“It is better to discuss large ideas using small gestures. When we over-use large gestures, they progressively lose their power. A play, book, film or artwork that is non-stop drama has no contrast or topography, no quietness setting the stage for a storm.”
“June is the greenest month. It rains all the time, the whispering mountain undergrowth, tangled and heaving: steamy with life and tingling death. Raindrops lodged in a spider’s web, collected; slowly descending along the veins of the leaves of new hydrangea like glass tears. Stems, blades of grass seething with chlorophyll : the slow camera of photosynthesis”
“Arundhati Roy had written about this pandemic being a portal into another world. I keep thinking about that other world on the other side. What will that world be like? Will it be more empathetic? Or is all this really that world already? ”
“We’re so busy talking to ourselves, in a language of our own construction and pleasing ourselves with our own ideas, that we aren’t seeing what we should be seeing….Perhaps these are the dark ages. Every age thinks they are the enlightened ones but we are the barbaric times in someone else’s past. And that bothers me, but it is also inspiring because things can always be better. If someone is reading Tales From the Inner City in 500 years, I hope they think ‘He wasn’t quite there – but he was going in the right direction’. ”
What I think is that right now human beings are entirely capable, have entirely enough knowledge and capability to do this: we could only use energy transfer to fulfil our needs for warmth and light, we could provide that for every human on earth. We could live entirely respectfully with other forms of life on earth, only using land which has already been used, or use new land but offset it. We could avoid using valuable biodiverse land entirely. We could change our paradigm to believe that being respectful and loving towards our home planet earth is desirable. We could have farms which have a philosophy that they are borrowing land from nature, using it to produce food in ways which work with the seasons and soil health. We could use lots more of countries with small farms, run by families and small firms, who produced food for humans without cruelty to animals or using poison or medicine which harms those who consume it, or destroys or poisons the land around them. I entirely believe this is already within our capabilities as a species.
The fact is that as a species we choose not to do these things. The reason for this is that the number of people who believe this, and even have the knowledge to implement it, are kept away from power. A majority of humans either never think about such things, or are convinced that it is impossible. They think this because they think within a certain paradigm. This paradigm is kept there by a small number of people who want to keep it there for their own enrichment and greed.
That’s it. That’s all.
If you think of it as chimpanzees, with alphas and betas and the rest of us. Alphas are not necessarily wiser or gentler, they’re sometimes just bigger or fiercer or greedier. A group of chimps might have different alphas at different times depending on the needs of the group. Groups of chimps are fiercely competitive with each other, to the point of violence, in order to secure resources.
Humans don’t need to be fiercely competitive any more, but we still behave as if we do. Our brains are wired to feel these things, even when they’re false. We might choose a fierce or greedy alpha, by no means chosen by everyone, but just by a small and powerful pack of betas, even when there is no competition, just because we’re falsely aroused to believe there is one.
I keep thinking of Star Trek. The point of it is that in the future humans have created ways to create an ideal state of living, without competition for resources. They’ve done this by making food reproducible by machine. But this is false. There is no need for this in our ideal scenario. It is false to think that there is a scarcity of resources over which we’re all fighting. There isn’t. We have the knowledge and capacity to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Small farms didn’t disappear because huge intensive farming was the only way to feed a growing population. This is what we’re told to believe. What really happened was that this system, which worked totally fine, wasn’t making lots of money for anyone. And some people’s only raison d’être is to make lots of money for a small number of people. Small farms, lots of them, all over countries, run by families and small companies, works just fine. Different things are grown in different countries and we have the capacity now to share this around. We could totally do that. These farms would be rewarded for their excellence in keeping clean of poisons, of working with nature, and for creating and encouraging and working around biodiversity, wild-ness and respect. The farms would provide a livelihood for the farmers and companies and those who worked for them. They would be rewarded for making sure everyone involved knew what to do.
We have the capacity as a species to understand biodiversity and abundance as key principles for all actions, in particular actions directly on land. We choose not to do this. There is disagreement because old fashioned ‘knowledge’ of land management is based around entirely false premises. From neatness to forms of culling to burning heather to digging up peat. We know what is right now from what is wrong, if you keep the survival of the planet as your base line of achievement. If you don’t keep this as your base line, and many don’t, then you act in all sorts of ways which directly go against this trajectory.
If your actions go against this trajectory, you are doing the wrong thing.
I’m talking about change though. I’m not talking about you and you and you and your actions, whether you should really buy that top, or that ready meal, or take that plane journey to a holiday destination. I mean that as a species we know what to do.
But we’ve never thought of ourselves as a species. We’re too bound up with being ourselves to look outside ourselves. Those who do, many wise people, are kept away from day to day life. Without a sense of how we fit in to the planet with the other species we share it with, we cannot change. We’re both entirely alone, cut off from our connection to earth, obsessed with ourselves, and yet unable to see ourselves as a whole.
“So much workmanship is that of certainty when you know the result before you start and that is very dispiriting. Whereas if you do not know it – if it’s the workmanship of uncertainty – you don’t know the result and that’s a nice definition of creativity.”
“…against every choice of destruction, there is always the choice of creation; that against the extractionist, there is always the generative, against the exclusionary, always the inclusionary and the generous.”
Maybe the realisation from the previous post is a product of where we are at the moment with the world in shutdown due to the virus. I should maybe care that i’m just shut away in my studio, my brand new studio and exhibition space which I was feeling my way towards what I wanted from it. It has been suspended. But I find that most of the time I don’t really care. I’m just here alone making stuff and putting it in the window. People go past and have a look in and some of them smile at me and give me a wee wave and others look haughtily at my work for a moment and see me but ignore me then walk on again. They are consumers and I don’t really care about them. I care about the wavers. When we get back to having more public space again it will be the wavers I’ll welcome in. Perhaps that should be the title of this post – Not Consumers but Wavers.
When I first started out painting again in 2014, I felt it was important to say ‘I am an artist’, in order to build up my confidence to continue. It seemed a vital thing to say that the act of making art would de facto make you an artist. I needed to be defensive about it, in the face of doubt both from other people and from within myself. I realised today that I don’t feel this anymore. i’m now very comfortable saying that ‘I am trying to be an artist’, and that I am ‘trying to make art’. When I started out, I was paddling in the shallows, trying it out, but not entirely committing, and yet I made the bold statement ‘I am an artist’. Now I am comfortable diving in to the deep parts of the ocean, but unafraid of nothing showing up. The point of having a studio practice, with having a process, is the realisation that maybe about 1 in 5 ideas land, that 1 in 5 things are ok, maybe even less. When you are working from this assumption, it can be much more relaxing. I feel knowledgable about my own work, it belongs to me. I trust that when it starts to go wrong (and it always does), I will be able to either pull it around or abandon it without a sense of loss.
Maybe this is a temporary place, and one day I will again need to say ‘I am an artist’. Maybe it won’t be driven by need or desire, but will be a simple statement of fact. Actually when I think about it, I believe that being an artist, proper, is being in this state anyway.
JANE FRANCIS 