Collection Study

Gabriella Boyd, Presser, 2024

Xanthi Barker’s An Encounter with Presser is written in response to Gabriella Boyd’s Presser (2024), an oil on linen work in which two figures merge with their surroundings; one sits at a table in front of a bowl and one more shadowy figure cracked and bisected with lines. Both the title and the heightened tactile quality in the painting evoke a sense of touch that might be at once comforting, coercive or painful, like a ‘tumour pressing on a nerve’, as Boyd has said. Barker used Presser (2024) as a departure point as she reflects on the death of her father and illness.

Text by Xanthi Barker

An Encounter with Presser

“There’s another world, but it’s in this one.” ¹

¹ Although mostly attributed to the poet Paul Éluard, this line itself has travelled through different bodies, reinvented and reused, as Paul Eluard himself perhaps found, reinvented and reused it. Mackenzie Wark follows the trail here: https://publicseminar.org/2014/01/there-is-another-world-and-it-is-this-one/. I came across it through my dad’s own rewriting of the line in his poem ‘Double Take’ (Sebastian Barker, The Hand in the Well, Enitharmon (1996)).

Paul Éluard

I

For a long time, I thought dead people stayed dead, and people, dead or alive, could not leak from their bodies but were held, singular and captive, inside them. I don’t know why I thought this. I had no evidence. In fact, I had often spent an hour or more talking to a person who then floated with me wherever I went after, arriving unannounced, incorporeal, repeating some idiosyncratic phrase or gesture. Like when I caught myself in the glass of a shop window, my arms hanging tense and unsure, exactly as my mother’s did. Or when I opened my mouth, intending the utmost sincerity or intimacy and heard someone else’s words ricocheting out. Or when among a group of friends we found ourselves converged, driven by a centrifugal force made of need, circumstance and affinity, in which passions, hatreds and turns of phrase bled from one body to another.

Often, people had merged, burst, leaked and blurred. But these incidents, alarming as they sometimes were, could pass unseen, unnoticed, inconsequential. It was possible to pretend.

The first time I saw a dead body it was not possible to pretend anymore. The lie was obvious. The illusion was instantly revealed, a kind of flimsy packet-mix version of reality nobody even liked the taste of. Death was there in the room with me and it had been all along. My dad was on the floor and he was not on the floor. He was absolutely dead and he had escaped. Slipping away into the fabric of things.

A few weeks before that day, when he was walking the vertiginous line between one type of being and the next, he had told me something with an urgency that gave away the scale of wonder this fact held in his mind. He said there were particles of matter so small they could pass through this planet without noticing it was there. They were called mu mesons, he said. I hung onto his words like I was hanging onto the edge of a cliff. Of course, his words were the cliff that I was hanging onto the edge of, in love with them and in terror of what lay below. I hadn’t had enough of his words and I would never have had enough and so each word I absorbed deep into my architecture like grief had recreated me out of sponge. In that moment I saw not only his face, crumpled and exhausted, mysterious and playful, but also the room, the house, the city, the planet expanded to the scale of the universe. There were huge gaping gaps in the structure of things. It was obvious once I’d seen it.

‘There’s a crack in everything,’ Leonard Cohen sings, ‘that’s how the light gets in.’ ²

² Leonard Cohen ‘Anthem’, The Future, Columbia Records (1992)

But also, it’s how the light gets out.

These are the cracks I see in Presser. Those fractured lines that break up the space. The atmosphere itself is fractured, like its bones are broken. The space is wounded. What does it mean to live in a wounded space? I see the shadow figure caught in lightning thoughts, wrapped tight like a caterpillar in its pupa, melting its body down to liquid. Is it in the hydraulics of pain that metamorphosis is possible? To be with a person in their sickness and suffering is to be willing to take the echo of that sickness and suffering into your own body, your own mind. To bear witness; to bear the stretch and tug and thrash of taking what is offered and holding it safe, whether or not it is wanted; to be willing to be altered completely.

I think about how inadequate every word I spoke to my dad felt, and how much better it would have been if I could have taken out the feelings I had for him and given them to him, a ragged glowing thing to press inside his own chest.

The sick bed is a liminal space. A waiting room at the edge of existence — perhaps in your own living room, your own home. Perhaps a mu meson or one thousand will pass straight through your chest while you are sitting there and you won’t notice. This is the space where it is possible to leak from one world to another. Where it is likely the other world will leak back. Where the patient becomes an apothecary, mixing their irreducible selves into a potion their loved ones may or may not be able to drink.

