When I started out as an “artist” (-a word meaning life-concept, now considered a crime against self-deprecation), writing music, poetry and prose in my 20s, I was ambivalent about success. It beckoned like a devil. Success was ’selling out’, in a mask. The most important thing, I told myself, was to do what I wanted and liked. If a few folk loved what I was doing, cool. Someone was bound to dig my work, sooner or later, if I stuck to my guns. Better the honest artist than the artful salesman seeking to satisfy people’s desires, however peverse. The good artist is the teller of truths.
It all felt very noble. And then I sold out, although not as an artist. I did and said things I didn’t believe in, to be a good husband, student, teacher, even Muslim. Part of me is glad I did. The noble individualist is a selfish and sanctimonious moral position to take. More than that, I’m glad I learned to look at things from points of view I might have otherwise balked at. I’ve seen the world in a way that would have otherwise remained hidden from my lofty artist’s ivory tower. Yet part of me feels soiled.
Now, as I return to my literary obsession, the hundred times I’ve betrayed myself has helped me understand that art — as a concept of living-working — requires the artist to step outside subjective solipsism. But I remain just as tender to all those betrayals. I have never stopped reviling the art of salesmanship — and that’s nothing to do with the fact I’m a crap salesman. The use of plot or character are devices for exploring human possibilities in a fictional narrative, not ploys for pulling punters. What has to engage the reader is a sense that the work is a coherent, considered, creative, sincere, evocative exploration of human meaning. I am inviting others to walk beside me in order to explore life, not escape from it.
Telling a good story, or creating attractive characters, or writing sparkling prose are not ends themselves, except for the starving entertainer. That insight casts fantasies of interviews and awards, along with the devil himself, back into the burning, sulphurous abyss. Writing is not a fucking test, with the pass mark being a publisher who insists you re-write the last 50 pages to make it appeal to deadheaded bedwetters in surburban Basingstoke.
Art is about human transcendence and cultural evolution.
Writing is the most prostituted art on the planet – blogging, novel writing, you name it. Whether it’s for acclaim or cash, the old whore is out there, telling you what to best say and how to best say it in order to make it seem like the real thing. And if you learn to touch her L-spot in the right place, she’ll never stop telling you what a fantastic person you are. I just unsold out.
The Mapmaker is going to a great novel. But if you’re a looking for something to distract you from a world pissing in yer face, my advice is, put a brick through a bank window. Art is about where humanity is heading, not how to escape from the here-and-now whilst doing fuck all to save yourself. Art is about liberating the soul from torpor, not surrendering to it.
I’m tired of the intellectual, emotional and political cowardice that pollutes so much art in contemporary Britain. Death to those who shit on the word “art” as if any discussion about possibilities beyond living room banalities is a crime called “pretension”: death to a culture dominated by such bitter, tiny minds, where striving to be something more than pedestrian is mocked as “grandiose”. Sounds to me like we’re being told to mind our place.
Goodbye to all that. Art is where everyone in the world becomes Rumi.
Like I said, I just unsold out.
December, 1148; 543 AH: a small band of assorted travellers gather on Marettimo, believed by some to be Homer’s Ithaca, now a fortress island off the coast of Norman Sicily. Among them is leading intellectual luminary of Roger II’s court, Muhammad al-Idrisi, ostensibly on an expedition to complete his geographical grand treatise, 
