Twelfth Night

Feast of the Kings, Epiphany, time to take the decos and cards down. End of misrule.

Misrule here takes a very mild form: eating our way through the Christmas cake, having the fire in all day and lounging around in front of it in the bean-bag with book and/or headphones and Molly in full-on lapdog mode, sometimes drinking wine at lunchtime, not caring if I get mud around the bottoms of my trousers when I'm out walking or if Mol slobbers on them in case I was thinking of wearing them for work the next day - the dress code isn't strict but cowmuck and dog saliva might be frowned upon - and generally letting things slide a bit. I always enjoy it and it always makes me uneasy. There's the sense that the end of it, the return to order and normal routine, is hanging over me, that I may not be able to square up to it, something of dread. Tom very cheerfully set to on New Year's Day with the timber and foamed concrete building a partition wall upstairs, and I did in fact pick up my textbooks and start preparing, at least mentally, for next term's teaching, which involves an extra class and change of premises, so a little apprehension, but I stayed in the bean-bag to do it.

The above Adoration of the Magi is by Phillipino Lippi. Generally regarded as good and full of incident, but a little over-busy (apparently they wanted Leonardo for the job, but he got distracted and never finished it, probably too many admin. duties with that long-running Mary Magdelaine fan club he was involved with or something). But one particular incident caught my eye.


As the great and the probably not so good of Renaissance Florentine society, the effete and the curmudgeonly, the precious and the powerful and the ruthless receive their expensively bought honours and recognition from the Virgin and Child, in the top-left hand section, a group of travellers are alighting. Mostly their attention is taken up with awe and astonishment at the star, unseen by us, in the sky above, but one man is oblivious, absorbed in being greeted by his dog. It is a moment of natural, timeless warmth and spontaneity.
In the poem "Musee de beaux arts", the one that begins "About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters", Auden saw something cold and bitter in this indifference to the momentous, the ominous, the tragic and terrible. With the sense of impending doom with the rise of fascism and the coming of war, of suffering on a massive scale, he found little comfort in the knowledge of life going on. Thomas Hardy did though, for all his lugubriousness, " This will go onward the same / Though Dynasties pass ".

So, as the nations are broken, as Icarus falls from the skies, before the massacre of the innocents ( and after, and during), I'm off to walk the dog.

( For links to the poems,http://poetrypages.lemon8.nl/life/musee/museebeauxarts.htm , for the Auden, a lovely page with the Breugel picture also, http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/429.html for the Hardy. I attempted to put links in the text, without success. Think I need some http lessons.)

What, mememe ?

There I was, happily languishing in obscurity, certain that this thing wouldn't happen to me, when rr went and memed me. This, it seems, is a kind of game of tag, where the person tagged (that is I, in this case) has to perform the forfeit of telling 5 things that people don't know about them. Like anyone else, I naturally have things few people if any know about me. There is usually a good reason for their not knowing, that is the things in question are/were sordid, painful, embarrassing, stupid or just plain boring. And I certainly can't compete with sexual cavorting with spies in embassies and the like! However, in the interests of being a good sport, and in acknowledgement of notice kindly taken, here goes.

1) When I was 5, I won a postal order for 5 shillings in a painting competition. My picture was exhibited in Berkhamsted Town Hall, and was titled "London". It consisted of a wide arc (London Bridge) being traversed by many little men sporting bowler hats and umbrellas. I doubt that it was an accurate depiction of the capital at that epoque: if the denizens of the city did still wear bowler hats, I don't suppose their arms were growing from the middle of their torsos.
The work is now lost.

2) When I was old enough to know better, I used to want to be Biggles.

3) On a birdwatching expedition to the Norfolk Broads when we were about 15, rr and I were fortunate in seeing all three species of British swan - Bewick's, whooper and mute, on one stretch of water.

4) While working in a shoe shop on the King's Road in the mid-eighties, I sold a pair of lemon yellow pixie boots to Grace Jones.

