“The Painting” is a short film, created in response to work by the artist Nicola Durvasula. It will form a part of her new exhibition, PANG, at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in New Delhi, India, from March 22 until May 17, 2025. Whether the Voiceover represents one arguing consciousness or two, or none, is a matter for the viewer to decide.
Narration: Will Eaves. Painting: Nicola Durvasula.
Carillon – for organ
This is a Sibelius digital file of a piece written in 1991 (and revised in 2023) for the Marstal Church Organ, built by Frobenius & Sons, on the island of Ærø in Denmark. As Kate Bush once said of The Dreaming, play it loud. The score will be published in The Point of Distraction (TLS Books) later this year together with a suite for piano (Four Diptychs), played by Richard Uttley.
What is ability?
1.
We think of ourselves as creatures with willpower and rights of self-assertion, but it is surprisingly hard to think for oneself.
Original thought always involves non-compliance with precedent, and in a systematic society and economy that is tricky, both practically, because it is for example hard to run one’s life offline, without the various permissions of web-based administration, and emotionally, because it’s a way of saying no to authority. Refusing the known produces feelings of uncertainty, the possibility of disappointing others or being disappointed by them. It’s an old problem to do with hierarchy and the individual. Explicit examples, in narrative literature, are Abrahamic myth, The Tempest, and 1984. But even Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion qualify. Austen’s novels are not about romantic love; they are stories about the practical and emotional obstacles in the path of truth-seeking, and the way families and riches do not take kindly to daughters who disappoint them.
Creative ability is always a move beyond, or rather into, uncertainty and the fear of unforeseeable consequences. It’s always an act of refusal or of resistance to something already established, even if you are adding to it. Extension is an outward trajectory; it involves a move away from security. In logic and mathematics, it involves accepting the profound consequences of inconsistency and incompleteness, the true propositions that cannot be proved from the axioms; in art, it requires the painstaking undermining of preconceptions, including the idea that writing a book or a poem is about deciding to write a book or a poem rather than discovering the form as you go. Scientific method and artistic construction are both matters of formal experiment and experimenting with form. (It still amazes me how few scientists and artists point this out.)
Ability is also resistance to oneself, what one has already done, one’s effortful CV, one’s “skills”, the carefully curated evidence of a thing called identity, as if identity were a set of emotional and behavioural cues on a plinth in a museum, or indeed a university staff card. It’s in this sense of extension and resistance that I understand George Orwell when he says, in his 1946 essay, Why I Write, that literature is driven both by powerful personal motives, “ingrained likes and dislikes”, and by the constant struggle “to efface the personality” in pursuit of the truth.
What, then, is the “ingrained” component of ability? In her excellently clear book, Heart and Mind (1981), the philosopher Mary Midgley makes a case for the existence of innate gifts, not as quantities of intelligence feeding entitlement or its opposite, but as “personal repertoires” of “tastes and powers which can often startle both ourselves and those around us, which may find no path in our culture”. Her defence of the personal repertoire perhaps relies too heavily on unprecedented geniuses like the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, who had very little education. You can’t infer a general truth about innate ability from such examples. We are not commonly exceptional. Yes, of course, we are different; but by degree, I suggest. If that were not so, we would be condemned to lead solipsistic lives, and others’ abilities would be inappreciably mysterious to us.
I also think that innatism by itself is not enough to explain our changes in life, our adoption of trades, practices and activities that run counter to an apparent inheritance. This is more than adaptability; it’s the will to change ourselves and the world by refusing something given. We may have a predisposition to draw or paint or calculate and yet object to doing so on emotional grounds (our parents did it!). What we later find, typically, is that the draughtsman’s gift is re-expressed in another direction, mathematically or musically or paleontologically. As a species, we have learnt to do many things. Most animals do the same thing, but we specialise within the group, and even as we specialise we diversify: there are many tasks to be done and we can learn to do each other’s tasks, up to a point (though always get a good plumber). What this doesn’t alter is the idea of an underlying subjective disposition – including the ability to have a go at various things in accordance with our temperament or in defiance of it.
Midgley is quiet about this second possibility. She discusses abilities rather as if they were unique-to-user applications, whereas I see them as conscious variables inclining, over time, to expressions of personality. This takes us away from innatism or biological programming to something more intriguing: the ability to educate ourselves, building not just on clear aptitude – the thing that comes naturally – but on what we can’t do so easily, but might, with the right teacher, find interesting.
