On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  Granite is not only grey; it contains bluish and greenish specks and even little cells of translucency: nascent diamonds that would have grown given more heat, more pressure and more years, but are now jostled by their greyer companions too rushed to transluce.

  I didn’t always do granite. There was my gold period, which I look back on as rather vulgar. We all have to develop as artists, and although I clearly have a natural talent, I had to learn the art like everyone else. Gold seemed so flamboyant and I still bore within me the last traces of the arrogant and assertive culture that hurtles round me like a vortex in which I, the epicentre, alone experience absolute tranquillity. I had not yet understood the purpose of our art, which is not a human being imitating a statue; it is a statue of a statue of a human being. It is a higher form of art than sculpture itself. Michelangelo and Rodin only studied the animate through the medium of the inanimate, but we study the inanimate through the medium of the animate and thus become inanimate. We reach a higher state of consciousness.

  Gold was easy. The makeup was easy, and it only took a can of spray-paint to turn an old suit into a golden one. But gold didn’t express my inner feelings very well – not the depth of my inner emptiness. When I was gold, I wasn’t really a statue. I was, you might say, in a transitional state. Half-man, half-statue. Satisfactory as a direction of travel, but not for long.

  One item from my gold period is still in use. It’s the gold-sprayed cloth cap that serves to collect my takings. Those who appreciate my work throw coins and the occasional note into the cloth cap, and its goldness represents our terrible, oppressively inescapable necessity to get our hands on cash just to survive in this society, even if you’re a statue. Of course, most of my outgoings are on the makeup imported from America, and I’m happy to suffer for my art. Those who have to paint, paint, those who have to play music, play music, and those who have to petrify themselves, petrify themselves. The artistic drive will not be denied.

  So I keep my gold cap as a reminder of my journey – of how much I have achieved in a relatively short career and of how much I have sacrificed for it.

  Tricks of the trade. People ask me what’s the hardest thing about being a statue. Do your legs ache? What do you think about? How do you keep still? Such questions! Each one betrays their terrible ignorance. Like the tone-deaf listening to music or the inarticulate to poetry, the public stand before the human statue and think it is a game, a moment of distraction in their day. Some, the most ignorant of all, actually resent our presence on their streets. “Why don’t they get a proper job?” they say. How little do they know.

  Nevertheless, art is artifice, and great art makes artifice look natural and spontaneous. The first thing you must do if you want to follow this career is learn to empty your head of all thoughts. This is the hardest thing to do and requires great concentration. Not thinking is the very essence of a lump of granite, whatever its shape or likeness. Your rock-like passivity can only become credible when you have achieved a true state of emptiness. This means avoiding any stimulus that might provoke anger or strong emotions. Don’t watch television and don’t buy newspapers. By all means study the movements of ants in your bedsit without, of course, interfering in their behaviour. Interventionism is strictly forbidden. But don’t study anything human, as it is likely to trigger animate sensations.

  I live in Glasgow and work a patch in Buchanan Street. Our weather is unpredictable and one summer afternoon turned cold. As the streets emptied I resisted the desire to stop work early. My hours are fixed and usually only heavy rain will drive me from the streets. A compromise, I’ll grant you, because a truly inanimate statue would disregard all the elements. As I struggled with my sense of duty, a young woman with blue hair passed by. She was short, athletic and well modelled by nature. She wore a tight T-shirt and baggy black trousers. She glided as she walked and barely noticed me. My mind filled with thoughts and sensations. My heart leapt and accompanied hers. All my senses were focused in a single direction, and my defences were down. In that second, I was hit by a moving object that brought me to my knees. A chubby girl of about eight or nine was hanging around my neck, and she was laughing with delight – the harmless delight of a child. “He’s down,” she shouted and others joined her laughter. Theirs was crueller. It was the laughter of adults, who are more likely to detest or at least distrust the figurative. I, the statue who had learnt perfect passivity, rebelled against it all. I jumped in the air and twisted as I did so, tossing the girl away like a stuffed toy, an object devoid of will. Even as I watched the short arc of her trajectory, I knew that I had made a terrible, inexcusable mistake. She fell badly and hurt her ankle. Her screams were unrestrained, and a second later her father’s fist was in my stomach like a small rock landing on a mattress. Pain and anguish: I was a statue no longer, just a lonely, middle-aged man who had made a fool of himself. I shuffled home that evening full of thoughts, regrets, self-hate and misery. Why had I done it? Because I had broken the golden rule of statues: never feel. Or rather, never feel like a human being feels; always feel like a rock must feel, which means eschewing all human consciousness. The girl with blue hair had distracted me from my professional statueness.

