postaday

MANIFESTO – The Artists Will Set You Free

The Artists Will Set You Free

There are no paintings, no sculptures, no books of poems. There are only conversations between the creator and the canvas , the chisel and the stone, the pen and the paper, all asking: What could you be?

And the dialogue does not stop there. The art asks the audience and the audience answers even if only to say: I do not understand. The creator asks the canvas, creating art; and the art asks the audience and the questions spread. Why? Why this way and not that? Why him and not her? Why your favoured son in the grand chair, why my daughter in the sweat shop? This is what the hegemonies fear.

The questions breed questions. A population explosion, immeasurable, restless. What is the story of the unmade bed? What tide washed in the room full of sunflower seeds? Why do some have no water, and some drink only sugar syrup?

Art is a meritocracy. The questions and the conversation do not see rags or riches, colour, gender, preference, height, weight, they only hear the questions asked as the chisel falls, as ink flows to the nib.

The hegemonies fear for their control is based on illusion. They fear because one mind wide awake can pierce the veil of dreams they wrap us in, cuddled and coddled and exploited. A feedback loop of fantasy in which we are sullied and despoiled.

The questions and the conversations and the dialogues are locked in vaults. They are traded at great price, commodities, goods, merchandised to cheapen their meaning. They are caged in wealth. The chosen, favoured creators gagged by privilege. Money is the divisive wedge.

The rest languish, ignored, the susurrus of the silenced in abandonment, daubed with the discounted cross of price: This has no monetary value – Therefore it has no value. Our language has been suborned and yet we live out our lives without outrage.

The only true currency is communication. What questions does the art make you ask? Does it fuel your courage with indignation? Does it make you inquisitive? Does it wake you from your lives of silence and subservience? If it makes the questions bubble up from beneath the somnolence of soap operas, quiz shows and celebrity worship then the art has some purpose, it has meaning, it has value.

The artists will set you free. They will show you chains you do not know you wear. They will draw back the lace curtains from the cage of thought in which you are trapped. They will make you question the burdens you have become so accustomed to you do not know you bear them. The will smash the yokes of ignorance and blindness with which you plough your birthright for the table of another.

You could have a walk on part in this war of ideas that is long overdue. Did you even know your freedom has been traded for shallow comforts? The sweat of your labour is stolen back from your hands with goods you don’t need made by slaves you will never see, paid for with your own bondage.

The artists will set you free. They will carve the faces of the unschooled children who make your trainers into the soaring walls of corporate mansions. They will spatter the overpasses with the strip mined landscapes where the precious metals for your hybrid car are ripped from the earth. They will bend wires into the spirals of despair and destitution faced by those who don’t fit the narrow confines of the corporate capitalist model.

The artists will set you free. Feed them, hear them, invite them into your homes and hearts. Challenge them to wake you with the truth, and listen when they scream it, raucous, uncouth, uncontained. Ask the questions they ask you. Demand answers and the hegemonies will fear you, hate you, hurt you. Give your own life meaning. Overturn the illusion of your privilege, where the best part of your production lines the pockets of those with plenty.

There will be peril, but at the end of the chain of questions there may be equity.

END

In a similar vein a recent post from someone I follow: Let us judge Art by QUALITY not POPULARITY!

And off on the consumerism tangent – check out What’s the deal with consumerism?

This piece was brushed off from its initial incarnation because a daily prompt asked for a manifesto and mine has not changed.

My book available here and here among others. Buy it, review it, tell me what you think.

The Door I Never Opened

The Door I Never Opened

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

TS Eliot – Burnt Norton

I cling to my regrets. They are milestones and millstones, showing where I have been, or the doors I did not open. Keepsakes, chains on snowflakes that bind my failing memory.

There are things I would change. Most are actions or decisions of such monumental personal proportions that I cannot unravel the consequences. Life, death, love and loss are contingent on those turning points. Best left alone, I think.

Little moments, almost inconsequential incidents also haunt me: a choice of words, a second’s hesitation. Given the chance to do these over I would take a different path.

This is one.

There is much I regret about that final year. My glittering academic career, punctuated with awards and scholarships, came crashing to earth. I ignored the syllabus and threw myself into night-long discussions on metaphysics, maths, syntax, and the recipe for the perfect mozzarella salad. I wrote a lot of bad poems. A lot, and really bad.  I spent hours tapping them out two-fingered, but I could not bring myself to spend a fraction of that time in the library reading about my course.

All that is set. Let it stay.

I’d change the two words I said to you one summer afternoon before we sipped elderberry cordial in the shadow of Woolf and Wittgenstein.

There is a lot I don’t remember about that year, twenty and some have passed since then. I do remember you. We smoked on the window seat in my room, our legs dangling towards the river and the Bridge of Sighs three storeys below. I should have been revising for my finals.

You asked me to turn you into a vampire. I bit your neck.

I remember how much you loved those windows. I remember I didn’t kiss you.

