Painting a Statue of a Woman

Imagine:
the task of applying a coat of paint
to the statue of a woman; 
it would be to apply oneself 
to each and every aspect of her beauty, 
at once frail and human,
at once ethereal and undying; 
it would be a love letter to her, 
even if the statue represented 
no soul on Earth, 
and a love letter to the world; 

and yet all they would see is, 
oh, the statue is duck-egg blue now; 
yesterday, it was white; 
they would not understand the tenderness 
in each brushstroke, 
nor how it felt to take 
each aspect of her unworldly, 
worldly beauty in hand
and show that you understood it; 
understood its posture and geometry, 
understood its relationship with light 
and the human eye; 

the whole time, you would be whispering 
I know, I know, I know, 
I know; and she quietly, not looking up at you, 
would say: I love, I love, I love, 
I love; and you would ask - how could you not? 
You are made of love 
as all works of art are acts of love, 
love letters to the world 
written in self creation and self sacrifice, 
in genuine communication,
with the intention of being overheard; 

every second you would fear 
putting your brush in the pot of duck-egg blue paint 
only to find it dry, 
yet your brush would find it ever lubricious, 
new-smelling with the just-made odour of fresh paint, 
and as you completed the painting, 
you would find yourself wishing 
the gentle agony would never end;

once finished,
you would refrain from kissing her
still-wet duck-egg blue cheek,
and gather up your paints
and painting paraphernalia
as the brightness eased from the light, 
and you would go home, 
your bicycle wheels squealing,
and you sighing in the crepuscule, 
rejoicing that you're going home, 
lamenting that the day and all the work is done.

The Good, the Bad and the Inefficient

"All good writers have some bad in them." -- Philip Larkin

I believe he's right because, if you want to make art, you have to really believe 'This thing should exist' and 'It has to be like this', but nobody can be so self-oriented only when they make art; they must be that kind of person all the time.

My next point will broaden the stage of this intrapersonal story quite dramatically, so to speak.

I think there is too great a concern with being good and being perfectly good. I think it's okay to be bad. The universe is fundamentally good (take 'good' to mean something like 'unified' if the word 'good' is losing its meaning at this point). The goodness or unity in the universe is strong enough to carry the weight of badness or disunity, and that may even be what it's for.

Let us take the politician as a case apart from artists. All politicians are at least partly bad because they all want to control the monopoly on violence. They all desire the right to apply force, to compel their fellow citizens to do things they would not otherwise do. (Authority in my view is a form of disunity or 'badness' because the only people who can represent that people is that same people themselves).

But, for one, this 'badness' of political actors may in the end achieve some good, suggesting that their badness may have been part of a goodness so great that it was difficult to perceive.

(As an analogy here, consider the inefficient but surviving business. It is inefficient because some of its activities do not convert investment into profit as efficiently as possible. But some of that inefficiency may yield an insight that increases the business's profitably. In that case, what was thought to be inefficiency was in fact an efficiency that could not be identified using the available methods. So it is with the good and the bad.)

And secondly, the necessary badness of individual politicians is tolerable because there is enough good to carry it.

But what if there is not? Shouldn't we say 'Badness is okay *as long as* there is enough good to carry it'? Let's try it. If a government becomes so subsumed by badness that its goodness collapses under the weight, much more suffering will radiate outwards from it to the rest of the people. But those people, being largely good, will carry the weight until a better time and better decisions. And if they are not, and they destroy themselves, humanity will live on around them to that better time. And if humanity is destroyed, the considerable remainder of the world will live on. And if the world is destroyed? The galaxy? The universe? Ah, the universe cannot be destroyed. There cannot be no universe. As long as the potential for existence exists, there will be.

And so, it is not necessary to say 'as long as' because there will always be enough good to carry the bad. It is just that there may not be enough good to carry the bad within a given identified container.

Having established this, we can now work backwards. If Earth doesn't need to be ripped apart as part of some powerful disunity (or some greater good so large it looks like tragedy to the human eye), it shouldn't be. The nation, the community, the individual should not be consumed by badness if there is an alternative.

I think identity exists so that we will struggle for it, but we have innumerable concentric identities: self, family, profession, sex, class, background, political outlook, society, nation, continent, planet, galaxy. A person who could align all of their identities and struggle towards unity in all of them would be the most powerfully good person. But because we cannot do that - none is sufficiently strong - and so each of us is necessarily somewhat bad, somewhat disunified.

As Plato had Socrates say in the Protagoras, "No one errs willingly". They who know right will do right. But knowing, for example, that it is right to give food to a person who is starving is not enough. We would also have to align our identities sufficiently to understand that we and the suffering person are of the same kind. Then we would automatically help them.

When we know how to preserve, how to be the good and carry the bad, we do so. And when we don't know how to be good, we must necessarily be bad and be carried.

This provides no assurance against personal destruction or that of our kind but, because the greatest reality is indestructible, even if our collective badness leads to the end of any good we recognise, some small part of us will live on until the end.

Art and the Hero

Of the news about Neil Gaiman, I must say that I am heartbroken.

For those who do not know, I must report that he has at best been accused of coercing young women in his employment to have sex with him, while, at worst, he is accused of rape. His disappearance from social media two weeks ago seems to verify the seriousness of the claims.

First, I feel deeply sorry for the hurt done to those young women, that I admire their their bravery in speaking out and hope this can be part of their moving forward. I also feel sorry for the more general damage done to the relationships between men and women, and between the powerful and the vulnerable.

Secondly, I will say that there are two philosophical positions on the matter: those who believe that the artist and their art are separate, and those who believe that they form together a whole. I believe both positions are valid, but I must necessarily take the latter for I find that my knowledge of the artist informs the art and makes it greater, and the separation of the two would be to the injury of my appreciation.

My own story relating to Neil Gaiman dates back to the 90s when I read Good Omens and continued in 2002 when I was 21 and got my first steady job. I used to take my £150 weekly pay cheque to Forbidden Planet on Buchanan Street in Glasgow and purchase one Sandman collection for £15. I was paying a tithe to DC Comics at that time, and it was worth it. My appreciation for Gaiman has been long, and my respect for him has been deep, even as I envied his success, freedom and influence.

I thought that in him I had found one successful living writer whose work I loved who lived up to the high ideals of his own art. Now I have lost this, and I am bereft.

Fortunately, I am not alone for the art still whispers its messages to me, and if I listen very carefully, I can still hear. But what now that I lack a worthy human model for my progress?

I must resist the temptation to let my envy turn to pleasure in how he has fallen. I must resist the temptation to turn inwards and, in a childish sense of hurt, declare that I will follow no more heroes.

And of the future, I hope that, should the world ever turn its eye on me and create such a large version of me that a smaller me can be hidden in its shadow and become wicked there, that I would have the wisdom to resist corruption. For, if not, then the best thing that can possibly happen to me is that I continue to labour honestly without the glare of the world upon me for the rest of my days.