On the underground train above ground the whole carriage overheard two rather stoned young dudes speaking about Art, that is, themselves. As we unzipped the treetops people glanced at them, glanced away, smiled. One dude had a wry American accent and the upper hand. The other dude was Persian and explained at some length that his name is traditional, it means (if I heard right) secret treasure. What do you do, man, you must be an Artist? he asked. Yeah, American wry dude allowed. But like, what kind of Art, what do you Make? Well, mostly drawings and…. tattooing.
Instant rapture. Oh, wow, I should show you this tattoo I want, it’s like, I’ll have to show it to you, it’s so beautiful, man. There’s this guy and he’s smoking. And then there’s this girl. She’s, like, smokeface, like, she IS the SMOKE.
I remember that feeling, I thought: BEING the SMOKE. By the indulgent expressions on other passengers here and there in the cabin I thought that other people might once have experienced this, too. Persian dude said, you could like, do me with this drawing and then I could like, show everybody and make you totally famous.
God, I loved them. Their fatuous fellowship and impulse-buy tattoos. Just type my name into facebook, American dude promised, you will find me. Out in the strangely humid night there was a high round moon barrelled way up into the still-blue sky like cannonshot; people crossing the crowded railway bridge seemed to me ceremonial and slow. A tall princely man with Ethiopian features walked by in state, pushing a wire shopping trolley with five empty bottles in it.
9 years ago in Berlin, I lived this tiny story.
Tag: everyone’s an artist
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be the big smoke
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smaller than you might think, vaster than you might imagine
I’ve been using the exact same folded square of toilet paper to blot my fountain pen every time I refill it for about three or four months now. It resembles the nosebleed of some terribly well-educated, landed, gentle person. Gentle in the old sense, I am gentle in the new. My blue blooded blotter and I carouse the seaming waves, always looking out for something that can survive the dark salt water, that can breath underwater and emerge intact and stronger, softer, something that breeds new life like a manatee mistaken by desperate sailors for a comely mermaiden.
I use this pen for prose, ideas, letters, postcards: everything except writing poetry. Poetry I find can tend to purple and bruise when handled too finely. It needs plainer tools. I write it like a shopping list, unafraid of whatsoever cravings might find their way onto the page there. I know that like tormented fruit plucked over by too many hands the cliche and banal trueism will rise to the surface, overnight like cream or over many weeks like flaws on a false politician, and I can pick it over and scour it out and glean from it that which is manifest, worth its weight in oranges, weighty but not too weighty, worthy.
All writing of poetry is worthwhile, we ought never to stop ourselves in the initial act. It’s got to be good poetry, though. It’s got to be rewritten. Real and true. You have to be able to jettison those ragged phrases that wear out their welcome in the mind, the ones you tend to mumble over on the final read-through. Poetry is more infested than perhaps any other art form with pretenders who use its name to shield their cowardice, their apathetic shouting, their lame attention-seeking, their emotional lies. Overstatement, fancy language, lack of conviction, boring ideas or endless self-description buried in ornate and impenetrable prose (yes, prose) – it’s all being displayed under the name of poetry and I think that puts a lot of people off. I think if much so-called poetry were performed under the name Songwriting – a related art we mostly tend to feel far more confident in judging – people would fold their arms and tip their heads, say, “You’ve not been playing guitar that long, have you?” Or, even worse, “I don’t believe you mean that.”