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Note on Art

I thought of turning out little numbers beginning ‘And we have...’. When there were enough I would rearrange them and call the set Mill Hill Park. This first piece is a drill or magic spell to render harmless such urban nasties as graffiti. These daubs are not, I believe, antisocial so much as risk-taking; think of the illegal fun that nippy car drivers have—the suits, not the joy-riders. If such self-expression is rebellious, can it be justified in any explanatory, if not exactly healing, vision like my one here? Partly, yes, though I don’t totally convince myself. Let me admit that for all my admiration of William Blake (my exegesis lies in a bottom drawer awaiting its moment), and although when I speak of vision I mean it somewhat in the Blakean, biblical sense, I don’t claim powers of hallucination, clairvoyance, eidetic sight, prophecy and so on. I have my limits, and poets are not moral legislators.

The signatures of graffito artists are tags. A Meister is a master craftsman—affected, but it sounds good. Viz. and loaded are literal, but also allude to magazines. Orc is Rebellion in Blake’s mythology. Stroke, bowl, ascender and crossbar come from calligraphy. ‘Fractal devils and angels’ alludes to Escher’s Circle Limit 4. Plank does double duty as itself and as the Planck Length, said to be the smallest (10^–35m) possible spatial magnitude—or, to quote Roger Penrose:

‘[the Planck length] is the distance (10^–35m = (hGc^–3)^½) at which the so-called “quantum fluctuations” in the very metric of space-time should be so large that the normal idea of a smooth space-time continuum ceases to apply. (Quantum fluctuations are a consequence of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.)’—The Emperor’s New Mind, Vintage, 1989.

No, I don’t understand it much either. I gather that space-time is possibly grainy, or stringy, or membranous, and there’s no such thing as Nothing:

‘Nearly all the theories [to marry quantum theory with general relativity] predict that on tiny scales, approaching the “Planck scale” of 10^–35 metres, familiar notions of space and time start to disintegrate, giving way to a seething melee of quantum gravitational fluctuations known as “space-time foam.”’ R.Matthews, New Scientist, 20.3.99.

Alan Marshfield

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