When someting is very simple it follows you. It holds on to you for a moment after you have left. For a moment it is still with you, clinging and cleaning and cutting through. Simplicity is very easy to lose but it is not at all easy to lose quickly. It is disposed of step by step, piece by piece. It is added to, moment by moment. It is a lack of anything else. All the messages are so simple. See you later. Call me. Hello. Have you forgotten me. Message are alwats very simple. I looked up unexpectingly and saw some of the paintings. Why were they so complex. Why were some of them so complex. I really can't understand why I bothered to be so complex on some of these pieces. It really is beyond me.
The blue footprints were well balanced. They had exactly the right feel to them. They are losing that now that the ink is fading. They are also going pink. The blue is fading to pink so the balance is not at all so good. Still it had been bothering me, even though I thought it had to change, still I object to the change. It is not the one I like. It was well balanced and now it is less well balanced. The blue is changing to pink and the effect is not as strong as it was. The balance is not maintained, it is lop-sided. It is like footprints in the sand, and then the tide coming in, the sand getting moister and collapsing fluidly and finally the image is gone. If the tide was coming in over a pond it would still look right, but somehow the ducks are not sea ducks. It is all wrong. It is not balanced. I may have to rebuilt the footprints in a blue paint. The ink was nice but it has faded so it is no longer balanced.
I was looking at something you had painted nd finding a lot of things in it and the pieces were fitting together very gently and slowly but surely the pattern was emerging. But there are pieces with no meaning at all for me. There are two pieces with no meaning to me at all. I can understand the presence of one piece that has no meaning, and that being its function, but I cannot understand two. The cowboy boot and the saxophone have got me beaten. If one of them has to be meaningless, perhaps the other is for defeat.
I spoke to someone who was old enough to clearl;y remember the second world war. We disagree strongly about the way things are and thwe way things should be. I like things to be very direct. I like a cause for an effect. I like simple economics. This is your job, this is your money, that was your choice, this is your destiny. She likes to think of equality. of all people being more equal. She wants the standards at the top to come down and the standards at the bottom to come up. She says what a small world it is. She has lived n many parts of it. But she does not think people respond to the world. She thinks they see no further than their own country. If a very able person can receive a doubling in their standard of living in another part of the world, for doing the same job, that constitutes a pressure on the most able to move elsewhere. She says that if they have so little loyalty as to look only at money then it is no loss. Perhaps she is just older. We belong to different worlds. She did not really want to continue the discussion, she did not see that it would achieve any change. I did want to continue the discussion. I think it helps to examine your views in front of a critic. I am probably painting myself too kindly. She did not seem to have any flexibility. I see advntges and faults in the present system, I just think it is better for everybody now that it was ten years ago. We belong to different generations. She remembers the loss of the war, but she wants todays youth to continue to pay. She wants it all to stay here with her. She said she thought morality was a genetic trait, like intelligence, and she was happy to see the intelligent leave the country because it left the moral majority. She implied that morality and intelligence were both genetic, and mutually exclusive. That intelligent people were not moral. I amn sure I am being less than fair, but that was what she said. As she spoke I felt this all derived fom fervour, and was not very clearly thought out. It did not feel well considered as she said it. It was interesting to meet somebody with clear beliefs. Rigidly held beliefs of any sort are just dogma, maya, cosmic lavatory paper. It was not at all clear. It was as though paradise could be attained just from somebody else. On her own she was free again. I think that perhaps she has stopped thinking of herself as one of a couple, and now wants to see herself as one alone for a moment. When I saw her she struck mne as much freer than otherwise. More open. More relaxed. She had much better space around her. She was smiling genuinely this time.
That is how it seemed. If I am right it doesn't matter. If I am wrong it doesn't matter. I am hoping to be wrong and trying to avoid thinking it by not writing it. But that is how it seemed to me.
A man talked to me about building a factory that looked just like an eighteenth century building, to preserve the character of an area. A fake. It will work if there is only one, but a fake is a fake. If there are many the style of visual deception becomes a style in itself, and the real buildings become fake designer fakes. It is probably better just to accept change, to build new, practical, functional quality styles.
So I happened to suddenly think Bob was missing Peter, and if I suddenly realised they had spoken on the telephone that morning, and that they missed each other, that's how it would have been. And indeed that's how it was. I am beginning to know what is happening.