Penny Siopis: Grief

Penny Siopis

Grief

Penny Siopis

Grief

Penny Siopis

Grief

‘Acquainted with grief’. I have always loved this line. It comes from Handel’s Messiah.

I heard it sung year in, year out. My mother was in the choir. Always at Christmas, though it was meant for Easter time.

‘Let me write your lament,’ someone said. ‘I am gifted in the aesthetics of pain.’ She was an old Greek woman, so acquainted with grief, no wetness stayed around the eye.

Like all those pictures crying in dried paint. Faces petrified.

Always the same ...

The same irregularity of the eyes, veiled and sliding sideways down into loneliness — WG Sebald

Grünewald’s Magdalene is my favourite. I had her postcard on my wall. Then my child took it to draw. The magic of his hand! The weeping, the veiling, the fingers, all lines perfectly twisted. Veins draining from a wound.

The original Greek word is unfaithful to the trauma of its translation. If wound is what gapes forever long, what of the wells behind the eyes?

And if I come back one day Take me as a veil to your eyelashes Cover my bones with the grass Blessed by your footsteps — Mahmoud Darwish

Take your ink, and draw the veil. ‘I cannot. I do not know the lines.’ No one knows the grammar of grief, so set all that aside. Just go to the studio. Go be alone, with the liquids lying there. Open the glass. Let the inky waters out. Let them rain everywhere. Let them weep. Let them bleed. Drop them in the milky paste, that gum. Let them burst their rivulets and roam. All over the place. Let every run run, and overrun. Let the hues stain the gum. Let it gobble up some.

Let everything sink into its element.

When things subside you’ll be surprised. Suspended animation. As flows arrest and gestures hang, a picture has begun. A figure? Two? And sky all empty and thick?

It’s dry to touch but quite alive. Not made by hand. Look, there are the eyes.

It looks at you. Now what to do?

It grows a skin, a see-through shroud. Is it the glue? Maybe a cloud? And there, those tiny dots. All black and bare.

I swear to you: I shall weave a scarf from my eyelashes embroidered with verses for your eyes and with your name on it A name when watered with the praises of my chanting heart will make the trees spread their branches again I shall write few words on the scarf more precious than kisses and the blood of the martyrs — Mahmoud Darwish

Don’t stop. You can flood the picture still. It’s never really dry. Put it in the sink. Let the water gush. Hold it down. The gum will rise, and let things in. Vermillion, cadmium and scarlet too. Whatever’s hot and close to hand. But now for some cerulean. Be careful; don’t wash away the eyes in all that blue. What, the Mediterranean? Please, no! Not to be lost at sea. Don’t worry; here they can be made again. It’s just a page. A skin of glue, a few specks of ink. Pithy punctuations. It’s painting, after all.

Drop, drop the rain …

Do you know how gutters weep when it pours down?

Do you know how lost a solitary person feels in the rain?

Endless, like spilt blood, like hungry people, like love, Like children, like the dead, endless the rain.

Your two eyes take me wandering with the rain, …

I cry out to the Gulf: “O Gulf, Giver of pearls and shells and death!”

And the echo replies, As if lamenting: “O Gulf, Giver of shells and death.”

— Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

It is in Lethe’s waters people dip when life is just too hard. Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, is not on Mnemosyne’s side. But they are sisters after all. Lethe quenches the thirsty dead as they go down below, but the mourners, they are the ones most parched, for mourning is just so. But you know how Greek stories go. Lethe is of time gone by, but her waters can wash away our woe. The trouble now, we talk so much, we think it is a cure, but all we find in our excavated souls is hole after hole. The water just runs through.

Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning, I’m suffering.

— Roland Barthes

There is an altar to Lethe at the Acropolis. Come, she says, come cast your eye upon my stone. It has a watery effect, but you must concentrate. Close your eyes, shut out the sacking of the city, all that burning and mutilation. It is not good to look on so much pain.

Not for anyone. See what it does to you? Your mind. Your hair. Eyelashes. All gone!

Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blink the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

— Joan Didion

I went there the other day, in search of Lethe’s stone. But her marbles, gone. Were they ever there? Freud looked there too, in 1904. Years later he penned a letter to a friend.

‘A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis’, he said. His father lost, but never mourned.

Civil war was in the air. In Greek, the name they call it is family cut in two. It’s grief, the worst of all.

Why do you stand there, orphaned children, like strangers, like passers-by? ...

Why do your eyes not run like a quiet river, so that your tears become a lake and make a cool spring, for the unwashed to be washed, for the thirsty ones to drink?

— Greek folk lament

Niobe. Water turned to stone, so terrible the picture of her children slain. Her tears ran into a river, then petrified, then dropped down to form a waterfall. This is how she is remembered. Face fixed, arms alarmed. ‘You will not drink from Lethe now. You will never, never, ever, forget.’

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.

Otherwise kill me.

— Louis MacNeice

Save these things to your memory stick. You may feel more composed. Worry less about what you know.

Is there something to be learned about the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and devastating exposure to this condition?

— Judith Butler

Read on. Read what you like.

I measure every grief I meet With analytic eyes; I wonder if it weighs like mine, Or has an easier size.

I wonder if they bore it long, Or did it just begin?

I could not tell the date of mine, It feels so old a pain.

I wonder if it hurts to live, And if they have to try, And whether, could they choose between, They would not rather die. …

The grieved are many, I am told; The reason deeper lies, – Death is but one and comes but once, And only nails the eyes.

— Emily Dickinson

Dip into viridian, and cobalt too. Drop in the glue. Cut words from the papers that you read.

See what floats, falls, fractures and fixes. Be not ashamed of the blots. Don’t stand back. Let the space between your hand and eye be small. Or not at all. From your head things will fall, tiredness and all. Paint the pit in its fleshy fruit. There is a truth. It is life after all.

It was peaceful, yes, definitely. It was peaceful, and that’s all I am prepared to share.

— Graça Machel

They did not show him the news in the end. He was too frail to see the world. Before, it was different. That’s when he read, out loud, the poem he loved most of all.

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville nor at the police station at Philippi where he lies with a bullet through his brain — Ingrid Jonker

I had a dream. From his chest, a big wound travelled across the page and at the moment of his fade, it hit the girl beside. The papers full. His dates now closed. Another dream.

In all that gray, there a spirit stands. Red, as ever, glows at his core.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – — Emily Dickinson

To Colin

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Penny Siopis lives in Cape Town where she is an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Solo exhibitions include Incarnations at the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Mauritius (2016); Penny Siopis: Films at the Erg Gallery, Brussels (2016); Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2014), and Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2015); Red: The iconography of colour in the work of Penny Siopis at the KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009); and Three Essays on Shame at the Freud Museum, London (2005). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including Kunsthaus Dresden; La Maison Rouge, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki; Tate Gallery, Liverpool; The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm/ Burlafingen, Germany; Hood Museum, New Hampshire; and the biennales of Venice, Taipei, Sydney, Johannesburg, Gwangju and Havana.

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Siopis quotes extracts from the following in her text: WG Sebald, After Nature, 1988; Mahmoud Darwish, To My Mother in The Music of Human Flesh, 1980, and I swear to you: I shall weave a scarf from my eyelashes in Khalid A Sulaiman, Palestine and Modern Arab Poetry, 1984; Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Rain Song, 1960; Greek folk lament cited in Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 2004; Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, 2010; Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005; Louis MacNiece, Prayer Before Birth, 1944; Emily Dickinson, I measure every grief I meet, 1924; Graça Machel interviewed in The Guardian, 27 June 2014; Ingrid Jonker, The child who was shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga, 1961; Emily Dickinson, After great pain, a formal feeling comes, 1929.

Published by Stevenson © 2016 for works and text by Penny Siopis, the artist ISBN 978-0-620-71800-4 Editor Sophie Perryer Design Gabrielle Guy Photography Mario Todeschini Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town

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