In search of unicorns

jobs. cormorants. Imperfections.

Oct 20, 2024

Blue skies. A sparkling day, finally, and surprisingly mild. You could think it was a more clement month except the trees are resplendent in their autumn finery, so the cormorants took me by surprise. Two of them, in the lake, on the dead tree. I’ve come to associate them with fog. A golfer looks annoyed at me, as if my pausing to look at cormorants has affected him, as if he could hit me with a powerful strike of a golf ball, as if that golf ball wasn’t going to end up at the bottom of the lake imminently.

Boars hill yesterday. You see that weirdness that looks like I’ve over edited this? Another sign that I need a new phone. Which isn’t going to happen till I sell another 4 raven prints.

I proceed with the days ruminations. Today I have been wondering if artists are in fact, unicorns. No one seems to believe me if I say I am one, as if it’s a sort of pretend occupation of a bored housewife. It’s like if you told me you were a unicorn, I wouldn’t believe you were a unicorn. I’d nod, but imagine you went home and tied a narwhal horn on your head and ate skittles for dinner and probably needed to see the mental health nurse because unicorns don’t actually exist.

The first time I met the mental health nurse he asked me my job and when I told him he seamlessly and without hesitation asked if I wanted help getting back into work. I don’t want help getting into work, but if I did then I would have lots of help because trying to get me a ‘proper’ job is a fairly common response to finding out my chosen occupation. I’m not 100% sure what constitutes a ‘proper’ job, but I think it involves a salary and being miserable on a daily basis.

What I’ve come to understand is most people would like me to be a teacher. I live on a school and I’m married to a teacher, so what other credentials could I possibly need? Perhaps there is a strict policy of not marrying outside the profession I have not been told about? At one gathering to meet other parents, I was asked if I was a teacher so often I asked the only father present if everyone assumed his wife was a nuclear physicist? Is that how it works? You’re just assumed to have the same job as your spouse? His wife has never been asked if she is a nuclear physicist. She is a teacher, though.

Also, if you ask someone their job, they can answer and that moves the conversation forward. If you ask them if they’re a teacher, they’ll probably say no and then stare at you enjoying the awkward silence for a while.

Having ascertained I was not a teacher, I was asked why I am not a teacher. This is easy to answer. Children are too noisy, I hate the parents and strongly dislike teaching people things; honestly they keep making mistakes which is irritating, and it would be much better if they went away and left me in peace to do it properly. Also, and this is really quite shocking, incomprehensible and hard to grasp, I like my current employment.

For two years the mental health nurse has not mentioned my job again. He tends to ask if my house is tidy, which I find quite sexist, and also the tidiness of my house is no gauge of my mental health. I have run the full spectrum of human emotions, and none has produced any form of neatness, and far from indicating a balanced mind I strongly feel a tidy house probably indicates something terrible. It came as quite a surprise, then, this visit when he asked ‘you dabble in arts and crafts, don’t you?’

Dabble. Dabble.

Presumably he doesn’t think I am good teacher material. He also told me he is leaving in November. I think I managed to keep the look of rapturous joy off my face, but I can’t be sure. The good news might’ve been the only thing keeping him from leaving work with a broken nose. Reducing my life’s work to dabbling is not the worst thing he’s done but it’s beginning to rankle.

Found a nice mushroom too. Nothing to do with the text but then it’s hard to photograph unicorns. On of the colleges says it has a unicorn horn but it’s a narwhal tusk.

Maybe, I think, passing the cormorants, dark harbingers of winter in their dead tree, maybe artists are things that only exist in the past. There were artists, but now there are graphic designers and surface pattern illustrators and other more sensible jobs that involve salaries and misery. It can’t be solely a financial thing, though, because everyone is happy to call Van Gogh an artist while still firmly wed to the only-selling-one-painting myth.

I used to have a t shirt that said ‘fake artist’ because when people finally see my work, or perhaps if they don’t appreciate printmaking, when they see a drawing or painting I did that they like, they’ll say ‘oh, you’re a real artist’. So I decide it’s like pop stars. Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin are artists, but most of us cannot aspire to that, the way that normal people are not Taylor Swift. You can’t decide you’re a pop star; being a pop star is bestowed upon you. Perhaps I don’t get to call myself an artist, people bestow it on me according to their own definitions of art and artists so I need to find a new job title for introducing myself with.

Then next day the sun rises swathed in thick autumnal mists. Perhaps cormorants bring the fog, not the other way round. They settle on the tree and the warmth of autumn is replaced with a soft creeping of damp. That’s probably what they’re up to. I’m glad they’re back.

Dabblings

I have carved and proofed all three magpies. Which is quite good going, I think, for an unemployed person.

Findings.

I’ve been watching ‘The Art That Made Us’ on IPlayer, which I have enjoyed. I learn there’s a thumbprint on the stained glass window in York Minster, a six hundred year old thumbprint, and I wondered how old a thumbprint has to be before it stops being a perceived flaw and starts being a reminder that hundreds of years ago there were people, and they were just like you, and they were making stuff. We try so hard to make things perfectly and yet perfect things roll off conveyor belts in factories all the time. There is a surplus of smooth moulded perfection. what we need are more thumbprints.

I also found this very old graffiti in a church. How old does graffiti have to be before it stops being wanton vandalism and starts being history? The voices of the long dead echoing through church walls. Accidentally printed onto the windows.