MORNING SERIAL

BUT he still insisted it was the subject that gave the work its substance, not what they had done with it. It was, he’d say, as if only the emotional spasm Bevan had once ridiculed had been revealed, but not the intellectual star-tapping which the Tredegar dreamer had wanted for us.

His old man said that the nouns “artist” and “poseur” were synonyms. Both paradoxically concerned with removing the self in the very act of observation only to show how selfconsciously it had been done. For him the vantage and the viewed were inseparable. His riff was that all life was memory even as it was experienced, there and instantly gone, so that we forever lived in the past, even as it left us. We lived on by imagining that past which was the future we yearned to remember. The dream of life was aspiration. Its nightmare was memorialisation. We trapped ourselves in the techno-present by the cloying memento mori that was the falsification that photography bought. Memory, which was History, was a jumble of relationships to be savoured, not a grid of relatives to be connected.

His old man fed the boy scraps about his past as if he was a hungry and insistent dog. Bit by bit. A piece at a time. His mother’s grandparents built up the picture of their daughter for him, but it came as coloured shards of a sacred window, so that he glimpsed the child and schoolgirl and trainee teacher only through their blinded eyes. “Good people,” his old man would say when Billy came back from visits there, to his own more pared-down home life, set amidst the old man’s canvases, brushes, easels and the lingering smell of gooey oils. They had died, young, in their sixties, the one after the other as if arranged. Billy grieved, just like a dog. And asked more about what he didn’t know, his teenager feistiness setting up confrontations which the old man diverted with trivia whenever he could.