life drawing

She thought she saw herself once though, in the shimmering torso of the naked man. They had come for drawing classes and were met with Adam, the nude. The door was pulled open by a man with a moustache and a mischevious regard. He tugged them into his world of sin (what would her mother have said?) and there, among the bright lights and crimson curtains was a naked man lying on a canape. He was very intently still whilst twenty female art students focused on him intently, trained their eyes on his shadows.
She didn't know where to look, so she fixed her eyes on his torso and drew in a frenzy. She tried to untangle the scene but from any angle it was licentious. Life drawing. This was what she'd signed up to: skething this naked man all flesh, displaced from Eden, ballerinaed against the blank bright screen. These women were all pursuing knowledge. They drew the blocks of shade and light over and over again, exploring the demarcations of sin/virtue with their hazy 2B pencils. Thought in the act.
His cures intersected ruler straight lines. She found she could not bring herself to draw the dangling fact, so left it blank. A neat square space between the dip of the hips and his two legs.

do sculptures get crushes?

Leaves fall on them. So does pigeon shit, rain, dust, desire, sometimes snow. Love, never. Scuptures in Paris certainly don't get crushed by the heat of the moment, but they must get crushes - with so many beautiful people walking around, how could they resist? Human hearts built these sculptures, remember - something of love still fizzles along the stone outlines.

Paris is full of people with style and certainty and an urban confidence in aesthetics. Paris is alive. To be in a city of busy traffic, buzzing telephones and heartbeats, among scattered couples' sparkling kisses along the pavements - to be among all this, and yet stone, motionless, eternal, must be torture.

Sculptures that see this vivid living daily - of course they desire it! Of course they chase it, the way men in bars chase women in red skirts and smiles - how could you not covet the life that flows through people here? Imagine being a sculpture here - perched among trees that blossom, leaves that fall, fertility consummated and confirmed before your very eyes, yearly anew, whilst you - fruitless, barren, old - are strapped in stone for ever.

I like to think that every now and then, one of these statues slips out of her stone chrysalis, winks at a beautiful young man with Monoprix bag, and smiles a little sadly when he saunters past, oblivious.

elles@centrepompidou

According to its literature, the Pompidou is devoting more than 8000m 2 space to presenting its collection of art by female artists. This sounds seriously impressive - and yet, isn't a women-only exhibition a bit tokenistic on the part of the Pompidou? Why don't they normally show women's art in their galleries?

It's weird to have an exhibition where the only thing linking the works is the gender of the artists. Would we ever put Picasso and Da Vinci in the same exhibition, purely on the basis that they are both men? At the Pompidou, male artists' work is normally exhibited individually, whilst "female artists" are getting lumped together as a collective. The titles: "corps slogan" or "une chambre a soi" suggest that women's art should be viewed in the context of feminism, rather than meriting stand-alone space.

Whilst galleries normally spend time and effort showcasing works on loan from other places, the Pompidou has simply bunged a bunch of works that are already lying dormant in their collection into the space. If these works are owned by the Pompidou anyway, why aren't they being shown as part of the permanent collection?

As an exhibition of works by female artists, elles@centrepompidou is deeply flawed. On the other hand, if the Pompidou did a smaller exhibition on "feminist art" it would swiftly make more sense. A lot of the works on level 4 concentrate on female bodides and power relationships and date back to the 1970s. I discover the great Guerilla Girls here. Labelled as "feminist" rather than female, the exhibition would have a thematic coherence, a precise educational aim (learning about feminist art and how images were used by women in the '70s), rather than seeming like the Pompidou had just bunged every female artist they could think of in one space.
Below: a poster by the Guerilla Girls - the kind of tokenism I think that the Pompidou's exhibition may give rise to...

At first it seems daring to fill over half the Pompidou with works by women - but when these women are included in a collective term "elles@centrepompidou" and none of them gain name-recognition in the exhibition title, this seems more of a hindrance than a help to female artists. Yes, it is great that the Pompidou's curators have decided to exhibit the story of feminist art in the 70s and the way image was used to political effect. I just think that the title - and scope- of the exhibition should be different.

If the Pompidou really wants to put women's work in the limelight, then why aren't these works normally on display? Why don't they exhibit some female artists people have heard of, in individual exhibitions, like they do with men?