I see you in there, Presser: a blue face mixing your golden soup, mixing up the golden bones into medicine. And your witness: a vampire drenched, hovering on the precipice, hospitable and needy, bold and repentant, sucking up all sense of dying and metamorphosing in whatever way is possible.

II

I should tell you that once I also slipped through those cracks, found myself falling through into another world.

It was soon after my dad died. I could not sleep. Instead, I would close my eyes to see the world splitting open. There were cracks in everything and I could slide straight through. I could step out of bed and into an alternate world, rooms that did (not) exist, shaped in angles, colours and carpets both familiar and unfamiliar, the precise experience described as uncanny, and yet in this instance all other uses of this word were hyperbole. Death had struck and space-time would not hold together and so I slipped through its torn gaps and found myself sliding and crawling through sickening places — the wrongness of them precisely that they were, on the one hand, possible and tangible, sensorially and architecturally precise with the grim white glow of the energy-saving bulbs, wall smudges and conglomerates of dust; and yet on the other, these spaces were vacant, secluded, untouched, and I knew with instant certainty that whoever lived there could never get out, would exist only in that fragment, an ugly island like a lethal mistake in the design — the spaces felt lethal that was what sickened me, that I knew if I stayed too long, took too many breaths, or ate from their absurdly stocked kitchen, like a twenty-first century urban Persephone, I would be stuck forever. It was fear entire, and I was entirely awake, my mind lucid as I fretted that I did not know my way back, did not know who or what might reside there. Yet I was led by an urgent desire to see and to know. What was I looking for? What boundary had I crossed? And by what force or by whose decision was I permitted, each time, to be released, travelling by the weight of my own corporeality, dragged, suck-suck-lurch, back into my own bed and body?

Everything had come apart. The seams wouldn’t hold. How had I not noticed them before? Now they left great gashes in the multiplex.

We talked about those seams, in fact.

You and I.

The painter of Presser and the writer of this essay.

You are not dead but springing with life, light, turpentine and hog-hair brushes. Your hand holding a brush dipped in colours made of metals and oil, as though it was possible to pull these images, these feelings, directly from your head and build them out of earth, rock, stardust. My hand tapping on black plastic keys marked with the modernised Latin symbols for the sounds we breathe and chew and spit our meanings into.

What I might see on the horizon, out through the pinkish, smaller window on those muddy slopes: those two sets of hands walking together, demoted for the moment to the role of gesticulation, while our feet took the pride of walking and dancing, carrying us over mud-trenched fields in the auspicious sunlight, fabric tags on our wrists and our feet making shapes, our arms trombones and saxophones. We ate through time disavowing night and day, laughing at the idea of it, ha ha ha, like Max in his wolf suit sailing off ‘in and out of weeks, and almost over a year’.³ It was like our limbs could thrash through the boundaries of things; like that kind of joy could rip its own hidden tunnel through the seams of time.

³ Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are

Except when I landed back home alone in my treacherous bed, a cold, weak fever in my empty hands, the ceiling pillow duvet smudged window collapsing into one shape, punctuated by the sea-bleached sheep’s shin bone I kept on the sill, cadmium yellow fish-bird signalling my dad’s hand, and all the hollows of my body. Hollow were the barrels of joy,
hollow were the barrels labelled enthuse
hollow were the barrels labelled will to live
and, too, miserably, hollow were the barrels labelled sleep: I could not.
No, my body could. But my mind could not. Have you ever remained awake to witness the feeling of your body deactivating, surrendering its agency to the forces of rest, also called sleep paralysis? My body was a cage of flesh lying on top of my shrunken I straining to get out (hollow burned the barrels labelled: breathe) tug tug tug please please please terror like a long silver knife curved and swinging straight for my chest — all these creeping fingers pressing me, pushing me, whispering that I had no choice but to disappear

and all at once I flew free.

Snuck out and above myself. Saw that sad exhausted girl splayed and lonely on the bed. How small and witless her sad face.
Vertigo. Freedom.
Vertigo.
Freedom.
It was not my first flight from myself.
If I had died already, I wanted to use it.

I bolted for the cracks.

And you painted them.

These lightning cracks, these electromagnetic waves, these branches of invisible trees, red laced on brown, I know you. But how will these scarred feet carry me where the branch splits, where the fold threatens itself, where the edges dissect, so that I can reach the sprung green chlöe above, the bee-gold pollen spreading into a rose, threading its way to the edge of the canvas?

