As a child, I saw ghosts. Not often, I must say: mostly I could just feel them, coming and going, drifting around. The house I grew up in was haunted, not one of those nice ghosts from a Disney film, where the child just has to face up to the scary vision and suddenly it’s all smiles … it was a nasty, vindictive and cruel presence thriving on peoples’ misery and anxiety.
We lived in South Devon, within walking distance of the sea. I really miss the sea, it’s a living presence with all its moods, swinging from tranquillity to fury and back, so very human, so appropriately personified as Poseidon. As a teenager I would clamber down to one of the limestone quarries scattered along the coast, and sit and talk to the sea. If there was a storm I’d yell and scream and leap around. You can’t really do that in civilised Oxford.
Some sunny weekends my parents would drive my Sister and myself to Dartmoor for a picnic. I don’t really remember the stunning views, quaint architecture, all the things that so absorbed the adults. What I took away from Dartmoor were the memories of the rocks: creased, wrinkled, indented, cracked and weathered, the forms of ancient granite from deep underground.
I found the cracks in the rocks deeply disturbing. I felt ghosts coming and going, drifting from the gnomic realm into the light and back again. I couldn’t stay long by a rock crack alone, it was too unknown, difficult and dangerous.
It was 2 decades before I read about Shamanic cultures which held cracked rock faces as sacred, because the underground spirits came and went through the cracks. Whatever the objective “truth” of such a spirit world, it is a fundamental experience of being human.
At 17, struggling at military school, I went back to some of these memories. I found I could imagine standing by one of these cracked rock faces, and when a spirit drifted through I could do something liberating: write a poem, sketch something, invent some music. It was a deliverance, and within weeks I had decided: This was what I was going to do with my life – wait by rock faces, imagined and real.
Over the years I’ve discovered that ghosts are generally very lonely. Nobody knows they’re there, nobody speaks to them. Even irascible spectres will be friendly in return for conversation – although there are always tortured souls that can only thrive on fear and distress. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in graveyards, chatting to the ghosts. That must partly account for my melancholic disposition.
It’s why I can’t live in cities – every street corner is littered with fragments of peoples’ tormented lives and fractured souls, like astral slugs writhing around and imparting their agony to passers-by.
More recently I’ve discovered I don’t have to wait by the rock face. If I try hard, I can push, wriggle, squirm and writhe my way through the crack, and fall into the eerie depths of the underworld. What I find is unpredictable – inspiring vision, painful truth, insatiable desire …
It’s hard to explain all this – many would have me interned in the Warneford Hospital, others dismiss me as a weak-minded romantic or gullible mystic. Most who understand are other artists … because this is what creative endeavour is really about: touching the mysterious and unfathomable.
It doesn’t matter whether you experience it as ghosts and spirits, day/night dreams, flashes of inspiration, streams of ideas or embodied intuition. Every imaginative, creative artist has their way of talking about it, but ultimately it all comes down to mystery.
If you’re doing that mystery, the rest just happens – the mystery demands an audience, compels the magician to seek out other magicians, obliges the practitioner to perfect her skills, coerces the enchanter to seek out knowledge …
That’s why I find the theorising, academic rigour, objective measures of quality, so absurd – a great game for art historians and bureaucrats, but fundamentally missing the point. It’s about the unfathomable: anyone doing the unfathomable is doing “quality” art.
But why are we so reluctant to say this to our audiences? Why do we write endless treatises, persistently saying it without saying it?
I’m sure many disagree, but I’m saying it: bring on the magic, the sacred, enchantment, trance, underworld, supernatural, bring on the mystery of the unknowable, and to hell with endless, futile rationalisations!
