I am writing this in Amsterdam, Holland, the Netherlands, in an old Amsterdam canal-side house so lofty and with stairs so steep it has a crane on the top to hoist furniture up from the street and in through the huge windows. My studio overlooks the Old Church. The Dutch call it De Oude Kerk. One of Amsterdam’s ancient canals flows past the front door, its surface dark green and full of reflections. The water inches by as slowly as the hands of the church clock. Yesterday a discarded television took all morning to float past, looking like a commentary on the futility of contemporary life, if your mind is of the sort that will wander that way. The canal moves in response to Amsterdam’s complicated regime of water management, which keeps the sea outside the dikes at bay. We are living below sea level here. Global warming is not some future terror for the Dutch; the movement of the tides and the level of the sea is their continuous present. The story so far is that the Old Church has been standing over there on the other side of the canal for maybe six hundred years. It fills my window with its ancient asymmetries and wonderful colours, a picture so solid and true it pushes out doubt. And yet, where we are is also what they call the Red Light District. All around me the little streets and alleys are filled with whores. They stand at the windows in their bras and pants pouting and knocking on the glass at the tourists who throng here night and day – and at me whenever I leave the house – and at the seagulls that flock the canals, come to that. They do it at everything. In the afternoons the sun hits the west front of the church like a clapper striking a bell and the pimps stand on the corners like policemen on duty and the seagulls screech round and round looking for something to steal and the whores stand and perform their sexual mimes. The picturesque and the salacious are all mixed together in this place like an emulsion.
Which is good, I think, because I am here, in this tall, canal-side house paid for by the art school, trying to make sense of my proposition How To Like Everything; this idea that crawled out of my head maybe two years ago now and has been lying at my feet writhing like a pole dancer ever since while I try to integrate it. And maybe that word ‘emulsion’ is what I want. An emulsion is a fluid where everything is not dissolved in the water but ubiquitously mixed – the particles are held together in suspension. Maybe that’s what needs to be done. Can I call myself an emulsionist? Keep all the balls in the air at once? Something so enticing and so complicated as How To Like Everything might not integrate, might not solve – might not dissolve – after all.
“Why do you want to do this?” My Dutch friends say. They whom my wife Lola calls the Inquisition. They travel in a pack of three and ask questions non-stop. Except when they giggle. They giggle like naughty boys. “What use is it to like everything?” they giggle. “Do you like torture? Do you like bombs? It’s so hard to like everything!” Collapsing in giggles. Once I visited some American friends, she the architect, he the painter of large grey canvases of girls on the edges of nervous breakdowns. He had a huge vinyl collection, as young men all did at that moment in history, but unusually it was a widely eclectic mix of stuff – he played Ella Fitzgerald, then Bartok, then Kate Bush, then The Chemical Brothers, then Coltrane – it was lovely.
“Oh sure, I like every kind of music, music is like the ocean. It swirls around the globe and connects us all up,” he said. I couldn’t have agreed more. It was lovely! I once drove for three hours across the desolate Rannoch Moor, highlands, Scotland, UK, with my silent fifteen year old son, my eldest son now grown up and left home, listening to the heavy metal band Metallica – his choice – and I have loved that record ever since. And now it was so warm and giving in the broad ambience of this painter’s music collection, this man who liked every kind of music, that I wanted to hear it again – can we hear some Metallica? I said.
“Hell no, man, I don’t listen to that shit.”
“But, but, but…” I stuttered, completely stalled by this about face. I searched lamely, mistakenly, for some description of the band’s quality to justify my choice: “but they’re so precise!”
“And that’s all they are,” he scowled.
It’s not enough to believe in nothing. To like something you have to frame its qualities somehow – which is why, when cornered, I called Metallica ‘precise’ – but then I could have said ‘mathematical’. I could have said ‘sweaty’. A quality is only a part of the story, part of the explanation; something your mind can grab hold of. There we were arguing over Metallica, when in actuality there was no Metallica present, only a chimera of Metallica in our heads. Things – and do all atheists think that people are things, or is it just me? – things exist in the world in all their actual complexity, but a thing is only itself, not an idea but a thing: one of countless millions of things in the world. Why do we try to overcome this? Why are we so keen to simplify and rank and grade? Is it innate or is it something we laboriously learn from infanthood on?
THE DOORBELL RINGS. A Jehovah’s Witness is standing there on the doorstep in her perky mauve hat and her old fashioned suit, holding a little briefcase. She is working the red light district. A lone snowplough out after a heavy fall. She takes out a picture of planet earth taken from space and shows it to me; the blue green brown globe hanging in the blackness, swirled with clouds, incandescent with the reflected light of the sun – it’s beautiful and complex – it’s a picture of everything! Is my first thought. Everything on Earth is too small to see in that photo, but it’s all there.
Her opening question is: how can you believe something so complex and beautiful as this was not made by a greater power? In the beginning there was chaos, and then God made the world, is her story, and – she goes on –“now look, it’s full of confusion because we’ve lost our way.” She says do I have any thoughts on that? And I think this: in the beginning, the world was perfect and then god came along and changed it into something else. Or was it the devil? Can you believe in the devil and not believe in god?
“Look,” I say, “You may get me to agree that god exists. Something’s got to explain the grief and the strife. But you’ll never convince me that he created the world.” And it takes me an hour and a half to persuade her that I mean it, standing there on the doorstep while the traffic of the sinful world passed by.
