What irks me and keeps me up at night and brings me back to my art and craft
Fred D’Aguiar

That beast. It can change shape and shift to the form of the thing sent to fight it and stop it in its tracks. That beast grows from the fight with what it meets. The act of a bout with it makes it grow like a sponge. So it is clear to me that the thing that I send must have in its nuts and bolts the keys to take the beast down and break that beast up. As the beast tries to eat the thing – and make my fight part of what it is, so that it may live as the genes of what was sent to fight it, so the thing starts to work to break up the beast. What I send to fight the beast looks like food, like more food for the beast, so it thinks. In fact, the meal is a ruse that the beast plays with, even as the real work of the thing starts to break down the beast.

Two things – one, a feel for the earth as a way to jump for joy in poems geared to big-up life; and two, a form that takes on greed by the few who add to their wealth while the rest of us fight to make ends meet and a lot of us die as we try our best – these two join to form a force that meets greed in a one-on-one and lives to tell the tale. The meet part is known; the live-to-tell-the-tale part not so much. Why? Well, it means that some trick must take place that does not leave a trace. That trick makes the beast think that it has won the fight and placed the force that tried to beat it on its side as a slave that now works for it, which the beast does with all that it meets that tries to block its path.

But not this time. With this trick of two things (the form and the stuff in that form) rolled up to show as just one, the work starts just when the beast thinks and feels that it has won. Think of a code in the form of a thing that starts out of the blocks as soon as it is touched, though just kept out of your sight while your gaze is fixed on some piece of it that shows off in front of you – a piece that grabs your eye up close and keeps you from that big out-of-sight and more apt thing. What this smoke-screen-act does is place a key in the beast, a code, that the beast does not see, a tool that fits all the nuts and bolts that keep the beast whole, a tool that turns those nuts and bolts one by one, so that bit by bit they wind loose and cause that beast to trip and fall to the ground, pulled limb from limb in a way that stops it once and for all…

Let me say it once more with a mind in sync with how I feel: I know how hard it is to fight the beast while lodged inside it, in its gut. I know that the big ask is how can you fight it if you are in it? I think that the form is where and how the fight should be waged, not just what is said to block the path of the beast. That form (the ‘way’ or the ‘how’) is the thing that starts to work out of sight of the beast as it feasts on what is said to its face in a bid to stop it in its tracks. The form is not free of what is said (the two things tend to show up as one thing). It is just that it is not in plain sight; it is hidden from the gaze by what is loud and up front for the beast to get to grips with and feast on, making what is said one more thing to add to how it works through and on the crowds that chant and march to stop it.

Through my art I wage a war to stop the beast of greed and gain. Through my art I work to raise hearts and minds to come on board with this task of change for good. Art steals round to the back of the field of troops paid by the beast to be on guard to stop art. Art says a thing in a way that is seen and heard, but not known to the full at that first meet and greet with it. Art wants to shake hands and sit and break bread and keep talk in the air, since talk is free and good for all of us, whoever we are. The beast is not on guard for such a foe as art. Such a foe is warm and brings a lot of good to give for free to the beast, who just knows how to take, take, take. The beast sees art as soft and hardly worth the fight. Once the beast starts to feed on what art gives it, then art can start to do the work that will stop that beast once and for all time.

The craft of art is made of the stuff of what I have lived, from the days of my youth up to now. I take the past and tweak it for how it sounds as a thing that comes from the past and takes hold of you. I see it and hear it, too. I try to give to it all of the things that I have in my nerves and flesh and blood and mind and heart. I give it a shape that looks good and looks as if it does not weigh much. I want it to lift with ease off of the tongue and latch on to the heart and stay lodged in the head. I point my art at what I see that looks wrong and hurts to see. My art tells me what does not feel right and needs me to say so.

My art is helped by shelves and sound files, and scenes framed on walls, or shapes stacked in cool rooms, and some left in the air or shown on the spot in a flash or left to break down in time for all to see, including those who do this same thing, too, or a thing like it. I learn from them (and I hope they learn from me). We join ranks for the fight with the beast. I do not feel that it is just me face-to-face with the beast. I am part of a crowd. There is a long line, that goes back in time, of those of us in the arts (all arts) who jump on board the craft of the arts on terms that we have worked out in our talks. These talks work out, as well, the terms of the fight that we find when we turn up for it. I think all the time of the poor and those robbed of their rights, that they are the ones who guide my art and drive my need to read and write (and sing in the bath!), and I try my best to stop the beast who preys on those who need help – preys, in fact, on all of us. I count the dead left in the trail of the beast. Some of them have no names. Most of them died out of sight. The beast took them, killed and ate them, and threw what was left of them on a hill of the dead. Then the beast moved on. Here I come to meet it. In it and out of it. With form and with what I put in that form. The two things are one thing, or so it seems. The beast clamps down on my art with teeth and with long nails. The fight and feed start, and so it looks as if my art will die and end up on a hill of the dead. So it looks as if I did not know how it is that the form of what I made has its real work to do once the beast takes hold of it.

