Why do I write these? Greg once said I was honest with you and that’s what made the writing good my thought was how would you know? If I’m to write honestly I should be up front with everyone – I write these to be seen. I am not the man I want to be, so I make and write in a search for validation, so that someone tells me I’m good, moral, clever, an artist, that I am making a contribution to the world above and beyond what any human could be expected to make, that you read these and it makes a mark. I write to be read. I model to be appreciated. And it’s never enough.
I’m a big fan of Aidan Moffat. Arab Strap, L.Pierre, Nyx Nott, all the solo stuff – it’s a constant background noise, a life punctuated and increasingly narrated by a gruff Scottish voice that seems determined to exacerbate any lingering mental health problems the listener may have. My favourite song is probably Quantum Theory Love Song – a troubling meditation on sexual infidelity through the observer effect. It resonates with me not because of the subject matter, but because of that idea of other lives. Another “you” that lived differently, made perhaps different choices or, crucially for me, had different things inflicted upon them. I live within the echoes of those other lives. Being here has fragmented my identity even further, not just a spiralling quantum overlap of Aarons, but the splitting of me into Aaron-as-is and Aaron-as-wants-to-be, both a perhaps unnecessary overlay over whoever I am – Goonhammer as a form of the double slit experiment.
It’s a relevant thought here, I promise. Another me – perhaps one just two months back – set out to make a Knight about happiness, about fatherhood, about the experiences of joy and wonder and beauty that have filled my life since the birth of my son. The one you’re stuck with though for the next two or three thousand words is not that one. Instead, this was an exercise in frustration, in the limits of my personal creativity limping through what could have been a dance, a time when will met plastic and resin, and they won. I knew what I wanted to express, and I ended up telling myself a kind of truth. I’ll tell you another.
Want What You Want
People ask me if I’m okay when these articles come out. I am, usually. It’s been a hard year since the lancer. Illness, disruption, unexpected costs, the merest taste of what women and “primary” parents go through in returning from year long parental leave, endless frustration that the world is not as it should be, or not as I want it to be, which are – perhaps – not the same thing. I have not felt settled – a year on edge. Still, I have persisted, like a stone under the slow drip of water, transforming myself through persistence. I have said, often, in therapy, “I can’t cope with this,” and the answer is always, “but you are coping”. Good point, well said.
I have conceptualised this period as “the burden”, the weight of parenthood and lives both personal and professional. It’s what we have to maintain to stay alive, but it’s also what we maintain on each other’s behalf. The burden is crushing, but I can’t imagine giving it up – when I see those without it, my feeling is, I suppose, close to pity. That’s not pity for those who have no kids, or anything like that, but the pity for those who see the world around them and choose not to take even the slightest weight on themselves to better another life. It’s killing me, undoubtedly, but at least, I tell myself, I will have lived. That was the inspiration for this build. Atlas, a Titan, cursed and blessed to carry the world on his shoulders. Crushed but not killed, enduring. My notebooks filled with a wretched giant shouldering the burden high out of the muck.
But this isn’t that – at least partially because I couldn’t make the bloody Cerastus chassis look miserable enough. Mostly, though, it’s because I have a new, iron, core of happiness running through me, because of the Boy. I met him confused and reeling, trying to work out why the NHS would allow a baby in an operating theatre, before everything in my life clicked in one split second when a weird, wriggling, squalling, shivering little body of mucus and blood was handed to me. It was because he was my baby. Mine.
We’re getting on for two years later now – or will by the time this build is finished, long after you read this – and for two years I have been able to access joy on demand, with a thought, memory, picture, longing, planning or faint physicality – the pulled hair, the twinge in the back or the knees, bruising and blood blisters from straps and bags or strange soft calluses from a fraying pram handle. The difference this has made to me is immeasurable, because now the ground of my being isn’t the aimless burden, it’s the weight of the Boy.
I carry him around in a massive chunk of a baby carrier, a second hand bag that provides my single favourite thing about parenthood, one that arose unexpectedly, in an unasked for and unwanted penance for nine months where she carried him alone. Now, I carry him. Carrying him is accompanied by an endless, repeated litany of a single syllable – da. I’ve heard it everywhere we’ve been together, and that is happiness – the sound of his voice, the feel of his hand, and the weight of the bag. Not a burden, but a blessing.
So this was supposed to be that: a Titan, yes, but not Atlas. Porphyrion, the giant born of a God castrating his father, transmuted into a striding colossus of happiness in hand and weight, despite all it appears to be.
What Do You Want from Me?
