Man Alive

The artist sits with the children on the bright red sofa while outside it is raining cats and dogs. The three are watching a film - a possibly insipid family tale with a nonetheless perky mixture of animation and live-action - while I sit at the round red table, catching up on some correspondence, including emailed and reported reading, from, to, and about, the war zone. I suppose there is something deeply incongruous about these two elements, fused together as they are like incorrect wires in an impossible conundrum of good electronics and bad poetry, and yet it is because of the work in the war zone that we can pay for the film on the sofa - this makes me sound like a mercenary and yet nothing could be further from the truth. My work there, I like to think, is about grasping the nettle, grabbing the bull by the horns, confronting, along with many others, quite possibly the principal issue of the day, at the same time as being paid for it. Unprompted, the artist leans her head back on the sofa and tells me she will finish writing the email to the impossibly famous artist by the day's end. I feel like a traffic warden ensuring the correct parking of everyone's tasks and yet this also could not be further from the truth. Anyway, I tend sometimes to see nature as the best pattern for mankind to follow, not contrivance, compromise, self-murder, or selfishness. The artist, I like to think, is the same. Talking of nature, the cats and dogs continue to fall from the sky, their tails and floppy ears, whiskers and tongues, touchiness and tunes, cascading to the ground like rolling thunder. By the way, the speculating neighbour was caught by the artist popping his head round the property again, this time under an umbrella. Amusingly, as she opened our bedroom blinds and he guiltily pulled away, it looked as though he had been caught in the act of some kind of voyeurism. Closer to home, the desert lamp is now lit and the backs of everyone's heads are like gargoyles in a church. To my right, the artist's three present pieces are on the wall, made even more mysterious in the half-light, and for a few delightful seconds, it is seldom for longer in life, I feel like the luckiest man alive. 

The sights and sounds of the ups and downs

I have been in the garden brushing away the flies, ladybirds, and wasps, while the artist works on a kind of dream rendition indoors. Trying to write with the children playing is not difficult when compared to some people's distractions in the world, and in truth I can hear the traffic more than the children, motorbikes mostly, and await with well-honed foreboding the sound of a high-speed crash. This is not unfamiliar territory. It is perhaps the same with the Middle East, Persian Gulf, North Africa and Central Asia. We all hear something. We know the situation is bad. And some of us fear it will get much worse. Also, with a kind of well-honed foreboding we await the sound of a high-speed crash. (Nuclear? No, we dismiss.) Which is why as well as writing I have also been reading a book today by a man I met on a number of occasions and with whom I once gave uncredited advice. His latest volume covers one of the countries in the present fragmentation, the strongest perhaps, and though I have only just begun it I can see already the problem I have with my own ignorance. I can never for example seem to grasp fully why things have to fall apart. Over two thousand years ago these people were the most sophisticated on the planet. Renowned for their rectitude and wisdom, they were hunters, poets, and musicians. Indeed for a while they would use art rather than weaponry as their principal means of persuasion. So what went wrong? Did the flies, ladybirds, and wasps get too much for them in the end? Were they obliged to withdraw indoors? Today once again we have some of the so-called most sophisticated people on the planet, on both sides some might argue, people famously keen - again, on both sides - on rectitude, thinking they have the answer, and maybe some of them do. But what can you really do when you hear a motorbike drive too fast? What can you do when you see a wasp on someone’s nose? Warn them? Strike out and risk being bitten yourself? Or, like a woman I met on a two-masted brigantine once, keep calm until it passes? I have a friend who would know. He is cleverer than me and writes about insects well. Hang on. Wait. Another motorbike. (A beat.) Phew. No. It’s OK. (Actually I thought there was a wasp, too.) Wait a moment, shall I just go inside and listen to the news instead?