Fiction, titled suggested by Alasdair Stuart. Some time around 2002, back when I wanted to, y’know, do this shit for a living, I came up with a character called John Dials. The basic idea was that he was a hyper-intelligent time traveller, shagging his way around various kinds of historical fiction, and solving crimes by really unlikely methods or even by accident. You know, comedy. The first was was going to be a Bronte parody, full of overblown violent landowners, windswept moors, and amusingly graphic incest.

But I don’t really do light comedy very well, and I was constantly frustrated by my inability to make it work. But then a year or two later someone asked me to come up with a horror thing with “scary trees” in it for them to draw. And I went back to Dials, and re-imagined him in a more mad scientist/stark horror vein, and came up with something titled “Earth Died Screaming”, set in 17th century Dorset, about Black Shuck, the devil hound, and a hangman’s tree.

But when I saw the title “The Atom Waltz”, it reminded me of him. So here’s John’s recounting of his own origin story. John Dials, my own personal Doctor Who, back before all this revival bollocks.

The Atom Waltz

The hippies will tell you we’re made from stars. That all the matter of our planet, and our own bodies was all born in that white hot furnace in the heart of the sun. And they’re not actually wrong. They’ll get all excited about protein chains in some primordial soup, and a lightning strike. They’ll tell you’re we’re born in fire and lightning, that we’re somehow holy or remarkable for it.

Fuck ‘em. I am John Dials, and I am a scientist, and I tell you straight: fuck ‘em. In the eyesocket.

We’re mud that sat up, and about as fucking bright. We’re bastards who spend our lives looking from things to hump, kill or eat. Just like every other animal on the planet. That fact that we’ve got a language means nothing what so fucking ever. Whales have a fucking language. And no, it’s not fucking deep and moving and beautiful. It’s just vast fucking cow noises. Get over it.

We’re nothing but an accident of chemistry and physics. Bear that in mind. Sure, people will waffle on about the astronomical odds of our universe happened. Of us happening. There’s a fucking massive number of zeroes on the odds of anything. Great. But it still doesn’t make us special. There might be a massive number of zeroes on the odds, but there’s an even more massive number of zeroes on the amount of time that everything had to happen in. You can pick your own metaphor, if you have to, but I’m not helping you dress it all up in something like it means anything. It’s all just fucking maths. Physics. Whatever.

The point is, the expanse of nothing we came from is so fucking vast, that however massive the number you need to stake against one is, still, there’s enough of it to make sure that we happened in it. In fact, the odds are pretty good that we’ve happened an infinite number of times. That actually, despite the vastness of the odds, actually, we’re tediously inevitable. That everything is.

But the really sad thing is that stupid fucking inevitable accident of cosmic-scale science that we oozed our way out of, somehow equipped us with brains that like to find patterns and meaning. Impose order on things. Whatever. So we scrabble around a meaningless universe, and we find patterns, and we make shit up that gives it all meaning.

That’s all your fucking gods and magic and hippy star children rubbish are. The heavy grey bit in the top of your strangely shaped bag of dirty water making shit up, so that… so that…

I don’t fucking know why.

I’m the smartest fucking man on the planet. You think anyone else could have invented all this shit? I’ve looked inside quarks, I have. You know what’s there? Vibrating string. Vibrating fucking string. You get down small enough, it’s always vibrating fucking string. You look inside one vibrating string, you know what you find? A smaller vibrating string.

That’s the face of your god, cunts. Vibrating fucking string.

So I started drinking. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? I mean, every last one of us is all alone in a pointless universe that contains not one iota of detectable meaning, but at least all that fucking starstuff has come together in a few forms that will get our brains good and fucked up.

Anyway, some time around the third week, I had an idea. It’s all vibrating string, all the way down. And there’s this thing where time works differently when you get down to the really small scale. Look, there’s maths, OK? Give me a blackboard, and about three weeks, and quite a lot of really expensive scotch, and I’ll write it down for you. You won’t understand it.

But to cut a long story short, I invented a fucking time machine. Yeah, I really am that fucking smart.