Detective Cycle: the Pavement Artist

Crazy vibrant colour rings
hugging the pavement like some hippy
hula hoop, cooked up on chewing gum canvas
was my only clue.

Soon they were everywhere –
a string of spaceman signs
fashioned from gooey lumps of gum
that peeked from lampposts, pavements, bins
like painted eyes. Who was behind

these pretty masks, gummy art lumps?
Who had transformed the chewing gum
dropped on the street by grimy teens
into spat speech,
into spoken rings of song?

I searched in vain, followed
the clues, was convinced it was a ruse;
a hoax; a pointless joke,

till I saw him crouched
on a street corner
getting art into the gutter
turning grim litter into little gems
of colour- till I saw his yellow workman’s jacket

jangle with signs and ribbons
and realized that he was moving the mundane
into beauty. It was no small feat
to bring us shimmering strangeness, stamp colour
from underneath our feet, letting the street speak.

Picasso, National Gallery

Picasso's subject matter and range of styles is so wide, it would be presumptuous of me to attempt to piece together the parts of the jigsaw puzzle - I'm sure I wouldn't grasp the entirety of his vision. But I can record my own impressions: here they are.

When Picasso painted his lovers, why did he distort their form so? Which body did he love - theirs or the one he'd reimagined for them??
~~~

Picasso's way of painting bodies reveals a distinctly new way of thinking of them: human flesh, no longer viewed as subtly undulating outlines and divine rosetints, but as lumps and bumps, bodies that can be reduced to their sum parts, or re-formed on the canvas. In a century of frenzied flaunting of human flesh - as body bits are strewn across battlefields, as wobbly bumps in bikinis hit the big screen, and cosmetic enhancement of breasts becomes the norm - Picasso's abstraction of the human form seems strangely in keeping with the times, with what would come next in terms of art and body image...

Yet to leave it at that would be deceptive, dismissive. What Picasso painted is far from clinical, his works are not a cheap survey of the age or a zeitgeisty creation of art-cool - as Warhol would later attempt with his (literal) reproductions. This exhibition is all about Picasso's inspiration from the past, from art history, which weirdly enables us to see what's so new, so startlingly modern and never-before about his art.Through comparison, we can see what he's kept from the masters, and where he's departed. Picasso's reworking of the human form, of the female form in particular, is a highly original vision; his his figures are crouched in space, they are not defined by their surroundings, just as his works are not defined by their place in an art movement, a time, a landscape - though they borrow too from European art history and contemporary politics (cf: Guernica). Picasso, like Pound, was hoping to 'make it new' - to take the same old components, of the body, of the world, and transform them so that centuries on, we'll still be pondering Picasso.

"here the woman is no longer an animal who submits or is overpowered. She too is awake and animated by desire, as if they had both joined forces to search for their souls."

Rilke, on Rodin, a figure in the gates of hell

The Red Academic

Property is theft anyway - at least, that's what I tell myself when stealing from my flatmates' shelves in the fridge...

"If property is theft then intellectual property is just stealing from the communal body of knowledge. My only hope is if ideas cannot be owned by anyone, if ideas exist purely as selfless facets of human wisdom rather than claimed & copyrighted snippets of someone's thoughts. Losing copyright over intellectual property would mean that no-one would strive for originality, to say something new, because they could not derive personal glory or fame for it - if good, it would be shamelessly repackaged and plagiarised. That way originality would no longer be the pinnacle of human achievement. This would leave people free to learn for learning's sake, not for fame, and search for what is 'right' or what seems truthful, rather than what is original. Too often people say something purely because it's new, exciting, unusual - with little regard for the truth of their statement.
Surely pointless to distract readers from the pursuit of human truths, in search of novelty?"

transcendence

The Lecturer is explaining Rilke's views on transcendence "use of seasons which becomes more and more important" and as he speaks his hands flower, his fingers unfurl into petals of intricate gesture, out of season in this autumn reality but in harmony with his own speech, hands rising and blossoming in response to the babbling sun on his lips, that golden disc of speech, as impossible and fleeting as his beaming blond hair. Outside the window grimaces contemporary drear. Concrete black and white blocks scream contrast to our contemporaneous discourse, the pale sky's imitation of blue, but inside Charlie is humbly muttering his magic, and we are listening.

notebook: Maeght, Royal Academy

« UNE FLEUR C'EST UNE CHAIR AUX POUMONS BLANCS
