Sparrows

Sparrows dart round these chambers, never knowing what they will do: where will they fly or perch? The nostrils prick at odours, the mouth tastes flavours. Memory singed long ago. How boring other people's sparrows seem when they're not your own, when magnified – as they usually are – to a stature they may not deserve. It's the same with thoughts, with loves. Never in the same room, always someplace else. Recalling; thinking; questioning: what would van Gogh have made of the sunflowers in Italy? Of Italy itself – the Italian countryside?

Read and write...wonder...sparrows perch, fly.

Picture credit: Sparrows and Camellias in the Snow, 1838, Hiroshige (source: WikiArt).

Attributed to reading White Egrets by Derek Walcott.

Written June 2022.

City

A city low on nightmares (though with a fondness for mythological monsters), of dreamlike beauty, of love and betrayal, of rumour. Twilit and dangerous, described as having damp, cold, narrow streets through which one might get lost, or find oneself in an abandoned palazzo, which must surely be a Venetian principle, just as honeymooners in gondolas are another.

A city of dust, of time, of fog. A city ceased to be seen, that in winter chooses invisibility, all the while crying (in an echo of JB's) “Depict me! Depict me!”

Picture credit: Venice with the Salute, c.1840-1845, J M W Turner (source: WikiArt).

See Watermark: An Essay on Venice by Joseph Brodsky.

Written June 2022.

Language, Observation

In my book-burdened heart I see coincidence, everything linked. Books, passion-filled, contain vivid image and smell; a late sunbeam gilding their spine as my mind is carried away, far away to the land of the book or to my own past. African villages, shacks roofed with tin, hills a Chinese scroll, gulls circling inland. A wood-pigeon's coo disturbs such imagery and takes me to Middleton-On-Sea. Language, observation; that's what characters – real and fictional – are made. Affliction, wounds stitched into them and questions curled like sea-horses; sunken galleons rumoured – with skulls and treasures – to be there but never found, too many fathoms deep.

Picture credit: Seahorses in Morecambe, Eric Gill (source: WikiArt).

After Derek Walcott, written June 2022.

Ma Kilman's Bar

I cannot see the island's geography as clearly as I can Ma Kilman's bar: NO PAIN CAFÉ ALL WELCOME, with its wrinkled paint, bead curtain and neon sign endorsing Coco-Cola. Blind Monsieur Seven Seas sitting on a crate outside speaking in old African babble to his sharp-eared dog; shifting as the day ages his box to the shade. Philoctete, a wounded fisherman with foam-white hair, in the rumshop window staring out to sea, periodically anointing his itching, tingling shin with ice or Vaseline.

Picture credit: West Indies Divers, 1899, Winslow Homer (source: WikiArt).

See Omeros by Derek Walcott. 

Written June 2022.

Jigsaw

The sleep of reason (war), the reptilian brain awakened. Peacetime, innocence restored; all is possible, life is trivial. Imbued with meaning or seeming meaningless; saturated with or depleted of experience. Any significance acquires in time, with second thoughts and afterthoughts, rehearsed, then executed. Tiny pieces of a jigsaw puzzle collected then assembled to perfection.

Picture credit: The Tower of Babel after Pieter Brueghel, (Gordian Puzzles), 2007, Vik Muniz (source: WikiArt).

From Journal, May 2022.

