‘Most people lie,’ was all the comment that Alfonso made.
I had just finished venting about a particularly preposterous lie that I heard. I had been looking into the eyes of this liar and they had not even flinched. Was it possible that they even believed their own lies? Or were they completely shameless?
‘I don’t lie.’
‘That is why you do not have much,’ said Alfonso. ‘People don’t welcome the truth with open arms. In fact, they loathe it and will do anything in their power to destroy it.’
‘It is not the truth,’ I said tiredly. ‘It is a truth. One of many.’
‘You believe that hogwash?’ asked Alfonso incredulously. ‘You have told me yourself that you are the truth.’
‘Although not everything that passes as truth is the truth,’ I elaborated, ‘still there has to be some room for manouevre. You don’t want a rigid and totalitarian framework. Which is what knowledge passes as in this society of twits. Their fascism is supposedly knowledge.’
I thought again of this liar and the lie. I had heard some good ones in my time. Some of them had even fooled me. It was obvious why these people lied. Because the truth was too dangerous, because they wanted to cover up their own guilt, because perhaps their intellects were so unsound that they could actually believe the paper thin story they were trying to wrap events in. They were so skilled at lying to your face. And then they would call it ‘civilisation’, their false narrative.
‘Don’t let it bother you,’ said Alfonso, sensing what I was thinking about. ‘You live in a society of liars. I am surprised that you still haven’t gotten used to it.’
‘Only a coward accepts injustice,’ I said firmly.
‘Yet what do you do about people lying to you? Nothing.’
‘What can you do? As you said, they will not accept the truth. It is not worth wasting time on them.’
‘And if the lie is an injustice?’
‘If I had my way,’ I told Alfonso, ‘There would be no lying and there would be justice. This world has never been ready for that in its entire history. Why would it be ready for that now or in the future?’
‘So why do you exist then?’ asked Alfonso. He sneered at me, one of his trademark sneers. ‘I thought you told me that you fought for truth and justice.’
‘Yes, by telling the truth myself. Just like you can’t make someone love difference when they are prejudiced, just like you can’t make someone choose fairness when they are biased, just like you can’t reason with a bigot, so you cannot stop a liar from lying. They have a psychological problem and they need therapy. They are just compulsive liars.’
‘I keep telling you, don’t be upset. Forget everything.’
‘I will, I told Alfonso. I will go to sleep now.’
Alfonso clasped my hand. ‘If you are the truth,’ he said, ‘show us the freedom and the wildness of The Tiger.’ He knew what was in my dreams.
Finally, after several years of not taking a holiday abroad, he had decided to go to foreign shores. However, nothing in life is easy, least of all a journey of ease. He did not know where to go.
His parents had not taken him on holidays abroad when he was a child. He had never booked a holiday abroad by himself or had the decision about where to go.
He lacked any kind of experience and he was stumped.
The first choice had been Japan. Beautiful Japan, the land of inspiration. But what was it that he was actually going to do there? He had a vague impression of nature and local traditions. But how was he going to organise everything?
The second idea was to take a coach trip around Europe and to cram in as much as possible. But then, how much did Europe interest him? Surely it would be pretty much the same as England?
The third idea was Athens. He had always wanted to go there. But then there was that association…
Athens could be had for about seven hundred pounds. A nice hotel with a swimming pool and breakfast. Plenty of archaeological curiosities out there.
Choices. The whole world to be had. And yet, every time he had tried to go abroad, all the plans had come crashing down around him.
There was nowhere to go. There was no place for him.
And at the same time, he could not rest where he was.
In the universe, we are a space. Our body is a space. A tiny little space in what is almost an infinity of space. And that space of the body relates to the spaces of the bodies around it. His space, his body, it had no relationship to the bodies around it. So it did not matter what country he went to or what he did, he would never have a human space around him. So why try? Why imagine being in a different human space? It was all very well saying that no man is an island. But an island he was. He would be an island in Japan, Europe, Athens or Africa. It was not what he wanted, but what he was.
After a promise to write in the night, I sat there at my desk in my boxer shorts scratching away idly at my inner thigh as I endured a severe writer’s blank. I tried the usual methods to break the blank. A feverish search in my vocabulary of words. Reflection on an experiences that would inspire something. Themes.
Nothing worked.
