Farrin Foster on Regret
I don’t feel regret.
I can’t connect with its implications. Regret imagines a peak and trough, another option. The promise that something better could have been.
Regret is the territory of someone else. It is for people who don’t foresee the inevitable flattening out of life; who aren’t preoccupied with the looming oblivion. People who refuse to invest in the unhappiness inherent in being alive.
They started life in a different place. Gently introduced to reality, they learned its deadpan sameness only later. Discovered the magnetic pull toward tragedy slowly, as they aged.
Regret is for those with the courage for optimism.
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Ida Sophia feels true regret. A burning loss. A grief for the evaporated potential of a different past.
Her artworks are laced with it. Light and dark. The gaping maw of loss and the burning brightness of fulfilment. Everything glazed with a glorious, glowing love.
It’s all filled with these incomprehensible shapes of a life in full motion.
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At the opening night, we all stood around her and talked. Ida sat and stared at what she had done.
After we left the gallery she sobbed and sobbed. And we watched her from the footpath - observing from a different time and place, a few metres away.
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For 28 days Ida committed to her grief and her optimism. In the gallery she watched a wall of flowers die, and she thought about her father, who had also died, but who she hadn’t watched.
The vigil - six hours a day, every day - was to release her. A penance in the form of what should have been. She created an apology in action, with the rest of us invited. We could sit with her, and we could borrow from her incendiary belief in absolution.
Ida asked for our regrets to be put on her body. Wanted us to pass them along and let them go.
But I have nothing to add.
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The first time I sat with her was a Tuesday. The gallery was empty, just me and Ida and her heartbeat amplified on the speakers, filling the room.
I feel disassociated from her, like she’s an object in the room. I decide I can’t look at her because I don’t want her to be chewed up by my gaze. The passers-by look through the enormous floor to ceiling window and stare at us both, unabashedly.
I sit there long enough that I forget about my body. A leaf drops from one of the dying branches among the flowers. Ida and I watch it. I can’t see her, but I know that’s what she is doing. Time has become slow and sticky. Every change is inescapable.
Eventually I go and sit beside her and read what everyone else has written down. It feels like voyeurism without the guilt. Most people regret what they didn’t do. Sex not had. Love not expressed. Responsibilities unfulfilled.
The ones I remember are in the abstract. A story only partially told, but its weight handed over.
Sometimes Ida’s heart changes rhythm unexpectedly. For a moment, it sounds like there’s a second heart beating.
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The next time the gallery is in perpetual motion. The flowers are bent and greyed out and Ida is heavy, covered with hundreds of excerpts from peoples’ lives.
She has a steady stream of visitors - some sitting with her for the first time, but most have come back. One person I speak to didn’t know about Ida’s Dad, but returned three times, hovering around the regret they’d placed in Ida’s care.
I make myself try. I find a moment that feels clean - a choice that was only mine and that was wrong. A time when I wish I had been someone else. I write it down and put it on Ida, and rush back into myself.
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Closing night is full and still. We all sit with Ida and wait.
Before she lets our regrets fall, she walks around the room and looks at us. I cry because she wants to give me something I don’t think I can take.
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Ida told me that every regret holds the opportunity for release. I don’t believe her exactly, but the thought sticks to me for a long time after the show closes.
I still don’t want to release. It feels dangerous to forget.
But I was given the chance to regret, to move. All of us who wrote something to her felt a shift. And it was just enough for me to see it – the possibility, the distinction between the past and the future.
At night, when I listen to my own pulse, it is a cascade of other peoples’, all racing together.
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