  That was my greatest failure, and it derived from a momentary lapse of concentration. My greatest success occurred not ten metres away from that spot. A month or two later, I was deep in a state of emptiness when a boy came up. You know the type: cropped hair, dull insolent expression, small intelligent eyes full of menace. “If ye’re a statue, ye’ll no feel this then,” he said and landed me a kick in the shins with one of his heavy boots. I was vaguely conscious of the pain and the possibility that he would repeat his action, but so concentrated was I on emptiness that those thoughts wilted like weeds under a heavy sun. Later I would surmise that it was the very solidity of my essence that had deterred him from further action. That evening I returned home like a conquering hero. I felt the greatness of my achievement and then I knew that this is something I can do, for some inexplicable reason that I should never challenge. Some people, many people think we are ridiculous. At times, I have thought so too. But like any other art, you have to take it and yourself seriously – but not so seriously that you don’t learn from your mistakes. I clearly had.

  These are the things you must remember, if you too want to be a statue.

  Stubborn passivity. In our society we don’t rate passivity. It is associated with a doormat – an object that everyone tramples on and uses for scraping the dirt off their shoes. Passivity contributes nothing, or so it is thought. This is perhaps true of needy, fretful passivity that arises solely from timidity that cannot mask underlying wants, but stubborn passivity that detaches consciousness can be as influential as activism, perhaps more so. The passivity I speak of is the one that derives from having as few wants as possible, and a sense of detachment from the self.

  That kind of passivity can incite, excite, stupefy and perhaps simulate an aura of holiness. It can be an act. Surely it is always an act, for where is there a soul entirely free of wants and entirely detached from the self? It is an impossibility, but I know from my own art that you can get close – or fairly close. Some might think it sad that you can only approach virtue by suppressing every part of your being. I can understand that, because once I thought like them.

  My routine. I am, as you have probably guessed, a creature of predictable behaviour – a habitudinarian, some might say. I maintain the level plain of my existence by never deviating from my rigid routine of creative work and intelligent repose. You might ask where my life is going; you may wonder at the monotony of it. That is because you have not understood the purpose of existence, which is not excitement and agitation.

  My working day consists of two shifts, each of three hours and fifteen minutes. They are separated by a half-hour break, which takes me to a café in Gordon Street. It is unwise to eat too much before work, but you do need a certain amount of calories for the heavy task of emptying your mind. I hav
e one sandwich and a cappuccino.

  How we can save the world. It recently occurred to me, while walking home on a pleasant summer afternoon after a particularly rewarding day lifted by my public’s appreciation of my inanimate spectacle, that I was endowed with a skill which shall prove most useful to the betterment and survival of humanity. We live in a world that is overflowing with isms, as we all know: communism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, consumerism, materialism, imperialism, terrorism, centralism, provincialism, cosmopolitanism, intellectualism, rationalism, cyberactivism, impressionism, Dadaism, modernism, post-modernism and whatever comes after that.