Of course I’ve used the fucking thing. You know what I did with it? I came back in time of course. So I’m standing here in a my sealed suit, in the middle of the most unpleasant fucking storm I’ve ever seen, and in about two minutes, lightning is going to strike this pool of horrible smelling sludge at my feet. Probably. Well, certainly, but I’m standing here with a big copper pole. I’m just trying to decide if there’s any meaning in killing all life on earth before it starts or not.

Yeah, it’ll work. Don’t give me that killing your own grandfather rubbish – I’m the one that did the maths, not bloody you. It the lightning his the pole, rather than this slime, I’ll have wiped out all life on earth for ever.

But I can’t decide if it means anything that I’m in a position to do this.

I’m the smartest man on earth, and I have no idea if it means anything.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about the practical applications of Art, just to establish that Art is relevant to everyone, and not some load of effete rubbish for an intellectual few.

Architecture isn’t something that immediately springs to mind when someone says “Art”, yet it’s probably the form or art that most of us have most daily interaction with, since it’s the art form that creates the spaces we live in.

But on the other hand, it’s also the one to which it is hardest to apply the working definition I opted for in my last entry – that Art requires that the creator be expressing a thought they have had about the world. It’s not impossible. Jump Studios for example, created a fascinating space for the new Red Bull office in London this year. I’m not sure how it would feel to work there, done out as it is in heavy blues and stark whites, but it’s certainly interesting. It’s other major unusual feature is that the building incorporates slides as a way of moving between floors in the office.

Which leads me, of course, to “Test Site” Carsten Höller’s current exhibition at the Tate Modern. Holler’s body of work combines architecture, sculpture and other disciplines to ask questions about the way we interact with the space around us. It’s a notion that’s increasingly relevant today, as we start to move from an industrial economy to an information economy. Suddenly, we no longer need to have our use of space dictated by the practicalities of using machines. There are exceptions as, for example, major internet companies are forced to locate their server farms in places where they can obtain the bandwidth and electrical supply they need, but for the most part, we are increasingly free of the need to work in warehouses, or even dedicated office space.

And so it becomes increasingly relevant to ask how we can make use of space in such a manner as to enhance our daily lives, not just from a functional point of view, but also as a means to create moments of pleasure in our day to day life. This is the question currently facing artists and architects, and having been to experience “Test Site” myself, I have to say, Höller and Jump are probably on to something.

So if I intend to talk about Art (in all forms) here
I suppose I ought to set out my stall, first. Let’s start with a quote:

“Art, in the human truth of it, touches the universal. Seeing Art, we recognise a thought we had but could not utter, are made less alone.” — Alan Moore from “Snakes and Ladders”.

I use that quote a lot. But it’s one of the best working definitions of Art I’ve ever come across, or at the least, it’s one I find myself in strong agreement with. It provides a way of telling Art from non-Art – the acid test it points to it simple: was the creator of a given work trying to express a thought about the way they see the world, as opposed to “just” creating something pretty/entertaining?

This definition, or course is one that leads to things being Art simply because their creator says they are, but then, Art is not automatically good or worthy. There is no shame in simply creating something pretty or entertaining – I’d far rather look at a really pretty picture that was not Art than a really banal one that was expressing the really boring views of a very tedious man. I don’t wish to suggest that it’s in any way a lesser thing to create beauty rather than Art, simply a different thing. But if we must have a means to define Art, then that’s the one I choose to use.

I’d further suggest that in order for Art to be considered “good” it should also invite the person experiencing the work (I could just say “viewer” but I want to emphasise that I’m not just talking about the purely visual arts here) to think. It should pose questions, or make suggestions. It should be the artist engaging in a discourse, saying “Here’s what I think. Do you have any ideas on the subject?”.

So, the Turner prize this year goes to Tomma Abts. Personally, I preferred Mark Titchner’s work – his themes and his general approach are things I have a lot of personal sympathy with, but hers were a close second favourite. I thought Phil Collins (not that one) documentary was interesting, but I think I’d rather just have watched the documentary of telly, rather than get presented with it as “Art”. Rebecca Warren, well, think I see what she’s trying to do, but it’s a fairly old hat idea.

I do wonder if Abts won in part because her painting are closer to most people’s idea of conventional “Art”, and if the Turner Prize committee are trying to balance the scales a little, after least years Shedboatshed, and Jeremey Deller’s documentary the year before that.

