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.