Inward Sight, Outward Seeing

Mum shared a birthday with William Blake. This was, we learned early on, significant. But signifiers were everywhere for my superstitious mother, whose seeing was more crystal ball than rational or empirical. One year when we were teens she had a series of nocturnal premonitions, terrifying scenarios that drew gasps around the breakfast table when world events, some days later proved them ‘true’. Only Dad chuckled and talked about co-incidence. He was the true empiricist, the ‘only natural logical positivist he’d ever met’, as AJ Ayer, the philosopher and a colleague at UCL, had once remarked.  Dad was the supreme realist, and not just figuratively speaking. Yes, he was a figurative painter, but was also depressingly realistic when it came to knowing how long to allow to pack a suitcase, or hail a taxi, or get to Liverpool Street Station in good time.

The lights and lenses of my father’s early morning world were his twin gods. Emanating from a point beyond mere vision, an inconceivable singularity dispensing itself graciously at 186,000 miles a second, light flew, flickered and focussed itself into beams, then arranged itself to shapes convenient for the canvas. Time and space condensed on sable brush-points, reality collapsed captive and issued in images of grey-suited men in high-backed armchairs, or rooftop scenes of glimmering luminosity. Adding another chink of China White, Dad would step back wiping his hands, and crack a joke before cracking open another bottle, usually of harmless linseed oil or turpentine.  The single malt was reserved for after dark, when other luminaries were darkened or eclipsed.

My times were commensurate with his, but mensurated differently. The highly-coloured abacus of early childhood gave way to the black and white of piano keys, and the iambs of blank verse to musical dodecaphony.  Once menstruation struck I’d outgrown the emanations of my Ventolin, and began to seek for other lifelines, differently-metered vibrant actuations. 

Usually these were musical, violent and vibrato-laden,  as I sublimated my way through adolescence, turning sexuality into verse and voice, media I had the illusion of controlling and understanding. Music came naturally to me. Expressions of sexuality less so. I was an energetic teenager who preferred scales and arpeggios to the touch of boys – or girls. I looked inward, looking to the lyricism of my own thoughts for glimmers of a distant light.

Mornings were anathema, however. While Dad paced the floorboards as the day streamed in, pink and luminous through the swing of wooden shutters, I lay inert in the next room dreaming not of visions but of sounds. I woke spouting verbiage, ready to sing and scan the world, the movements of my mind never coming close to the cool precision of my father’s steps or of his sable paintbrush. I was deemed ‘excitable’ and emotional as an eight-year-old, and sent away to board.