Periodicity

Picasso, I am told, worked in periods. So do I: several years back I was seized by textiles; I read every book on textiles I could lay my hands on; visited every museum and every private collection; spent countless hours looking through reams of cloth in shops and warehouses. The ‘period’ culminated in two extended driving trips, one in India and one in Thailand, going from one weaving center to the next to see the work and to buy samples, sometimes still on the loom. Perhaps the greatest fun was driving through villages with the window down and listening for the clack-clack of the loom, then following it to find the solitary weaver weaving under the house, a few strokes at a time in between cooking rice and seeing to her children; and barging in on her to see the work.

Then there was the Iznik tile period, which took me to Istanbul and Iznik and London and Lisbon; the South East Asian dance-drama period which took me to Bali, Bangkok and Java on numerous occasions over three consecutive years; the Italian painting period before it, with repeat visits to both Italy and all sorts of museums all over the world; and the Baroque opera period before that, during which I crisscrossed the Atlantic chasing rare performances of obscure works, spent hours in audio-libraries and acquired a vast collection of records. And always read, read, read.

Now I am discovering cinema, an art which I have always ignored. Good films had seemed so far in between; now I know that they were simply hard to find, a problem thoughtfully solved for me by a local video store entrepreneur. So, I have been watching films, three, sometimes four, a day.

There appear to be many branches of art which I have not yet discovered: enough to keep me busy next thirty or forty years.

(But how do I square my misanthropic insistence that my happiness must be self-sufficient with the fact that so many of my pleasures are man-made?)