‘I Knew You Would Come Back to Me’
A Reflection on the Everyday Sublime, January 2020
“Walk on air against your better judgement” These words are written on the tomb of the poet Seamus Heaney. To me this means — have faith, and take responsibility for your self. On the side of the house in Belfast where he lived as a child are now written in monumental letters DO NOT BE AFRAID.
Similar glimpses of insight have shone into me during a now long term collaboration with the scientist Kostya Novoselov. Since making the art work “Am I My Brother’s Keeper?” -a work about home and identity that took me several years, we have been working on a joint project “Everything is Connected” underlining the fact that everything is connected. We do this through a conceptual body of work that aims to illustrate in every way possible and all through the world that if everything is connected we might as well behave better towards one another and towards the world we live in, if only for practical reasons (!)
I used to think I had no truck with functional explanations but a better understanding of mathematics has brought me to the same metaphysical conclusion as Seamus Heaney. Through long discussions with Kostya about chaos and harmony, truth and what might be the purpose of our existence, I have been trying to see on what facts can we base any understanding of our universe and our place in it. If as Marcus Aurelius says ‘our life is what our thoughts make it” — what are the facts on which we can base our thinking?
Take for example the irrational numbers pi and Euler, which each individually go on into infinity and are without any rationality at all, by definition perhaps then ‘chaotic”. Well if you add these two numbers, in any formulation of them, they fall in to order. They create simple, harmonious numbers eg -1 in the example illustrated here in colour code.
Thus letters and numbers and their expression of the harmonious concept of free will have set me down gently in a new inner world. Paradoxically these things began to make themselves clear to me during the period of the onset of the coronavirus in March last year. The helplessness and perplexity of the human race seemed ever more entangled. On the television we witnessed one human being slowly stamp the breath out of a fellow man. Donald Trump, democratically elected by more than half the US population, filled the papers and airwaves with divisive falsehoods, underlining the worst in many of us, misrepresenting himself and others and sucking the hope out of politics.
Yet conversely magic was everywhere. As Marina Warner writes in her review of Eliot Weinberger’s “Angels and Saints” “by stitching together passages from different sections of life one creates, without inventing a word, a glorious startling tapestry of the marvellous.” As rioters stormed the Capitol, one million children in the UK were left at home without schooling for the lack of a computer or WiFi access, and people died in hospital without being able to hold the hands of loved ones, the papers were filled with recipes, origami kits, stories of communities pulled together around the elderly. Perhaps the new juxtapositions and unreal perspectives we have in and on our own circumstances, (as well as the proximity of death) has lit up ordinary activities with meaning. As Walter Benjamin points out in “The Storyteller” when men and woman are imprisoned in repetitive tasks, storytelling flourishes.”
This work “I Knew You Would Come Back to Me” circles back to Seamus Heaney again, the everyday that defines our existence. Even at moments of great despair, I have loved ordinary life, I have always known that that love will come back to me. Here too Heaney writes in memory of his mother in “Clearances”, recounting peeling potatoes, folding the sheets, laying a fire, encountering the other albeit for the fraction of a second, just being, while the clock ticks. This ordinariness is what defines us, and this is the sublime:
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.“
Theodor Adorno’s famously observed in “Cultural Criticism and Society” that “after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric”. Yet the sublime persists, beauty can and does exist alongside an innocent man like George Floyd being stopped and murdered on the street, the UK government creating a law in July 2020 to loan £1 billion to help countries with poor human rights records including Saudi Arabia and the Yemen, to buy weapons from us interest free, 72 million refugees, and young men being shot at by child snipers for fun during the war in Syria. Appreciating what we have in such a context is not just a gesture of political optimism it is what life is all about.
Commonly one is brought up with an idea that the heavens are beyond or above us; perhaps even beyond our understanding. something to work towards. Poetry and art can bring us closer to the sublime, but as an artist living in this current natural world, no man made work can compare with the beauty of the smallest accident of nature. Nothing will stop the heart like the sun catching my son’s hair while he eats his breakfast, or hearing a bird sing while I lie in bed.
Writing and the arts have always been a means of thinking things through and noting down such thoughts. So during this lockdown spring, it seemed a good idea to learn Aramaic, the logical end of studying written language from hieroglyphs and the ancient Chinese I studied at university. Writing is at the core of my work as an artist and two years ago I was invited to create a body of work in response to some of the objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun which were on tour from Egypt. I was helped by Professor Richard Parkinson, who runs the Egyptology department at Oxford University, and PhD student Ellen Jones. Learning about hieroglyphs was in itself a revelation. Egyptian art for the dead, “served as a material aid for eternal life, as magic utensils” as Rose-Marie Hagen says. Pharaohs were considered almost as Gods by the ancient Egyptians and artists were important mediators for the Pharaohs. Artists recited magic formulae as they worked and performed “opening of the mouth” on major artworks, in order to formally animate the works spirit. Austrian painter Kandinsky considered artists “equivalent to a prophet whose destiny was to communicate the divine to the public’.
Ancient Egyptian architecture with its perfect marriage of aesthetics and rationality symbolises “in every detail (…) the mechanics of reincarnation, whether that be in reference to physical death or rebirth or the death of one phase of consciousness in the seeker and birth into the new”
In Soetsu Yanagi’s book “The Beauty of Everyday Things” he writes about mingei, a new word in Japanese denoting the perfections of ‘craft’ ‘of the masses’ — ‘the aesthetic result of wholeheartedly fulfilling utilitarian needs’. Mingei objects are “ordinary things” (getemono) “neither expensive nor produced in small numbers, not made for viewing pleasure but for daily use. In other words they are objects indispensable to the daily life of ordinary people, that are used in commonplace settings, and that are wholesomely and honestly made for practical use.” The Greek Golden Ratio
I was touched to see now that Dr Jill Biden chose “Landscape with Rainbow” an 1859 painting by Black landscape artist Robert Duncanson as the presidential inaugural picture. It features a gray-toned rainbow, an elm tree symbolising freedom and an Edenic valley scene painted by Duncanson, born into slavery. He paints from Cincinnati looking out over what was at the time the slave state of Kentucky. ‘Yet his restrained rainbow feels solid and unshakeable. We trust those who have seen the worst when they believe in the better. Their sentiments, thick with experience, have weight.” observes Eleanor Harvey, the Smithsonian American Art Museum curator who helped Jill Biden make her choice.
Some years ago, in this new distorted timeline that the lockdown has brought us, in a state of existential questioning following my falling so deeply in love with the human race as I met refugees for my tent project, I went to the Large Particle Collider at the CERN in Switzerland with my friends Beth and Chris. I was looking for what is the point of all this wonder and suffering. There in the middle of this tunnel that spans 4 countries, theoretical physicists explained to us their dazzlement when they noted the first results of crashing particles in to one another. One analogy made a particular impression on us: by crashing two ordinary particles you precipitate the change that gives arise to forests of silver birch, grand pianos, world war 1 and the Higgs Boson. These accidents of nature are what gives rise the everyday sublime which is ever-changing and all around us, inter-connected at every level, and this is what my book is about. Everything is more than the sum of its original parts.