From the moon to diplomacy

On a night when despite the light pollution the sky is clear and the moon is bright, and with my hopes held high like a plate on a pool cue and my mood ambitious, it seems only right I should be attending a screening later about those few brave men who have landed on the moon. (As I alight from the train, I remember the two trainee astronauts I met in the lusty south of the country across the ocean one time and thought were Buddhist monks.) One of the astronauts in the film stared to camera and recalled peering like a child out from the capsule, and how everything he knew, everyone he loved, everything he had ever been brought up to see as his world, he could now hide, conceal, block out, with his thumb. He could hold it out and make it all disappear - it was that small, that fragile, like an unsmudged smudge. It was obvious to another astronaut - like an epiphany, he said, a moment of ecstasy - that when he stared at the moon, the earth, and the sun, he knew, he just knew, he said, there was a major spiritual power out there responsible for all this. Not one of those religions we've created for ourselves in order to make our own kind of sense of the world, but a serious, all-knowing, immense, omnipresent tribal elder of a spiritual power. (Travelling home alone, I was thinking they were all like tribal elders now, these men of the moon, these wacky, far-sighted elders.) They had deep space in their eyes, the big picture. There was nothing small, dull, trivialist, consumerist, or just plain vain about them. In fact I was still thinking about them like this as I rocked and rocketed alone through the underworld on a silver train to my next destination, a talk given by a slightly different tribal elder, a shrewd and cunning man, but an elder all the same. He was talking about the war zone and special relationships, one special relationship in particular. (I thought of my own murmering.) I suppose if I had more time I could knit these two experiences - the men of the moon and the man of the world - into the one jumper. He was candid, unpublished, and at times shone the torch of experience and illuminated all manner of detail. Of his own people, correctly or incorrectly, he described them as poor on vision but good on pragmatics. (The opposite of the artist, I was thinking, who is good on vision but poor on pragmatics.) Later, as I placed all the different pieces together again in my mind, someone stared threateningly at me at the last station. I gently ignored them and stared at the moon, immediately transported. None of them along the line ...

Never try to clean a parakeet cage with a vacuum cleaner

We were bumbling down a nearby lane this morning when we spotted a parakeet in one of the trees. Though they do not hail from these parts, we host a great number of parakeets in this capital. Some of them work very hard. Some of them make an incredible noise. Others flit about silently and at night. I came across two yesterday. They seemed to be working all day long, probably for very little, while the owners of the tree were away I believe. Anyway, we stared up at this one parakeet, its elaborate strangeness, the emerald green feathers, ring-neck and red beak. It seemed strange that something so exotic could survive the clumsiness of our cold winters. We have since discovered online they came here originally from the foothills of the Himalayas - we like foothills - and there are well over 30,000 rushing about the capital. Parakeets of course are not the only foreign invaders in this land. We have the Chinese mitten crab, for example, as well as the more familiar grey squirrel. (Bless 'em all, the long and the short and the tall ...) Non-native species, in other words. Whatever that means. Birds, like humans, often take flight. They even say the Celts hail from Vedic India. No, we will grow accustomed to the parakeet. Successful integration, I believe, is key. It will also help of course if they don't change the culture too much, especially of our schools, and push them to 'breaking point'. Some parakeets have already developed good relations with the crows and magpies, I hear. This has got to be a good thing. I gather some have even stopped feeding themselves with their claws, using their beaks instead, just like everyone else. Unfortunately some people will always resent non-native species. (This is ignorance as much as prejudice.) As long as the parakeets don't cause too much harm to the ecosystem, or attack the other birds, I don't see too much of a problem. No, the parakeets, I suspect, are here to stay. They've already colonised the nearby cemetery.

I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things *

The artist's brother has learned how to fly. He has since taken his wife up in a plane and he has flown with her, dipping and weaving above the expanse of fielded countryside surrounding the market town where they now live with their delightful young son. I have always thought it must be an incredibly liberating feeling flying a plane. Nothing original to this thought, I know, but true all the same. In fact, getting above myself, I think I view the feat of the pilot pretty much as I view the artist. (The two are not so very different.) The pilot for example must know the magnitude and order of space and choose a direction in which to fly at the same time as soaring with a kind of composed relaxation above the humdrum. Well, the artist is the same. Flight is the process by which an object achieves sustained movement through the air by generating lift or using buoyancy. Well, art is the process by which an idea achieves sustained meaning sometimes on a wall by generating belief through the use of stimulation. Both chart a course, both can loop the loop, some prefer straight lines, while others, not always the most reckless, simply dive-bomb. No, the idea of a flight of fancy existing in real terms is very appealing to me. And I come at this with a kind of creative respect. If I had a plane right now and the freedom to do whatever I wanted with it, with no limit on fuel, a total ability to fly the damn thing, and great navigational skills, I would fly it with the artist in what I suppose would have to be a north-easterly direction and head towards the nearest sunset. We would watch the pinking clouds above the polar ice-cap, avoid throwing the plane into too steep a dive, and draw crazy patterns across the sky. There is a popular piece of software, a kind of virtual globe, which more and more people, especially children, are using as if only a flight simulator. Of course, they should really know that nothing can match the real thing. But they don't. Well ... nothing, that is, except the artist.
* Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)