Metamorphosis of Narcissus.
Dear friend,
Chiara, Lucy, and I stood today in front of Salvador Dalí’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus. It must be an image I’ve seen over and over again as a thumbnail online or reproduced in magazines.
It’s hanging on the wall on the fourth floor of the Tate Modern. Somehow, I couldn’t quite feel certain that we were looking at the original work of art.
You get so used to mis- and disinformation.
But it was the genuine article. I love to get as close as I can to a painting and imagine the artist making a particular brushstroke. With Metamorphosis of Narcissus, it was honing in on the details of the figures in the background, and then you’re taken by the image, falling upwards into the road along the coastline. In a dream.
You can get lost in an art gallery.
We had a bit of an incident earlier this morning when Dippa got to playing with a burly staffy on the canal path.
I know the staffy—he goes by the name of Simba and is a cannonball on legs. The two of them took Lucy’s legs out from beneath her and barreled her onto the towpath in what could have been a nasty fall. She’s having a salt bath now to ease a strained thigh muscle.
My fault.
It would have been better to have had Dippa on the lead.
“It’s always the owner’s fault,” said Lucy, and I think she’s right.
On the way back from the Tate, we dropped by to celebrate Pablo’s daughter’s birthday. The good news: his dog is a lot better, and the swelling on his jaw has gone down.
He’s in good spirits. It was a relief to see him that way.
It was nice to see their family together.
To celebrate.
A year of a kid’s life, in which so much has changed.
You want things to stay the same when it’s good.
But they don’t.
The upside is, the down times don’t last either.
How to come to terms with constant change?
I guess one step is to move deeper into acceptance of what is.
It’s nature.
Moving in cycles.
Can you imagine yourself at the very center of it?
Right here in you, life takes on her myriad forms.
A universe.
A Dalí.
A Picasso.
A woman sitting,
Stunned, on the towpath.
A cannonball of fur and legs and dog spit. Crazy birthday candles going off like fireworks while we sang out of tune, once more with feeling.
Life lived in the details.
In the ever-changing,
Now.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey