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.

When words express

The image is a powerful thing. But it is also a very personal thing. For example I lived much of my childhood in a property by the sea and was a few moments ago looking up information on this area when I came across part of this property for sale again. Furthermore there was a photographic tour through the very property available and like a person passing a childhood venue for the second time and finding the door open, I couldn't help but pop my head in. In fact I took the artist to this very building on a number of occasions, and have mentioned it in this blog as the place where she finished a series of images of my relatives from the flatlands across the roaring sea. Anyway, some of the rooms on display during my virtual tour had been tarted up: I use the phrase correctly I believe. What once were bright and often pale-walled modest rooms were now brash and bordello-like expressions of ghastliness. (The price, too, was obscene.) Through one of the windows I could see one of the gardens and could not bear to think while staring unblinkingly at this latest rendition, that once upon a time I ran about in such gardens, picked rhubarb, weeded, watered them. It was to me such a beautiful place, a special place, and is now about simply sixteen uncommunicative and cramped looking flats. I could feel the spirit in my bones tingle, like a lampshade of knives clinking in the wind. Now, to anyone else such images would probably represent only the unremarkable. Another example, say, of people's poor taste when it came to what they imagined prospective buyers liked. (Worst of all: they were probably right.) To me, though, it was like someone was meddling with my past and though this is not an experience peculiar to me it was only me feeling it at the time. A great artist, I suppose, is capable through images of conjuring up such feelings, but when it comes down to it in this instances, only these words will I think do. The past is indeed another country. Boy, they do do things differently there.

"When the past no longer illustrates the future, the spirit walks in darkness" *

It is a curious thing seeing people again for the very first time in years. Crudely speaking, it is like peering down a tunnel of time, taking a moment of history, so-to-speak, and smash-cutting with it to the present. I did it twice today and on both occasions it must be said I was energised. (Maybe I was just lucky with the people.) It gets you thinking, though. It is almost as if the excitement comes from the fact that everything that has happened - to both parties - since you last saw a person is somehow crammed into that split second when you do see them again. You register - in an instant - each developed or developing line on the face, every subliminal piece of code in the other person’s make-up, a kind of glimmer of unexplored facts in the eyes, and a tantalising hint of wisdom. Perhaps, I have since been thinking, this is what it will be like with some of the artist's work. Hers is after all work about carefully selecting and freezing a moment, aesthetically compartmentalising it, giving it a kind of immortality, and positioning it in order to transcend time with it. At some point or another with the work the present will bump into its past again. In a sense it illustrates the difference between the idea and the reality and explains art's triumph over mere thought. My comment about the tunnel of time for example may be interesting to me but it is still only a thought. The artist’s work on the other hand makes an actual statement, a time-honoured commitment, a kind of conquest, even if years later looking at it again may be like peering down that tunnel of time. *Alexis de Tocqueville