RICHARD SWANN ART

As if being killed by a cat and dragged into someone’s house isn’t enough, you then get put in a sandwich box littered with crumbs and residues of cheese and peanut butter and chucked in a fridge.  In the ice-making bit at the top with a warped plastic door that someone melted with a fan heater when they were defrosting it one time.  Not even a proper freezer.  Then you’re taken out and put on a piece of board balanced on a computer while someone does a painting of you and watches a Grand Prix on the screen behind you.  All very amateurish, the guy’s not even working in a proper studio, the light’s bad and he’s mixing his paint on a plate.  You’ve only got about half of this unprofessional no-hoper’s attention anyway and to add insult to injury it’s another tedious Mercedes one-two.

But consider this, little ptichka.  Consider your immensity.  Walk into a cathedral and you are struck by space, immense, echoing space, and by light, streams of it, miraculously coloured.  Step back outside again and there’s even more space out there, and even more light, but you didn’t notice it.  The cathedral is designed to reveal, and to awe with the revelation.  A dead bird has the same effect.  Sudden knowledge of the detail and complexity of the world, of how precious and fragile life is.  The only way to respond is with awed appreciation, with reverence.  One purpose of humans, maybe the only purpose, is to be conscious of stuff, it’s our unique ability, there’s no point in all those supernovae and sunsets and waterfalls existing without someone to appreciate them. And for a while, despite the sandwich box, the freezer and the Grand Prix,  you occupied and dazzled my consciousness of the world.

A painter is trying to pull off the same effect as the thousands of tons of stone and glass of the cathedral, only on a small rectangle of canvas using pigments suspended in binder.  It’s a noble but futile ambition, and not something I could ever do as well as an ex blue tit.

Blue tit