I’ve been trying to think of my life as a play, breaking days into acts, drawing narrative arcs, sensing character development. Sacredness is at the heart of this, making something higher. I’m reaching, always reaching; life as art and visa versa until everything is just a crepuscular glow and I melt into the ground or dissolve into the sky. That’s the idea anyway. I want the bone crunching knee tingling feeling, I want to be powder, liquid, glass. 

You’re sitting in a pub in Amsterdam, smoking inside and smoke stinging your eyes. You lack grace, and so does sacredness. You don’t follow football but that’s what your friends are watching, rooting for Germany; this provides the necessary detachment, like seeing things through water or syrup, slowing and warping. Above the TV screen there is a stained glass panel with a beer holding man, Lucas Bois, he looks on as a side-line saint. Everything begins glow like a hum. 

Vermeer knew about sacredness, his secular Marys staring out of windows, all quiet Dutch divine light and space. I am no Mary but I still want to glow. Velasquez knew better, he paints my kind of sacred, smaller still, warmer still. ‘Old Woman cooking eggs’ is what I have in mind, the people as an extension of the still life, the same infinite care, showmanship. The culmination of glows, sheens, shines and luminescence. It makes things untouchable, bell jar ready.  It’s a different kind of beauty, one with room for the grotesque.  That is my sacred, all about the light, the distance between bodies, alignment. It’s earthly, prosaic and carnal. Perfect moments are what I’m searching for, pregnant moments.

Outside the Pompidou a man is bent over feeding pigeons. He was the sun. The pigeons’ tail feathers turn and feet lift off the ground in unison as he stumbles forward, they cascade in front of him. Food is light. The universe is strange and wraps and folds inside of itself, there are solar systems within solar systems.  This does not glow gold but has a silver sheen, and you don’t want to bottle it. Would you photograph god? Can you photograph the sun?  

Walking around the Louvre I decide I want to be a small blue Iranian pot from the 15^th century.   I think of moon jars, combining heaven and earth in two joined hemispheres, a true sacredness. The problem is I just want to wrap everything in satin and stick on gold stars.  I’m essentially a sentimental moth. A bit like Velasquez cradling his parade of gleams, glints and glows.

Sacredness is about weigh, I want to make everything vital and heavy. Sacredness is about transcendence, I’m creating a world inside itself, a tinging, throbbing perfection.

We’re on a volcano, the sand doomsday black. We’re in a lighthouse on the spine of the Atlantic, between two tectonic plates. And the air is like a swimming pool, thick and hot so that the ash sticks to our skin. You’re standing on a 10cm ledge in the bell of the lighthouse, clutching onto the net of metal that bolts together the glass with your fingernails. You’re teetering.  You feel like you've found the edge of the world.

I’m stuck in the early middle ages with my celestial spheres. I’m tired by all this reaching. Maybe this is all nostalgia then, this longing, it’s too earnest. I wear myself out.

You’re on a moped speeding over the road bumps, lifting off your seat. It is 1am and you've just watched a documentary on Artie Shaw, the people you were babysitting for came home to you in tears swaying on the sofa. You have only been driving for a week. It is cold so you keep the visor down to avoid misting up, even though the air scratches your skin.  A bat swoops a meter in front of you, your eyes squint shut, you scrunch your hands and swerve onto the pavement.

Sometimes I feel like my eyes are too small. Velasquez saw everything, every object painted with respect. And of course this was all to reflect back on himself, to show his virtuosity. I fear that my compulsion towards the sacred is some vain attempt to distance myself further from reality, to create new gods, to create myself as a god, consecrating left right and centre. But it’s more sentimental than that even, more sentimental than Velasquez, I just want warm yellow syrup light, eyes like UFO beams, sucking scenes up from reality. A man no longer a man but The Sacred Man, totally reborn in my own eyes, no longer human. I’m scared I’ll rob everything of its humanity like Velasquez.  As I write Emmy the Great sings ‘and the things we set on fire don’t exist’.

Light is the crux of the matter. By cataloging the sacred like film scenes I simultaneously make the light, by removing them from reality, and heavy by canonising them. When I see a sacred moment it glows, liked a burning meteor turning from solid to gas as it tears the atmosphere.

When Joseph Beuys fell from the Crimean sky in the winter of 1943, the Tsar Tribesmen wrapped him in felt and fat. Sacred moments are like butter, yellow, between states, vital; Velasquez’s egg whites on the brink of transparency.