We only part to meet again

The artist has still sold all her work. I am still going to the war zone. Tomorrow. Fresh razors are bought. First Aid is checked. The artist is delighted with her news but sleepy. My passport is felt. Shirts are selected. Money, currency, is sorted; kit inspected. Lenses. Tapes. Leads. Microphones. The artist is smiling but dozing. Flight times are double-checked. The latest news is viewed. The eight-year-old girl is, especially, hugged before going to sleep. The five-year-old boy is, especially, hugged before going to sleep. The artist cannot believe her good fortune. Bags are readied. Shoes are polished. Lists are crossed out, rewritten. The artist has almost fallen asleep on the sofa. Emails are sent. Arrival times verified. The artist wants to do a large piece after some time off. Expense claims must be sorted. Toothpaste. Aide memoire. Cash. The artist must be coached about her emails. The artist is an artist. I am the artist's husband. 

Expect victory and you make victory

There is a pearl in the oyster. There is a genie in the lamp. Hats off to the tireless artist and her shining knight of a visitor. The visitor, the artist of all artists, who came today, bought everything, which is to say everything the artist showed him, eight pieces in all. He also wants to do a book on the artist, perhaps two different types of publication. He has also commissioned her to do another piece, and has said he wants photographed and framed all the unframed work, even work he does not own. His gallantry delights me, reassures me. In other words, the sun came out this morning on a small part of the capital. It lit up dark corners of the soul and showed them to be luxurious, generous, clean, and progressive. The artist, like a rising sun, is over the moon. All the doubt, all the pain, all the self-punishment, has faded away, broken apart like bread. The whites of the eyes are matched with the blue. Truth has won, over cynicism. Wildlife has popped its ears up and listens again. Leaves have delayed falling from trees. Poems sit parked on pages, finally convinced they will one day be read. Terrorists have paused over their bombs. Squirrels have passed, on the offer of nuts. Cars have decided not to crash. The sea has cleaned itself. Fruit feels rightfully boastful. Water has never tasted so good. I will leave for the war zone in two days time so impressed with the artist and delighted for her too. Her integrity, in short, has been rewarded. And the artist of all artists deserves some credit too. Hats off to him, I say. I could not agree with him more. Why, even the laptop feels tactile today.

The Artist's Code

The artist worked until four o'clock in the morning and is still working now. She is what a friend of mine calls a grafter. Furthermore her visitor tomorrow is being treated like a king, by virtue of the amount of work the artist is putting in, and so he should be, and in a few days time I will be gone, my passport stamped, me flying across both mountains and desert, and some kind of verdict from the visitor in place. Still, I like all this intensity, enjoy both its calibre and drama, and the importance of this man's visit, certainly in terms of what it can do for the artist, cannot, should not, be underestimated, even if it does mean I am presently unable to share with the artist any feelings of apprehension I may have about returning to the war zone. I cannot for example discuss with her the prospects of dry mountains, epic space, mines, manners, weapons, vigilance and nerves. But this does not matter as ours is not a selfish relationship and I think both of us 'expect' the other to pursue expression with a kind of creative, if not purist, relentlessness. What has been interesting for me about these past few days has been the scrupulous manner in which the artist has harnessed herself so completely to the idea of 'collecting' the different works, 'binding' them with a kind of equality of detail, and 'shedding' any notion of disparity. In short, the work has been made conceptually more sound, which I suspect will not be lost on the visitor. Looking at the artist now, she bears what look like the scars of labour across her face, as pastel marks, like war paint, stripe each cheek with a kind of primitive authority, and black stains disrupt the self-drawn image on her t-shirt. I tried - with the promise of some Madeira cake - to tempt the artist to take a break, but already she is back to work, the opposite in fact of the eternal tea-breaking worker. We have a code for a tea break in the war zone. We call it Tango Bravo. We have a code at home, too. It is an artist's code. It is called work.

Chalkhill Blue

The Chalkhill Blue butterfly ascended from the sunny slope in the garden. Like a leaf, it floated towards a pair of open glass doors, its tiny shadow stroking the freshly mown and occasionally threadbare lawn. As if by magic, it slipped between the gap presented by the two doors and our Chalkhill Blue was suddenly inside the building. Stunned to find itself in a children's room, it sat for a while, spellbound, on the bookshelf, next to Jacqueline Wilson's 'Cliffhanger' and Francesca Simon's 'Horrid Henry's Wicked Ways'. Just then, a five-year-old boy wandered in and our butterfly remained perfectly still, quietly watching as the boy rolled out a small plastic drawer from beneath his bunk-bed and unearthed a small brown rubber band. The butterfly watched further as the boy, unaware of the small creature's presence in his bedroom, pulled the rubber band back, dangerously so, then let go: laughing as it sped through the air and smacked against the patchily grubby white wall. Upset by this, aesthetically disappointed, the butterfly took its leave, took flight, flying into the sitting room instead. There, suddenly alive to the fresh reality, it parked itself on a small wooden table. The table was crowded with drawing instruments of various sizes and colours, and the butterfly watched as an eight-year-old girl drifted through, contemplating another cartwheel, and an artist to the butterfly's immediate right knelt before a picture as if in prayer. That is strange, thought the butterfly to itself, the two figures in the picture, though small, are familiar. And then it dawned on our butterfly that these were indeed the two little people in the flat. Anyway, there were many such pieces visible in the room - art work, mirroring itself, everywhere - and each piece looked braced as if for the elements, as well as an important visitor. Meanwhile by a nearby round red table studiously sat a man by a laptop. At this very moment, the butterfly took to the air - the Chalkhill Blue, that is - and landed bravely by the man's laptop. It looked at the screen, which was glowing and looking faintly nuclear. 'Chalkhill Blue', it read on the screen, the light blue of its wings already itching to take flight again: 'Males congregate on animal dung.'  

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

I feel bad for missing the second wedding party of two friends yesterday but as the artist said to them in an email I had no choice. My next trip grows ever closer and preparations intensify. This morning for example I received four fresh boosters in both arms and as a result feel like Popeye at the moment without the spinach-fed strength. In fact I am walking like a cowboy with motionless arms held either side a few inches from the hips. I have had almost twenty such injections in the past few weeks. This morning, as the needles entered my arms, I glanced at the front page of my accompanying newspaper. Where I am headed was the subject of the front page. My eyes then travelled across the room to the window. The tops of some branches blasted a kind of gorgeous green as the sunlight licked the leaves. It reminded me of one of the pieces the artist has been working on. But my eyes travelled back to the front page again. A journalist also died yesterday. He was found with a bullet in his head. He worked with someone I know. With one of the papers today came the counterpoint of a fold-out guide to the nation's butterflies. What beautiful colours, let alone names. The artist's colours are butterfly colours, which is to say matte-like, accurate, pastel colours. Presently, I am looking at illustrations of a Purple Hairstreak, a Painted Lady, a Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary (Fritillary: what a name), and a Green-veined White. Perhaps, instead of armies, all sides should unleash legions of butterflies on each other instead. Where's the White Admiral (adults often nectar on bramble flowers in clearings with dappled sunlight)?

Instant Vintage

The artist's parents kindly sent us some money from the foothills for an anniversary meal. This we had last night with the children. We sat round a friendly table in a pleasant restaurant, a table of twelve loud women to our left, a serious couple to our right, and were enthralled and gripped unashamedly by our own narrative, as if this was one of the first times in a while in which we were able to let other people do the work for us, and I guess we wanted to celebrate this too. The children were - in a napkin kind of way - dribblingly incisive, as indeed was the artist fetchingly strident: a hint of cleavage, warm red lips, affection for her grateful husband. No, it was an all-inclusive experience, whose backdrop had been a day of helping the artist - as if help was needed - fine-tune the pieces to be shown Wednesday's important visitor. Now, presently, right now, as some 'electronica' plays on the laptop, and the children do hand-stands by the bright red sofa, I look over at the artist with a third - previous - piece on the go, and watch her hand tweaking, comfortingly, the already rich, and impossibly detailed, content, and I feel a mixture of pride and hope. Actually, I have just noticed a sculpture freshly created by our five-year-old son. Where did that come from? When did he do that? On a pink plastic plate in a bed of clay are three small toy ladders, one slipped slightly into the other, and the three of them, tall and aspirational, now leaning like a skeletal version of the Tower of Pisa. ('It's called "Nothing",' he says when asked.) Also, in just under an hour our eight-year-old daughter has a friend over and I will take them all to the old-fashioned fun fair erected for a few days on the open expanse of land serving as a kind of buffer zone between us and the rest of the city. Seabirds will glide in the vast blue-grey sky. Kites will compete. Buses will move grumpily. The sign outside the local drinking establishment will sway in the light wind. And I will look upon these children and feel the opposite of despair. All the while knowing the artist will still be working with a smile on her face. 