While Reading Pushkin

A single sentence, a short paragraph, an economy of words, disciplined prose, and imagination triumphs over my own reality. Fiction and history blended together, towered over by Pushkin's figure.
I see Russia, as does Ibrahim, the Tsar's negro, as 'one huge work-room where only machines were moving and every worker was occupied with his job in accordance with a fixed plan'; and wonder if under Putin it is the same?
I see a ball-room, ladies and gentlemen in two rows, curtseying or bowing low repeatedly to each other to the strains of melancholy music, and Korsakov, fresh from Paris, wide-eyed and biting his lip at this 'peculiar way of passing the time'; and then flouting the rules of Russian etiquette humiliated and forced to drain the Goblet – filled with malmsey wine – of the Great Eagle; and wonder if that scene was as entertaining to write as it was to read?
I see Kiril Petrovich Troyekurov's kennels with over five hundred hounds – though that number seems inconceivable somehow – and hear them 'singing their praises in their canine tongue'; and wonder, though it's wrong, if the Russian military do the same – whine and lick Putin's hand?
A pause...and then my imagination is struck again.
I see a cat saved from a blaze; officials trapped inside, the roof falling in, their screams stopped. Nothing but charred remains.
I see a daughter with the run of her father's extensive library, choosing which French writer of the eighteenth century to read; and wonder about her father's favourite the Perfect Cook – what sort of book was it?
I see dispossessed officer Dubrovsky's pact in the post-master's house with the French tutor; see his transformation from officer to brigand to teacher to brigand again; and wonder if it's true that we always miss what's right before our eyes?
I see the Volga with loaded barges floating on it, and 'little fishing-boats, so aptly called smacks', flashing here and there, and the hills and fields and small villages stretching beyond it; and wonder if those with such a landscape as a view know how fortunate they are?
I see many-coloured lights flare up, whirl about, and fall in 'showers of rain and stars'; and am, like Maria Kirilovna, 'carried away like a child.'
I see, from a distance, an airy shadow approach a trysting-place and meet a bolder shadow, and then, some time later, one disappear among the trees.
Time flies...lost in a dream.
I see a red-haired boy stealing a ring from a hollow oak, and caught see him dragged to and locked in a pigeon-loft with an old poultry woman as his watch, and then brought before the police-captain; and wonder how it feels to be a prisoner, for your fate to be decided?
I see a pistol drawn, one that wounds, one that threatens; and consider how a moment can change everything.
I see two winning cards, three, seven; and wonder nervously, unlike Hermann, if the third will be...? Three, seven....
These idle thoughts, sensations, escape me while reading Pushkin.

Picture credit: Pushkin at the Mikhailovsky, Pyotr Konchalovsky (source: WikiArt).

See The Queen of Spades and Other Stories by Alexander Pushkin (Penguin Classics, translation and footnotes by Rosemary Edmonds). 

Written 9-10^th May 2022.

Anointed

False king, false prophet; false claims, enchantment. Heavenly voices, humanly fabricated stories. A restorer of peace and a channel to it; disturber of peace and an obstacle to it. Divine justice itself in the form of a person; or, evil-thinking, evil-speaking, evil-doing. Tests of battle, victory; interrogation, heresy. Right at the time, wrong years later. A blazing rise, a dying fall; a burning death, a risen star. Human, Saint; the human person dies, the saintly being shines. History rather than memory igniting interest.

Picture credit: Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII in the Cathedral of Reims, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (source: WikiArt).

See Joan of Arc, A History by Helen Castor. 

Written May 2022.

Embrace

Released from the embrace of art and clasped again in an embrace of politics and history, that of my own country, that of another's, and that of the fifteenth century. History told forwards and learnt backwards. Individuals placed in context of the events that unfolded or are still unfolding – still felt or are of now and may yet be felt by generations to come. Of what are we made? Resistance and violence; joined and severed hands; ill-starred, ill-advised negotiations, enemies-turned-saviours and bogus declarations of peace on which the future stands or falls.

Picture credit: Shadow of the Teacher, 1932, Nicholas Roerich (source: WikiArt).

From journal, May 2022.

Jazz

A final decade, a second life. Things reduced to the simple, yet made profound; resurrected – from death – as a reductionist. Brushes, pencil and charcoal abandoned in favour of coloured paper and scissors. Cut paper like jazz music – improvisational, spontaneous; scissors like a bird in flight, knew what line to take. 'Circuses, folktales, and voyages'; Icarus, a black silhouette, burnt by the sun, with a red circle or star or dot for a heart, tumbling, as myth dictates, to his destruction. Icarus' fate but not Henri Matisse's.

Picture credit: Icarus, Henri Matisse (source: www.metmuseum.org).

From a larger work I call 'The Magician', written May 2022.

