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.

Disembodied Voices

The artist is attending the opening party at an exhibition this evening and the two children are half-asleep on the bright red sofa. It is good for everyone that the artist is out. It took some persuading, a few moments in which she seriously considered cancelling, but she looked positive when she left and is now - I hope - enjoying herself. She knows many players in the art game and owes it to herself to explore these connections again. No matter how much it may feel like several steps removed from the art itself. In truth, there are no steps back to be had. It is all forwards. I can imagine the sounds. The disembodied voices. I made a film once about an artist. The scenes I hated most were the ones at opening parties. This was to do with the sound as much as anything else. The camera would pan with pretentious seriousness across what it hoped were interested or interesting faces, but underneath it all, on top of it all and through it all, was this inaudible and complacent din. It was the din of voices, laughter, clinking. Nothing of any sense was being espoused. But there were moments of delighted innocence. Art-loving at its purest. Only when the main subject spoke - the son of a tuba manufacturer, bizarrely - did we hear anything we understood, and this only because of the wireless microphone pinned to his shirt. (As it happens, I am in the process of purchasing a set right now, which reminds me - I must look into frequencies.) Anyway, just as I was about to check up on the children a few moments ago, the artist has just phoned. ('They are asleep,' I told her.) She said she was on her way home having enjoyed herself greatly. I was annoyed with myself. I had meant to text earlier, having wanted to say the most recent piece on the wall worked well. She wasn't so sure when she left. I hadn't wanted this to debilitate. Don't tell me I was underestimating the thickness of the artist's skin.

I couldn't even remember the punchline

As I said to the artist on the phone as I was walking past the garlic, cannellini beans, pinoli, focaccia, biscotti, and pancetta for sale in the innards of the mainline station, my sister wants so badly to stay alive but knows she is dying and the two facts simply are not compatible. My sister looked like she'd done fifteen rounds too many with the cancer. The mind looked like it wanted to ditch the body. The lights looked like they were going out, though a kind of obstinacy remained, a glimpse of something sturdier than it should be. This is not me being morbid - I have never felt so life-affirmative - but this is how it is for my sister. She shook her head one time when I was with her and stared at the floor. It was as if it was the unfeeling doctor saying to her she had only weeks to live that had done it in the end. With the cancer she was almost fine, or at least she knew it and somehow managed it, certainly keeping it down with the regular doses of chemotherapy she hated so much. But the stark and unsentimental timeframe she was so suddenly presented with, the fact it was put so bluntly, I think surprised her to a degree that it was as if she'd always given doctors the benefit of some kind of mortal doubt when it came to manners, but now, as she sat dazed in the corner of her living room, punch-drunk and against the ropes, I don't think she was sure about anything, except that manners perhaps were more important than death. With great effort she raised her head again and looked at me. Was I the referee come to call the whole thing off? A long-lost component of a divided self? Or an irritant, a fly on the windscreen, as she struggled to enjoy the view? The daffodils bobbed in the wind as we spoke. The carved wooden elephants and sailing ships all looked so terribly familiar. The mantelpiece was crammed almost boastfully with cards. But they were both hurting, my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law said to me later that he wouldn't see much point in surviving my sister. I reminded him he had a son. Just before I left - my sister was tired - I stared deep into her indigo blue eyes. I lost her briefly but then she returned again as if slowly getting some joke I had told but had long since forgotten. (I couldn't even remember the punchline.) Anyway, the artist listened sympathetically as I told her briefly what I could on the phone about my sister and then I elected not to buy any of the prosciutto and caught the train home.