A Dab Hand

The artist is on a roll. There is no stopping her now. Her hand moves furiously across the paper on board. It goes dab, dab, dab, like soft fingers on soft glass. A piano sonata plays in the background - more fingers, more dab, dab, dabs - and it is a joy both to see and to hear. This is all in preparation for the visit on Wednesday from the most expensive living artist in the world. He has emailed the artist several times now, as has his assistant. No pomp. No self-importance. His last message reaffirmed that he was indeed looking forward to seeing what he called the 'pictures'.  It will be interesting for them to see each other again. Both are as committed as the other: it just so happens that one of them was rewarded with extraordinary success. But he, I suspect, knows Oscar Wilde's dictum that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, even if my earlier mention of him as the most expensive artist in the world today suggests I do not. Today is our tenth wedding anniversary. I sprang into the back garden, like a cat, not a particularly agile one, at seven o'clock this morning, and plucked a bright red thorny rose from the rose-bushes by our bedroom window and presented this to the artist while she lay in bed.

Strange Dream

Of his love for his city, he was sure. 

Maybe he was never quite meant for this world. Maybe he was like an islander on a mainland ward - comfortable, at times, with his own soul, but seldom with anyone else’s. But on the subject of the city, his now, he knew he was quite sure. 

So why did he feel so nauseous? Or did he always feel this way, before and after, which is to say sick, sick as truth sometimes, sick like some political virus working its way into the body martial? 

He needed wisdom, advice. Before going back, to the mountains, before returning, to the fight, he needed wisdom fast. His city, his now remember, was under threat. This was why he spent longer than usual pulling himself out of bed, if indeed it was bed, entering and exiting the other room, the so-called room for ablutions, kneeling by the bowl like some half-believer, whom he had almost forgotten, in his attempt the night before to body-surf across the up-raised hands of the city, was this city's man through and through. 

He entered the populous streets and walked alone in a long straight line. Romans. Anglo-Saxons. Danes. (Runestones?) He needed some advice and needed it quick. The air by the river was fresh but no match for the mountains. Even with everyone in both places armed, at least over there you felt nature’s triumph. Here, these days, he found only a kind of former magnitude. And even with the mines over there like seas of jellyfish once the rains had stripped away the upper surfaces of the soil, nature did nothing wrong. Here, within the conurbation, within that which he had up until this very moment thought he knew well, cars continued to target the money, with their businessmen and businesswomen and service-based minds. Credit crunch? A mountain stream, he thought. Fifty million tonnes of cargo on the river each year? How about a place where the angels sing?

Anyway, he felt a swelling in his throat again and began concentrating on the enemies, for this was one of his bents. He thought about deliberately unimposing houses in the suburbs, dissociative glances, here as well as in the mountains, and he thought about stealth. And, he remembered, the quiet, increasing gatherings: the beards, darting eyes, and closing minds. The giant, epic, other bowls, of granite, made of granite, in mountains far away. 

And he wondered why they wanted to kill him so? 

He crossed the floodplain, by this hill and that. He crossed the busiest and oldest road, at least of his world, and saw some of the lights were on in the building. This was his, for now, his building of advice. These lights, he knew, these bulbs, like bulbs, like beacons of enlightened but depressed courage, belonged to this city, too. Even though it is day and the clouds have parted and the sun is sending wave upon wave of ancient heat and light to stoke the city’s heart and stroke the city’s skin, these lights will always remain on. 

He didn’t bother with the lift and kept on walking. He could feel the sweat on his collar and still he kept on walking. One bead ran the length of his back and did a kind of detour passed his scar. Vertigo, he was thinking. He never used to get vertigo and yet two weeks before in the mountains he got vertigo, started trembling - right there, on the mountain. And this was exactly when he saw the city’s enemies. 

It wasn’t like the old days. Not like with the others. Not like when with blazing ants coming at you and screaming like undertakers, you popped behind a rock. Not like when with the this and that and more rocks, you fed their children. Not like when they hit above your heads and you had to lean right back and watch what you thought was the mountains fall. 

He had a pet theory about vertigo and it was this. As you eat your city sandwiches by the river and dream of falling in love again, please remember. They don’t give you vertigo when you are young because you are expendable then. Vertigo is there to save your life when you have children.

The carpet was soft, thick, violety. It was also, in patches, a quiet, almost shy, salmon pink. (Like a salmon, bouncing its bloody belly upon the tooth-like jagged rocks, he was also thinking, I shall reach my goal, I shall make a shoal of my affection... ) Anyway, a woman in the room to his left took her feet off the desk. He couldn’t see who she was, not to talk to, but felt a kind of respect, like they were two sides of the same river. 

He proceeded towards the end of the corridor. This was when everything fanned out like a beautiful idea, like he had always hoped the city would again, and this beautiful idea was like a kind of half-nightclub and half-sitting room in which you might find God. 

He moved cautiously, careful not to crunch the candles underfoot. On the wall to his immediate right - as he checked the cameras in each corner - was a large glass cabinet. Inside were these small sculpted heads, urban voodoo bracelets, handwriting on parchment, and very small pieces of amethyst. 

Amethyst. The Ancient Greeks and Romans wore amethyst because they believed it prevented intoxication. Some of the pieces were also violet and some the colour of purple grapes. 

‘Ah, there you go,’ came a voice. 

He looked around, staring at the cameras first, but could not trace the source of this voice. He looked behind but didn’t see anyone there, either, only a chair, a lime-green, or possibly turquoise, chair. 

‘Is that you?’ he asked the strange voice.

‘Is that who?’

‘Are you ... you know ... the one?’

‘You know the difference between your mountains and your city?’ The city man stepped back a few feet and listened. ‘The city, your city, is built on clay, and the energy, get it, the energy is absorbed, gets absorbed, right into the ground. Your mountains, however. The mountains from where you returned. The place where you say you saw this city’s enemies. They are all rock, the mountains ... all rock. There, there, in the mountains, everything pings straight right back at you, and doesn’t get absorbed at all.’ 

‘Is that it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘No reason for them to want to kill me, though,’ he said. Siren sounds passed through the street outside. ‘More prisoners?’ he asked, hearing them. ‘More people about to be absorbed into the ground.’ 

‘Somebody said to me that you wanted to know why these people wanted to kill you, is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well they don’t.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘They don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Want to kill you.’

‘Is that it?’

‘No. There’s one more thing.’ 

‘What?’

‘They love your city.’

The Artist Makes Sense

A better day. The artist worked on her two latest pieces and I finished a short story I was commissioned to write. The artist kept busy while I also researched the events I may encounter in the war zone when I leave. The artist paced herself, though. She stepped back, then moved forward again. Concentration. Pastel dust fell like snow, like dirty snow. The tall skinny legs of the stool scraped the floor and sliced the papers. Hopes were whispered again. Why should I expect every day to be good? The artist moves fast enough and it is not about me. Her gestures were scratchy but her thoughts were fleet. Even turning to ask a question is like a shot. Dedication. The tea is drunk fast. And made, again and again. Last night there was a documentary on a female artist not dissimilar in age. She made no sense. 