PAS UN REGARD NE TOMBE COMME UNE PIERRE »

Image, sculpture, journal: This gallery: Surrealists of the 40s and 50s, a collection of works exhibited in Maeght’s galleries, Paris. The paintings and sculptures are nonsense rhymes strung together in images; sculpted shapes and bright colours. Child's play. The world of their art, the world that these Surrealists inhabited, is a far cry from the world of war or any world of mine. Is that what they intended: a cry, a calling to another realm, an escape from the grim reality of post-war poverty and famine?

Yet in these realms of seemingly nonsensical symbols and signs, the pain and hunger and despair of the war years still filters through. These canvases may look like the poetic prattle of a child’s crayons, but they are pierced with the cry of war-torn Europe, and they carry that cry into the present day. Even the artists’ paper reeks of rationing: poor quality pulp that smacks of post-war poverty.

In the gaping mouth of the 'tête bleue claire' (Miro), in the incomprehensible fragmented shapes and signs, I see the creative impulses of poets and artists who turned to nonsense because they could no longer make sense of the war-struck real world, who preferred to paint colours and curves because the real bodies were too grim to portray, depict, comprehend. These colourful jumbles mask the fear of the creators who turned to art to escape - though the hard-learned facts of war were well-turned hounds at their heels, were birds of prey picking at every spare moment, every missing space, every bit of blank canvas. The artists ran - and they filled the spaces with paint, and wrote and drew and sculpted furiously, hoping to herald a new peaceful dawn with their surrealist scribblings. Yet the scrappy holes and blanks in their art are cracks, the paint peeled back to reveal grim horror of war.

The artists in this exhibition turned to a new, non-representational form of art. They turned to surrealism and abstraction in a bid for creative regeneration, to find hope in art where they could not see it in the world; yet even in this art their war-torn world resounds.

Miro: les oiseaux de proie foncent sur nos ombres.

not just a pretty face...

will modern culture lose the muse? - article in Cherwell

I used to think being a muse was like being a high-class whore: both get paid and laid, and both practice an age-old, outdated profession which involves flattering men's egos. Recently however, the role of muse is making a glamorous comeback: celebrities such as Uma Thurman and Penelope Cruz have become modern-day muses, and even Cherie Blair inspired artist Euan Uglow when she posed nude for him.

No longer paid and laid, the modern muse is still someone who exploits her ‘inspirational qualities' - I'll leave that phrase to your imagination - for financial gain and celebrity status. Now that we have a cultural climate which allows women to be creators and active thinkers, why are they still posing passive for male directors, artists, fashion designers? Why haven't they climb out from under the wings of cultural giants, to make their own mark?

MODERN MUSES

Isabel Rawsthorne 1912-1992

This celebrated woman inspired Epstein, Picasso and Giacometti among others. She was strikingly good-looking and moved among Paris and Soho art scenes. Rawsthorne attended the Liverpool School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools and later worked as a painter and designer of ballets, but was better known as a subject than an artist. She lived with Giacometti as his lover for a time, fathered the child of sculptor Jacob Epstein and was beautiful enough to tempt even the homosexual painter Lucien Freud into bed - or so he claimed. She can be identified in Lucien Freud's painting Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho, in Epstein's bust of her and influenced five of Picasso's paintings.

Edie Sedgwick 1943-1971

Andy Warhol's muse and lover for a time, she worked with him at his studio-party venue The Factory and starred in his film Poor Little Rich Girl. "I think Edie was something Andy would like to have been; he was transposing himself into her à la Pygmalion," claimed Truman Capote. After becoming disillusioned with Warhol, as she saw he was more celebrated than her, Sedgwick fell in love with Bob Dylan and reportedly inspired his songs, Just like a woman and Leopard skin pill-box hat, but was devastated when she found out Dylan was married. Sedgwick died from a barbiturate overdose, but is still celebrated today as a creative spirit and It girl. Sienna Miller played Sedgwick in Factory Girl, a film about her involvement with Andy Warhol.

Penelope Cruz 1974- present

Cited as Spanish director Almodovar's muse, actress Penelope Cruz starred in his films Volver, Live Flesh and All about my mother. In a joint interview with Almodovar at the National Film Theatre, Cruz said, "He's my everything...I became an actor so that one day I might have the opportunity to work with him." Almodovar claims that he wrote Volver ‘with her in mind' and explains, ‘Usually I don't write the characters with actors in mind. In this case, I wanted to work with Penélope and she was included in the project from the beginning.'

