Twenty seven

My younger son and I went back to the abandoned kindergarten, one week later. He was very excited, and as if by inherited instinct he wanted to go to all the parts of its playground his older brother loved the most. He’s become very interested in sandpits and gravel, digging with such enthusiasm it almost seems like he’s trying to swim. He unearthed an interesting object, a large rusted bolt.

A week or more has passed since I wrote the previous paragraph. I haven’t felt like writing at all, so for some reason I continued writing in the previous iPhone note. In the unlikely (or even impossible) event of these iPhone notes becoming a book then instead of a ‘chapter break’ the final paragraphs of the previous note and the first paragraphs of this note could overlap as columns on the page. The text has now disengaged itself from everyday life, become superfluous and harder for me to understand. My son is sleeping in his pram. I’m sitting in the playground. The sky is utterly blue. The magpies are chattering insistently. I’ve been too busy for conscious thought most of the time, to the extent I’ve forgotten about it. It’s probably still happening sometimes, but I don’t notice it. I’ve had to put my phone on ‘low battery mode’, so if I pause for a few seconds between sentences it blanks out. Today is the end of the school term for my son. He’ll spend a week or two going to the school for just-playing days (no lessons, just pure fun; what a country, what a society this is), but then we’ll go on holiday, repeating our routes and visits from last summer. I’ll write about carrying too heavy bags on trains, stressful disasters (or just disastrous stress), and European cities. My younger son will, like Hannibal or Attila, leave his mark upon the continent on his way through it. I’ll catalogue my older son’s interests and projects, which will sometimes coalesce with mine: a world of pencils and paper, marbles, spinning tops and video games. Unbeknownst to him I’ve bought him the new Zelda game as a present for the end of the school year. Last night I played the previous Zelda game for a while, as if visiting a familiar place for the last time. I stood upon hilltops and surveyed the landscape, wistful and wise, reflecting on a life well lived. I crouched down in the grass and watched some birds flying idly in the distance, and stayed there for a long time until it started to rain and the moonlight began to glint on the rocks.

A few days ago I got the keys for a friend’s studio, which we are going to start sharing. I went there alone for the first time yesterday. The space is very light and clean, and time stopped the moment I closed the door behind me. The night before I hurriedly packed a few things that I’d be able to transport there by bicycle; some scraps of paper with ideas for work, and some little objects that had gathered. I put the scraps of paper in a drawer in the studio’s plan chest and put the little objects on one side of a big drawing table.

I’d unconsciously assembled a small retrospective of the last year or so: the quince I’d had difficulty depicting during the winter, now utterly petrified, a couple of shards from broken marbles, the end of a bar of soap, the metal bolt my son dug up last week in the abandoned playground of his older brother’s old kindergarten, and the two watercolours I use so often that I have to buy replacement blocks which don’t fit in the tin with the others. I also brought the apple core I’d been drawing a few months ago, the one that stands up by itself. It is perfectly complex (as a visual specimen) and perfectly simple (as a symbolic object), as well as being elegant or noble or shy or expressive depending on which way it is facing. I mostly think of it personifying a modest, virtuous and honourable figure, like a knight of humble origins who has earned his place at court through quiet acts of chivalry. Now that it is completely dried out and will not really change much I could very well concentrate my entire artistic practice on it from now on. Perhaps in a few years I’d develop my skills enough to take on the quince. When visiting the studio with my friend the week before I noticed that she also had a nice apple core, which she had made a little painting of. She had left her apple core sitting on the scrap of paper upon which she’d made the painting, on her drawing table. We had been talking about what I’d need to bring to the studio, what I’d need to use the studio for, and I was explaining that I’d probably just be drawing things like apple cores, for example… then saw she had depicted one too. She explained that she’d spent a day there not achieving much, so just before leaving made the painting very quickly so as to have achieved something. I did the same thing before locking the door yesterday.

I wonder why I did almost no drawing or painting at all for the entire time I was trying to be an artist (from the beginning of art school through to the beginning of the pandemic, more or less). I didn’t even think of it. The very detailed drawing reproducing a digital collage of scraps of paper (which I wrote about in an earlier iPhone note, at insane length) was almost the only one, and that doesn’t count because it was just a meticulous act of copying, using a grid, and was done from an already two-dimensional source. I’m not sure what I thought art was. I suppose I didn’t know, which might have explained the problems I had with it. There were also some very strange and tentative pieces I made just after we moved to Sweden. I had some large sheets of very thick watercolour paper, onto which I traced out some faint lines in pencil then added a few dots of paint to.

It was a kind of pointillism of the barely present, or a deliberately wrongheaded attempt to show that Duchamp’s Pharmacie proposed a method for painting, per se. I can now see that the relation I was seeking in this method wasn’t optical but material: I was placing coloured dots randomly, or so subjectively I didn’t understand what I was doing, just enough to grant objecthood to the paper, not to make a picture. I don’t know why my instinct is to make artworks that are vague, even to me, and which are not really graspable by my conscious mind.

During the amorphous period just before the pandemic my son, who was then four years old, was starting to do more and more drawings, so I began drawing again too. When the pandemic started we took him out of kindergarten for a few weeks and often went to the clearing in the woods I took his younger brother to a few weeks ago, where we would eat a picnic and draw sticks and stones and leaves and make paper aeroplanes. Somehow this blended into the production of drawings for my exhibition that was to take place in 2020, but which was delayed.

In a few weeks we will be back in Antwerp, and staying in the place the unsold works from that exhibition are stored. I might try to give them all away to friends there; people who will like and look after them. My son is sleeping in his pram. I’m sitting on a bench. We’re in the playground, in the shade. It’s now very hot. I feel as if I’m almost disappearing, in harmony with the lack of urgency I feel to write.

A week or two ago I became obsessed with a book on the ancient Etruscan civilisation, mainly because the objects depicted in it are photographed against (or have been retrospectively placed against) brightly coloured backgrounds.

I would like to do this myself - to achieve block colour backgrounds for the little objects I draw and paint. It would solve the problem I have with backgrounds. But it would not answer the question of why I want to apply the aesthetics of scholarly archeological collecting to scraps and junk. Why have I always done so? I’m not so interested in the identity of the objects, more their ambiguity. They are easily comprehensible (or easily graspable) unanswerable questions. Before starting these iPhone notes, when I was struggling to write my still-unfinished novel about an art school, I wrote about one young student whose work made reference to the Etruscan civilisation; to the way it remains mysterious to us despite the volume of archeological material there is, and to its somewhat mysterious language.

“The objects that Victoria was gradually assembling on the floor of her studio space were inspired by archeological sites photographed from the air. She had seen a magazine article about large areas of the Po Valley where evidence of the Etruscan civilisation was being uncovered: dry and grassy landscapes within which formations of stones were visible. The rougher of these stones were once buildings, or parts of the infrastructure of walled towns. Occasionally much finer stones were found, tablets inscribed with the barely-understood Etruscan script. Both types of stone, those that formed documents and those that had been mere building materials, were at once the remnants of discernible actions performed by people in the past, but also utterly inscrutable. What could be deduced from them? Beyond broad historical conclusions, what can they tell us about the lives of specific individuals or local societies? These might seem like obvious questions, but Victoria had difficulty formulating them so simply or conceptually. She was very shy and quiet, and was also self-conscious about her accent. Most of her fellow students, both domestic and international, could not quite make out what she was saying and it did not come naturally to her to repeat herself or speak more loudly. Although she came from a city, it was much smaller than the one in which the school was located, and one where nature, in the form of strange towering hills and rock-faces, had an overbearing presence even within the urban environment. She had come to study in the capital not due to personal ambition, but because of the advice and recommendations of a tutor at the provincial college where she had begun to tentatively study art. This tutor detected (as he did in one student each year) a certain ability to ‘make’ things (as opposed to replicate, depict or represent them), and saw that Victoria was someone whose curiosity was productive in some way. This equated to ‘potential’, in his mind, and so he pushed Victoria to apply to art schools that she had never heard of before. Overwhelmed, and even more shy and quiet from now being in such an infernally busy and chaotic new city, she enclosed herself in her work and thought only of how things might be placed and arranged. Unfortunately, this concentrated dedication meant that her actions were sometimes inexplicable to her tutors or fellow students. Instead of explaining or discussing that which had interested her in the aerial photographs she was loosely replicating the ancient Etruscan landscapes using small objects. The only real criterion for the selection of these objects was they should be ‘imperfect oblongs’, able to either stand up unsupported or lie flat on the floor. She had so far found several erasers that had been rounded off through use, some matchboxes with dented corners, a domino that had been damaged and scratched by road traffic, and some (increasingly rare) 10-packs of cigarettes. Her budget for acquiring materials was very limited, but she had bought some tablet-shaped sweets and unwrapped them so that they would completely harden. She kept the wrapping papers, neatly flattened out, for some future use as yet unknown. The assembly of these objects on the floor was extremely vulnerable to being kicked over or stepped on by her fellow students. Victoria arrived earlier than almost everyone else each morning, finding her work intact (but at times added to, seemingly, although she couldn’t be sure about this; the additions were very slight), and then through the course of the day found herself having to repair the arrangement after people (both staff and students) blundered through. Her plan was to document the scene from the top of a high ladder, replicating the aerial photographs upon which it was based. There were many more pieces to assemble before this could be done.”