Eight Days

The impossibly famous artist has been in touch with the artist here, twice in the past few days, and now his assistant is in touch with her too, arranging a visit for him to see the artist's work. This has been ever since the artist wrote to him after he gave his email address. (And made my day by replying immediately.) This comes as some relief to all of us here, and for a variety of reasons too, including the fact I don't think the artist quite believed it when I said he would be in touch. I think she has been working so hard she has become creatively self-contained. She may have forgotten sometimes how to interact, and like many brilliant but retiring artists she can also mistake an art world that communes with itself, even celebrates, with a conspiracy against seriousness. Anyway, she now has eight days before he comes to see the work. This means eight in which to get her work in order. There are one or two things she must do with the two latest pieces, but she is almost there. I will be off to the war zone myself a few days later - I just received my new dates - so I hope it will be at least with some fresh hope for the artist that I take my deep breath and go under the metaphorical wire again. Since my sister died less than an hour after I landed a few weeks ago from my last trip, relations with the artist have been unusually strained. This has been partly my fault but it has also been as if the artist just wants the dam to break now and for her work to be allowed through, and it doesn't really matter too much about anything else apart from of course the children. This I suspect has contributed towards a kind of inner and outer rebelliousness on my part, which has not really been helpful of me, and has not been the case for almost a year now. At least when I saw the children's shining faces today before they were whisked off again, I saw something of a light within.

Esprit d'escalier

I didn’t sleep at all well one night recently in the war zone and awoke to the syncopated sound of what was intended as a 21-gun salute to honour the country's victors in a war against recent foreign invaders. For security reasons, I had not been allowed to attend and had spent the night catching up with an old friend instead. As I rubbed my eyes, I took in the semi-darkness. My t-shirt was wet: wet with sweat. Then I began to hear some other sounds. They were of different weapons. What could have been machine gun-fire. Sporadic. Whatever it was, it was not far away. I stood up and slowly opened the shutters. The machine gun fire, different again, was more intense now. I knew something was up. I switched on the TV. Almost immediately, it was mentioned that the feed I had just missed of the nearby parade had suddenly been pulled. Something was definitely up. There was talk of the president having been whisked away and then they showed some replayed footage. What looked at first like a long distance, low budget animation of the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band filled the screen. A variety of strangely disconnected and theatrically attired people were sitting in the shade. Ambassadors, dignitaries, ministers, soldiers. Suddenly you saw some people fall forwards, others disappear towards the rear of the stand. It was redolent of the assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat. I dressed quickly and to the sound of a swarm of helicopters made my way to the security of the main compound. I felt uneasy, unlucky, faintly fatalistic. I also felt like I should be writing this all down in my blog; I should be finding the implausible link between the drama of the present moment and the battles and survivals of an artist. I say this only because I am looking at the artist right now and it was impossible to write about this from the war zone. Presently, she is working, her expression serious, and I can feel the explosions in her head. She will make it to the security of the main compound.

Man Alive

The artist sits with the children on the bright red sofa while outside it is raining cats and dogs. The three are watching a film - a possibly insipid family tale with a nonetheless perky mixture of animation and live-action - while I sit at the round red table, catching up on some correspondence, including emailed and reported reading, from, to, and about, the war zone. I suppose there is something deeply incongruous about these two elements, fused together as they are like incorrect wires in an impossible conundrum of good electronics and bad poetry, and yet it is because of the work in the war zone that we can pay for the film on the sofa - this makes me sound like a mercenary and yet nothing could be further from the truth. My work there, I like to think, is about grasping the nettle, grabbing the bull by the horns, confronting, along with many others, quite possibly the principal issue of the day, at the same time as being paid for it. Unprompted, the artist leans her head back on the sofa and tells me she will finish writing the email to the impossibly famous artist by the day's end. I feel like a traffic warden ensuring the correct parking of everyone's tasks and yet this also could not be further from the truth. Anyway, I tend sometimes to see nature as the best pattern for mankind to follow, not contrivance, compromise, self-murder, or selfishness. The artist, I like to think, is the same. Talking of nature, the cats and dogs continue to fall from the sky, their tails and floppy ears, whiskers and tongues, touchiness and tunes, cascading to the ground like rolling thunder. By the way, the speculating neighbour was caught by the artist popping his head round the property again, this time under an umbrella. Amusingly, as she opened our bedroom blinds and he guiltily pulled away, it looked as though he had been caught in the act of some kind of voyeurism. Closer to home, the desert lamp is now lit and the backs of everyone's heads are like gargoyles in a church. To my right, the artist's three present pieces are on the wall, made even more mysterious in the half-light, and for a few delightful seconds, it is seldom for longer in life, I feel like the luckiest man alive. 

That's My Boy

The boy sits on the floor. He has a pastel stick in his small right hand and he has just returned from playing at a friend's house. His friend's parents are artists too. The daddy is a painter and the mummy a sculptor. They make things. They have tolerant, interesting, open minds. As I write I can hear the paper the boy is using slide across the shiny bare wooden floorboards. I can also hear the pastel stick slide like a mushy skater across the surface of the paper. It is the sound of childhood and rain. Another sound I can hear is the firm prodding of the boy's mother's, the artist's, pastel stick, against the surface of her piece, of the boy's cousin, the artist's niece. I pick up a washed green grape from the plate with the painted illustration of the children that the artist designed and pop it in my mouth. Suddenly, as I chew, the boy is no longer sitting on the floor. He is standing beside me, alert, ready, with the flowerpot his friend's father gave us with several sunflower cuttings already growing in it. He wants me to plant them in the garden. He wants to do this now. Two hours later, we are still in the garden and the sunflowers are all planted and we have weeded four wheelbarrows of weeds. This time it is something else he wants. He wants the artist's no longer used sketching board from the shed. And now he is working on it with his pastel stick in his small right hand again. Circles. We would be square without them. 

Infinity goes up on trial

The four of us spent some of the meadows of the day in the reading library of one of the nation's leading museums, having spent the previous hour walking through its rooms, which were pregnant with artifacts and symbols of cultures and conceptualisms past. Anyway, at one point in this tall and deep reading room stood the artist by this one wall of books, pulling from the erudite shelves these thick and non-dusty and highly illustrated tomes of some of the leading practitioners of art these past few hundred years: her eyes lit like lamps at pages and drawings, many of which she had never turned before. Our delightful daughter, meanwhile, having taken herself away from one of the computers, moved soft-footedly to the children's section and pulled out a book on the Egyptians, followed by the plucking of a black and white outline for children from another shelf, and the taking up of the challenge offered by a box of crayons and colouring it in. Our son, meanwhile, sat at another computer - 5-years-old, imagine it, and already by the computer in the reading library of a major museum - determined not to be disturbed. In fact at one point I whispered him over to the fact of the children's books our daughter had already seen, but he had rushed back again to the computer and had already pulled up an image of a Corinth Civil War relic on the screen. No, these were good moments. All the lights in our heads were on, and the fact the room maintained its official silence maintained a kind of serenity over the occasion. I hope the fact I was frustrated with the artist on the way home for not having done enough herself to get people to see her work didn't detract from the importance of our time there. Or my anger with a neighbour for wanting us to persuade our landlord to let the neighbour buy some of the space by the side of the building we rent so that he can destroy yet another children's summer with ruddy building work. 

Fear and Loving

It has been a week since my sister's funeral and almost two since I returned from the war zone: I still have dreams about the former by the way. They are episodic and intense and never last very long, despite the rhythm of fear running through them all. (With my sister it is different: there is a kind of shroud of peace now across the face, if I can call it that, of her death.) Life can be fearful anyway but I guess the thing about war zones is the inherent permission they give you to fear. Perhaps art can be described as the same: isn't one of the things about art its permission to fear too? I spoke to an old friend on the phone today, not about this so much as the artist's work. As a professional critic he is probably better positioned than me to speak about the work, but he is a fan and I think likes the idea of familial loyalties, in creativities anyway. (His late maternal grandfather has just had a book reprinted and he is attending a literary festival with his mother this weekend to celebrate this fact; he is also returning here again in a month or so to celebrate a separate book by his father.) He has written well about the artist in the past and has always struck me as the sort of person drawn to art by its poetry rather than its careerism. The artist is working on the email she will send to the artist mentioned yesterday by the way. I spoke to this friend about this and he supported the idea. Rather kindly he has also potentially linked the artist with what sound like a great and interesting couple with an elegant space in the centre of the capital in which the artist can temporarily park her work if it helps in terms of making it easier to have people - potential gallerists and the like - come to see the work. Where we live, though ample for us, is off the beaten track, it would seem, certainly for your regular gallerist. They, too, it would also seem, have fear. A fear of the unknown street or artist.

