This post is going to be different to all the previous art-object ones, because the ‘value’ of the object in question does not reside either in the sense of its beauty that I had when purchasing it, or in some kind of rarity value, or in the interesting emporium from which I obtained it… in short, it is a real one-off, and I should now without further ado explain what all this is about.

 

 

 

Well, actually… let me set the scene first. The location is a large ramshackle building on several floors which I shall call the warehouse. When it was first taken over by Jack the Lad, the whole vast space was given over to every sort of antique furniture, paintings, objets d’art – Jack has never been afraid to have a go, and he certainly had plenty of scope. Much of the original shop area has now been converted to other uses, and the actual antiques patch is a shadow of its former self. In addition, various fringe bits are leased out to others, and it was in one of these patches, belonging not to Jack, but to another local dabbler in bric-a-brac and so on, that a couple of years ago I had a strange experience. There on the wall - during one of the frequent visits that I have been making for several years now – was a picture. What was singular about this picture was that I knew it very well, but I had totally forgotten it. And this was because this same picture used to hang on the wall of our house when I was a child, and I had looked at it many, many times, but not seen it for perhaps forty years

 

For my father, I suppose, it was a picture of religious devotion, of men at prayer. As for me, I am not sure that I ever realised that the men in the image were praying. After all, one prayed in a church, and these men were not in a church, or indeed in any other building. O.K., so one also prayed at home - kneeling by the bed side with hands together. No-one in this picture had his hands together.

 

It was certainly not prayer, that is,which held my youthful attention. Of course, there were  two men in strange costumes in the picture and, even more interestingly, perhaps, a camel. But what I believe truly fired my imagination as a small boy was the only other constituent of the image apart from the two men and the camel – a rolling panorama of sand dunes, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. And the only obvious feature in all that wide landscape was the trail of footprints which one could see leading far out over the dunes until it was lost in the vastness.

 

I do not know any longer what exactly was the impression made upon me by this image. But I very strongly suspect that it told me that, beyond the confines of the suburban England of the fifties, the rows of pebble-dashed semi-detached houses in which the anonymous drones of lower-middle England went about their grey affairs, there was, somewhere over the horizon, another, an elemental world, where the writ of the petit bourgeois did not run. This image never seized me of a desire to rush off to Arabia or the Sahara. But it did, I believe, help me unconsciously to sense that one day I too could walk out of those suburbs into a wider landscape. (To this day, I cannot stand suburbs.)

 

 

 

All this happened between one and two years ago. I did not buy the picture. It cost peanuts and this was not the issue. Whilst I could not deny the singularity of this strange reappearance, this in no way meant that I therefore felt that I should buy the picture, take it home and put it on our wall – even with my partner having been brought up as a Muslim.

 

That picture had been my father’s choice, and for I in my turn to select it and put it on the wall implied that I was identifying with him on some level – I don’t mean to intellectualise this, what I’m doing is using my mind to analyse retrospectively the raison d’etre of what were, at this time, only feelings. I’m not sure how much I want to write about my relationship with my father. Perhaps the kindest thing I can say was that he had grown up with powerful emotional inhibitions and that this prevented him from ever being able to establish any kind of emotional closeness in his relationship with me. In the world of my childhood there were never any tears from either of my parents – emotion was the poor relation. On top of this, my father was very judgemental, and one of the criteria he used was the extent to which my behaviour did or did not correspond to what he considered to be appropriate Christian norms.   

One result of this was that it has taken me a very long time to be able to appreciate my father’s qualities – for he had many – and to reduce to some extent the sense of distance, of alienation from him that I have felt for as long as I can remember. One significant element in this reduction, strangely, occurred in early 2007 when I went to visit a well-known local medium. During the session, my father manifested his presence, and indeed rather took over for parts of it. Judging by her reactions and comments, the medium seemed to like him a lot more than I had done!

 

 [I am aware that at the mention of mediums and contact with a dead relative, many readers of this will immediately freeze. Unfortunately, there are still many, many people who do not find it in themselves to have an open mind about such things, but feel a need to violently oppose any claim of the possible reality of such phenomena.]    

I have more questions than answers about what exactly goes on after death. The father who communicated with me on this occasion seemed quite needy, wanting to invade my hour with the medium, for example by recounting incidents from his early life. This rather juvenile need for approbation / affection, certainly characteristic of him in life, did not seem to have been diminished by his sojourn ‘on the other side’. At one point my mum also appeared, and was apparently playing cards with some women friends. I am left rather puzzled as to what purpose exactly this other realm is intended to fulfil – if it does not enable those who inhabit it to progress psychologically, and if they ‘pass the time’ there rather as one might do on Earth.

 

Anyhow, my father also said that he was proud of me, which certainly represented a major shift from his attitude down here, and my partner Hacina had a similar experience in which her father behaved and spoke in a way which represented a very marked shift from his previous manner. Apparently the future was also accessible from the other side, and my father made two specific predictions involving me. (Neither have yet come true, or seem likely to. I have an inherent tendency to believe predictions which on the face of available evidence seem to make no sense.)    

 

This ‘encounter’ (the first time I had visited a medium or experienced anything of this kind) has I feel, over the intervening fifteen months, contributed to a slow re-appraisal now going on in me of certain aspects of my relationship with my father. In particular, I feel that I am more aware than previously of him as a person in his own right – belonging to a different time and circumstances, facing different challenges and decisions, attempting to make the best he could of the hand of cards dealt to him. And I am certain that, during his lifetime, I must have been a bitter disappointment to him. He had hopes of me as an engineer and pillar of the church, and neither of those hopes was ever to be realised.

 

Fate played the same trick with me concerning ‘Prayer in the Desert’ as it did with the landscape painting of art objects 41. One day I passed through Jack’s, and it had gone. I mentioned this to Carla, the seller, when I bumped into her in Roger’s one day soon afterwards. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I just took it down and shoved it in a corner. In fact, I’ve reduced it to half price. I can’t believe no-one wanted to buy it. I really like it.’ I told her of my connection to it. ‘Look, Carla’, I said, ‘I’m going to go round to the warehouse and get it – I guess you didn’t sell it because it had my name on.’

 

It’s a good feeling to have it here. Don’t get me wrong, I still have issues with my dad. But this picture represents, perhaps, the things on which I can feel in a sense close to him. Part of my inheritance from him is to have been exposed to his qualities, just as I was to his faults – and both have become part of who I am. My father was not a bigot. This image reminds me of a poem that he once read to me and that I remembered enough of to be able to find it again on the web, decades later.

 

Abou ben Adem

 

Abou ben Adem (may his tribe increase!)

awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight of his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

an angel, writing in a book of gold.

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adem bold,

And to the Presence in the room he said:

“What writest thou?” The vision raised its head,

And, with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”

“And is mine one?” said Abou, “Nay, not so,”

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerily still, and said, “I pray thee, then,

Write me as one who loves his fellow men.”

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again, with a great awakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adem’s name led all the rest.

 

- Leigh Hunt