I can’t. The cat’s tail swishes and slips between worlds. The cat’s tail. The cat’s tail swishes. I. I make present. I make this. I make available. It comes. Rub that. Forget. It moves. If a dream. Despite grief. Loneliness. Despite. A Thousand inhibitions. They come. Into. They come into being at all. Be. Let me. Be. Let me. In. A match strike, she moves, match strike. The beauty of an enamel coffee pot. It reflects the flare. The holiness. No. I try to move. This. What is left? Hair. She. Remember an easel. Grimsby, of all places, it was everything. The cat. Let me. Try. Don’t hurt. Don’t harm. Fur. The fluidity, I hope it carries something of me into the world, the paint. The detail. As uncertain as a smear. The cat’s tail. Swishes. Nerve memory with strategy and willingness. I’ve left the film, the book, the drawing. Another space, but still. Hold this. Hold this open.

Skittering blooms. They were my figures. To see what had not been. These eyes, only mine. Could only be. I hope. No. I. Let me. In. And it opens onto her. To think. Together. This way. This thinking as. With. My own. Matrescence? It opens. It closes. An opening. An enclosure. An erotics. Here. You can put it anywhere. Negative capability. What is happening here? The arctic rigor. There is both. Held. Held. For a moment. Held. Rub that.

Both. Her hair. A metaphysics. Always two sides to a line. It curls. Corpuscular. Dandiacal performances, curling and bunching, just so. Paul. At an opening in a white silk scarf and a Dior cashmere coat bought for 15 quid in a Stockholm charity shop. Those gold Fassbinder frames. Rub that.

A single line. Then. Another. Just. Another. Now.

I can’t. and that’s the thing. I can’t. It comes from there, from what was once considered negative. It’s the something. Something. Out of nothing. Blooms. Skittering nerves. The figure. Figurative. To hold open. For now. For this moment. It’ll change. To hold. Open? To shelter. To be the space we can, be. Soaring upwards. Dream refuge. Illusions of extravagant fantasy. Alone. Far from this. Century. Memories of more congenial times, Berlin, perhaps. Of less base surroundings. This jejune, idiotic, cretinous. World. Stay. Speak. Memory.

But the figure you were working with wasn’t humanistic. It wasn’t about depth.

These dreamers are not surrealists. This dreaming isn’t a collapse or a ludic slippage. No, this internal, framed languor - this revery - is completely bound up with. What? Construction? I remember standing in Paul’s studio looking at a sheaf of drawings in process and being struck by the rubbings and erasures, the amount of editing and redrawing involved in the production of these pictures, the sheer weight of visual and material thinking on the paper. The studied gesture. The whole body, its nets of nerves, muscles, grey matter, every little experience, success, failure, frustration, that plays out and is sublated in the sheer accomplishment of a pencil line. The metaphysical pleasure of shading. Rub that. Hold.

Open.

John Douglas Millar, 2023