Here in this studio, up on the fifth floor, I can see only sky and some seagulls cruising around just outside the window. I can hear industrial crashing and clanging. The quince now smells of dusty wicker furniture.

Sometime later, during the evening, during one evening or another, I’m waiting for takeaway pizzas at the end of a very hot and sunny day. Unusually for me, nowadays, I am drinking a beer - fast. It is having an instant effect on me. There is thunder and lightning in the distance, but not here.

I more or less stopped drinking at the beginning of the pandemic, not wanting to go to restaurants or bars (including the one I was working in, which I’ve never been back to), and because it’s slightly inconvenient to buy alcohol in Sweden. Drinks stronger than 3.5% can be bought only from the state off-license, and there isn’t one in our neighbourhood. So I just stopped drinking. I wondered if I’d be able to, if it would be difficult, but I forgot about it almost instantly. On reflection, I think that prior to that I had an alcohol problem, even if the accessibility of alcohol here and its high price had reduce… wait, a moment of drama! A seagull just attacked the table of two young hipster women and a small child. One of the women went inside to order a beer, and brought her little daughter with her, leaving the other woman alone at the table. A seagull approached, and the woman got very scared. In fact, she flapped around like a seagull. She then ran away, leaving the table exposed. This was the moment any dispassionate witness was dreading: the seagull, now joined by a colleague, swooped again to raid the table with impunity. Plates and glasses were cast asunder, pizza crusts were torn… had reduced the quantity I was drinking quite radically. Rather than having hit some kind of rock bottom, I’m vaguely aware of having had a near miss with alcoholism.

The force of my younger son’s will, his voracious enthusiasm and the risk of injury he sometimes poses to himself and others are, essentially, the markers of very good character traits. With any luck his temperament will be nothing like mine, and the world will be a straightforward place to him. But, although I would never have wondered about it in advance, I did not expect my authority as a parent to be so much less the second time around. His older brother was defendable, literally speaking, and was probably shaped by the way we constantly defended him from everything. The younger one appears to be much less malleable, much more pre-formed as a personality. I have no real control over anything. In fact, I’m utterly powerless.

I’m on the bed, my son is sleeping next to me. My older son is sleeping in his bed. A group of seagulls are making an incredible amount of noise somewhere outside, perhaps in battle with other birds, perhaps in some orgy of food scavenging. My wife is doing something in the kitchen. Yesterday she was running in a long trail race on the other side of the city, in intense heat. My sons and I went there in time to see her cross the finish line. It was the kind of day I’d once have written about in detail in an iPhone note.

Tomorrow we will travel to the little island for a few days. I’m almost surprised about the lack of urgency I feel to write about what’s happening. Just as these iPhone notes began after I ceased trying to be a writer, they are now continuing after the time during which they were written with attention and enthusiasm. This is partly an effect of how much my/our days and nights have been getting busier and busier and more and more filled (I have had a lot of work, attending to which means leaving my wife alone with our son, which means I must try and fail to compensate for this, and he is getting ever-more active and tiring to look after, and I’m simultaneously conscious that his older brother needs more attention, which means he goes to bed later so as to spend time with me before bed, which means that there is a very short time after he is asleep before I must go to sleep, and I’ve given up trying to live what remains of my life in the hours after everyone else has gone to sleep).

I cycled to the island, carrying all our luggage and food shopping in the bike trailer my older son is now too tall to sit in. The idea was that it would give me some kind of bike ride, albeit very weighed down, while my wife and sons would enjoy an unencumbered boat trip to the island. Things did not go to plan. Shortly after I arrived I received word that the boat journey was nightmarish, and when I went to meet them at the jetty my wife’s face was badly scratched. Silence was maintained for a while. I took the pram and walked around so that my son would sleep, and once he did so we went to an area of shade at the bottom of the garden, beneath a colossal horse chestnut tree. I started picking up sticks from the ground and carefully stripping them of their bark. Only certain sticks are suitable for this procedure; they can’t be too dry, nor can they be too fresh or recently alive. My selections were good - I could feel a lifetime’s experience of bark stripping behind me. I’ll try to draw them at some point.

