Capture

Work from life, work from memory; capture a moment of life: movement, intensity, realism, 'driven always', wrote Suzanne Valadon, 'by a feeling for life itself.' Capture, in other words, the truth of the world: its beauty and its squalor. Capture the everyday: the ordinary movements of ordinary people; and the positions human bodies contort themselves in; and the places they frequent or inhabit. Capture the imitation of life, the imitation of art. An aspiring painter mirrors in her art that of her established patron's; a writer models himself, herself, their lived life on Woolf's Orlando. Become it! Become life, become art; and capture others becoming so.

Picture credit: Jeune Fille au Bain (Young Girl Bathing), Suzanne Valadon (source: WikiArt).

See Mistress of Montmartre: A Life of Suzanne Valadon by June Rose. 

Written March 2022.

Hunter

To sit quietly and work – read, write, study – one needs first a precious opportunity and then the perfect setting: an institution dedicated to the mind, the pen; or a solitary table with a solitary chair set before it, placed in a small room housing one, where one may read for pleasure and study from a mountain of books; and here make notes from the text or of one's own thoughts and questions, which may lead to further investigation.
Compelled like a Benedictine monk to read, though unbound by any rule, such individuals let life's normal transactions slip from them. But a book, like a revolution, like the discovery of an unknown continent, like an army sieging the gates or walls of a city to occupy land they think should be theirs, can be an agent of change; can be akin to a wall built, a wall toppled; a leader made, a leader taken down; a flag planted in the soil, a flag waved in triumph at the summit of a mountain; or less dramatically, a traveller falling mysteriously ill: a sneeze, a cough, a fever. A book's influence may be slow to gather pace, may be a less thrilling event than other heroic moments, but Time will record it, and Time will notice. And thus preserved, curiosity, once said by the Church to be a mortal sin, will compel new generations (of readers) to hunt, to read, to learn.

Picture credit: Roman de la Rose (Author of a manuscript at his writing desk), Wikipieda, National Library of Wales.

Written March 2022.

The Age Was ...

The age was Shakespearean, Dickensian, Wellsian, Orwellian; named for poets and writers, not Kings and Queens. The age was... not our own; their morals not ours; nor their...; nor their...; nor their... even. The age was dot dot dot; that unsaid left to the imagination, to the poets and writers to supply. The modern reader would feel everything was different; another temper altogether. The moment put to paper brief, the moment gone in pages; the moment alive then dead in the act of reading.
A fictional Russia caught in a different era: its landscape pine and snow and wild horses. A fictional London, the Thames frozen over, in the Court of King James. The poets sing of a disastrous winter that saw frost and flood; that saw Shakespeare's Othello staged in a carnival atmosphere, with ice and skating as its backdrop. The writers speak of the trance that followed, of thousands comatose, as if put under a spell by a wicked fairy or by too many party sedatives, which no amount of noise would waken before the advent of Spring. And then both - in poetry, in prose – describe how if Russia was mentioned an uneasy hush, an uneasy gloom would fall; though with all memories wiped nobody could – if pressed – explain why. A note that penetrated modern minds...

Picture credit: The Sleeping Beauty, 1890, Edward Burne-Jones (source: WikiArt).

Indebted to Orlando by Virginia Woolf. 

Written February 2022.

Jacob Flanders, A Potted History III

Jacob, twenty-six, in sunny Athens, standing in the Square of Constitution, seeming vacant; running into the Williamses: Oh!

Jacob, Sandra, Evan. Dinner and talk: the Williamses are going tomorrow to Constantinople; Jacob, it is believed, went with them; and gave too to Sandra his poems of Donne to remember him by.

Jacob back from Greece, very brown and lean, sits in Hyde Park with Bonamy. They talk, as motor cars passed over the bridge of the Serpentine, as small children run down sloping grass and fall. Bonamy guesses he's in love; Jacob does not respond – in look or words – just stares fixedly ahead. Bonamy enraged by Jacob's silence rises suddenly and stalks off.

Jacob, still in Hyde Park, draws a plan of the Parthenon in the dust; reads a long flowing letter from Sandra; feels for his chair ticket in each trouser-pocket when asked for it by the ticket-collector; can't find it and parts with half-a-crown.

But what does he think of sitting there in a green chair under a plane tree? Rome? Architecture? The ancient past, the distant future? He, like Bonamy, rises suddenly, tears his ticket to pieces and walks away. To where?

His face is recognised too late in Piccadilly by Reverend Andrew Floyd – Jacob had crossed the road already; he's glimpsed in a street, perhaps reflected in a shop window, by Clara Durrant on her way to the theatre; then gone.

Where had Jacob gone? To fight for his country. His room as it was, his letters any how. A wicker arm-chair that nobody now used, and an old pair of shoes. Jacob's Room.

THE END

Picture credit: Poppy, P R Francis

See Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf. 

Written February 2022.