What does it Mean to be Alive?
by Chris Arthur Eastover Press (2024) £21.99
A Review by Graham Johnston
To essay (from the French essai), is to attempt, to trial – to try out. Rather than starting out with a conclusion and then seeking the best way to order and transcribe it, Chris Arthur’s essays seem to record how the medium of writing itself – the process of naming and structuring through words – reveals previously hidden significance to both author and reader. Arthur, you get the feeling, isn’t writing to deliver pre-conceived assertions – he is writing to think.
Unearthing ‘hidden cargoes’ (the title of a previous collection of essays) is a common aspect in Arthur’s work and is particularly valuable in this age of the short attention span, the relentless algorithmic competition for our ‘engagement’. In this, his latest collection of essays (‘What does it Mean to be Alive?: Fourteen Attempts at an Answer’) Arthur seeks to point us - beneath the surface of the familiar, the close at hand, the everyday – towards the extraordinary and the universal.
The full title of Arthur’s latest collection of essays is important to bear in mind because the first part carries the tiniest risk of promising to answer its own question – as in a self-help guide, or the wisdom from some life-skills guru. But the sub-title defuses any such danger and alerts us to the nuance and humility that characterises his work - yet retains the scope to tackle the deepest of questions.
Essay writers are a rare species, and it wasn’t until I found myself, in 2018, talking to the co-organiser of an academic conference on The Essay, that I realised that, looking back over decades of reading, it was essays that stuck out as having had the most lasting effect on my thinking and my way of looking at the world. Intrigued by this thought, and learning that the conference was at the magnificently eccentric Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, I decided to accept an invitation to attend, and it was there that I first encountered Chris Arthur, a guest speaker and, as an exponent of the form, an object of academic probing – a sort of ‘Exhibit A’ of the essayist genus.
The conference introduced two questions; what is the viability of the essay in the modern publishing environment; and what are the defining characteristics of essay writing? Perhaps one hope of the conference was to find an answer to the former question in the latter, but for me the success of the conference lay in its posing questions about the nature of writing, and, by comparing essays to other forms, how literature plays a role in the formation of individuals and societies.
The answer to the first question was rather gloomy – essayists, in publishing, are more than just rare – they’re an endangered species. The second question was met more with an essai – an attempt at an answer rather than an arrival at any agreed conclusions. In a mirror of one unifying quality of essays, the conference looked closely at the surface of the essay form, to see what lay beneath. But what else unifies and defines the essay?
Essays can be on any subject, and are not limited to a particular length, though they do tend to be relatively short in form. Montaigne, the renowned father-figure of the essay, took a sort of free-range philosophical point-of-view, while the great essayists of more recent times have become famous through (and perhaps steered by publishing imperatives) a clearly defined subject area – John Berger will forever be associated with art and the politics of the left – Susan Sontag with photography. Essays resemble journalistic articles, but they are not tied to reporting on contemporary events. They have a lot in common with magazine and newspaper columns, but these tend to be opinion pieces from a fixed and familiar point of view – columns tend to reinforce rather than explore. Academic writing is also kin, but essays are less constrained by the need to ‘prove’ or endure the scrutiny of peer review. And there’s a strand of essaying that could be considered part of the autobiography canon, but the presence of the author in an essay is rarely the actual subject.
This lack of clarity makes the essayist paradoxically vulnerable in what might be described as the Anglo-Saxon literary bias – which I would describe as the cultural dominance that defined verbal concepts have over all other forms of thinking in this part of the world. Words, as the cultural reserve currency, have given us the remarkable and powerful tool of being able share definitions and concepts across space and time. Literature has an almost hegemonic hold over the concept of an idea: if it’s not in words, it’s not an idea. Or at least, if it’s a non-verbal idea – like a movement idea, or a musical idea or a painterly idea – it is of a lower order, intuitive sort.
What was beautifully circular about revisiting Hospitalfield, was that 40 years earlier I had been a young art student on a summer residency there and had been pondering questions of the role of art on the formation of individuals and societies and, perhaps like all young art students, was wrestling with the nature and status of the kind of thinking that goes in to making art. I was greatly assisted in this by the essays of the likes of Berger and Sontag, as well as Raymond Williams and Rudolph Arnheim among others. I don’t remember those writers reaching conclusions – but I do remember the originality and detail with which their words looked at the objects of their enquiries – how they used precise and original language to define and redefine what they were looking at, and in so doing revealed new emergent properties.
