Song for today

I left the artist hard at work and firmly pulled the door behind me and climbed the cold steps into the light and made my way across the open expanse of common land between me and the station; I was listening to some music on my phone and the words were fighting with the wind for my attention. I braced myself: the woman twenty or so meters in front looked like a mountaineer, so strong was the wind gusting towards us. Just then, a song by the name of 'Villanelle For Our Time' came on, sung by Leonard Cohen, a man who, like Bergman, is wittier than people credit, though on this occasion deadly serious.
From bitter searching of the heart,

Quickened with passion and with pain

We rise to play a greater part.

This is the faith from which we start...

The clouds were moving fast and when I wasn't thinking about the words I was thinking about the time between now and when the gallerist gets back. It is all so ambiguous. Really there is no way of knowing what she has to say. Hope flatters. Still, I noticed the gap in the clouds and the sun slanting through, stroking and clearing the shadows from the grass where during one former conflict there were allotments.

Men shall know commonwealth again

From bitter searching of the heart.

We loved the easy and the smart,

But now, with keener hand and brain...

There is something unusually reflective about song, I was musing, and something entirely non-reflective about the way people go about their business in the capital. Ah, the sun was now reflected on the small pond, blindingly so, and I waited for a car to pass before safely crossing the road.
We rise to play a greater part.

The lesser loyalties depart,

And neither race nor creed remain

From bitter searching of the heart...

I was invited with the artist to an exhibition this evening. We couldn't go. I don't think we wished to, either. It was at a gallery who kept the artist waiting for months to make a visit that they promised to make and the artist never asked for. They never did make it in the end.
Not steering by the venal chart

That tricked the mass for private gain,

We rise to play a greater part.

Reshaping narrow law and art

Whose symbols are the millions slain,

From bitter searching of the heart

We rise to play a greater part...

But first I must get to the station and ride into the centre of the capital, crossing my fingers for the artist and us all. Not heavy of heart but gleaming, like the sun now encompassing all of the city.

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 ...

Strategic communications

So the artist, looking like one of those intelligently fetching female characters in an early Truffaut film, met with my friend in the art database world the other day. He was very helpful and companionable, as indeed he often is, and they discussed at some length the artist's various strategies, certainly to a degree later considered both helpful and kind by the artist. As I think I have alluded to already, the artist then met the gallerist in person, though for one reason or another, or maybe none, he was too busy to meet at first, but they did sit down together in the end, about an hour later, across from one another like characters in an oil painting, card players perhaps, discussing the precise merits of the artist's work and its subject matter. The email, which the artist was then asked to follow up with, took place the following Monday, in fact three days ago, but she has heard nothing back yet. (Silence can be painful for the artist, even the artist's husband, as it reeks also of a kind of bad manners.) Anyway, people who work in galleries are often telling you how busy they are - unlike aid workers, or frontline soldiers, or secretaries for absentee bosses, who really are - though from my experience this so-called 'busi-ness' invariably incorporates simply moving from the phone to the newspaper and back again, in between a cigarette perhaps, though less and less, a sip of wine, or a strong coffee, oh and the odd stroll around the gallery if someone with what looks like a fat enough wallet walks in. I hate to say it but there is nothing, or at least very little, sacred about the capital's private art galleries, certainly as far as I can see, which admittedly may not be very far. I have seen more manners in a small seaside store selling crayon drawings than I have in any artistic venue in the capitals of the world. (Talking of which, not even Vincent Van Gogh could sell in a major sale last night, I also noticed, which must be saying something not only about our economy but about the fickleness of fashion, also.) Anyway, the gallerist in question, a man I must respect, has told the artist he will think about it, so I suppose the best thing to do is to let him think about it, and without any further disturbance. I wonder, though: where he will do this thinking? I suppose it will have to be in his head as he has none of the artist's work, not even reproductions, though the offer did reappear in the artist's email on Monday that she is willing to bring the work round to the gallery, if in fact he is insufficiently motivated to come and see the work for himself. No, where, I wonder, will he think about it? Will he stare out at the masses pouring through the capital and think about the artist's claim that there is little of the big world pouring through today's great art? Or will it come to him while staring at the glint in a child's eye as they stare up at their father, say, while feeling momentarily fearful of the world? Or, like much else in the world, will it rely totally on self-interest? As sure as this sentence will end, the artist will get a show somewhere.

All Bar None

This is our last day in the foothills. Tomorrow we return to the capital. I just received an email from an old friend in the capital. I think they were wondering why I haven't been chewing the fat and out carousing with them. The truth is, I have so many other projects developing and being developed and needing developed that I have not been able to afford the slipstream of recreational socialising for some time now. Besides, I find the hard edges of some of the subject matters I am mingling within these days unable to lend themselves well to simple cheer and they in fact often require sober discretion. I hate to say it, but maybe I am experiencing a kind of late flowering of seriousness. Are these intimations of mortality? I don't know. But I must continue forward. I certainly feel extremely connected to my children right now and also determined to see the artist into that space which adores her work, up into those heights which I know she can sustain, and among those people for whom marvel at the work can come easily. Meanwhile, the extreme beauty of our present location has continued to dazzle and inspire. To be reminded again of the magnitude of nature has been a shot in the arm. Tomorrow when we return to the capital by train I shall be looking at the three refreshed faces with me, including the artist chomping at the bit to do more work. Good fortune favours the bright and cheerful. I need to complete this full transfer from sentimentality to sympathy.