Help The Artist

I ran into an old acquaintance of the artist's from her art school in a fashionable media club the other evening. He is quite possibly the most famous living artist on the planet. I have been wanting the artist to get in touch with him for some time now and wasted none by asking directly for his email address. This he gave to me without any hesitation and it is now down to the artist to get in touch with what I have suggested should be an invitation first for the man to view the work and then to perhaps consider it as a potential part of the giant art museum in the countryside he is building. The artist knows, I hope, the importance of exploring all avenues. She is out herself this evening with three girlfriends, two of them artists and one an actress. The children are being creative.

Portrait of a Nation

As I write, the artist is putting what may or may not be the final touches to a small portrait of her niece. It is screwed to the wall to the left of two larger, other pieces on the wall, and is like an appendix. Our children meanwhile have some friends here from school and I can hear their laughter and mock screams wafting without danger through the doors leading from the back garden. They are cheerful children, our three little guests, and I can well remember their parents when they first came to this country, though we did not know them at the time, only saw them from afar. They were refugees and the general area from which they had come I had visited a few years before. As I watched their severe expressions searching their unfamiliar way down the street at the time, I remember feeling familiar with their look, their haunted gaze. It was that same look of a lot of the young people from where they came - people who knew too much, too fast. Anyway, now their children are fully integrated and their father is working in a local bakery. The mother is a popular member of the community and her chief concern today is in sending sufficient funds to her family back home. 'They want bread, we have so much bread, from the bakery, but we cannot send it,' she says. We have all manner of refugees in this country. One man who hijacked a plane in order to get here not so long ago is now working at the country's leading airport. The artist is made exotic by being from here. 

Eulogy

First of all I would like to offer my deepest sympathies to ______ and ______. One of the bittersweet ironies I suppose of any close-knit family is the anguish and pain, disorientation and despair even, delivered whenever a family member passes away. The very thing which hurts is the very thing which tells us how much we loved a person. _____ was the second of ____ and ____ ____'s six children. She had four sisters and one brother, and it is on her family's behalf I speak. But what should I speak of? Is it _____ as a girl triumphantly leading over one hundred ____ ____ down a crowded village street? Is it her poignant success in bringing the family together at her and _____'s wedding? Or her loyalty, frankness, dignity, and giggles (not least, I am reliably informed, in church)? Is it her cutting off her thick pigtails, aged three or four, and flushing them down the lavatory out of sheer devilment? Is it ___, _____, _____, pigtails intact again, leaving __ ____ ____ together for __ _____ in _______? Or, later, _____'s visits to our grandmother's hotel by an inky-blue sea when, if memory serves me right, she would walk along the seafront, sometimes with ______, _____ and myself, and buy us all an ice cream? Later still, is it _____'s quiet pride at gaining a degree? How about the homemaking skills, extended to occasional guests such as myself, with echoes of one's own childhood - the carved wooden elephants and model rigged ships - all around? Or her devotion - returned in kind - to _____ and ______? Or should instead I speak of her keenness to read and to keep up to date with fashion, a love of shoes and handbags, not only when as a child she famously refused to take off her ______ hat when going to sleep, but, also, very nearly right up to the end, when with _____ she sat watching TV talking about fashion? When word first began to seep through of the severity of _____'s illness, we elected to have a small family gathering - just the six siblings - in a beautiful setting outside ___. _____, we will always remember, looked remarkable. In fact, she was positively glowing. Her blue-grey hair chimed with the ________ blue of her eyes. Inevitably, different memories were shared - I can remember for example _____ talking to ____ about the daily taxi and bus ride they would share to the _____ ______ in ____ after the family moved to _________ - and, all the while, of course, we raged against the prospect of her death, Dylan Thomas's "dying of the light". But, and here's the thing, we never really know someone. Not as well as we would like to think. I believe it is the thought of _____'s courage as she prepared to go over the top - the first of the six - which tells me most about her. As _____ knows, as _____ knows, as _____'s sisters and indeed brother knows, ____ was a loving wife, mother, and sister. We miss her badly already. I have just been to _____ again. I think she liked that. Nor was she one to shirk the idea of national responsibilities. Anyway, it was while in _____ this last trip that I received a text from my wife ______, telling me ____ had been returned home from hospital. I remember reading this over and over as a military _____ helicopter struggled to land, and a collection of dust and scraps of paper blew into the air. I was in a ___ ___ base - ____ _____ - and, no matter the protection, no matter the fact I was, among others, with ___ _____ _______ __ _____ that particular day, nothing could make me feel safe from thinking the worst. Which was why I was so determined to return to see ______ one last time. As it happened, she passed away within perhaps minutes of my landing, and it was too late. We all want to be happy and we are all going to die. Our grandmother had a solution. It was a phrase. 'To live in the hearts of those you love is not to die,' it read. Well, on behalf of _______ and _______, myself, ______'s four remaining sisters, ___, ____, _______, _______, their husbands, my wife, ______ in a church at this very moment in ______, our cousins, sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, and good friends, I would like to propose to the House - for life and death is to some of us still a long and furious debate - that ______, sturdy, trenchant, loyal, courageous, beautiful ______, by living as she does in the hearts of those she loved, will not die.

Smoking Guns

Writing the eulogy for my sister's funeral is not, as you can imagine, anyone's idea of bliss. I am keen to do my late sister proud, however, and feel vigilant as the words I will speak are slowly formed in my mind and then committed to the page. What has already been formed in the mind and committed to paper, is the new piece the artist has, in my absence, been working on. This time, for every piece is different, there is a kind of initial and deliberate indecipherability. A mass of thorny twigs and branches conceal a tiny figure parked almost at random towards the right. And just when you think you are entering into some kind of puzzle, you realise that in fact nature has you surrounded. You, too, are somehow entrapped. The silent valley down which you so confidently marched is in fact crammed with people. I met an artist in the war zone. He reminded me of the artist here. They share the same dedication, a kind of melodious absence of other options. Their work is an absolute necessity. The artist in the war zone used to do portraits, he was a portrait artist, something which at one time was illegal. Furiously, he would cycle through the capital with his latest piece rolled up tight and concealed in a bag on his back. One time after he had spent weeks if not months on a particular portrait, he was caught by a young policeman. Fortunately, they knew each other, they were old school friends, and so the artist's painting hand, as sometimes was the case, would not have to be chopped off. Instead, he saw the fruits of his labour lit and burned by his old friend and returned almost fearfully to the ether. I have asked my four remaining sisters by email if they have any lasting images of our late sister that they would like me to include in the eulogy. I would hate for those images also to go up in smoke.

Trigger

Strange to say, it is only now beginning to dawn I am no longer in the war zone. It is as if I am still waking from some kind of dream, a dream of fitful whirlpool sweats, one in which the mountains are impossibly high, the people uncannily wise yet poor, and the prospects as bleak as a winter's day, which some small part of me, some ridiculous principality within, still believes could end in sunlight. My sister's funeral is at the end of the week. There, is a kind of moonlight, not sunlight. I will be going with the artist. We will wear black mostly, but the artist has said she also wants to wear the blue shawl I bought her. This I purchased with a close protection team from a thirteen year old boy who has known only war. Wear it well, his brave smile seemed to say as I looked back one last time. The snows on the peaks were melting fast. The passes were clearing. Was that cordite I could smell in the distance? Or a twist of hope? I like to think my late sister would have known. Interesting, too, how we grant the dead wisdom.

My Sister

My sister has died. I have been immersed in other people's problems for a good few weeks - assassination attempts, minefields, cross-departmental blustering, charity, military strengths and tribal weaknesses - and have forgotten about those equally important issues closer to home. She was a strong person, my late sister, a firm mind, and bore no humbug. I am told my other sisters were there for her, as much as they could be, but her husband will not have taken it well. He is a loyal man who nonetheless depended on her greatly. They had one child and he is with him now. I am hoping to receive a date for the funeral and perhaps I will find it appropriate to say something there. As the only male member of my immediate family since before my voice broke, I find it important to speak on such occasions. I only wish I had the power to bring people back to life.  

