Shepheard - How to like everything - a utopia

This is a book about everything. Its a big subject, so Im going to start with a story and then Im going to ask a question.

Heres the story:

Once upon a time there was a girl, called Little Red Cape, who was wandering in a forest. The forest was full of confusions. Some were ugly and some were delightful, but they existed in such plenty that it was possible to spend every minute of your life amongst them without noticing you were getting any older. Little Red Cape knew she was lost, but she didnt care. She was supposed to be carrying a basket of eggs to her grandmothers house. She had been told that the way to get through the confusion of the forest was to follow the paths that had been built between the houses, like strings in a maze, to keep from getting lost; and shed started off down the path, but she soon found it so overgrown with the forests confusions that she had become interested in them, and shed dilly dallied, and thats how shed gone astray.

You know this story. Little Red Cape is Little Red Riding Hood, or, as they say in Holland, Rood Kapje. The original is a Grimm Brothers tale of warning, about the terrors of the wide world. The second part of my story is not so familiar:

There were other creatures in the forest that had different ways of living amidst all the confusion. They maintained a tight hierarchy between the members of their packs and they elaborated their lives in rituals, as when they gathered together in circles to howl at the moon. And recently they had discovered that the humans were losing the keys to the locks that kept their houses safe, and discovered that if they wanted to they could simply walk in and eat the humans up and live there themselves. Maybe they were impressed by the power that the houses manifested. Maybe they thought that by inhabiting them, they could share the humans power. But the fact was that the howling and the hierarchies were incorporated into domestic life; and so you could say that with this development the forest became even more confusing than ever.

So thats the story its an analogy for todays world. Who the wolves are and who the humans are I am not yet sure; but little Red Cape is you. The forest in the story is not a labyrinth or a metaphor for the workings of your inner mind, it is a picture of a complex field. A picture of the actual world.

And heres the question. What will you do, Little Red Cape? Will you go on searching for your grandmothers house, with all the risks that that entails? Or will you remain out among the confusions with all the risks that that entails?

A LITTLE WHILE AGO I suddenly had this thought: I have to get my ideas on television. I wanted to stalk the world in sharp clothes speaking to camera like all those other guys. But I soon found out that this attack of ego, this yearning for the varnish of fame, was as doomed as a night on the Big Brother tiles. I discovered that my thoughts were far too chaotic for the medium. I had hundreds of bits and pieces flying about in my head, which spewed out into my trial scripts like one damned cornucopia after another.

Look, Paul, said the film maker I was working with. Keep it simple. He was exasperated by rewrite four, which had turned out even more convoluted and baroque than rewrite three. Are you listening to me? He said. Keep it simple. In a one-hour television programme you can say three things, okay? First, you say what youre going to say. Second, you say it. And third you say what you just said.

Look at them! Its true! Thats exactly what they do. They say something, say it again, and then say it a third time. So I sent the television script files to the recycle bin and changed my computer desktop background to a crazy mimetic-expressionist painting by Asger Jorn that looks like a food fight at a childrens party, and started on what you have here. At the time I had been reading Tom Stoppards play The Coast of Utopia in book form, speaking the parts to myself, imagining myself into all the characters and their clothes and their voices and exits and entrances, and as I was reading I thought that this is what all books are: theyre scripts. Writers write scripts for their readers to perform. Like an actor performing a play, when you read a book you bring something to it that only you can. When you watch television, you sit back as sceptical as a child being lectured to, only half listening to whats said, passing notes to the others in the room and counting the hairs growing out of the teachers nose. When you read a book you get involved, you act; you perform what you read in the theatre of your imagination, enriched and costumed and all lit up with your own knowledge and your own memories and your entire history.

The title of this project, How to Like Everything, started out with a smaller ambition: How to Like Art. That was the pitch of the first draft of the first TV script. It all began because I wanted to pin down the confusion of contemporary art. I wanted to say that todays art is so full of the revelations of philosophy and science that it has become criticism, and no longer art: and so full of discrimination and fury, as a consequence, that artists have to hitch their wagons to an explanation of what they do before theyve even done anything. The explanation has become the artwork. The thing itself is a mere illustration of its own story: notoriously, the shark, the bed, the pile of bricks. This is not news to you, everyone knows it. But the question I wanted to ask was not how to know whether something was good art, not even whether it was worth the asking price - but what is art itself? Maybe even What bloody use is it?

Now, after looking at it and talking about it, and reading French philosophy