Agyness Deyn 1983- present

At 25 years old, Agyness Deyn is one of Britain's hottest models and plays muse to her flatmate, fashion designer Henry Holland. Holland says of Deyn: "I call Agyness my muse because she is the inspiration for the collection and for the label itself. It's her individuality, her sense of fun and the way she throws all her clothes together. She just looks so good in all my stuff." Deyn has featured on the cover of Vogue in Britain, Italy and the USA and is very much fashion's It girl at the moment.

Lee Miller 1907-1977

Lee Miller was a model, war correspondent, artist and photographer, and muse to Man Ray and the Surrealists in Paris. Man Ray was besotted with her, and together they developed the technique of solarisation, becoming jealous of her when she starred in Cocteau's film ‘the Blood of a Poet'. More than merely a muse however, Miller's photos are extraordinary in their own right, both for their skill and subject matter. Miller was one of the first people to visit Hitler's secret apartments and photographed it extensively.

"Naturally I took pictures," she said in 1946, "What's a girl supposed to do when a battle lands in her lap?"

parading the pompidou

We are talking about going to Paris, and daydreaming about the places we might visit. These get increasingly extravagant: a metro station, a french market, the musee d'Orsay, the Louvre...

"But not the Pompidou," he says, and something in me squeals with disappointment.

"Why not?" I say evenly.

"Well, I like the building and everything, but when you go in it's just full of crap."

If this comment were coming from a football fan or music maniac, I could argue against it quite fiercely and put their dislike of the Pompidou down to their ignorance of modern art, or something similarly snobby. But it's not. It's coming from a guy who is interested in art, who was happily dragged around the National Gallery and the Matisse museum - and yet he was not impressed by the Pompidou. My heart sinks.

I like the Pompidou, with its quirky Miroesque fountain and its vibrant colours and the ridiculousness of its exterior plumbing. It is, quite literally, a pipedream. It is modern art biting its thumb at mundanity, at mediocrity and at tradition. Plus, it has a great bookshop.

But, upon reflection, I had to admit that he was right: oftentimes, the Pompidou is full of crap. Installations that go nowhere, videos that mean nothing, art that does not try to say anything and isn't even aesthetically pleasing (most art I like tends to do one or the other).

And yet - and yet, whenever I go to the Pompidou centre, and drift past the pretentious pseudo-art pinned up on the walls, I find something special. The first time I went it was a Miro painting. Years later, it was a photograph of two white hands almost touching across a dark canvas - two cards stacked up against the darkest odds, trying to keep leaning on each other - that seemed to mirror my own state, that made me shiver with sadness. The last time I went, I found a piece named WHAC - charting the movement of feminist art in New York, recalling a 1970s exhibition- and I bought the notebooks that spawned this blog. So the Pompidou is also where this chain of thought began.

Yes, it's often full of crap. But I will defend it to the death because every time I go, I find one thing: a memorable, meaningful piece of art, so striking it justifies my entire visit, excuses all the rubbish I have had to sift through. Exploring the Pompidou is far more thrilling than exploring the National Gallery, say. Discovering one, extraordinary piece of art is much cooler than going through rooms upon rooms of mediocre pretty pictures. There are gems in the Pompidou, hidden among the fake gold; finding them is like finding treasure among the rubble of a crushed city, like saying 'open sesame' and seeing the doors part, the jewels of modern art twinkling at you. It gives you a headrush of hope and greed, as you fill your eyes with artwork, wishing you could burn its colours into your brain, wishing it was yours...

odalisques & art whores

On a train to Nice with little to do but think, Tom and I come up with a working definition of art:

"Something which appeals to the visual and/or to the touch, which has been created by a person, and which that person intends to be art."

I like this definition of Art: it is broad enough to include Tracy Emin's egotistical arrangement of personal objects, or Sam Taylor-Wood's film of David Beckham, or any artistic graffiti, but rules out anything which is not intended as art: a child's first scribble on a piece of paper, say, or a call-girl's pin-up in a seedy Soho phone box.

And yet - what is the difference between painting and pornography? Between Matisse's muses and a paid-up page 3 model? Porn-stars and muses get paid & laid alike; both are objectified; both are alluring. So why do Matisse's portraits count as art, but the Sun's page 3 pin-ups fall far short of the mark?

