Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
I guess that my forage into the World of Red Shoes gave me my first ever standard.
I can never be satisfied with a good red shoe. Even a great red shoe. This shoe I liked wasn’t the best shoe in the world, not the most attractive, not even the reddest. My professor at university spent some time talking about immanence. A kind of glow, a kind of spirit. When you know it’s good, and it’s right. What my red shoe did for me was to give me an example of something that I could hold up as a standard for what I really wanted – my immanent shoe. I had always had trouble really knowing what I wanted. So easy to be submerged by what was there, to believe that inside of that group a choice needed to be made, or the fear that I would get nothing at all. There’s nothing at all wrong with nothing at all. It’s just waiting, and sometimes waiting is not a finite state. Maybe you can see that this was a revelation for me? And it stands with me now as a solid, companionable post that I can lean on when things get tough. I really have nothing better to do, and I like that red shoe. So I’m happy to keep looking. And wait.
My doctor said: so you are free then? Of course he wasn’t talking about the shoe, nor was he trying to make another appointment. If you are free you hardly need another appointment…I was surprised, I hadn’t realized what freedom was. It really wasn’t what I expected.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I’m not free – I’ve never been free.
.
.
.
I am, however, cheap.
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…. as in “and nasty” …. hopefully more like ….. as in “inexpensive and excellent value for the investment “…. 🙂
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Lehan, I was free once but then I got caught 🙂
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I don’t think that’s the free he was talking about either Hung.
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I told the doctor that I had nothing better to do. My future had been crashed, and so there was really nothing else I needed to do. It was then he said that I was free. I no longer had any expectations, either, of the disastrous road I was on. And so my motivation had become intrinsic. I guess that’s what he meant.
I still don’t have anything better to do. That is just luck I think – possibly bad luck, but anyway it’s luck. So what I do now is the best I am able. It’s not always that great, but it is the best.
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That chicken painting is a good portrait of my much beloved ‘Leghorn’ of some years back. At one stage, someone from the ABC had stolen her and I posted reward notices up around the ABC corridors in Ultimo. Sure enough, after a couple of days I heard a familiar clucking and clicking noise outside my door. Choking with emotion, I opened the door and in a box of shredded articles and contributions was my lovely and only Mavis, the legendary Leghorn.
Lehan, your painting brought back fond memories of Mavis, and like her, Mavis’s beady eyes always moved and followed me around the room.
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I’m envious, Gerard. I want a chicken. But I don’t think I want a chicken living in the house during the winter months. It would keep us warm. We would have a terrible food chain struggle.
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I was thinking I could turn my shed into a chicken house, and make a pen for him out of chicken wire. But it would be expensive, and in the winter he would still have to move indoors. He would be a bit neurotic from all the cats, and the dogs barking would upset him. And then, if it was a rooster he would crow. I like roosters but the neighbours are very strict about their retirement quietude. So I guess I’ll just have to keep painting them until my luck changes.
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I doubt the rooster would have to spend much time feeling neurotic. I would predict, rather, a feeling of panic, intense but mercifully short. Short if he met the dog first. Cats like to play.
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There are things I would love to have, things that I have seen in someone’s home, in a magazine, maybe in a shop, or even something I saw someone wearing on the street…
These are not anything major; a nice floral teacup of fine porcelain, a pretty scarf, a beloved book that I don’t have anymore, but which I’d like have again…
Because I have thought about them, felt and touched them, I usually spot them. Maybe among the clutter at the flea-market, in a book sale, where ever, but they usually find me…
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I do like your chooks Lehan.
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Thanks Warrigal. This one is the Genetically Modified Chook, off the Guardian news the other day.
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Saw that , Lehan, you got the likeness right…
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It was a pretty stunning chicken I thought.
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