Word salad

In the mid noughties the expression “Web 2.0” became prominent – referring essentially to participatory web presences in the form of wikis, blogs, folksonomies, and social media in general. Before long it triggered an irritating stylistic trope of the form “Anything 2.0” and “Everything 2.0”. Thankfully that form of expression has gone the way of all things nerdy.

However, one of the more useful products from around that time – although it had precursors – was the so-called tag cloud, namely the spatial display of terms, arrayed in varying sizes, colours and fonts, in an attempt to indicate semantic relationships and key ideas of varying importance. They became quite a design meme of that era, and they still persist.

Here is an example, one appropriate to a pleasant English bank holiday weekend, combining my love of information science with my love of (occasionally healthy) food.

:

Enjoy

So what’s that supposed to be, then?

In idle moments of lockdown I’ve been catching up on some of the televised portraiture competitions from the Battersea Arts Centre. 

I paint, write, doodle on the keyboard, and am blessed with some exceptionally creative relatives, and so in a personal way I’m familiar with some of the tribulations of the creative process, but I know little of portrait work. Therefore the following observations may be tritely familiar to those who are better informed. If so, I apologise, but the fact is that I found watching these artists, struggling to achieve something inevitably very difficult, against the clock and under the glare of the TV cameras, inspiring and comforting during these anxious days of ambient death and disease.

Typically, in every programme there are three sitters, each of them drawn or painted within a four hour period by three artists - amateur or professional - who have already demonstrated their ability by submitting self-portraits. Naturally, all the artists featured had their own preferred way of doing things, which under the pressurised circumstances proved to be to their advantage, or not. Many techniques were employed, some conventional, some far less so, and the results weren’t always convincing or satisfactory. Nor were they necessarily “interesting” failures, although all the efforts were well intentioned, fuelled by a determination to succeed. Some were absolutely wonderful.

Given the nature of a competition, the objective being to win, understandably there were pressures to be daring, to stun, to elicit something more than the politely mouthed “wow” by the sitter (finally permitted to see what has been made of them, hiding their horror and disbelief), and so it was. The journey towards “getting there” could be fascinating, even if the destination sometimes disappointed.

Rather than attempting hyperrealist precision – impossible anyway given the time constraints – very often the candidate was trying to create something unexpected or even slightly wild, to add artiness and painterliness, consciously avoiding simple verisimilitude. Vagueness and abstraction might be introduced, along with colours and dynamism not objectively visible, qualities felt in some way by the artist to be latent in the sitter and needing to be emphasised, plus trademark special effects that they hoped would add something personal and appealing. Nevertheless, by the end of the day, or rather the four hours, the essence of the subject had to be captured, had to “look like them”, otherwise the attempt had – pretty much – failed. However much subjective sparkle is added, realism cannot be denied entirely

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A few things I noticed. 

Fairly early on in the process the artist will often “get” the look of the subject, so that one can say, “yes, that’s him” or “that’s absolutely her”. At this point one can see that they’ve captured that distinctive “look” perhaps almost in a shorthand way, a caricature or cartoonish kind of way. Sadly, infuriatingly, so often they then go on to labour their chosen medium until the likeness is lost among a mess of unfortunate brushstrokes and bright ideas that didn’t quite work out. 

Knowing when to stop, with any art form, is a skill that cannot be taught and is always situation-specific. When is the work finished? Is it ever? Surely an unnecessary cheesy adjective (like unnecessary or cheesy) could be removed here, a comma inserted there; that dark patch on the chin ought to be softened; that high note could be attempted again, the bass could do with a tad more echo. If the moment when it is best to stop is only 20 minutes into a 4 hour competition and everyone is watching, the temptation to “improve” will be well-nigh irresistible. Otherwise, what are you going to do for the next 3 hours 40? Tinkering can be so detrimental, hindsight so cruel.

On occasion, the first version of something, whether of a painting, a poem, or a piece of music, may be the best that can be achieved. If the artist is on a roll, is in the zone, in the flow, is inspired or is enjoying any one of those near-synonymous labels of rare but magical highs of creativity, the work pours out effortlessly from the unconscious mind, ready made, down the arms and out through the fingers, as it were. The first “take” may be the most inspired and absolutely right version that will ever be achieved. Usually, it isn’t. The form or content may be all there in principle, but polishing and tidying up are normally required.

Very often the artist (or musician or writer), has to work “against” something, which in practice is what he or she has already produced, either in the current work or a previous one. The first marks on the canvas (or other recording medium) may be feeble, crude, awkward, inarticulate and wrong. However, they need to be “got down” so they can be worked upon; a start has to be made somehow, otherwise indefinite floundering may ensue. Parts as yet undecided in detail will need to be blocked out, overall structure planned. You don’t want the left ear falling off the edge of the canvas.

Once the initial attempt has been made, then it can be altered, deformed and improved towards the final product, with details added and tweaks performed as deemed appropriate. This process is similar to but is not quite the same thing as “doing a rough draft and then writing it up properly” – as we were perhaps taught to do with school homework. No, this is a deeper creative process, perhaps closer to carving or sculpting – or even wrestling - than to editing or striving to be neat. 

