Accumulated Notes

Written by Barry Brickell

Oh shit! As a 75th birthday present, I’ve just been told that I have a right or perhaps a requirement to offer birthday presents in the opposite direction. I believe that once beyond the age of immaturity, which in my case was last year, the whole business of birthday gifting, an absurd convention, should be reversed.*

So, here are my precious, pious offerings:

1. Writing is only about words. How to use them to scintillate or to castigate others rather than to instruct them. The latter does not work, never has and never will.

2. As a collary, there’s no such thing as teaching, only learning.

3. Painting is only about applying paint; not murdering it to make false images. It’s lovely stuff if allowed to be itself. So much for styles, fashions, vogues or any other stupid ‘movements’. Better to make use of organic movements such as those of the bowels.

4. Poetry is about metaphor, nothing else. Rhyming is the best way to murder it. Let it fly, unconstructed by any convention – had enough of that during ‘education’.

5. Photography is about images using light, nothing else. Commerce has utterly murdered it. I feel like puke-ing every time I open a glossy magazine, but I reach for a glass of God’s medicine whenever a rare true photograph comes to light.

6. Pottery is about vessels that hold things, nothing else. Like all other things made by the hands of humanity, it can be good or bad. As it happens, 95% of pottery is bad. I hate most of it because I have a passion for the organic and refined use of clay and fire combined. It has been taken over yet again by style, vogue, fashion and commerce more than perhaps any other medium except architecture. If you search though, you will still be able to find very beautiful pots, but it will take time and patience. To find a real potters work takes time, discretion and excretion.

7. Sculpture is a word that originated from classic Europe, when stone was the material from which sculptures were made by subtraction, carving out to generate a desired form. The word has become bastardised to cover everything that is not paint, works on paper or anything else in two dimensions. Nowadays it covers anything made in three dimensions, even the work that I do, the opposite of carving out, building up. So I have to insist that my built-up pieces are erectures. One could use the term erections, but this has other twists of meaning which are perhaps less relevant.

8. Lastly, just on this page, is a brand new word. ‘Wrerting’ is an essential escape from ‘writing’. Writing in the literary sense is serious. Yes it can be very funny too but the funniness is perceptible only by those with a literary intelligence (mostly). Whereas writing has certain rules, wrerting has none. Basically, wrerting is word-murdering, a pastime that gives me much pleasure. I’ve been wasting my time of late, compiling a ‘Wrerter’s Dictionary’. It is such good fun, but no publisher would ever be able to publish it, unless he/she shared the warped sense of humour or sheer sense of the enjoyment of the absurd that I am afflicted with (sorry about the shocking sentence construction).

To my surprise, the best wrerting is done on a warm summer evening, stark naked with a glass of pinot noir or two in hand. God looks after fool, peasants and the poor rather than the educated literary because they live and laugh longer (Shakespeare “the last laugh”).

I hope and trust that this orchestrated litany of lies, according to most but pearls of wisdom as read by some, will be the mere start of my outgoing birthday presents campaign. My Doctor has just had the results back from lab, tests of my blood, bowels, lungs and liver. For some strange reason, everything is satisfactory – so far, but he cannot explain to me why.

* Note: I would have thought the date of conception to be infinitely more significant than the date at which one actually emerges from the great hole. The Church no doubt, had something to do with this. Baptism! Why try to fix something that is already fixed? To cleanse what?