See Henri Matisse, A Second Life by Alastair Sooke.

Image

Name on every tongue; figure held in every eye. Lizzie Siddal. Annie Miller. Representing in a painting not themselves but some other female beauty; the painter inspired by their looks also using them as a study – the shape of their face, their hands, the fall of their hair. Forever possessed, forever caught.

Picture credit: Annie Miller as Helen of Troy, 1863, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (source: WikiArt).

Written May 2022.

Man Ray

The attempt made to crystallize thoughts on the page; the thoughts of years. The language simple, the punctuation sometimes mystifying; a resemblance at times to Gertrude Stein: on lecturing and teaching (page 353): 'the goal was the same: to make people think. I [Man Ray] have made some of my listeners think, and it has sometimes made them angry, but I have also made others angry and it has made them think.' The author aware of his own contradictions in behaviour, in thought, in speech, in art; and nowhere are these contradictions more apparent than in autobiography; for in writing of oneself – one's life, one's thoughts retrospectively – it cannot be helped. Contradictions will occur whether one is aware of them or not. It is a problem of autobiography as is chronology; one snapshot leads to an earlier or later remembrance, thereby distorting, confusing time, and the reader's sense of the lived life and the experiences it contained. The author explores the finished and the unfinished areas and hopes the reader follows. The reader considers her own unfinished areas – the not seen through, the not taken up – and wonders if they are just as valid? Or even if perhaps their unfinishedness was somehow intended? A blank on her canvas.

Written April 2022.

Picture credit: Landscape, (Paysage Fauve), 1913, Smithsonian American Art Museum, (source: Wikipedia)

Reading Recommendation: Self Portrait by Man Ray.

A Scroll

A scroll opens, life – to this point – unrolls: images, faces, questions. The still living, the long or recent dead. Memory battles with itself, for who else could verify these impressions? Dormant, they have risen; a resurrection, in the here and now.

Picture credit: The Joshua Roll, Vatican Library, an illuminated scroll, circa 10th century, Byzantine Empire, University of Arizona (source: Wikipedia).

Written April 2022.

Dove

Dante's. Her soul never to bloom, her bright hair to fade. I paraphrase. Ruskin's “Ida” after Tennyson, “a noble, glorious creature”; might have been “a countess”, Ruskin's father. A beautiful tree Ruskin wanted to save, a piece of Gothic he wanted to support. He tried... But Lizzie S. was always caught been life and death, earthly and heavenly love. Dante, her sickness and her medicine; laudanum, her familiar.

Picture credit: Beata Beatrix, 1864-1879, Gabriel Dante Rossetti (source: WikiArt).

Book recommendation: Lizzie Siddal by Lucinda Hawksley.

Written April 2022.

The Puzzle of Stein

The puzzle of Stein: why did she write the way she did? Well-read – she shared Woolf's love of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans – and yet her writing suggested to publishers and newspapers – and still suggests to some readers today – that she had no knowledge of the English language, was perhaps not an English speaker, and was imperfectly educated; or if none of those applied was perhaps not in possession of a sound mind. Well, none of those did apply, so why? Why write as she did? Was it deliberately experimental, deliberately original? She was – as she seemed to think, and to often imply – a genius! Was it not deliberate but authentic? She was writing in English as she thought, and so disregarded other people's plead for commas. Why should she instruct her readers when to take a breath, they can decide for themselves. Her writing may have been appalling, but the newspapers she said always quoted it and what is more quoted it correctly; they don't quote those they admire. So, she was different; judged unreadable, but different. A new literary movement with very few followers; and yet she believed totally in her ability to write. You have to admire that if nothing else. She amused herself, and that really is the whole point of creativity. Although it's hard not to say when reading her, particularly The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “What an ego!” and “Where is Alice?”

Picture credit: Gertrude Stein sitting on a sofa in her Paris studio (source: Library of Congress, Wikipedia).

From journal, April 2022.

