Seahorse songs and hungry dust

The more I read of Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, winner of the Commonwealth writers prize in 2002, the more I have that delicious feeling that is rather like eating dark chocolate, drinking red wine that costs more than 3 pounds a bottle or talking to a really good friend. You know the delicious feeling I mean?

I have been thinking a lot about art lately, the point of art and why I am spending a ridiculous amount of money to get a masters of fine art. It’s not like going to banking school, not very practical at all, not very well known for post-graduate job opportunities, not very safe or comfortable or even very useful.
At least when you go to banking school you learn about managing money. Although I haven’t been to banking school, I imagine they are quite straightforward about the supremacy of capital, unlike art school and the art world, which is also all about money but everyone pretends it isn’t.

Although he speaks about writing, Gould could just as easily be referring to art when he says

“Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human diginity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before he too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations – that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. And more, moreover. Or perhaps not. Because it clearly was too big a burden for God, this business about reminding people of being other than hungry dust, and really the only wonder is that he perservered with it for so long before giving up.

I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.

… a book at its beginning may be a new way of understanding life – an original universe – but it is soon enough no more than a mere footnote in the history of writing, overpraised by the sycophantic, despised by the contemporary, and read by neither. Their fate is hard, their destiny absurd.
If readers ignore them they die, and if granted the thumbs-up of posteriety they are destined forever to be misconstrued, their authors transformed first into gods and then, inevitably, unless they are victor hugo, into devils.”

and yet I want to be more than hungry dust, and banking school doesn’t really have very good solutions for living as more than hungry dust, as more than a number defined by the numbers at the bottom of a bank statement.

Gould again: “I imagined the weedy seadragon’s beauty arose out of some evolutionary necessity; to attract mates possibly, or to merge with colourful reefs. Now I know beauty is life’s revolt against life, that the seadragon was that most perfect of things, a song of itself.”

you sing it, Mr Gould