Yesterday was very difficult too. But today some kind of possibility to live as well as simply survive occurred in my mind. Many things were pleasant and refreshing. I’m not present enough to describe anything, or even present enough to remember to write; to remember that I seem to have an ongoing project of writing oddly detailed iPhone notes about my daily life. You should know that when I’m not writing my life continues anyway, usually in much the same way as it does when I am writing. The same kinds of things happen, the same kind of thoughts, feelings, difficulties, minor successes, drawings, bike rides, sticks, stones, leaves and dust.

Now we’re back in Stockholm. My son is sleeping in his pram, I’m sitting on a bench in the shade. The sun is absurdly bright. Next to me on the bench is an astonishing yellow ladybird, sitting perfectly still. The wind is whooshing around in the trees. I’m so tired I could fall asleep on this bench. Before leaving the island my son and I made an attempt to draw one of the stranger sticks that I’d stripped the bark from. It is shaped like a curious, thin old pipe, the kind your European great-great-grandfather might have smoked while staring implacably at the camera brought to his cabin in the woods by an earnest young photographer from the city, intent on documenting the peasantry in all their mute, noble wordlessness. We weighed down one end of it with an interesting stone my son found in a rockpool. The resulting form resembles the kinds of weapons made in the new Zelda game by fusing one object to another.

The left hand controller of his Nintendo Switch has started to malfunction, an apparently well-known problem known as ‘drift’. Dust must have entered its inner workings, causing phantom contact with its sensors. If idle, Link starts to walk to his left, as if he were pursuing some personal objective of his own. I had to extend my part of the drawing a bit because I hadn’t left enough space to complete the stick’s shadow (I didn’t think we were including shadows, but at the last minute my son said we were). I used a little yellow lottery ticket, one of three that my son bought at the island’s late-night midsummer festivities two evenings before. These festivities take place in a clearing in the forest at the top of a hill in the middle of the island, around a wooden stage that is there, I think, for just this one night every year. The atmosphere was one of fervent celebration and dancing. Many of the adults were drunk, and many of the children were hyperactive. There were some fairground-style games at the peripheries, including a competition to get the night’s highest score at darts. My son threw his five darts with extreme aggression, not hitting the dartboard itself but each one lodging itself deeply in the wooden board to which the the dartboard was attached. We left at about 11pm, the sun still extremely bright, flicking away mosquitoes as we walked.

The three yellow lottery tickets seemed like nice pieces of paper to keep. They were rolled up tightly like sticks, to be unrolled by the purchaser. On one of them I tried drawing something spiralled, a pretty nice snail shell my son found. He was impressed by the drawing. I wasn’t so sure, I’ve always had difficulty drawing snail shells. In fact, I don’t like drawing snail shells.

My son is sleeping in his pram again, I’m sitting on a bench in the playground again. The days are too busy for any real reflection, but certain thoughts shimmer through me. I’ve spent the last couple of days editing the CVs, exhibition biographies and publication histories of various artists and writers for various books. Hundreds and hundreds of books, group shows, solo shows, film screenings, awards, grants, residencies, prizes, success after success, outcome after outcome. I corroborate my own activities with the time periods of the CVs as I edit: one solo exhibition every decade, approximately, a few fragments sent here and there, some texts read by (as far as I know) 10-20 people. The extent to which I’ve been living in my own head, seemingly parallel to but in fact divergent from the world of real artists and writers becomes clear. A pigeon swoops past with a collection of sticks in its beak, seemingly building a nest in a sycamore tree that I think is the territory of the magpies. It’ll only get harder to ‘become’ a writer or artist now that I’m old, it would mean taking the steps I should have taken when I was 25, 30, 35; the sheer insanity of living in an art-adjacent daydream when the medium’s only real currency is that of visibility.

The reliance of this iPhone note on images makes me wonder if, despite everything, I am moving towards them. Perhaps I’m becoming an artist (perhaps I’m becoming an artist again). Perhaps I should study art again.