The word “education” has two Latin roots: educare, which means to train, and educere, to lead or draw out. The second of these is the one that tends to be forgotten. Drawing out presupposes the ingrained or innate; it also suggests the hidden, submerged, and contrary. We’re not just drawing out an obvious talent. Thwarting ourselves, steering away from what comes easily, is often at the heart of a breakthrough. The tussle is itself the expression of something. In this sense, the gift of an ability is difficult to pin down. It’s often counter-intuitive, a kind of Turing-esque or Gödelian problem, in which unprovable truths are at the heart of defined processes, in which it is simultaneously true that I can write novels and that I dread so doing, or that my attempts to avoid writing are themselves a kind of preparatory activity. Keats famously called this state of resistance Negative Capability, “that is, when a man is capable [my italics] of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason”. Orwell is all irritable reaching by comparison, but his relationship with a talent that expresses itself uncertainly as the inverse of ability – debility, indeed – is one Keats would have recognised. “Writing a book”, he says, “is like having a long, horrible illness.”
2.
Ability is both innate and shaped, determined and acquired, but it is in all cases the property of a conscious entity. That education appears now to be mandating acquisition of something off a menu called “skill” over any real feeling for the experiential uncertainties of art, music, language, or indeed scientific method, is something that should concern us. The concomitant problem is not so much that machines will acquire conscious abilities, but that we are already some way along the road to forfeiting ours.
It is possible, just, to say no to systems like exams and SATS and phone upgrades and the tiers of administration in workplaces, but they are now firmly, normatively embedded in our lives, and by and large we do not stop to question them. We don’t feel that we can. Technological systems owned by private corporations (in California, mostly) are essentially dominance hierarchies, like religions, or powerful families, and like those other institutions they greatly elevate the notion of control as a force for good. We are leading better lives by compliance, they say. We are in control by allowing ourselves to be controlled. We need this upgrade. Everything is easier if we just say yes. In such a long-lived protocol of submissiveness – Julius Caesar, Elizabeth I and Stalin would all have recognised its utility – requests from an almost numinous electrical authority are to be understood as commands, and no command in practice may be refused. If you don’t say yes, there will be consequences. You will be locked out of your bank account, you will not be able to order your medication, you will not get onto your degree course or be able to graduate. Notice in all cases, that the content of the account, the nature of the need, and the substance of your work and argument, your ability, are utterly irrelevant. It is simply non-compliance that signifies. Notice, too, that whoever is at the head of the hierarchy is usually exempt from these consequences.
In his Gifford lecture on “The Religious Experience”, the sceptical cosmologist Carl Sagan has this to say about codes of submission: “Consider how we bow our heads in prayer, making a gesture that can be found in many other animals as they defer to the alpha male [. . .] We’re enjoined in the Bible not to look God in the face, or else we will die instantly. In the court of Louis XIV, as the king passed, he was preceded by courtiers crying ‘Avertez les yeux! Avert the eyes. Don’t look up.’” I confess I’ve thought much the same as Sagan in various seminars, when no one looks up, or when I’m walking down the street, and I see students, everyone, myself included, bowing to the phone light.
It takes about three years to get the fear of God out of my students. To help them to see that getting a few low marks doesn’t matter, that the fear of losing their place in the hierarchy of grades is an anxiety about power and influence deliberately fostered by one model of economics among many, that they are more than their earning capacity, and that the point of literature, as Auden said in his introduction to Poems of Freedom, is not to make us more efficient, but to make us more aware of ourselves.
The technological climate, in which capacity and influence are so important, has confused freedom to develop the person you already are with the acquisition of power and status. Students want jobs; I hope they get them. They have loans to repay. But they also want to be successful; they tell me in their essays that they know they’re smart, but that they’re struggling to see the point of a second-class degree; and I worry that this generation, more than any other, sees recognised achievement – success granted by an authority, often an absent and quasi-religious electronic one – as the goal of learning. That is what they are being told, after all. That is what Nicky Morgan, the former Secretary of State for Education, meant when she said that studying the arts holds pupils back. (Never mind that the creative industries are worth more than £80 billion a year to the UK economy. Never mind that the whole Renaissance humanist project – without which no rationalism, no economics, no Bacon, no Newton – was enshrined by the study of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and philosophy.) She meant that there is no development without competition and, it is implied, reward.
It is the materialist-individualist creed, of course, and like every iteration of that delusion in every age, it never asks, simply and logically, what individuals will do with their reward, and how they expect it to shelter them from misfortune or make them happy – what relationship it has, finally, to the conscious inner life.
This is the point. Human ability is conscious and therefore intentional: it grasps meaning and has a felt, as well as reasoned, relation to the world in which it operates. It values what is being done as it is done: look at a toddler clapping its hands when one brick stays on top of another. It is not merely attributed or assigned relative to an observer, like a message “sent” by Outlook; it is experienced, and experienced both by the persons with the ability and the people around them. It is the fact that we experience a great singer for ourselves that makes his or her ability so moving. If it were merely a matter of manifesting technique, there would be no need to involve a conscious audience. But in practice, and in all cases, ability, whether we choose to do anything with ours or not, is potentially communicative and reflective as well as personal: in someone else’s unique gifts – let us at last call it their sensibility – we experience the emotional echo, and the limit, of our own, and that sense of frustrating limit is important in defining who we are. “We are looking for freedom, not omnipotence,” Midgeley reminds us, and freedom – the ability to be ourselves – has mortal limits. “Real gifts, in their nature, are limited.”
A talk first given on September 25, 2020 at CODEX: Leonardo at 500, Royal Society, and first published in Broken Consort (CB Editions), 2020.
Ariel in Texas
A devil, an eddy, an air ambulance:
I wish I were any of these things
and not the sort to raze where I have been.
Last night? Where was I last night?
Turning the bridge into a whisked piano,
making killer passes at cattle. The limit
What would I not give to put things back,
spin blindfolds out of thunderheads.
No one, then, would look on my lowing
except as necessary grief, the wind
in wrangled spars astride the Brazos
and the buzz of telegraph wires.
First published in Sound Houses, Carcanet, 2011.
The Absent Therapist
Some pieces of work are never finished. In 2014 I put together a serio-comic book of voices, The Absent Therapist, which at different times I’ve tried calling “an experimental novel”, a “group of miniatures”, and a “collection of prose”. It was always fiction, but not necessarily (or exclusively) fiction for the page. Since that first publication by CB Editions, Therapist has been a teaching-aid, a cabaret, and a live edition, with Prof. Sophie Scott, of the science-literature podcast The Neuromantics. Now it’s a one-off audio drama, engineered by Mark Lingwood and Bibi Berki of Tempest Productions, with some piano music. You can listen to it, for free, on Soundcloud and Spotify or your platform of choice; or listen/download here:
https://www.tempestproductions.net/podcasts/episode/90f8e028/the-absent-therapist
Pohlmann Baby Grand, c.1935.
Echoes to the Questions of Ethne Alba
The “Quis est Deus?”, or Questions of Ethne Alba, is a medieval Irish lyric, with the calm but pointed, sometimes disconcerting, tone of enquiry – a kind of flinty innocence – characteristic of the early church, and of the ordinary person’s conception of belief at that time, when a deity’s invisibility did not lessen His claim to material reality. For reasons now obscure – I’m a reverend agnostic – the poem made an impression on me in the early 1990s, and I appended a version of its informal title to a suite of solo piano music written in my late teens.
In fact, the suite had its origins as several different pieces of music, some of them for voice and organ, some for solo organ, others for piano. I still have the scores for all of these: some strike me as playable; others I have to imagine in my head, which is what I did when I wrote them. Truthfully, I can’t remember how much was composed at the keyboard and how much on the hoof.
“Echoes” is a recording made at a friend’s house in Bath in 1991 by the producer David Lord. I found the master cassette a few weeks ago, in a box of old programmes, photos and postcards, and had it digitised. As you can hear, I played an old piano (not the one in the photograph, but similar), with slightly off damping. The scores for the various pieces were all laid out in front of me, and I went from one to the next, improvising a little where necessary, but mostly sticking to what I’d written. I don’t know if Ethne Alba would have appreciated them, but here are my answers to his Questions.
