Category: Living

As sometimes happens, after I wrote my last essay, I started noticing more things in the media on the same subject – or at least, which shared some of the themes I’d been writing about.  (I’m fully aware that that’s just a classic instance of selection bias at work in what my eye catches when I surf the internet, by the way.)  There was an essay in the New York Times yesterday, for example, on how we can now realize a luxury, vacation-filled form of communism, the way the pre-purge Trotskyites imagined it – written with slightly more verbal elan than the Trotskyites ever managed but with less intellectual rigor and a kind of winking po-mo materialistic-but-trying-to-mock-it-as-a-lame-fade style, which, as a proper Trotskyite (the kind that would have been shot by the NKVD in a boarding house in San Francisco in 1937), really cheesed me off.  Separately, there have been a number of articles across the internet questioning whether or not we have any hope of actually “halting” or reversing climate change, or whether we need to accept the fact that the climate has and will continue to change.  One article sent by a friend took an apocalyptic view; another was more balanced but still took the point that “the world is changing and we need to think of it as undergoing change, not somehow as a project we can reverse or overcome”.

It’s a problem in modern economics and environmental studies – both of which are more related than most of their practitioners realize – that the writing is just dreadful, so I’m not providing links to the articles above, simply out of a desire to not waste your time or offend your aesthetic sensibility, dear reader.  But my essay had three primary points, each of which kept getting echoed in the online postings of the last week:

(a) we are living in a post-scarcity era, yet our economic systems and even our ways of imagining economics remain stuck in concepts which are only sensical in the presence of scarcity;

(b) we also seem to have crossed the threshold where the technology we initially built to surpass the limits of scarcity have created a new environment of existential threat; but,

(c) we’re building and assimilating technology so fast at this point, that it seems highly unlikely that we’re truly facing a physically existential threat – although all of the above factors mean we are at a kind of psychological and intellectual inflection point.

I’ve been wrestling especially with the third point, mostly because I don’t like the idea of being predictive about the future and I’m crossing that predictive line with such a statement.  I’m willing to make observations about the present which are unconventional if supported by historical data – both causal and what I’d call “field based”, that is, judgments which aren’t rooted in cause and effect but which show a field of related and sometimes correlated trend vectors which point to an obvious basis for current conditions.  I’m really reluctant to draw that forward, even though as a human being you kind of have to because you’re trying to position yourself for “the good life”, as Mark and Viktoria keep reminding me, at all times.  We can disagree on what the good life consists of, but we’re all trying to achieve it, and to either get closer to the goal of the good life or maintain a good life that we’ve already discovered.  So you have to project, if only to then be able to evaluate different choices against a backdrop of what you think the future may be while you ignore the fact that you have a poor and blinkered view of what “choice” and “possibility” actually are and you’re ultimately stumbling about in a dark of your own creation.

But I don’t think it’s particularly interesting to note that we are building and assimilating technology incredibly quickly, faster than ever before.  It’s not even interesting to note why: communication is now essentially free (other than due to self- or societally-imposed censorship barriers), transportation of the goods and service providers required to create interesting new stuff is also essentially free (especially in terms of time), and there are lots more of us clever hominids around to have ideas and see where they go.  So if the equation that leads to the quantum of innovation in a given period is something like:

Innovation = ∫ f(population, lifespan) • g(proximity) d(f(), g())/dt

Inserting some numbers into the above, we’ve gone from less than a bit less than a billion people, to nearly eight billion people (increasing by call it a factor of 10).  By proximity, I mean both physical closeness and the proximity of ideas or of values.  Initially we were separated in space and with immense time costs to overcome, but now with almost no separation materially in space (factor of 10⁴, meaning it’s literally at least 10,000 times faster for two human beings to interact via trade or the like than pre-industrial times) and with time compressed in terms of the time used to connect and share information as well (at least a factor of 10⁴ and rising), it’s an almost supercritical implosion of ideas and people and the things we share amongst ourselves.   Even the number of years of life in which we can share amongst ourselves has vastly increased and thus the idea of “usable lifetime” has doubled – small change compared to the other accelerations but still material.  In other words, we’ve increased the potential for innovation by something like 2×10⁹in roughly two hundred years.[1]

That’s a pretty big shift in potential.  We have 2 billion times the creative capacity for innovation over a given period of time (call it a year, or a decade) as a species as we had in 1750, if I’m roughly correct on these orders of magnitude.  Unsurprisingly, it would seem, we’ve not only gone to the moon, split the atom (for good and for ill), cured or found preventative mechanisms for most of the diseases that used to kill us, continue to raise more food than anyone thought possible, and managed so far to not kill ourselves – either intentionally through war or unintentionally via poisoning the planet beyond recognition.

It’s that last bit that has media articles focused on risks and the potential for some kind of accelerating Venus greenhouse effect planetary spiral (albeit in the face of 4 billion years of evidence to the contrary), but I’d argue even there, our innovation and potential as a learning species is coming to the fore.  In all developed economies, the birthrate is now comfortably below replacement; that’s a kind of learning as the species becomes accustomed to abundance.  With expanding lifespans and material plenty, we’d be idiotic to continue to reproduce at pre-modern levels, and sure enough, we don’t.  As we reproduce at lower levels, which, demographically speaking, compensates for the expanding lifespans by not overly stressing population growth in the moment, we demonstrate the system’s ability to learn.[2]

So our capacity for innovation has exploded, like nothing ever seen before in the history of the species, and we seem to be initiating a strange combination of changes – societal and technological – which are tuning us as a species to the new condition of both abundance and innovative potential.  We’ve not completely lost our chance with the planet, either, although we might have to get used to a bit of a stampede as we all migrate to northern Manitoba and deal with some not insignificant and probably quite violent shifts along the way towards dealing with a planet which will take millennia to cool down again.  As a species obviously capable of violence, it should surprise no one that – even as we learn (hopefully) less violent ways of collectively navigating change, we’ll engage in a lot of killing one another along the way.

I hope I’m not coming across either as optimistic or callous.  I’m not optimistic about the future simply because the capacity for narcissism in us as individuals means the future will be awful no matter what happens to the environment, or to our ability to solve cancer or create new diseases, or what have you.  Our own selfishness – our individual inability to love for its own sake – will ensure that on any given day in the future, most of us will wake up and struggle to hold back tears of despair for a race so God-forsaken as ours, while others of us wake up, snort a couple lines, and spend another day viewing other individuals as objects for their own consumption.  And while I think too much in terms of statistical dynamics, which often risks allowing one to ignore the individual souls who are affected by the processes of complex systems such as the system of human society, or the linked systems of humanity and the non-human natural environment of our planet, I also am choked up every day, trying to deal with the terrifying duality of an effective learning system being built on the backs of individuals who suffer, who are confused, who harm one another with a kind of smug contempt, who are ground down into dust, who die without a viable hope other than the myths we invented back before we knew how to live with abundance.

One (again poorly written) essay I read recently, riffed on the idea that, if the planet (or our species, which to us is the same thing) were to be destroyed at a time certain in the future, our very notion of time would change.  Public figures often talk about needing to do things to preserve our way of life – or at least, life itself – for our grandchildren or what have you, but the essay raised the question “well, what if we knew there would be no grandchildren – we’d all be dead from an asteroid in 30 years?”.  They used this to introduce what should be an intuitive thought, that we’re motivated at a certain base level not by preserving life for our grandchildren, but we’re preserving life for the idea of the species continuing to have children ad infinitum.  We cherish that idea of the species living far more than we acknowledge – preferring to hide behind the vaguely recognizable faces of as-yet-unborn-but-surely-imaginable children of our children’s children.

Where I’m optimistic is for the species, and for the system we call Earth.  We – and this is a collective we, humanity and its host – seem to be getting better and better at learning and responding to one another.  The system seems to be holding up well; Earth is getting deadlier to us at an individual level, which is good in terms of thinking about how a learning system should work (bad for individuals, obviously), and collectively, the system is getting more innovative, and we’re even starting to get less damaging with our innovation (read about changes in mining pollution from pre-1970 times to today and tell me that’s not true).  There are more of us – but we’re somehow hearing a kind of system feedback, and we’re responding in our collective individual lives, leading us to have fewer children as we live longer and face a more challenging existential environment.

This is a different concept than worrying about “mankind on earth” or even about my grandkids.  I struggle with what I’ve imposed on my son in terms of how his life will be able to unfold, beginning as it did in a specific moment in May, 2012.  I’m mostly not worried about the long-term effect of his parents’ divorce on him; he’s been loved and he so clearly understands what that love means, in the varying ways we both show to him, that that side of him, the side that will discover and add new meaning to what love can be, will be fine.  No, I worry about the choices he might be forced to make, about him being potentially the first generation to live confronted with the full effect of abundance while being stuck with a human set of wiring that has its breakpoints, whether around social jealousy or the power of chemical addiction.  And I’m worried about what I’ll tell him about those choices, and about the why at the heart of the matter: why his mother and I had him.  We made a great decision, I know – but will I be able to express why?

My son’s offspring are literally not real and won’t be, likely, for a couple decades or more; I’m not worried about them yet as concrete beings.  On the other hand, the species, and the sentient-species / earth system that really makes up who we are, is very real. It is mine just as it is everyone’s, and I’m fascinated by it.  That system is having a bit of a growth spurt problem, but I’m not worried about that either – not merely because I have a vanishingly small impact on that system, but because even in its growing pains, it shows the unmistakeable signs of learning. Even as some lessons don’t get learned well or quickly (“hey, should we really burn 100 million years worth of carbon accumulation in 200 years?”), the act of learning is clearly taking place, including the painful discipline that results from getting things wrong for awhile.  That all makes sense to me.

When you center that process on a specific sentient individual, however, that’s where it becomes hard.  That’s where I worry.  Especially when you were part of the process to bring that sentient being into the world.

My dog passed away last summer, and I wrote about how I felt the need to state that I killed him, or had him killed.  I’ve come to realize both (a) I was right, and (b) I was wrong, and (c) the words I have available to me are so sparse, so impoverished, that capturing the full force of what I felt was impossible, so I simply need to be nicer to myself.  That being said, once you help a creature – a dog who otherwise would have been abandoned or put to sleep alone – you also condemn them to a new, future death.  Once you give birth – or you participate in a birth as a father – you do the same thing.  You’re not selecting the moment, and you’re not killing them outright (unless you’re a monster) – that is to say, their death, even if you bring it about out of kindness, is not your fault.  But calling into being a sentient creature, capable of giving and receiving love, capable of understanding the world on their own terms, also involves setting them on the path towards death without, fundamentally, asking for their input in the decision.  It was your choice, not theirs, and you have to own that, just as much as they will own the actual act of dying.  I helped bring my son into the world – which means I also condemned him to leave it someday.[3]

This is, I think, maybe the more fundamental existential demand of our emergence into abundance. Back when lives were properly nasty, brutish and short (Hobbes got it right for all of human existence up until around 1960 or so), we brought life into being unconsciously, and stared somewhat incomprehensibly at our offspring if – if – they asked us why.  We faced our mortality as if in a constant daily lottery, as did our children.  Any of us could die tomorrow, due to famine or accident or disease most likely, but lurking just around the corner was the imminence of death by war and crime (crime, interestingly, has been falling as a cause of death pretty much since we have archaeological records to infer it).  We brought our children into the world as both insurance and as a reaffirmation of our own existence in a world where scarcity and the fear created by that constantly challenged that existence.  But now, we don’t need children to affirm our life tomorrow – we know we’ll die, but in awhile, and most likely due to a “disease” which is really just the slow accumulation of our own poor nutrition choices or overindulgences. And since society runs, well, pretty efficiently, we don’t need children to care for us in retirement.  We might want companionship, but that’s existentially different from needing children to actually supply us with food and shelter in our post-working years.

As such, we’ve lost the answer to “why am I here, parents?”.  It used to be quite simple, if a bit selfish: “you’re here because we’ll need you, and if we’re being perfectly honest, we need a lot of you because most of you will die prior to full recovery of the cost of husbandry in a world cursed by scarcity”.  Now, when our children ask us why they exist, that answer is completely discredited. So we damn well better have an answer more compelling than “well, I was bored” or “your mom and I were acting out of a kind of societal habit” or “because maintaining a steady path of GDP increase requires a certain base level of population growth in an economy still dependent on resource distribution in an overall Ricardian framework of land and primary good scarcity.”

The primary philosophical impact of the end of existential insecurity – the beginning of abundance – is that it demands of us some clarity for not just why we’re here, but why we’re participating in others being here.  It’s terrifying because we can no longer hide behind a few static questions – “why am I here”, “what is the good life” – and instead we face an insistent demand for a dialogue, not between ideas in a Kantian dialectic, but an actual dialogue amongst sentient, and therefore unpredictable and limited but differently limited and thus not wholly intelligible, individuals.  And the dialogue then extends to include a learning discussion with nature as a whole, implicitly trying to discover whether our sentience makes us the adults, or whether the conjoined complexity of the earth makes it the mentor and reduces us, both as individuals and as a collective, to preschoolers – or whether we’re all just infants blindly searching.  It becomes a dialogue with those who brought me into being, and those who I bring into being, and that cradle of nature from which all of us sprang, about why we all chose to be here.

The existential terror of our time is facing that question without the crutch of fear, of the uncertainty of survival tomorrow or even today, giving us a morally justifiable way out of resolving the question.  It’s facing Sartre’s guilt over being alive in the midst of death, but just as much, facing our own confusion as to why our parents brought us into being, and looking at the future and telling all of them, too, yes, you’ll die, you were born (in a certain accurate way of saying it[4]) in order to die.  But that is no reason for despair, even though many of you may die painfully or willfully at the hands of others.  Fear – and despair – are easy but no longer credible cop-outs to that question now that abundance exists.

Until now, we’ve gotten a bit of a free ride.  It wasn’t free: we paid for it in scarcity, in famine, in plague, in war.  But now we have to look at ourselves – our system, the whole system, sentient us plus Earth that’s too complex to fathom or understand – and every day come up with a why.  Abundance is the signal that our childhood, as a species, as a planet, is over.

If you, reader, remember the moment when you first realized childhood was magical – that moment when you also realized it wasn’t truly real anymore, even if it had been when you were living it – you’ll probably remember thinking that adulthood remained an abject mystery.  You knew that something whole in childhood couldn’t be authentically felt any longer, but that the new – that thing that you were supposed to understand – seemed terrifyingly out of reach.  My response to that moment was a bit obsessively intellectual, and it’s taken me thirty years to claw back to a point where I can recover the body memory of being a child while still being ready to face what will, inevitably, come. Tying those loops together – tying together time before I was born and time after it, tying together nature and being human, tying cords of love and letting them bind or fail as they will – will never be easy.  But, dear reader – and my son, for whom I’ve always been writing – we’re here to learn. I wanted to bring you here to learn, and for you to teach me.  You’re doing great.

---

[1]I know, the factor of 10 increase in population means that we have a physical impact on the environment greater than ever before.  And the impact of the technology required to reduce the physical separation of each of us means that we accelerate that impact even faster.  But, I’d argue, even a physical impact equation would not have the 10⁴multiplier associated with our communications. Innovation, in other words, travels at the speed of communication; environmental impact travels at the speed of a truck, or a pipeline, or a smokestack, and with a dissemination function (time to get plastic bag from factory to Great Pacific Trash Gyre to whale’s stomach) slowing it down from there.

[2]Demographics are fun and easy, by the way – you can set up your own world population model in an hour or so in Excel, and in a few more hours, build a fun model to test your own theories about birthrates, expanding lifespans, shifts in mortality trends, and you can even throw in some random variables for things like wars on the downside or sudden upticks in lifespan due to, say, a cure for cancer. Seriously, it’s fun!

And in other news, I still have no girlfriend.

[3]That doesn’t happen in relationships, oddly; we find someone already on that path, and we see if we’d like to walk together for awhile, and if it doesn’t work out, we resume separate journeys but, after all, that other individual didn’t send us on the path, and didn’t really even change our path.  They just made it more or less enjoyable while they walked nearby.  Topic for a different day, I suppose.

[4]Accurate but burdened by the poverty of language – I’m trying to learn from putting down Gordy.  But this is important as well: part of the existential fear of this transition to abundance, and the dialogue it forces on us, is that we can’t use simple language to have the conversation.  We need to rediscover the roots of where we came from back when we were pre-sentient – and we have to anticipate a dialogue at the level of the system as a whole for which we still lack any real tools.  Our language is both far more complex than anything existing in nature – and far less complex, and far to poor in complexity, to comprehend that nature taken as a whole.

Today, I made madeleines.  In the past I have always used a recipe by Clair Ptak, which reliably produces delicious results, but I thought I would try an alternative, by Sabrina Ghayour, with an additional Persian flavour: finely chopped pistachios.  They turned out reasonably well, which is to say, they were a pleasure to eat although perhaps not as visually impressive as in the past.  Now I must consider whether to repeat the new recipe a few times, improving my technique as I get used to the slightly different ingredients and instructions, or whether to revert to the former recipe with which I am more familiar.

This is a recurrent problem, as in cooking so in life: there is comfort in repetition but there is excitement in variation: what is new, innovative and unusual, keeps us engaged and alert, but what is old, traditional and habitual keeps us secure and calm.  Some of us cope better with disruption, but all of us need it from time to time, not just in our diet but also in the way we feed our minds: what we read, listen to, look at, where we go and with whom we talk.  Finding the optimal mix of theme and variation is one of our great challenges in the quest for happiness and fulfilment.

Even though I prefer to consume them with a short-black coffee rather than a tisane, eating madeleines invariably reminds me of reading Proust: not the famous scene at the start of the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, but the sequence of involuntary memories which occurs in Book III of the final volume, Le temps retrouvé.  The narrator – now ageing, infirm and despairing of ever starting, let alone completing his great literary work – returns to Paris after the end of the First World War, and heads to a social event hosted by old friends.   He slightly loses his footing and regains his balance on uneven paving stones; he hears a spoon knocked against a plate; he wipes his mouth with a starched napkin.  In each case, something very ordinary, albeit unexpected, creates a connection with a moment in his past, a moment that is remembered as one of significant pleasure for the place where it occurred and delight at the feelings to which his mind returns.

Proust writes, in characteristically lengthy, complex and insightful prose:

Yes, if a memory, thanks to forgetfulness, has been unable to contract any tie, to forge any link between itself and the present, if it has remained in its own place, of its own date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or on the peak of a mountain, it makes us suddenly breathe an air new to us just because it is an air we have formerly breathed, an air purer than that the poets have vainly called Paradisiacal, which offers that deep sense of renewal only because it has been breathed before, inasmuch as the true paradises are paradises we have lost. 

Thus the great paradox of the novel is established at its conclusion: the narrator has been motivated to start writing the text that we are now reading only because he has been jolted out of his lethargy by the provocation of memory, but what he has just remembered, and the joy it brings him, was always, as he lived it – over seven long volumes – more a source of disappointment than of pleasure.