This is the part of the essaying tradition that Arthur exemplifies. But what makes him stand out for me, is that there is in his work an equivalence to the point of view of an artist – the way in which he draws on his immediate environment, projects a certain intimacy of experience -which is consistent with my own experience of making visual art.
The emergent properties that Arthur identifies are drawn from his encounters with objects and memories that are close to hand – from close looking at what is there, of questioning what we’ve come to accept that we think is there – to seeing it anew through his medium. As he says in ‘Learning to See Goldcrests’ - one of my favourites in this collection - ‘Is it possible to use language differently, to forge our descriptions according to new reference points, so that our words create perspectives that are eye-opening?’ If it isn’t Arthur’s foundational question, it’ll do in the meantime, because it seems to be at the heart of every essay in ‘What is it like to be alive?’
It's impossible to link the objects in each of these essays in terms of subject categories – there is no evident chain of thought - and as Arthur states in his introduction, ‘they may appear like unrelated pieces that don’t belong together.’ What, for instance, connects the troubling history of prostitution buried in a decorative print by the Japanese artist, Hiroshige (‘A Lament for Tama’), to the natural history of a patch of lichen on an Edinburgh sandstone windowsill (‘Litmus Test’)? Not much, on first inspection. However, one consistent theme – or perhaps it’s more of a tenor – is that Arthur essays on the idea that the profound is embedded in the (one of his favourite words) quotidian and the familiar, and that language is the medium with which he can unearth it. It is not so much, as Marshal McLuhan famously put it, that ‘the medium is the message’, but rather, that the medium is the messenger. In fact, a double messenger: if you use a creative medium, it will reveal things to you – stuff shows up; and simultaneously, the product of that activity can reveal that same stuff to someone else.
It's possible, of course, to also see Arthur’s writing as examples, not so much of the work of an endangered species, but of a beneficiary of another facet Anglo-Saxon cultural bias. Arthur makes no secret of his roots as a white, middle-class son, growing up in post-imperial, protestant Northern Ireland. But while this is perhaps an unfashionable starting point in today’s publishing landscape, it becomes an enlightening point of departure in that it gives Arthur something for his language and his curiosity to cut through and emerge into a bigger picture. What makes them particularly fascinating to me, as someone trained in the disciplines of the visual arts, is that Arthur exploits the essai-ing qualities of his chosen medium to not only trial the words that will accurately communicate the objects of his attention – be they things or ideas – but also to attempt to track down what it is he is thinking about them in the first place.
In this, he seems much closer to a painter or a visual artist, in that the medium is a way of being in the moment, of sketching and becoming fully engaged with what is in one’s field of vision: by focussing on describing what is truly there, rather than accepting received or handed down notions, Arthur is open to what show’s up in the journey from first glance to revised cognition. As he says in the first essay of this collection, ‘I’m interested in how easy it is to look at things and not really see what’s there.’ It’s telling how many of Arthur’s essays are based on a photographs of an image or an object which then go on to reveal an initially unknowable or contradictory reality.
We are as a species, programmed and conditioned to ignore or devalue the routine, the normal – it would be exhausting to experience as new and fascinating, every familiar experience in every day. If every task or activity required the same attention and care as it did the first time we attempted them, we’d never get anything done. Efficient this may be - and productive, even - but unless we pause occasionally, to see the conceptual gymnastics of a ‘You Are Here’ map (‘Snowglobe Co-ordinates’), or the difficult backstory to a familiar historical statue (‘Nicholson’s Horse’), we fall away, in tiny incremental ways, from the kind of engagement with the world that really matters.
What allows us to be transported by Arthur’s writing – to be carried from the specifics of his own history – is the precision of his language which seeks always to find the bigger picture. The process of essay writing, perhaps, is to be in a medium which carries its practitioner closer to the thing at hand; subject and object are in the same space - co-exist in the text. Arthur achieves this by an openness to the objects he encounters in his particular journey. Describing them reveals that they are emblems of something bigger than his own place and status in the world.
It is in these qualities that I recognise also those of the visual artist – the medium enables the author and the reader to be more fully ‘here’, to be truly engaged with the objects of their attention and to respect the vast histories of their being. What it means, perhaps, to be alive.
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