As these iPhones come to an end I’m conscious of them almost shutting themselves down before they actually finish: I’m writing less, and writing less frequently, and events in my life are not prompting me to write so much any more. I’m not imagining anything, or projecting myself into artistic fantasies. I’m not rebelling against my loss of identity. I’m not counterbalancing my losses with gains, or failures with successes. I’m not dreaming at night or acting deliberately during the day. I don’t feel as if I’m acting autonomously. I’m not doing housework or going to the shops. I’m not reading, writing, studying or thinking. I have, on the other hand, been making artworks, plotting ideas for artworks, making plans and sketches, responding to the world visually. I’ve outsourced my mind to the studio, a drawing table, scraps but also pristine sheets of paper. Instead of writing iPhone notes I’m rapidly filling a plan-chest with records of, if not my thoughts, then my impulses.

My son is sleeping in his pram. I’m sitting on a bench just next to his older brother’s old abandoned and overgrown kindergarten. Enormous trees above us, birds and insects everywhere, flowers, blossoms and parasites.

Later in the afternoon, my son is sleeping in his pram. I’m sitting on a bench just outside our building, in a solid block of shade. The sun is so bright it makes me feel sick. Last night I was meant to meet a friend for a late night bike ride (it’s pretty much light all night at the moment), but neither of my sons would go to sleep in time for me to get out and meet him. The younger one was just being rowdy, strutting around like a drunken British lad on holiday in the Mediterranean, and the older one wouldn’t go to bed until he had spent what he considered a reasonable amount of quality time just with me once his brother was asleep. It is hard to argue with that: I’m conscious that he now gets only fragments of the attention he used to, minutes rather than hours of drawing together, marble triage, Zelda, cricket practice, elaborating private mythologies, discussion, baking, everything. I’m also conscious that I use the word ‘conscious’ too often in these iPhone notes, both correctly and incorrectly. By the time they were both asleep and I had got my cycling kit on and my bike out of the storage room I received a text from my friend to say it was going to be too late by the time I got to him. I went back upstairs and removed my kit, then had a shower just as I would have done if I had been cycling - anxiety and stress had caused me to sweat profusely anyway. My wife has just brought down the bottle of electrolyte and carbohydrate drink I didn’t consume while cycling. Bees are working intensely on some tiny pink flowers right next to me. Every time I look there are exponentially more unread work emails in my inbox, .doc and .pdf files, so many books about art, so many texts, so many reflections, histories, practices, biographies, bibliographies, filmographies, not to mention imaginaries, all of which need to be made sense of so that they’ll make sense to other people. Even then they’ll retain the weird style that authors of art CVs have developed, unconsciously and en masse. In my practice, I fail to work on my CV and also fail to find people and places to send it to. I also have difficulty writing in third person, and am aware that the punctuation points of my career get fainter over time.

David Price was born in Glasgow in 1982, and lives and works where he is based, in Stockholm, Sweden. He has exhibited internationally, but not nationally, usually in the second or third cities of Western European countries. His work spans a variety of media, from HB to 6B and colour pencil, pen and watercolour. In his practice, he explores ideas relating to misremembered feelings and thoughts, emotional ephemera and scriptive imaginaries. His current project is a long and directionless series of iPhones notes that demarcate his proximity to but inexplicable self-exclusion from the fields of visual art, literature and criticism. Price’s collaborative praxis includes intermittent yet extensive exchanges of SMS messages and emails, as well as ‘liking’ any comment made on one of his Instagram posts.

A few weeks ago I placed a coffee cup on the desk next to me, which spilled slightly and made a stain that looks almost exactly like the silhouette of my older son’s head and shoulders.

Yesterday at the studio, delirious from the heat and the number of artist’s biographies I was proofreading, I took a fresh sheet of paper, held it over the coffee stain against a window, and traced the outline of the silhouette. I drew a grid over it, which I then used to make a larger version of the image.