There were certain things it was now best to avoid. That was not helping. Because it was those things that were on my mind the most. The unfinished business…
Suddenly I felt tired so I grabbed the laptop and lay on my bed. And, immediately when I done so, all the words and ideas came flooding in.
Curious. Had it been the change of scene? But why? I am comfortable at my desk and habituated to writing there. Then I realised. I had laid down. Which had changed the orientation of my brain.
I had jiggled the jelly.
That was what had sparked off the creativity. All I needed to do was to change the orientation of the mass inside my head. Maybe if I leant to the left, that would mean that I would produce poetry or soemthing like it. Then, the right might produce prose and non-fiction. Maybe if I leant my head back while it was straight, I could produce some good erotica.
So simple. All I had to do was to introduce different movements into my routine.
I tested it out. I lay down and tilted my head to the left. Failure. I started thinking of they, all the moments. They were on my mind frequently.
I tried the other side. It was worse. I started thinking of the big C word. My career. And out of work time too. I shuddered.
Why was the writing impulse so elusive today?
But if it was the jiggling of the jelly…
‘Eureka!’ I cried. The solution was so simple. I slapped myself on both cheeks and on my forehead. That would move it.
I pummelled away at my face with my open palm. Unfortunately, however, you can not get much writing done when you don’t have any free hands. The jelly was jiggered and not jiggled. And in all the experimentation, I had forgotten the idea I had when I laid on the bed. There was not going to be any story tonight.
My discerning, demanding readers would be most displeased.
It was the words. They were not speaking the recognised words.
‘You cannot say individually. You have to follow convention. Peculiarities raise precautions.’
They looked sorrowfully at me. ‘What if I cannot?’
I advised them that for the next attempt, they should put a prompt into an artificial writing machine.
‘Are you serious?’ they asked me incredulously?
‘You are in dire need of a Robot Cyrano.’
‘It is not just the words. What about my actions and feelings? Cyrano is a fiction. Most of communication and speaking is not the words.’
‘The speculations of one that has shown little success. What do you have against a robot Cyrano? If they like your actions and feelings in addition to the words of predictability and convention, the words of a society, what is wrong with it? Technology assists humankind in all of its aims. Why not love? And then, Robot Cyrano is a people pleaser. Robot Cyrano will do the job.’
‘There is something awful in you. All is not fair in love and war’, they said. ‘I cannot corrode my voice to belong.’
So, they stumble and bumble. Because they won’t imitate. Because they won’t parrot Robot Cyrano. Because they have their own words. Because they don’t and can’t follow the acknowledged rules.
I am happy to ask the machine. After all, it works. There is an algorithm to connection.
She wanted one eyebrow to be blue and the other to be green.
‘Why?’ they asked.
She said to be different. To be able to waggle her eyebrows so as to be received in a polychromatic perception. To confuse in blue. To judge in green. To be playful in colour.
They told her it was discordant, disarranged, disparate.
She said it was outrageous, outstanding, an outlier of style and sophistication.
Those are not good things they said.
Who are you to be gods of society? she cried.
We will have our wish upon a dish they proclaimed. There is a law of the face which we cannot misplace. For to do so would be disgrace.
So she shaved off her eyebrows and she unveiled her eyes, one blue and one brown. It was the talk of the town.
At the risk of death, he packed everything of his strange self into the folded flower of paper. Neatly sealing everything in, neatly pressing down, neatly wincing when the paper cut into his thumb and finger, staining itself with his blood.
This paper rose, this unreal flower, he festooned it upon the wall of his house. The innermost was now on the outside. They came. They looked. They said that the paper flower was foul. They said that he, who had made the paper flower, that he was foul. They would have clawed his eyes out if they could and chopped at his fingers if they could.
The paper flower, hurt by the eyes and hurt by the words, it sighed in perfume. And the scent stung at the eyes of the haters. Their eyes watered and the tears fell. The tears were full of poison. They tore apart the paper flower.
And he? He was in the paper flower. They were tearing at him, clawing at him, ripping into him. He was unbuilt and uncreated, whittled down and scarred all over. Big gaping scars that screamed with oblivion. But he, he could not cry.
Very kindly and attentively, Nigel led me and my friend around the artworks. He was reading Tolstoy and we discussed Russian literature and the nature of artistic meaning, its ambiguity and its polyphony of interpretations.
