Failing to write about uncertainty

A Restless Art was written from a place of relative confidence, although that confidence ebbed during the four years it took me to write. I set out complacently thinking I had knowledge to share but, as I met more people working in community art, I saw how much I had to learn. In the end, that book reflects both realities, old experiences tested by new ones. 

The testing has grown since its publication. Public events and private experiences have unsettled my foundations and made me far less sure of what I know or think. I’ve never minded uncertainty—it’s part of the definition of community art I proposed in A Restless Art—but I’ve not felt it so deeply before. It’s woken me up, excited and scared at the same time. I think about some of those who’ve inspired me over the years: Richard Feynman, who argued that scientists need a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, Michel de Montaigne, who was never afraid to show the human inconsistencies of his ideas and, most recently, Buddhist teachers for whom not knowing is both a reality and a starting point. 

Still, it’s not a comfortable place to be. I spent time last week drafting different posts about uncertainty. I shelved them both after sharing them with friends who asked good questions. I found that I was uncertain about uncertainty, confident of its reality and value, but unable to articulate anything clearer than that. I’d quoted Rainer Maria Rilke’s words to a young poet advising patience ‘towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves’ but I was still trying to answer them. Old habits are resilient. 

So uncertainty itself taught me a lesson. Stop trying so hard. Stop rushing. Stop looking for solutions while pretending you’re not. Live with the questions, and for as long as it takes. Maybe answers will come, maybe not. Maybe A Selfless Art, if I do find a way to write it, is about living with the right questions.

I’m hesitant about sharing this journey without maps: it seems likely to be meandering, with unexpected halts, dead ends and reversals. But I’ve always thought that the journey was the point, the process of community art—while paradoxically believing that process is validated by what it produces. Time will tell where this ends. 

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The pinhole camera photo is from a project in a youth custody centre in Portugal by MEF, (see A Restless Art)