Since being at the studio I’ve started or resuscitated all kinds of artworks. I’ve traced lost fragments of thoughts that existed as notes or barely-expressed shapes made with pencil lines. I’ve been tracing quite a lot of things in this way, standing at the window. If I had a light box I’d probably use it, but it’s nice to be at the window and stare out at the expanse of industrial buildings, motorway flyovers, disused rail tracks and distant buildings. Sometimes a seagull and, I think, its fledgling land on a roof that protrudes just outside the window. They left a small bone there the other day. I’d be risking my life doing so, but I should really recover the bone - it would be nice to draw. Or carve into some kind of tool. Or cast it in bronze then bury it deep in the soil to confuse metal detectorists or future archaeologists (Here’s to You, 2025). I still haven’t moved into the studio properly (there are boxes and portfolios at home of things I should move there; all kinds of stationary and artworks, a super 8 film projector, cameras, all the things I acquired in the years when I was trying to be an artist, and which I never look at), and all I have there are the things I stuffed into my bag the first morning I rode there by bicycle. This includes a small sheaf of scraps of paper on which I’d written or drawn fragmentary things I no longer understood. I half thought that in the neat and ordered silence of the studio they would make sense again, one by one, and flourish into thoughts. They did not. So, I traced them all onto one sheet of paper, forming a complicated and absurd symbol system or codex. I then scanned the tracing, isolated the pencil lines, and thickened and darkened them as if I was making a comic book page or diagram. Earlier in the process of writing these iPhone notes I would have explained the origins of every one of the image fragments that make up this ‘diagram’, but I won’t do that now. I’ll wait to see if the diagram becomes useful first.

Early this evening I cycled very fast (I was late) into town to meet a friend I hadn’t seen for a long time. He talked about his current academic work, the philosophers he was reading, and I was intellectually out of my depth and stumbled over my words slightly. He also talked about the steps he was taking to continue and advance his academic career, and I began to wonder why I never did the same thing, why I never treated my PhD studies as anything other than a period of scholarship-funded daydreaming. Why did I never write an academic paper, seek publication, seek to communicate what I was doing to others and communicate with them about what they were doing? It never occurred to me that there might be a place in the world for me. Something he mentioned about Rancière reminded me of the very funny ‘C’ episode of Deleuze’s Abécédaire (C is for culture), in which Deleuze, quite comedically, rails against culture, intellectuals, the act of talking, etc. At the beginning of these iPhone notes I remember writing that instead of reading I’d just watch the Abécédaire. I didn’t even do that, I only got as far as C.

Deleuze’s position seems to be (approximately) that artworks are not carriers of ‘cultural’ or symbolic freight, nor should they be employed as connecting points in some kind of cultural ‘network’. Instead they should simply be the other party in rencontres, which the English subtitles give as ‘encounters’ but should probably just be ‘meetings’. I would like to disaggregate the word ‘meeting’ from its official and officious workplace meaning. However serious Deleuze is being here or not, it seems true to my lived experience to think of discreet individual meetings with things, to ignore or even reject any conception of networked meanings or even networks themselves. I’ve burrowed myself too deeply into my own life to understand them, even conceptually. At very least, thinking this way helps me to post-rationalise the extreme scaling back of intellectual ambition I have undergone since I almost tried to become an academic.

I was unable to find a reasonable and stable middle ground between individual meetings with things (and images, words) on the one hand, and wider (consolidated or synthetic) ideas on the other. I became dizzy when ideas ran away with themselves and formed connections between things. I would get excited, get seduced by excitement, talking to myself, then feel lost. This is probably why I act and think more simply now, ‘culturally’ speaking, projecting or promoting myself or my thoughts very little, and working on one very small thing at a time. This would also explain the art-like gestures I seem to be working on. Yet, just like in the last iPhone note, I clearly long for relation at the same time. It’s not like I’m writing all these iPhone notes just for myself. Glissant and Deleuze were friends; I should go back to Glissant to make sense of this. And I should watch the next episode.

The last few days have been spent preparing for our journey. I haven’t been to the studio or gone on a bike ride, the lack of one or both of which contribute to me being in a state of exhaustion-derived depression. I couldn’t be in a worse state to write.

23/06/2005

I’m an idiot. Always writing about my life, my one life in this diary. There is more than that to think about.

Somewhere in the middle of these iPhone notes I started quoting from my ca. 2005 diary. I imagined that thereafter the notes would occasionally be peppered with illuminating or oddly congruent words from myself, from years before. I didn’t even continue doing that, and just left the diary leaning against the wall by the desk. At the point I stopped reading it I was in a state of great confusion, having separated from my girlfriend and started seeing my wife. I was moving house quite often, it seems, wandering around the streets of Paris. I was about to participate in an exhibition organised by some friends at their studio building somewhere in Belleville. The work I made for the exhibition (it was the first time since my degree show a year earlier that I’d made or shown ‘artworks’) was quite strange. I had become interested in triangles, I think because they were simple but variable shapes, and ones that could be represented correctly, geometrically, without needing to measure anything. I don’t know why this felt significant to me. I was pretty lost, according to the diary. I was often happy and excited, but just as often unhappy and confused. I read Underworld by Don DeLillo, listened to Adventure by Television, walked around, picked up scraps of paper in the street and read anything written on them, borrowed comics (but never proper books) from the library, wore, I think, quite ragged clothes, made friends, drank some alcohol and smoked some cigarettes, both of which I’d previously given up, and felt simultaneous freedom and panic. I set up an old video camera on a tripod above the desk (can’t remember which bedroom in which apartment), rostrum-style, and placed a piece of white paper so that it filled the frame of the image completely. I then proceeded to draw a constellation of triangles using colour pencils, pressing ‘record’ for a second or two at a time as the lines accumulated. It was a form of very crude stop motion.