Oh Sister

I am visiting my ailing sister tomorrow. I have mentioned her before. I may also have mentioned I have five sisters. Anyway, this sister was the reason for the reunion a number of months ago and I now gather from my eldest sister - a former doctor who worked for many years on the world's poorest continent - that this particular sister's health has taken a sudden downturn. She isn't well at all now and it seems death is trying hard to stalk us again as a family. Just as it did when our parents died prematurely, in my case before puberty. Sometimes when I am relaxing on a train, or staring out the window of a plane, I wish I knew more about my parents. I wish for example that they had left some kind of articulation of their being, especially my mother who for many months knew she was dying. This regret is perhaps one of the reasons I am glad of the opportunity in this blog to express feelings not only for the artist and her art but for family life too, and indeed for life - and in this instance death - itself. My ailing sister is probably too discreet to say much at all of any personal note about her predicament except with those closest to her. I can say a few things. For all of her working life she looked after others. Now she is a recipient. No one can quite stamp out the merciless march of cancer when it gets going I gather. I was going to say it is like the largest army in the world marching into a tiny country. But there is a fairly recent precedent of the tiny country winning. (Only to have another illness?) Can this really be a good omen? All I know is that with any luck I shall catch my train tomorrow and stare out the window and think not only of my parents but of my ailing sister's unailing dignity. Because of the fragmentation, the shattering almost, of family unity when our parents died, I never got to know my sisters - all older - well at all. But our love is indivisible, in sickness and in health. I am proud of this fact.

It's A Girl *

Shortly after having our daughter, giving birth to her, releasing her into the big broad world, the artist set about working on a piece, a large work of art. This she sold in the end. She sold it through her art dealer at the time to a collector across the ocean. The piece was manifold. It contained about as many as twenty-seven or twenty-eight individually framed and small re-rendered items. These were each taken from in and around our daughter's early life, or first few months, and reproduced like loaded joy. I sometimes wonder where on earth this piece now is exactly: on which wall, in which house, by which people. (The artist's gallerist at the time discovered the artist by sneaking into her studio when she was out and offering her a show when she was in. Now he is a selfconscious supporter of esoterica.) Anyway, right now slides of the piece lie on the table in front of me. They feel loaded and are vividly coloured, though minimalised. If I hold them to the light, these perfectly executed objects from our daughter's early consciousness stare back at you like cerebral trophies on some memory shelf. From the top left, as if reading them like a book, I see the following. A perfect pair of grandmother-knitted small red and white and blue socks. The inside figure from a Russian doll already featured in one of the entries in this blog as having been also a page in a literary journal. A saggy toy lamb. A Champagne cork from the bottle opened at the hospital on the day our daughter was born. A sepia-tinted drawing of a photographic portrait of my mother as a baby sitting on an old carved chair. A nipple with a bead of milk, the artist's nipple, also featured in the aforementioned journal. A tall giraffe-like toy which used to play a tune I hear now looking at it. An unidentified greetings card with a Madonna and child. A baby fist, also featured in the journal. A kind of ball of socks. A bare, unwalked foot. An ear. A sleep-suit. A toy duck. A grandmother-knitted white cardigan. A squeaky elongated toy from a couple met on the continental mainland. Another sleep- or dream-suit. Two pairs of baby tights. A giant ladybird, which used to droop over our daughter like a bent flower. A nappy, or diaper, with evidence of success. Two mittens. The handwritten ID tag from the maternity ward. A crib. A giant butterfly. A hooded cardigan. A small teddy bear. As ever, the detail is incredible. I don't know what to say about it now, other than wanting to laud it. Maybe I am impressed most by the lack of sentimentality. You would think that with a list like this we would be entering into saccharin mistrust. But this remains and is art. It goes back to this business about the artist being a mother and artist simultaneously. It's not just art; it's life.
* Title of the piece

A Work of Family

Conceptual art runs deep. While the artist knows she must examine her strategy again next week, a kind of ingrown creativity continues to yearn and promise like a kernel among her offspring. Our son coughs. The desert lamp shines its lamp across the polished bare floorboards in front of the fireplace and unlit candles. In this space come the two large and white cardboard boxes. With one now perpendicular to the fireplace on the floor our son crawls inside it, slowly lifting the other box on top and disappearing. Over and over he does this - it is an open and shut case - hoping someone will notice him, and continuing quietly until they do so. It is like a work of art, a cardboard womb, a fictitious nest, a comic kind of cavity. Eventually I acknowledge to the 5-year-old artist that I see him and soon he is leaning against the back of the bright red sofa like an amateur golfer admiring another person's swing. Then he starts asking questions. Why for example can you not fill the cardboard box with water? He has been skateboarding with his sister today and his cheeks are red as blushing fruit. This afternoon I could see the artist watching him grapple with the gravity and physics of it all and saw her smile when he slipped and fell and immediately screamed out: 'I'm all right!' In some ways our whole lives could be transmuted into a single work of art. Conceptualism may run deep but it also runs through this family like a blog running through a major artist's journey towards fresh recognition. I would say watch this space. But this isn't space. Space suggests something unfilled. This place is jammed to the rafters. And we love it.