Onwards

I have been away for some time. I feel trained. I feel about myself, for a moment, the way I have always felt about the artist. Application, for that is the word, pays rewards. But tomorrow I return to the war zone. There I will think about the artist and our beautiful children the way a poet might sometimes contemplate the sky bleaching out melancholy. I am going into the light. There is darkness there but for my part there is no vainglory, only a kind of service to one's fellow man. The artist serves us all. She pays homage where others take things only for granted. She is a cradle of discovered ideas. I cannot wait for you to see the work as a whole. It is a whole with which to fill the hole which is man's inhumanity to man. Think big and you will be big.

Chocolate Melts and Befriended Viewers

Crouched on the wooden floorboards last night like the Little Mermaid statue, the artist laboured until two in the morning preparing her new piece. She was doing this only in order for me to be given sufficient time to put the piece up for her to work on before I disappear on my pre-journey journey first thing tomorrow morning. (I am crossing a short stretch of sea and back.) This of course is typical of her. It was late in the night, very, she was tired, very, but she knew it was something she had to do, and so she did it. In an age where publicly funded artist millionaires complain regularly about the lack of public funding, it is always refreshing to see an artist determined to walk the true road to art alone. It is difficult, however, to remain totally concentrated on the artist and her work at the moment. This is because I am probably without sufficient time to do everything I need to do myself. In a way it may even be fortunate the artist and children will be with their grandparents soon, as that way I will know they are safe and well at the same time as being able to be a little bit more selfish about my own preparations. I still have a host of people to see as well as technological corners to turn. Since writing that last sentence, mind, I have managed to get the board up on the wall. As far as the technology is concerned, the test I did the other day did exceed my expectations. And as a particularly cherishable piece of chocolate melts in my mouth, and the artist snaps herself another on the sofa, I do feel more relaxed than I have all day. Also, I am settled in my mind that the artist is correct in going for another piece rather than concentrating all her efforts on getting galleries to visit. Besides, she will be able to get her teeth into the new piece big time while I am away. Art is companionship as well as expression and what one day may befriend the artist may another day befriend the viewer.

Erithacus Rubecula

There is a robin's nest outside the front door inside a basket of plastic flowers. There in the middle sits a female robin when all of a sudden her male partner flies in.

Robin (male): How are you, my little redbreast?
Robin (female): Fine. Fine, darling. You?
M: Glad to be home. Some of the other males out there are acting a bit uppity. How's the -
F: The family in there?
M: The artist.
F: Pretty good, I think. It was snowing while you were out and they were all out in the garden. The artist's husband was filming them. He looked like a twitcher. The snowflakes were pretty thick.
M: He should be going soon, no?
F: Not sure.
M: I'm sure I heard them talking about it when they were in bed the other night and I popped round the back to get some more twigs.
F: Bring anything for supper?
M: A couple of worms.
F: I'll put the appetite on.
M: How's the belly?
F: Fine.
M: What shall we call it?
F: Do you like Latin?
M: A little.
F: How about Erithacus Rubecula then? Hey, the artist was on her exercise machine again.
M: Was she? What about the kids?
F: They don't need more exercise.
M: No, I meant what were they doing?
F: Oh, that. Sorting through their toys and clothes mostly. Once they came in from the snow.
M: Did the artist do any art?
F: Not today.
M: Good. She needs a rest.
F: You didn't find that magazine did you?
M: Which one?
F: BirdLife International. There's the new IUCN List of Threatened Species.
M: No. Sorry.
F (whispering): Shush.
M: A thrush, did you say?
F: Shush. The artist's kids have gone to bed. I can see the husband typing at the round red table.
M: Not again.

The two robins place their paper napkins round their necks and tuck into some worm.

Art of the matter

I have the bad habit sometimes of discussing the need for identifying potential venues for the artist's next exhibition just as the artist is beginning to feel relaxed and the children are all asleep and everyone has arrived at the end of the day with a fatigued but well-earned sense of completion and sometimes, if we are lucky, achievement. I really must stop doing this. It is grossly unfair. It is like watching someone climb down a large stepladder with shredded palms after completing a huge mural and suggesting they had missed a bit. I suppose, as someone who knows how good the latest work is, I must feel the artist's frustrations more than most. What is foolish of me is that the artist probably has it all under control and has for example decided without any hint of procrastination to begin and complete one more piece before getting more people around. (The work probably does require another in order to emphasise the range.) It is not as if the artist has been met with a downpour of rejections. As I have suggested before, anyone who has stepped across the threshold and seen the work in the flesh, so to speak, loves it, and the only private gallerist to have come and seen it did in fact want to show it, but for one reason or another could not. We looked at another gallery on the internet this afternoon. This was after I had finished a new test edit of some footage and the artist had finished her volunteered art teaching at our children's school. We drank our tea and examined the site closely. One of the artists from the gallery's stable used to share a former gallery with the artist. His work is good, but sufficiently different for there not to be a conflict of interest. (It can be a competitive place the art world.) The artist looked up from the screen at one point and stared at me with her beautiful blue eyes. 'I'm not avoiding the issue, I'm really not, by wanting to do this one more piece,' she said. Her two most recent pieces were on the wall behind her, sort of bookending her head like pillars of excellence, ear-muffs of glory. Just then, the sun came out and travelled across the trees in front of the flat. It was like the sunlight was made of fingers and they were unknotting all the gently swaying branches. A tulip, I also noticed, bent like a swan in the wind. That was when I vowed not to hassle the artist again about her work, not when it is late at night and I really should know better.

Testing truthfully under real circumstances

It is perhaps within the correct spirit that I should be using images of the artist and our children as material for testing how best to do my work in the war zone.

Shot 1: Our 8-year-old daughter dances by the fireplace while our son sews his stitched sculptural man.
Shot 2: Our daughter types a list of her favourite books on the laptop: the list reads like a poem.
Shot 3: Our daughter's fingers type at the keys with improbable speed.
Shot 4: The artist is in the foreground on the bright red sofa listening to Bob Dylan's Workingman's Blues #2 on headphones while our daughter continues typing in the background.
Shot 5: The artist is dressed in grey and works on the detailed grey surface of her latest piece.
Shot 6: The artist's hand fills the frame as she crafts away at the detail.
Shot 7: Our daughter eats tomato and mozzarella while reading again on the laptop screen what she has just written.
Shot 8: Our son eats a bowl of soggy cornflakes with the TV screen in the background showing a weather report.
Shot 9: The artist tests a wireless microphone, twirling, mocking, smiling, talking, dancing.
Shot 10: A silver-coated Buddha sits on a lace-patterned black bookshelf between eleven novels and biographies.
Shot 11: The artist's husband looks and talks to camera while testing the wireless microphone and remote commander with self-mockery and a zoom out.
Shot 12: Our son and daughter are sitting on the bright red sofa as the camera zooms in and they whisper into a concealed microphone all the things they want to do when they visit their grandparents and cousin in the foothills.
Shot 14: Side-angle of the artist still working away at her piece.
Shot 15: Our son yawns and stares to camera.
Shot 16: Our son explains his stitched and sculpted man.
Shot 17: Our son and daughter dance again by the fireplace.
Shot 18: Caption
Shot 19: End credit.
Shot 20: Our son still stitching.

A well-known teacher across the ocean in the city of the scraped skies once described acting to his students as living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. Perhaps the above is simply about me testing truthfully under real circumstances.

