Dunno why this random group of plants caught my eye yesterday, but there they were minding their own business on top of the little freezer and they seemed lovely, I mean really beautiful. A bunch of Basil leaves- they’re for a panzanella; the remains of the Dill we used in making dill pickles this week and two South African plant cuttings from our neighbour Charlie. Madame’s an avid collector of house plants.
There’s a strongly aesthetic side to growing and cooking. We do both, and the uniting of the plants we grow with some jiggery pokery on the stove always feels like alchemy. Something emerges which is even more than the sum of its parts. Our neighbour on the allotment grows figs, and we exchange successes – like her lovely figs in return for our shining aubergines. Knives, pans and chopping boards occupy the same place in a culture as the brushes and palette knives of the artist or the laptop and camera of the writer or the secateurs and the spade on the allotment. Technique (and I’ve paid a price for this principle) is the invisible foundation of all creative work. The whole point is that technique should never be sufficiently in focus to be noticeable. It should be obvious that grandstanding around the world like a carpenter, wearing a belt filled with tools for all to see is not necessarily a sign of giftedness.
I’ve had a few days off to do some intense reading which is easy(ish) to do up to 25 C but if the heatwave gets any worse my brain just gives up at 26 C. I was studying DNA in a modest sort of way because I never had the faintest idea how it worked or what it did. I was curious to address the vacancy, but the books I was reading all seemed to mention, or even to major on the thorny subject of plant intelligence. I’ll spare you the technicalities but during my searches, I came up against a word, a conceptual word – “Qualia” which is the quality of experiences which are just so difficult to express to another person. As for plants and their feelings the jury looks set to die of old age! I’ve stolen the word from the Magisterium but they’ll never know because they think I’m the cleaner. When I talk about eating a crab for instance, I’m filled with the memory of a day we ate a crab on the beach at West Bay; breaking it up with a couple of heavy pebbles and washing it down with a bottle of wine we’d floated in the sea on a length of string. Or up in North Wales the memory of a long conversation with an old lady who patiently explained to me why crabs are seasonal and how to tell the difference between a cock crab and a hen crab. Or of the time when Madame (being pregnant) was suffering from pica – in this case instanced by crab meat, and my efforts to meet her needs with hardly any money. Would 2 oz do the trick I wondered . Mercifully it did.
So when I talk about eating crab; my side of the conversation is filled with happy memories which I don’t explain because you might die of boredom. You on the other hand might have eaten a wrong’un years ago and can think of nothing except a long night of retching. Short of a game of verbal ping-pong there’s no way in a normal conversation to convey the “quale” – pronounced kwaalay – in anything like a satisfactory manner. But that, of course, is precisely what the poet, the artist or the writer is attempting to do every day whilst always knowing that the dice are loaded against success.
However today we went to an exhibition of Norman Ackroyd etchings and drawings in the Victoria Gallery in Bath, and I was quite overwhelmed by his work. Let the phenomenologists, the philosophers and the brain scientists tug each others beards like their counterparts did at the Council of Nicea as they argued fiercely about the exact wording of the Christian creed before they agreed on a solution that nobody understood which completely resolved the issue. For my part I believe that Ackroyd had worked the magic in spite of being dead for two years and I was able -for an hour or so – fully to engage with his experience of the light, the sea and the rocks around the Scottish isles. These wonderful etchings are not “about the sea, the sky and the rocks”, neither are they two dimensional renderings of the landscape; they are accounts of the artist’s inner experiences, the “Qualia” of those journeys which by some miracle I was able to access. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it always leaves me tearful. Being human – and that’s what this blog is all about – is difficult and at times incredibly lonely. More often than not our conversations are hit and miss – mostly miss – approximations in which, on reflection, we say too much and too little at the same time. His was the skill we’re all reaching for; the skilful act of communicating the qualia, the boring everyday moments on which a sharp ray of sun suddenly falls and illuminates a vision that lingers forever in the memory. Great art isn’t ever about anything its raison d’etre isn’t teaching us anything new, it’s about the certainty which comes mysteriously in music, in art, in poetry and song; in cookery and gardening and in walking that in spite of all the evidence it’s alright.