And now I am swept by anxieties and doubts. I switch on the coffee machine and wait while it does its little gulps and snorts. I try to get my thoughts straight. Daylight pours through the studio window kissing every surface just as it has for two hundred years, but the grace of god it used to kiss with has turned, during that time, into a cascade of photons. The drips of coffee scud across the surface in the jug like atoms in an experiment. The percolator growls. Tiny bursts of steam escape as the water turns from liquid to gas – but has science taught us anything? Every day, we watch the sun coming up in the east and going down in the west even while knowing that what we see is the Earth going round the sun. Everyday we are at each other’s throats, locked in ancient enmities, even while knowing we are one humanity. How could life illuminated by science still be so confusing? Is it that the everyday fact of hurtling through space, hugged by the coincidence of a water-laden atmosphere, spinning towards a future when the sun itself will eventually explode, is too terrible to look at?
I stamp round the studio, my head running hot, babbling that our fear of dark knowledge is what god fearing has become. And all around us people attempt to overcome it by grasping at this and that firm thing, history, sustainability, ethnicity, gender; they strap on a bit tighter the blinkers of holy books; they gorge on sword and sorcery stories; and at the same time as they’re doing all that, they go and decode the genome and try to recreate the Higgs boson.
Suddenly, the Inquisition is here again. They burst through the door in the middle of my rant and clattered up the steep stairs and started to raid the liquor cupboard before they even sat down.
“I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,” says one.
“I know a lot about art and I like a lot of it,” says the next.
“I know everything about art and I like everything,” says the last, and they collapse into giggles all over the floor. I stay as silent as a stoic.
They keep at it: “Why do you want to do this? What use is it to like everything? Do you like torture? Do you like bombs?”
They want Margaritas. Six shots of Tequila, distilled from cactus juice, three of Curacao liqueur with its bitter whiff of Caribbean oranges, and the juice of two limes. Plenty of ice, then a little more ice. Shake it up and pour it out.
Why do I want to like everything? I survey their beaming faces. Lit up with mock expectation and brimming with giggles. Ready to send their cocktails spluttering back into the glasses through their nostrils. And okay, I say to them holding up my hands like a burglar at bay: it is a peculiar idea. When the first seven years of our lives are spent learning to sort the wrong from the right and the good from the bad, and the rest of our time on earth actively sorting them. And when everything we do is based on discrimination and judgement, on making decisions and getting them right; when all our hopes are for a better world, when all our striving is for excellence and we value goodness as highly as breathing –speak for yourself, says the pimp on the corner, what I do is make a better world for me. The girls come in on trains from the East and I shmooze them into coming with me because believe me man I can be charming when I want to be, then I lock them up in a darkened room and hit them with wooden planks until they’re softened up and I can put them to work.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe the pimp is doing what we all do. We whack the world with planks until it softens up enough for us to change it. Why do we want to change it? Maybe we still believe the old story, in which we were cast out of paradise. Where when you’re hungry all you have to do is open your mouth and the food jumps into it. Where the ground has no hills to climb and you want for nothing. And we were cast out of that into this terrifying, hostile place, full of ice and mountains and toil: the wilderness. And we set-to whacking it back into shape. Whacking it soft, whacking it smooth. Getting it back to paradise. And we’re still doing it.
“You pussy!” say the Dutchmen. “Who do you think you are – the world whisperer?!”
They mean like horse whisperer. They are teasing me but I like the sound of it, The World Whisperer. And I tell them that if people liked everything, they wouldn’t behave like that towards the world, or towards each other. The torture and the bombs could be put back on the shelf.
“So what about disease?” They yell. “How do you like that?” And then – suddenly swerving off on a tangent –“How did Aids get started?” They stare at each other, bursting with giggles. “It was a monkey plague for years then all of a sudden it’s in the humans. How did that happen?” They are pretending to want someone to blame. Pretending not to see Aids as emergent nature, but as an invasion.
“Come on put your hand up!” they yell, as immoderately as the gutter press, laughing and pushing each other like school kids. “Who was it?! Who was it who fucked the monkey?” We laugh and laugh and laugh.
And then fall to quarrelling about the provenance of that joke. I tell them I’ve heard it at least twice before, and so the discussion transmutes: of what value is originality? Is it, like beauty and authenticity, triggered by emotion? The materialist in me says that everything is emotional, everything is authentic, beautiful and original. Every particle is a one-off. Every joke is new-every-morning. But whether that rates originality as high value or low value or the only value we cannot agree.
BACK IN ENGLAND, in the Cedars Care Home, my aged mother is sitting in a special old person’s chair with a big spring in it and a lever at the side that can raise her up to standing position. She’s five hundred kilometres away but I know she is sitting there because that’s what she does all day long, day after day. She spends her time amongst forty other oldsters with a combined age of three and a half thousand. Collectively they are as old as Stonehenge. They sit there in a circle for long hours without uttering a sound, like menhirs on the plain. I call the care home Spaceship Cedars. If I walk in there with my little boy Jackie, strange customer that he is, everyone is riveted. In spite of everything, he carries the magic branch of youth, and they love him for it. You can see it in their eyes when they look at him; yes! There is hope!
Everything is emotional because hope is. It took the sight of this happy bunch of shipwrecks in the Cedars Care Home to make me see it and now I can’t stop. When I talk to people I no longer see rational beings engaged in rational discourse, I see objects, emoting. It has made me such a deep materialist that I see everything as objects, people, dogs, trees, rocks – objects that burn with the animation of hope, each engaged in their own private miracle of being. And the things that people make, the buildings and machines, the paintings and the poems, are artificial miracles, which glow with light borrowed from their makers.
“Hey, World Whisperer,” comes a shout. And the three of them are grinning and jiggling their empty glasses at me like a bunch of monkeys.