Art is not hopeless in the face of death.

The Birthday, Marc Chagall

Yesterday I had a conversation with an drunk at Twickenham station. He was elegant, slim, dressed in a black polo neck shirt, bearded.

His manners were on show. He was a polite drunk.

"Do you think" he asked me "the truth is out there?"

"Do you mean UFO's?" I asked him, hopefully.

"No. The truth. Is it out there."

Oh dear. "Well, I said" "the point is that art can create the truth if it is good enough. Wouldn't you say?" His eyes flicked left, then right. Then refocused on me.

"The world is too big for that." he said.

"What I mean," I said after a pause of a few minutes, "is that there are so many piecemeal narratives around us. Your personal history. Mine. They don't add up. But if you can express something well enough. It criss-crosses narratives. and so we can all share it."

He looked at me speculatively.

"If you were to give someone advice, he said. What would it be?"

"Only the advice I would give myself" I said.

"And what is that?"

I took out a black notebook. "Well this is the advice I gave myself this morning." And, to make a point, I read him the quick notes I had made earlier.

Break from the waters of sleep.
Burn in the fires of dawn.
Rise in the currents of morning.
Shine like the midday sun.
Explore the forests of afternoon.
Wander its hills and valleys.
Rest by the rock of evening.
Surrender to the clasp of night.

"Thank you..Very poetic. If I may say so." he remarked.

I laughed.

"My train" he said. and toddled off..

But what I was thinking about as I wrote the poem was about Gandhi. You see Gandhi wasn't such a good role model. He was too extreme. He kept to his own philosophy. He was consistent. He never wavered. That doesn't work for most people. They can't treat their own rules as iron commands. Because they are hardly omniscient beings creating rules for themselves.

So Gandhi had a touch of the megalomaniac about him, and many other people who decided to live by their own rules. I defy you to make a set of rules now. In front of your keyboards, which you can hope to keep and live and die by. It can't be done. Rules for life have to be general, so notional. They have to be mere commendations, they have to refer back to scriptures. They have to be quilted, as Joseph Campbell suggested.

Art is powerful indeed in confronting death..

Art was very important in mom's death and in the death of my father three months later. In particular Chagall and Harry Voight. Harry Voight, a good, serious painter, painted a portrait of my father. It's a large portrait. It's a wonderful portrait and a a great technical achievement - I was told by an art expert (who publishes limited, hand illustrated, edition books of his own aphorisms in German).

Technical quality aside for a moment, the portrait captures dad well. The way he sits. His alert nobility. His handsomeness. His presence. The portrait hangs in Harry's studio in a valley near the Sudwala caves. He gave it as a present to my father. So we'll get it back soon. He has just varnished it.

Chagall -Paintings of Jewish villages. Of husbands and wives. Above my parents bed was one of the pictures by Chagall of a husband holding onto his wife's hand as she flies up. For their anniversary I gave my mother and father a little framed Chagall picture in red of a couple in a flat in Paris where this time it is the man who flies up.

When they came to London a year ago we went to see the stained glass windows Chagall had made, in a little church in the countryside. Beautiful windows in blues and yellows and greens and reds, commemorating the daughter of the patron, who had drowned.

When my mother died, (as all mothers will, I admit. Yours and mine and I mourn yours as you mourn mine), my father held her hand. We looked up and there was the echo of the Chagall picture. I asked my brother, an Observer photographer, Andy Hall, to take a picture. Dad wanted it.

Silence. The afternoon light. The red and yellow flowers, the body of my mother stretched out on a big white bed. My dad, holding her hand. Hunched, next to her. Of course none of us could bear to look at the picture later on. Not even my father. I doubt we ever will.

When dad died. After a long trip to England and seeing so many people. He too, in the late afternoon, lay on the same side of the bed and Leigh, Harry's wife and also a wonderful artist, saw him lying there. She said he looked so peaceful. She wanted to paint him.

"You should have" I said. Not that we would ever have wanted to look at it.

At the funeral the Chagall hung on the wall. What do the paintings of Chagall mean? I don't really know. But they gave us another narrative perhaps, one that criss-crossed our story. One that we share.

But of course I didn't tell the drunk that.