Since my babies left me

With humour and exactitude the artist prepares the children for their trip tomorrow with their grandmother and cousin. They are taking a supposedly whizzing and skilfully leaning train out of the congested capital. They will snake from the self-inflated constriction and across the bottle green land into what we shall call the fast-flowing foothills. There they will stay by the tall and handsome mountains where the buzzards fly. (I have the honour of feeling like an African chief when I write the above. Or an Iroquois in deerskin breechcloths.) I can remember the times before we had any children and the artist showing the same amount of care and attention to her art whenever the work would go off – usually via the framers - for an exhibition somewhere. Children, though, represent themselves and the artist knows this fact. They are their own titles. They have their own themes, their own movements. Even the way they carry themselves is about them and nobody else. And it is a kind of freedom. Freedom. There's a word. We hear it less and less these days but even with my limited experience I know it to be real. I have crossed from one place with freedom into one without and the difference is uncanny and very real. As the children shunt along the tracks tomorrow to their vacational prosperity in the hills I shall be here with the artist in the fumbling metropolis delighted they have such freedom. And it all comes back to art. Art for example is freedom. I can remember a gentle old man, the father of an old girlfriend, replying to a card I once sent him. The card was Japanese and bore the image of a bird taking flight. We did not know it at the time but my girlfriend’s father was dying. He wrote back. ‘Such freedom,’ he said of the bird. It was one of the last things he ever wrote. No, the children will be enjoying their freedom with their grandparents and it shall be interesting watching the working artist in their huge absence over the next few days.