Reference to Things Past

There's an artist I resemble when my hair is let down, to fall in soft or crinkly just-washed waves around my face. An artist whose engravings I have admired, though they didn't inspire me as they did Christopher Isherwood and his pal Allen Chalmers. Three prints of his hung on the walls of Chalmers' Cambridge rooms as they made up stories within stories, worlds within worlds. Mortmere, their private domain. A village that before it was a village was a town: The Other Town, only a doorway away, until the pair, with their imaginations, moved it miles from Cambridge, proclaimed it a village and named it, then peopled it with all sorts of unusual characters.
The Bröntes did similar. Lots of budding authors, though they may not have known they were budding then, seemed to have made up lands in their youth, often with the help of siblings, cousins or companions, for it takes at least two to make-up and people an entire town or village. I can't say I ever did that with mine, but we made furniture camps and put on plays and built castles of sand and of air, and got scared at stories our elders told of trolls and pirates.
Alone, I convinced myself I had a imaginary friend called Katy, who was really just an excuse to talk to myself as this I already did. Even I struggled to believe in her and gave her up pretty quickly. I think I must have read somewhere it was something girls did or I was copying a child in a book whose friend couldn't be seen and yet accompanied her everywhere. My Katy was abandoned as most imaginary children eventually are, as I found animating toys that much easier. And frankly the dog made a better psychoanalyst.
That's the trouble with imagination: it takes you off the beaten track. The track you thought you were going down is easily diverted from and not always returned to, or not, at least, without some difficulty. I did not I assure you plan to build or keep you, the reader, in suspense as I'm sure you've been asking the question and want it answered: Who is this artist?
Albrecht Dürer is his name, was his name. And he was in my opinion a great artist, not only for the engravings Isherwood and Chalmers were greatly excited by, but for his studies of just about anything else: the proportions of the human body, studies of heads, portraits of his father who, to my mind, has a look of Thomas Cromwell, and couples like The Cook and his Wife that might have come out of The Canterbury Tales, along with a few fowl and some beasts. I particularly like The Young Hare and The Little Owl. You can view over 800 of his artworks on WikiArt, but, for some reason whenever I visit I'm drawn to his self-portraits. I say 'some reason' but I know the reason very well. I see a likeness. To myself.
How narcissistic of me! Yes! And to one in particular, of him at twenty-eight. Though I think I bore a resemblance more when I was that age myself; now the resemblance is fainter. I've never owned a moustache and beard, and his eyebrows were at twenty-eight much better than my own, but growing a beard wouldn't have been out of the realms of possibility, though if I did so now the hairs would be a wiry white gold and not a rich copper brown. Just as Dürer has faded from people's minds, I, too, am beginning to fade.
And so, if I want to recall how I looked at twenty-eight (and for some time into my thirties) I will call up this image, because I'd rather see myself in him than see a photograph of myself. Very few beyond a certain age exist of me anyway, and of those that I like there are even less.
Dürer was attractive as a man. Perhaps I was then, too? I've never really considered it. I wouldn't have seen it if I was, nor made the most of it. Perhaps twenty-eight is a golden age? Though I certainly don't remember it having a golden tone; maybe just in looks alone...definitely in maturity. I think I was more mature then than I am now, in every way. I'm fading and regressing. And according to my mother also resembling more when the hair's not up and is instead in tendrils around my face a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. This I can't explain, she could, but I refuse to allow her a voice on this ridiculous matter. So it could be that vanity also prompted me to write of Dürer, because I'd rather my mother when she thinks of me thinks of this famous artist.

Picture credit: Self portrait at the age of twenty-eight, 1500,  Albrecht Dürer (source:WikiArt).

For Mortmere, see Lions and Shadows, Christopher Isherwood.

Written February 2020.

