Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace within it

I have just returned from a talk given across town by the principal spokesman for the largest military alliance in the world. When I walked back into the living room at home, where the artist had just stopped working, our 5-year-old son popped his little head up from behind the bright red sofa, and let out a sigh of relief. There had been a severe electrical storm and he had been worried about me, and was still a little worried for himself. I looked at the artist, then back at our son. I placed a hand on his warm shoulder and kissed the top of his head. Where exactly studies of conflict fit into this is debatable. Maybe it is some kind of weird muscularisation of a strong sense of peace. A feeling of unfinished business. An appetite. A new career. A craving for content. An affirmative thirst for knowledge. A working hunch. I am sitting at the round red table now. The artist is on the sofa. Her new piece is on the wall, to her right, and looks as abstract as camouflage, especially as it begins only in places to take shape. Anyway, our son is asleep next to her and the news on the TV shows a plane looking sad, broken, deflated, next to its intended runway. There must have been, oh, two dozen nationalities in the room where the talk took place. It was a public discussion, open to anyone: there just isn't that large an appetite these days for subjects such as agreements to mutual defence in response to attacks by external parties. Only, external parties weren't really discussed, not in the intended sense, as the organisation in question is a kind of external party in itself in the theatre of operations where most of the discussion was centred. I stare at my son still asleep on the bright red sofa - a gentle smile on his face - and think about the children in the war zone who never wake up. The idea, lest we forget, is for that number, that figure, to come down.

War's not about who's right, but who's left

I remember as a young man waking up in the war zone. It was a war back then, too, but a different war, and this was long before I met the artist. Anyway, I had just been awoken by the azan, or call to prayer, and it was a handsome thing discovering you were still alive. By the entrance of my tent, a small one-person home donated by a western government, stood a tall figure. I squinted and rubbed my eyes again. It was still dark outside but I began to see that the man staring over me was holding a metal plate with some naan and yoghurt. Also, I noticed, he had my camera under his arm, my film camera, and it was half-wrapped in a light grey blanket. I took it from him immediately, before I took the naan and yoghurt. What was he doing with it? This was mine. This was my lifeline, why I was there. Without it, I was useless, both to the people I was with, and to the people I hoped would be paying me later for being there. I devoured the food he gave me and thanked him. I think we both chuckled in the end. An hour later, I was filming with this man's commander as about two dozen others were preparing for battle. This transition from prayer to war had been seamless. A buzzard, I seem to remember, swooped down and rose up again before jinking behind the facing mountain. Weapons were dragged like bodies from the cave. Barrels were cleaned – something I'd been told never happened - and I kept filming, kept peering at it all, through my peephole, only occasionally losing my balance. It kept coming, too. Fresh ammunition cases were stacked on top of each other. Pride of place in this expanding ritual was a twin-barrelled heavy machinegun, plus the usual assortment of what are and were the most famous assault rifles in the world. As we moved closer to what would become my first ever firefight, I told myself that if I made it out again, I would always try to be a man of peace. Well, I feel I have tried to keep to this. I have erred many times, many times, in other areas. But I like to think I have at least tried to keep the peace. Is this down to living with an artist?

The Homecoming

I awake early. The radio is on. Ever-rolling news. (The chaos of the events unmatched by the neat re-telling.) I roll over, to the east. The artist is not there. Of course. She is in the foothills, though travelling back today, with the little people. I lie on my back and catch up on the news. The stories seem familiar. Some are. I heard them in my sleep. Indeed, in the course of the previous six hours I have probably been around the world five times. I examine the artist’s work on the wall. It will be the first thing she looks at when she arrives. (Mark my words.) Furthermore she will say it needs more work. I shower and shave. I run an errand, and speak on the phone to one of the children, then the artist, who is preparing to leave the foothills. I head into the heart of the capital aware of their imminent journey. Everything in the capital feels relaxed, though I am there to meet a man back briefly from a war-zone. He saunters in to where we are meeting. He bears a relaxed but worldly demeanour. I have seen him each time but one when he has been back. I remember when he first told me he was going out. It is interesting to register the changes, and good to note, in his case, a continued strength and respect for others. Also, you know you are in good company when the brave man plays down the risk, belittles the danger, and talks with humour. We discuss my own possible role in this field - we have had this conversation before - and I am satisfied. I bid goodbye. The sun is on our faces. And I wish him well. He flies back tomorrow. In the morning. My second appointment is with another war-zoner but this one I discover has postponed the meeting for two days. I decide instead, perhaps indulgently, to prepare for the artist and the little people’s arrival by going home and cleaning the flat – we were working hard before the foothills and left it very dirty. Why, I shock myself by buying a mop on the way. Who am I trying to impress? If it is the artist, you would shake your head at some of things I have done in the past in order - you would think – to do the opposite. The first thing I do in the flat is to open all the windows and doors. With basements, the airing of the space is essential. Anyway, when they arrive a few hours later their spirits are high and their appreciation apparent. The artist then looks at her work: ‘It needs more work,’ she says.

