Lifescape

On November 10th I’ll be delivering an all day creative workshop entitled “a way of being free” . The workshop is part of Nant y Coy Art’s programme of events, exhibitions and activities. See their website at www.nantycoy.com for further details and to book a place on the day-long workshop for only £15. You can also download a publicity sheet for the event by clicking here: A way of being free. The article below is a ‘work in progress’, based around this theme.

“The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene.” Dennis Potter, April 1994

In one of the recent Guardian series of Great Interviews of the twentieth century series there’s an extract from Dennis Potter’s interview with Melvyn Bragg in April 1994. That, in itself, is a frightening thing: not only how quickly those years have gone by; but also that its taken me 13 more years since first seeing and being inspired by the interview to realise how much potential significance it had for our psychological, political and intellectual freedom.

One the one hand, Potter, dying, says what he pleases – eloquent and rapier-like – enjoying targeting our political and intellectual culture in general and individuals like Rupert Murdoch in particular. And on the other hand, freed of any sort of constraint within himself (with no sense of himself in the future), Potter is able to be utterly free in the present. And that, in short, is the ultimate freedom for any individual – to be able to be so much in the present that we not only notice what is around us, but we are freed of any hopes or fears about what the consequences of this moment might be in some kind of projected version of ourselves.

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