When I came to Amsterdam to write this book, I thought criticism and creativity were clean different things. I thought that one was about use and the other about making, and that the theories of use – critical theories – had grown like thorn thickets around the arts of making and enmired them in critical protocols: the tail is wagging the dog! as the old guys used to say. I thought that art had been diverted from its purpose of exploring perception and that artists had become so bogged down by critical practice they could no longer act – that they could no longer tell their means from their ends. I thought that discrimination and dialectic had become a curse and that deliberately setting out to like everything would be a way to counter that. How To Like Everything is a utopia, I thought, a utopia that could be made simply by reframing our stance to the world around us.
Now, having been dragged through the briars by Bamba and Katrina and Lola and Fronk and Bob and the anaconda and the Inquisition, not to mention Jackie, whose congenital inability to conform has floodlit my desire to pitch what’s emergent against what’s usual, I need to reframe the distinction between criticism and creativity. I said before that evolution and creation are not opposites, but two attempts to explain the same phenomenon; so, criticism and creativity are both wrapped up together in the questions of how we use the world and how we abstract it. It is not that art must be liberated from criticism – but that criticism could be liberated from itself. It could act from inside its subjects, spurring their trajectories, wobbling their orbits and sharing in their evolutionary opportunism. Let the dog start wagging the tail again. And think again of Beauty, Truth and Goodness: they could be approached not as ideals, but as actions and passions intertwined. As means and ends. We find beauty, we pursue truth and we do goodness.
It is not only artists who engage with the actual world through abstraction. The entire human artifice – everything we make and do – is a huge collection of abstractions. This shade of utility is speciesist rather than humanist: It doesn’t elevate human consciousness above all else; it is merely partisan for humanity. We abstract the world differently to crows because we are different from crows. But we are powerful. Our abstractions inflect the world more than theirs. I once stood in the park – an abstraction of wilderness – and watched a squirrel rooting through a waste bin, picking out possible things to eat and flinging the leftovers on the ground. A pair of crows stood by the bin picking over what it threw away, looking up at it for what came next like black-feathered beggars. It was funny to see. It looked like the squirrel was feeding the birds.
AND NOW WE’RE ON A DAY TRIP to Rotterdam. We have sunshine, warm breezes and clemency. The weather has changed, like a benign catastrophe. It feels like the first day of spring already and it’s still January. Lola and Jackie and I are in the beautiful old Boijmans Museum, standing in front of The Holy Kinship, the painting Lola was looking at yesterday in that big book.
Before coming here we took the tourist cruise ship that runs down to the working part of the river. Rotterdam is a huge port and full of the world’s trade. A long and intricate system of docks plays host to ship after ship after ship after ship. Filthy as hard work, streaked with rust and spume and seagull shit, with strange alphabets on their sides from all over the world, coded Chinese, Korean, Russian. Great stacks of blue and brown and red containers stand at the docksides casting shadows deep as mountains. Cranes throng the sky. And through all this heavy commerce, for a long hour, our pristine white cruiser slipped like a snooper. The three of us stood up on the top deck open to a balmy sky that seemed as big as the planet itself exalting in the glory of the wide world. While downstairs, in the lounge, a party of young teens barely older than Jackie but heavily neuro-typical, sat round tables smoking and playing poker and not looking out of the windows at all.
Rotterdam is a twentieth century city, bombed flat by all sides in the last great European war and rebuilt from the rubble up. New docks, new houses, new shops, offices and factories. New parks. It still quivers with the toil of the rebuilding like a chisel-hewn jungle. It’s so uncompromising that the people who live there have taken on progress as one of life’s great jokes. Try as hard as they can to love their city, they can’t. They build buildings that slope and posture like comedians, and they say that the Amsterdammers are fairies who live in dolls houses. But: in the middle of this windy, assertive place-of-now stands the Boijmans museum, a 1930’s flapper of a building, silken-fringed, flat-chested, sublime, that somehow escaped the swarm of bombs. It has thin brown bricks and fancy green copper roofs and intricate stone dressings. It is a museum of art. The contemporary collection is a mixed bag of gestures and pouts like the city itself, but then upstairs there are the old masters. Room after room of painstakingly detailed Dutch paintings painted with tiny brushes apparently made from eyelashes that show miracles happening in ordinary life, like The Holy Kinship we’ve come to see.
