Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

the spring bloom which visited Mairead’s cheeks in those days before she became ill

this blush which I have always seen as another sign of winter’s passing, bringing with it the glad news that our world had turned into a warmer and differently lighted place where we could stand easier in our flesh and bones without the winter cold to bind us and indeed Mairead, as always after the first of March, had already moved the garden furniture from the shed into the back garden so it was no surprise to see her sitting there when I came around by the gable that day, sitting in her quilted jacket with a mug of coffee and a book, the day nowhere near warm enough with its stone-coloured sky overhead but Mairead as always holding to her belief that the sun had to be coaxed up into the sky and that it was her job to show it the way by sitting at the garden table in the middle of a grey March afternoon with cold-roses in her cheeks

mistress of her own domain

which was of course was the very feature that tipped Mairead in favour of this particular house when she first saw it so many years ago, the house itself ordinary enough but the unusually big garden held out the promise of trapped sunlight so that during those summer weeks when we were scouting for a place to buy she visited this particular one on three separate occasions, each time returning an hour later to stand in the middle of the garden with her face turned upwards like a pale sunflower till the third evening, around nine o’clock at night with the shadow of the house itself halfway to the sod fence which marked the site’s mearing, she lowered her face and said

yes, this is what we’re looking for

and it was only then it dawned on me that she had been checking out the angle of the sun at high summer and was happy to find that the greater part of the garden did not pass into shadow till after half nine at night so that

when I saw her that spring afternoon, with the sun slanting into it at a low angle and honed with a chill edge, she was sitting at the table in the middle of the lawn, all tucked up in a padded jacket and a mug of coffee in her hand, wired up to her iPod and reading away, and the

strangest thing

so strange

coming upon her unawares like that, my wife of twenty-five years sitting in profile with her hair swept to her shoulder and her crooked way of holding her head whenever she was listening intently or concentrating, I saw that

a whole person and their life

cohered clearly around these few details and how, if ever this woman had to be remade, the world could start with the light and line of this pose which was so characteristic of her whole being, drawing down out of the ether her configuration, her structure and alignment, all the lines and contours which make her up as the woman she was on that day, with her health and spirit intact and content, this moment in which she was lost to herself in books and music, heedless to the whole world in a way that allowed something true and unguarded of herself to present so clearly that I found myself standing at the corner of the house, gazing at her from a distance, hardly able to believe that I had shared a quarter of a century with this woman who, in a few days would have her health taken from her by

a viral event which would not only spread to a citywide scale but would also prove attentive enough to fasten into the narrow crevice of this woman’s ordinary life where its filth and virulence would prove so difficult to remove while all the time

Agnes’s despatches from the disaster area

continued to keep me abreast of things, her calls coming every evening around seven o’clock when I was sitting at the kitchen table looking out over the garden to the mountains in the distance which rose up into the grey dusk of spring, her voice on the other end telling me in a tone of cautious excitement that word had got out in the city about her installation and that it was drawing a steady flow of foot traffic through the gallery,

people who appeared to genuinely engage with the work over and above the usual well-wishers with the invigilators and the gallery owner showing her the visitor’s book which was steadily filling up with enthusiastic comments and observations which, by and large, read the exhibition as a welcome artistic engagement with some of the more difficult social issues that for too long had been ignored by a visual arts culture which seemed only too willing to withdraw into a private rhetoric at a time when it might be expected to engage with its wider social environment, plus the fact that there had also been one favourable print review in a Sunday broadsheet — an unusual enough happening Agnes assured me — which had picked up on her theme of the body as a rhetorical field, a fitting conjunction for a time when the city itself was in the national news for reasons to do with the sovereignty and integrity of the body within a democracy, a positive review she said which stressed the relevance of the piece beyond the narrow precinct of this city, such a thoughtful essay that Agnes was hopeful the two-page spread with its colour illustration might draw the attention of some curator from one of the more adventurous galleries in Dublin — there was a chance it might happen but she wasn’t holding her breath, she knew how difficult it was to break out of the provincial art scene but, for the moment

she was enjoying that glow of well-being which comes after a prolonged bout of concentrated work, very tired now and getting lots of sleep but feeling good and in fact it was only today that she had been back to her studio for the first time since the installation went up, spending the morning sorting through all her stuff, all the notes and newspaper clippings along with the sketches and templates she had worked from and there was a lot more tidying to be done than she had thought so it would probably need another day at least before the job would be complete, but never mind, it was a good feeling to have old work cleared from the studio and to have created that open space ahead of her now in which new experiments were possible, she was looking forward to that exploration and no, she wasn’t sure what she would do next but she had a feeling she might

return to oils, she felt them drawing her once more and she missed their slow application, the way they cured to their proper resolution over weeks before finally fixing themselves, she missed the way time measured itself to a slower beat whenever she worked with them, it would be relaxing to be back among the smell and feel of it, oils mixed with linseed, a welcome change at least from the intimate relationship she had struck lately with her own blood — speaking of which

something odd

she was now getting used to being drawn up in the streets by those fringe members of the visual arts community who were eager to make known their admiration for the brave — their word — work she had completed, artists her own age with tattoos and piercings and too much mascara and

it’s weird Dad, she said, I’ve been showing oil on canvas all this time and was able to pass unmolested on the street but the moment I leave down my brush and take up a syringe, people are anxious to see me as some sort of Jeanne d’Arc or someone like that, someone bent on self-sacrifice, the exemplary sufferer who’s supposed to stand against I don’t know what and

I was happy to listen to Agnes going on in this mode for a while because it was assuring to know that one of us at least was out there having a good time, engaging with the world in a way that did not sicken or frighten her and as a father it was good to hear in her voice the sound of someone coming into their own, my daughter taking a decisive step towards herself, a curious feeling which had me in two minds, as if I were welcoming and saying goodbye to her in the same moment, all the anxious feelings a father has for a daughter as