“Desert Backbeat”, Chine-collé print, 2011, by John Eaves
“The Lord is Listenin’ to Ya, Hallelujah!” – poetry, Sydney Road, and Carla Bley
If memory serves, I was trying to write a poem about the middle reaches of Sydney Road in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, where the shops and butchers and Turkish cafés and semi-abandoned bridal boutiques face each other across a patched and uneven surface clogged with traffic. Trams clatter up and down the street as they have done for more than a hundred years. The late Victorian buildings, many of them, retain their coloured plaster facades, like cake-decorations with pink and brown piping. The more I looked at them, the more they refused to obey what Thom Gunn has powerfully called the “occasions” of poetry, which are not decisions to write so much as a sorting of real and imaginary experience in which one must be alert to the happenstance, the inner prompting that presents itself as a found object or an unexpected idea.
I’d injured my back and was in a fair amount of pain. Helpful distractions included the energy and beauty of my surroundings, the birdlife, the markets, the sounds of flyscreens slamming shut in the wind, the kindness of the people I met, the Polish lady on Lygon Street who took me under her wing, the odd way in which my relocation to Australia had both banished and revived childhood memories, because of course memory is dynamic – a conversation between past and present in which the retrieved event serves the needs of one’s current predicament. Memory is meaning in search of form.
That search is a treacherous thing in both prose and poetry. Too strenuous an attempt to fix the results on the page can produce something aggressively personal or inert – the writer getting in front of the camera or in the way of a more unresolved and therefore interesting image. But if you can slide past a declared aim and speak in an aside, then the “adventures in writing” (Gunn again) can begin. I am taken with the notion of asides: they are, in early modern drama, the formally informal convention whereby people – liars especially – let slip the truth. I write a lot of them. They are part of the flow of a scene or narrative, but relatively unplanned, quickly ushered in. When we find ourselves digressing or speaking in asides, we are often saying what we really think but would be embarrassed to own. There is something Proustian about even the most trivial examples. It is almost as if we can tell the truth only when it doesn’t matter.
This is by way of introduction to a poem I wrote, unusually for me, with few corrections. It is somewhere between an aside and a soliloquy, and there is plenty in it that strikes me now as peculiar – that “helium-filled Titanic”, for instance. But the strain in the image is part of the overall sense of unburdening that came with staring at the shop-fronts on Sydney Road, and the heart of that staring was a revelation of indebtedness. I wanted to tell my father, who loves listening to music, how much his example has meant to me. I listened to music as I walked up and down Sydney Road, and for a while I listened every day to the American jazz composer Carla Bley, whom we both admire. I associate her gospel instrumental, “The Lord Is Listenin’ To Ya, Hallelujah!”, with Dad, with Melbourne, with the smell of meat in Brunswick market, with the dramatic monologues of U. A. Fanthorpe and Billy Collins, with the Psalms of thanksgiving.
The Lord Is Listenin’ To Ya, Hallelujah
for John Eaves
Gary Valente’s on trombone and you’re mixing acrylics.
The sound is that of a lone magisterial goose laying
about itself in cycles of wide-eyed, tearless grief.
The other farm animals stare at it in dismay.
“What’s got into her, apart from extra corn?”
Lately, people have been telling me I should stop
writing about my childhood and move on. Where to,
they do not reveal. And how can I,
when it follows me down Sydney Road,
in even these blue nethermost latitudes,
flapping its weird relic wings in despair
at all my pointless running about?
I could try, I could for once just try
listening, as I do battle with phone companies,
internet cafés and robot ladies grateful for my abuse,
to what the music is saying, however painfully
long the passage of recall might be on the way
back to mornings of hopeless pleasure in a room
filled with light and colour, your paintings
streaming on every side like pennants on a standard
or the tricolor plastic strips at Dewhurst the Butcher.
Perhaps that’s why the goose is so frightened:
though even in the grip of the most plausible terror,
knowing full well what goes on behind the curtain
where the rosy-cheeked lads let fall their arms,
the noise she makes tells a different story.
Instead of trying to sound beautiful, let it blow.
Live as though you were already dead and free
to wander the brazen rooms of this honking solo
which lifts off like a helium-filled Titanic
and floats effortlessly upwards laden with coughs,
barks, distant alarms, cheers, dropped glasses, sleep apnoea,
locked-ward chatter from the audience and every other song
of inadvertent praise you can imagine hailing from the top deck.
