to invent new lines of childishly dramatic poetry before the train arrived. It was all right for usto be demonstrative, clambering onto tartan railway upholstery, declaiming iambic pentameters to the world. We measured life in metered actuations, breathless. Asthmatic, I husked songs to imaginary audiences (or passers-by) and went unchecked in my voluminous poetic aspirations. I, too, had my necessary tools.  Spectacle-less, I depended on my Ventolin to sense and signify the world. I touched reality through song, not sight.

“I touched reality through song, not sight…”

It was vision that characterized my painter father, although he’d never call himself a visionary. That was my mother’s prerogative, she whose dreams were premonitions, and who talked to Suzanne Valadon in her sleep. Valadon, the mother of Utrillo, was ‘an artist in her own right’, and an artist’s model, in both respects like my mother. Mum’s in-her-own-rightness defined her when we were children and the initial glamour of modeling and her marriage had worn off. She wanted to show what she could do, and invoked the muse and model Valadon, celebrated lover of Renoir and a former trapeze artist, in her more psychic moments between dusk and dawn. Her seeing was not so much visual as inward and imaginary.