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I remember the night four of us walked across the scholar’s garden. The moon through the branches striped the lawn. I took off my shoes and went third, it was our Abbey Road, or Belsize Park. “Do you remember, barefoot on the lawn with shooting stars?”

And I remember the day you were going on a trip upriver, and either I invited myself, or you insisted I go with you. There was a gang of your friends. Of them I remember nothing at all.

We watched the trees pass overhead from the bow of the boat, wading through the unreal beauty of Cambridge. You pulled me back as the others strolled to The Orchard tea room and said, “I do love you, you know.”

I said, “I know.”

Those words cut me today, while you have undoubtedly forgotten them. I don’t know what I was trying to prove, or what coolness and aloofness would achieve. A moment to be anyone but Han. I should have said anything else, I still don’t know what.

Who knows what it would change. I forget now if I ever saw you again after that day. Perhaps once in a fleeting goodbye and a promise to write. Perhaps not. Those facts might remain unchanged. But the burden of two careless words in my memory would be lifted, and I would tread a little lighter.

letters

END

If you are interested in my storytelling look here

More memories from college collated here

DP: Choice – The Choice that is No Choice

Daily Prompt today is to choose a location to be kidnapped to: desert island, jungle or locked in a building.

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The Choice that is No Choice

“It is a simple enough decision. Why hesitate?”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t quite trust your intentions.”

My captor smiled. At least I assumed he smiled. Something in the shape of the silhouette, which had barely moved throughout our conversation, seemed a bit more smiley.

“I bear you no personal ill will,” he said, “I have just been asked to keep you out of the way for a while. Once things have taken their course we will come and get you and you can go.”

I had already made my decision, it was pretty straightforward. Either to be abandoned on a desert island, or locked in a building, which would trigger my acute claustrophobia; or to be left in a jungle, with my creepy crawly phobia. It was a no brainer. Blessed solitude, time to work on my tan, if they gave me paper and enough pencils I would be happy if they never came back, swimming, catching fish. It would be Survivor and Desert Island Discs rolled into one.

The choice wasn’t about my choice of destination, it was whether I chose to trust someone I could not see, who had had me bundled into a blacked out X5 outside Henrietta’s house, and brought here. Wherever here was.

I remembered the bunta joke and began to laugh. Quietly at first, a little hiccoughing giggle, that gained momentum until I was bubbling over with hysterical snorts. I don’t have a particularly attractive or cool laugh, and once it escapes I can’t haul it back. Now, with the wire tight tension it grabbed me and launched me off the cliff face of clownery.

“You find something amusing in the situation?”

It took a while to get my breath under control. “You just reminded me of a joke about choices, and under the circumstances I found it funnier than it really is.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s really not that good.”

“We have a little time until your transportation gets here. Indulge me.”

I shrugged, “You asked for it. There are three explorers deep in Africa, who are captured by a tribe, and tried by the chief for trespassing on his territory. They were found guilty, and the chief offered them a choice: death, or a punishment he called bunta.”

There was no sign from the silhouette to suggest he had heard the joke before, so I ploughed on. “Fearing death the first explorer says, “I choose bunta.” The chief smiles cruelly and the man is dragged off into a hut. His friends hear fearful screams for about 20 minutes, and then the guy emerges, naked, limping, haggard, his eyes empty and his cheeks hollow. He grabs the next guy by the hand and says, “Choose death, there is nothing more terrible than bunta”. Then he falls unconscious to the floor.”

Still nothing from the silhouette. “The second guy also fears dying, and also chooses bunta, despite the warning. An lo and behold 20 minutes later he is out as well, naked, limping and broken. “Choose death” he begs his friend, “choose death.” And with that he passes out too.

“Now with two testimonies in hand the third guy is resigned to his fate. “I choose death,” he says. The chief smiles again and says “Good. Death by bunta.”

Nothing. Not a snigger, not a snort, not even a groan. This must be how a comedian feels when his material falls flat, although it was never really a very good joke. It took a while before he said, “I see. The choice that is no choice. You fear perhaps that there is a building in a jungle on a deserted island?”

I suddenly went cold, and a stinking sweat broke out all over. “Say that last bit again.”

“You fear a building in a jungle on a deserted island.”

“I thought it was a desert island.”

“Not at all, it is just far from any shipping lanes, and there is no human habitation. The island is off the coast of Finland, but too far to swim for shore.”

I should expand on the things I don’t like, enclosed spaces, bugs, and being cold.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I am being well paid for it. You need to be kept well out of the way until Lady Henrietta is married, and when she is safely away on honeymoon, you can come back.” I definitely heard the smile in the voice this time. “His Lordship thought an object lesson might be in order, so you could reflect on your behaviour. Lady Henrietta has so much to say about you in her diary, and I am always thorough in my research.”

So that was it. My shoulders slumped in resignation. “Tell me about this building.”

End

My book available here and here among others. Buy it, review it, tell me what you think.

The photo above is one of my own, taken from a seaplane over the Maldives.