Sound barriers

I was thinking this afternoon that it is in fact a very sound barrier the pain barrier that is the line between good and great art. Few reach it, even fewer get past it: especially when the onus these days is on immediate gratification and simple one-liners. Mind you, you might think such a barrier would keep out what few might dare call bad art, but bad art does sometimes still get through and even enters the very psyche of the culture. Anyway, I was made aware of this line again, this important pain barrier, when invited by the artist to offer an opinion on the piece she was still finishing. A fellow artist and parent of one of our 8-year-old daughter's good friends saw it the other day and he thought it was already finished. I knew it wasn't. I certainly knew the artist didn't think it complete. Anyway, that was many days ago. Since his visit, the artist has been grafting away, 'polishing' further the surfaces of a thousand pieces of slate - some tiny, some forceful, most half-slid down a mountain side. It is sometimes as if she is actually there, inside the image, polishing away, quite literally, and stumbling precariously across the slippery, steep surface. Look. There she goes, with her bucket, her liquid, her large scrubbing brush. Watch the deep chasm, I am thinking. That was close. Steady while you're on that tall rock. Don't cause another landslide. Careful. Yet more days pass and the artist is still on it, at it, with it. You know why she hasn't stopped because a part of you approves of her tenacity, and you know the standard has been raised so high you may as well carry on through with bleeding hands and feet. Excellence in art is not always waiting by some roadside as in Zen Buddhism. Sometimes you must climb onto, and across, the scree. You must also have a head for heights. You must know what risk is. Idle materialism will go out the window right away. But to watch this pain barrier being broken, I tell you, is to see a coming of age. Ironically, it always reminds me of when I was a boy and the jets in the sky would scream past breaking the sound barrier. It was always a thrill, a kind of sense of achievement, a glimpse of the extraordinary. Well, today, in the late afternoon, I felt the artist close to it again. In fact I almost placed my hands to my ears and ducked.

Death on the Mountain

Someone the artist knew at college, a pretty high-profile artist, committed suicide on Saturday. He had been walking alone through some woodlands in the mountains to the chilly north after parking his car by a roadside. There were no further details but I have since discovered he was found hanging from a tree. It was the last day of his exhibition in the capital to the south. He was only 41. The artist here was shocked when I told her by phone and very sad. I had just read about it on the train as the sun came out and slapped a brilliant and perhaps incongruous light on the suddenly fragile glassy skyscrapers across the river. I met the artist in question a few times myself. I remember his vagueness and slight discomfort as he leaned against the bar like the man our 5-year-old son stitched together the day this artist died. It is all indeed very sad and must be particularly gruesome for his surviving family, in particular his mother and brother. There have been a few mountain suicides in the news lately. Unhelpfully, I always love walking the hills alone. OK, you are disconnected from one major aspect of life, namely your network of friends and family, but for me this is more than compensated by the even deeper connection, arguably, with nature and epic space. Additionally, you are put into some kind of mercilessly true and ultimately helpful perspective. Anyway, the idea here is not to be morbid. The victim was part of a famous group of artists and on one level had everything an artist could wish for. He was successful. He was loved. He was not poor. Or was his problem deeper than that? Was he the victim of too much hype? Did he see through the unscholarly adulation and come to believe the critic who described his work as frustratingly slight? There is perhaps only one thing worse than being a great artist who is not recognised and that is being a poor one who is considered great. 'I wish someone could have reached him,' said the artist tonight.

A Day of Rest(lessness)

The sheets felt pleasantly chilled when I awoke. There was a hint of sun outside. I could hear the birds - these city birds never stop. (So much to say.) The children were asleep and I could hear their breathing, which was soft and dreamy and full of the chimes of innocence. The artist's body was turned away from me, in a gentle clump of sleep. I noticed a faint smile on her face and smiled too. I didn't want to get out of bed. Eventually I took a deep breath and pulled myself up and stepped like a passenger from the foot of the bed. I parted the blinds, or at least some of them, to check it was in fact sun. Affirmative. I fumbled for my tracksuit bottoms and trainers. I poured myself a glass of water and drank half of it. I stretched a few times and unlocked the door and went on my run. A man with a cowboy hat was walking past with his dog. He was the person who picked up an old bed of ours that we were throwing out one night. He probably sleeps in it now. Either him, bless him, or his dog. I picked up speed. Well, my rather cumbersome idea of speed. Two fellows were walking on the other side of the road by now with their hoods up. Instead of feeling threatened by their slightly intimidating gait, I chose to think I knew what was going on. They had been to a party the night before and hadn't made it home. Without enough money left to get the bus they were still walking. I did a kind of circle and eventually passed the bench where the poet sometimes sits. By 'poet' I mean the troubled man with the swept back hair who sometimes listens to classical music on an old radio while writing tiny notes. He never says hello but his presence is always appreciated, certainly by the likes of the artist. I then passed the sheltered houses where mostly the elderly stay. Those whom we must always protect. All was still. They, too, perhaps, had had a hoolie last night. As I turned the corner, already out of breath, I looked up again and marvelled at the range of clouds in the sky. I could feel the dampness rise from the ground as I took deeper and deeper breaths. I made it to the shop in the end and when I saw all the newspapers lined up like soldiers on parade I was reminded there was a war.

The Halves and Half-nots

It has been a day of three halves. A kind of mathematically impossible, yet cerebral, as well as emotional, ride.

1) I contacted an old friend yesterday who lives and works on a tropical island with what I quaintly imagine are windblown palm trees and low flying clouds and deep blue skies. (We went to school together in the chilly north.) I had written to him in order to alert him to someone else I knew, a painter, a successful one, and someone I have written about before on this site. I had just read that this painter was living and working on the island too and I thought they might benefit from each other's company. (I was also keen on finding a route to the painter for some advice.) Anyway, this morning I received a reply from my friend from school, stating that they were in fact the best of friends. They surf together. They play racquetball together. Their families know each other well. Indeed, they were all with each other only last night.

2) According to reports today, a prominent female artist has disappeared without trace in one of the major capitals of the continental mainland. She was from a third country, a large one, famous again for eliminating its opposition. Though there is no evidence of foul play, and her husband does admit his wife's disappearance remains a complete mystery, one or two experts already point to a conspiracy. They also point to the mysterious ransacking of the museum where she last exhibited, and to the many recent serious threats.

3) The 5-year-old filmmaker of this parish placed down his camera today and picked up a needle and thread. He proceeded to create a life-size figure. He made a man with hands and facial features, a bag, long octopus-like arms, knees like boils, clothes like a fashion king of grunge. He spent most of the day making this creature and while he would place it down every now and then, it was never for long. I have now just been told the aforementioned creation will be accompanying him to bed. He also wants to take him to the beautiful foothills where his grandparents live.

Diverse and ongoing.

Interface, Setup, and Input: Action!

The day has been much like a river - and not just because of the sky-sliding downpour - and this river has flowed with about as much technology as a brain like mine can take. If I am honest, I am probably trying to grasp too much too fast, and yet, because I have no choice, because the clock is ticking so fast, or digitally morphing, I have to go along with it, swept away downstream, on the jetsam and flotsam of some other, deeper, but not necessarily darker, current. Obliged, exhilarated, I feel all manner of gusts of new information blow into my face like spice. Then, occasionally, just occasionally, I see the overhanging branch of some particularly nasty and complex conundrum coming my way - 'playhead controls' or 'generator pop-up menus' - and just when I've ducked, made it through, something else comes along - 'zooming and scrolling in the timeline' or 'using a breakout box' - and whacks me on the back of the head like a pretty serious bear-hunter from behind. Still, I have probably learned more in the past 48 hours about this one particular craft, which is to say filming and recording and editing again under hostile conditions, than in all of last year. Now, momentarily, I stretch my back and feel the muscle I twinged while running this morning. But it is late evening and because the children are asleep an air of calm impertinence caresses the room. Also, because it is late, I feel like I am slumped somehow on the riverbank. Not as a fish out of water: rather, as a happy, wet spaniel, or drowsy bather, or soaked compendium. At least I can dwell more calmly on the artist now. One of the things I filmed today for example in order to ascertain whether I was 'importing' images correctly was to move in slowly on the artist, zooming with grooming so to speak, as she tackled the last few stages of her now almost completed latest piece. Playing it back again, an hour or so ago, was a pleasure. Aside from the one or two technical glitches, in terms of what I had shot, I was able to study the artist. There was something captivating about the concentration. What was she thinking: that I should stop filming? The chiseled excellence of her small right hand, clutching what she uses to work with, spoke of unsentimental dedication, though that sounds too pretentious for the artist. I tried to play what I shot back again, in slow-motion this time, but this made her look even more intense. I fast-forwarded it: she looked scarily industrious. I froze it: an intimidating picture of ardour. Now, I ask the non-existent members of the editing committee, who would wish ever to edit out that?