5) The first autumn we were here, Tom and I completely re-roofed the house, completely on our own, slates and batons, using a death-trap lash-up of borrowed scaffolding - rusting poles and pegs, rotten planks and bits of string - and a rather novel and acrobatic way of balancing on the timbers to avoid walking on the slates. In fact, everybody knows about this as we haven't stopped talking about it since. I can't think why, it wasn't courageux , it was just foolhardy. Tom fell off a ladder shortly afterwards, then went down with a fever and nervous exhaustion, and spent much of the subsequent winter laid out on the sofa - our only seating at the time - so I read "Vanity Fair", and many other classic English novels by firelight sitting in a laundry basket.


-Well, there we are. Unfortunately I can't participate in the next part of the game, which is to tag 5 other people who must also carry out the forfeit, because I don't know anybody. Or, more to the point, they don't know me. The other bloggers I read have either recently been tagged anyway, or are far too enigmatic or stratospheric to be importuned in this way by an upstart parvenu such as yours truly, so, alas, I must break the chain.

Spell of Creation

This is for my dear belle-soeur, Andy, who first walked into our lives and our hearts as a luminously lovely 18 year old, and is as beautiful and as well loved now as then. Wishing you a safe return, and get well soon. (Sorry the poem's not home-made, I didn't have anything good enough, but the pictures are...)

Spell of Creation by Kathleen Raine

Within the flower there lies a seed,

Within the seed there springs a tree,

Within the tree there spreads a wood.

In the wood there burns a fire,

And in the fire there melts a stone,

Within the stone a ring of iron.

Within the ring there lies an O,

Within the O there looks an eye,

In the eye there swims a sea.

And in that sea reflected sky,

And in the sky there shines the sun,

Within the sun a bird of gold.

Within the bird there beats a heart,

And from the heart there flows a song,

And in that song there sings a word.

In the word there speaks a world,

A word of joy, a world of grief,

From joy and grief there springs my love.

Oh love, my love, there springs a world,

And on the world there shines a sun,

And in the sun there burns a fire,

Within the fire consumes my heart

And in my heart there beats a bird,

And in the bird there wakes an eye,

Within the eye, earth, sea and sky,

Earth, sky and sea within an O

Lie like the seed within the flower.

( Apologies if any copyright infringed. For more on Kathleen Raine and her legacy, go to www.temenosacademy.org . Also credit due to Tom, who took the 5th and 6th of the above pictures.)

Apologia

Is this all fiddling while Rome burns? It's a tired old image, a tired old question. Yes, of course it is. Here I am in my quietist seclusion on top of a hill in Brittany - a bit windy, we often say, but it'll be handy when global warming really kicks in - writing pretty and sensitive prose, snipping pleasant quotes and pasting on nice pictures, to who knows what end, ruminating on the spiritual but unwilling to commit myself to any active body of religion ( "I would prefer not to..."), of course this is effete, pointless nonsense while the world crumbles in fire, violence, fear and pain. Nero, it might be said, was in a position of rather more practical influence than I am, but he also lacked the goodwill.

Cutivate your garden, said Voltaire, somewhat disingenuously I gather, (and also my mother, who put it more literally into practice; my horticultural contribution here is mostly cutting the grass, which I do with a more or less good grace...) On the other hand, for evil to triumph... etc. When does cultivating one's garden become good people doing nothing?

I don't do politics here. That doesn't mean I haven't any political views, or that I don't feel strongly about world events, or try to educate myself about them, or even sometimes try to do something useful. But if I tried writing on the subject, it would read as lame, naive, probably ill-informed, hand-wringing. Also, in typical codependent fashion, I don't want to risk pissing anybody off too much. We half fell out, by e-mail, with my American first cousin, the eldest, British-born son of my much-loved aunt, my mum's GI bride sister, not so much I think because we couldn't accommodate differing political views, but because we couldn't stomach each other's modes of expressing them, something to do with attitude rather than opinion. We resolved to stick with what he calls the "warm and fuzzy", ( I suppose what my frizzy friend would file under 'little fluffy white clouds'!) but somehow when you've ventured onto cold and thorny ground, the warm and fuzzy doesn't feel so safe any more. Perhaps I'm just being too British, perhaps that's the problem.

There are intelligent, brave, nobly-motivated people in this and every other sphere of the media who address political issues far better than I can. I am deeply admiring of and grateful to them. What they can't do and only I can, is attempt to relate my experience, to make something from the melding of my inner life with my perceptions of the outer world. Naturally, this will not bring about world peace, or accomplish any single practical thing of any significance, but it still seems to have been an important human thing to do, in one form or another, for a very long time.

