I don’t believe I really have anything in common with Tracey Emin, apart perhaps from the fact that we are both female. She is bold and brash, deep thinking and highly artistic and of course seems to simply thrive on controversy. I admire anyone who feels able to throw open their lives and their souls for other people’s entertainment and scrutiny but really that’s not my style. Tracey Emin, however, did something in early 2016 that fascinates me. I find it both amusing and moving in equal measure.
So what did she do that has stuck with me nearly 12 months later? Well how do I put this? . . . Tracey Emin married a rock.
To be fair it’s not just any old rock, it is apparently an ancient standing stone . . . but still . . .
So? Crazy? Some might say definitely, but when I read her thoughts (and don’t mistake me there is part of me that concedes that it was most probably some kind of publicity stunt) I was quite stuck by the romantic ideals of the match.
“Somewhere on a hill facing the sea, there is a very beautiful ancient stone, and it’s not going anywhere,” she has said. “It will be there, waiting for me.”
Weirdly, and please don’t think I am loosing it, I can actually empathise with this idea. Who wouldn’t want that kind of relationship. To have something so timeless and unmoving somehow linked to you could seem a comforting idea.
In another interview Emin has called her stone “an anchor, something I can identify with”. Perhaps this is the attraction (is that the right word), a partner that is, pardon the pun, solid. But what does it say about today’s society if the most stable partner she feels she can find is one a lot older than her (by several thousand years), with no pulse and more than a little difficult to take to out to dinner?
She is not the first to have amorous ideas about inanimate objects, after reading the article about Emin I began looking into it a little. It is a recognised condition. In 2015 the tabloids relished telling the story of a woman declared her devotion to a tree she called Tim. There was also a woman who married the Berlin Wall (how did she feel after they knocked it down I wonder?) and another who wed the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Silliness?
Last year Emin said “The stone I married is beautiful and dignified – it will never let me down” and to be fair isn’t that all any of us want from our partners? Just a thought.
For more thoughts, the same but different, try this : Rock Solid Love
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