The Holy Kinship is a late medieval idea that set out to show Christ as a king by stressing his dynastic attributes. So in the painting he, the baby, looking as wise as Jesus already, sits on Mary’s lap next to Mary’s mother Anne and her cousin Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s baby son who will grow up to be John the Baptist. His father and uncle and the original patriarch Jesse are at the door and his future disciples, boys of Jackie’s age, are sitting on the floor breaking open a barrel of beer. In their elaborate setting they look like a pack of animals living in a gilded jungle. The pack is a baby’s introduction to life outside its own little ecology of the womb. It is the first horizon. Kid’s stuff. That’s what makes this a picture of everything.
Later, in the cafe, I contemplate my own little intense threesome. St. Trogo, St. Paul and the immaculate Lola, surrounded by the artifacts of contemporary life. Who will paint us, and why? There is the actual world, flashing past us at incomprehensible speed: there stand the artists trying to see it. Everyone catches a different glimpse, everyone tries to show what they see of it to everyone else; and these abstractions of the actual, these splinters of perception, are the content of art. Looked at like this, even the most realistic representations are abstractions; even photographs are abstractions. Every art is abstract art. Artists stand there before the ongoing emergence of the world making their approximations as best they can. And why? Because someone has to do it.
On the way out we pass the rooms where the Boijmans museum keeps its minimalist sculpture. Minimal means, among other things, no names. So: shining steel cubes on the floor, blank canvases and rows of coloured fluorescent light tubes pinned to the wall like trophies. The works are famous for not being abstractions, but for being real. As the placard on the wall says, “These works are not representations of the real, they are the real.” But if all art is abstraction, how can that be? Does the distinction between real and actual worlds clarify it? Are these mute minimalist lumps in the end like those bourgeois paintings of second empire high couture, pictures of fashionable women perfectly dressed, immaculate pieces of the real world imagined by humans?
The next room has only one piece in it, a large steel cage painted German Army grey. In fact it is a double cage, a cage within a cage, within the room. The outer cage is an impressively logical arrangement of components incorporating doors that would allow, were this not a museum, access to the narrow separation between the outer and inner cages. The inner cage holds nothing. The affirmatively separated out space between the inner and outer cages flows easily through all its parts, but it also is empty. Jackie goes right ahead anyway and squeezes in there, and grins at us like an animal in the zoo.
It was WH Auden who said that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. For Auden, nothing being something was a modernist game. But an abstraction of nothing like this cage is a pretty hefty game to play. It seems to stop time. And I think of the actual gorilla in his cage in the zoo, waiting for nothing to happen. Living in the present, day after day, year after year, until he dies. My god! Is that art, too?
ALL THE WAY BACK TO AMSTERDAM on the train, Jackie is having a hard time. He lives like that gorilla. Imprisoned by the present or liberated by it we do not know. What’s going to happen next? He asks again and again. How will we know when we get there? Where the average citizen carries an understanding of the workings of the tram numbers and routes and how the constellations of lines and stops stack up into a picture of the city, to Jackie it might as well be magic. It has been a lesson to me to try and explain how we know the number 16 will go down the Damrak just like it did yesterday; because what is at the bottom of the explanation is that the tram driver has agreed in advance to do it. In fact when you dissect the workings of society, the whole thing depends on contracts and trust, from the money in your pocket to the vows of marriage. It’s what the pecking order has become – all backed up by the force of the law as sure as a swipe of the Alpha Male Baboon’s claws. It’s another description of the real world. In some ways Jackie is more in tune with the present than any of us. Less contaminated by real world abstractions. But how do you know whom you can trust? This train could be going to Siberia and we will be deposited in a land of snow and white tigers and be stuck forever in gulag land.
Every day I thank him for the insights his condition forces out of me. Because now I fall to thinking that this train ride is not just a contract – it is an abstraction of the journey itself, a translation of desire into life. I try to communicate this fledgling thought to Lola, wondering if there could be some sort of brain yoga that Trog could do along the lines of, what shall we call it –abstraction translation? But she tops it with a better idea. A technique called Attention Deconcentration.
