• Abstract and Figures
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‘You cannot give the world the slip more certainly than through art, and you cannot bind yourself to it more certainly than through art.’ Goethe In the Gorbals gusts reversed my gaudy umbrella and ruffled vast silt puddles. The tower blocks were discarded but inhabited — vandalised standing-stones. 1981 With a ghost behind me, vaguely threatening, I crossed the footbridge back to the place of shops, showy institutions, relics with pretensions to propriety. The People’s Palace and the Indian Victorian carpet factory with its coloured brickwork and exotic crenellations welcomed me back to the anthropomorphic fantasy-land, the tip-of-the-iceberg inner city. Saturday January 3rd On the motorway back to Edinburgh Father holds jealously to the high lane as if it were his only claim to status. He hurtles tetchily towards the pathological tidiness of Edinburgh’s streets. Thursday January 1st The directions of fear: it can take you away from life, it can empty your words and block your inner directions. Perhaps this is its distinctive modus operandi in Glasgow, its good feeling: the colour of the stone, gregarious quality, character of the world, where it is one of the most important arbiters. But, liberated, that is, little sidestreets. A real city full of rounded but not closed people. cherished and released, it can be a force of expansion. How does one use one’s fear properly? It is a matter of squeezing it out of the objects it (sometimes Barbara in her new flat: sat in bare feet, jeans, jersey, cropped hair. Smooth arbitrarily) inhabits? And what if those objects are people, how does one’s quality of her voice. Sharpness and rapidity of her speech. Grey-brown eyes, face treatment of them alter when they are deprived of their ability to cause fear more delicate and Eastern than I remembered. Crescents curving down from her (which, after all, can hold relationships together as well as break them apart)? eyes. Her postures. Her independence, intelligence. She never played the hostess Does fear derive from adherence to systems, or rebellion against them? From (though we discussed the role), was happy to talk to the pudgy Abigail about responsibility or subordination? people I knew nothing about, or to disagree flatly with something I said. Too abstract. There are as many fears as personalities, as circumstances. What am Friday January 2nd I talking about — Father’s fear of losing (control of ) the family? My fear of The Way of the World? The more general fear (or its reverse in artists) of the deep, Periphery and subordination. irrational self? With a French couple on the underground. They look at me, and I can’t help The point, then, is to personalise fear, to give it features in which one recognises putting my whole state, thoughts and emotions, clumsily encoded, in my oneself. If fear is systematised (as it is by its title), it is to be feared. As a personal expression. What a sweet, sharp pleasure just to be noticed! possession, it can be experienced. Fear lies on a continuum with all the other emotions, which are themselves of myself where I sulk, hoping not to be noticed, between the positive / negative joined with thoughts and physical reflexes of all kinds. But fear is a negative link of real response and the pliable, affable fraudulence of a role. The trouble is, I — the point where the roller coaster plunges under water. You may refuse to take am not only noticed here, I am defined: the cobwebs, the unseen termites, this dive, you may quiver poised on the summit and come as close as you can to cigarette ends, cuttings from ancient newspapers (particularly the financial a halt. That is abdication. That is death. section) are implied, imputed, to be a part of me. In the gaze of my ‘friend’, I become a magnet for these alien ends and odds. I tilt this way, take a breath, tilt Artists go down alone, alone they brave the plunge, and relish it. But if what they the other way, breathe again, but neither place gives me more than gas alms. really fear is the Way of the World; the stigmatisation of fear, or the institutionalisation of fear, aren’t they just finding an isolationist, a personal The thing is — John is not something grey and dead, he is full of eccentric vitality solution? I was once accused by a Sociology tutor of describing a utopia full of which finds itself, and all its inwardly logical ways, perfectly real, sane, alive. And isolated hermits. People must be able to give their fear a face, a handle (but not a because John’s bachelor certitude is simply the comic face of his bachelor leash) together. It’s the paradox of breaking a repressive communality (illusory, melancholy; the lagoon in which he noisily and cheerfully paddles his little boat since it permits only superficial examination of fear’s properties — the most — so I have to stretch out and trail my hand in the water, his water, full of his effective frightening being the least explicit) in favour of a liberating organic forms, while he tries to divert me with newly-learnt manoeuvres. communality: ‘Stop clinging together so that we can teach you how to hug!’ Shelagh, in her cosy living room glowing with fire and TV, talks about Auschwitz Detail personal fears which correspond with social fears. Make explicit their over tea and cake. Downstairs, John says that she — or he — will be put away if it substance, its origin in certain ritual actions of the participants. Dissolve the goes on. She has six ‘depressive’ stories of this sort, he could tell me any one, in rituals, release the fears. Plump — they fall like strange Christmas toys into the every detail, at any time. Sometimes she recites them one after the other. Rattling laps of children! poisonously, he compares her to a snake. Now we are underwater, in the depths of his tragic lagoon. He begins to panic, seizes out at the flat underbelly of his Sunday January 4th boat up above. He drops me at my door with relief — alone he will dry himself off and polish up his oarsmanship for better passengers. Those appreciative, ‘Spirit’. The word sounds like a paperclip dropped onto a thin plate of glass. those obedient, those congenially incomplete. To make one’s own space as a dog rotates in wild grass — yet to do this with Wednesday January 7th one’s feet alone, which protrude from the end of a pencil-thin glass tube which prevents one from using the space. This is the time when people will talk to themselves. Words will ring from solitary walkers like jubilant war cries. I passed two on the streets this evening. But this inhibition is nothing to the state I am driven to with John Thomson. From the very start of the evening I inhabit a no-man’s land where thought and My concern is with other possibilities of form and action — and, implicitly, their feeling are impossible. It is not the no-man’s land of common ground, of relation relation to the prevalent ones. The disastrous swallowing up of diversity, sleight- (every man’s land), because such a space only exists for John and me in of-hand accommodation: this is what makes things seem, beforehand, classrooms we both claim to have forgotten: it is a useless, neglected little corner predictable, then, after a moment of dizzying revelation, they lapse into the apparent inevitability of retrospect, and sand blows over the mark, the event. It is On with Nathalie Sarraute’s ‘Portrait of a Man Unknown’, a flip through Elspeth the unconscious turning of a corner. No matter how many corners, the pale Davie’s ‘Creating a Scene’, bits from a purchased Sight & Sound with coffee at apparatus we are provided with for thinking shows us only straight lines, the Student Centre. chiaroscuro vistas falsely receding, denying change. I should write at night. Sleep in the day. Work is essential for happiness; meaningful work, voluntary limitation. Leisure is like a child’s trolley with hard wheels, a great, well-masticated chewing-gum cross Under a bright, low grey sky with a surprising tone of pink glowing in it, the planted on it, to which you stick like an insect on fly paper and hurtle down a trees, grass, cobbles and roofs shone wet with rain; sharp, distinct, uniform, hill in darkness. Good work kindles beacons on the route, allows you to fling fertile and serious. The forms branches make as they tilt and spray, always static. back the sticky mast and steer with it. The astragals are different shades: six blue, six pink. It takes one to make you notice the other. My God, what does a picture like that mean? Set beside the logic of dream, the milky abstract curdles visibly. I live in this house as aimless as a cat. But I lack their ability to settle on a cushion and let their eyes narrow as they fade inside themselves. Ruth in the mental hospital — like Isobel Huppert in the final scene of ‘The Lacemaker’; black dress, face lined and anaemic. She speaks quietly and quickly, Friday January 9th says nothing strange, but turns against herself easily, is fully on the side of her captors. ‘I escaped today and made an appointment at the hairdresser’s — look, I have the Beuys book at last. Also Beckett’s biography and some psychology it’s like rat’s tails — but I don’t think I’ll be up to it.

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