S113 “Talking With A Psychoanalyst: Night Sky”, 1975–80. Private Collection. Copyright Estate of Ken Kiff. Photograph by Angelo Plantamura. Used with kind permission.
Ken Kiff – The Sequence
It is very hard to write persuasively for others about the works of art that one loves, unreasonably and irrationally. “I am a Jane Austenite“, said E. M. Forster, “and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen.” In Forster’s case, the childish imbecility perhaps conceals an element of exquisite critical self-satisfaction: ‘I have been inducted into the ways of this writer or artist and I can only feel sorry for those who are too sophisticatedly stupid to feel as I do.’ An actual child would see things differently, without apology, and it is the work of a lifetime for many poets and artists to think their way back into that state of mind which encounters the world, and consciously ferments the encounter into a response, for the first time. It is Wordsworth’s subject, of course: the deep love of being that trumps learning, as learned as he might be. He’s sceptical about it, which is interesting, perhaps because he knows that this “under-sense” of replete identity with something (usually nature) is apt to sound pretentious, or even like a disavowal of adult responsibility. He calls it an “overlove of freedom” in Book VI of The Prelude. At the same time, it is indubitably real and important to him, because it represents the mystery of artistic immersion, which he experiences as a “treacherous sanction” of the critical. Better than any explanation, and worse, because it is not to be trusted.
The work of the English painter Ken Kiff (1935–2001) confronts this head-on: his is a riotous, protean imaginary of sexual archetypes, Shadows, surreal encounter, landscapes and artistic anxiety that takes seriously (though not sombrely) the whole business of love, the personal, sharing beyond words, and how hard it is to give a reliable account of these things to others. The open-ended summation of his, on the face of it, very un-English, wrestling with the Psyche, and with Jung (Kiff was in analysis for some years), is a 200-image serpent of continual making called “The Sequence”. He began it in 1971 at the age of thirty-five. A beautiful sketch, with an Uccello-ish dragon bottom left, and a tree dividing the page like a pale green fuse, was left unfinished at his death at the age of sixty-one. The paintings are mostly acrylic and pastel on stretched paper, with the gummed tape around the edges preserved as a reminder of their essential provisionality. Walking round the astonishing exhibition of sixty or so paintings, at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, is like visiting Regent’s Park Zoo with something from the reptile house as your anima and guide – a salamander, say. Kiff likes salamanders. Symbolic and actual, clearly emanating and signifying from inside the head, but smooth and scaly to the touch – a highly proprioceptive fantasy.
There is nothing like these paintings anywhere else. They do not belong to the main outgrowths of European Surrealism, with its manifesto-led disaggregation of narrative elements, its collage and taboo. They are not Abstract, although two abstract geometrical forms – a blue spike, like a tooth, and a flying parallelogram, like the Phantom Zone from the Superman comics – find their way into compositions otherwise made up of anthropomorphised animals, floating heads, defecating or spitting bodies, lovers, smiling naked figures, and darkly observing or listening shapes who might be the painter or his analyst. They don’t seem aware of their own facility, which is the problem with Chagall, and even Dali, whose idea of the unconscious was heavily branded from the start. They’re not faux-naive, either, or archly primitivist, in that way you can’t help laughing at when artists find a shtick and can’t stop waving it (Hodgkin’s frames). They’re not unaware of the rest of art – far from it – or trying to be singular. In “Spitting Man” (1976–80), a seated thick-set figure, pink and monumental, expectorates other smaller figures. The heaving up is a reverse-engineering of Goya’s famous Black Painting, “Saturn Devouring His Son”, and like that image, which started out as a wall painting, Kiff’s fleshy acrylic has an air of the built about it – of plaster and blank, wall-eyed permissions. They are happy to refer to things. In “Talking with a Psychoanalyst: night sky” (1975–80), a tremendous dramatisation of the scene of analysis, but in a real room with proper curtains, the two breast-like hills outside the window are Uccello again – the Fiesole hills in Florence.