I want my chants and spells, and calls to act, to work like charms with builtin shocks that can wake up a closed mind and stall the greed in a gut, tripping the beat of a heart geared to take, take, take from earth and the rest of life, with no mind for what is left or where it leaves us all. I say all this and yet I know that my words on their own do not act, but wish to lead to some good act; I know that this song and dance wants to put the mind in a trance for some good deed to break out. If there is a look for what I do, it is that youth strapped to skis and crouched as they race to the lip of a ramp that will launch them, so that they float, stretched out, for as long as they can defy the pull of the earth’s poles back to the ground: the space that opens up as they float is the gap that I want to write into, and for these works to act through, from me to you.

We are not at the end of all things, just at our end, it seems. Earth and those left on it will have a life when we are gone. Germs will be left to roam free; no bleach to drive them back. Ants, too, free of our nerve sprays and last meals. The cockroach and some fish as well. We have killed and will continue to kill more of the rest of life on earth as we live out the last days of our lives, and most of those creatures have not even been named by us. What can be worse than to kill a life and not take the time to give it a name? I do not mean that the thing can be named and then killed. I mean that the mind that is in a mood to kill, and kills with ease, does not take time to get to know the life it takes. I also mean that despite the pains that we go to in our gaze at life on earth we still take the route of wiping out all life forms. That is cause for grief. The earth is scarred by what we have done to it. The pits deep in hills, the oil spills, the spent rods of nukes. For that I grieve as well. What I do not shed a tear for is the fact of our end. We came here to take care of the place that took care of us, and what did we do? We broke it. We smashed the gift that it gave to us, of a place to live in and be with and thrive for as long as we had life in us. That is a crime. In a court we would be put to death or locked up for life. Not left to sing as the ship of our life on earth sinks for good. Not with some of us geared to the craft of songs that say what we did wrong and why we did it with eyes wide. To stare at a life and take it, in the knowledge that it is the last of its kind. To know that we have reached a point of no return in our path and still head at full speed down that road to our death. That takes a mind locked in a death wish that does not give a damn.

What is to be done with the fact that how I see and feel are tied to where I live and what I do? The life of the life-denying beast thrives off me. I say something that is meant to stop the beast in its tracks and the beast stops, takes the block of the thing that is in its path, and eats the good and the bad that the thing has wrapped up in it. The thing in the path of the beast had a job to do – to stop that beast. Once held, it starts to work on the beast who holds it, and, the hope is, stop that beast. But the beast just does its thing, which is it takes up and folds and eats and gains from what is sent to beat it – changing the thing from bad for it to a plus for it – and moves on.

If it is true that we see what we want and not what might be new and strange to our eyes, then only once a thing is seen by us on our terms do we take the leap of the gaze that makes it strange, that makes it look like a thing whose name we do not know. It hurts to think what it costs us to be blind and stay closed off to what we do not know, to think all our eyes are good for is to turn things into safe bits of life kept near at hand to serve us. If I lean in to be up close to something, that is down to my need to feel what that thing is made of and how it wants me to get to grips with it. If I mourn for the way we live, with no care for the rest of life on earth, that we do not stop to think what the young will have to live with once we are done with our smash-and-grab ways of life, then it is in order to make one last try to turn the craft back as it speeds to the brink. The turn takes much work by all of us who care for life on earth – all life and all earth, not some of the life and parts of the globe. How do we turn a mind? From bleak to hope. From the greed that wants to bring all things to an end for short term gain to the keen gaze that sees all life as linked, not one life as prized and the next as of no use. The nerve to want to save the earth, and all the life on it and in it, has to come from a mind that is tied to a heart, a feel for a thought and no thought that is not felt as it is formed. A nerve that holds up both arms to greet what is strange. A mind that does not put a price on a thing as the first thought, but wants to know what makes that thing tick and tries to forge links with it as a first way to meet with it on the same ground. This asks for the heart and mind to work as one, for the feel of a thought to be the same in kind and tone as the thought and not split from it.