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| William Kentridge |
On the front of a church I pass when I'm driving back from my mother's house is a blue banner that reads, Try Praying. I see it as I turn left down the main road towards the sea.
Every time I see the sea, I admit, it is different but when this banner is in my head and I look at the horizon, something in the line where water and sky merge makes me think, why not?
A tiny proportion of my life has been spent in prayer, according to the traditional definition. Growing up it wasn't mentioned at home, only at school. I'm not interested in defining it. What I'm interested in is the impact of those two words on me as I leave my mother's house, her neighbourhood split between two hillsides, sliding into a valley that becomes a wind tunnel in storms, that has one of the worst GP practices I've come across and no facilities for its mainly elderly population.
Those two words in the context of this place, its terrible failures, complacency and the money being made on refurbishing the homes of the old and reselling them, suggest there really is no way to reverse the trend. And so this odd place becomes gentrified, people are shifted away from sea views and into blocks of flats that have another block between them and the sea.
Try Praying. Some might be caught by the confidence of the address, direct to him or her, to them, and so away from it, out of the car, I see it might help.
My problem with it is the dot I've just noticed. It's a website. Of course it is. A place to make a donation and read stories of people who've connected with god.
I'm always drawn to signs, road names, posters, public invitations to engage in some way. I love the best graffiti, the wit of a random person with spray paint or a permanent marker. I love what are now called interventions - unexpected text in surprising places. The poet Matthew Sweeney was commissioned once to write a poem to be pulled behind a light plane. He wrote three stanzas, each for a separate banner. The poem was called 'A Smell of Fish'.
I think of Barbara Kruger's Your body is a battleground, I think of the artist William Kentridge.
But with the appropriation of art and poetry by brands, with the idea that we can all call ourselves artists and poets, I guess I could ignore the link that Try Praying is trying to lead me to and just enjoy the philosophical meandering it provokes. The old definitions have gone. So it leads me to the wind farm on the horizon on a clear day, or at night, flashing red and to wonder if artists have had their day. But for daydreaming purposes it could be worse.
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