Art accrues

Some people write to express themselves. Some people write to communicate with specific audiences. The hardest writing is the stuff that appeals to a lot of different, unknown people. I find notes to myself that I can no longer understand; there are letters and emails that are full of code and shared ambiguities that would be confusing in the wrong hands - or even dangerous; but fiction ...

There are already more novels in print than a person could read in a lifetime. Does the world need any more? Does a new novel have to be better than what has gone before? Is topicality something people want from their fiction?

The question is important now because the traditional methods of distribution for all the creative arts is changing. And the creators are the ones who are suffering most. Bookshops are now big and muscular, or online and dictatorial, and are squeezing the publishing companies; photographers contribute to massive online libraries where the revenue gets lower and lower as more and more pictures are available; music is sold by the track or listened to for next to nothing on streaming audio. People can access everything, from any time, so new work is in obvious and direct competition with classical and proven material from all over the world. Who wants to pay a premium to listen to stuff, just because it's new or local?

I don't know what happens next. I can see less and less originality making it into the public arena and I know more and more creative people who are struggling to earn money from their imagination. Meanwhile, publishing companies are refusing to read manuscripts and even agents are preferring work by celebrities.

This is one story that does not appear to have a happy ending.

Travel broadens the mind, maybe

"In future times, even these things shall seem pleasant." I forget the source of that quotation. A Greek, I think. I carry the phrase around like a warn coin that has worn off the milled edges and the raised type of details, spending it regularly on journeys where I am tired through lack of sleep and excess of motion, thin from rucksacks and missed meals or thick from the extravagence of lunchtime menus and credit card dinners - as time goes by, what I recall are the occasions where my jaw dropped at the wonder of the world, created by nature or man. I forget the bites and the wet clothes and remember the unique and unusual, things stared at intently to fix and cement into memory.

And then I return, usually to nothing special, but more aware of the world.

Except the world I return to does not care for wonder elsewhere, does not value experience beyond its own horizon, so my home world seems even more tawdry and childish, more limited and plain than when I left.

So then I find myself stretched, with my feet on familiar roads, entering familiar shops to buy the routine and the essential; but my head still sees the snow on the mountains and the golden temples, still smells the fragrance of the forest and the salt of the sea, still hears the bird calls and the choir to which I now belong, singing in the wilderness.