I find it difficult to keep regular hours with Wordstall these last weeks, and wonder what’s stopping me. Men Behaving Badly? Ebola? ISIS?
Perhaps I am forgetting to note what I can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do I know how to see what is worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes me?
Nothing strikes me? Then I can’t know how to see. White walls.
La Revoluzione siamo Noi.
Why is the ceiling of this room this high? The room is enormous, like a cathedral. Even an orchestra could fit in here. It is big enough to hold a concert in.
Cry Out.
It has a perfect acoustic for music. That can also be a vehicle for social change. Cry out again with enough imagination to say: If you build it they will come.
Wave Arms.
And try to say, at least gesturely, we can be in a permanent dialogue. The white walls are covered with more than twenty large paintings. They are brightly coloured and filled with cartoon-like figures. Some have words written across them in German – phrases like ‘Demokratie ist lustig’. There are also rectangular glass cabinets in the middle of the room filled with things. In one there is a wooden sleigh, and in another there is a violin. A third contains a strange, a misshapen metal thing. The note beside it says it is a back brace. There is a red fire extinguisher on one wall, but then on closer inspection I see it is not on the wall but inside one of the paintings.
Art belongs to the People!
La Revoluzione siamo Noi is a large sepia coloured print (Edizione Modern Art Agency – Napoli). A man wearing a felt hat walks purposefully towards us. He has a bag slung across one shoulder.
(No Photography)
I feel I know, or that I ought to know, the identity of the man walking purposely towards me. He is someone I recognize, someone important out of my past.
(No Photography)
La Revoluzione siamo Noi was created in 1972. and 180 copies were made. I know the man walking is part of my history and that he is also the history of many other people.
A small sign on a stand in the middle of the room states that photography is not permitted (for copyright reasons it says).
The man in the felt hat is walking along a cobbled stone street in a foreign land. I think it is Italy or somewhere on another continent where Italian is spoken.
Recently I was staying in a house where a July/August copy of a magazine called Foreign Affairs had been left by a previous visitor. I noticed that it was expensive (£9.95 per issue). The issue was called “WHAT REALLY HAPPENED” and the first articles had titles which all began the same way:
‘What really happened in Iran
The CIA, the ouster of Mosaddeq, and the restoration of the Shah’
‘What really happened in Congo
The CIA, the murder of Lumumba, and the rise of Mobutu’
‘What really happened in Chile
The CIA, the coups against Chile, and the rise of Pinochet’
‘What really happened in Bangladesh
Washington, Islamabad, and the genocide in East Pakistan’.
Iran 1953, Congo 1961, Pakistan, 1971, Chile 1973: it was the ‘What really happened in Chile’ article which caught me. The piece was written by a man called Jack Devine and it caught me. The introduction said Jack served 32 years in the CIA, and the article was adapted from his book Good Hunting: an American Spymaster’s Story. It began like this – ‘On September 9th 1973, I was eating lunch at Da Carla, an Italian restaurant in Santiago, Chile, when a colleague joined my table and whispered in my ear…‘
(No Photography)