Milton’s portrayal of Adam and Eve in Eden reads as dull and uninspiring by comparison with his description of Satan leading the rebel angels into civil war in heaven.  It is Satan who first lost his place in paradise but, unlike Adam, he did so with great panache.  By contrast, Proust fails to make the narrator’s life exciting, except in those moments when he unexpectedly stumbles across residues of lost time: the rediscovery of his past generates greater excitement than he experienced during the living of his life.

Was our past truly a paradise, or do we choose to remember it that way because what we have lost is our sense of its reality?

History is said to be written by victors; likewise, memory is accessed by survivors.  When we go to the archives of our minds, we mostly find what we want, what we like, what we hope to remember.   Like the waves of the sea as the tide comes in, creeping up the beach  metre by metre, removing the hollows and peaks, the undulations formed by wind, by footprint or by spade, smoothing the sand like icing on a cake, so too we supress evidence of our former unhappiness and dissatisfaction, and deep down below the placid, even-tempered surface of the past we bury the ugly debris of our lives.  Our memory functions like a picture post-card, a snap-shot idealisation of a former world that was never quite as good as we later seek to persuade ourselves.

The madeleine, therefore, is not the key to a locked door, which when suddenly flung open, grants us access to distant, long-forgotten truths; rather it is an amuse bouche, the tantalising first taste in a feast of nostalgia, of embroidery, of fabrication, of indulgence.  We can, if we wish, vary the recipe – add pistachios! – but we cannot avoid our perfidious predisposition to misremembering.

At least we cannot if we choose to remember alone.   One of the great benefits of good friends is that they don’t allow us to get away with complete self-deception: to use the argot of youth, they help us to “keep it real”.  They are a necessary corrective against our deep-seated tendency to embellish our past, to accentuate the positive, to hide away the detritus that we have accumulated through life, to forget.  They force us into a more honest engagement with our former lives and, thus, with our true selves.  When we remember the “good old days” they force us to calibrate more accurately: they are mirrors, lie-detectors, weighing scales.  They insist on the re-telling of times past as they were, not as we would like them to have been.  Good friends make for more honest memories.

One of the notable features of contemporary Western societies is the mass self-deception of older people: not everyone, for sure, but for many.  We see very large numbers voting for politicians who are irresponsible and irrational, for policies that are unobtainable and unsustainable.  Rather than wisdom, the defining characteristic of the average older voter is credulousness.   Why?  Not fake news, but fake recall.  As we grow older, we tend to romanticise the times in which we came of age; we tend to forget the hardships of the past and dwell only on the achievements; we repudiate the optimism of youth in preference for the complacency of the superannuated; we endorse heritage and disavow progress; we look back, as we say in England, through rose-tinted spectacles.  In short, we gild the past and trash our grandchildren’s futures.

Whether we read Hesiod or Moses, the idea that the modern world has emerged through a process of steady decline – from an Age of Gold or from a Garden of Eden – remains a dominant cultural meme, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary.  Decade by decade, life gets better for most people, but most people continue to believe that life gets worse.  Progress is slow, costly, tentative and reversable; nonetheless progress occurs, and lives improve.  In his celebrated novel, Soldiers of Salamis, Javier Cercas gives one of his minor characters these lines, which have always struck a chord with me:

People today are much happier than they were in my day, anyone who’s lived long enough knows that.  That’s why, every time I hear some old man fuming about the future, I know he’s doing it to console himself because he’s not going to be able to live through it …

Older people, in general, like to believe that the past, which they were part of, was far more desirable than the future, in which they will play no part.

For which reason, not only do we need friends to remind us of who we were and, thus, who we are; we also need friends with a good mix of ages to protect us from the conceit of imagining that the years of our prime were indeed a Golden Age; that we were born in Eden, from which our children, and their children, and their children’s children, even unto a hundred generations, have been duly expelled.  As I grow older, I have learned to value my friends of long-standing who can remind me how I came to be as I am.  I have also learned to value new friends, younger friends – my daughter’s friends – who cannot remind me of anything, but who continue to insist that this is their world and they will do a better job of running it than my generation managed.  A well-diversified portfolio of friends helps us to be more honest about both the past and the future.

Friends have another important role to play too: they help us to make good memories by helping us to live good lives.  Friends are our collaborators, our accomplices, our company.  They see what we see, whether in the gallery, the street, or from the summit of a mountain; they read the books we read and help us to think about them; they listen to the same sounds, in the concert hall or on the wind-swept dunes, and feel with us the tingling sensation on our skin, from the sun and the rain; they eat and drink with us, sharing their favourite tastes and exploring new flavours, unusual combinations, different varietals.  With friends, our sensory experience is widened, deepened and intensified.  We engage with the world more fully and more rewardingly when we do so together.

The education of the senses represents a challenge, a demand on our limited resources of time, energy and concentration.  Yet, to taste, smell, hear, touch and see the world in all its richness is not possible without the cultivation of our sensory faculties.  The harder we work at opening our minds to the widest range of life experience, the better able we are to enjoy the world and its diverse possibilities.  And memory is the key to maintaining the consistency of our identity through our lived experience of the world: each new experience is valuable in the context of the experience that comes before; each judgement – of preference, of comparison, of quality – is grounded by its relation to other, prior judgements.  We accumulate and we sort; we develop dominant themes and we entertain variations upon them; we take pleasure in the old and the new, because all our experience is ours.  And when we are tempted to believe that madeleines always tasted better in the past, we need our friends to remind us that they were there too, and that we are wrong.

I am in a gallery in Shoreditch, having just listened to a talk given by an artist friend.  Soon he and I will go for a drink, but meanwhile he continues to network, so I wait for him.   There are around twenty people in the gallery, mostly chatting with each other in small groups of two or three.  I turn my gaze once again to his paintings and drawings, one of which I now own.  I notice a woman who is not talking but looking: she looks at the artworks from a distance and then from close-up; she looks carefully, thoughtfully, actively; she is an engaged observer.  I wonder: Will she also look at the world as attentively she looks at art?  Will she also hear the roar of the wind and the ocean?  Will she also train her palate to appreciate the taste of good food and wine?  Will she also understand the value of investing in the deep friendship that helps us to regulate the ambivalence of memory and to construct the elements of a happy life?   There is only one way to find out.

