Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

that matter was once the womb of life, that our blood is moved by the impetus of its tides, that our feet stand on it’s platforms, that life is engulfed by the soil only to be resurrected from it. But when men have not felt this unity as a sensation of delight they cannot be moved by such logic. The fact that their bodies are under the same law as stones and water gives them no feeling of kinship with stones and water: it alienates them from their bodies. Therefore this delight is the one foundation and proof of my whole philosophy. From it I arrive at the three following definitions:

      God is the name we give to something eternal, fundamental, unvarying and limitlessly generative, which cannot be proved, only felt. Life is God operating through matter to the extent of it becoming self-conscious. Mind is that bit of God which operates through self-conscious matter.

      The difference between life and matter is that God is conscious in one and unconscious in the other; the resemblance is that he is fundamental to both. But in saying that God “is fundamental to” life and matter I imply that he is not completely identified with them, and there is an element of the universe which is not God. I do not believe this. The unity experienced throughout the delight must be absolute if it is to be true. All the universe is God, and men are parts of God. But if this is so why do we need to discover that God is fundamental to us and what surrounds? Why can we not always feel and see it? It is no answer to say that our sense of impropriety when children and old people are flayed by jellied petrol is founded on a delusion about the nature of things. Why, after accepting this brotherhood in eternity with the avalanche, the microbes of disease, howling wolves and murderers with bombs, must the thinker return to the universe of time and space and flight to eradicate them? Why is there evil?

      To me the only answer is, that conflicts within the body of eternity are the conditions of its existence. God could not be, in his entirety, eternal, fundamental, unvarying and limitlessly generative, if his parts were not unbalanced and in unending conflict. Such evil as the deliberate scorching to death of innocent people will always be part of life in the universe of time and space, and so will the struggle with such evil. Without evil there would be no struggle, without struggle there would be no life. Though life can often relax a little while from the struggle it can only finally abandon it by dying. Our inducement to continue this struggle is, that those who are most active and use all their faculties to the fullest stretch are occasionally rewarded by the heightened sensation of eternity stretching itself through them. The delight of this usually justifies life for those who feel it.

      A mind is a piece of eternity enclosing (as a balloon encloses air) an expanse of unknown and evil eternity, which is part of itself, and enclosed (as air encloses a balloon) by an expanse of unknown and threatening eternity of which it is part. Life is the mind’s struggle to explore the unknown and lessen the threat. When a mind has done a little of either it recognises its own eternity in what was previously ordinary, remote and horrible, and enjoys the short delight of extended consciousness.

      Note: throughout this thesis the words “God” and “eternity” are interchangeable.

      THE CONDITION OF THE ARTIST AMONG MEN Only a few men in any age are capable of the most rewarding sort of struggle to compel eternity from its dens inside the ordinary, the remote and the horrible. The majority prefer the comfort of acceptance to the delight of prolonged struggle. Delight is always a dubious, flickering thing. Comfort is stable, and can be protracted. It is got by accepting the result of a struggle (often somebody else’s struggle) and then struggling only enough to stay alive. It is essential that the majority should prefer comfort to delight, because the few who prefer delight are seldom given to that toil which supports a society – they are too busy forwarding it; besides, they often make poor parents. But adherence to comfort sometimes prompts men to muffle the discoveries of those who prefer delight, because acceptance of a new discovery often modifies an old one, and robs us of some of its comfort. When men need to defend their ignorance with censors, jails and executions it is a virtue to undermine their comfort, for the good has gone out of it.

      A short time ago “human progress” was an over-rated concept, now it is an under-rated one. Unluckily so, because it contains an important truth. Both failures to understand the nature of human progress come from measuring it in terms of comfort. Shelley and Wells – who mark the beginning and end of the 19th century optimism – thought they were pioneers of a society where comfort would be universal, struggle unnecessary and delight cheap. They believed they were preparing for a concerted human effort that would plant a garden where the ordinary, the remote, the horrible prevailed. We of the 20th century have learned that life always borders upon these enormities, and that even the bit of eternity which is our birth right can sometimes only be kept with a hard fight, and that without such a fight the unknown and evil can encroach on us and make us bestial. This lesson has been made so hideously true to us by two World Wars that we are inclined to disparage the idea of progress, especially social progress. But if progress is measured in opportunities for delight – or more precisely, in opportunities to struggle for delight – then we have reason to believe that a modern society such as our own is superior to most of the societies preceding it – even the slave-supported but magnificent society of classical Greece. Those who gave our society everything that most furthers it preferred delight to comfort. The great painters belong among such men.

      Anyone who classes painting with alcohol, nicotine and other expensive luxuries will see little reason to lump great artists with the scientists, politicians and religious enthusiasts usually regarded as the pioneers of civilization; for though no society has lacked great artists it is not easy to see how these influenced the events of their time. Perhaps artists do not influence the events of their time to any important degree. They do something altogether as solemn and important. They penetrate the external essence of contemporary events, make a lasting beautiful shape out of it and let that shape broadcast the significance of the event. Without artists there could be no history. Delight can be communicated and preserved through music, words, pictures and shaped minerals, but in not many other ways. Without being embodied by art in something we have made, no social delight would survive those who first enjoyed it:

      London’s pride is tumbled down,

       Down-a-down the deeps of thought,

       Greece is fallen and Troy town,

       Golden Rome has lost her crown,

       Venice pride is nought.

       But the dreams their children dreamed

       Fleeting, wild, romantic, vain…

       These remain.

      This poem (I have misquoted it slightly, not remembering the whole) contains everyone’s justification for making what they do as well as they can. The artist expresses, and by expressing, perpetuates, the actions and discoveries by which his people glimpsed eternity. A society which does not make such things will add nothing inspiring to history, and be commemorated only in footnotes to books about other societies, as the Spartans are commemorated.

       THE VISUAL ARTIST CATEGORY

      Good pictures are maps of districts where an artist discovered eternity. “This is where I found eternity” says Turner “in rain and steam and speed.” Michelangelo found it in the bodies of athletes, the artists of Altamira in the bodies of bulls they hunted. Poussin found it in the organisation of a civilised landscape, Bosch in the tumult of a phantasmagoric subconscious one. Bad pictures are faulty maps of districts where the painter has never been but where he believes eternity is to be found, because some good painter of the past has struggled for it and won it there. Bad paintings shine with reflected delight. Bad artists often find it easier to sell their work than good ones, because they are peddling the comfort of the accepted. They rarely try to crib from contemporary good artists because in doing so they run the risk of joining the struggle and becoming good.

      When we look at the world’s good paintings with the intention of putting them into categories we are depressed by their variety. Each painting seems a window into a different world, a world with its individual colours, proportions, inhabitants and emotional climate. The only common element is that each painting has an irrefragable