Agnes has drawn this part of the mesh. We sing and dance along the lines as we bask in the sunlight breaking through the surface of the water. It is warm just beneath the surface where the sun heats the water and forms hazy patches of bleached blueness. We bask just beneath the surface and we see many others, other selves, on their own lines, on their own lines just beneath the surface of the water. We are all waiting for something to happen, it would seem. At this particular point we are all just bobbing beneath the surface of the water, just below on the lines, but fairly static. We are not in rapid motion, we are hovering on our lines, we can even be between points or between intersections— we are hovering you see, we do not need to be at a point of intensity as we realise we can be bobbing up and down a little, just treading water, perhaps lying on our backs and swishing with our hands and arms, gently moving our legs in the sun-soaked warmth. Movement so slight just enough for a hovering, a fluttering, a shimmying.
I am quite happy at this point. The Agnes Martin painting allows me to rest for a while without the immanent urgency of coursing along at high speed. I am aware that if I do progress along my line it will make everyone else move also, everyone else will have no choice but to move. My movement forces the movement of others as we are all interconnected in the mesh. We all know this and we all know that we are interdependent as well as to some extent independent. But if anyone shifts significantly it sends waves across the surface of the water, impregnating downwards, sending waves beneath the surface, activating a current or force through the water and we will all have to move suddenly as the dynamic has shifted. We move and we are immediately conscious of our motion causing a ripple effect and we are thrown deep into the water to find other points on lines much deeper in the darker regions of the sea.
The depths of the sea are much darker: a Prussian blue, a deep Phthalocyanine blue, so deep we may not easily see each other as we dive down in the mesh as it is immersed in the infinite depths of the ocean. I am much colder here, the surface was warm but the depths of the sea are cold and dark. I do not wish to stay down here but I must navigate this. Perhaps a way is through colour, perhaps a way to understand the immersion into the depths is not necessarily through dark memories but through thinking about mixing colours on my palette. I am very good at mixing pigment—from its raw materials—from the powdered pigment. Agnes struggled with colour I imagine; she did not use a lot of it.
—————————
The line you are on is your line for this particular present—another time and another line might be the one you occupy—there are many other lines. Be careful here that you do not become too rigid or assuming about the line you are on. You should perhaps be more open and sharing in the way you conduct your passage on this line. At the junction you arrive at you must slow down to almost stop at the point—the intersection with another oncoming line.
‘I have to breathe for a second,’ she thinks. Here, I meet another thought, another memory. On the line is an intersection—a point of intensity—a point of meeting with something else—with myself on another line—I have been journeying for a long time it seems and my legs are weary.
_________________
Suddenly there are many other intersecting lines all coming close together that form a bunching-up, a crusting together of blobs of matter. Matter suddenly becomes viscous and sticky like white sticky rice all stuck together or cancer cells all stuck together in the forming of a great mass. I find myself momentarily stuck at a junction: here I have a memory of cancer—of finding out that the cancer I had was the type that burrows itself into healthy flesh and eats its way through it, jumping some distance from one once healthy cell to the next, devouring healthy flesh—not the type that goes across the surface of the skin but the type that dives straight inside. Here, I am buttressed against a post of intersections in the mesh where a great mound of cancerous flesh has exploded itself across various lines. I am trying desperately to move through and beyond the cancerous zone.
_________________
You forget about A as you hurtle towards B but B is not the only place you are going and in fact B is now forgotten as you zoom very fast towards C—yet C is really not a place to stop for long as you catch sight of the beautiful blue sky out there today and decide that moving on to D would likely be a warmer more comfortable place for a sit down and a cup of tea perhaps? A cup of tea at D takes a little while as at point D there is a conundrum occurring. An event appears to be happening—which you might add was not happening when you first arrived at D, but after a little while an event definitely seems to be mounting—an energy is building and others are joining you at point D. What was a calm reflective moment, a subtle quiet moment all alone, where one can examine a subjective state of mind, suddenly becomes intersubjective or even rather rudely shared as an experience— one which you have not really wanted to share at all. Yet, everyone seems to be turning up at point D. There is a ruckus, a disturbance and somebody got hit or fell down spontaneously and suddenly there is a collective need for a decision to be made. What was the event that took place: Did anybody see what happened? We all saw it to some extent, but others might have seen what happened from a different point of view—others might have seen it differently. So, everybody’s account of the event is important—important so as to form a collaborative effort at depicting the event, so it could be uncovered what happened, what went wrong.
—————————-
The cancer will not infect all criss-crossing lines—we think—if we can move beyond, through this quickly enough we will not get cancer, we will not get HPV if we move very quickly and hose ourselves down in the shower—very quickly. “Ah my dear, not that type of cleaning—not that type—that won’t help you, dear.” I have long thought that at some point the cancer would come back—“There are a great many lines to go down there, my dear, there are millions of lines which tell us about the cancer.” I have, however, realised that although the cancer occupies this conglomeration of points, I am also experiencing the thoughts that oscillate around the cancer: the body that moves—the body that dances—the body that lives on despite the threat, despite the past—the body that moves to write—the body that paints— the body that also dances in the studio—crushed-up against this point of intensity—is also life.