 

Reading Mark’s post last week, a rush of ideas washed over me.  My first thought was: ‘How delightful!’  Mark talked about phenomenology – the study of subjective conscious experience – without ever getting bogged down in the jargon of academia.  Obviously, he knows the language that philosophers use to describe the experience of feeling the wind on one’s face, or the coldness of the sea, or even the sensation of music in one’s body.  But scientists and philosophers tends to analyze in a way that keeps them ‘inside their heads’, removed from the actual experience – which was not Mark’s intention. Mark wanted us ‘in our bodies’ – to feel the wind, to hear the roar, to envy him the experience of being attentive to one’s experiences, and inspire us to do likewise.

Right after reading his post, my mind immediately started to compose a reply. An echo, really.  I didn’t want to argue with any of his thoughts, but rather show how they had unlocked some of my own.  But I didn’t have time to sit at my computer, or even to scribble my first few paragraphs.  My husband and I had prior a commitment – an experience to enjoy.  Thus we went on a nature walk with a group that was too large to see much wildlife, but it made me appreciate that our home is a sanctuary for more than Walter and I.

As we returned, I looked outside and saw the goslings – we harbor a large number of Canada geese families this year – 13 at last count.  At about two weeks of age, their 50 or so babies look like miniature dinosaurs.  I thought: “Spring is in full swing – the goslings have hatched and the greenery is shining.  But summer has not yet arrived – as the lake is still rising.”  I’m lucky to live close to nature – somehow its raw beauty inspires us to stay alert to our surroundings.  Still, I realize how easily human beings get lost in their heads – so focused on our conceptual understanding that we may stop seeing, hearing, and noticing what is actually there to be experienced.  On that glorious morning, Mark reminded me to be attentive.  I thank him for that.

I know that when I lived in the city, I was much more ‘closed’.  There is nothing meditative in the randomness of city sounds, so I’d donned my headphones as a buffer (sometimes even without any music).  I knew that I shut out more than the noise of ambulances.  I consciously constrained my field of perception because I didn’t have enough energy to discern the chaos.  My mind was (is automatically) looking for patterns  where very few commonalities remain.  We live in the midst of so much stimulation, so many ‘inputs’. I obviously don’t mind the diversity of our cosmopolitan city life.  But the connections that I shares with my fellow city dwellers were merely to exist in the same subway car, living in parallel – often while not even speaking the same language…

A day later, now unconsciously, Mark’s text still simmered.  As I walked with my dog Tobey, I was amazed at the range of ‘mental states’ that I can experience.  I can be in the moment, or lost in thought.  I can remember things I’ve read, but only sometimes the fleeting thoughts that they provoked in me.  More vivid in my memories are my emotions.  I’ve known giddy joy, and pain – both psychic and physical.  I’ve experienced love – both as the inner peace associated with its emotional safety, the rush of energy of its touch, the urgency of desire, and the anguish of its uncertainty.  How amazing it is that I can recall particular moments of my past and how they made me feel!  I guess this means that I was ‘fully present’ when experiencing them.  And yet, while I think of such memories, right now, am I less ‘present’ to what is currently surrounding me?  I caught myself slipping into my mental domain, and redirected my attention to my breath, the warmth of the sun on my face, the spring in my step.

Every second day, I walk the same 3 miles.  I’m comforted by its familiarity.  I still make an effort to notice the blue jay and the rabbit skittering away.  In fact, this year I discovered that a fox family has their den under my neighbor’s seacan.  But like Mark expressed, the relative sameness of my walk tends to somewhat dull my senses – unless I make a conscious effort to stay alert.  Yet this repetition allows more thoughts to bubble onto the surface of my conscious.  I become ‘reflective of’ instead of ‘immersed in’.  I realize that these are not opposite states of mind, but actually two ways of subjectively experiencing.

Wow, how complex is our consciousness, when we bother to pounder its mysteries!

On that walk, I also had an epiphany.  I realized that, amongst the seemingly infinite ‘things’ that I can experience, there are also things that I cannot experience.  My husband’s thoughts is a prime example – but that also applies to all other minds.  The ‘content’ of his mind will forever be out of my conscious reach – unless he expresses it to me.  Moreover, I realized that what I know of my husband – his tendency to worry for example – is distorted by my familiarity with him.  Maybe that today, he has not worried at all!  Maybe that, on average, he is worrying less as months go by.  But until and unless I choose to rediscover him anew, I might not notice that his thoughts have changed.  No wonder that so many people can drift apart imperceptibly – it takes effort and diligence to perceive with fresh eyes.

Obviously I know that I am not the first person to have that particular epiphany. Now that I am reading heavily from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I’m realizing that my thoughts are sometimes eerily close to those of my long dead predecessors.  In other words, I have ideas that I didn’t know had been thought previously!  I’ll have to be on my toes to not be accused of intellectual dishonesty.  How is it even possible for an ‘Other’s mind’ to think along similar ‘lines’ – even recreate an argument, or through empathy, an emotion – and yet be so impenetrable in a ‘direct’ experience?

That is a paradox – that we cannot ‘experience’ the thoughts of others unless they are shared, and yet our human minds can experience similar thoughts ‘independently’ (for lack of a better word).

My wandering mind is now quite far from Mark’s original words…  But his ideas still echo within – opening metaphorical doors in my own psyche.  As I hiked and swam with him, as I sat in my home feeling the wind and cold, Mark succeeded in reminded me of how incredibly intimate the ‘act of living’ can be… and that we have to calm the ceaseless roar of our thoughts in order to pay attention.

Pay attention…  What an odd idiom?  Peter, is ‘attention’ part of your new system of value?!?  Maybe it should.

I was riding in the weathered naugahyde wonderment that is the front seat of a 1973 Chrysler Imperial Lebaron earlier this evening, my friend and my son’s namesake in the driver’s seat, looking like he had been born to drive such a monstrously beautiful automobile.  It was a perfect Maine summer day – a little humid but not too hot, humid enough that the clouds were puffy and the air still, making it essential to drive with the windows down on back roads to get some air movement, to feel a breeze, between stops for lobster rolls and fried scallops and Diet Coke.  My friend pointed out that fried seafood – and, for that matter, shellfish in mayonnaise on a hot dog bun – is quintessentially downscale summer seaside fare, but it’s not cheap.  The lobster roll was sixteen dollars, the fried scallops twenty-two, each beyond the reach of a family trying to stretch a vacation budget who would thus maybe, maybe get a box of clams for eighteen dollars and three hot dogs and fries to round things out.

