But it seems that this power is not always honest and without pose. (But this again is one of the hardest tests of the creative individual: he must always remain unconscious, unsuspecting of his best virtues, if he would not rob them of their ingeniousness and untouchedness!)

In this state all is noise and chaos and devoid of meaning. It is difficult to imagine: our lives are so much more made up of light and sound and thoughts and feelings that form meaningful patterns and which help us to make sense of our lives and may grant us pleasure. The patient experiencing a psychotic episode is robbed of these harmonies. We cannot know the mind of another, and certainly not the mind of a psychotic other, but we can imagine that such noise, such a dissolution of meaning, would be intolerable. In this context it becomes understandable that a person in such a state should urgently seek to find or construct meanings and, in this process, to employ themes that are culturally or spiritually familiar - albeit often in deeply strange ways, given the disorder of mind.

It is as though to put black people into fiction or to imagine them in the future would be to participate in an unseemly exercise in political balance, as though black presence could only and ever be there to represent “blackness.” He can hear himself arguing now and he dislikes the sound of it.

He had thought of Tuymans and Dumas but now he thinks of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose portraits are all of fictional persons. There is an abundance of black presence in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, black people who do not exist anywhere but in her paintings, paintings that may be set in the past, present, or future.

Why should such a magnificent creature be on the verge of no longer existing? As I apply white clay and red camwood dye to depict the monkey’s fur, as I paint the monkey into being stroke by stroke, I feel I am engaging in a kind of public mourning, as though I were soothing the body of the dying animal.

We see people who have come through the impossible and have resigned themselves to the necessity of being practical. Survival is living on, living above the wreckage: survivre, supervivencia. You think you know how hard life can get. Then something else happens, something of a kind different to what you ever allowed yourself to expect and you have to revise your whole picture. This doesn’t stop happening, there is no end of surprise. Strangeness arrives again and again, without end. We live on the accumulated ruins of experience. Überleben, sopravvivere.