if art should fail humanity...

If you could find a place
where no one would find you,
if you could paper that place
with a paper to suit you,
if you could make a garden
to surround your lonely place
and live there like a hermit
'til you knew what human was,
if you could send a post card
delivered to my door
to describe in single syllables
what human life is for,
and if the world at large
could be invited in,
I wonder... would that open
your brave new world to sin?
And if you took to painting
would sin besmirch the vision
of your world seen at its best
or seduce you from your crusade for
explicit this, explicit that -- 
in which the vast majority
by definition don't believe.
(Blessed are they 
that have not seen
and yet believe... etc, etc.)

If you could keep your place
for both the secular and holy,
free of false dichotomies,
a land of god and no-god,
seeing god as both a shorthand
and a longhand form of art,
seeing art as sign and semaphore,
a dance with flags and dazzling lights,
unverbalised theology
bringing music to the sights --
a cannabis for scriptural faith...
And if you left your haven
to dance down dirty streets
would it all be out of kilter,
would you need the magic philter,
explicit sex and revelation,
to return you to your station?
If you could paint a tenet
for a faith that's yet to be,
would a fine brush or a wide brush
or a roller set you free?
Would you nurture a small parcel
or a landscape or some scree?
And if art should fail humanity,
where then would prayer be?

A Card in a Shop Window

Seen among the Lost Pet cards:

Have you seen them?

Two lost faiths,
much loved and greatly missed:
A fluffy kitten, black and white --
answers to the name of adam (meaning earth --
pristine, of course).

Also, a snow-white puppy --
comes when you call eve (life-
giving - as in the biosphere 
of all life, everywhere).

When found, they'll likely be together.
Please search the garden
and the potting shed,
beneath the apple tree, etc.

Porn: an ugly introduction to a world of beauty.

Brown paper parcel
damp from overnight dew. Left 
in our camp - but
by whom?

Beneath the brown,
some white sheets.
Folded.
Delicate as skin.
Old people's skin.
Tattooed in black.
Cats and aeroplanes
for the most part,
as I remember them.
Bone dry -
although the bone lies deeper
than you'd think
beneath the skin.

I strip the flesh away.
Reveal the bone -
a soldier's pay book.
British. Inside which:
six German bank notes.
I wrap the brown around them all --
but hide the white sheets
in our secret place.

You found it where?
the sergeant wants to know.
I tell him haltingly.
That's private land!
(I knew!)

Back at the camp
unfolding the white sheets
(Two of. I now discover
they are folded one
more time than I had thought.)
They reveal what's real -
something from the adult world,
ergo the real.
Two prints. Top one
(Both senses.)
Crucifixion --
of a female Christ. 

I'm far too early on in life,
religion, faith, and other things
to contemplate such heresy --
And far too innocent
to take on board
what Roman soldiers 
at the cross's foot
are doing  to her. 
My friend arrives
and helps me out.
Then I throw up.

The other sheet 
a man and dog....
some time it takes
(the two of us)
to work out what is going on.
Then when we do I retch --
quite violently.

And so
an ugly introduction
to what will later be
a world of beauty.

Arnhem Land (Northern Territories) Rock Art

Imagine a myth
a modern myth
invented by me:
a beast, part
dragon and part bird...
steps from some fable
into a wasteland
where it dies.
The  landscape is
too high, too wild
for access by the modern
man - except proud
chopperman -
and this all fifty
thousand years ago.

The beast decays.
Flesh ossifies
bone petrifies
flesh to bone
and bone to rock
the rock a shelter
ancient man discovers
(how?) calls home.

He - Aborigine -
is spirit energy personified.
Covers walls and ceilings
with images of his true home -
our hidden genesis.


Imagine now
you find this shelter
and walk in. Around you
images begin to sing
each in its native tongue.
Here is no bare rock,
but all is marked with spirit forms
as if the fabled beast
before it died
was given a full body
interior tattoo. From which -
between the edges of the songs -
thoughts, feelings, inner images arise
and take control
of modern man
as easily as old.

Walk through
this archive of your spirit ancestors
for somewhere here
an image of your spirit stirs -
or maybe one your spirit made.
When you encounter it
hang it on the small hook
at the far back of your mind.
It is your satnav for the songlines
you must walk. They will
embrace the image fervently.

Now from the center of each song
a tear-out sheet. The souvenir.
Totemic ancestors asleep
beneath  a dark flat earth
burst through convulsively.
Half human and half plant,
they travelled everywhere,
created landscapes.
Mountains, rivers, waterholes
wallaby and kangaroo
eagle, ant and snake.

We do not own the land,
the artwork sings,
the land owns us.
Land gives us culture, soul, identity.
There are no boundaries, but everywhere
the spirits move, connect all life to all.

.............................................................

The image: from ABC News.

Image and poem refer to recently discovered Aboriginal Rock Art which predates by several thousand years anything known before.

What makes us human

Disjointed thoughts sparked by a BBC4 arts series, "British Masters".

Evolution, life's
main chance (maybe
life's only chance),
is too much stressed.

We're changing
the environment
far too quickly
for life forms
to accomodate.

Albert Schweitzer's
great insight was
to have understood
the full meaning of
his: "I am life
that wills to live
in the midst of life
that wills to live."

My father, shaping
wood, observed the
grain before he'd
start - then felt
it as he worked.

"The grain has made
the wood," he'd say,
"the grain respects
the wood - will see
it safe and sound."

