I would imagine even you,
netizen, are busy, busy, and busy again - eager to whizz or surf off. For, let us face it, a Treacle slowness is almost a
contemporary crime. But, I admonish the wrong crowd. Please excuse me, for you have chosen the tortoise route, haven't
you - the route that is slower seeming?
So pleased you could join me!
Map? No, sorry, there is
no map. No, I don't know where we are going. But I am pretty sure we start from here.
Let’s start from that
original painting. It is our point of reference. It is not a large painting, nor very noticeable. We might walk past the painting
but, even so, we have seen and have experienced. An exchange has taken place between
the painting and ourselves. Or unique exchanges on an individual basis. Having seen, experienced and exchanged I am changed,
yet again, forever (especially when moving forward in time which is my learned habit). Yet, what is this painted thing? Can
we know anything about it, from it, or of it? I mean really know. Can we
understand the exchange? To start with a simple obvious question, “Who was Betty Treacle, for instance, and would that
tell us anything”?
But, before we start, I must check you are ok to leave
without a map.
Time
and space are one and the same, a common or garden tree with its growth rings can simply show you this, if examined at a Treacle
pace. So, will you embark on this rambling journey through spacetime, even with me, your unelected
leader, acting up like Ahab? Will you step into the 'howling infinite' with me?
But as in landlessness
alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously
dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
Chapter 23, The Lee Shore, MOBY DICK, Herman Melville
You might get lost in this treacly, map-less world
so, like Betty Treacle, carry your key with you. Yes, go get your key. Touch it for comfort. It will help you get closer to
Betty. I'll wait for you.
Your key is a reminder of a large part of who you are
in this world (place in space). Another large part is where you are in time (moment in space). Action through time and space
is experience. Embedded experience through repetition is knowledge: a rough map of life to tell you useful strategies in known
contexts. To leave without a map is to want to test that knowledge: an adventurous human spirit.
I have
always thought that an artist finds new knowledge patterns in a non-linear, more fluid and cloudy way, than a 'straight
line' thinker (popularly retrofitted and caricatured as the scientist or the engineer). Perhaps this is lazy stereotyping.
It’s a hypothesis to test. Thing is though, this might mean, to explain a fragment
amongst the myriad, then I may have to take account of everything in the artist’s
productive chaos and lay it out in straight lines. I’ll try not to do this even though it would, of course, make it
easier to understand - there is no logical reason why it might not, equally possibly, make it easier to misunderstand. So,
sick of galleries persistently forced to try to explain art (by their paymasters), I’ll resist a dry explanation in
favour of trying to give you a feel of intuition, a sniff of creation, a frisson of risk that comes with the realisation that
it might not be straightforward. It might not add up! That is, you are welcomed here by a handshake with Treacle.
The painting is by an unknown artist. It is idiosyncratic yet, at
the same time, so (seemingly) unremarkable that I feel safe in using what is termed 'common sense', to make the presumption
that there was an actual 'sitter' for this painting who once lived and acted and did things in spacetime. How or why
else would it be painted? The figure represented in the act of posing, may or may not have been called 'Betty Treacle'
as the museum label suggests, but it pictures a likeness of someone who, with high probability, once acted in the world.
I use 'acted' in the sense of, as we say, 'did things' or made actions.
Whether she made something or nothing of herself in life we do not know but
we do know that Treacle was dead to begin with so we must travel first to the
realm of the dead to find her. Got your key? No, thought you would skip that? I would go and get it, if I were you.
OK?
Then, let us go! Let us commence on the trail of Betty Treacle.
After all, what better place to look for a doorway to the land of the dead than a Victorian museum?
