How many are we, those of us lacking the mutation for creativity? More than Marcin thought, but less than you might expect. In Europe there are probably a couple of thousand. Enough to fill a village, say. Around the world, maybe a couple of million. A lot of us blog, although I do not.
It’s not such a bad world, this world of clocks. There is, in truth, much art that is astonishing. Some of it is breathtaking. Generals are writing novels that, before the clocks, would have gone down in literary history. Shopgirls are producing art that challenges Leonardo and Titian and Hirst. In Caen I sat through an oratorio by a ten-year-old schoolboy which had tears running down my cheeks.
As Marcin said, all these works were already there, in a sense, in the minds of their creators. Clocks don’t make someone a great artist; what they do is unlock the impulse, conquer the writer’s block, provide the enthusiasm. They’ve rewritten our genome so that we want to be artists.
We — I should say they — don’t want to be artists to the exclusion of all else. That would be a world out of a nightmare. Everyone carries on with their normal lives and jobs; they just want to spend their free time creating art.
This has had some interesting side-effects. On the whole, people have better things to do with their free time than hating each other or worrying about geopolitics, and warfare around the globe has dwindled away to almost nothing. I say ‘on the whole’ and ‘almost nothing,’ because there is a small civil war going on in the Czech Republic between two groups of Dadaists over an invisibly-fine splitting of hairs about the direction of the movement, and an entirely incomprehensible insurgency in Britain which seems to revolve around the definition of science fiction. That one may be running down; a number of us posted an announcement online to the effect that we would boycott Britain until things calmed down, and calm of a kind appears to be returning. At any rate, it’s been several weeks since there were fatalities.
In odd moments, on autobahns and motorways and autostrada and in the first-class lounges of airliners, I think about Marcin and his brave new world. He said he thought that humanity as a whole was not so bad, that it was only the occasional asshole who gave us a bad name, and now and then, when I’m not listening to someone’s symphony or reviewing a novel or trying to work out whether an hallucinogenically-Turneresque watercolour has actually been hung the right way up, I do wonder whether he hasn’t been largely successful. And if he has, it occurs to me that we, the critics, are the most dangerous people on Earth, because we are not distracted by the imperative to create. If we wanted, we could rule the world. And then it usually occurs to me that we do rule the world, in a way. And yes, it’s very very nice, thanks.
It is still not a perfect world. But it is, by any stretch of the imagination, a beautiful one. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get some sleep. Tomorrow I have to drive to Barcelona and tell a surrealist sculptor what I think about his new work, which in photographs appears to be made entirely from human toenail clippings.
v
Sometimes, things just come together out of nowhere. This story was written for Jetse de Vries’ anthology of optimistic science fiction Shine. It didn’t make it into the book, but it did appear in the Shine project’s online magazine, Daybreak. I’m often accused — with some justification — of being a bit of a gloomy sod, so it was nice to have a go at something optimistic. Again, the title was floating around for a while looking for a story to bolt itself onto. The story itself was inspired by a typo. A friend posted something online about her ‘paint meds’ — meaning, of course, her pain meds — and I riffed on that. The setting came from a recent visit to Gdansk, and basically the story wrote itself, which is unusual for me. I am very pleased with the way this one turned out, which is, again, unusual for me.
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Rowland hated driving on the motorway, so we made our way out of London on various A-roads that left us at the mercy of roadworks, traffic jams, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings and idiots on mopeds and scooters. By the time we were on the A303 it was almost lunchtime, the very tenuous sense of humour with which I had left home had entirely evaporated, and a colossal wall of what appeared to be almost pure black had begun to rise out of the Western horizon.
“Weather looks bad,” Rowland said.
“Mm,” I said.
“I hope they’ve got the site properly secured,” he said.
“Mm,” I said.
“People just don’t realise how much damage rain can do to a newly-exposed floor,” he went on, shaking his head. “These things were laid down when acid rain was just some awful possibility.”
“Mm,” I said.
He looked at me. “Do you have a hangover?”
“No.”
“You sound as though you have a hangover.”
“Do I?”
“You’re very taciturn.”
“Oh?”
He nodded. “You always get very taciturn when you have a hangover.” He looked back out of the windscreen at the great bank of black cloud we were driving toward. “You always did. I could always tell how much you’d had to drink the night before by how much you said in tutorials.”
“Could you?”
“Oh yes.” He nodded to himself. “Some of your other tutors used to comment on it. ‘Jim was very laconic today,’ they’d say, and I’d know you’d been out on the piss the night before.”
I glanced over at him. “That is so much bullshit.”
Rowland shook his head. “Of course, they meant it as a compliment. You were quite highly thought-of among the staff for your laconic sense of humour.”
“It didn’t make them give me better grades.”
He snorted. “Of course not. I knew you weren’t being laconic. You were just hungover.”
I reached into the little well under the radio, took out a packet of cigarettes, removed one, and lit it one-handed. Even after all this time, it was still a surprisingly difficult operation while trying to keep my eyes on the road.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I don’t mind you smoking — how you choose to die is up to you — but you could easily lose control of the car while you’re lighting your cigarette.”
“Oh, shut up, Rowland,” I said.
It was tempting to compare Rowland to a force of nature, but that wasn’t a very good comparison. Most forces of nature these days arrive with some kind of warning, but Rowland always arrived out of a clear blue sky, wanting you to track down some source in the British Library or copy-edit the manuscript of some paper or take photographs of one of the milecastles on Hadrian’s Wall or get samples of Roman concrete from a godforsaken bit of masonry on the Welsh Marches. Didn’t matter how inconvenient it was for you. Rowland wanted it, and it had to be done.