I have loved Matisse paintings since I saw Matisse: the Fabric of Dreams at the Royal Academy. The Matisse museum in Nice is exotic, yet European; Catholic, yet fundamentally guilt-free in its hedonism; vividly beautiful. One room displays a moving, evolving wallspan of images, each portraying the same vision: topless women wearing nothing more than middle eastern baggy trousers, placed among exotic patterns and bowls of fruit. These women are like everything else in the picture - nothing more than beautiful objects.

These paintings are exquisite, but how can I justify liking them, when they literally objectify women? Not only do they encourage you to view the women as objects: bounty, booty- they also turn women into objects of art, into paintings, portraits... to be viewed, not as human beings, but as colours and curves.

What is the difference, then, between staring at Matisse portrait and a topless page-three pin-up? A page 3 image is not celebratory - it is for men to leer over, it objectifies to degrade. It implies nothing more than a financial transaction - the exchange of objects, an image for some cash - and implies no connection between the photographer and the model, or the model and the viewer.

Matisse's paintings, on the other hand, call forth a relationship between artist and model which is more than merely financial. Matisse's painting is celebratory - he is admiring the female form. He is objectifying, but to admire, and the woman portrayed is very much in possession of her own beauty. Surely celebrating a woman's body cannot be misogynist?

While the relationship betweeen Matisse & muse is an unequal one - he is recreating her in his own image, possessing her through painting her - he is also celebrating her, and making her beautiful form permanent through painting it. Celebrating the human form is one of the most vital and distinctive elements of art - and it's this celebration, this human connection, which is sorely lacking from the seedy, sex-as-sin adverts you'll find posted in Soho phone boxes.

Matisse: the Fabric of Dreams
matisse museum, Nice

concert at Exeter college chapel, Oxford

We sat down and were showered with gold. There's no other way of putting it: gold liquid drops of candlelight welled from the wax as though the candles had been moved to tears by the music. Then there was the honey-gold that spilled onto the singers' skin, reflected from the chalice-coloured archways of the church, where the saints shimmered like crumpled stars, hung above a portal into another world - one of music and unsayable longing.
Music and art often reach feelings that are deeper than words... The way that classical music could stir people has been lost to the class snobbery and academic bias of decades, centuries even. Now ordinary people avoid classical music and academics/ pseudo-intellectuals relish it - they can speak intelligently about a piece of music, and think that this is akin to understanding it, ergo enjoying it. This is false logic; one can enjoy something immensely, feel moved by it, without understanding it at all... kissing, for instance, is one such example. Music is another.
Sometimes speaking critically and academically about a piece of music enables you to find a deeper meaning in it. Sometimes it simply distracts you from the power and beauty of the thing itself.

The singer in this chapel was singing 'an die Einsamkeit' - 'on solitude'. Kind of ironic, I thought, that three people had joined together to perform a piece of music about being alone... Then I looked around at the golden light and the fragile blue of the chapel windows, like egg shell vibrating as the living, incredible thing hatched within, cracking our human shells with this beautiful sound...
Alright, I thought, well done, you've said something suitably clever. Full marks, you faux intellectual. Now shut up and concentrate on the music...

Charivari Agreable, the Oxford Baroque ensemble

Nuremberg, Germany

This place is beautiful only if you can call concrete jungles beautiful. Expensive shops, complicated fretwork, buildings rise like sculptures from concrete plinths. Humans walk around like living miniatures. The tall buildings shade most of the ground from the sun, dip it in semi-darkness - a perfect light for preserving expensive artworks.

But we are not miniatures or models or sculptures, we are people. We are breathing, living beings - and there is something beautiful about life that this city with its grey squares and fancy pavement patterns iscrushing, withholding, failing to acknowledge. Art that is truly beautiful, or arresting, often contains a glimmer of life, of emotion or muscle or colour or something, some vivacity, which Nuremberg totally lacks.

is it possible to fall out of love with a painting?

"Is it possible to fall out of love with a painting?" I asked as we wandered around the National Gallery, London. What if a painting (or a poem, or a song...) holds a special meaning for you at that moment, if it seems to be telling you something, pointing the way?
The next time you see it, the qualities that struck you about it before seem insignificant. Previously infatuated with the colours, the brushstrokes, the perspective, you now discard the painting as 'one I used to like', confine it to the scrapbook of the past.