All true craftsmen
work in harmony with
grain of some sort.

Is not nature
the grain that
runs through life -
all Life, that is?

Bio-diversity
and the will
to live: which
one drives? and
which is driven?

We are altering
the environment
too rapidly to
feel the grain
responsively...

Playing a great
cathedral organ
Schweitzer was
asked if he was
not afraid that
some notes might
be wrong. "No,"
he replied,"God
does not hear a
wrong note." He

was my first hero,
my first bastion
against the gloom,
and my first saint.
His writings were
pure gold and came
direct from heaven.

I read then differently
now, but still they are
as good and true, as up
to date and wonderfully
fresh as they were then.

His insight led him to
Lambarene to found and
work in a leper colony
and hospital. That was
working with the grain
all right, part of his
"Reverence for Life".

Credo

I was awoken yesterday, as usual, by the radio alarm set to a local station. Also, as usual, I heard the disembodied voice suggesting a topic on which listeners might like to phone in, text or email. Usually these topics are pretty trivial (this morning, for example: "What do you call your dog? Have you an interesting name for it?), but yesterday morning the big news story was the demise of The News of the World and the suggestion was that we might like to share our thoughts on what it is that we believe. At any rate, being only half awake, that's what I heard, and my mind immediately began to concoct a sort of rough and ready personal creed that I might recite on appropriate occasions - whatever they might turn out to be. But slowly, as I became more conscious and more tuned-in to what was being said, I realised that he was saying "What you believe in?" - the "in" being most important. We were not being asked for a list of things we could tick off as believable, but to reveal in what we were willing to put our trust. A very different proposition. Where belief suggested a creed of some sort, trust brought hesitation. Are we going to be asking for probabilities, even guarantees? Even Christ never gave guarantees. He offered the possibility of Eternal Life, but it was always conditional on a person's response, beliefs, whatever.

After some thought I decided that if I was pushed I would say that I believe in possibilities, and of those possibilities, that of renewal is the most significant. The arch-metaphor for which has to be nature's continual thrust for renewal. David Nash is a sculptor who works with, co-operates with, nature. He was originally associated with the Land Art movement, but now is a sculptor who works pretty much only with trees. He will take a whole mature tree and over a period of time find numerous sculptures in it, but he never takes anything that nature does not give. He will use only trees that have fallen or are so diseased that they have had to be felled. He has told how he works within the natural cycle. Trees - like people - do not just die, they are programmed to die. If you fell a healthy tree and use its wood to make a table, and if you take that table into your home, you are taking that wood out of its natural cycle. Then, when you are finished with the table and put it outside, you will be putting it back into its cycle. Some of his outdoor sculptures are designed to facilitate the natural decay. He has programmed the constant renewal - and therefore the ultimate death - of the sculpture into its creation.

Death is part of renewal. It's why the body's cells continually die in their programmed way. Nature continually renews itself, and we are part of nature. There is a very old joke concerning a man hard at work in his cottage garden when the parson cycles up and stops to pass the time of day. "How beautiful is nature," observes the parson, "when man and God co-operate!" "Indeed," replies the gardener without looking up, "but you should have seen the mess He made of it when He had it to himself!" That's looking at nature from a man-oriented perspective, of course. Leave the garden to its own devices and soon enough the weeds, trees, brambles and no end of other stuff will be thrusting up through the patio. A mess from the householder's point of view, though not from nature's. Left alone indefinitely it will go back to a very different sort of beauty.

So, in what do you put your trust? It depends, I suppose, what your intention is, what - if you like - you want from life? Do you want to believe in the possibility of life after death. That you will meet up with your loved ones in some form or other? Or do you want to make sense of life, death, creation and the universe? And if the latter, do you need to make sense of it in personal terms or from a more nature-oriented viewpoint? Do you, perhaps, just want to settle for peace on earth and to see man behaving with more humanity to his fellow man? Do you want to believe in the sustainability of life on earth, a viable earth into the future?

The human mind also needs to renew itself, which explains in part why our exalted thought systems stutter and fail one after another, none lasting for long. Philosophy was probably the first to go. It simply failed to keep abreast of learning and thereby failed to renew itself. Organised religion is in a parlous condition from the same failing. We have divided the one God up between ourselves - Christian, Muslim and others - even Catholic and non-conformist - and we have each run off with our different bit of the carcass to consume in our own way. It is probably not too late for organised religion to step back from the brink - as, alas, it seems to be for philosophy. Science, too, is almost at the point of no return - but here again, it all depends upon your objectives: what you want from the discipline in question. I remember a speaker being asked once why he thought Communism had failed. "It didn't fail," he replied. "Like Christianity, it's never been tried." Of all the thought systems, the political ones seem always to be the shortest lived.

Interestingly, perhaps, David Nash works from a former Welsh chapel. At any one time it will contain up to four hundred sculptures. It has been suggested to him that it now enjoys its biggest congregation ever. Art and religion have over most of their history, I suppose, been closely associated, for both try to awaken the spiritual in man. At times and in places they have been indistinguishable. In Western culture art has mainly been subservient to religion, but many (myself included) find the roles to be reversing. Maybe it is the hope that we have of what life will ultimately pay out, that is changing. Wallace Stevens is one who thinks this way. It was a great relief to me when I came upon such poems as "The Man with the Blue Guitar" and "Sunday Morning" and discovered that greater minds than mine were thinking these thoughts. Here are are some lines from the former:-

"                            Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place
Even in the chattering of your guitar."