What they wouldn’t do – no matter how down on their luck – is worry fundamentally about starving.  Don’t get me wrong, malnourishment and actual hunger is a problem in the US, particularly for lower income families, but actual starvation – famine, dying of hunger – is not on the radar screen for anyone except those with some kind of mental affliction which prevents them from being in the light of other human beings.  This, we forget, is something rather new in the history of mankind.  Up until the mid 19th century in the west, and sometime in the last fifty or seventy years for the rest of the world, people of almost any age would have had personal exposure to a famine, where thousands of their local friends and neighbors would, in fact, have lost their lives, or come close to it, due to a fundamental inability to find enough to eat for an extended period of time.  When that happens locally now – in third world areas for a variety of reasons, or in more advanced areas which have transport problems due, say, to earthquakes or flooding or the like – local government or the UN or various non-governmental organizations fire up a fleet of aircraft or littoral landing ships and import massive amounts of food to relieve conditions on the ground.  In most cases, the transport cost far outweighs the actual cost of the food.  In many instances, because it’s easier and cheaper to piggy back transport costs, they will also bring temporary shelters, stacks of clothing in various sizes, potable water, latrines, and pretty much all that’s necessary to survive.  Not thrive, perhaps, but definitely survive – and that, again, is a completely new phenomenon on earth.

We forget that routinely.  First, that it’s new – postmodern humanity is burdened with a terrible memory and an incomprehension of the scale of time, enhanced by our recently invented ability to fob off memory onto digitized storage banks and to the utter breakdown of our sense of duration due to the almost instantaneous delivery of change which now occurs in our lives.  The end of regularly occurring death on a massive scale due to famine is a very new phenomenon, but we don’t consciously recognize that.  We also, however, forget – or maybe simply don’t consider – that this is totally, completely new in the history of the planet.  At all times past, pre-sentient and even sentient creatures have had to accept that their lives exist, on some level, solely at the whim of the availability of nutrients and shelter, and that availability is roughly consistent but not totally so, and sometimes vanishes altogether.  But as long as we don’t lose the manuals that we’ve written describing how to engage in mass scale agriculture, and to build and maintain the machines that allow it and also allow for delivery of the harvest across vast distance and to store it over time just in case something happens, we’re going to be well-fed forever.  We are the first species to do this.  It’s actually more novel than language – we can see signs of abstract communication ability in dogs, chimpanzees, and even crows – and certainly more novel than tool building.  Admittedly, it’s a product of all the nifty cool intellectual and physical and inventive toys we have as sentient human beings, but that product makes us totally, completely different as a biological system than anything that’s ever grown up on our planet.

There’s something notable about totally new things, however, especially totally new biological realities.  Mostly it’s that if something is completely new, then the lessons or systems or learning frameworks which have come before it are now, if not no longer valid, likely not going to work the same way as they did before.  Literally every part of a living organism – every species that has been successful to date – has evolved in a condition of potential and often actual scarcity of the items which are required to survive and reproduce.  Human beings no longer are subject to that condition (again, assuming the vanishingly small number of us who do, in fact, know how to farm and build the machines which farm, convert produce to food, store food, and create fabrics and shelter items continue to do their jobs reasonably well, which I think can be taken as a given right now given how few people actually do this and how little investment is required relative to the overall human project to do so).  So we’re no longer subject to the one condition which has been a constant since life started to evolve.  Give that, I think it’s almost a given that we’re going to require some period of experimentation to get used to our new-found, utterly unheard of in the history of time gift of abundance.

Taking a step further, though, one could imagine that for a sentient, self-reflective species, which has already had hundreds of generations of reflection and thinking about how to thrive (giving rise to its own science of thriving, economics), and how to be happy (philosophy and religion and their various more or less ridiculous cousins), we’d face a further quandry of this novelty.  Scarcity – or the likelihood of scarcity, to the point of the almost-predictable assumption that mass death and destruction will occur, if not regularly in time then certainly regular in existential reality – is a sometimes spoken assumption of our thinking (in the case of economics, for example) and is an often unspoken assumption as well (say, in morality – “property is theft” really only works when property is scarce; if it’s not, then there really can’t be “theft” of an overabundant, valueless commons good, or if there is, it’s because a system has artificially walled off access to something which has no real scarcity value in the first place).  Our entire facade of thinking about how society should be ordered, how a good life should be lived, is based (at least in part, and admittedly to a greater extent in some contexts and a vanishingly small part in others, which I’ll get to in a moment) on at least a leg of assumptions that are now utterly, completely wrong.

In such a setting, we should not be surprised that the old organizing mechanisms – indeed, even the old discursive mechanisms which allowed us to analyse and critique the organizing mechanisms – seem broken and unworkable.  And it shouldn’t surprise us that the responses in the public sphere take on two, traditionally Kantian, end points of thesis-antithesis.  On the one hand, there is a community of those who deny that there is, in fact, an abundance: this would be the right wing of today’s world, demanding that walls be built and resources withheld from those who haven’t “earned” them when, in fact, there isn’t anything to earn any more except social prestige: how can you “earn” access to food which is able to produced in quantities which is tens of times more than what humanity can safely consume?  On the left, the response is to create artificial supply constraints – “we can’t use energy or land anymore because the world will boil up due to human climate change” – when those constraints simply don’t exist.  It’s not that human climate change isn’t real; it is, and plenty of cities will be submerged, and plenty of historically constructed mechanisms for how humans live will be uprooted.  But our ability to produce and move a surplus of the stuff we need to live and thrive really isn’t impacted by such change; it’s a red herring.  We’ll be hotter and want to live in northern Manitoba in a way which no one, ever, in history, has ever wanted to live in northern Manitoba (if there were other options on hand; admittedly, plenty of Cree people wanted to live in northern Manitoba when offered the chance to move to Nunavit), but we’ll be fine.

In fact the emergence of that dichotomy gives me reason to believe that I’m on to something here, that this totally new phenomenon of abundance does represent a real, new thing that humanity is failing to grasp.  I see few, if any, people talking about “well, we screwed up the climate, and sea levels are going to rise and the world will be hotter and deserts will grow, but I guess that means we should be planting more wheat crops in Siberia.”  I mean, some Canadians are thinking about how land prices should rise around Hudson’s Bay, but that’s about it.  (Canadians, by the way, are going to make out like bandits in the future.  Literally, Canada couldn’t have been designed to better exploit a warming Earth.  Maybe Toronto housing prices are for real.)  In general, though, people are either denying that change has and is happening, or they are saying that the “change” will lead to apocolypse, despite no evidence whatsoever to imagine that a technologically armed earth and human species can’t solve pretty much any problem thrown at it, at an increasingly rapid pace.  The emergence of a failure to understand a condition is actually a fine marker that the condition itself is real, given that human beings are a slow, plodding, and generally stupid race.

