It’s 6am in the morning, I’m in Sydney, Australia. I’ve been here for about 30 hours now and to be honest I’ve spent most of the time asleep, dreaming. Strange dreams mainly to do with death and journeys and art and fear. In fact, all to do with fear.
Today is one of the first days in months that I have not woken up in pain.
I’m not sure if it’s because of the dreams or the vast amount of sleep. Or maybe I’m lying on some magic ley line and my body is being spun by some incredible cosmic energy.
At security my bag of urine is checked for explosives. Sometimes they apologise, sometimes they don’t
Or just maybe the megaton dose of antibiotics I’m taking every day is kicking in.
I’ve just had one of the worst infections, a bad bout of E. coli.
For some people it’s pretty harmless, something that will come and go, flushed away with limiting effect. For me it’s an entire body takeover. This time, I swear to God, it got into my brain, crept up my spine, climbed its way through my neck up into my skull and started to attack my eyes from the inside. Holes in the side of my head made with a heavy metal drill, grinding away at the bone. Bleeding and shitting and shaking.
My kidneys felt bruised like they had been booted by a gang of steel toe-capped bovver boys.
This is how it is when you live without a bladder and you essentially have a hole on the outside of your body that leads directly to your kidneys. There is a constant vulnerability and fear. I think that’s why I’ve been dreaming of death.
It’s funny being here in Australia cocooned in this room, my cancer, my surgery all seem a million miles away, like it never happened, like it was another dream, a bad one.
I feel triumphant for getting here. It’s not easy travelling with a stoma.
Half my giant suitcase is filled up with medical supplies.
Fifty night bags, 40 urostomy bags, scrims, sprays and half a fucking pharmacy.
A lot of the time I go through airports in a wheelchair. I feel like a fraud but the truth is I can’t walk to gate 42 or wherever it may be, I can’t get that far without stress and fear of having a bodily malfunction, giving myself a hernia or simply just being too weak to walk the average 10,000 steps needed at any airport to board a plane.
Going through security my bag of urine is always checked for explosives. Sometimes they are nice and apologise, sometimes they don’t.
On the Eurostar last year at Gare du Nord, they made me take my bag of urine out of my tote bag and hold it above my head. It was a rancid affair, I felt pretty humiliated.
But today I’m feeling triumphant. I’ve come all the way to Sydney to look at art.
A pilgrimage to see the work of my friend, the late great Louise Bourgeois.
Louise was 97 when she died back in 2010. She had met and known lots of the great European artists of the 19th century and, of course, the late great American artists of the 20th century.
All mostly men of course. Louise’s career didn’t really get started till she was in her sixties.
At the end of her life we collaborated together on a series of prints titled DO NOT ABANDON ME.
I had Louise’s splashy watercolours for two years before I dared draw on them. Every time I saw her I’d apologise for being so slow. She’d say, “Take your time. You have time!”
Then one day, with my spindly ink lines, I turned her penises into crucifixes and her pregnant torsos into landscapes with giant vaginas, I wrote poems and text. It was a magical process, the works looked like they had been made by a single hand and a double mind.
I felt like I was holding hands with art history.
I felt like Louise and I were travelling through time.
I’m so lucky to be here.
Has the Day Invaded the Night, or Has the Night Invaded the Day?, Louise Bourgeois, Sydney Modern Art Gallery, New South Wales
Tracey Emin is an artist