Who was the most important writer to emerge from the American Civil War? Emily Dickinson. (Where did that come from, was it Salinger?). OK, I'll say it before someone else does: I knew Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson was a friend of mine, Senator, you are no Emily Dickinson!

Leaves

... from box-elder, of course. Collected in France in 1995, just after we were married. I recently found them in a box file of memorabilia from that trip.

Winchester Cathedral...

... very far from bringing me down, you continue to cheer me up, viewed from the kitchen window, with flowers the colour and scent of Nivea cold cream, which simply haven't stopped blooming, come rain, wind,frost, drought...

... and very jaunty red hips.

Spem in alium, Westron wynde

There is no image in my collection that I can match with the sublime, vertiginous richness and depth of Tallis's "Spem in alium". The polyphony contains forty parts; no-one knows how he even achieved the notation of it with the materials of the time, or indeed how he was able to conceive of it at all.
John Taverner's (the original, with an 'r') "Western wind mass" is of a more attenuated beauty. It is based on the melody of the anonymous "Westron wynde" lyric from the 16th century.

"Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,

The small raine down can raine.

Chryste, that my love were in my armes

And I in my bedde againe."

Spare, enigmatic, timeless. A world of longing and loneliness in that. Perhaps. I always read it that way, anyway.

These sounds and words can move me deeply, bypassing the intellect, accessing feeling. But, when I started writing this, I was considering how hard I have to work sometimes to feel a seemingly normal level of compassion toward other people. Anger, or pride, or perhaps fear (but of what? fear that I might one day require compassion extended toward me?), or a kind of lethargy of spirit, a sense of unreality about others, when only my ego seems reliably real, seem to get in the way. I thought of Kenneth Branagh's depiction of the Nazi Heydrich in the film "Conspiracy", who, having designed, organised, and sealed the fate of those who were to be murdered in the Final Solution, puts on a record of a Schubert quintet, weeping at its beauty, beauty, he says, that "will tear your heart out!"

But because we can't always feel things we should at the moments when we should, doesn't mean we needn't hunger and thirst after them as good things. There's a bit in "The Screwtape Letters" (and I can't quote it accurately because the book's upstairs in a box somewhere...), where the devil Screwtape urges his nephew to take advantage of the human creatures' failing in prayer, because when they pray for something, compassion for example, they expect instantly to feel compassionate, and when they don't assume that the prayer hasn't worked.

Yet compassion will come, did come. Only wait, corral the tigers of wrath, stroke them with care, placate them with titbits but don't let them loose, cut through the wadding of lethargic fearfulness with simple action. It comes unbidden, dropping slow, at times of cooled serenity and reflection, or like a whizzing wind in moments of warmth and sudden openness and fellow-feeling.

Credo

"The most beautiful and deepest experience a man (sic) can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science... He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. The sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is."

Albert Einstein, 1932.

(OK, so you've probably heard it before but I only came across it recently...)

Boxing Day

" Mangos, papaya,
Chestnuts from the fire,
The food is so good
You will want to stay!"

( Rosemary Clooney - George's aunt, don't you know!- "Mangos")

Small instances of grace

Not much time this morning, as my early start has mostly been used up in cutting up and portioning out chocolate covered flapjacks, which were initially developed for the family of Oscar, who has to be egg-free, but have become the product of choice from my kitchen at this time of year for most of my adult acquaintance also. I shall later distribute them around the countryside, Little Grey Rabbit style (- except I don't think LGR drove a beaten-up old CitroenBX...).
After a crummy couple of days with many checks and reverses and small abrasions, many self-inflicted - to my self-esteem, and a failure, despite liberal doses of aspirin, vitamin C and L52, to resist this season's current viral infection, I came home yesterday to find lovely comments peppering my blog. This cheered me beyond measure. So thanks Rachel, thanks Pol.
Furthermore, on coming down this morning, the fire was still glowing embers. While nothing impressive in terms of the laws of physics, to me this is always a small grace which needs must be honoured with the application of paper screws, tinder, but strictly no matches or fire lighters, and now I have flames for company too.