Fact or Fiction

Education, apart me from giving me a good grounding in all the basics one might need to negotiate life, also imparted to me a liking for history. A liking for the old, the already happened. The very very old and the relatively young past.
I think my liking grew as I grew, and grown now, just over the forty hill, and having read more about the world and the peoples of the world, I have come to realise (and appreciate) how important those first building blocks were.
1066 The Battle of Hastings. 1666 The Great Fire of London. The Egyptians with its project on how pyramids were built and bodies preserved; and how I still regret, even now, that we hadn't studied the Vikings. Henry VIII and a rhyme to remember the names and fates of his six wives. Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada, although I can't remember whether this was school or a bit of history I suddenly inexplicably took an interest in; I know it led to a large beautiful illustrated book of Kings and Queens. And of course The Gunpowder Plot. What child doesn't learn, and enjoy learning, about Guy Fawkes!
Modern warfare came a little later. The Blitz. Air raids and shelters and tube stations. With BBC educational dramas – that's how we broached the subject of sex too: the boys disgusted and the girls horrified at the sight of a woman giving birth. History right there in the making.
The grittier facts of history came a little later, when we'd all gone our separate ways to whatever secondary school had decided to take us, where history, I soon discovered, was less integrative fun and more data, none of it that easy to remember, but with detail came a more rounded feel as different perspectives were explored.
I don't recall much prior to GCSE, but I know we did the Romans, for I distinctly remember in class discussing a chapter on Roman baths.
I was always going to choose it over geography. And I'm still glad I did, although it did become more about dates, statistics and policies, which I've never had much of a head for, because what interests me is the influence of events on people. But I did okay. A 'C' in my view was respectable – in the late 90s Cs were respected more.
And it has left its own legacy, its own stain on my character, for out of all my subject lessons, those of History have stayed with me the longest and given me, weirdly, a fondness for particular events and eras. Most notably 1930s America: The Wall Street Crash, The Great Depression, the severe dust storms and drought conditions in the Dust Bowl region, The New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. The jazz clubs, prohibition and bootlegging.
I still wonder why we concentrated on it as much as we did? It was in the curriculum; yes, but we're weren't American. It formed the world view, that was it. Bled in to what was happening with the rest of the world. Cause and effect. America had their struggles and in Europe Hitler was on the rise, striking terror into the breasts of Jews.
All countries have their hardships: economic slumps, revolutions, military dictatorships and constitutional monarchies, and history allows you to study these, in the aftermath, from all conceivable angles: what, who, where, why etc. With hindsight, so much can be seen, so much explored, and not just factually but fictionally, too.
And I do like to explore fictional interpretations, imaginings of history. Two historical figures brought together; a deeper layer revealed to a factual relationship; a different meaning given to an event that happened etc., because then it leads me to want to know more, if I knew very little before, of the actual people, the actual event that inspired the novel. In doing that though, I'm well aware that my enjoyment of the novel might be shot to pieces, for the plot or the meeting of two individuals might then seem too fanciful, too loosely based on facts. There's a line and that line is extremely fine.
That, for me, is the real problem with liking history: that line, though a different line this time, between moral decency and ambiguity, which is equally as hard to define in a few words as to explain in more, since history, both retrogressively and progressively, is like gossip: it guiltily excites and morbidly fascinates.

Picture credit: Clio, Muse of History, 1634, Johannes Moreelse (source: WikiArt).

Written February 2020.

Cut-throats

I've never been one for lofty ambitions.
For those you need to be a cut-throat and I'm not a cut-throat. Cut-throats have the right attitude: nothing and nobody will stand in their way. They will win people around, they will knock others down. They will do and get all that they need to realise their dream and they will work hard. Cut-throats believe they will get to where they want to go and beyond that.
Some if not born a cut-throat can become a cut-throat, though the path to get to where they want to go might be rockier. I think, however, in general, there are those that are cut-throat and those that are not.
Nature? Nurture? Who knows.
But we always want to be what we're not. Or at the very least, on occasion, admire what we know we're not in others. Despise it even.
It's never too late! they say to fulfil an ambition. I think it is. For me at any rate. And I don't have one, because, as I've said, I don't have an ambitious bone in my body.
I've always suspected my bones were rather porous and this suspicion has since been proved correct. They are not the building blocks of ambition, but the supporting scaffold only. And so this too has proved in my ongoing working life, if you can call it that. Nietzsche however might call me a decadent, whereas I would argue I have a working ethic, I just don't always know what to do with it, nor where I can best make use of the codes I wish to live and work by.
I would argue Nietzsche had the same problem. But then I do like to be deliberately contradictory in my arguments; it infuriates my opponents.
And Nietzsche, too, seemed to like to ruffle feathers, as well as be self-congratulatory. The best example of the latter is his autobiography: Behold the Man!
I did as he said and beheld him, with my reading eyes, and discovered his vaingloriousness did not put me off getting to know him, nor, afterwards, his Zarathustra.
Nor did such swelling pride put me off knowing 'You Are Welcome' Cellini (a Florence-born goldsmith and sculptor) whose autobiography is more heroic than Nietzsche's. What one man can do! What one man went through! It's a fascinating account of life and art.
In mine, if there ever came a time for me to write my autobiography, there'd be very little self-congratulating going on, and maybe only a little truth.
For I have achieved nothing remarkable and nothing commonplace. A Life of Humdrum, could that be its title? It would be very humdrum indeed. No ambitions, so no ambitions thwarted. No wild adventures. No poor parental relations. No sibling or cousinly rivalry. And no mad passions.
There would literally be nothing to tell, unless the excitement all comes in the next forty years. If it does it won't be of my making. I won't have imagined it nor made it happen. Although I could decide to fictionalise my life in all the accounts I might leave of it. But as tempting as that would be, I think (as it always does) my brutal honesty would get the better of me, and some things might instead get written out rather than written in.
If you can imagine it, you can have it. Cut-throats believe that; they practise it! I can't say it's not true but I can't say it's true either, for those of their ilk would cut off their own finger (and others' too) to succeed, whereas I have never had a burning desire to be, to do anything, and therefore try anything to get what I want or to where I want to be. Nietzsche, so he claims, felt the same:
'To 'want' something, to 'strive' after something, to have a 'goal', a 'wish' in view – I know none of this from experience. Even at this moment I look out upon a future – a distant future! - as upon a smooth sea. It is ruffled by no desire. I do not want in the slightest anything that should become other than it is; I do not want myself to become other than I am...But that is how I've always lived.'

