WOW

We're standing in Southend Library this morning, looking out the window, and she comments on the press coverage this tree has recently had. I'm not a morning person, really - bit slow on the uptake, so she kindly pointed out that it's March, and this tree has forgotten to shed its apples. It still thinks it's the growing season. I made a politically incorrect joke about her comment on the tree being some Scottish breed - I said, well, the Scottish are known to be tight, but... funny at the time. Anyway.

I don't blame the tree: it may or may not know there's a recession and to hang on to - and show off its assets seems to me to be a good move. It also appears not to know that it's not autumn any more; winter has passed, it's spring. To be in joyful denial of the seasons passing is quirky but I find optimism in it. Or it's ruthless determination, but either way, me and the tree might be kindred spirits.

And we have to be: the recession has hit the arts badly, and the landscape is changing at a daily pace; worried faces, an unsure future; considering options, plan B, plan C... let's go to a Kibbutz instead and leave it all behind.

Hardly: really exciting to hear Syd Moore on Womans Hour www.bbc.co.uk/programmes11/03/11 'give it some' about reclaiming the Essex Girl stereotype, her Essex accent loud and clear, but what a pleasantly feminine and eloquent voice. Syd is an intelligent, articulate woman with a lot to say: unshakable conviction in her beliefs and and a determination to carry on regardless, refusing to shed any assets along the way. I take my hat off to her. She does it in style.

"Launching this year, WOW - Women of the World - is a joyous celebration of the formidable strength and inventiveness of women - a pioneering, groundbreaking annual festival, which will present, recognise and celebrate women, and act as a conversation space for issues of all kinds." www.southbankcentre.co.uk/women-of-the-world Incidentally, a Kibbutz is a combination of Socialism (common or public ownership) and Zionism (self-determination) through agricultural sustenance. So we may not have to travel to Israel to have some of the pioneering energy and celebration of ourselves, a sense of identity, a new growth of joy and optimism.

I'm not the kind to hug a tree, but that's what I might just go back and do.

Love in a Cold Climate

John Stezaker Love XI, 2006, collage. Private Collection, Switzerland. © The Artist.

I went to see John Stezaker whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/john-stezaker at the Whitechapel last week. Glamorous images - manipulated - altered - intervened; the visual language of surrealism, a central loneliness, and she remarked to me, as we stood looking at these images "How can he spend his whole life on one thing?" She's young, and we're talking about a retrospective that is pre-digital where the platinum print is iconographic and loses none of its mistique, stark in the contrast of today's expendable culture.

He must have been in love. I know I fall in and out of love with my own work, and go through times of disillusionment and times when it is so rapturously engaging. How can we fall in love with what we do? Part of it may be sublimation - to immerse and invest in one's personal dialogue. But, there are many kinds of love, as we know, but watching Michael Sandel talk about Kant and the Catagorical Imperative, it seems Reason is the one ulterior aspiration: what the "right" thing to do is; to see others, their welfare as the prime; to set an example. And so it is with love: to want the best for that person, to put that person as prime, to put them before oneself. That could be a mothers love, for some, or for a lover, a truly altruistic love; for others, it's giving to a purpose higher than themselves for the greater humanity.

The "right thing"  - these are simple rules we live by, mostly, maybe, but where was Reason when Love walked in the door? That's the gap between aspiration and motivation. By bringing the two together we become morally upstanding citizens, maybe, but where's the glamour, the romance, the loss of reason to make images as elusive and timeless as Stezakers?