The Inexplicable

Something I forgot to mention about my Gallery Night experience, indeed something which has been a constant of my experience of each and every night so far, was the extremely powerful general sense I had of something being conjured, a wisdom and beauty if you will, far beyond what you might reasonably expect of any eighteen-year-olds. No, that's patronising. The age is irrelevant. Just far beyond people anywhere, any age. In the case of almost every individual artist there was something, a single work at the least, of which I felt: Now where did that come from? Surely not from the frail human vessel on hand to present his or her work?

Now I know that much, probably all, of what was on display was derivative, openly so. The little write-ups that 'explained' the artist and what they'd been up to name-checked the influences with glee. But that really doesn't matter. It still didn't alter the strange power of the works I've got in mind. They did what they were trying to do, to this viewer at least - or, possibly, perhaps even likely, they did something they weren't necessarily trying to do, at a conscious level, at all.

When we see this kind of thing going on in those we label 'genius' it's easy to recognise because there's so much of it. But I reckon there's a little bit of it in all of us and a good deal of the excitement and satisfaction, sometimes intoxication, of making art lies in the fact that we are aware of that when we do so.

I'm reading the first volume of Ian Bell's biography of Dylan, Once Upon A Time - The Lives of Bob Dylan at the moment. (My follow-up to the RVW biog.) It's obvious to me that there's simply no rational explanation we can give to how the distinctly unpromising (and, frankly unpleasant) nineteen-year-old fairly hopeless hopeful turned himself into the Voice of a Generation (in around about eighteen months) before going on to greater things - and, what's more, and here things get really spooky, KNEW he was going to do so. The irrational explanation I offer is that he opened himself to his daemon, his bargain for salvation, I suppose. And it worked, big time.