This happened to me when I visited the Miro Museum, Barcelona. I was taken by the paintings, the sculptures, the murals with umbrellas and bits of rope splashed onto the walls with starbursts of paint. Miro was the first artist whose work really gripped me, made me smile. Now all I see is squiggles and meaningless coloured blobs.
So if it is possible to fall out of love with a painting, then what implications does that hold for our relationships with people? The painting hasn't changed, but the viewer has. Or perhaps the viewer hasn't changed much either, but is just fickle. If we can fall out of love with a painting, something totally static and faithful, what hope do we have with another person, whose qualities and appearance constantly change?
They say you never stop loving people, even when they are out of your life; somewhere in the past, your younger self is still there loving them. Perhaps the same is true of paintings. A painting you once loved is still there in your memory. Even if you are no longer crazy about it, you smile a tender smile each time you see it - a nostalgic smile, one that still holds love. Next time I go to Barcelona, I will return to the Miro Museum, although I am not in love with it any more.
And the greatest paintings - or people - are the ones that rise above, that are wonderful even if you don't need them at that point in your life, that you want to see because you like being around them. The greatest paintings should reveal something sparkling every time you look at them, something special - the greatest people do the same.

Originality

Is there no new innovation? If we view poems as a combination of words, one particular choice among an infinite amount of combinations, then there's nothing new. Poems combine pretty much the same elements of life over and over again: love, death, God, nature, war, and children. Should this repetition of themes reassure us that humans have common, shared experiences? Or is it just depressing that nothing original, nothing new, can grow from art forms such as poetry?
The question of originality is important- is originality something that culture should strive to attain? Is being original more important than being skilled? Tracy Emin’s art, celebrated for its intimate details and its modernity, is certainly original in that it asks us to consider something mundane and a bit disgusting – her bed, her tent – as a valuable and valid art form. However, it does not seem to have required much talent. Conceptual art makes us think, but is not always skilful or highly detailed.

“Reliance on devices like the photograph and slide
will lead, I rather fear, to linguistic suicide.
We must keep on challenging language to engage
with all we suffer from in this new modern age.” Tony Harrison

and as for originality with words – art is constantly moving and changing, not only our perception of what art means, but also the materials we can use and effects we can create. For instance, the field of computer graphics has evolved to such an extent that whole films can be created using nothing more than a computer. Language is also constantly evolving, encompassing new words that reflect our technological and scientific advances, and it is up to modern poetry to use these new words to create new effects and meanings.

currency

Currency

Words are valued for their age and beauty, for their permanence and their origin. Words can be given as gifts, are free, can be used by all, and evoke all the wonder of the world. The most valued words are the oldest, most evocative and historically resonant ones – for example, chalice is much more evocative than glass, treasure instead of capital, love instead of crush, court instead of flirt. These older words have been used in more contexts by more writers across more centuries; they thereby become richer, acquire more resonance than new words which are exciting, because they are new, but still rather flat.
Capitalism uses money as a currency: paper notes that evoke nothing more meaningful than numbers, that are not freely available to everyone. Capitalism is a system within which the things that are valued are those that are desired by the greatest number of people and available in the smallest amounts (greatest demand, smallest supply). Things which are of value in the capitalist system are often material, having clear physical worth.

Artefacts are interesting, because they hold value in both the capitalist system and the cultural system. The capitalist system deems them valuable because they are rare, in small supply. They also have clear physical worth and are attractive; therefore lots of people want to collect them.
However, artefacts are also valued by poets and authors, in their world of words, for their permanence, and their historical richness. They are aesthetically pleasing and from the past and yet strangely timeless, in that they are accessible to any future generation. They reveal truths about humanity.

Culture Vulture

