an article written by a very talented Sophie Ward
The Feathered You
WHO DO YOU SAY THAT YOU ARE WHEN I ASK YOU? WHO DO YOU SAY THAT YOU AREN'T? WHO ARE YOU THAT I'M NOT?
How can I ever find out. What if you weren't like me, because really, you are. You were made on the same clay board, turned about and smoothed over, grooved in particular places. But your life happened when you were born, when people talked to you and told you your name. Your world was created through language and custom and special days when you wore clean clothes for a change, when you blew fire from wax sticks stuck into cake every year. The smoke dreamt about, floated through your life and altered the way you sensed the world. There's so much smoke about you, everyday. Your fires are what I'm interested in. I want to know you before the smoke. I want to know what you were like before your flame went out, what it's like when it's lit. I don't know why you want to be different. You want to be different. This I know.
I remember the faces most. The strangers, the odd ones, the people I see myself in. They seem to have held on and I watch them move often past my eyes, like a silent flim rolling through the veins in my body, I'm always aware of the memories. Voices that brush forth through the noise, eyes that look not right nor left but straight at me and down through this web of rumbling nerve and emotion. They turn up in times most unexpected. A boy with salt-faded hair and skin like shortbread on a beach of sugar-silt sand, a crinkled nose and gap teeth. A sister with inqusitive green eyes. A mountainous man with wavy grey hair and graceful hands. Who was that tiny girl in the doorway? Who was she talking to? There was a lone man I saw from the beach once, floating on the horizon with a face painted white and streaked, I thought he should be a ghost, and it seems he has lingered. What does it mean when you're never mistaken and when these faces mean everything and nothing? They were dots on the horizon. But the only ones.
When there are so many people, the look almost the same. just almost. You are like me, all white bone and warmth, but look closer at my face. Wonder what it's like to be me or a man or a woman. I've found boundaries I never knew could exist in a person, lines on a face that make mystery a game. I sometimes forget I'm different because I hear it was better to fit in, it's more fun to be the shadow of Peter Pan rather than walk into the light. The shadow runs wild but it's so unreal. It doesn't have any breath that you have and there are no great lines on a shadowy face.
Somewhere right now there's somebody else alive adn breathing. Someone painting their skin with mud and feathers, winding on a beaded bandanna, an unusual dress. Someone like you is talking to the world, changing the marks and making them over. Why shouldn't we wear feathers everyday? I think you have your own version, and it's quietly hidden in shadowy smoke. Under who is say that you are, there you are. Only you've forgotten how different the dance sounds. Remember in real life there couldn't be any shadows and there's nothing to frighten you. Let your shadow run off, let it play for a while in the light. I want to see you, who you are and who you aren't, your different feathers.
Once long ago, you learnt how to act in the world and were told that in this theatre you ought to stay the same and sane. Sometimes you think otherwise but we abide by so many directors. You've made music no one has heard and art that can't be seen. But it's quiet in the dark, isnt it? Aren't you just longing to find out what you look like alive? Just what do you want to do today, who are you going to be? St Francis de Sales said to someone, 'Do not try to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly'.
There will always be shadows, for the darkness would only be gone if you were, but your light is most interesting; the changes, the drama and wilder faces. The voices and hands and whatever it is that you do with them.
Together we're liquid clear and coal-black different all at once, in a flash. But you've caught the reflection, a light or a shadow. I see your inquistion. We're watchers of the change and the curiouser the change is, the better the day. Given the choice between colours and canvas, you'll paint the canvas just for the change. I'm here because you're painting a canvas. You have something to give to the world and you're the corner store fellow, the boy on ths bus, the UN, Miuccia Prada. People need that breath in the world, always shifting and growing, are magnetised by the excitement about them. Life is about you being in it. They need you to be you and nobody else.
I'm interested in who you aren't, and the only one person you are in between.I want to fall into your inky skin and see through your looking-glass eyes, I want to be you and love not being you, because you want to be me and it's interesting. Can I fall through your mind for a while? Would you like to know me? Watch the painting, my hands, that voice. You've wondered why fire is hypnotic, I think. You'll find there's always surprise on the sidewalk; people waiting to dance, cigar smoke at noon, a wind blowing the breeze and those constants of change. Might the unthinkable happen? Know thyself and thy neighbour will follow.
One day I'd like to be an astronomer, so I can see al the flights of the universe and be able to feel the future. I like to imagine the past travelling towards me, watch the light of stars maybe already gone, to know that where I am is the future already, or almost. It seems poised just beyond my reach and I'm hovering before and above or below it. If the past is travelling both towards and away from me, and the future never arrives, I'm only here now and I'll never be again. There is always a now, and then it's away. Change happens now, your different now. Though onced it' past you've seen it before and you're bound up in the press of the clockwork, between the canvas and paint, waiting to explode into reinvention.
Watch the sky. The explosions in space are thrilling and can alter the way the world is thought out. Explode every day. Because below the cloud, you don't notice what astronomers do. I've watched for a light and the fuse only burns when you dance with the time, look up when you can and feel the world already at your feet. The longer you do so the longer you'll live, for a continuously changing body has no burden, it remembers nothing and thinks about today before tomorrow and yesterday never. Can you think of the most memorable face in your veins, the ones that have lasted, the greatest on this spherical horizon? The great ones, you'll see, don't fade with the sun. You'll see why they linger. You'll linger.
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well said, I'm going to write a letter or like..something to the magazine congratulating her, that article was truly wonderful, to me