There was a real surety there, and the enthusiasm I had going into this build was above and beyond anything I’ve experienced. It’s me! It’s him! It’s happiness and technical work and extremes of joy. The major plan – the gun, the crane, the open back – was all in place before the boxes arrived. There was self-conscious decision making in every element, “take a village to raise a child” through harassing family for birthday present vouchers, friends for components and suggestions, drawing on the family resemblance to incorporate old models, natural elements as in the lancer and deliberately attempting to shape a knight, for once, exactly as I wished.
What I have found frustrating – in an obvious and inevitable comparison with parenthood itself – is that the model has built itself as much as I’ve guided that construction. Just like I parent, I started to build without a plan. The vague idea was to split the Cerastus down the middle and sit a volcano cannon inside. This was surprisingly doable, a little rickety and weird with my plasticard building skills being limited to “measure zero times cut twice” but came together well. The gun was set in a couple of different places, held up by a 3mm brass rod that runs through the torso into the waist and then soldered into (most of) the legs. This destroyed my plans for the pose – it is much, much more upright than I hoped, but the reality of putting all that weight of resin through the Cerastus’ tiny little waist meant that a literal brass skeleton dictated everything else.
The first week of building – tiny snatches of time stolen from child, and wife, time that could and should have been spent with them, not with a masturbatory monument to my own psyche – was an endless cavalcade of posing and reposing. Everything was torn apart at least once, brass rod was snipped, bent, wedged in place with endless milliput and still – nothing. Not a feeling, not a single resonant or flow-state breakthrough. The skeleton sat empty of meaning, and sadly, it still does. It is nothing – just a model. Just another eternal waste of plastic.
Meaning had to come from elsewhere, but it didn’t for a long time. I’ve forced it in, sitting with each component and pouring symbolism into it, emotionally blank throughout no matter what I attempted to do. Everything has meaning, but I feel so little of it. Much of it only means something to me, and this time I’ll not be honest, not go through every tiny thing just to thrill or sadden. If it doesn’t come from the Cerastus sprue, it means something, so imagine the meanings if you will – you’ll be right each time.
But what does it matter? I can look at these signifiers, the passages of favourite books I have painstakingly painted in script, the dead pet immortalised, the recent tattoo replicated, my grandfather’s candles, Annie’s leaves, my own pine and trailing root and all I wonder is why. I wanted to make the Knight of happiness, but the Knight of frustration and validation shines through it, and the whole thing is perched dangerously between those two poles, so why am I doing this? Not the modelling (answer: it’s fun), but the writing. Why spill out life into the aether? Because it must be read, right? I am creating significance in myself, creating worth, creating meaning, by telling you how meaningful I am. Validation again, much to my disgust.
I became mired in the frustration of the build, convincing myself I do this for the likes, or for your comments, or for someone, somewhere telling me I am a good writer, a good father, a good man. The whole thing became empty and meaningless, a scream into the void that I am worthy of attention, and love, and regard. Please see me for who I tell you I am. The disgust took over – another me, another life, another way of seeing.
Seek Disgust
I followed disgust down the rabbit hole and found meaning in structuralism. I pondered the meaning of the last knight over a long and legitimately terrifying evening, reading and rereading your comments to pull myself back into a place where any of this meant anything. Signifier is to Object as Song is to Child, so I wanted to spend time pushing the limits of what Hares on the Mountain (see the Lancer for why) means to me beyond a pretty good bit of freehand into the harnessing of ground-state reality, new materials that were the song, not of it. A trip to the fishmongers later and I was in possession a whole lot of fish skin. It bathed in brine, was scraped by flint I’d made for the occasion and sank for a week into dark stewed tea. It emerged in a couple of forms which have made their way to various places on the knight, some decorative and others more structural. Halibut, dried and tanned strong and thick, acts as a structural component to release some of the pressure of the splayed interior, pulling the front together tightly so to allow a better support for the cannon. Salmon tanned fairly well, so it’s more decorative and supple, pteruges, baltea and cloak-of-fish over the knight. Skate I’m not sure tanned at all but looks hard as hell, so it’s in easy to remove places if, as I’m pretty convinced, it has only case hardened and will rot from the inside over the next few months.
That process was a joyous one – weird, most certainly, but creative and interesting. There’s a substantial difference between this and what we usually do when we learn new things in miniatures painting or building – read about it, practice it, achieve it. But this is chemicals and quick-rotting skin, so it was all experimenting, creating with no hope of positive outcome, but it at least happened each time, working enough that I was (and am) amazed at the process of salting, stretching, tanning and oiling. The fatty, thick, and stinking skin has been rendered translucent in a metaphor so obvious I’m surprised I haven’t started casting knights in clear plastic, and there came the meaning I’d been reproducing through hollow, cargo-cult sentimentality. Through process we let the light in. There is still much to learn, and I haven’t done it well – I’ve basically created fish rawhide, which is a potentially extremely disgusting statement – but I have truly learnt, and enjoyed, and embodied myself in the process. Perhaps in a month it’ll be too disgusting to keep on the model, and that’s fine. I’ll take it off then, maybe.
