School's Out Forever

Today against a conscientious backdrop of the artist drawing a kind of viral cornucopia of elegant and spidery images on absolutely everything - cards and T-shirts and frames and books - which are then meticulously wrapped in simple brown paper and taken generously as end-of-term gifts to teachers and helpers alike at our local under-funded primary school, I work briefly, possibly indulgently, on a small chapter where shortly after the Soviet withdrawal a former Afghan warlord complains to the British miles away in Jordan - with a kind of clumsy assertiveness - about American training and funding of Saudis in his own back yard, reminding me in the process that even with the ingenuity or inventiveness of art or craft, though in my case inadequately written words, there’s still no real match to reality, especially where issues such as Afghanistan are concerned, where truth really is stranger than fiction. But maybe that’s why I like the artist so much. Her work is locked in a kind of super-reality in which everything is true and yet certain characteristics of the so-called truth are mixed with stridently and beautifully provided alternatives. Let’s not be too unrealistic, she seems to be saying with some of her well worked pieces, but we don’t need to look at the world this way when for example we can look at it like that. In fiction – something I really don’t have much experience of – you can’t just rewrite the facts, can you? Not casually; not when it comes to real deaths, surely. Or maybe I'm just showing my inexperience. Anyway, in a culture where solutions groan, I like to think of the artist here lending a kind of grave optimism to proceedings, though I sometimes fear my own hunger for things like news – though I am not really a journalist either - has been counter-productive to a purer form of imagination on her part, arrogant though it seems for me to think I can impose myself anyway on someone so attractively independent. At least I know the teachers and helpers at the local primary school are taken care of with T-shirts and the like now. Maybe one can concentrate on the Afghan. I hope he survives. I really do. In his defence, he didn’t ask to be invaded by the Soviets. Anyway, the artist is now placing our 7 year-old daughter’s long blonde hair into sixteen plaits. See what I mean? Relentless. Creative. Real to the end.