Customs

'True, mortality was toffee. It was a dance of glee at the edge of the highest neon-cross hill, for the knowledge of the drop, the death, seemed to add sweetness to the movement of the dance.’¹ This is Kojo Laing in Women of the Aeroplanes (1988), a novel about Tukwan, a town of busy, committed immortals exiled from Kumasi who make trade links via aeroplane with a village in Scotland instead. That’s one of the things I like about flying, the toffee time. Thick, a moment to be with ‘the paradox of long time and short time,’² minute-to-minute monosubstance that is the same in every direction and which I give myself over to when I fly. Cannot move freely cannot get away and so you sit and are. They bring you food and drink and you watch movies you can’t really hear. There is a totality of privacy in the strange sardine proximity and what I see in Anna van der Ploeg’s figures here is that they sink into themselves, come to rest. Except the typing man of Inner beach, he looks like he is having a terrible, extremely familiar time. Temporal duress and staring into a screen. But, he is with us, and we are here amongst the people of the aeroplane. All of them aglow, they are built out of sweeps and flairs of translucent, dextrous colour; their density seems inherent to their respective beings rather than a product of the paint and brush strokes. The seep and spill of colour and luminescence in van der Ploeg’s work is the sensitivity and humour with which she sees the people and things around her, which spills out of them in turn. To my mind, the root tone of her work even in other palettes is gold, honey, saturated with inner light. That glow is the light within these figures, suspended as they are in space and time as they fly from one world of theirs to another. There is something total about them which is not at all to do with enclosure. So much of the generosity of van der Ploeg’s work is that her gaze, imagination and touch don’t seek to expose the people she paints. She invites them forwards and then makes room for them to be as they are, mutable, inscrutable, whole in their aliveness within the world and currents of their particular being. They come from her to be amongst us, ‘ritually hot’³ and vital. Her eyes move with her heart; her paint is always fresh. At one point in Women of the Aeroplane, Timmy Tale, the Ghanaian-Scottish anthropologist, asks Babo, one of the three men in love with Pokuaa, the woman at the heart of Laing’s story: ‘“So what do you do with your knowledge?...” “Live it,” Babo said simply.’4 In Customs, living is to see, to paint, and to come to know. It is a profoundly enabling thing to be seen well, to be looked for, to have someone look towards you and see you within your context as yourself, whatever your setting might be. ‘“Is this what happens when you squeeze up time and soul? How did you manage to tame technology and make it so human?”’5 Timmy Tale asks this of the people of Tukwan. Customs came out of being in transit with the many people who live and work in Europe and, at the cleft-time between the years, arrive in Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport on their various ways home. In Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport, long time is made concentrate. You drink it thick and interminable as you blur from queue to queue, trying to keep what’s clear about you so you don’t miss your flight. One year, van der Ploeg noted a trend for using cooler boxes as luggage. Cheaper than a suitcase and easier to stack. Imagination is a technology, ‘restlessness before the divine.’6 The directness of setting terms for how you move in the world; like this, with cooler boxes. When I was 28, I went to have my star chart read. I was visiting a sweet friend with many piercings who lived in a group house in a city you arrive into on the spine of one of its many vertical and declarative bridges. These hold the steep slope of the town in place as it slides down towards the river below. The young man who read my chart was overseeing the magical education of the other people in the house. One of them was a Zen Buddhist from California. Regardless, as we sat to do the chart, he began by describing to me his vision of life within the cosmos. He described a hand, dipping its fingers into a pool of water. The palm of the hand is consciousness, life. The pool is reality as we know it. Each finger is a particular manifestation of the infiniteness of life. Each finger is one of us, or one of these figures set here in the confines of the aeroplane. I found this image elegant and lovely. An image for the common fact of Being Alive. The palm as a third space that is not being alive nor being dead but having come to be in the first place. For the people held in transit in these paintings, the aeroplane is something like this, too: To come, to go, to be changed, to be untouched. The child in Moonmilk / On the wings of the moon peers over the back of their seat to see who is behind them. Going home is a return to language, to cadence, to gesture. Idiolect is the way you yourself speak. This will change as you do, in motion around where you came from and where you are going; the sweet toffee time of being warmly, densely with yourself, the thick pads of pleasure that at times come just from being alive and which can fleetingly cushion the world around you; Yes my boy. We see these people borne aloft on lambent clouds of dignity; a young boy reads his book. Things are in transformation as one leaves and returns, making life up in places that can mirror and cleave to and disconnect from what one understood, before leaving them for somewhere else entirely. The inventor Mr Kwame Regret Atta says to Pokuaa: ‘Love has altitude, and don’t I know it.’7 Looking, like in the work van der Ploeg shares with us here, can be a practice of loving and of lifting up. And when would they all meet again? And all the waving seemed to give the aeroplane greater height, as if the hands held the fuselage so easily in the palm. The jet emission was full of love spreading down to the good-bye heads below.8 Women of the Aeroplane by Kojo Laing (William Heinemann Ltd, 1988). All quotes taken from the 2011 Pearson Education Ltd edition.