More Spirit Than Animal

THE JUDGEMENT OF PARISH

The die had been cast as soon as the numbers had come in. Unclear on the exact sequence of events and how one thing led to another, I suddenly understood the correlation between war and profit. I had stepped back from the metaphorical brink understanding at last what it was the man who threw the apple had been trying to say. In the war on the moral abstraction of terror, fortunes were being made and I finally understood that international conflict is more about the harvesting of opportunity than it will ever be about fundamentalism and the clash of ideologies. Lines in the sand are not always where you think they should be.

Casino slot machines rattle every ten minutes, within earshot of the punters, giving hope. The perfumed air, the lack of natural daylight, the disorientated ambience like a narcotic seducing the unwary with the lascivious appeal of the take down, the bags of cash, the jackpot! The many arms of Pantheon gorged on the outpouring of investment in what would be one of the longest and least understood conflicts in history. With all the glee of a free lunch the message had been relayed to me, whose unwritten signature stayed resolutely within the pen hovering some two inches above the Pantheon Directorial Contract. Join us, be a man, wet your whistle.

I naturally fled.

A call from Donald, measured, compelling and eschewing any suggestion we were negotiating, a chance to redeem myself, think of your wife, your family, always family, and the soul searching with Thalia the piggy not so in the middle, pulling on heartstrings and struggling with an unequal love for two men. The opportunity of a lifetime, the envy of any man, take the plunge my son the water's fine. Their boy had strayed, not thinking straight, he'll come around, just takes time that's all, he's new to this game, everything will be alright.

The benefits of coming aboard were made quite clear. It would be the wise choice, an enhanced appreciation of the real world, it would be the strong choice, bringing power and wealth and it is the choice of all who love you, enriching the love of my wife. Wisdom, power and love, gifts offered by Zander, mine for the taking, if not for him then for his daughter. Thalia pleaded long and hard, but I just withdrew. My shadow self recoiled from the vivid neon reality of Zander's world.

Since serving I had turned my shadow self to the arts, painting and reading. I had always sought the enlightenment and wisdom of the writers; the great communicators. Moving from military exploits á la McNab, through Forsyth, Le Carré, Woolf, Joyce - couldn't make heads or tails of him; the elusive Victorians Elliot, Dickens and Tolstoy; then on to the great American classics, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Melville, Fitzgerald, Twain, Plath - yes poetry although I didn't pretend to understand what ever she had been trying to say, I just loved the rhythm of the words, like the songs of Hendrix, the Doors, Dylan, Radiohead, the Velvets, Bowie; who cared what they meant; the same could be said for Byron, Shelley and Keats; and then the Beat Writers, Burroughs, Ginsburg and Kerouac, the polemicists, Mailer and Vidal and contemporary new kids on the block like Franzen and Hitchens. Of late I had also enjoyed the eccentric Portuguese Jose Saramago and Haruki Murakami. But it was always the American voice I was drawn to. Perhaps it was less constrained by old world politics of behaviour. That pioneer spirit was still there for men like Twain, Kerouac, Steinbeck and Hemingway. Their voices captured a cultural honesty that would never pass this way gain.

In my studio which I located on the top floor of our home I brooded and painted and sank deeper into my small but significant library to ameliorate this pervading funk. Who could I talk to? Father? Mother? Thalia? I needed some truth. The choices held me in a state of stasis, paralysed into inaction.

Painting of course, at its most expressionistic is open to misinterpretation offering alternative perspectives of more than one moment in time like the light of Monet's Reims Cathedral series charged by subtly different lightscapes. The writer however offers a kind of certainty that words rarely deny. The pity of it is the perversion of the viewer or reader attempting to interpret what the creator was 'trying to say' sending it back home not quite the precocious child the originator sent out into the world, but it would have to do, there being no other way of relating to the brush or pen stroke. And by pen I now mean keyboard.