  And why, do you suppose, are there all these isms? Very sensibly, you haven’t given it much thought. No matter, I can reveal the cause: it is the absurd human compulsion to rack one’s brains, to ponder, to ruminate, and to take out that old, moth-eaten thinking cap. In other words, thought itself. And what is thought if not the destruction of our longed-for universality, because it is little else than fragmentation – the pointless fragmentation – of all things into smaller and smaller categories. Demetrius came up with atoms, which is pretty extreme and he’d never met one. That’s where all that cogitation took him: the indivisible unit. It was of no use to man or beast, but it was of use to the people who like to think too much. They went off and divided the indivisible into nucleus, neutrons, protons and electrons. Were they happy with that? Of course not, they then went after quarks.

  There is, of course, something extremely egotistical about the way these people put reality through the mincer. In their destructive glee on seeing our material world crumble before their prying eyes, they spare not a thought for the rest of us, who can no longer trust the ground we walk on. Nothing is solid, and everything some kind of abstraction.

  Thought then is subversive. Not only does it separate and categorise, it also divides us all between the many interpretations. People go to war over ideas or over things or over competing groups. All distinctions. All animate distinctions and follies.

  If, I suddenly wondered, we were all to empty our minds entirely of thoughts and become statues, how many benefits would accrue to humanity and its beloved planet? So many, so many.

  There would be no thought. There would be no argument. There would be no disagreement. There would be no hatred or love. There would be no war. There would be universal harmony.

  What wonder, what bounty, what glory to my name!

  I encounter some contradictions in my plans and how I resolve them through a second epiphany. Once I was satisfied solely by my art and its development, but following my discovery, I became aware of the special nature of my artistic vocation and my responsibility to share it with the world. I even gave my art a name – a proper name: human concretism. One might even say that, given the importance of what I am about to reveal, my plans for humanity must be implemented, whatever the cost – even at the cost of my own artistic integrity, and you cannot put it stronger than that.

  The problem I encountered was the one of supply. If we all become statues, then who will provide the food, the clothing and, above all, the huge quantities of theatrical makeup that will be needed if these plans are to come to fruition? Hertford University Services would not be up to the task. I imagined the city of Hertford, a dull city carefully planned by corporate architects on a limited budget. A worthy place, in a way, with a small university, public library, hospital and other public buildings all invented at the same time and in the same style that is not a style. Houses all in a row with lots of garden, as you’d expect in a country with so much land. And then in the corner of this measured utopia, there suddenly grows this industrial behemoth that is Hertford University Services. It has to send to every region of the world for the essential ingredients for make-up. Quarries, distilleries, factories, warehouses, lorries, ships, aeroplanes, railways all working flat out to turn every last inhabitant of this planet into a statue. Who would do this work? Who would slave to liberate others? Who would forego the enlightenment of nihilism, nothingness and not knowing?

  Then came this second epiphany: why was I in anguish, if not because I had heard that siren call of contemplation, and given into its deceptive lure? Of course, of course, I could not defeat thought by thinking. We will bring the universe together by a revolutionary act of all becoming statues, and that act will bring about a cataclysm that will be beyond redemption and considerations of a purely practical nature.

  New energies will be produced and we might easily turn into stone – we might all petrify quite literally. A world of human statues irreversibly transformed into a higher consciousness or, rather, a sophisticated lack of it.

  My place within the universe. The reason I eschewed the industrial solution is that I am fundamentally an egalitarian. But the only guaranteed form of equality relies on equal subservience to a supreme leader – the helmsman, the sun about which all things must orbit, the saviour of our solidity.

  Now when I wander home, I sometimes catch myself muttering aloud or another person glancing at me as though I were acting strangely. Little do they know, I think, what plans I have for them and how I can liberate them. Little do they know how soon they will know my name and thank me from the bottom of their hearts for all the changes I am bringing. Little do they know that these mutterings are the fine-tunings of a cosmic plan.

  I am relaxed about the fact that it has, after all, fallen to me to engage in thought: fire must be fought with fire, and the vanguard through its sacrifice earns the right to a special morality.