She says she learnt it from some free divers in Bermuda. These are the guys – and dolls – who go down to 100 metre depths with no oxygen tanks. Obviously being able to hold your breath is the first qualification. They can do it for seven or eight minutes, in a complicated physiological practice that compresses their lungs to the size of a tennis ball. The second qualification is obviously a reckless disregard for personal safety, I am thinking, but far from it. What they are doing in these dives is approaching the boundaries of self-control, all the way to the edge of the abyss of panic. To achieve it they practice a mental calming technique called attention – attention what?
“Attention de-concentration.” She says. “What they’re looking for is a way of taking in the whole field of perception. Usually when you’re working on something you have to concentrate your attention on certain specific tasks, but this is the opposite.”
“Why do they do it?”
“It’s like meditation, but without the aim to detach. High stress can induce it. Soldiers in action know what it’s about. As a psychotechnic,” as a what? “As a brain control technique – it was invented for people doing intricate and stressful tasks. Like those astronauts who do zero gravity space walks to fix satellites.” I’ve seen the pictures. Hanging in space clutching a socket wrench, tethered by a gold plated umbilical cord, surrounded by infinity. “The divers say that what happens in the deconcentrated state is that anxiety evaporates, and you feel your position among things, and everything becomes part of you. Your consciousness empties out, but you are so in touch with the situation that you can react immediately and without thinking.” Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Is this, finally, how to like everything? Maybe call it Discrimination Deconcentration?
What you’re trying to do with attention deconcentration is to distribute your attention across the whole field. People learning to deconcentrate start by looking straight ahead and observing the periphery of their vision, above, below, left and right, all at the same time. This helps to suspend spontaneous eye movements and focuses attention not on objects, but on fragments of the vision field. If you get it right, your eyes won’t cling to objects, or even move. It’s hard to learn, because the instinctive way to see is to concentrate on the centre. But when you’ve mastered it, you expand the practice until it covers not just vision, but all sensations. I look over at Jackie staring out of the window at the hedgerows zipping past. If only he could do this. If only he could learn to take in everything simultaneously and evaporate his anxiety. Then I catch myself; ‘if only’ is meaningless. The world could be different, but it’s not.
“How did you meet these diver guys?” I ask her.
“Don’t be silly,” she says with a smile. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
THE WINTER’S HALF OVER, and soon we will be leaving Holland. But a nursing home issue has suddenly spun up and I have to make a trip to London to see the solicitor. He has an office nineteen floors up a twenty-storey office building in the city. He has that lawyer’s charisma that comes from maintaining positions of certainty for long periods. He likes to make small talk on the way back to the elevator after meetings. He asks what I’m doing in Amsterdam, and when I tell him I’m writing a book called How To Like Everything, he says “But liking everything must be nearly impossible.” Nearly. “Like seeing everything, don’t you think? You can see nearly everything, but you can’t see your own face,” he says, with a look of bemused concern. I try the rest of the slogan on him. Believe in nothing, know what you know, live in the present.
“But if you believe in nothing, how can you explain anything?” he says. “An explanation is a description mapped on to a system of belief. That’s basic information theory. It’s how the law works. And it’s how the world works.” The law! I sigh. A house of cards! I say that believing in nothing allows for provisional explanations – it’s the way you take on other worlds: a way to explain such things as Shakespeare’s racism and Neo Classical architecture’s imperialism without derailing your affection for the works themselves. But he has little patience for speculations like that. And I’m grateful to him – his trust in his pack of cards is one of the things that gave me the idea for this How To Like Everything project. Along with Jackie’s predicament, the story of Little Red Cape and Fronk’s image of the Globeskin. The question is how to be free in the real world while knowing that you can’t be free in the actual. The law is a systematic discrimination and so is contemporary philosophy. I wanted to try and write without system. I wanted to write indiscriminately. At the time I imagined writing a book like one of those plastic postcards covered in tiny grooves, with one image printed on one side of the groove, another on the other. So that every time you shift it slightly the picture changes. That’s what I thought this book could be like.