When someone dies you should not say I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. You should say, Don’t blink. They are coming for you.

Sometimes in the long grass. Sometimes in a bowl of golden gruel stirred by the hand they used to hold, or the hand they used to hold a spoon of blood, their light robe dangling.

Do not forget the sunlight stripes on the stairs that stop you tripping up when you are rushing down to save a life, remember they are there so that while you are rushing to save a life you save your own life also, do not think that you must give your life to save a life, this is what those yellow lines are telling you. There is a road out and it is rolling through a window frame draped with bougainvillea, that shocking pink that will sneak fantastic shards back into your barrel of joy when you’re not looking. Don’t forget the instruments of fire someone has put there precisely for this moment and that you can use to scare off the hands that will tear up the edge of the ground and shake it so that you feel yourself being sucked into it because they are raging at the fact of your barrels not being empty anymore. They will suck you in if you blink for a moment. Let them.

III

Out of the other window, its large plates of glass partly obscured by reflected light, I see another day. Those same two sets of hands, our hands, again demoted, gesticulating, holding bags and exchanged books. The same sick cadmium sun spooling over smoother hills, and the golden gruel announcing itself as an ice lolly followed by another: we needed the ice lollies because terrible things were happening, terrible things of which we were trying to speak. We ate them, lick by lick, while the hills took our breath, made us sound like our beloved impossible ones, an echo that spilled into everything we said. There are conversations in which what passes between two people spins out beyond the words which are uttered, more like those ragged glowing things, pressed from chest to chest. For a long time, every time I was out of breath I thought of my dad, and remembered the sound of him, how it filled up a room. This day was nine years later and I remembered no less, only now strapped to my chest I had this wriggling, bleating sign of the future, my four-month-old daughter, her extraterrestrial intelligence interrupting our journey. She stole a lick of your icy lolly, this leap across the boundaries of things, while we were distracted by the inadequacy of words, words, words — how babies and the terminally ill glue clocks to our throats so we cannot speak but measure them. I remember after my dad had gone, I was driving with his friend and said something ridiculous like how four days had passed, I should be able to think and sleep, and she said, Four days! Four days! Oh how strange it is to count the days, so like after the birth of a new baby. I see the cerulean sky leaking in, my painter friend, how the future cracks open like an egg on your head, sometimes, and other times like a fledgling hop, skip, leaping from your chest.

All this unthinkable coexistence, how time unveils itself, veiling itself all the while, revealing nothing but shards of sensation. How an emotion flies in and changes the shape and texture of the world that is inhabited, how many worlds are overwritten atop one another. George Saunders has a word for this, when the feeling is despair: darkenfloxxed.⁴ As children we understood it as what happened when the Dementors appeared on the scene.⁵ Here I see your apothecary mixing treasure from shed blood, the kind of treasure that cannot be lost or exchanged, the kind that only lives inside a body, let’s call it something that begins in those shards of joy and keeps on soaring, let’s call it a hybrid creature, a bird built of a single feather whose threads erupt in cherry blossom, wild strawberries, poppy seedpods, winged lemons, let’s call it Brute, as you did.

⁴ Darkenfloxx is a fictional drug used to induce debilitating depression in George Saunders story ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ in Tenth of December (2013).
⁵ Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling, 1999.

Yes, brute is the word for this brutal juxtaposition, how dare the barrels be filled again? How dare one feeling transpose itself into another? How dare this sea-bleached whale-bone arrow dipped in oblivion begin to sprout with the softest petals of becoming? How dare six thumbprint eggs fallen from a rainbow hawk brood insouciant at the edge of things? No, these eggs are not so inviolable: one has rolled from the nest. They send out a laser to hook their sibling back, scold the red ball for daring to be spherical. The purpose of an egg’s asymmetrical shape is that unilateral escape is not possible. Every egg of pain finds its way back to the nest. There is no slipping away from the ticking certainty of loss: an abyssal uncertainty is the only future guaranteed. This scolding spell poses as a paradox, until Brute bursts forth, signalling the many paths leading back from, or straight on through, the void. How do your snowy feathers glisten simultaneously with life, light and the sea-bleached bone-pale of death?

Take me with you.

Or do I see you flailing out every force of light you have only to stop us slipping behind your red door? An incandescent decoy.

I have a guess what is behind there.
These two unbearable things:
The underworld itself, all our dead ones become the sea inside it.
And the future itself, invisible, a hungry secret coiled, guarding its eggs.