I think I’ve used the phrase ‘very crude stop motion’ before in these iPhone notes - it’s probably the single most telling metaphor I’ve employed. I dubbed the resulting video back and forth between a VHS tape and the camera over and over again until the image was degraded and fuzzy, and the colours distorted. It looked a bit like the lines were being plotted by an early computer that had been assigned the task of ‘artificially intelligent doodling’ by a stoned engineer late at night, hours after a California earthquake, insects buzzing outside the window, Gaucho on the stereo, a camp bed set up in the computer lab to zone out on during the hours it takes for the machine to plot the lines.

A few days before the exhibition took place I selected an area of concrete floor in the entrance area of the studio building (where, unless I’m imagining this, there usually stood a table tennis table in the shape of the island of Cyprus, although I don’t think the net followed the line of the border between the Turkish and Greek sides), set up another tripod and videoed myself replicating the drawing of triangles. I did so using chalks, on the floor. All I remember from the resulting video is that I was wearing Levi 501 jeans that had been dyed a kind of scarlet-purple colour and red high-top Converse trainers. I was presumably wearing something on my upper body, but I can’t remember what. That video is lost. I also can’t remember much about the exhibition itself, where my videos were shown, who came or who I spoke to. I vaguely remember being in a crowd of people standing on the chalk drawing, which I’m not sure anyone noticed, and which was being gradually erased by our feet. Conversations and explanations can, in any case, be difficult when the work is inexplicable to everyone including the artist. I presume that I, finding my own life incomprehensible, took some refuge in drawing simple shapes. One draws a line, then another starting from one end of the first. If a third line is drawn connecting either end of the resulting ‘V’ shape then a triangle is formed, by default.

We’ve just got on to the first in our sequence of trains, beginning our holiday with extreme acts of weightlifting. My shoulder, which is still injured, hurts due our bags. Rather than me carrying a too-heavy rucksack, this time I am pulling a very large piece of luggage on wheels, which is heavier than any previous rucksack.

My younger son’s preferred way to travel seems to be striding up and down the train carriage, greeting the other passengers with a vigorous wave, sometimes shouting the Swedish word for ‘cars’, and touching people’s possessions, thighs or feet if they seem interesting in some way. He became a little violent if restrained, but none of the wounds drew blood. We arrived at my wife’s godmother’s house in a small fishing village on the southeastern tip of Sweden, a place of almost incredible beauty and tranquility. The gardens of every cottage are full of roses, herbs, lavender and foxgloves. I am exhausted.

After months since the last update, my son shed some more light on his concept for a new Zelda game, which he plans to make in collaboration with Nintendo (working with Nintendo staff whose English is good enough to communicate with him in case he doesn’t learn Japanese quickly enough). I had almost forgotten about The Legend of Zelda: The Crown’s Falling. The main quest of the game will revolve around the search for four crowns, each one of which is to be found in the depths of a ‘brave temple’. He advises beginning with the easiest of these, a brave temple defended by a creature known as Aquasantes - “a giant bubbly frog with the upper body of a Venus flytrap”. The player is assisted by earning the special abilities of ‘temperature hand’ (with a swoop of the hand one can change the temperature of the entire space one is in, turning water to ice or vapour, for example) and ‘gigantahand’ (which is like the ‘ultrahand’ ability in the new Zelda game but “much, much more powerful”). He also explained that, in the imaginary country he has devised whose lore and history is constantly being elaborated, he has been asked to star in a stage production of The Legend of Zelda due to his physical resemblance to the character of Link, but also because of his acting skills.