I have no idea what will emerge; driving around in a pre-oil-crisis Chrysler, which was dumping aerosoled gasoline into the air a pint at a time everytime we pulled away from a stop sign, isn’t an ideal environment in which to come up with original thought.  Although it is a rather pleasant one, I must admit.  My unoriginal concept at the time was to guess that humanity will make survival goods essentially free, or at least, subject to trivial barter economies in which the basic desire for human services – a haircut, a massage, life coaching, maid services, decorating, creating small objects of beauty – will allow most of us to not be bored and in return, we’ll get food, shelter, comfortable clothing, and basic health and mental care.  Meanwhile, those goods which remain “scarce” – remarkable items of human or natural origin, like artworks and diamonds and real estate – will continue to exist in a parallel but increasingly abstracted “market” which has less and less to due with day to day survival, and access to such network will be subject to as-yet-unknowable “criteria” of admission on which we will base our social and hierarchical battles of the future.  Literally battles, I think: we will end up fighting and creating new immoralities so as to be able to be a part of that market, even though it will be increasingly self-referential and thus absurd.  That is, “real” goods and services will exit the market, while Geffen goods – goods of sheer privilege, whose possession is not actually important except to express the possessor’s ability to possess – and what I call control goods – rights to social control or direction of others – will exist in a market with a denominator which is increasingly irrelevant to day-to-day life.  And over time, there will be fewer of us – because who wants to raise new children in a world irrelevant to striving? – and our ingenuity will absorb more and more goods and services into the unpriced, free world, and the Geffen and control goods will become increasingly irrelevant, but never entirely.

It will take millenia – if ever – before the Geffen and control goods lose their meaning because those are the hangovers of our past existence, a period so far as we can tell of over three billion years, of scarcity.  As sentient, self-referential beings, who have also been clever enough (and have the opposable thumbs to enable it, sorry dolphins) to create the technology required to eliminate scarcity for survival goods, we’ve actually been building for a few millenia the artificial notions of scarcity which will allow us to continue to “want” to strive in the future.  We don’t “need” to strive – now that we have Deere GPS-navigated tractors which can till soil, sow seeds, weed, harvest, and re-till at the rate of an acre every five minutes, with no human engagement whatsoever – to survive.  But we do need to strive, to feel like we have a point for doing anything, because that’s how we got past the billions of years of scarcity.  Scarcity made us strive; we re-invented scarcity, albeit of a derivative and purely social kind, to keep us striving.  Thus until we actually do get past the idea of survival scarcity completely, we’ll just create new trophies to strive for because we have to.

I really can’t imagine a world past scarcity in an absolute sense because of that genetic defect.  I have to hope that there will be a mutation in the future of the genome that will drop the notion of scarcity entirely.  That being said, I think it exists: I think that’s actually the basis of what love is, as I know it.  Love exists without limit, and is given without need of return.  It’s the perfect example of a non-scarce good, a limitless good that actually gets even more abundant as it is “used” or “consumed” or, really, shared.  But the last few years of my life have made me realize how much we are too terrified of love to make it our own.  Most people think “love” is just another Geffen good, another thing to strive for.  Even when you try to escape that, our coded expectation of scarcity usually overwhelms and, in this new world of being human, distorts and corrupts.

But then again, abundance is new.  Maybe love is just a step ahead of its time.  Hopefully, anyway.

Visitors to the ‘Van Gogh and Britain’ exhibition, currently at Tate Britain, are welcomed to the show by a painting of a middle-aged woman, wearing a white blouse and a black dress, seated at a dark green table with two pale green books in front of her, against a rose coloured background.  She stares back at the viewer, her head resting on her left hand, her left arm resting on the table, her expression neutral but engaged.   This version of L’Arlésienne, painted in 1890, is on loan from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.  There is a similar painting, also made in 1890, held by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, in which Madame Ginoux smiles.  In another version from the same year, now in a private collection, the wallpaper is pale yellow with a floral pattern, the blouse is pale green, the dress pale pink and the books on the table are red.

In June 1912, Robert Walser saw yet another version of l’Arlésienne, this one painted in 1888 and now held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  Madame Ginoux, in three-quarter profile, stares ahead, avoiding the viewer’s gaze; a black ribbon falls from her hair onto the back of her chair; the wall behind her is bright lemon-yellow.  A book lies open on the table before her and she appears lost in thought: but what is she thinking?

In a short article, published in Kunst und Künstler, Walser struggles to find anything substantive to say about the painting, despite his obvious admiration for it.  It is, he says, “just a picture of a woman in everyday life”, but the mysterious quality of the brushwork has a “grandeur that grips and shakes you”.   Six years later, in an article published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Walser remembers the painting and his reaction to it.    He thinks at first that we should “pity the artist who had squandered such great industry on so low and charmless a subject”, but then says that the painting is a sort of masterpiece: “The colours and brushwork possess the most extraordinary vitality, and formally the picture is outstanding.”

Then Walser imagines Madame Ginoux speaking to him, telling him about her childhood, her family, her schooldays and her friends.  He considers her life: ordinary activities, quotidian experiences and emotions, the passing of the months and years.  And then, he continues:

One day a painter said to her – himself just a poor working man – that he would like to paint her.  She sits for him, calmly allowing him to paint her portrait.  To him she is not an indifferent model – for him, nothing and no one is indifferent.  He paints her just as she is, plain and true.  Without much intention, however, something great and noble enters into the simple picture, a solemnity of the soul it is impossible to overlook.

Walser’s process of creative imagination – what Madame Ginoux’s life was like, what van Gogh saw and felt, which he tried to capture in his portrait – is one form of active looking, one form of sensory engagement that fine art, at its best, provokes.

There are other ways of seeing.  Writing in the Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935, Daniel Catton Rich described the influence of Japanese print makers on van Gogh’s painting style.  He says: “Van Gogh’s greatest work in the Japanese manner is undoubtedly the startling portrait of Mme. Ginoux…” and goes on to describe the version of this portrait that had so impressed Walser, noting the probable influence of Sharaku’s work:

Sharaku, through his heightened simplifications, his distortion of feature for emotional effect may easily have suggested similar qualities for “L’Arlésienne”.  At any rate the use of a vivid background (here yellow; in Sharaku yellow, mica or silver) which, instead of absorbing the figure thrusts it forward; the brief strokes for eye, deliberately lengthened nose, and mouth – all these altered in proportion to gain new power – the angular, rhythmic silhouette, the play of flat masses of colour (note the expanses of black and white, visibly stressed) all suggest that the Dutch artist may have consulted one of Sharaku’s amazing prints.

