Eli (me) by Estelle Cadwallader (taken in Dec 2014)

‘We don’t know why we are here.

We don’t know where we go.

We have an intellect to try to find out.

We cannot.

It’s quite desperate, no?’

ANSELM KIEFER

It’s the 14th of December and I’m in London viewing

Anselm Kiefer’s grand narratives without atonement.

Oil and blood on canvas, death fugues,

unending, peeled back layers,

textures of destruction.

These are the things that have survived,

that were pulled out of the wreckage.

I’m not arsed about Osiris and Isis’

necrophiliac progeny

and what Kiefer’s trying to say –

I just like the poetry of ruins,

the shellac, the ash, the beauty,

the chaos, the order, the pain, the cycles.

Cyclical. Circular. Life.

My life goes on and I don’t want it to.

I have no purpose or maybe I have.

Achievement.

Enjoyment.

Closeness with others.

The building blocks of CBT my therapist has shown me.

About Kiefer’s show I write:

Cataclysmic.

Volcanic.

Fundamental.

Severe depression returns me to a teenage-like state

where I don’t laugh at my overuse of superlatives

and where Kiefer is my artist of choice.

My mood can’t stomach the picaresque of Shrigley

or even Emin.

I need the punishment of Kiefer, the extremity,

mortality, misery,

man’s cruelty to man.

And yet I feel light-headed, giddy.

The sheer amount of work, the bombast of Kiefer

is a calm to arms, a call to create

…. Something.

I eat a ham and cheese toastie at Piccadilly’s EAT

as I ponder life’s unebbing circularity

exceeding the day’s self-imposed calorie quota.