Picture credit: The good little sister cut off her own tiny finger fitted it into the lock and succeeded in opening it, from Snowdrop and Other Tales, Brothers Grimm. Illustration by Arthur Rackham.

Reading recommendation: Ecco Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Written February 2020.

A Wolf's Wedding

In a forest clearing a wedding was taking place. The groom in a wide-sleeved embroidered robe tied with a wide blue sash and his youngish bride in a tattered dress not unlike that of Cinderella's rags but this one woven, so it was whispered among the congregation, by spiders; indeed it did have a cobwebby look, like those that have been undisturbed in corners for years, which set off the bride's fair, though some would say pale, countenance. She wore no veil but her dun-coloured hair had been coiled in a shimmering net with jewels that winked in the sun. It was said this was to distract from her lack of footwear because the groom had wanted to be the taller of the pair in his court shoes with buckles. This was his day, not the bride's. And everyone gathered there on this day knew that.
The bride, standing next to him, trembled, though not from fright, of what she wasn't sure as she wasn't a child and she had known wolves before, but this wolf somehow seemed more man (an effeminate man to be sure) than wolf. He had insisted on doing the decent thing: marriage first, then dessert. She didn't quite know what to make of this proposal (nor of him) but had rather foolishly accepted and now wished she hadn't, for what if he really, despite appearances, wasn't a wolf but a man? She didn't want that. She had been saved on too many other occasions by grandmothers and woodcutters and passing children; this time she hoped to be eaten.
'Dearly beloved, we are brought here today,' intoned the village vicar brought in for the occasion...And so it began and then continued like any normal marriage service except the bride instead of being kissed was playfully pinched and made to cry big fat tears. Unless these had been forced from eyes, and they had to be the bride's, a wolf's wedding was not recognised.
And cry she did, for not only had she been pinched all over, her feet had (accidentally it must be said) been trodden on. Unaccustomed to such treatment (and confused by it) she wailed and was still sniffling, and hobbling a little, on the short walk to their reception: a canopy of trees under which a banquet table had been set and spread with many dishes: meat and vegetable. The groom, to everyone's surprise's and particularly his bride's, stuck to the vegetarian options: nettle soup and braised wild mushroom steak with vegetables, whilst the bride evaded most of the woodland treats and suddenly finding herself ravenous tucked into meat: pigeon pie and roasted kid, all washed down with blackberry cordial. She ate and drank with such abandon, and with fingers, it was quite a disgusting sight. 'Starved, poor thing' the wedding guests murmured and tried as hard they could not to stare. The groom, however, looked on, down the length of the table, at his bride feasting with a glint in his eye, but whether it was of scorn or of relish nobody could surmise.
It was all a little strange; none of the guests had known what to expect or how to behave as the last wolf wedding in these parts had happened such a long time ago, before some of them were even born. The bride wasn't a local woman (she was more that than girl, trapped as she seemed to be in a girl's body) and the groom was relatively new to the forest. The story was she had got lost and had tapped on the old woodcutter's cottage, which the wolf had lately taken up residence in. He'd escorted her to the nearest village and on the way asked for her hand, because wolves, unlike men, are fast operators in stating their purpose but are slower to secure it, those of the gentleman variety at least and there were a few of those at that time knocking about.
Which again brings us to here: the wedding feast and dessert. The real dessert, baked apples with a cinnamon nut cream, had been eaten – the bride had demolished hers in the same manner as the earlier courses, and the groom genteelly – and the guests had taken to dancing to the Forest Fiddlers. The moment had come for the bride and groom to depart; the bride hopeful about what was to come and the groom glum for, despite saving himself, he wasn't a bit hungry and was unsure how his new wife might react when he failed to fulfil, as he knew he would, her darkest wish.

