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.

You Took My Sleep

It is still dark when the four of us awake, and there is a kind of film-set condensation on all the windows, tiny dribbles of morning struggling down the glass like artists looking for galleries. A few stumbles and much laughter later, we are hurtled like fugitives across the capital in a bright red people carrier, the river glinting with alien colours, the light brightening only slightly, and the city still asleep. Our driver talks to himself. He smiles at what he is saying. (It must be good.) As passengers, we set the camera at various speeds and experiment with shots of the street lighting as we weave in and out of people still walking home. Eventually we reach the station all photographed out and clamber like comedians aboard the train, as if straining to get out of the fumbling metropolis, desperate to shed our urban skin, before it all wakes up, before several million reasons for humanity shake our dream and pluck us all back in again. Result. The train pulls out of the station and we are unrestrained: we are safe. The capital peels off. The carriage is warm, maybe too warm, and we are so sleepy in it, it could be that we are in fact dreaming all of this and are still tucked up in bed. I drink coffee. The artist peers at me from across her plastic cup. The eight-year-old writes and the five-year-old stares out the window. A round of newspapers sit like facts on the table, their news of yet more devastation round the edges of the war zone no real surprise. I stare into space. 'You took my sleep,' I hear a child say. 'You took my sleep.' The child is not ours and her father has just woken her. 'You took my sleep,' she repeats. What a beautiful phrase, I am thinking. Meanwhile, the artist looks relaxed and strangely at peace without her work. There is a light mist hanging like a spectre above the green fields and a bright sun now burns through, to the frost still clinging to the grass. We are off to the foothills. We are off to the mountains and nothing can stop us.

Since my babies left me

With humour and exactitude the artist prepares the children for their trip tomorrow with their grandmother and cousin. They are taking a supposedly whizzing and skilfully leaning train out of the congested capital. They will snake from the self-inflated constriction and across the bottle green land into what we shall call the fast-flowing foothills. There they will stay by the tall and handsome mountains where the buzzards fly. (I have the honour of feeling like an African chief when I write the above. Or an Iroquois in deerskin breechcloths.) I can remember the times before we had any children and the artist showing the same amount of care and attention to her art whenever the work would go off – usually via the framers - for an exhibition somewhere. Children, though, represent themselves and the artist knows this fact. They are their own titles. They have their own themes, their own movements. Even the way they carry themselves is about them and nobody else. And it is a kind of freedom. Freedom. There's a word. We hear it less and less these days but even with my limited experience I know it to be real. I have crossed from one place with freedom into one without and the difference is uncanny and very real. As the children shunt along the tracks tomorrow to their vacational prosperity in the hills I shall be here with the artist in the fumbling metropolis delighted they have such freedom. And it all comes back to art. Art for example is freedom. I can remember a gentle old man, the father of an old girlfriend, replying to a card I once sent him. The card was Japanese and bore the image of a bird taking flight. We did not know it at the time but my girlfriend’s father was dying. He wrote back. ‘Such freedom,’ he said of the bird. It was one of the last things he ever wrote. No, the children will be enjoying their freedom with their grandparents and it shall be interesting watching the working artist in their huge absence over the next few days.