But, in referring to things, to ideas and other artists, to writers (there is an astonishing drawing of Mayakovsky blowing his brains out), to himself, Kiff never feels as if he is drawing on a store of decided knowledge or material that has been imported from another discussion or medium. What comes up for him in the process of painting is the unaffected recreation of passion and erotic delight, the importance of colour as a ground to which every other question of formal invention and planning is subject, and in both the passionate and colouristic manoeuvres he is convincingly childlike, without being creepy. The paintings resemble those semi-ritualistic, incrementally developmental games that children play as they discover for the first time, and with a never-to-be-recaptured combination of hesitancy and sweeping confidence, their relationship to the external. That’s why the donkey’s legs (“Donkey”, 1976) are so accurately seen, the soft kink of the hind legs, and the scale of the animal so intuitively grasped before a mark is made. That, too, is why the sun is smiling. It’s not kitsch. It’s a matter of stepping truthfully into the moment. The world exists before my eyes, and I am making it.
Idealism agrees, and so would C. G. Jung. For the great symbolist analyst, the psyche was individual and irreducible to anything else. This is also broadly the position of philosophers like Thomas Nagel and John Searle, for whom the mind is physical but not in ways we currently understand; for whom the subjective viewpoint, our looking-on at the world, is not a skim on the surface of objective reality but a puzzling part of it. And inextricable from it: this may be the most important point to consider, Kiff suggests. Before we recruit him to one side of the subjectivist debate or another, we need to remember that he is an artist and a maker before he is anything else, and that artists do not feel they are transcribing or representing or interpreting the world. They’re just in it, and they’re in it more comprehensively for their willingness to have an experience that doesn’t try to isolate the understanding. The problem with the language of symbols in artistic activity – the sun is the mother principle, the shadow challenges the ego, the tree recalls Ygdrassil, and so on – is that the attribution of meaning takes place after the event, when one is only looking on or looking back. One wants to ask: how can unconscious meaning survive into consciousness? Here is the logical obstacle in the path of psychoanalysis. To get at meaning, we need to relive, not describe, and experiencing art, Kiff thinks, is one way of achieving this.
We want the kind of absorption in all our contemplative activity that neither stiffens into description nor threatens a psychotic episode in which objective distinctions disappear (Wordsworth’s “treacherous sanction”). Kiff puts it best himself in a long and sensitive letter to his friend, the writer Ian Biggs, dated June 10, 1998: “My position is to emphasize that the unknown is the unknown. That the unconscious is unconscious. ‘Self’ is an unknown, as ‘wholeness’ is an unknown . . . Painting evokes the sense-data by which we read the world, I suppose . . . It is an independent thing, however, because it isn’t the servant of our conscious activities, nor is it merely a product of our unconscious activities, nor is it a mirror. It is a highly developed medium with a continuous logic.” In other words, painting isn’t a record; it’s a form of pattern-forming attentiveness, in which things that are seen change as the painter looks at them, and in a way that feels logical and sensible, however unlikely the changes. It’s striking, as one moves from painting to painting, how genially unperturbed Kiff’s dramatic personae seem to be by all the psychic chaos. Nothing puts them off their stroke; there is illness and fear (a man throws up), but there is also comfort (another man, rising out of the ground, comforts him). Domestic routines are done naked. It’s Eden, or the 1970s, or a bit of both, maybe.
In “Posting A Letter” (1971–2), a beaming male nude strides towards a smiling red post box with an envelope in his hand. He is lifted up above the ground, above his own shadow; he walks on air. Behind him, to the left of the sheet, a bowler-hatted commuter disappears behind a tree. Both figures are regarded with total self-possession by an ant-eater, where one might possibly have expected a dog or a squirrel. The surprise is like the bend in a pencil when you put it in water and the memory of the first time you looked at that phenomenon. It is a real thing, an image, and a piercing emotion all at once. Emma Hill’s excellent catalogue to this rejuvenating show – the most enjoyable I have seen, anywhere, in years – reproduces an email from Kiff’s former student Emma Bosch, who remembers him at work on this particular painting. Kiff was a great correspondent, and he talked, Bosch says, about “the excitement of leaving a letter in the postbox and then waiting for the reply.” Hope is often an unreasonable and irrational feeling, of course, but it’s sentimental to think it always without foundation. The man in the air could fall. At the same time, he is buoyed up, right now, by sheer communicative delight.
First published in Brixton Review of Books Issue 5, March 2019