How to build a shelf

                            Buster builds a shelf

​Andrew Huberman is in my kitchen. His voice, thick with certainty, booms from a body he has spent time building. Huberman, an American neuroscientist, is a how to kind of guy. You know the type: thinking about people in the same way you think about putting up a shelf. Drill a few holes, screw in some battening, lay down your wood and, hey presto, you have a beautiful borderline personality shelf or an easily manufactured mahogany narcissist. He is talking to Bill Eddy, a man of gentler mien, before the blade of conviction cuts through. Having mounted the pulpit from the gleaming steps of data, he recites the percentages for paranoiacs and histrionics who are out there in this dangerous ol’ word these guys are gonna tame.


A friend had sent me the Huberman Lab podcast on How to Deal with High Conflict People. Not, I think, or hope, because she thought I was one, but that I would find it interesting. I did. Not, perhaps, for the reasons she imagined.


This laboratory, like most in science and selling, is in the business of exploration only as a path to the solid house of solutions. Proofs or predictions to trim the world. I lasted thirty two minutes and five seconds. The two and a half hour podcast, like the world it inhabits, is broken into manageable bite size chunks that can be labelled, packaged, consumed. At 38:54 you can chew up Negative Advocates; at 1:37:27 you can spit out a Combative High-Conflict Individual and the gobs of Blame. After, both men have painted the past in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer technicolour, they tell all of their listeners, children be warned,  how the world has gone Bergman black and you must never get engaged, or marry, until you have known the person for 365 days. Huberman then does a snake oil routine for one of his sponsors who produce the only vitamin he ever lets into his temple. I snapped. The shrinking of complexity coupled with the brazen selling of a better self, had me broken.  I was about to hurl the speaker into the oven with my Friday night fish, when I thought What Reason Could I Give. Not to the destruction of certainty or the certainty of destruction for the speaker, but the beautiful Don Cherry duet with Bobo Stenson. I usually cook with musical accompaniment and Huberman had remninded me why. Music rescued me from the madness. I switched from the attempt to straitjacket the world into explanation, to swaying in my kitchen not knowing where I was. If you don't know the track, give it a listen, it might take you somewhere.


        

                                      The Crossing II (Famine Horse), Ken  Currie, 2024

​Artists work in their own laboratories, but - unless it is within the technical, material or formal elements of a medium - they are not in search of certainty. Certainty chokes. For artists, - and some clinicians: Oliver Sachs, for example, who once said, I would  have to know someone's whole biography before I offer a diagnosis - there are no answers, only explorations, questions, playing. A path to who knows where. This is why art - poetry, music, painting  - is such  rich terrain and the threat that it faces from the explainers and quantifiers needs to be resisted. We must not let the rationalising mind erode art's "tendency to celebrate the purposeful purposelessness."  as Jed Perl wrote in The New Republic, back in 2014:

This process is reflected in the ever-growing obsession with polls,  surveys, and sundry forms of bureaucratic analysis, which threaten to reduce all art’s unruly richness to a set of data points.  Instead of viewing life’s unquantifiable artistic experiences as a check on quantification, the well-intended impulse among  many liberal commentators is to try and quantify the unquantifiable. But the power of art, which is so personal and so particular, is finally unquantifiable — and therefore a source of embarrassment to the rationalizing mind. What is at stake is art’s freestanding power.                                                                                 -   Liberals Are Killing Art, Jed Perl

​Artist, Ken Currie, one of the so called "New Glasgow Boys", has just exhibited his latest paintings, The Crossing at Flowers Gallery, London. These are pictures of terrible beauty. There is not much light but there is life.  And one of the joys at being at a smaller gallery is there is no text on the wall. You have to look, take time to engage, think, feel and travel across, and into, the canvas. All of the paintings, tender and unbearable, are exquisitely painted, full of rich detail and a fine application of paint. Currie has turned his brush to create a world that is hard, unforgiving, absurd, fascinating, ambiguous and unsettling. Having stood before them once, I went back for a second looking and wrote this:

​                                       

        The Crossing

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          I return to Ken’s tenebrous turning
          of paint to relentless gloom
          where white hope is dead, haunting
          the basement with its filleted light

          stiff legs and arms lift from boat’s stillness
          in prayer or naked despair, watched over
          by stern executioners, eyes resting above
          penitent dresses, suits stitched with night’s thread

          I tread through his world, keen dread
          presses my gaze into the blackness
          a murk made in mans’ mastery
​          where I must look but never live

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                                        Ghost cod, Ken Currie, 2023

​Ghost cod, an almost two and a half meter high canvas, illuminated the basement, its glow, pulling your eyes towards it. This butterflied cod is luminous. You know and don't know what it is a painting of. The lines and light of its caudal fin are intricately rendered. Currie’s use of white captures the solidity and fragility of its flesh, dense patches of colour against lighter strokes and featherings of white fluttering into the darkness. Yet, even what first appears to be a mass of greyish black is dusted and scraped to reveal a pulsing lightness. It is fish, angel, light, it is plummeting and hovering, it trembles and stands solid. It is a wonderful painting without meaning. Unless, of course, it finds its way on to the slab in the Huberman Lab. Then you'll know it's a manic depressive angel trying to escape heaven disguised as a fish.


Some people yearn for explanation, I want to hold on to wonder. But, what reason could I give... 

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