Friday's list

My phone wakes me. The artist is warm beside me. First our daughter then our son make their presences felt. The artist's sister is asleep on the bright red sofa. Later I hear her voice as she speaks to her nephew and niece. I am on my back. The artist flicks the switch on the kettle. I see heavy rain through the blinds and briefly listen to the news and a song. A sock falls to the floor. A magazine glistens. After some tea I unlock the door and bid goodbye to the sister. The children meanwhile dress for school. Daffodils shine in a vase. Scraped cereal dishes sit in silence. Taps continue to gush and then are switched off. Silence. I am alone again. I re-check the news, this time online. The war zone has dropped in profile but not in reality. I switch all the lights out. I vow to make a list of my day. I deal online with processors, memory, hard drive - with speeds of up to 7200 rpm. I have also been reading a book written by the man I bumped into the other day. I enjoy his pages and feel comfortable there. It is my kind of place. I check a borrowed camera for quality again. The images I am examining are the ones taken in the park. I am reminded when looking at them that I unwittingly filmed where the other person I met that day actually lives. This I filmed before knowing he was in the neighbourhood. It is strange when something so emotionally prosperous as an image is reduced to purely technical analysis. Illegal colours. That phrase again. I first heard that getting a film approved by an old quality controller for the most famous public broadcasting company in the world. The artist comes and goes without talking of Michelangelo. I buy fish. I watch the funerals of massacred victims on TV massacred because of massacres because of massacres because of massacres. ('Without any solution there's only action and reaction,' said one figure.) I look at some new ideas by the artist. The sun is out. The rain has gone. A siren passes the window and disappears again.

Radar Love

The artist was with our daughter's class at a national gallery today. I felt aware of them as I passed the area they were inhabiting for the day. It was like picking up on something held like a fly or flies on your radar. Or a small cluster of lights. You knew exactly what the radar was picking up on, but it still held your interest, as if you had never seen their like before. I was on my way to an old colleague whose advice I was seeking. (I have been doing this a lot lately.) Actually it is a liberating feeling knowing the enormous gaps in one's knowledge can to some degree be filled by other people's expertise. You simply need to know how and where and who to utilise, find and ask. This is perhaps the truer expertise - knowing who to ask. Because most of my questions are tied up in what I am told should be called global conflict prevention - some kind of attempted rollerball of solutions - I suppose I shouldn't feel too self-centred as I hunt for answers. My own personal needs these days are certainly smaller than those living in the war zone. It gets you thinking, though. Wouldn't it be strange if everything was maps, beeps, blips, zones and radars? Maybe there is a grid of all the capital's galleries to be created, for example, in which certain flashing lights denote availability, aesthetics, manners and the like. Perhaps lovers can find an equivalent. Phones detecting interest. (Actually people and phones can do this already.) Anyway, when all my errands were done and it was time for me to return home, the artist and our daughter and her class had already left the station. But my train was right behind them. I could feel our two separate groups moving in a kind of familial tandem. It was frustrating, though. No matter how fast my train travelled, they were always a few stops ahead. My radar didn't like it. That got me thinking too. It was like being an artist in search of the right exhibition.

Scene from a marriage

INT. LIVING ROOM/STUDIO. DAY.