I was talking to him about the fish skin, because pontificating in the vague direction of a child walking next to me is basically all I do now, when he handed me a pebble. We’re in the stage where the world has become interesting – museums are no longer baby-spaced looking around, but places where objects are found, and loved, and then shown to me to communicate that love. It’s hard to get across what that means to me, but the happiest moment of my life thus far has been in that context. Here, Dad, is a thing that is amazing. You must come to see it too. That is happiness, right there.
The Knight’s fist clutches that pebble. Not the worked flint I originally wanted to include, and spent a day soullessly and joylessly knapping, because that would have been about me. It’s a pebble given to me in abject wonder. It’s the first one given to me and it radiates a love so powerful I am almost fearful to touch it. Look at this, Dad. Look at it! Look at the joy it brings me because it is cold and round! I want you to have it. It is flint, a stone I have both physical and spiritual connections to, and it is held out to invite you to feel the same. We have found, and will find, many more. This is the first, but not the last. I will try to keep each one.
I should talk about the hands, really, shouldn’t I? There’s somewhere in the region of 150 open hands on the Knight, either in chains, the gunrest, in the carriage for the cannon, or held out in exaltation by the crew. They seem to be very popular, and I’ve been told many times now that they’re exceptionally grimdark. I don’t see it. I see a hand held out and up to me, to help negotiate a tricky step, or to comfort after a fall, or just because he wants to hold hands. Small hands search for larger ones, and larger reaches out for small. It’s not an innate thing, you know. You learn it. How could it not feature?
It Doesn’t Work
When I look at it, done, sitting on my desk as I work out how in hell I’m going to photograph it, I can see about an even split between things that worked and things that I couldn’t do. It’s a very me build in positive ways – messy and organic, a bit weird, strewn with all the right bits that show it as a lenoon thing, unique in its way. It’s also a very me build in negative ways – it’s squat, more or less symmetrical despite asymmetry being a deliberate aim, conservative in posing and in places beyond messy/organic into just plain shit. There’s the double slit experiment again, the Knight as both an expression of happiness and of this desperate need to be better without the will or the energy to work at it. For all I might pontificate about art and the spark of creation and all that, can you ever be happy with a model, or yourself, if you couldn’t improve it? Do errors make the man, make the model, or is perfection a worthwhile goal? I do not believe so. Trapped between the ideal and the reality is the ground state of existence, so here it is. Here I am.
The cannon is a point of unhappiness, no matter what I said above – torn between the idea of the crane and the sculptural zombie-based rest, I did both and neither have worked as well as I wanted. The crane does not appear to hold up the gun, but the zombies don’t integrate it into the body. It is a half-way house, a frustrating exercise in self-compromise, in arguing myself out of what I want in favour of what I have convinced myself is the limit of possibility, an uncomfortable realisation to have as I work on arresting this cycle in my real life. Seeing it here on the model is painful. I do not deserve to do this to myself, but I tell myself all too frequently that it is the only option I have. I snapped awake with the solution in a dream – apotropaic eyes and literal words of frustration, condemning it to be finished as a monument to deliberate, cold self-sacrifice, sealed into resin to stop it from hurting.
There’s still something missing and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. There isn’t the commitment I was going for – above and beyond grimdark, something that arrested the eye and sparked wonder and confusion and it doesn’t. It’s a knight, with a gun on a crane. If that is, truly, wondrous, then I have failed. The masterpiece isn’t there, wasn’t coming, as much as I can cram lichen into nooks and crannies and feed the model enough organic material and spidery freehand to create a thing of awe. It exists and that is perhaps good enough, for now.
That would have been a sad note to end on, an impossibly irritating waste of my time – and yours. The final bark – dried and old Eucalyptus and fresh, flaking lichen-covered poplar – made me feel significantly better. They’ve transformed what was essentially a Cerastus with a big hole in it into something very different, the very final elements pulling everything together. What a miracle our hobby is, sometimes.
Unsympathetic Unmagic
He wasn’t sleeping well the other night. At all. Screams and whole-body-rigid style bed refusal, even with an extra bottle on the go. I’m told I should stop co-sleeping, but I like it – it is such a comfort to wake up hand in hand. When he still can’t sleep, we play or I tell stories, and when that fails I take him through to my office and talk about my day. That time, I picked him up and showed him the Knight, at that point half-painted, a black skeleton with a distressingly bright gun precariously balanced on it. He picked up the arm and I took it, softly, out of his hands to many tears. I thought what the fuck am I doing here? The seconds I spend on this, this monstrous thing that he can’t be allowed to touch for fear of swallowing a small piece (he can pick it up and break it, it’s only fucking warhammer), are seconds not spent with him. I made a decision – painting wouldn’t be the once in a lifetime effort that the lancer was, because I have better things to do with my time.