When Catton Rich looks at the painting, he does not imagine Madame Ginoux’s childhood experiences; instead, he sees how techniques characteristic of one form of image making in one culture, have been borrowed and adapted for a different form of image making in a different culture.

Walser and Catton Rich both admire the version of L’Arlésienne that now belongs to the Met. despite the very different ways in which they describe their experience of looking at the painting.  Their interpretations are not rivals but complements and, taken together, they illustrate an important truth about looking – both looking at art and looking at the world – namely that “we live and move in what we see, but we only see what we want to see” (Paul Valéry).  Paradoxically, what we know about the world is principally determined by what we see in the world, but what we see in the world is principally determined by what we already know about the world.  All our visual perceptions are judgments and – just as in the best traditions of case law – each judgment is grounded upon a set of pre-existing beliefs and assumptions.  We never look unprecedentedly.

In the 1860s – around the time that large numbers of Japanese prints started to arrive in Paris and other European capitals – changing forever the way that Western artists saw the world, and changing the way they painted the world that they saw – leading British artists and art historians were almost universally dismissive of the work of Sandro Botticelli: “puerile ostentation”; “bad drawing and worse painting, and such revelling in ugliness”; “coarse and altogether without beauty”.  Walter Pater, whose collection of essays, The Renaissance (1873) is seen as a landmark of modern aestheticism, devotes a chapter to Botticelli and writes that, “his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important”, but even he describes him as “a secondary painter” (see Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention, 1985).   One hundred and fifty years later this all seems to be nonsense.  Botticelli’s place in the premier ranks of Italian Renaissance artists seems assured: but only because tastes have changed, and because few of us think about the history of the canon.  Standards of beauty are not timeless: what we see is mostly what we are taught to see.

It would be easy – but wrong – to assume that Catton Rich looked at van Gogh’s painting only from the point of view of an art historian, whereas Walser looked only as a storyteller; easy – but wrong – to think that scholarship is an obstacle to emotional response.  Knowledge of art history helps us to contextualise a painting – the visual content, its symbolism, the structural features of the image and their meaning for the artist’s contemporaries – and this in turn allows us to judge both its success in formal terms and its merits compared against the wider canon.   So too, our emotional responses to paintings are always – yes, always – conditioned by what we think we know about the object in our view, by our upbringing, our culture and our prejudices.  We can change the way we look at art, just as we can change the way we look at the world, but to do so we must educate our sense of sight: we must train ourselves to see better.

Two years ago, I sat in a room in the Kunsthaus, Zürich with my oldest friend (by which I mean, the person who has been my friend longer than anyone else).  We were looking closely at two Claude Monet ‘water lily’ paintings, both very beautiful.  It was a weekday in February and the gallery was quiet.  We sat, undisturbed, for many minutes, staring at the huge canvases.   We talked about how we each felt when we first discovered Monet’s painting when we were teenagers; about the way in which the popularity of impressionism and the ubiquity of its most famous motifs have jaded our reception of them; and about the thrill or our unanticipated re-discovery of them – their complexity and grandeur – in this room, together on this day.

Art is a shared pleasure: we learn to look more carefully when we look in company, drawing on the insights and emotional response of others, whose judgments and honesty we trust.  It is not possible to educate our sense of sight alone, because the world that we see is a shared world, it’s objects and their meanings – and their representation, directly or abstractly, in painting – themselves the product of collective undertakings by many people over many generations.  There can be no solitary, private visual language because paintings are full of signs, and “every sign supposes a code” (Roland Barthes).  And what is true of painting is true of the world: it can be seen truly only when in company.

Recently I have visited exhibitions of work by Patrick Heron (at Tate St Ives) and Pierre Bonnard (at Tate Modern), both of whom painted gardens as a way to test the possibilities of the dissolution of form, the abandonment of perspective and generation of pictorial intensity through the adjacencies of colour.  Some of this I know because I read the catalogues, some I understand because of what I see when I look attentively at their canvases; some I remember from gardens I have visited, when the light is clear and sharp, but the borders of the flower-beds are not.  In each exhibition, I was reminded of that day in Zürich – of a shared experience of beauty and of a long and valued friendship – because Monet’s presentation of the water lilies in his garden pond at Giverny, seems to me to be a significant harbinger of colour field painting.  And, in consequence, a significant contribution to my understanding of and emotional response to the natural world: as painted forms dissolve, so the physical world manifests its complex reality.

The education of the eye is not just about the accumulation of art historical knowledge and cultivation of aesthetic taste; it is also the foundation of ethical judgement.  By learning to look carefully at the world we can teach ourselves and others to see the social world differently, leading us to treat people better, with greater sympathy, with more respect.   I think of Lucian Freud, the preeminent portrait painter in recent British art history, whose quest to capture ‘the truth’ of those who sat for him in his studio was legendary, and whose large canvases present the human form with candour, without illusion.   He is rightly admired for his work.  But …  but when I remember his major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, when I look through art books devoted to his work, I do not see my social world: I do not see London, I do not see Notting Hill, where Freud lived.  I see only pale flesh.

Next summer Tate Britain will host a major show of work by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, also a British portrait painter.  Her paintings are of fictional people in neutral nondescript spaces.  What makes her paintings ‘true’ is not the resemblance of the image to the person, for there is no person to resemble.  Rather they depend on the plausibility of the image: the look, the stance, the gesture, the colours of face, clothes and background.   All her portraits that I have seen are of people of African heritage, and in this sense her work challenges the dominant aesthetic of British art galleries, and the dominant ethic of British society.  She paints people who are mostly unseen, unrepresented, unheard and unwelcomed.  She is less acclaimed than Freud for her technical prowess, and I think this assessment is fair: her work at its best is very strong, but the quality is mixed.  But she presents a truth of our society that Freud shied away from, for which reason I look forward to her show next summer and the chance to look and learn more about the people who populate my world, my London.

Van Gogh was commercially unsuccessful, suffered from mental illness and killed himself in his late thirties but he changed the way we see the world: not just how sunflowers look in a vase, or how stars shine in a deep blue Mediterranean sky – although he helped us to see both of these natural phenomena anew – but also what an ordinary working woman might look like as she sat at a table, reading and thinking.  He died poor but he has enriched our view of our natural and social worlds, if only we take the time and trouble to see.