Typically, despite many notable exceptions in all creative media, the artist doesn’t know in advance what the final product will look, sound or read like, although they may have a mental picture, and recognise it once achieved. Or, at the end, they may be forced to accept that what they have produced isn’t what they had in mind, isn’t good enough, doesn’t “work” – or is acceptable only as something other than what they had intended.  Only once the creative process is well under way they may discover what it is that they are in fact trying to do; they may surprise themselves. In an essay published in 1998 the late Jenny Diski wrote: “One of the great pleasures of writing for me is starting out in the wrong direction and discovering how all points can eventually lead to home”. That particular writer evidently had her own demons, but more generally it can be said that a creative individual works his or her way into a work of art of any kind, writes into it or paints into it or plays into it - into it and against it - slowly finding out what it will be, experimenting, withdrawing, plunging in again, trying this and that until they have it.

Particularly annoying - or in a more positive assessment particularly revealing and informing - is when the painting, piece of music or item of text is completed, or nearly so, and then its creator suddenly realises in a eureka moment of supreme horror / excitement how it should have looked (sounded, etc), how or what it was “supposed” to be. The response at this moment may be despair, rejection, abandonment, exhilaration, a risky attempt at “fixing” the problem, or it may be the start of a motivation to go on to the next thing. There has to be a mechanism whereby a creative person moves from one project to the next, and this could be one of the components. 

This late-in-the-day realisation may be accepted as just another stage in the “working against” principle, part of that uncertain and meandering journey from first daub, scribble or squawk to finished masterpiece. Under normal circumstances that’s all to the good. Unfortunately, if the four hour deadline is approaching, for those brave bared souls on public display, it may be too late. Let’s hope that – at “time’s up” - what they’ve done is good enough.

Doing without

I’m not a chocoholic, if only because I haven’t been trying hard enough. If I see, remember, deduce, sniff, or otherwise sense that chocolate is lurking somewhere around the house, its days are numbered. Unwrapped, defoiled, it’s a goner, soon to become a victim of the Mastermind mantra “I’ve started so I’ll finish”. However, if I know with certainty that there is none, it won’t be long before I forget all about chocolate, even when I see advertisements for it or visit shops selling it.  It’s not an addiction; addictions are different.

An appetite denied may subsequently wither away and be lost, though not necessarily permanently. It’s the result of a process commonly called “doing without”. We’re not a society that likes to do without, but in these strange times of lockdown and imposed denial many appetites – for socialisation, travel, leisure activities, “retail therapy” – have to be put on hold, and done without. The desire for safety takes over, at least until boredom demands relief.

Which raises the whole question of the effects of coronavirus upon appetite-driven behaviours. Is the enforced isolation the perfect passion killer, the ideal appetite suppressant? Is our involuntary requirement to step back from the daily tussle likely to engender new distastes, new cynicisms, as we realise how unnecessary or even harmful are some of our routine “normal life” habits and behaviours, personally or globally? Will new kinds of “functional anorexia” be one eventual outcome of this outbreak? New disinclinations, more things we are happy to ignore and to forget about; will they rise to the surface as we learn to be content with less? To have less stuff, less noise, less angstiness, to adapt in the longer term to “doing without”; will that be part of the infamous “new normal”?  And if so, will this be beneficial, and to whom? Or will we just lapse back into the lazy old ways?

Appetite, in a fundamental sense, is crucial to our well-being and to our development as happy, interesting, creative, well-balanced personalities – and societies. Too much appetite – whether for chocolate or anything else – is of course harmful. Similarly, doing without can be taken too far, leading to an etiolated kind of personality which, from the outside, looks like a depressed one, although the individual concerned may claim to be not unhappy. And for personality read nation. The sweetspot of Goldilocksian just rightness – here as in other situations – can be a tricky one to identify or adhere to. Meanwhile, a society financially and - in fact existentially - dependent upon well-developed consumer appetites and upon learned desires to be constantly busy and bustling, is one very vulnerable to a crisis such as the one we have at present. As we are discovering.

At its most basic, when as human beings we are starved of food, water and most acutely – as recently witnessed so devastatingly – oxygen, we die. In the last few weeks Abraham Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs has been up-ended for so many unfortunates; rather than striving for self-fulfilment too many people have been left gasping for air. Rather than reaching for the self-actualising summit they’ve been struggling to breathe on the baseline of that hypothetical structure of human needs and satisfactions. Even the Prime Minister, someone who might  be perceived as having self-actualised more than most, has been brought down to the biological bare necessities of life, plunged down the side of the Maslowian pyramid to its very foundations.

Even without catching it, awareness of what this dreadful pandemic is doing to our world, and of its sheer awfulness can, any day of the week, hurl anyone down into the depths of sadness, anger, anxiety and despair, but then the next day that same individual can be overjoyed from hearing about the brave activities of those battling to save lives, or rendered ecstatic by the simple things of life - newly rediscovered - like a clear blue sky, the warmth of the sun on one’s back, a bunch of flowers, or indeed, chocolate. Forget algorithms and being “smart”; this is humanity at its most marvellous; this is what mankind is really all about.

