December Suite I: In the Flat Field

Both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness by which I mean that what is appropriate to early life is not appropriate for later stages, and vice versa. (Edward Said)

On the 20th, I drove through the Veneto, the train windows like a cinema screen that showed, again and again, dapple-grey terraferma in the fog, and almost nothing else. In the pale amber of my carriage overhead lighting, I read a book on Constable, simply because for some time I had been convinced that every painting in the world was or would, in time, become Cenotaph for Joshua Reynolds. So naturally, I wanted to find out how Constable had achieved that particular feat of transformation.

But what I encountered instead of an answer, in the book on Constable, was the notion of how an artists' trajectory can be organized in three stages: an early style shifts into a mature style and that, in turn, eventually shifts into late style. Early style, it was explained, is characterized by experimentation and scholarship, study of predecessors, development of taste, testing of means, learning skills. As time, patience and exercise play their magic, experimentation becomes more focused, taste more accurate, choice of means more adequate, skills more refined – and at some point during this process, early style becomes mature style: the distinct, individual profile of an artist in control of their attitude, their tools and their ambition. x turns into X.

What struck me then, was the abrupt realization that I was of the age where artists usually cross the threshold between early and mature style; and it also struck me that this teleological model of artistic development had all sorts of obvious flaws, most of which we had already exposed when I was a student of art history, so I was, as the train sped on through muddy fields, reading utterly debunked theory; and it also struck me that the reason why I had been all but silent for a whole year, maybe the reason why I was right then crossing the Veneto in a second class Frecciarossa carriage, was that I found myself unable to develop a mature style.

And I was not even an artist, which made the problem somehow more pressing.

For in my general ideas about human life, I assumed – why do I write in the past tense? – I assume a certain abiding timeliness, by which I mean that as you live, you move through model-able episodes of various lengths, episodes that can, in turn, be grouped into early, middle and old age. And on the 20th, thanks to the book on Constable, it dawned on me that I was on the threshold of my biographical 'middle period', or, just maybe and more menacingly, that I am already squarely within it, but "puzzled as the oyster" as the song goes, with absolutely no idea of how to move within it, how to conceptualize myself within it, of it.

Time is simply flat around me, with no profile, no sculpture, no relief.

True, it probably didn't help that the middle period started violently and traumatic; true, it probably doesn't help that I have not done what is commonly done in order to provide a concept for the middle period, namely start a family. What I happened to be good at during my twenties, I happened to be good enough at that I am now regularly grouped with the careerists bores who drank the koolaid about how what we do is an actual job with value for the world and for yourself, whereas I would never venture beyond 'it's a fun group activity'. I want to play a bit of Mario Kart with friends, so I am by definition not friends with those who want to play ranked Counterstrike to find out who's the alpha. And that probably doesn't help. It makes me find my most important professional in- and aspiration among younger peers, grads and postgrads, but that, in turn, makes me the Slightly Older Skater Guy Teaching Kids Tricks At The Half-Pipe, a character inevitably considered cool by the twelve-year-olds he teaches, but an obvious loser in the eyes of everyone else. And that probably doesn't help. I have been taught deconstruction, and now feel that the times call for either destruction or construction, and I am incapable. I have a certain gift for drawing, and by 'certain' I mean a resolutely second-rate gift that is just strong enough that I can sometimes forget its obvious limit; a faltering, quivering parody of a creative act, a waste of time that just doesn't look like one. And that doesn't help, either.

But those are excuses, I thought to myself as I swallowed 10 mg of escitalopram with San Pellegrino and the Veneto plains grew darker with evening, those are excuses; there is still the page, there are still the words, there are still the powers, and at least there will not have been no blog posts at all for almost a whole year. –