Phone An Artist

I remember - in the foothills of our relationship - being in a medieval town surrounded from the land and sea by formerly friendly neighbours who were now enemy forces, and though this town was not your traditional frontline there was an armoury of dispiritedness – bloody hatreds, wretched breakdowns, twisted animosity, and the like. I’d spent the day touring a tortuous sequence of large and deserted buildings, hotels mostly, shells, which smelt of human excrement, anger, and in the corners of some rooms urine-doused fires. The people who let me speak to them would look fearfully over their shoulders the whole time and chain-smoke non-filtered cigarettes from nervously crumpled packs. Fear was everywhere and was contagious. The faintest of unfamiliar sounds were met with frozen looks and mass-migratory thoughts. It was hot, too, and I remember tugging my shirt between my thumb and index finger from my sweating chest. In the distance was a bombed-out radio tower, broken like a toy, and on the floor were spent cartridges, and on the broken tables were lavish and unused dinner menus printed in several languages. By one desultory wall close to where I was staying, I remember a hospital doctor waiting in the sun to hand a list of desperately needed medical supplies, and when I walked the cobbled streets, sinister figures appeared from nowhere, offering to take me back to their flats where the flickering darkness had me convinced I would be murdered. And the dogs, the dogs. I had never seen so many strays before, some of them pedigrees, whose wealthy owners had fled across the sea with cash and gold on high-powered speed boats. Conscripted soldiers were everywhere, too, bruised and back from the real frontline, and I will always remember, always, one young man in a large trench coat despite the heat with this look in his eyes – the look – which said he was a good man but had done some butchery and could not live with himself anymore. I could not take it, either, and went to a public phone exchange where I waited in a queue to phone out. Eventually I made my call. It was to the artist. I burst into tears.

Oh What A Lovely Art

The artist had a tooth taken out today. Her mouth exhibited a bloody rout. Years ago I introduced the artist to a legendary figure who once exhibited a group of bloody war artists in a large townhouse across the ocean and with me the day before draped massive green camouflage netting all the way down from the fourth floor to the ground. It was the forerunner to a later and more grand show - which I never saw - before his very sad and premature death one Christmas day in Paris. I had a Scottish-Nigerian friend make a cassette of second world war speeches and songs for him which played throughout the wild opening party of this first exhibition. Surreal Eighties cocktails were drunk to the sound of Churchill denouncing 'Corporal Hitler' and Eisenhower talking about the bazooka, jeep, and atomic bomb. Vera Lynn came into it, too. Meanwhile throughout the townhouse tiny watercolours peppered the slightly camp walls with glimpses of hell as painted by people painfully unsuited to the slitting of throats. The artist here in fact once briefly contemplated being an official war artist but felt that journalism and photography covered the subject amply, which I believe to be true. There was a time though when artists were the only visual war reporters, just like when the painters of the American frontier were the only means for the settlers to see what lay ahead. (How the artist and her husband could do with their equivalent now.) Talking of art and war, it was the aforementioned townhouse curator who told me of a possibly true and certainly artistic incident in the second world war when the British built a fake bomb factory close to a real one and how the Luftwaffe one night dropped a rubber bomb on it. (And if true, what a wonderful jewel in an otherwise ghastly crown of thorns.) Why, even 21 SAS in the UK are to a select few known also as the Artists Rifles. But, it must be said again, the TV screen today with all its compressed news from Iraq and Afghanistan burns in the corner of the room with a kind of endless artlessness and all creative thought goes out the window. What will we have next in this light? The Basel War Fair? We've already had the suicide artist. Don't you just hate it? It's like pulling teeth.