No time like the present

I am working with Patrick at the adventure playground every Tuesday. We have decided to talk, do and then work with the kids when they arrive at half three.  This week we got talking about building a pirate ship.  Pirates are in many ways utopian  as they live in the sea and don't obey the normal rules.  Pirates represent freedom.  I remember being shocked to discover that pirates wear an eye patch as they have to give one eye to the sea.  This is due to damage through siting a sextant on the sun at noon everyday to work out the angle of latitude. Pirates literally burn their eyes out trying to find where they are. Like Oedipus they eventually have to pay for the things they have seen with their sight.  I think proper pirates like Blackbeard or Captain Pugwash don't care where they are and are happy to float with full vision in an ocean of doubt.

So the plan that emerged mainly out of my head is to make a pirate ship.  We hope to launch the finished thing on September 19th which just happens to be International Talk Like A Pirate Day, ah ha me ship mates. From the perspective of the Taking yourself seriously project, its made me think of the  idea of having an idea and how that makes you want to realise it. This is one of those things we talk about a lot and say that it is something artists do - like looking really hard at something really normal like an olive or a door stop.  The fact is that everybody or most people or a certain type of person that likes a mission will work in this way.  It may be building, a shed, growing cactus or restoring a car - artists are not the only people to have a mission.  What I am now thinking through for this project is the possibility that in certain contexts the specific type of mission artists have and their ability through experience, training and cultural capitol to realise them can be specific and of value. The mission could be writing a book, performing a play, capturing a scene in paint, film or pixel or, if I push things further than is necessary, building a giant pirate ship.

I feel like I now need to credit Tim Neal as many years ago he would talk of how by asking certain questions we create rather than question the problems that the question defines.  Not to put Tim down Ernst Bloch says a similar thing in his treatise on wisdom.  Not to go to around the houses, Bloch suggests that philosophy as invented by the Greeks is a bit shit and as soon as someone asked the question 'Why are we here?' we were fucked because it's impossible to answer this great big ontological mystery of life and worse than this the only thing that can help us live with the great unknowing of why, is the inadequate development of the very philosophy that messed us up in the first place.  So here it is 'Is a giant pirate ship for kids to play on for the next ten years art?' to which I need to reply by drawing from my close reading of some of the greatest French philosophers of the last 50 years from Deleurs  to Foucault from Bouriard to Rancier, 'who gives a shit?'

After about an hour of talking I got a 'no time like the present feeling' -and went off to buy wood to patch up the castle I had made in 2001 - I worked hard all day even during a hail storm.  I was really pleased I was able to do something practical.  My friend Lucy walked past and waved and I shouted back about our hangovers from Sunday night drinking.  Her kids play on the castle and I was pleased she had witnessed me doing something useful.