Picture credit: The Sleeping Beauty Wolf, 1921, Leon Bakst (source: WikiArt).

Written February 2020.

The Blood of Christ

A man, new to faith, got hooked on drink through drinking the blood of Christ. He didn't realise this was the case at first. He thought his behaviour was typical of someone newly converted, and indeed he had experienced other moments like this as a young man, when, for example, in the throes of a novel undertaking, such as a book, an idea, a person. He'd always had this tendency to throw himself one hundred percent into something or someone, and wax lyrical for days, sometimes months, on end about it or them and so he assumed he was being the same with the church. After a time, he thought, his keenness, although he hoped not his new-found piety, would transition from enthusiasm into the natural rhythm of his life as he'd arranged it.
That it didn't, and showed no apparent signs of doing so, perplexed him. For he found he wasn't as demonstrably or expressively religious as he had been at the beginning (with this his atheist friends concurred) and yet his church-going had increased and kept increasing. He'd even offered to arrange the flowers and play the organ, though he could do neither well and one very badly indeed, but so desperate was his need (so he thought) to be in the presence of Our Lord, and only realised, with hindsight (and the eventual help of Alcoholics Anonymous), that what he was really doing was trying to find out where they hid the wine. When that strategy had failed he'd visited other churches in the parish with the same end in sight: to receive a drop of Christ either from a bottle or a chalice; he wasn't picky. It had, however, to be church wine. Blessed and ruby red.
He hadn't any illusions that he was aware of: that for instance he was really drinking the blood of Christ. He knew it was symbolic; and even that it was only wine because at one time wine was safer than water. Though he did, on occasion, question whether Bram Stoker's Dracula had so influenced (and terrified) him it had led him to believe that by ingesting the blood of Christ he himself would turn Christlike, or become if not his bride than his groom. This revelation he kept to himself however (only pondering upon it at his leisure in his own private quarters) for he knew it was a mad idea, although it proved (he thought) by thinking so that he wasn't mentally unsound.
Fiction had a way of colouring everything else and his interest in areas, it is true, waxed and waned with books. And it's also true to state that (surely by coincidence?) he had taken up with the church after reading of Count Dracula, which is interesting if only from a psychological angle, as if he thought Dracula might have a second coming and so needed faith of some sort for added protection, though he didn't, it should be noted, arm himself with garlic bulbs or attempt to steal any sacred wafers from the churches he frequented. That Dracula seemed quite fond of churches and churchyards hadn't appeared to cross his mind, or those of the notes he left in his spidery script.
And of wine, well, his journal recorded that he'd never liked it. Red made him feel positively sick when he drank it with spaghetti bolognaise. And white was too dry, sweet or acidic. Bread, which had been his one indulgence with a thick spread of butter, he'd all but given up, save for the odd crusty roll, ever since he'd been scolded by an elderly Father, who'd run out of wafers and so turned to the old tradition, for biting into the Host, which had made him feel like a publicly admonished schoolboy as well as a murderer. Thou shalt not kill. But it had been rather a large piece, that he'd felt sure he would have choked on if he'd hadn't. To eat bread thereafter made him feel cannibalistic. He'd even tried cutting buttered slices into soldiers, as these could be folded over and placed into his mouth, but the very name they were known by of course made him think of men, so when he ate the bread he sobbed thinking of the countless lost, the many lives he'd gobbled. His mouth, a killer and a coffin.
It became apparent in the telling of his story as it did to his multidisciplinary team, if not immediately to him, that he was very obviously a literal person, though they weren't in full possession of the facts, and manipulative, too. For he blamed (and still maintains) the acquisition of faith formed his filthy wine habit.

Picture credit: Glass of Wine, 1908, Pierre Auguste Renoir (source: WikiArt).

Written January 2020.