Gesta non Verba

My first photographic exhibition was in 2015, and my first exhibition of paintings and sketches was in 2016. Despite this, I blush when people suggest I am an artist. It's not my day job, and though I think of it as more than a hobby it certainly doesn't pay any bills. A colleague of mine, a recent masters graduate in fine arts, told me one of the most important things he learned in his long years of study. One of the senior lecturers, in the very first lesson, said, "you may have a lot of good ideas for paintings, and you may spend some considerable time developing those ideas in your head.  But let me assure you, people who produce works of art in their heads, even astonishingly brilliant works are called dreamers: People who paint are called painters." He was in great company. The great Pablo Picasso would have agreed, saying, "What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing."

When my last relationship ended, the break up hit me hard. One of my friends asked me to picture a timeline of all the things we had done together, everything of value, all that we had done, talked about doing, our dreams and our expectations. Lay it out taxonomically, pinned down like butterflies on tickertape. Then to take an axe and cut that timeline, severing it at the point of the breakup. Everything on the left of the cut, he said, are the things that actually happened. All the things on the right of the cut, well, they didn't actually happen: they were just what you hoped would happen – your dreams, expectations and intentions. Think about each side of the timeline.

Of course when I began to look as he had suggested, and pictured the timeline as a dark ribbon, severed and each side now gently flapping about in the breeze, I realised how much talk and expectation there had been, and how little real action. And in my grief the most curious realisation came upon me – that the things I valued most and missed most about our relationship had been the things that were yet to be, the things for which I had hoped and worked, the expectations – these things were imaginary. Why should I be so harmed, and ache so much, for something that was only in my head? Perhaps I should not have been so surprised. "All pleasures are in the last analysis imaginary, and whoever has the best imagination enjoys the most pleasure. Only unreality gives value and is actually the only reality." So writes the Nineteenth Century German novelist, Theodor Fontane in Trials and Tribulations.

But it got me thinking about actions verses intentions. What if I set out to do something truly noble, outstandingly admirable, but it fails, and even harms.  Do my intentions give me an alibi, a degree of nobility? Do they exonerate me from the moral culpability of what I do? Conversely, do bad intentions corrupt good behaviour? What if intend to harm someone, or provide only begrudging, lacklustre assistance, only to have it backfire and elevate them instead – what then of my intentions?

I've come to the realisation that I am, or at least truly aspire to be a man of action. Like Alexander, Caesar, hell, like Batman, to be not what I think, neither what I hide, but what I do. And like any Hegelean hero, whose intentions don’t matter one bit, who I really am, what I really stand for, and what I really believe must demonstrated by my actions. Inserting some intention after the fact is nothing more than an elaborate form of self-deception. Funnily enough, when I thought back, Gesta non Verba was my high school motto: actions not words.  Perhaps it sunk in further than I had noticed.

I understand now why Batman is a loner. Or Logan, the Wolverine. Most people say they want things done, but mostly they want to talk it rather than do it. People say they want sensitive new age men, but when your car has crashed and its on fire, do you really want the man who runs up to the wreckage to say how much he understands and even empathises with your pain, or to rip the door off the car and carry you to safety in his bugling hairy arms without necessarily even speaking. In the words of Shrek, "Hey! I'm no one's messenger boy, alright? I'm a delivery boy." Careful what you ask for.

So if I'm ever in a position to start measuring out tickertape ribbon again, axe sheathed for now, by all means say I love you. Say it with passion and conviction. Say it because you can't hold it in any more. And say it because the words have formed of their own accord as a force of nature. But it's no get-out-of-jail-free card. I don't want you to say I love you – I want you to do I love you. I want it self evidently and overwhelmingly clear from your actions and behaviours. Keep your Hallmark moments. It's like most marketing I hear – If you feel you have to say it to make it true, then it probably isn't really there at all. Gesta non verba.