Why does there need to be a “purpose”?

It is. Just like we are. That’s probably about all you need to know.

A better question perhaps is “what does art do for me”?

Now there is something worth exploring. Given that our universe in all probability just “is” it is down to us to make our own “meaning” – if meaning is what we feel we need. If meaning is necessary to our soul, our life. Our happiness.

Perhaps that is why we invented god. Alongside art. When the earliest known cave paintings were scrawled on stone walls some 100,00 years ago, why did the cave man do it? Or cave woman.

Or non binary person. There! How modern I am!

I suggest it may have been a search for meaning. A statement of meaning perhaps. The earliest religion is thought to have arisen perhaps as long ago as 300,000 years.  Shamanism and animism, it is said. The juju man, dancing around the fire, waving smoke in your face, casting spells and exhorting spirits. Probably daubing the walls of his hut or cave with paint, likely as not making crude trinkets and charms.

And so forward to Sherborne Abbey, the magnificent gothic church pictured above. By then the juju man has acquired a more formal code, but he still waved around holy smoke and incanted his magic, his powerful ritual.

All these people had discovered their own meaning where before none such had existed.  A god who has made the world and shoved us in its epicentre. Animals and spirits who conjured the tides and the weather. Who make the crops grow or dispense terrible famine in retribution for man’s shocking sin.

And so back  to today – and in particular to 21st Century England. A shit hole if ever there was one. William Blake must be crying out in pain to see that his land is now covered in dark satanic mills from it’s very head to the tip of it’s sooty, grime ridden toes.

So perhaps these days art continues to play much the same role as it did in the days of ancient shamanism. Now, our terror is not thunder or famine, but the hideous mess we have made of a formerly green and pleasant land. Endless concrete, endless noise, the hammers and anvils everywhere. No peace to be found, no beauty.  And the whole ghastly edifice about to collapse on top of us, as global warming comes home to roost.

So now more than ever art is needed. To show us a better way perhaps. Or to mark out descent as we reel and grope our way to our end.

Tracy Emin – her lurid concentration on her own body. Fair doos, as they say. A way to express the terror of her own shocking existence. Anish Kapoor – perhaps endless wealth was not his aim. Perhaps he too was expressing something of his own anxiety. Or disappointment. Or fear. His weird structures and conceits certainly seem to express fear, as well as curiosity and wonder. A ghastly second coming. The end, the last judgement.

Art as self expression – perhaps I am getting somewhere. But maybe art also as seeking – seeking beauty and god in the case of Sherborne Abbey. Beauty certainly exists, although presumably in the eye of the beholder. And god too, because he is your creation and your refuge.  Both god and beauty may be an escape from the bestiallity of the real world of hatred and killing, of suffering, poverty and privation.

I think it is time that I concentrated on art. On my own art as well as the creations of others. Art as poetry perhaps, or music. Even writing prose can be seen as powerful art – it is certainly as creative as any other art form.

I am seeing art as part of a retreat from a fearful world. Fearful in so very many ways, the mere expression of that fear is terrifying. Lack of meaning is the hardest to come to terms with – the fear that this whole ghastly melange of terror and beauty, of hatred and violence, of love and cruelty just “is”. Just grew, just festers and, one day will just fizzle out.

So have your day in the sun. Pick the flowers while you may. Glorify and bless your existence with gothic masterpieces and exquisite poetry.

Splash your genitalia all over the canvas and hang it out for all to see.

Paint, sing, dance, build, create. Because you can. For a while at least.