On Melons

Melons seemed to us to be, by a kind of negation, the fruit of drought. Walking through parched valleys, or over the cracked earth of dusty plains, we came upon melons and we ate them as you might draw water from a well in an oasis. They were improbable, they comforted us, but in fact they did not really quench our thirst. Even before they are open, melons smell of a sweet enclosed water. A heavy enclosing smell with no edges to it. Whereas to quench your thirst you need something sharp. Lemons are better.

In the words of John Berger

On Hands

I remember holding my father's hand and thinking it must be the heaviest part of him, heavier than the skull and the brain. I imagined it weighing more than those miles of coiled intestines lodged deep inside him like the chains of a cargo ship. They were certainly heavier than his heart; I thought of his heart as weighing the same as a beer can.

But here, in this print I found, his hand appeared small and delicate. I placed my hand over it, spreading my fingers exactly where his had been and found it was far small than mine. And there in the centre of the print where the middle of the palm hadn’t touched the paper was the unmistakeable shape of a heart. It looked just like the anatomy drawings of hearts we were given at school, I could clearly see the pulmonary artery leading off from the top right and on the left, if my memory has them the right way around, the pulmonary vein. Yet it also reminded me of the Scared Heart which blazes in the chest of Jesus in Roman Catholic depictions, an almost gaudy symbol of the power of love.

On Photography

For me, the photographer's organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates (when the camera still has such things).

I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way. For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches - and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

In the words of Roland Barthes

On Repetition

Outside the window the city is full of its repetitions, the sky full of its greyness. Identical terraced houses stretch left and right, chimney pots sitting on their roofs like top hats. If I had to give one word to the city it would be ‘repetition’.

In the early nineteen twenties John Brabin the Art Nouveau architect put forward a new model of terraced housing aiming to get ride of this repetition. Brabin, a good friend of Gaudi, publically criticised their uniform fronts and proposed that they should be stripped and rebuild. To minimise the vast work load he put forward six different façade designs which would be randomly ordered along the street, the interior of all the buildings would remain the same. He claimed that this would substantially raise the mental wellbeing of city dwellers, especially those living in the grim (his word not mine) industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester.

He was of course instantly ridiculed; Gaudi or Gaudy as he was referred to at the time was still unpopular in England and was unable to help his friend’s cause. Yet looking out the window I couldn’t help agreeing with Brabin. I am sick of living in London; I feel a kind of nausea from seeing the same buildings day in and day out. Repetition after all has become the form of punishment we use in Britain today. We no longer torture or kill our criminals rather subject them to the repetition of prison. London has in a sense become my prison.

On Irregularity

God, the King of artists, was clumsy.

I propose to found a society. It is to be called 'The society of Irregulars'. The members would have to know that a circle should never be round.

In the words of Pierre-Auguste Renoir

On ageing

Passion doesn’t change, but you change – you become older. The thirst for women becomes more poignant. And there is a power in the pathos of sex it didn’t have before.

In the words of Philip Roth

On 'pieces of string too short to be of any use'

When clearing out my mother's house after her death I found a small shoebox. On its lid she had scrawled in her black and almost illegible letters ‘pieces of string too short to be of any use’.

I opened the box and found hundreds of pieces of string like the worms fisherman use, each one only about an inch in length. These ends must have been cut from longer pieces which may have been used to hang paintings, to tie in a cross around a parcel, to help runner beans up the garden wall. All that useful string is gone now leaving only these off cuts.

That is perhaps all we can hope for in our own lives. The useful parts gets used up, invested in our relationships, our hopes and failures until all that is left are these small mixed pieces. The leftovers which are put in a box and placed in the ground.

But I’ve kept the small shoebox as a hopeful message; those pieces which are too short are the pieces that last and are treasured.