As Parmi les nomades at the Afrikabidon festival in Ardèche on the 26th.

It seems that every few years I have to go through the cycle of thinking through the following thoughts about doing art and documentaries, in no particular order:

This is going nowhere. It’s depressing and humiliating.

Maybe I should give it all up.

I don’t want to give it all up. That would be depressing and humiliating and there’s nothing else to do with my life but rearrange folders on my computer while obsessively picking my nose.

Maybe I’m doing it for the wrong reasons. [Followed by introspection.]

I don’t think I’m doing it for the wrong reasons. But do I get anything out of it? Couldn’t I just look out of the window instead?

I get more satisfaction out of it than from anything else. I should carry on.

The most recent iteration of this, in parallel with deciding to take a full-time job for the first time in years, led to my current settlement with myself, a sort of cosying up to despair: I’m 43, the art world has failed to recognize me, no one pays me to make art, no one buys it when it’s made, I don’t like academia – not that I have the brain for it – and I don’t think academia likes me, I’m no schmoozer, but I can still keep going, without hope/despair of reward or recognition.

Part of the process is having the work seen by other people, though, so, I asked myself, how can I get that outside these institutions I haven’t managed to establish myself in? By my website; by publish-on-demand photobooks and DVDs; by using my house as a gallery; by paying for gallery space. The house-as-gallery has a certain bohemian credibility, but that’s somewhat thwarted by being part of the E17 Art Trail, and self-publishing and paying for space sends people’s noses upwards. The official advice is:

In general, hire galleries are well known on the art scene and curators and collectors are wary of them.  While many artists organise shows of their own work in a group with other artists, putting on your own solo show in a gallery space that can be hired can suggest that no art world professional is willing to select your work for exhibition and thus tarnish your reputation.

“He’ll be writing his own Wikipedia entry next,” they might say, if they cared.

At the same time as I’ve been shedding my pride about maintaining the pose of a ‘proper’ artist, I’ve taken to wearing a fluorescent tabard on my bike. I even leave it on, with my  helmet, when I go into shops. I think this is all good, but I’m not entirely sure.

And who’s got their stuff in Gimpel Fils, and who’s hoping for the basement of a bookshop on the Lower Clapton Road?

I’ve been listening to my new CD of Gustav Mahler’s second symphony, “The Resurrection”. This is all about life after death: from both the music and what Mahler said about it, the idea is that life is good when you’re young and naive, then becomes a complex of confusion, doubt, anger and, predominantly, suffering, then you die – but that’s OK because God will call you and you will live in bliss forever:

Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n / Rise again, yes, rise again,
Wirst du, Mein Staub, / Will you My dust,
Nach kurzer Ruh’! / After a brief rest!
Unsterblich Leben! Unsterblich Leben / Immortal life! Immortal life
wird der dich rief dir geben! / Will He who called you, give you.

Wieder aufzublüh’n wirst du gesät! / To bloom again were you sown!
Der Herr der Ernte geht / The Lord of the harvest goes
und sammelt Garben / And gathers in, like sheaves,
uns ein, die starben! / Us together, who died.

O glaube, mein Herz, o glaube: / O believe, my heart, O believe:
Es geht dir nichts verloren! / Nothing to you is lost!
Dein ist, ja dein, was du gesehnt! / Yours is, yes yours, is what you desired
Dein, was du geliebt, / Yours, what you have loved
Was du gestritten! / What you have fought for!

O glaube / O believe,
Du wardst nicht umsonst geboren! / You were not born for nothing!
Hast nicht umsonst gelebt, gelitten! / Have not for nothing, lived, suffered!

Was entstanden ist / What was created
Das muß vergehen! / Must perish,
Was vergangen, auferstehen! / What perished, rise again!
Hör’ auf zu beben! / Cease from trembling!
Bereite dich zu leben! / Prepare yourself to live!

O Schmerz! Du Alldurchdringer! / O Pain, You piercer of all things,
Dir bin ich entrungen! / From you, I have been wrested!
O Tod! Du Allbezwinger! / O Death, You masterer of all things,
Nun bist du bezwungen! / Now, are you conquered!

Mit Flügeln, die ich mir errungen, / With wings which I have won for myself,
In heißem Liebesstreben, / In love’s fierce striving,
Werd’ich entschweben / I shall soar upwards
Zum Licht, zu dem kein Aug’gedrungen! / To the light which no eye has penetrated!
Mit Flügeln, die ich mir errungen / Its wing that I won is expanded,
Werde ich entschweben. / and I fly up.
Sterben werd’ich, um zu leben! / Die shall I in order to live.
Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n / Rise again, yes, rise again,
wirst du, mein Herz, in einem Nu! / Will you, my heart, in an instant!
Was du geschlagen / That for which you suffered,
zu Gott wird es dich tragen! / To God will it lead you!

And it’s an astonishing piece of music, if often dense and confusing, with emotions turning on a sixpence, colossal, articulate, beautiful, lyrical, ironic, terrifying. It didn’t make me think about God or an afterlife, though, so much as the possibility of this world being better: I imagined some passages as a soundtrack to a film about some great, ideal revolution, the shat-upon masses standing up straight and coming into their own. But the piece as a whole wouldn’t fit that, because in Mahler’s world not only do you have to suffer before you get the reward of a better life, you have to take the great bungee jump of death itself. Only this bungee rope, like Tinkberbell’s resurrection in Peter Pan, only works if you believe in it enough. No faith and you’re just a skin sack of broken bones and ruptured organs. That’s the price of Mahler’s hope: faith and death.

So what use is hope if you don’t believe? Even when I did, I don’t recall thinking much about the afterlife as a reason to do the right thing or put up with stuff – that seemed a rather unworthy, self-centred preoccupation: surely a believer should do the right thing because that’s what God wants and so it’s as right as gravity and the speed of light, if we could but see it. I can see it makes good evolutionary sense to have an emotion that makes you keep trying even when all  evidence and reason suggests that there is no point; a neurophysiological response that overrides everyday rationality to keep the organism alive for another day: like God, your genes don’t care how much you suffer, just get on and keep trying to fulfil your destiny. But is there anything in it for me? I don’t think so.