SUNLIGHT pours through two half-opened window blinds, casting shadows across two works of art - detailed, worldly, expansive - on a long white wall. A female ARTIST, attractive, dark hair, sits anxiously on a bright red sofa. The ARTIST'S HUSBAND sits typing by a laptop on a nearby round red table. The phone rings.
ARTIST(answering): Hello? Oh hello. Hi. I missed your call. How was your holiday?

A MONTAGE of small talk, the words REVERBERATE and ECHO, the images begin to BLUR and WHITE-OUT, the ARTIST taps her fingers impatiently.

ARTIST(cont.): Good. Great. (a laugh) Oh. (a long pause) Right. I see. (a sigh) No, I know. Yes. Pardon? No. I see. Never mind. That's just the way it is. I completely understand.

The ARTIST stares defiantly, admiringly, without vanity, at her work on the wall, and shakes her head.

CUT TO:

INT. LIVING ROOM/STUDIO. DAY.

The ARTIST'S HUSBAND opens the blinds completely and leans back on his chair. It SQUEAKS.

ARTIST'S HUSBAND: She was the first private gallerist to see the work. She loved it. She said so. She wanted to show the work. It's not her gallery. It's her father's.

The ARTIST smiles bravely and picks up the phone and dials a number.

ARTIST(into phone): Yes, hello. I'd like to order another board. (another smile) Yes. It's me. Oh, one hundred and twenty-two centimetres by eighty-five? No. No, it's for a new piece...

The ARTIST looks at her husband. The CAMERA crosses their faces, passes slowly over the work, encircles the room, moves into the light and out the window. We travel through the window and through the foliage of a line of trees, and across the road, across open land, above a park, where we meet a balloon and float, float HIGH above the city skyline and river.

Take what you can gather from coincidence

A curious but ultimately hopeful day with a fat cold sun. For example I bump into two people I have not seen in years. The first is a writer whose work now features with fetching regularity on many a bookshelf. (I knew him when he was a supportive but distant figure generous enough about something or another I wrote about my first experiences of the war zone.) The second is an artist, a painter, who painted the tall sets in my attempt at a play set on a fictitious and freshly invaded Polynesian island in the city of the scraped skies across the ocean. (He was also a boon companion.) It was strange, because I wasn't thinking about myself. On both occasions, I was actually gunning in my mind for the artist, who was still perplexed, like unrewarded talent, by the lack of communication on the part of the gallerist, the only gallerist to have been allowed to see - and who enjoyed - the new body of work. I was in the centre of the capital when I bumped into the writer. He approached from the left, a tall silhouette, and exuded the calm authority of someone who knows he is read. We talked about the war zone and I gave my opinion. His eyes had the sparkle I remembered and his wit was warm and melodic. It was a bit like having your brain coated with words. We talked about someone we knew in common, a good friend of his and someone I admire. This person works in film and TV. The writer at this point said he could never work in film or TV because there were simply too many people whose permission or blessing was required in order to get anything done. No, he said he much preferred being a writer and could for example go home now and write a novel about the war zone if he so wished. There was an element of mischief in his words and I enjoyed them all. I spoke about the artist and said with a tight gesture of my hand and fingers her work was extremely detailed. Again playfully he asked if that meant she drew everything on a grain of rice. Anyway, a few hours later, after a meeting with an animator and director whose measured opinion I sought on some technical matter, I am walking out of my local overland railway station and about to climb the slow steep hill home when slamming into me at speed comes the second blast from the past, the artist, the painter, like a missile. Amazingly it turns out he is now my neighbour and when we walk across the open land between the station and our flat together it is as if I am having a dream in which my old friend from across the ocean is walking with me across the open land between the station and our flat. I talk about the artist and he tells me about his partner. (They share the same name.) When I get home I tell the artist about all this but she is still at a loss about the gallerist. I suggest she texts her.

'So sorry i haven't got back to you yet,' the gallerist texts back: 'if it's okay ill call you first thing tomorrow. Hope alls well with you and the family, all the best.'

And then she leaves her name.

