*
Self-portrait as girl inside a reaching forearm. The first decision this print requires is how to frame it. Should the disembodied forearm and hand reach for the sky, or extend a handshake?
Within the outline of the forearm, lithographic black encloses the girl’s figure. She also reaches her arm out, looming white from the darkness like a deep sea creature surfacing to make a gesture within a gesture. The eye travels past her to arrive at the hand, which flowers into willow-pattern, blue on the paper’s cream ground. Framed on the horizontal, the girl within the arm will be trapped upside down, but the placement of the artist’s signature suggests this was her intention. Framed vertically, the arm will suggest a stop-sign, warning, question, or a tree’s urge for light, the hand of Daphne turning vegetal to escape the god who will give her leaves to poetry, but still leave Daphne herself in the dark. (Now let us interrogate the assault myths exchanged as cultural capital throughout history.)
I chose the horizontal orientation out of a sense of obedience to the artist’s wishes, which of course I cannot know for sure, but also for the way the hand thus oriented invites connection, and because it reminds me of a manicule, the typographer’s symbol long since fallen into disuse that shows a hand with a pointing index finger. I still don’t know if I got the framing right, and often think of reorienting the print.
*
The poet coordinating the collective poem – a renga – asks for a video reading of the six permitted lines. She asks that it be recorded at a window, as befits the lockdown in which much of the world finds itself at the time. But the backlight renders me a silhouette, so I go outside to stand under the trees in the bowl of the valley where I live. Despite my preference for the gentler ministrations of black and white on skin, I somehow choose to send myself and the valley in colour. The trees are my filter. A riroriro contributes the bright mountain stream of its trill to the end of the reading, continuing the flow of the whole.
*
Daphne can’t change back, she can only reassert herself, a self that includes but is not confined to the encounter with the god that changed everything. Daphne exists in the upright, pushing her small white stars towards the sun. If her feet are in the underworld, her face is open to the sky. She shares herself with the surrounding air, her scent enters without violence, and her flavour contributes something subtle to our food. What if the laurel always belonged, not to Orpheus or Apollo, but to Eurydice, who might return not to repeat history, but to transform it?
*
There’s another photograph, one I’d forgotten until just now because I have never thought of it as art, but it may be the starting point. If the artist’s intentions count for anything then it is art, because that is what the photographer wanted it to be. For me it can’t be art because it’s a photograph of me.
It was made in the same misty-eyed period when I was reading the Tao Te Ching; I must have been 15 or 16. It was made for a portfolio to be submitted to art school. The photographer, a schoolmate, was trying to maximise black and white by dropping striped slides into two projectors angled to produce a pattern of intersecting black bars on my head and shoulders. To increase the area of blank canvas, my hair is tucked under a headscarf: two layers of raw cream fabric folded into a triangle and tied at the nape, although a curl of hair has escaped near the ear. The provenance of the fabric is uncertain, but the fact that its edges have been cut with pinking shears makes me almost sure it was an offcut my mother supplied. It could be curtain lining.
The photograph was made in a darkened suburban garage, with the photographer’s father on hand for technical assistance. I am wearing a leotard – this was also the time when I was attending theatre workshops that began with a lot of warm-up, and some of the regulars were dancers, several years my elder, with whom I was slightly in love or rather awe because they were living artworks. (The workshops quickly taught me that my own poorly coordinated limbs would never find that trick.) To avoid interfering with the stripes, I pushed the leotard’s spaghetti straps off my shoulders. Perhaps the parent was there to be a chaperone, but I never felt anything sleazy was happening, just an artist doing the necessary work to get the effect that was in his head. I didn’t mind being the armature for someone else’s vision, although this classmate had never seemed the arty type. The matt crimson leotard – I can still picture its colour exactly – registers as a dull grey-black in the photo.
Head in three-quarter profile, gaze turned down and away from the viewer. Despite the bare shoulders and pale décolletage, the word ‘demure’ recurs to me, and I wonder now if the artist wanted to refer to the young girl as Vermeer might have painted her. Intimate, but without the eye contact that would give too much away. Not making herself available – for scrutiny, for judgement, for anyone else’s pleasure. The only time I have ever been an artist’s model, and just doing what I was told, but decades later I recognise the template.
*
The wise student hears of the Tao and practices it diligently. The average student hears of the Tao and gives it thought now and again. The foolish student hears of the Tao and laughs aloud. If there were no laughter, the Tao would not be what it is.
*
The carved black frame of the ur-photo is also a work of minor decorative art. From the bottom left-hand corner a découpage of green leaves and yellow flowers, slightly faded now, grows half-way up the side and unfurls along the bottom of the frame where, if you look closely, you will find a tiny green frog with a cheerful eye sitting among the foliage.
*
I smile, now, at how self-serious I was as that young woman trying to finding out what art was and how to do it, how much was imitation; but if I am honest that seriousness has never entirely gone away. We find ways to accommodate ourselves to the disposition we are given. The Book of Life shows the human genome as pages of black and white code using only four letters. Which tells us everything, and nothing. Self-portrait in misty-eyed prison?
*
What’s needed is to do what’s needed, and only then to sing about it. To do what’s needed seems both simple enough, and almost insurmountably hard. Even as the hills on the other side of the harbour shrug their rumpled shoulders, the foreground is cars on the motorway and the rage for more roads. That poetry makes nothing happen sometimes seems the highest compliment one could pay to poems. Poems don’t need to be paid, but poets do.
*
To become daphne, you need xylem for pumping water to plump up the stars, and phloem to store their sugar. The Little Witch swings a purse of herbs and a biochemical understanding. Her hair rises up like Medusa’s, but her gaze is kindness. These days the poem that pleases me best when I meet it resembles the black-backed gulls I can see now alternately gliding and working the air over the early morning harbour. Low sun makes their bodies glow white against the dark green backdrop of the headland opposite, a whiteness rendered intermittently invisible by the action of their own dark wings pushing the air down, then lifting up again.
*
A couple of hours later, a container ship all red, blue, white and beige is slipping out of the harbour while in the foreground two red tugs wait to usher another ship into the picture. The interisland ferry slides between the dark green peninsula that points back into the harbour and the rumpled green headland that points out into the turbulence of the strait.