Interview with an Artist's Daughter

An 8-year-old girl picks up her reading books from the round red table and places them with freshly discovered pleasure in her thin blue book-bag.
I haven't interviewed you for a while. How are you?
Fine, thank you.
She hangs the book-bag on the back of the chair.
Anything new to report?
Apart from reading? A smile. Actually, as a matter of fact I did some drawing in the morning recently. And my mother has been doing the most detailed and exquisite drawings about two meters long. She's been working very hard. She's also been working at my school. It's really weird seeing her walking into class and saying 'How are you?' and doing art with us.
How about your reading?
Again she smiles at the thought of it.
Well, I have been reading this amazingly fabulous book. Actually I've never read this kind of book before because it's a kind of an animal story ... but not only an animal story, it's also teaching you about the army and the war.
Which war?
The big one just over sixty years ago. She looks at the TV screen: images from the war zone. It's also quite a sad story.
Does it have illustrations?
It's got these quite small and detailed little drawings, which I think are really good.
Has your mother made you appreciate drawing more?
Definitely. She also inspires me. She took me to one of the biggest galleries with a friend the other day. I was drawing while we were there. My mother helps me lots. She always gives lots of tips. Before you do a face, for example, she always tells you to draw a line down the middle longways and then a line across half of the face sideways, then she tells you to draw the eyes on the middle line, and ... one hint ... add a fringe otherwise it will look a bit silly.
What about your 5-year-old brother's art?
Well, my brother's art is like real life drawing these days.
Thank you.
Can I go now?

A Projected Future and a Blast from the Past

The artist is already thinking of the piece she will begin when I return to the war zone, which I guess isn't so far away in time now. I was thinking: this is another of the reasons I admire the artist so much. For some it would be a cloth, a garment, a drink, an affair, emptiness, relief, drugs, obsessive behaviour, news-blanking, becoming reclusive. But not for the artist. For her, whatever the situation, it is always work. Not as a distraction. Not as a means of avoiding the facts of life. (Never.) But as a sure line before her. Her mothering skills for example never waver, though nothing to do with work will see her avert her eyes. Where others have a kind of laughable success - in which minor talent possibly is over-rewarded - the artist has nothing to say but industry and exquisite skill. This is why I contacted one of the most important art dealers again in the country just now on her behalf. (I should also have sent him a link to this blog.) I contacted him again after many years twenty-one days ago. He never replied. He used to know me when I worked in the art world myself and I think he enjoyed some kind of professional resonance from this. He also came to see an admittedly minor play I wrote but which was nonetheless produced and performed in the city of the scraped skies with some kind of fanfare. In fact he asked if he could meet one of the actresses afterwards who just so happened to be my girlfriend. Anyway, now, successful, loaded, powerful, he doesn't seem to want to know me. Instead of asking myself what this says about me, it is what it says about him that occupies me most. I just wanted him to look at the artist's work. I didn't want to tell him what to think. I didn't wish to influence him into offering a show - that would have to be his choice. I just wanted a nod from him in the artist's direction. Just like the nods I gave him when he was starting out. I tell you, gallerists are the only people I know who run a mile in order not to do what it is that they are best known for doing. Their loss, I guess. We have our art and the war zone. We are ugly but we have the music. We are not ducking any issue. They, it would appear, they whom we need but wish we didn't, have only money. (Go on, surprise me.) I can't wait to see the artist's next piece.

daffodils, That come before the swallow dares*

I bought the artist a rubber-banded bunch of unflowered daffodils the other day. They sat in my hand like a sad clump of long and lanky shrivelled vegetables of indeterminate origin. There was something damp-dry and slightly previous about the stems. The disc-shaped corona was just a dream. Narcissus is the botanic name of the daffodil. Well I hardly felt narcissistic as I unpeeled the skinny, snappy rubber bands, filled a bright red vase, and dropped them in. Wordsworth ...

"I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze"

... did not spring to mind. In fact, I felt like an unpoetic oaf. I felt as though some cynical hand had dispatched these bulbs back to these shores, charging so little that the person who broke their back planting them must have been paid a pittance. But then when I walked into the flat this afternoon after a tumultuous time in the centre of the capital, they were all laughing at me, all twenty of them, bright and yellow and slightly mad. They had flowered. The pigmentation was like the meaning of the word yellow. I was reminded of E.E. Cummings - or ee cummings - this time, a favourite poet when I was fourteen ...

"in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me"

It really is almost as if the daffodils are having the last laugh.
* William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

Tie a faded ribbon round the old typewriter

I finished my main document early afternoon today. It is a blueprint really. The project, the shape and the design of the building so to speak, will be affected by this. Afterwards, stretching my back and straightening my shoulder blades, I did something very old fashioned. I printed it out. I had to hold it in my hand, you see, and read it as print on paper in order not only to verify its existence but to judge its stamina, its ability to withstand a traditional eye. So much of what we do now is in the digital ether. Engines are concealed. Computer architecture is closed. CCTV is forgotten: yet always there. It is refreshing sometimes, is it not, to go back to basics. Perhaps this is why I trust the hand of the artist so much. It not only shows us something important: it reminds us all of what we have forgotten. Still, the advance of science can be an extremely helpful thing. I think of our battles against disease, some of which we really do win. Meanwhile, I pause a moment and take in all the sounds appreciatively and far from the madding crowds. Our daughter is in our bedroom wittily putting on an accent which is not her own. Even closer to home, I can hear my fingers punching these keys. I have an awkward typing style. I am told it is quite fast for someone who only uses two fingers but I know I over-punch. This probably comes from writing reams of largely unread nonsense from about the age of ten on an old fashioned typewriter. After about the age of twelve, I think, when I had my own, the using and re-using of typewriter ribbon became par for the course. As a prolific writer of nonsense - some things never change - the dear ribbon kept coming to an end and, of course, I would have to rewind it. The harder my fingers punched the keys the rewound ribbon the clearer the words. That, too, was physical, I suppose, and therefore 'real'. Anyway, I can now hear our son teasing his sister. Cars, and sometimes larger vehicles, hum weightily along the road outside. The table creaks. Someone in the other room is sorting through books. I can hear them being stacked on shelves. Our daughter has a new book, I am reminded by this sound. She bought it this morning with the artist. She says she likes holding it in her hands. I take one last look at my printed document on the round red table. I turn in the chair. I look at the artist's work on the wall. Then I zap the TV on.

Ernő Rubik's Fair

We made it to the fun fair. The grass was waterlogged, the wind cold, and hardly anyone was around. (Only the ghost train looked like it belonged.) I took our son and daughter to the fair in order for the artist to work. (Almost literally, on the rockface: she is still finishing a piece with the dramatic remains of a hard-earned slate mine.) Anyway, we leaned into the aforementioned winds and I was the father in the middle. We were holding hands. We were like sailors on a blasted deck negotiating our very own Roaring Forties. After a while, our hands parted and the children ran ahead of me. I filmed them on the phone, careful to adjudge how best to fill the frame while trying not to think about my imminent return to the war zone. But what I was really also doing was feeling these golden moments. It was eerie a few moments later within the so-called walls of the makeshift fair, or money-hungry lair. It was like entering an encampment of dubious loyalty some two hundred years ago. Unfamiliar faces looked up from steaming drinks. A seagull picked at some soggy chips. We passed some spinning vessels, loud blasts of music, dodgy constructions. 'You should never go on a spinning cup,' said our daughter, pointing to a kind of hostile version of Alice in Wonderland. As the wind hit my face again, I thought about the city I am in and the extremes people go to find themselves. Creativity no longer feels like a serene act and most trends these days are based on the idea of short attention spans. Wildness I have never had a problem with, but a lack of manners? Our culture has mislaid them. It is puzzling. Anyway, when we returned the artist looked just as refreshed as we had been made to look by the wind. Her work, to paraphrase Dylan, glowed like burning coal. ("Pourin' off of ev'ry page like it was written in my soul ...") Furthermore, the children had both won something and had had a choice of what to take as their prize. A blow-up cartoon character? A target? A cuddly toy? All manner of choices. So what did they choose? Two Rubik's Cubes. Well, 300,000,000 have sold worldwide, before I get too proud.

