The Park, just after 9am

neither beautiful or useful.

Magpies scream from the trees. I am unsure of the technical term for what the magpies are doing. Certainly to me, it sounds like screaming, to them, I’m sure, it’s a more sophisticated mode of communication. Recall a day where similar happened, although in a different country, on a morning colder than this, walking along frozen grass at the side of the road, when from behind the hedge, a young deer bounds, stands, stock still in the road, eyeing me with its large baleful gaze, before leaping into the woods beyond the other side of the road. That morning, I was conscious of the limits of my understanding of the non-human, and this morning, recalling this moment reminds me again of the same. I know nothing of the magpies or what it is they are communicating. My ear, so unsophisticated all I can translate their sounds into are screams.

I count eight of them. Unsure if the rhyme extends this far. The spring I was first pregnant with Alexander, I saw four all the time. Although, perhaps I cheated. Perhaps I waited, looked around to count more. They seem given to congregating.

Two in one tree, one in the tall pine opposite, two more in a leaning pine, and three scattered across the ground. It is the ones in the trees who are making the most noise, possibly positioned as sentries.

I stand still. Their noise intensifies. I look around, wondering what’s concerning them. The ones on the ground seem agitated now, all three of them hopping. I don’t stop to think that perhaps I am the source of their agitation.

I think magpies beautiful. The way the light catches their tail feathers, the deep cobalt of their wings. I have little idea what use they are in the world. I have heard all animals have a use, this allows us, I think, to feel concerned for them, to tolerate less tolerable animals, those carrying disease say, or those more deviant. We are conditioned, I have begun to worry, to equate use to value, and to see something used more as more valuable. I fear this is pernicious. Earlier this morning, I lay awake as night became morning, listening as the birds woke; knowing over the sea, a mile south, the sun would soon rise; I wrote in my notebook make something neither beautiful or useful.

Art is largely absurd, it says something like this on the back of Art is Magic. This is the thing I struggle with about art the most. I come from a family of useful people. In the order of these useful relations, I am largely useless. I do not heal people. I do not educate people. I do not even proport to save people. I spend a lot of time thinking. How do I monetise these thoughts? How do I quantify their value? What value this morning among the magpies? Standing here is of no use in the world.

For the last three years, I have tried to say there is a larger purpose behind my work. I have tried to argue it is doing something in the world. I often have messages from readers who tell me I have saved their lives or changed their lives or made them braver or less alone. This allows me to think my work is valuable. I have not wasted my time. But what if I do waste my time? Without those messages, would I still do what I do?

I have little desire now, to argue my work is of value, especially in an arbitrary value system. Yes, working for money is good, but does that money make my work more valuable? Does it make me more valuable? How is value defined? By money? By keeping someone alive? By stopping on a winter’s morning just to watch the birds? By what use the body is put to? Because let’s face it, that’s how value’s been defined these last three hundred years. The body as capital must always be putting itself to use, and a good, quantifiable use at that. This is how we come to have able bodies, dis abled bodies. All value is relational. My value in relation to my relations. See, language gives us away again.

And value in the context of art. That’s the slipperiest there is. That exists, surely to conceal and reveal the arbitrary nature of all other value systems. I am thinking this largely because of a heated conversation with old friends around a breakfast table in Glasgow. We each had different opinions about value, there’s little I love more than differing opinions around a table, although before coffee, it’s a lot to take in. I seem to recall we had coffee half way through. We seemed like characters in a Carver story then, although at least we didn’t smoke. No one smokes anymore, not around dinner tables. Espresso didn’t help any of us calm down.

I like these heated conversations because they remind me of conversations around my grandmother’s table, where Maggie (Thatcher) was often the subject of the conversation. No love was lost over her. Voices would be politely raised. Opinions aired. Conversations I didn’t understand would roll on over my head. I learnt to love these times. We were a useful family. We kept ourselves busy. My grandmother knitted. My grandfather grew things. My mother sewed. They were valuable people, hands never idle, never idly occupied either. But my hands are often the opposite. Mine are often writing things I will later delete, making notes I will never return to, painting things I will never show anyone, balling paper up and throwing it in the bin, it’s all in the process, I hear you say, but that’s still to come back to the idea of value, that something is made for something, but imagine making something for nothing other than the hell of making it, to escape the tyranny of William Morris now morphed into Instagram’s favourite cringe quote, imagine daring to make something neither beautiful or useful. Imagine…