SNAKES & LADDER

Dear Darren,

You told me over the phone you felt to always be saying the same thing about paintings. I know the feeling, but once the call ended I got thinking about why that might be such a bad thing. Or what the compulsion even to say new things is or where it comes from or why it might be least useful, especially, and most of all, when dealing with something as mysterious and obvious as a painting.

Have you ever seen the Paul Klee painting The Snake on the Ladder? I love the title more than the work. If the snake is on the ladder we can neither climb upward nor slide down. Which is a way of saying that action organises grammar or grammar organises action. Either way, the snake and the ladder entwine and our reading of both must change.

I’m writing this from a plane and the coastal low has scalloped the air up here. We shoogle like gravel in a gold pan. Crazed waves break in all directions below us, sea looks roughed with sandpaper. The sun hits the wing and I’m blinded. I wish I understood the weather like I wish I understood engines. It exists to me mostly as a vague, unruly and persistent claim the world makes unto itself, a kind of petulance we accommodate with a set of instruments that tell us where not to be and when. Flight routes are altered, towns evacuated with warning or with sudden fire or water.

But this isn’t a climate letter. Though perhaps it is a things turning up in ways we don’t expect letter. Like a snake on a ladder. Or the scuzzy flecks of an underpainting skulking below the final layer.

Which I was reminded of recently when a doctor scooped a benign lump from my forearm. I watched him insert and tighten stitches, arrange narrow tabs over the wound, dab it with minerals, align and smooth a dressing over the lot and finally waterproof it with a strange sticky plastic. At which point the whole configuration seemed to shimmer and I felt to be seeing through the gauze itself and looking upon the tabs and minerals and stitches which had been covered only a moment ago, and then through them into the cavity which they were put there to seal, and then through even that, through time, through every other surgery my doctor has ever conducted, through his medical training, through each and every overdetermined current buoying him into his profession and me atop his operating table. I thought of you, of our friends, bent over their various labours––paintings and poems and songs––delicately applying, shifting and removing things in an unruly and persistent submission to claims the world makes unto itself.

Which is to say, Darren, the weather is the weather. How we proceed––in those labours or in travel––is a matter of how we read it. Let’s see if the snakes uncoil.

Love,

Gabriel

Text by Gabriel Curtin