The scrubber's wife

The rain today became sleet and the sleet briefly became snow. The sun popped out only occasionally and the clouds slammed into one another like puffed-up jousters. The local fun fair must have taken one hell of a pounding. In between working on what I must be working on right now, I took my frustrations out on the bathroom. I scrubbed and I scrubbed like a person with nothing to do. And yet the scrubbing made a kind of puritanical sense and eventually my feelings, like the bathroom, became clean. I still go back to it. It took me hours. Anyway, I have been thinking about what this may all mean. It could be to do with the artist and her dilemma about showing her work. For almost a year I have defended the artist's right to fail spectacularly at self confidence when it comes to an ability to hunt socially for an exhibition. But now - maybe only today - I am not so sure. It may be about scrubbing too, I am thinking, elbow grease, doing what you don't want to do. I am not talking about the work itself. That is amazing and indisputably diligent. I am talking about physically making contact. After the long weekend we will discuss strategy again. In the meantime, I will continue to admire the bathroom.

Here comes the son

The artist is out with our daughter and her friend and mother today, though not the mother who has just given birth, while I am at home ostensibly to work. Only, that is easier said than done. I still have the 5-year-old film maker with me. His energy is like that of a dancing baby bear and the goods in the woods he wishes me to explore are kept from us both by my many tasks at hand, including this. A document I must finish as soon as is humanly possible is a struggle when a boy with a camera is wandering through and round you. Oh but what a boy. I am a lucky father. Presently he is - ooops! - the balloon he was playing with has just exploded. (See what I mean.) Red-cheeked he has just come running up to me declaring almost too convincingly that he is suddenly tired. Now, seconds later, he is examining the pieces of bust balloon spread across the floor like the leaves which blew in when the man here earlier came to fix the broken light responsible for our snapped electricity. (The man began talking about his love of time machines as he slammed his hammer into some electrical wire.) No, my son has recorded an amazing 60 minutes of filming today, using the smaller camera, I hasten to add. He seemed to find his metier most of all when he realised he could record in mirror mode, in other words with the monitor rotated 180 degrees toward the lens so he could see himself while recording. He lost all subconsciousness for a moment. He even began leaping back onto his grandmother's beautifully crafted cushions like a superhero. Now all I need is to enlist him to help me with the artist, to get him beside me as we try to coax engagement again with the so-called big bad world. With him as her ally she really should have nothing to fear.

Born To Be

A baby girl we look forward to getting to know was born today. Not so very far from us. Her sister was staying with us last night while her parents remained in an induced, expectant state at the nearby hospital, one of the busiest in the land, with one of the most diverse and expanding populations, too. Our guest is two years older than our 8-year-old daughter, but they laughed in equal measure. I could hear them quite possibly far too long into the night, as they giggled and whispered and swapped stories like people with baskets of fruit, but it seemed churlish to ask them to be quiet. The excitement was a life-force, lucky, and our guest's mother was about to deliver. I had spent the latter part of the day with our son, a new camera, and a 150-page manual. It is the new camera I will be taking to war zone and I have never experienced apprehension so stilled by so few years. The companionship. The attention to detail. Our son was a shining revelation to me. Anything from attaching the supplied microphone and the lens hood with lens cover, to locating a scene on a tape with the remote commander, became like skating painlessly across what had until then felt like a vast and unfeeling lake. At some stage in the night I heard our guest talk in her sleep, something about flight. In the morning I could hear our guest declare that the baby had been born. At first I thought it was a reference to our daughter's Tamagotchi, but then came round. The baby, according to the text parked with pride in her phone, was born at 1:30am. It is a girl. The proud and beautiful father picked up our guest shortly before the school round. He looked well. Everyone was well. And the artist had looked after everyone with consummate love. Well done the mother in the hospital.

Power

I have been enjoying a short break for a few days. This has meant a break from the blog too. The next few weeks will be very busy indeed for me and like everyone else I do need to switch off sometimes. That said, now I am here again, it is not a bad feeling. The artist and our daughter are out with another mother and daughter and I am at home with our son. Part of our electricity is not working and the man who came to look at it yesterday is now returning tomorrow. Electricity is one of those things foolishly I take for granted, though I can remember the power strikes we had during my time at school in the chilly north. I may have mentioned this before but it fell to me to go round all the switches in the two main buildings in complete darkness aged thirteen with a torch and switch off everything so that electricity would not be wasted when the power came back on again. I have also spent time in the desert where the sun is your only power, and the water you carry - though it gets very warm, almost too warm - assumes a life-saving potential, which is a power in itself. In the war zone as a young man I was without electricity too. At night this was no bad thing as lights didn't therefore give your position away. (Fires, too, were seldom used.) And the need for power, electricity, petrol, as we all know, is a source of so much tension these days. That said, though maybe I am too laid back about it, I never have a problem making do instead with what one has. Most of us have far more than we need anyway. Mind you, had the cut extended to the sitting room where the artist works, indeed where I am writing now and our son is watching his favourite TV programme, my attitude might be different. As it is, I can make out quite easily for example the piece to my immediate right that the artist has been working on. She has broken through now. A few days ago she was struggling, also with the anti-climax after the first private gallerist came. Now, however, the piece is looking accomplished. I have someone new in mind I would like to see the work. A man who years ago made it possible for me to travel with one of the most famous living painters of the time, only to have him pull out at the last moment because he felt he was being used. Not by me but by his government. It was to have been a trip to one of the great former tyrannies of the world. (Or no longer former?) I was going to write about it for a well know magazine. Anyway, the artist in question is dead now - though his work still features regularly in both the news and cultural analysis - but the man who arranged it is not and I saw him only two days ago. Perhaps if the power is on by then we may well be able to extend to a cup of tea.

On The Road

After my solitary run this morning - I call it a run but there are runners and there are runners, and I am not really a runner - I checked the news from the war zone on my computer - as I write, the artist is giving a two-hour art lesson to our daughter's class - and saw there had been a suicide bomb on the very road I remember travelling down perhaps most only a few weeks ago. Travelling this road was like a race against the unknown. It goes back to the security dilemma of what is risk and what is threat, and whether your strategy should be based on both, or, as some mavericks suggest, threat alone. It seems to be both at present. As a result there is not a great deal of movement or traffic and that is bad news for some of the aid. I was telling the artist about this road shortly after I returned. I didn't want to say too much but I remembered for example the man standing on top of his cart as he whipped a slow and slightly morose-looking mule into action. A woman was huddled in the back, bouncing up and down and shrouded in grey and black. You could not see her face, which for security rather than religious reasons alarmed my protectors, and they surveyed the vehicle with a professional vigilance. Another moment of concern came when a people carrier drove alongside us and one or two black-turbaned faces stared out at what they could see through our vehicle's darkened windows. We sped off. Later, a man was spotted on a mobile phone. He immediately looked away. We turned sharp right, and sped off again, the medical kit bouncing in front of me and the trauma kit on standby behind. Just then, two children rushed across the road and one stopped directly in front of us. Because the older boy obviously did not know what to do he just froze and looked even more of a threat, but on this occasion the driver just drove round him, a cloud of dust still floating slowly back to earth as we disappeared towards the airport. At the airport I was told one story about a group travelling in a similar vehicle when a suicide bomber suddenly leaped on the bonnet. He didn't explode, the bomber. For a few bizarre moments, the driver and him simply stared at each other, until, coming to his senses, or so he thought, the driver did what he felt to be the most natural thing in the world. He switched on the windscreen wipers. Anyway, six people died in the blast this morning. (How green, how fresh all that grows.) This is not good news. Like our driver, we must protect the children, as the artist is doing in class today, but we must get there, too.