He leaves me pushing the call button on the elevator and strides off back to his office, and I decide to use the stairs instead. When I get out in the stairwell I see the stairs going up as well as down and I find myself climbing instead of descending, and at the top there is a door – unlocked! – that opens onto the roof. I go through it and the actual world suddenly explodes in my face. The enormous sky and a wide-open vista of the city of London, spread out over the landscape as far as I can see, like a thick, elaborate layer of complications pasted over the ground. Breathtaking. Beautiful. And in that first ecstatic moment with everything suddenly there and the bowl of my horizon suddenly pushed out to a fifty kilometre diameter, I switch straight into the deconcentrated state that Lola’s divers were using. It sounded difficult when she described it but up here it happened just like that. It’s what city observation towers are for. It’s what the tower of Babel was for: to see everything at once. Recall it now – the first time you glimpsed an enormous view, and you suddenly felt elated, pitched out of time, and saw that you were standing on the surface of the planet. On top of the world!
And then, over the next few minutes, your mind takes repossession, and starts to sort and reorganize and construct coherence, and so gradually subdues the ecstasy. I once heard a description by the landscape painter Rackstraw Downes of the effects of closely observing the landscape. He makes intensely realistic –actualistic – fresh air paintings of New Jersey, along the Hudson River’s convoluted edge, a wasteland of heavy industry and garbage disposal with huge cloudscapes and white-feathered egrets picking their way through the polluted marsh grasses. He loves the minute-by-minute dynamics of light and movement and tries to catch it all. He seems to have trained himself to sustain that first ecstatic moment for the whole two or three months it takes to paint a picture, and with close observation, driven by the desire to get it down exactly right, he says he gradually becomes a part of the scene himself. He’s an artist, not a solicitor: he maintains a position of uncertainty for long periods. An enquiry is a position of uncertainty. He enters into the web of relationships in the scene, he says, and the man doing the painting becomes as much part of it as the weeds growing in the gutter, or the shifting patterns of traffic on the bridge.
Cranky.
Everything Places are not paradises; they are utopias of the possible. They are vantage points from which you can make out the multiple currents of the world and sense the complexity all gathered up into one fist. On my wall at home I have a picture of Lossiemouth air force base, in Scotland. The olive drab extent of it stretches out across the middle distance. There are the runway strips, the water towers, the control towers, the nuclear blast hardened shelters as big as warehouses and the little grey fighters being readied for the apocalypse. In front of all this is a pig farm, with maybe a hundred galvanized iron pigsties sitting on the pig rooted earth and separated by electric fences, the pink fatness of the animals scattered across the terrain like so many naked four legged humans. My brothers. Behind it is the stone garrison town of Lossiemouth built by the English invaders two hundred years ago, occupying a slight hill on the horizon with the church spire sticking out of the middle, small as a needle at this distance. And behind that is the greater horizon of the ocean and the sky and the mournful mountains, and the forests where the wild deer live.
That’s an everything place. So is the vision painted by the master of The Holy Kinship in the museum in Rotterdam. So is the top of the city tower. So is the pond in our garden in London with its tiny community of species tangled together in the evolutionary struggle in their two metre cubed world of water. And you know what? The harder you look for everything, the more of it you can find.
I ARRIVE BACK IN AMSTERDAM AT MIDNIGHT and fight my way through the sex-crazed crowds to my dark house and my sleeping family. But when I pass Jackie’s room he is sitting up, wide awake. The electric fan he keeps running all night to smooth out the sounds is churning away like a robot waterfall. “Time to get up,” he says when he sees me. I wrap him in a blanket and take him by the hand and open the hatch to the roof and we clamber out into the night sky together and survey the bright lights of the city burning like fury. I describe to him the satellite photos of the night-time earth that show pinpoints of lights, the places of human habitation, lit up like stars. We are standing in the middle of the Northern European Galaxy: for in these images the great conurbations of the industrialized world where the pinpoints coalesce are like galaxies. The black oceans and deserts of the Earth are like interstellar space.
I tell Jackie to imagine millions of packs of humans huddled round their campfires in the middle of the dark wilderness. We both look up into the vacant sky trying to see the truth of the universe and we see nothing. We climb into a spaceship and accelerate out into near earth orbit and look back, and see the surface of the earth, and everything on it, a universe in itself.