You’re off to the men’s group, eh Jimmy. To check out what’s going down. To discover the latest buzz words. To identify the enemy. Let’s hope your mission to uncover the uncoverable is successful. For no matter what the sum of present knowledge we might possess (possess?) we continue to push on into the unknown, the wilderness, where by definition, we can be caught out at any time. Caught out? Outside of what? Outside of some secret inner circle? So what is the initiatory test for inclusion? And which in-crowd are we seeking to be part of? The poets? The drug dealers? The people on the street?
I watched the Guardian video clip of Wednesday’s student demonstration, moved by these fifty thousand or so students (my daughter amongst them) doing something to voice their opposition to the vandalism of Pinky and Perky and the rest of the Bullingdon Bovver Boys as they dismantle a century of gradual assembly of the complex machinery of an interwoven system of education and social care in an orgy of destruction. The rest of us shrug and hope we can get through, beneath the radar, unseen by all those CCTV cameras.
Can the next sentence I write come a little closer to what it is I’m struggling to say? To put it another way, will I be visited by the muse of inspiration. Probably not, but don’t despair – inspiration is always close, like God, I guess, and just as much out of reach, invisible, unheard, except . . . well, there are always those moments when the veils thin, the breeze tugs at them and we catch a briefest glimpse.
So what if those cameras, constantly on the look out for celebrity (of one sort or another) catch us and expose the extent of our charlatanism. Help, we cry, it’s true, it’s a fair cop officer, I’m barely real, lock me up straight away – guilty as charged.
Or is it simply that I’m in need of a bit of a fight. As soon as I find myself on the inside, then I see the enemy, get them in my sights, and then I’ll show them I’m real enough. But come on, look what happens, check out the history; they’ll turn and ask me, ‘what are you talking about?’ and another voice will chime in, ‘you just have to accept that this is how it is and get on with it’. Is my fighting merely a way of covering up the paucity of my identity, a token fig leave to cover my nakedness, as I squirm by, seeking the shadows of anonymity. And then it occurs to me: see my paintings, see what I’m really made of.