The while we keep a man waiting, he reflects on our shortcomings *

Last night's vegetables were burnt in the end and it has not been a good day today for the artist either. She has left several messages as requested with the gallerist but has to date received no reply. I suggested to the artist this may be because it is the woman's first day back, but the artist is now being hard on herself for not having checked her emails and picking up on the fact the gallerist before her holiday was trying hard to get in touch. This may be in part my fault. In my own frustration I may have laid it on a bit too thick that the instructions I had left before going to the war zone were not taken up and should have been. I am sorry for this. Now, to make it worse, the artist has lost track of whether it is a positive or negative that the gallerist wanted to get in touch in the first place. As a result, it was impossible for her to work today and she watched the brilliant and heartfelt German film 'Das Leben der Anderen' instead. ('The Lives of Others' in English.) It is not that the artist is frail. It is not that she cannot handle all this. Early success as an artist and a former successful career in TV prove this. It's just that she holds this woman in high esteem and is still - albeit painfully - clinging to the ideal of working together. At least she seems more relaxed now sitting on the bright red sofa with her sister, staying with us again, leafing through a catalogue of a favourite French clothes designer. Also, tomorrow is not a cliché, it really is another day, and we must remain positive. Just as I try to be today when I learn I am to return to the war zone on the artist's birthday.
* French proverb

Food for thought

Butternut squash, sweet potatoes, green and red and yellow peppers, mushrooms, carrots: all are roasting in the oven. Wild rocket, spinach and watercress leaves sit in a salad bowl. Our son laughs with his mother in the bathroom. Our daughter watches a cooking programme on TV. The kettle boils, ready to accompany the rice on its eventual journey to our familial stomach. It is like a self-generating Grand Central Station in the kitchen. We went swimming today. On our way to the pool on the other side of the park - one of the lungs of the city as someone once put it - we stopped to watch the beginning of the race in which I thought my acquaintance from the war zone may be participating. If he was, I did not see him. In the pool, I noticed, we were pretty much the only people speaking our native tongue. There was many a consonant cluster used. At one point I lay on my customary back and stared up at the rusting beams as I floated like a leaf across the surface. In one arm our son was grinning away, safe therefore, and our daughter was tearing through the water in front doing the crawl. Unusually for her, the artist wasn't feeling up to a swim and I turned to watch her through the tall glass windows separating her from the pool. She was reading. Her head looked deep in thought and was part-obscured by the reflection of the people in the pool. It was like a bad collage made by a painfully bad artist. Most unbefitting. Anyway, I pulled our children across the pool again and listened to their laughter as I narrowly missed the other parents and children still caught up in their gushing waves of consonant clusters. These are precious moments, I was thinking. This is the peace zone. Here we make people welcome. And the gallerist returns tomorrow.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing *

I really just feel like wishing everyone a peaceful Mothering Sunday. (I never knew mine but that's another story, a lifelong blog in itself.) It's just that the more you look at the state of the world today, if in fact you look at all, the more you can despair at the breakdown of communication, and the more you want just to concentrate on what you at least perceive to be the good in most things. Keep talking. Keep mixing. Keep it open. And don't let the bad bugs bite. That's about the sum of it. I spent much of the day with the artist and the children in the park. I had a camera with me. I filmed them all, I filmed them a great deal, plus dogs, lots of dogs, planes, tree bark, flowers, a broken mirror, a collapsed wall, a boarded-up building, more dogs, a skateboarder, a jogger, a magpie, a keep-fit team, different clusters of trees, domes, a wedding. Everywhere you looked it was as if nature, or just life, was trying to tell you something profound, and it was simply a question of whether you had the patience to understand what exactly it was it was trying to tell you or not. I filmed another plane. At some point we passed a sign for a race from the park tomorrow and it then crossed my mind that this may well be what the man at the airport of the other capital with the helicopters and mountains in the background had been talking about. The one who surprised me by the candid explanation of what he did. It would be funny to see him. A small part of me obviously is not really here at all. It is still there in the other capital. Another part is simply waiting for the gallerist to return from holiday and cast her judgement. But my Mothering Sunday wishes are here. Respect. Which may, the more I think about it, be presence enough.
*Edmund Burke (1729-1797)