"Let me tell you," she crooned, "I know all about culture. Oh yes, it's been inscribed in me since childhood. My parents were a permanent stage; every night they played host to a different drama, a different emotional conflict. Our fridge was full of cultures, growing and writhing little clumps of bacteria feeding from a lump of cheese, just as art and theatre and literature feed on the staple diet of human emotion. My teenage face was certainly a canvas, carefull covered with makeup that did not match and would not last, and in student years was painted with suitable bohemian symbols like 'revolution' or little black love hearts - a fitting face for any artist, a work of art that any artist would be proud of. Now I step barefaced and bold into the swirling world, but my face is still a work of art, a kind of relic. The daring lips and eyes of old have been replaced with wrinkles and more permanent markings, ones I didn't choose."

tales of a troubled tourist

Ironic really, how tourists will journey half way around the world to see temples and tombs, the thoughtful constructions of an ancient civilisation, while leaving their own thoughtless imprint behind them - thick trails of smog, toilet paper that clogs up Egyptian sewage systems, plastic bottles dumped at tourist sites. The Egyptians left some awe-inspiring stuff as mark of their civilisation; meanwhile our modern Western civilisation will leave its legacy in every drop of acid rain, every degree that the earth overheats, in the unbiodegradeable Coca-Cola bottle that proved so iconic in the Pop Art movement, and now litters the banks of rivers worldwide.
What's my point, you may ask? My point is that other civilisations have left constructive contributions to future generations, markers of human progress thus far. Our civilisation's cultural output is flimsy by comparison. Although we have documented our culture in a very self-conscious, diligent way, we have documented it using flimsy, transient materials. Much of our cultural output now is virtual, with everything from philosophical musings to photographs posted solely on the internet, in a language which may die, viewed by technology fast becoming obsolete. Captured on camera or computer, culture will not last nearly so long as if it is carved into the walls of great buildings or inked out on vellum manuscripts.


I know that the Egyptian pyramids were the product of imperialist arrogance and slave labour on a phenomenal scale. I am not condoning this by any means. Nor am I suggesting that their devotion to dubious deities was inspired; simply that their record of this devotion has lasted thousands of years.
And whether culture lasts or not is, in fact, quite an important question. Lasting artefacts serve as historical markers of progress, as works of art to be enjoyed by future generations, and as inspiration for future creators. Our culture is totally temporary, a fact that we must try to remedy if our insights are to last into the next millennium.
If we want our civilisation to serve as a blueprint, or at least some kind of inspiration, we need to start creating culture that will last, ancient-Egyptian style. I'm thinking Shakespeare carved in stone (this is already going on in Stratford-Upon-Avon; long may it last), Tchaikovsky's symphonies permanently mindmapped into the human memory, through DNA or something. Hey, maybe we could genetically engineer humans so they all have Picasso's dove as a birthmark just above their left knees, to remind them of the importance of peace.
Or perhaps, instead of trying to destroy some of the most incredible landscapes on earth (the coral reef, the rainforests) we should make ouir mark in a more positive manner: build something great, shift some stones, the tried-and-tested way. Egyptian-style.

Dendarah Temple - description - Egypt

We entered the second temple, an awesome feat of human dedication. Broad columns with heiroglyphs and images enscribed and painted onto each one. The ceiling revealed the ancient Egyptians' calendar, which we have largely adopted.
Sacred, ancient, awe-inspiring, hidden stones that silent-sing of pharaos long since crumbling in their crypts, of goddesses that have fallen long ago. There is magic locked into these tombs, with figures that long to stretch, heiroglyphs that long to tell the tale.

II. Wall upon wall, shadow upon shadow, light and meaning flicker across these heiroglyphs, human figures of the past adorn these walls. Yet the walls are pock-marked, images effaced, gods and goddesses scrubbed out or chiselled off the walls by Coptic Christians who, jealous of these dark gods of burnished gold, sought to destroy them. Perhaps they used guns, chisels or even stones - stone effacing stone; the magnificence of one civilisation destroyed by the stupidity of another. I wouldn't be surprised.

And yet- what redeems us is not the history of wider society, but personal, more intimate stories. Osiris and Isis, Osiris loved back to life by his wife, standing over him in one of these carvings, with her wings stretched wide over him to protect him. Isis, who travelled around the world to collect pieces of her dead husband's body, and loved him after life. What will survive of us is - (Larkin?) What redeems us is - love.