Homeward Bound
Following on from: [Lizzie Limner’s seemed destined to be another photo on the growing montage of galleries unable to survive in the economic climate of the time.
And I needed to hang on in there for a month or two, until I knew where to go next.
I needed luck. And the luck which enabled me to hang in came in the shape of a monosyllabic stranger who bought the only ‘Talking Piece’ which I hadn’t discounted because the larger of part of me wanted to keep it.
Mr Almost-grumpy arrived on the last day that Lizzie Limners opened its door.]
The Talking Piece he bought was barely four inches in diameter and consisted of a mirror on which a tiny empty wire bed frame stood. It was entitled 'No Place Like Home' and round the edge of the mirror in black ran the quote which opens 'Legs from the Dregs'.
‘Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.’
It’s still one of my favorite quotes although it had puzzled me for decades. Now it seems as black as its lettering and Clock Clock’s plumage.
There IS no place for man’s head to rest. When true dreamless sleep finds us, it is in the delicious rising and falling of our chests. The fiction of ourselves as a self is absent.
Home becomes ‘where the heart is’. We are restored.
The stranger sighed a lot, stared into space and back to the empty bed frame asked me for an explanation which it was clear he didn't need. Negotiating a discount on account of our mutually shared understanding, he left with it carefully wrapped in tissue.
And left me with the exact figure necessary to shut up the gallery honorably.
Where to go next?
I was burnt out yet again, the M.E. reared its ugly head and the ‘Dark Mother’ associated with Blackbird presented no choice but to do what most about to be fifty-year olds would consider unthinkable.
But it was the obvious place to rest without rent. Somewhere stable (that’s a mighty clue for our next stopping place)…
p.s. The Sheep Man – a G.O.A.T. when it comes to one upwomanship - didn’t have one but a nest full of Clock Clocks living with him. They must have liked living as dangerous as he did, choosing to home in a tool-filled disused dirty washbowl on top of his fridge inside his front porch. It was highly risky since his other wild one was a feral cat living beneath it. But she knew where her daily morning milk and evening food came from, and therefore knew better than to disturb them!
We have not yet been properly acquainted with The Sheep Man, since in a linear manner we’ve only just arrived at 2010. But – taking our lead from the creatures who are accompanying us - our journeys are not linear. Returning to the ‘house of mum and dad’, we will travel the very best way to the land of my childhood, Surrey.
#blackbird #home #limning