I find myself in a strange frame of mind at the moment. Everybody seems to agree that the world in which we live has come to a very critical point. This is nowhere more clear than in the UK, where the very fabric of political life appears to be disintegrating before our eyes. Whoever I speak with, I find that there is an agreement that whichever party wins the forthcoming election (if, indeed, there will be any party that can be called “winners”) the country is facing an extended period of crisis and possibly of deepening conflict. I have yet to meet anybody who is optimistic about our future. In these circumstances, I ask myself, surely the role of art ought to be to cast a searchlight into the gloom and to illuminate, albeit in an intuitive fashion, the nature of our current crisis. Should we not expect that art might act as some kind of “oracle”, or should exercise a “prophetic” function in relation to our present predicament?
At this time, however, I find that my own work might be understood as the reverse of this. The latest piece I have finished looks back for its inspiration to a relationship I enjoyed with somebody particularly between 1983 and 1993. It was singularly important in my own personal development: but is such introversion no more than indulgence in our present situation? What is more, the new piece I am contemplating at the moment draws its inspiration from the same period. Should I be concerned about my “failings” in this respect?
Mulling over this problem today I find myself clinging to an idea that has been with me for many years. Shortly after I started on a career of university teaching I developed an interest in the novels of John Wyndham. He made his name with such “sci-fi” classics as The Day of the Triffids and The Midwitch Cuckoos. My interest, as a sociologist, lay in the implicit social diagnosis within his stories, and I was impressed by the way in which, in the face of imagined disasters or threats to human survival of a previously unimagined seriousness, he placed his faith in the values of personal decency, integrity and courage. He affirmed the ultimate importance of the moral individual in the face of forces that threatened to overwhelm the human race.
I can’t help wondering whether the vision that drove Wyndham’s fiction, and which interested me then despite my professional commitment to sociology, is perhaps still alive within my art today. I would like to think that my art, rooted in memory, is not a retreat from the future that the “real world” appears to impose upon us, but a challenge to it.