The Life of an Artist

An artist writes a poem about a girl he loves.

Another girl expresses regret that he did not write the poem about her and that she did not have an opportunity to meet the man who wrote that poem.

But she never will do, because he is not that man to her. Even if, and this is a big “if”, he were to end up writing a poem about her, it would never be the same poem because she is not the girl he wrote the poem about and he would still be a different person with her to the man who did write that original poem.

It strikes me that there is a symmetry of proceedings in their relative existential dilemmas to the extent that they both long for an experience which is fixed at a point in time and space.

What to make of this symmetry? Do we really dismiss it as mere coincidence?

What would perhaps surprise people about the footing of my best work (the finished book, two unfinished plays and short story), what people would never expect from what they have read necessarily, is that what I really try to do is to take geometrical patterns that occur in nature and build upon those patterns to find a new level of meaning about life (i.e. “The Spinner” is called The Spinner for a reason).

It is a mysterious business. I am not really sure where it came from. It has just always been there.

At times I have wondered what this really speaks of my psyche. Where does this need come from? This need to link the nature of man with the nature of patterns and templates that recur again and again in this world and beyond. So that a play which at one level is notionally a satire of Brexit Britain that also deals with themes such as Fate and Chance, masks an entirely alternate reality beneath the surface – one in which the same shapes form again and again in one dimension of experience, to guide people to a higher level of truth in this one.

This is the real reason why these works have taken so long to complete. I build from these patterns and build and build….I want people to go as far down the rabbit hole away from what we know as the “real world” as I can possibly take them. But to build this model requires time, care and patience.

The existential dilemma is sad in one way. Yet it is also a reminder that we must live in the present.

It is not a dilemma I have any other answer to. After all, if the events of the Dark Season did teach me anything, it is that I just a man. A long long long way away from being the best man I know. But I am a man nonetheless – who has understood finally the importance of trying to be the best version of that man he can be.

As for what becomes of the man when he is no more – the only answers I can offer anyone are those geometrical patterns in my writing.