Metallica - Enter Sandman

Long time no hear! I heard this on the radio this morning. Takes me back to a transitional place in my life.

This came out in 1991. I left school in 1991 having failed my A levels. My parents had moved South from Lancshire where I had grown up, and I stayed on in Lancs with a friend and his family to finish off my Upper 6th. I had spent much of my later teens playing drums in the rock band 'Tom Foolery' (I know I know...), sometimes known as 'War and Peace', and if you were around the Blackpool rock scene then you might have come across us. I suspect that my mind was concentrated on the band rather than the revision...

After getting my exam results, I joined my parents in Somerset, where they still live, and decided what to do next. I was in a dark place. Uncertain of my present. Uncertain of my future. I had planned to have a year backpacking before so I decided to travel anyway. That in itself was a transformative time as it is then that I really became aware of the presence of God myself and I became a Christian.

This song is about childhood nightmares and the liminal space where the monster under the bed, the Sandman dwells. The places where the darkness that surrounds at night is transformed into a place of fear because of the presence of the Sandman.

It is all too easy for us to find ourselves as adults surrounded by darkness and to allow that darkness to be a place where we become fearful because of the presence of all sorts of things that frighten or worry us.

The song marks a transition for me from being a teen to being an adult. From being a non-believer to being a Christian. The dark that surrounds us like a cloak is a liminal place - but I have come to know those dark places of uncertainty in my life to be places where God dwells.

Anish Kapoor and the Via Negativa...

I have just watched the first of a new series of the BBC series 'Imagine.' The programme tonight was handed over to the work of British artist and sculptor Anish Kapoor. The excellent program is available to watch here.

Over the years I have become familiar with his work - especially his voids. These have been set everywhere for me, most notably in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern with his enormous 150m long 'Marsyas' and as part of the exhibitions in the Sir John Soane museum.

The thing that struck me about Alan Yentob's interview was Kapoor talking about his use use of colour. He went on to talk about his use of 'black' an example of which is above. The 'black' of course is a dark red. But it is the sort of black that you see as you close your eyes - blackness tinged with the redness of blood.

This all got me thinking about how Anish Kapoor's work therefore is an external expression of the inner world. In other words, his art, some of it massive, reveals something of what is going on inside him and each of us. Kapoor like Bill Viola is a true apophatic postsecular artist... an interesting article can be downloaded from here...