Once he got back down, I didn’t. As I was awake, I ended up reading Goonhammer. It’s a good site, you might know it. Bair wrote a great article recently that I mostly agree with. It’s about being good enough – recognising your context and being happy with who you are. It’s a great piece, go read it. That’s how I painted this knight. Sometimes I pushed myself, sometimes I didn’t. I like freehand. I love to see brush strokes. I hate the faceless, feelingless vibe of the airbrush. Edge highlighting chains you to what the sculptor wanted you to paint, not what you want to. All that nonsense I occasionally spout about art as an expression of the soul. I agree with Bair, because I am good enough at painting. I disagree because I believe I am the best at what I do. You are too. No one paints exactly like you, unless you want that. Your painting is not comparable to everyone else’s unless you choose to compare it. You are a striding colossus of creation, a furnace of unbridled ability and beauty, a spark of whatever divinity is out there that inhabits the hand and soul in art, unless you sit and look at a Golden demon entry and decide that that is what painting should look like and decide on your own account that in comparison you are a failure.
These Knights are mine, and painted in my way. Layers of paint are rough, edges are missing, Non metallic metal can fuck right off, and extreme reflective highlighting sucks and my greenstuff skills leave a lot to be desired. Who in the hell cares? There is sympathetic magic in spades when you paint. You order the world, or destroy it, through your brush. You master two thin strokes or you mess with oils or you get it done quick because you’re playing tomorrow. Whatever it is, you are willing your version of the world into reality. You can will frustration and loss and striving into it, if you want, and Arawn knows I do. That as much as anything else is the point of this knight. If it’s about happiness, if it’s about fatherhood, if it’s about Me and Him, then it’s got to be what I want to see in those things despite the struggle to do it. I want to be happy. I want to be a good father, but I also have to allow myself to feel bored, and frustrated, and tired. I can be both, but to strike that balance I must put the work in every day anew – so that’s where the name came from. Mor Hawadd Ag Anadlu – As Easy as Breath – not because it is, or was, but because I want it to be.
That was the return to happiness and joy in building and creating. The fact that it isn’t what I wanted it to be is ok, even a lesson, that I am exactly what I am. I can be better – a better father, a better modeller, a better comrade and friend – but I must acknowledge that I am already enough. I am good enough, not perfect, not broken. I live and love and struggle too. The burden exists to be borne, but it is borne out of love, and I can make it lighter not through avoidance, but through becoming stronger myself. I could have created something wondrous, something that spoke to the man I want to be, or I could have created something that utterly failed, was entirely projection and validation of the man I need to be seen as, but instead I have created reality. The person I am – flawed, rickety, ill-constructed, but loved, proud, caring. It is not the masterpiece I wanted it to be, because I’m not either. I’m just me – and I am good enough, no matter that I tell myself otherwise. As easy as breathing.
An Ending
If I can return to my knight/person/article as a double slit experiment, I’m going to indulge myself with endings both intended and real. Somewhere in this monstrous, frustrated monument to my own limitations, there’s still the idea of joy, and that joy would leave us ended thus:
If this is a trilogy of sorts, I wanted to end with thoughts of my Grandfather. Another year has passed and I have not persisted like a stone under dripping water. I have regrown, I have embraced happiness after decades of blindness to the fact that it is inherent, not acquired. Thickened skin is now made translucent by care and attention, love communicated, joy held in the palm of the hand and not squandered. Still the leaves fall, and I am a better man than I once was. This time, I am able to tell him: Here is my son. We are here because of you. I have grown to be a good man. I love and I am worthy of love. I loved you, and I love you still.
That is a real end, for here is love here unbounded, both for myself and for others. There’s joy and growth and effort. But there is frustration and need and a deep and horrifying well of hunger – so let us also end honestly:
I have loved talking and writing about these knights, but what I have loved most is the feeling that I have constructed something worth talking about. So let’s end with the purpose of everything I’ve ever done here – is this enough for you, yet? Will you tell me I am a good man?
Both are true.
We’ve come to an ending to this experiment in Knights and feelings. There may be more knights, but they won’t be written. I have been touched by those who got in touch to share how this series has made them feel, in comments or emails or surveys, by every time someone has said “make a knight about it” in response to difficult emotions or unspoken feelings. Making a Knight about it is just the first step – and the easiest one. Make your knight, and talk about it. After that, the next step is big, but I know it isn’t beyond any of us: we must keep going.
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