It all frays to silver at the edges. Our world-tapestry becomes mercury, the vapours toxic to rational thought. Dreams invade our waking moments, become the element in which we exist, a strange beauty become the only truth we know.

We find that we walk in an alien land, a nightmare landscape of broken metaphors and twice-twisted image. We are forced to navigate by instinct, and deliver ourselves into the waiting arms of strange gods, creatures somehow more than human, and yet too small to save us.

Madness runs like a flame in dry grass, and our only salvation lies in our hindbrain, that lizard reaction at the back of of us. We must evolve thought again, as we struggle to keep our balance on a shifting plate of variegating concepts, and when we do, we find others like us, trapped in this moontime sprawl. Desperate, we rope ourselves together with language and pictogram, develop a syntax of urgent communication.

Emotions are born anew, and paint the mercury world about us with washes of colour, transitory reds and blues and greens and golds, with our anger, pride and passions. We break off into pairs and small groups to better understand this new world we are creating.

And as we dance we find that somewhere below conscious thought, tiny novae of brilliant inspiration flare behind our eyes. We discover friendship and lust and love again, and we do it all for the first time once more.
And this is the world in which we exist. Born anew in fire and poetry at every instant. Where we are marvels and madmen, should we but choose to be aware of it. Where we can do anything that we can dream.

Daybreak, and in the wires, the angels scream. Pulled from the higher planes, down into our engines of business and communication. People forget, now that modem technology is old and out of date, and they no longer hear the shrieking that accompanies their email. I don’t suppose it’s much of a coincidence that the digital revolution really kicked off just after we managed to make things run silent. Easier on the conscience.

Me, I haven’t forgotten. I keep a bank of old modems set up by my machines. I could use them for all sorts of things, but these days, they’re mostly just a reminder.

Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a sadist, or anything. No more than you are. Just because I can hear them when I want, that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Quite the reverse. I only turn them on when I can’t stand it any more.

It all started with Dee, of course. His strange mathematical formulae, taught to him by his angel. His angle. Who showed him that everything that is can be reduced to mathematical information, and then thereby changed. Yes, everyone knows that he was the father of cryptography, but who really stops to think about what that means?

Does anyone care what the distinction between encyphering information, and calling down protective spirits to hide it from prying eyes is? Does anyone really care that there are angels shrieking in the stratosphere, at registers beyond hearing, bounced from cellphone to cellphone, carrying our tedious reminders, idle questions and momentary flirtations?

Does anyone even notice the price? That as magic becomes everyday, the world becomes smaller? Starker? As if the soul was leeching from it, being bound away somewhere else?

That’s why I keep my bank of modems. It’s insulation, of a sort, and maybe, just maybe, a little insurance. The planet fills up with violence, with creeping convenience, as it becomes world of desires sated as soon as they’re conceived. Every day, things get just a little worse, as more and more of our better nature is strung out down wires, and spread oh-so-thinly across the globe. And I fear that one day, there won’t be enough left of our higher selves.

So I hide here, with my bank of angels, carefully preserved. I husband them, against this apocalypse of spirit, in the faint hope that one day, they’ll preserve me, as I have them.

One last flight of angels, trapped in cages of wire and diode, waiting for the end.

I’ve been taking creative stock of the year. To say I’m disappointed in myself is putting it mildly.

WEBSITES:

Ninth Art launched. Code re-write in progress.

Electricana mostly ready. Design needs a bit of tidying, and content needs writing.

Black Ink untouched. Inadequate.

The website side of things is, on balance, acceptable.

COMICS

ISAIAH BLACK. Nothing happening. Artist may be too busy. Pitch written.

2 BEATS SIDEWAYS. Nothing happening. Artist may be too busy. Pitch written.

STORMBREAK. Nothing happening. No artist. Pitch written.

ANIMA. Currently writing script. No artist. Hoping that this will be available mid-late next year, fear that publisher may turn out to be vapourware.

BLACK PLANET: WELFARE AND DEATH – should be available in the first half of next year.

BLACK PLANET: MINDGAMES – Currently writing scripts. No artists as yet, some prospects. Late next year.

This on the other hand, is just shit. I’d like to claim that I had good reasons why I haven’t been sending these pitches to anyone that will listen, but while I’ve got reasons, none of them are good enough. New Year, this changes.