Well, my wife tells me so, anyway.
Or at least she does when she isn’t telling me the opposite. Phinny the Palaverous is how she refers to me to her girlfriends. Who know, of course, she doesn’t mean it.
I don’t say we fight. But we are not immune to malign influences beyond our kitchen and bedroom. How could we be? Are we not all one family?
That the dry, embittered colourlessness of the conceptual — to return to my theme — helped harden the nation’s heart is accepted as a truism by artists of today. Art wasn’t the cause or centre of the great desensitisation, for which, of course, all artists apologise, but WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED — or TWITTERNACHT, as I like to call it when I am feeling skittish, by way of reference to. . well to many things, one of them being the then prevailing mode of social interaction that facilitated, though can by no means be said to have provoked it — WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, I say, happened, if it did, because as a people we’d anaesthetised the feeling parts of ourselves, first through the ugly liberties with form taken by modernism and second through the liberties taken with emotion by that same modernism in its ‘post’ form. I say ‘we’ because there is nothing to be achieved by saying ‘they’, indeed there is much to be lost, given that ‘they’ is a policed pronoun today, but when I am certain no one is looking (I mean this figuratively) I poke a finger at the alien intellectualism that brought such destruction first on itself and then, as an inevitable consequence, on all of us. Thus, again, the felicity of my TWITTERNACHT jeu d’esprit, twitter like much else in the same vein that was then the rage, having proceeded from the alien intelligences of the very people who were to lose most by it. Call that irony, a concept of which they, in particular, were overfond, which is an irony in itself. Let’s be clear: no one behaved well, but there is such a thing as provocation. The largest beast can be maddened by the smallest parasitic mite. (Especially when it’s clever. . the mite, that is.) I will say no more than that.
Except. . No, I’ll stick to my guns and shut up. ‘You talk too much,’ Demelza is always saying to me. And I’m a man who listens to his wife.
Perhaps future generations will describe what we do now as a cult of feeling, but better to feel than not to, better to experience love than its opposite. Better, in short, to live now than to have lived then. If the cost of not allowing ourselves to return to that inglorious past, or anything resembling it, is a certain mistrustfulness and vigilance, I happen to think it’s a price worth paying. Hence. . well, hence my doing what I do. My ho humming, as the Divine Demelza calls it. I don’t spy on my students or my colleagues. I keep an eye open, that’s all. For what? Well, for anything or anyone — how can I best put this? — left over. For business dangerously unfinished. For matter out of place, as a famous anthropologist once described dirt. For recidivism. In any of its guises, recidivism is what we fear most. Hence a job of this sort falling to someone teaching at an art college. Because art, for all its adventuresomeness, is also capable of being the most recidivist of human activities, forever falling back in reaction to what was itself a reaction to something else. People can behave like savages when they are allowed to, but only in art do they go so far as to call themselves primitivists. And when the primitivist urge doesn’t seize them, the psychoaesthetic urge, the study of human evil — itself another form of primitivism, when you come to think about it — does. So portrait painting is a further recidivism that’s frowned on and discouraged — that’s in so far as one can discourage anything in a free society. In the main, prize-culture does the job for us. When all the gongs go to landscape, why would any aspiring artist waste his energies on the dull and relentless cruelties of the human face? While not wanting to affect modesty, I suspect I wouldn’t be enjoying the favour and seniority I do — I omitted to say that I am Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky, FRSA — had I not from an early age followed nature’s laws in the matter of beauty. There are painters who paint more experimentally than I do, without doubt, but of my more troubled colleagues — those who still hanker secretly for the alien and the grotesque, even the degenerate (though they wouldn’t dream of pronouncing that term aloud) — I cannot think of one who hasn’t had to wait a long time to be given recognition, and even longer to be given tenure.
But to return to the point from which I began, and I don’t apologise for my vagrant style — ‘Keep up!’ I tell my students when I sense they are losing me; ‘Keep up!’ I even have to tell my wife on those occasions when I catch her glancing at her watch — I don’t claim more for what goes into my black folder on Kevern Cohen than it’s worth. I say ‘I keep an eye open’ but I do so only at the lowest level — code name Grey. Think of those I watch as birds, and I am no more than a Sunday twitcher. The work of serious, scientific ornithology is done by others. For which reason, while I am conscientious in my observations, I have never imagined that what I see or what I miss matters a great deal. Until now. Suddenly, I am conscious of having to deliver. It is as though the common house sparrow, on which — to nobody’s interest — I’ve been keeping an eye for some time, has overnight become an endangered species and I am at a stroke indispensable to the species’ protection. I won’t pretend to knowledge I don’t have. All my reports are now more scrupulously monitored than they were before, so I can’t say with any certainty that Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen — one of the common house sparrows in question — has risen to the top of any pile. I have a feeling about him, that’s all. Or rather I have a feeling that they have a feeling. I like the man, I have to say. He has for several years been coming in one day a week to the academy, teaching the art of carving lovespoons out of a single piece of wood. I admire his work, which is exquisite, but there are some who find him a little too good to be true. Not the students; they love his air of grumpy probity as much as I love what he makes, and I am sure that when their opinions are canvassed they will speak of him only in the most glowing terms. But it goes against him with senior members of the college that he doesn’t drink with them, spends too much time in the restricted section of the library — not reading a great deal, according to Rozenwyn Feigenblat, our librarian, just staring into space the minute he is a page or two into what he does read, as though wondering what he came here for — and is rarely heard to apologise. I don’t, of course, mean for reading books, I mean for anything — an act of carelessness or forgetting, a brusqueness, a contradiction. The reason he gives is that as he lives on his own, works in isolation, and so rarely has occasion to lose his temper, he has nothing to apologise for. Not an argument well calculated to win him friends in the common room, because the truth is none of us really think we have anything to apologise for. But the way an institution works is that you go along with the prevailing fiction. And generally — if not individually — the habit of delivering brisk, catch-all apologies is much to be preferred to morbid memory which embalms the past in the Proustian fluids of the maudlin. (Though Proust is no longer read, we still retain the adjective.) My authority for this is the media philosopher Valerian Grossenberger, author of Seven Reasons To Say Sorry, whose series of daily lectures for National Radio some years ago can be said to have changed the way we all think. Modern societies had spent too much time, according to Grossenberger, rubbing the twin itches of recollection and penance. In the bad old days, ‘never forget’ was a guiding maxim — you couldn’t move, I’ve heard tell, for obelisks and mausoleums and other inordinately ugly monuments exhorting memory — but this led first to wholesale neuroticism and impotence and then, as was surely inevitable, to the great falling-out, if there was one. Rather than go on perpetuating the neurasthenic concept of victimisation, Grossenberger argued, the never-forgetters would have done better carving ‘I Forgive You’ on their stones. In return for which, we might have forgiven them. But that chance came and went. And now who, today, is going to forgive whom for what? Only by having everyone say sorry, without reference to what they are saying sorry for, can the concept of blame be eradicated, and guilt at last be anaesthetised.