Charing Cross, 19.09

Yeah but I could have done that.

The baby is learning to smile. The father with his back to me, sits on the bench outside the train window. The baby’s smile is slow, not yet automatic. From the rhythm of the baby’s smile, I am sure of the exchange and the way it goes. The father will be smiling an over exaggerated smile at the baby who now does the same thing in return, and seeing this smile rewarded with yet more smiles, the baby does it again. And again. And again. Again, Bear used to shout, as he tumbled backwards off my knee, again again as his dad spun him around and around, again again again when a friend would hold him upside down, his blood rushing to his head which is where he still likes his blood to be best; and this baby’s smile says the same, again again.

And the train speeds up and the baby is gone, will stay in my memory there on the bench, and my head is full of the conversation from earlier; a packed record shop, and me sitting up on the counter because how else are you supposed to be seen by a crowd when you’re small, and next to me Jeremy Deller, also, small. We perch and we talk about his book Art Is Magic, not a memoir, but more a retrospective providing both a commentary on and context to his work. It succeeds in its nearly impossible task to capture work that’s largely ephemeral. It is also a very good book, not only the sense of the work it captures, but of the prose deployed. Some authors, it’s best not to meet, Jeremy is not one of them. We talk and quickly the hour goes, and people applaud and then applaud some more and then I am hurrying out the store into Notting Hill, speeding past everyone largely speaking French, a lit tabernacle, a street crowed earlier now deserted, down into the tube, and back to the coast. But what I am thinking about it is how we got to talking about public statuary, as if perhaps characters in a Frank O’Hara poem - and if you already know the poem then I already like you - what we talk about in relation to statuary seems to be the convergence of many of his pieces or ideas - It is What it Is and We’re here because we’re here (a kind of moving statue, a mobile virus perhaps, haunting Britain on the 100th anniversary of the first day of the Somme, spilling silently around the country scant weeks after the Brexit referendum, if you read about it, I urge you as you do to hum the title to the tune of Old Lang Syne, it is hard after to listen to children sing it at a school performance) and a conversation he had with Mary Beard kicking off with the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol docks. These things coalesce as happens in a good conversation, when themes emerge and themes across work suddenly become apparent too, this is when chairing becomes enlivening and enriching too, things to take back to my own practise. Aware I sound like a dick here, my own practise when really I just write things down in a cold room. Lies for a living. I am a hungry person, I like ideas. Maybe I am slightly cannibal too. Maybe I like ideas that reflect my own. Maybe I am vain that way. Whatever it is, where this conversation veers to is the insecurity behind large statues. We talk about the one at St Pancras. If you’ve been you’ll know the one before I even have to say which. Large. Very large. Far too large. The plinth broad and ornate. Two lovers embracing, an exploitation of the heightened emotions a train station can elicit, especially an international one like this, especially now a passport is needed to travel anywhere, everywhere, and not a burgundy one we were used to, but blue and overtly royalist; but any which way, it’s an ugly statue, an unforgivably ugly statue some might say. What Deller suggests and I agree with, is that the lower the artist’s confidence in an idea, the larger the statue and its plinth tend to be. I suggest this is true in relation to prose. It is Cusk who said unclothed, truth can be vulnerable, ungainly, shocking. Over-dressed it becomes a lie’. I suggest this might be true in relation to his work, which often moves as close as art can to the objective, through the lack of a narrative voice behind statements he records, I was thinking when I suggested this of his film, Putin’s Happy, but also of his prose. I am now thinking of my own prose. I used to show off, now I don’t. It has made writing harder but more satisfying. After I read this by Cusk I have worked to keep events unclothed, which to me means not embellishing the prose surrounding them. This would be to overdress it, and to reveal an insecurity too, if you know what you’re doing and have confidence in what you’re doing, no need to make it something it is not. Which is not to say, that prose is not a difficult thing, that it cannot be wielded like a scalpel, it is something I now feel I work inside, which is also hard to explain and describe without sounding like a dick, increasingly, I feel little need to explain writing, a dark art after all, just to get on and do it. In short, the best writing is art, but like the best art, it is best to make it appear simpler than it is.

It is good to leave the reader, the viewer, thinking they too could do it, because after all, we could all make an inflatable Stonehenge, couldn’t we. Couldn’t we?

(The astute amongst you will have observed this didn’t happen yesterday, since I was fevered in bed, and am still fevered although no longer in bed, but instead on the sofa with a little boy at the far end of it, also fevered. Instead, I am writing about Saturday, because I couldn’t get the image of the smiling baby out my head, or the line ‘the baby is learning to smile’ - a response I suspect to Slimani’s ‘The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds’ two lines I will forever be envious of. Post 35 of this on-going project.)