‘It was a picture of a ship --- a ship sailing nearly straight towards you.’ (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952, C.S. Lewis).

Art shows us that there is always the imaginative potential for another life. Mentally we hold down other lives even as we live our own. I remember as a child first reading C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader which opens with the picture of a ship on the wall of a child’s bedroom. We are invited to climb into the painting, to move through it, to fall through its frame. It is this permeable frame that makes the story, that is the story: that crossing over from one world to another that is the dissolving motion of all fantasy. I read and reread those passages hoping to dissolve into the fabric of fantasy. To be snatched away.

As a child I was surrounded by pictures of ships -- in life and also in paintings and photographs ---they seemed to be scattered everywhere. Heroic seascapes looking down at me. Life at sea was all around, and yet, it remained a fantasy because the world of local fishing was coming to an end, and we heard murmurings and cross words about this ending all over the place. On the news, in the paper, from my mother and grandmother. Fishing was dying in my hometown, but still the shops and markets and walls of school and houses, even our house, clung to the idea of the noble fishermen at sea. But seeing is believing, and I never saw men at sea; I only ever saw small boats coming in and out of the harbour, or boats tied up, lying like dead fishes along the harbour wall. What I did see was the ferry crossing over the harbour mouth ferrying tourists willing to pay the £1.50 fee. Boats were toys for tourists and the harbour a playground for the bored and restless. The Londoners.

          Still, there was a whole other world which once must have been real, otherwise how could you explain all those pictures, those paintings? It was those pictures that lead on the visitors, the tourists, those who like to speak in the subjunctive tense. What if we moved down here? What if we moved from the city, wouldn’t we be happier? Humans are very fond of the subjunctive tense and most art relies on this fact. That we are weary of the world we live in and would like to abscond. Voyage out.