Perhaps I’ve been avoiding intellectual ambition for longer than I realised. These iPhone notes, assembled together, give some illusion of depth and weight, but they too are simple completions of shapes. It’s as if, partly on purpose but also in part unconsciously, I’ve ruled myself out of serious or sustained thought, let alone complex or long-range thought. Some foolish part of me, however, believes that I deserve to publish a book too, just because I’ve written enough words to fill one. I try to explain to myself that things don’t work like that, that the status of ‘a book’ is an honour granted to bodies of text that have a degree of focus, and which assist the reader (at least to some extent) by addressing them openly and by making themselves open to the reader (rather then making themselves enclosed around the writer). I will never be able to write something that becomes a book. I’m unable, or perhaps unwilling despite myself, to learn any lessons from my previous unsuccessful attempts to do so.

In the new Zelda game my son and I have been pursuing slightly different objectives, this time in two separate saved game files. He is following the main narrative, whereas I am making strange and lonely scouting adventures, charting the territory of the game rather than playing it as such. Occasionally things I have learned in my game have been useful to him as lessons in his, but he is less and less in need of my help. So far he has not required me to conduct maintenance work or squirely tasks in his game, on his behalf. He has enough food, enough arrows, enough weapons, and he actually has more shields than I do. I have sometimes been playing for a short while late at night when everyone else is asleep, mainly just to experience a place and time where my actions are feasible (unlike the real world), but neither of us have actually had time to play the game much at all due to the excess of reality in which we’re living.

At the little beach here by the fishing village there is a large concrete ‘pool’ in the sea, where the water is fractionally warmer than the sea itself.

The pool is made by a few low walls and some rocks. It is full of, and surrounded by, small pebbles of every kind of geological origin. It’s also perfect for skimming stones, as long as no one is bathing in the pool within range of a skimmed stone. The pebbles are quite small, not heavy enough to have the momentum for truly spectacular skims - the best I have managed is seven bounces. I have had to adapt my technique carefully due to my injured shoulder, twisting my upper body more and flicking my wrist less. My son simply flings his stones with gay abandon, ignoring my advice to concentrate on flatness, counterspin and flight, and even ignoring my discourses on the poetics of surface tension and the resemblance of certain skimming stones to the aquatic landings made by some sea birds as well as seaplanes. His skims are less consistent than mine, but his good ones are, if anything, better than my own - they more often pitch and even roll in the air, sometimes between bounces. All this said, a high proportion of the pebbles one finds at the pool are actually too beautiful to skim and therefore lose. Some resemble emeralds (or, according to my son, are emeralds), others are incredibly smooth, almost to the point of seeming soft, some are combinations of differently coloured sediments of granite, and some are shards of slate whose sharp edges have been rounded. We very quickly collected too many to bring with us, so I made a small selection of the best ones.

There was one that I made an earnest and diligent attempt to draw, without much success.

My son, sitting across from me, drew the stone from his position to demonstrate that it wasn’t so difficult.

He elaborated things by giving the stone an imaginary companion, noticing the accidental anthropomorphism created by the two dots and the jagged line. I, of course, thought of the ‘Finder’ icon on my computer, but he said it would become the icon for ‘an app he was going to make’.

He has a certain mode of drawing, which he values much less than creating characters and pictorial stories, and which is like mine but less complicated and worried: he looks, observes, draws quickly, looks at his subject again, draws, looks, then vigorously draws the subject’s shadow. He employs this method only occasionally; if I ask him if he’d like to draw together with me, or if he notices that I am having difficulties with a drawing, or if I tell him that I am. He says that this is just “normal boring art”, and that my problem is that I’m stuck in it, unable to do anything “creative”. I have to admit that this is somewhat true. However, he’s getting better and better at it himself. It may even be the case that at the same time I am slowly learning to be creative. Perhaps we will converge at one point. The next day I saw a stone embedded in the ground that was coherent with both schools of thought.

My younger son is sleeping in his pram. I am sitting next to him on a bench, near the harbour of the town where my wife’s brother lives. We’ve been here a couple of days, without anything remarkable happening. The sun is brutally hot, and there is very little shade. The town is full of people who are seemingly happy to be in the sun, who sit in it deliberately. Everyone else is going to the beach. The beach will be extremely busy. I would obviously have a panic attack there, with no shade available, but having a baby gives me a legitimate excuse to avoid the Ballardian horrors. The sea itself, or rather the sound itself, with Denmark just visible on the other side, is extraordinarily nice, obviously. I’ll go there later on, at the end of the evening.