To me, Nigel’s image of a stranded picnic blanket next to a fruit machine in a huge expanse of field spoke of intense loneliness and isolation. The objects are things for humans but there are no humans in the image. The implication is that this is a representation of reality, an objective view at gambling. And the human things themselves are dimunitive, suggesting their insignificance. There is a perceptual shift to focus on these human things, the cloth and the machine. And as we gaze in detail at these things, we could perhaps reflect upon the isolation of the gambler that plays the fruit machine, as they are locked into a lonely game of the self against fate.
The painting is slanted to imitate the screen of the fruit machine, so in a sense, the viewer is inhabiting the body of the player. We are all gamblers, we all play our games against chance perhaps? The positioning of the unplayed fruit machine and the empty picnic blanket is almost level with the horizon, suggesting a contrast of the red with the blue sky: sin versus goodness. There is a surrealism in the image since it is placed in a field with an unexpected fruit machine there. Is this a removal of human context to suggest a highly personal experience? An equation of isolated gambling with wildness and the antisocial?
2. Guy Nicholls/Iris Inc. – Wave Yourself a Long Goodbye Because This Moment Breaks Through
As I entered the abandoned swimming pool that was now functioning as an art gallery, a surge of music took over. It turned out that Guy Nicholls was performing a song with a rich bassline. I caught him at the end of the performance and he told me that he wanted to test the boundaries of what counted as art and performance with his vocals and the music behind it. The heavy bass was to course through the body and provide a visceral experience to the viewer.
3. Yoobin Lee – (Harvard women programmers woven cloth and performance)
Arrayed in dazzling white in a white room, I noticed that Yoobin Lee was barefoot. Actually, she was taking a break from her performance and she told us about her piece.
The cloth featuring the early Harvard women computer programmers was a celebration of female ingenuity, a recovered story of their contribution to the computer revolution. At the same time, there was a celebration of the links between weaving and computing, since computing and its punch cards had evolved from looms.
Abruptly, she turned away and climbed a dizzying ladder. The performance now began. She plucked at the immense loom she had created like a harp. There was the revealing of the practice of weaving and the reality of the loom, the craft that has manufactured our computer led society. What was the significance of that journey up the ladder to perch on that ledge amongst the ceiling? Perhaps the performance reflected our journey through time and history into the age of the computer through the loom and weaving, the trajectory upwards into technological progress. The elevation of the women as weavers that have created this society as in the cloth of the Harvard programmers? The whiteness of the room and Yoobin Lee’s clothing perhaps an allusion to the environments of computer manufacture.
What is love? How can it be represented visually? Hyun’s piece explored these interesting questions. Is love obvious? Or is love abstract? The argument made in this piece was that love was abstract. There was a contrast in the representation of abstract love with the padlocks on the gates that attempted to lock love, to render it immortal (it is a lover’s practice to lock souls with these padlocks, apparently). In the abstract side of love, there were remnants of failed relationships which showed that love was not eternal but fleeting.
The piece reminded me of King Lear. Cordelia’s unspoken love versus the false (and obvious), spoken love of her sisters. Here, the idea was translated into the visual realm: abstract love versus obvious love.
What was interesting in the artistic binary that was being created was the awareness of the cultural specificity of ideas of love. Hyun mentioned the role of religion in creating ideas of love. In Indian culture, love has to be shown. One cannot be a Cordelia. There must be speaking and there must be demonstration, there must be the obvious.
A very beautiful and mesmerising performance unfolded in the chapel as Ash Jo interacted with a simulacrum of her body from which the lillies she had grown had emerged. The idea was the passage of time and the role of memories. There was a ritualistic quality to the motions, with incense and the ringing of the bell which called to mind Buddhist and Hindu practices. There was a great subtletly to the peformance and a subtle dynamism as the two players circled one another and then they were brought towards each other. The climax of the action, when the flowers were cut, was a huge contrast to the original stillness.
What attracted me to Zoe’s Gallery was the quality of the singing. She had a very fine voice. There was a sort of mad hatter’s tea party happening, full of life and chaos. It was immersive musical theatre with the visitors gathered at the table too. Very vibrant and enjoyable, a very accessible art form.