  Forks in the Road

  “He undermined me,” the husband said. “He purposefully undermined. He wanted me out of the practice, for one reason only…”

  She felt the pause, and its predictability weighed on her like a leaden cape.

  “… he was threatened by my greater knowledge of medical science, my skill, my brilliance.”

  Once he’d finished, she felt a slight relief… and the absurdity of it could not be denied. It was always a difficult moment: the union between the instability of alcohol and the instability arising from the conflicting emotions of self-belief and self-pity. And in her relief she allowed herself the flicker of a smile.

  He caught it. Amidst the fog of his brain, something latched on to that millimetric quiver at the sides of her mouth, and enlarged them into something grotesque, disdainful and even threatening: laughter or even a cackle.

  “Go on, laugh! Laugh, if you find me so funny,” he leaned across to her and his large bloodshot eyes stared cruelly, like those of an animal, fierce and not receptive to human reason. Yet it was him, surely. Her husband, the man she’d been married to for nineteen years.

  “You think you’re really something, don’t you?” he continued and laughed himself. She welcomed his laugh, because she knew that this situation could go two ways and the laugh meant that he was very possibly moving towards the point where he would say, “That’s my gutsy little girl,” and try to kiss her, which was always preferable. He stood up straight, as though to steady the thing that was spinning his head and could go either way. He was like a maddened bear, and now there was so much of him. When she first met him, he had been tall but slim with hard, muscly limbs; he had now become flabby but much, perhaps most, of his strength remained. Sodden condescension and sentimentality seemed less likely now he’d raised himself to his full height. The thing that was spinning in his brain was losing its spin, and would almost certainly go the wrong way. Her nerves tautened and her senses sharpened like a frightened beast’s.

  “Amazing really how much you put up with,” he said slowly with a terrifying coolness. “You came along, grabbed my family name, used my contacts, clambered up above me and kicked me in the teeth.”

  Experience had taught her never to reply. There was no proper reply to these groundless accusations which nevertheless gained a kind of awkward authenticity through endless repetition. To deny or to mollify would only increase their currency. Her silence was watchful.

  Then
it came with theatrical suddenness. His left hand grabbed the kitchen table on the right side and upturned it, flinging it to the left with unnecessary force. The breakfast crockery shattered loudly on the tiled floor, while knives and spoons tinkled like muted musical instruments. In spite of her alertness, she didn’t see it coming. With a single action, that same left hand returned and slapped her so violently she was thrown from her chair. He picked up the stainless-steel fruit press and threw it at her head, but she was already elsewhere with the quickness of a cat, her only advantage. Not enough though, in that confined space, to avoid his steely grip for long. This time he had her by the neck pressed up against the refrigerator. He appeared to be wanting to lift her off the floor: too much even for his strength. “I’ll fucking kill you,” he said, and she panicked. He had never said that before and it felt that this was how her life was going to end.

  And what a miserable life. Her father, though not physically abusive, had been authoritarian and never ceased to humiliate her mother with the cruel sarcasm of a bitter man – someone who might also have complained of a miserable existence and unfulfilled hopes, not because of lack of talent but lack of opportunities. When she met her husband, her father scoffed: “Never did a hand’s tap. A soft boy from a public school. You’ll regret it because people like that are needy.” Now she could see that her father had not been emotionally needy in the way her husband was, and she had never learned to provide for that neediness. Her father was a self-sufficient man and thus a different kind of despot, and, the worst of it, he’d been right, and thus able to smile smugly: “I told you so.” Those inevitable words, cruelly repeated. The truth as another cudgel that fell on her head. She had been the first in her family to go to university and found it a liberation, but hopes of a better, freer life had proved illusory. And now this was how it would all end. Strangled or her head battered against the fridge or the wall. She was a plaything in his large podgy hands, and an object barely perceived by his sluggish consciousness. She was a liberated woman; how could she finish up like this? It was absurd and shameful.