I spent a part of this morning reading a piece in the London Review of Books in which a selection of works were being discussed all dealing with the global politico-economic situation. How are China and the USA shaping up in their currently escalating confrontation? What is the future for the World Trade Organisation? How does the action of governments compare in significance to that of the principal financial actors? You get the idea. Towards the end of my career in the social sciences processes of “globalisation” were coming to the fore of the research agenda. Indeed, my own work on the sociology of international law, and on international tourism, also participated in that movement. These are huge questions, and it is little surprise that a group of eminent authors addressing them should see them in differing lights despite sharing an acknowledgement of their importance.
Then, over coffee, sitting in the garden, I read the script of one of Alan Bennet’s recent additions to his Talking Heads series of single-hander plays. It featured his usual intimate exploration of the inner landscape of individuals, outwardly conforming and respectable, but confronting conditions of inner turmoil, typically relating to sexuality.
The experience was rather like moving from the scrutiny of some distant galaxy with a radio-telescope to the examination of some tiny organism under a microscope. Curiously, having spent part of lunch-time watching the snooker World Championships on the TV I then discovered a small creature in the garden, the like of which I have never previously encountered. It is all a question of scale.
It occurs to me that my art swings precipitously between similar poles of scale. I have no idea how much time I have spent contemplating and interpreting the massive size and incomprehensible antiquity of Almscliff Crag. Then my attention is seized by a pear and a kiwi fruit seated on my kitchen table. I have been engaged by T.S. Eliot’s speculations about time, and the symbolism of creation, only to be diverted into recording an instant of time in the local Goit Stock wood, or my own inner landscape in my recent Wassail series. It is all a question of scale.