Not that we always need a life or death crisis to determine the direction of our appetites, positive or negative, although this current catastrophe may be exacerbating our mood swings more than usually. Even in normal times, we’re all affected by physical influences and invisible rhythms, whether biochemical, meteorological, or factors more subtle – not just the “time of the month” but the time of day, time of the week, time of year, time of our lives. One doesn’t have to be diagnosed as bipolar to have ups and downs; stress tends to exaggerate the peaks and the troughs.

The lower one’s mood becomes the lower it is likely to get; the less appetite there is for the world, less is found to be interesting, fewer things connect or make much sense or have much meaning. Ultimately, life closes in and can be very bleak. Conversely, the greater our appetites become, the greater still they grow. Appetite feeds upon appetite until there aren’t enough hours in the day, as more and more things are found to be interesting, more things connect and are perceived as having personal meaning - findings which in some cases lead to creative insight and activity. Again, this tendency can go too far, towards the pathological states of mania, schizotypal thought processes, psychosis, and the death of meaning. 

Let us keep hopeful, that in our enforced seclusion, in our prolonged period of having to do without, we haven’t lost our appetites permanently - the useful and healthy ones anyway. With the eventual release of the pause button, with availability returned to us, we can anticipate that they will return, hungrier than ever.

Be patient. Stay safe.

Social isolation dreams #2 and #3

Coronavirus stalks not only our days, but our nights too. Freud didn’t know the half of it.

#2  Because of the pandemic we’ve taken in a lodger. He’s called Benito Mussolini and though it clearly is him, in some sense, essentially he is a large pile of some dark olive green material, like an early type of polyurethane, with a smooth, globular surface, and looks rather like something sculpted by Rodin. He needs to go the loo, the one near our front door - though, strangely, on the opposite side of the house from where it usually is. Soon we begin to hear the sounds of Italian opera, which get louder and louder, hysterical and strangulated.

We look at each other. “He seems to be in pain. We’d better go and see if he’s all right”. We go in, and find that Mussolini has farted away the central part of his backside, which is dripping blood and poo, with wires and things sticking out. He appears to be distressed. We want to help but we can’t touch him because of the coronavirus. We bring him a few things and the next time we go in he has removed his buttocks, cleanly, much like a large bite out of an apple and the same colour too, leaving just a small central eye-shaped bright red hole.

#3 A series of instructional dreams the theme of which appears to be a requirement to get dissimilar items to fit together nicely into something aesthetically whole.

(1) pink pottery plantpots and cardboard boxes. Mm, this one’s difficult. Apart from the fact that the former can go into the latter, there’s no commonality.

(2) different building styles, including gothic and art deco. They fit together nicely into somewhere that might be Madrid or Manhattan.

(3) different musical instruments. The drummer says that his is the principal contribution to the band, but with patience he is persuaded to play with the others, and the end result is a balanced and credible song. “I used to be very successful” he says. He looks about 14 and resembles someone who was on “University Challenge” recently.

VE Day + 75

Our family mementoes of VE day are sparse, as I imagine they are for most people, unless they were involved in street parties or other public events. Although my mother sometimes kept a diary, and I have them for 1944 and 1946, I do not have one for 1945; she would have been teaching on the Wirral. My father made diary entries throughout the war, though mostly they were rather terse unless he was travelling, on leave, and for many days there is no record. In May 1945 he was at Tura, south of Cairo, where he had been based since 1941. Diary entries around the big day include:

Friday 4 May : to Heliopolis, then back to Cairo. Heard choir at St. Andrew’s.

Tuesday 8 May : V Day 1

Wednesday 9 May : V Day 2. Duty. Letter from [my mother].

Thursday 10 May : Saqqara – not a bad trip.

Friday 11 May : Cairo and Heliopolis. Saw “A song to remember” at the Diana cinema.

I’m unable to locate any photographs of these events, but this is the programme for the choral performance on 4th May:

 

The “J. Alfred Paulden” on the programme, otherwise known as Alf, came from Manchester and was my dad’s closest wartime buddy. They remained in contact for the rest of their lives. On the 9th May some kind of dance was arranged, with a programme as follows, including a few characteristic sketches doodled upon it by my father:

So it sounds as though the celebrations might have carried on over a couple of days, and that – perhaps in expectation of imminent repatriation - my dad was sightseeing whenever possible. Saqqara is the site of the famous step pyramid, which he had visited before. However, it wasn’t until early August that he began the journey home, across the Mediterranean on the “Ascania” from Alexandria to Toulon, and then by train to Dieppe.

When he eventually arrived back in England after four years away, aboard the “Isle of Thanet”, docking at Newhaven at around  2 pm on Thursday, 23rd August, he and his fellow  troops were pelted with stones by kids on the pier.  

Plus 75. Plus ça change.