I check my emails like a fly licking it’s fingers.
An unconscious, vigilant habit.
Wake up, check emails.
Pee, check emails.
Pause at work, check emails.
Finish chapter, check emails.
Before bed, check emails. (though I hardly know why, when it’s far too late for any respectable person to be conversing)
But I am convinced that someday, in the middle of service, in the early morning, after lunch, before dinner, between the Duolingo reminder and the Indeed alerts, a Carroll Alice mouse door will appear, innocuous, for me to crawl through into a bright shining possibility, the single yes among the sea of nos, propelling me into the next chapter of my life.
Someday my prince will appear in computer blue, announcing with some pride that he is pleased or happy or delighted or glad to inform me that I am finally worthy of whichsoever residency/open call/group exhibition/grant/stipend/etc. that I have begged for.
I know a habit has overtaken me when it enters my dreams.
In dreams, between confusing arguments with old friends I no longer talk to and impossible restaurant checks that wake me crying: ‘we can’t sit thirty people, you need to leave!’, I find myself refreshing the yahoo page, the app strangely formed, as all apps look to me in dreams.
I have become so used to disappointment (a lie, I never will be), that I find myself understanding what is written before it loads: thank you for your application, we are so pleased to have had X number of applications, tough competition, just not what we’re looking for, don’t give up, apply next year.
Only yesterday was different.
Yesterday, I woke, slightly too early, with the sun radiantly annoying through the curtains I failed to shut properly. And is custom, checked emails.
We are happy to inform you that your artwork “” has been selected as one of the finalists.
Florence Contemporary Art Gallery.
Huh! I think, too tired to scream and cry, as I might like to. I fall asleep.
I dream that the selected work (I have applied so much, it is difficult to remember what I have sent to whom) is a song I have written (I do not write songs) in collaboration with a friend (her songs are exceptional and need no input from myself)
The dream email goes on to specify a specific part of the song, the instrumental building up to the final chorus. I hear the music. An immense dronning sound, like honeybees in a piano, crescendoing into the biting lyrics: ‘my man wears his braid.’
(it is my understanding in the dream that within this collaboration, I have written the lyrics and she had created the music around that. I am embarrassed by writing. Something’s true in life are true in dreams)
In my sleep state, I think: ‘I must call my friend, I must tell her how much they loved her music! I must tell her that we have been recognised and enjoyed!’
Only when this insistence, this anxiety to be on with the day, to let all be known, overrides the troubled comfort of the duvet do I lift my head from my pillow and check again. I go to my email and find, not so much to my surprise as to my dread, that the email does not refer to the non-existent song of my surreal invention, but to an image of my own, something I had sent in on a whim, without properly looking to where and what I was sending.
During my second look, I realise the catch.
Florence Contemporary Art Gallery is not based in Florence, as the name would suggest, it is an online gallery. The exhibition I am a ‘finalist’ in exists only on their website.
For 70 euro, my work can be shown there.
For 100 euro, they will interview me.
For 550 euro, they will include me in their Up and Coming Contemporary Artist of 2024 e-book.
It dawns on me that this is perhaps not the opportunity it presents itself as.
But to be sure, I call my friend, I tell her about the email, in dream and in reality, about the prices, the concerning prospect that one could find themselves included in a book temptingly named if only they have half a grand sitting about, collecting dust.
And as we giggle, scrolling through the gallery’s exhibitions, their bizarre curation technique, I realised that in the email, the real one, they have made a fatal error.
We are happy to inform you that your artwork “” has been selected as one of the finalists.
your artwork “”
“”
They have forgotten to copy and paste the name of my work into the space between the speech marks.
Their only obligation, their only responsibility, to pretend that they’re not trying to simply rangle a small fortune, knowing, as they must, that artists are painfully desperate to have their work accepted, almost anywhere and they have failed. All they had to do was copy and paste. And they couldn’t do that.
Reader, I have not paid the fee. I will not be in that exhibition. The email stated I had three days to decide, I shall spend the next two smouldering, not in anger but in fear.
For I do not like to look a gift horse in the mouth. I am not so proud to make a habit of that.
Perhaps they are genuine, true to their mission statement, attempting like so many others to revolutionise the art world, one online exhibition at a time. Perhaps, I am making a deadly error, that in another world I have paid the due, have abstained from my regular indulgences so as to account for the price. Perhaps, it would have been that door I have waited and hoped for, and here I am, closing my back on it, snobbish, blind to their obvious genius.
If only they had remember to copy and paste. If they had addressed me properly. If they had offered the e-book later down the line when I might think: I have already paid a fifth, why not so more?
I will not know.
I do not know.
But in my dream, I heard the music of my friend. It was beautiful and free.
I was glad to recognise it as such.