Subsistence

This painting is a painting about light before it is a painting about anything else, of course: a light so strong that old age cannot face it and youth struggles with its brightness.

It is also a painting about a subject matter that increasingly engages and interests me, and one of contemporary culture’s greatest taboos: ageing and the aged. You may say this painting is about different ages or stages in life: maturity toiling in the field, watched by expectant eager youth, barely registered by the elderly. Its composition forces the viewer to square herself with the only faces that are fully visible and readable in their resigned lassitude: the faces of the elderly man and woman sitting on the foreground.

Its composition also suggests the contrasting horizons of early and late life. The young girl looks ahead, her horizons are as broad and vast as the rolling fields she contemplates behind the safety of the fence. In the elderly man’s gaze the artist has managed to convey the look of someone who has seen this scene many times before and was once the subject of another young child’s gaze as he toiled the land. The young girl’s posture suggests vigour and excitement, the elderly man’s face, merely recognition.

The elderly woman takes us a step further yet: her eyes are no longer with the world around her, but she is no self-inquisitor either. With her all is weight, the weight of the world on the aged, and to suggest that the painter has anchored the plate of food on her lap: food that is neither sensual nor reinvigorating. Food that ensures subsistence from one day to the next only: like the short faltering steps of old age.

Like a crab in a crevice

In the last couple of years I have pondered the aging process. It is easy to put your finger on age as a compendium of physical collapses: one day you are going up the stairs and your knees start to creak and what once was reversible is now with you for good. On a night out in a crowded bar where some exciting new band is yodelling the city’s dernier cri you find yourself yearning for your coverlet and hot water bottle. Another day you start to sit downstairs on the bus because your shopping bags are particularly loaded and never make it up again to the front seats on the upper decker.

It is much harder to fix aging as a mental process. In my mind, I am the same person I have ever been and the first few times I registered a differential and deferential treatment from those younger than me, I was slightly perturbed. A line had been drawn that made it indecorous for me to stray to the other side of the age divide. It was frustrating because I could still read the codes that those of previous generations could not decipher: I knew what was behind a t-shirt, a nail varnish, the flickering light of a website, I could hear a snippet of music and have a sense of communal recognition.

Then the sourness of those moments when youth, that very far away very small print that you are usually unable to read, comes in sharp focus and you realise that it is written in a language that you cannot decipher any more. This happened to me in a city centre café where I was having coffee and cake a couple of days ago: wandering around an airy room with high ceilings, my eyes finally settled on the young girl sitting two tables away from me: late teens, long unkempt but very healthy and clean hair of lustrous gold-brown, clear complexion; her attention is fully concentrated on the plastic knife she is using to dissect a cheesecake brownie that she has taken out of the paper bag that she is using instead of a plate. She is holding a take away coffee cup with her slender fingers crowned with chipped dark nail varnish. And I realise that I cannot read this girl. I simply cannot settle the question as to whether she is saving money by ordering take away and yet having it indoors, or whether she prefers the lighter packaging, or whether she is in thrall to America’s love affair with everything deciduous; Or a mixture of all three. What is not in question is that she looks graceful doing something that would mark me as odd. She is young.

Surrounded by the cup, saucer, plate and cutlery that tie me to the table in this cafe, I feel as outmoded as a venerable dowager drinking from a china cup in an ancient tearoom.

The party is over

The party is over. It lasted for days. It lasted so long your bones still rattle to the drums. It was so loud your housemate, the pill-popping Beastie Boys-headbanging piece of work,  had to sleep in his girlfriend’s car across the street. You took the right drugs and fucked the wrong man. You crossed the line of tired with your eyes open and your limbs loose. The world was sharp for hours and now it’s dull and smeared like the splash of vomit on the bathroom wall.

The party is over: there is no music and no strangers you can love with all your heart.

Look around you to see the faces of those who stayed behind to rinse up glasses, mop the floor and gently wake up the interloper on your couch. They are now your family.

Brit-lliance

On Friday I met an acquaintance that I had not seen in a very long time: one of those lapses of time that really gives the measure of change. A slim man in his twenties, now in his late thirties he was as trim as he had ever been but his hair and beard were speckled with salt and pepper and laughter lines had begun to plow a path around his eyes.

His character, in so far as I knew him, seemed unchanged: it was easy to see how a sardonic and mischievous sense of humour was largely responsible for his crows’ feet. His face bore witness to the old adage that by forty we have the face we deserve. I had met him in Dublin when he was the drummer in a band fronted by friends of mine but he now lives in Cork with his wife and two children. He no longer makes music, he now works in advertising.

At one point, after an extended and hilarious impression on Corkonian mores that could easily become a 30-minute stand up routine, he said he wanted to see “Inside Llewyn Davis”. “Nobody I know went to see that film,” he added, “I used to go to every single Coen Brother’s film, religiously. I don’t anymore.”

Later still, someone remembered that we were marking the 20th anniversary of Britpop. “Jesus, twenty years.” He looked up and sighed. For a moment, I had a vision of this man in a tight gold shirt behind his drum kit when we were all part of a community that revolved around music, literature, film, photography. A time when wearing a gold shirt was a plausible choice that spelt promise.

If you are fortunate in life, you will experience morsels of Eden: slices of brightness and promise that will only fit in their right places when life has also given you its inevitable taste of the fall. The sliver of life this acquaintance and I once shared with so many other friends was one of those morsels. It was Ireland in the 90s but for a couple of years life felt like a stroll in the park in the sunshine.

Today I bought a Sunday paper that sported a picture of Damon Albarn. He has just released an album, he now has a family; unlike my acquaintance, he still makes music. After buying the paper, I went for a walk in the sunshine down the canal replaying some of the memories that the unexpected encounter on Friday night had sparked.

I still go to see Coen Brother’s films and I had seen “Inside Llewyn Davis”. It’s a good film, it is also dark, damp, cold, and a deep shade of blue. A song played in my mind as I returned to my house trailing the sun this afternoon: “Parklife”.  “Parklife” is the perfect soundtrack to a day like today, warm, innocent, and full of brightness; a song drenched in the cherished unreliable sunshine of the British Isles.

When I was nearing the house at the close of my walk, I heard the chiming of an ice-cream van and, for the first time this year, it fell into place.