Today has been a long day. That often means it has been a bad day but on this occasion the converse is true.
i have contemplated mortality, gazing down from clifftop heights onto a slab of flat rock below. Birds criss crossing in impossible to understand flight patterns.
I would like to linger here and sketch the sweep of each bird, creating an entirely abstract pattern of graceful turns and purposeful straight lines.
what is art? Is it a communication? I don’t know. Nothing about the picture in my minds eye speaks of this place or how I’m feeling. The curves and spirals are only meaningful to me, the bisecting ruler lines could be misinterpreted so easily.
i imagine myself as important, someone who critics and scholars study.
“The curves and spirals represent an idea of freedom, the mid seeking spiritual ascension – whilst the frustration the artist feels at being chained to the mortal plain is signified by graceless and disruptive straight slashes across the surface”
Something like that anyway.
The picture does not exist for I have not drawn it. The critics do not exist either and even if they did, they would be uninterested in my work.
I would like to draw it anyway. To sit here, yards from certain death, surrounded by the fascinating and to attempt to chart it would be something.
Maybe that’s what art is. Pointless actions for their own sake. To draw is to consider something.
I wonder if the seabird considers the thrill of its own life. To watch them wheel away you’d swear for all the world that they’re playing. Music is movement and this is a symphony beyond any. A tip of the feather, a dip of the wing, a plunge, flying in tandem, soaring and hanging.
Frank Zappa talking about the meaningless of trying to write about music. Dancing about architecture was the phrase he used. I think music is just another language to try and express the things that we can’t say. To put what doesn’t easily go into words into some other kind of communication.
Now I’m composing something but I can’t tell you how it sounds. It sounds to me how it looks, timeless and ancient, thrilling and wild. A beady eye, an alien intelligence, a feather caught on the wind, the stomach jolting sense of distance, an impossibly blue sky.
Such a moment is hard to turn your back on. I lie, face down at the cliffs edge. Pollen drifts from the grass and tiny fragile flowers. I am watching for one thing only now.
There.
I see it.
A tiny black and white bird. It motors with clockwork precision just above the water. I catch it for a few seconds only but I know this will be seared on my mind.
I am happy.
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