Tide

Poetry washes over one, born as I was in an age where it was not learned, much less recalled, and little read for pleasure. Instead it was dissected, line by line, stanza by stanza – never any talk of metres – for its meaning must be found, and enjoyment destroyed. No time was given to how to recite – perform – it; to locate its beat, its rhythm. It was not drummed into one and I feel the lack, as words of verse, including those much admired, come in...then go out...like a tide. A feeling might remain for a poem or the poet, but the poetry itself does not survive.

Picture credit: The Inrushing Tide, 1885, David James (source: WikiArt).

From journal, April 2022.

Another Night, Another Day

'Another night, another day', to echo Housman; the blind drawn down to shut out the moon, the curtains pulled to let in the sun; and still Housman's mind is consumed with thoughts of death, the grave; and so mine too thinks on dying: those who want to live die young; those who want to die live long, suffer the infirmities of age. 'What man is he that yearneth for length unmeasured of days?' Not he, Housman; not I, a woman. And yet Housman for all his sad verse and doomed love lived into his seventies; made into poems sorrow's sum; gave to his readers unhappy reading, a melancholy feeling; that Death was close, was Life's companion.

Picture credit: Alfred Edward Housman, photo by E. O. Hoppe, 1910 (source: Wikipedia).

From journal, April 2022

See A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems by A. E. Housman (Penguin Classics).

A Time

A door opened and shut – blown open by a gust and slammed to; a veil – before a face, before a window, before a hidden space – parted and closed. Endless avenues, tree-lined; long unlit corridors; and dark uninviting tunnels. A slight figure with a plain face, neither young or old, walking through, wandering along, looking down, still intimidated by life, and bewildered by the time that has passed.
Behind a door, in a room, in another world, files of memory are repeatedly visited and rifled through; old stories told – the same sentences used – and with half-attention, never whole, listened to, by the young, by the old, by those who were not there – in that time or place – and those who were – living, at least, or shared the experience; and faded snapshots looked at, some more bleached than others. A time, a time, a time...a time that comes back as if it were yesterday; a time that seems so far away its edges are a little blurred. There are no words...there is a dislocation between word and reality – the words drop, the thought – the memory – hangs unfinished...

Picture credit: Youth and Time, 1901, John William Godward (source: WikiArt).

Written April 2022

A Way or Course

Roads that go straight somewhere and roads that go nowhere. Grey haired spinsters who drink hot water in Florence, Italy, and young ladies who study the Old Masters. Vague females in the background, bold females at the forefront; dusty and tousled, maybe wearing spectacles, or daring and beautiful. Roads of inspiration; roads of occupation. Roads that are less Victorian, or Edwardian, and more bohemian, though still leading mostly to marriage and children, and perhaps lovers. Roads that went somewhere, then went nowhere, nowhere in particular; straight roads whose end is met with suddenly, stopped short.

Picture credit: The Tuscan Road, 1899, Amedeo Modigliani

Written March 2022.

Ruins

A stone city made by nature, by erosion; “ruined architecture” fooling human eyes into believing this mirage, this illusion, and attempting always to cut a path to it. Ancient ruins made of natural materials; ancient ruins consumed by jungle; ancient civilisations simply disappear. And yet if the right god-selected agent looks he will see shards of pottery, moat-like ditches, evidence of bridges and causeways. Connecting to what? Leading to where? Other ancient (and lost) cities, probably.

Picture credit: Among the Ruins, 1904, Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema (source: WikiArt)

See The Lost City of Z by David Grann.

Written March 2022.

Picasso by Stein

Picasso as creator: fills and empties himself; fills and empties himself – of Spain, of France, of Italy; refills himself so quickly, he must recommence emptying himself of his different periods: blue, rose or harlequin, African, Cubism, still-lifes. Realistic, Naturalist, and Classic. Cubes, no cubes, and simply things. Large women and women with draperies. Period of rest – nothing to empty. That is his way. Picasso by Stein.

See Picasso by Gertrude Stein.

Written March 2022.

Picture credit: Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905-6, Pablo Picasso, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (source: Wikipedia).

Worried and Worrying

I share – I know – Picasso's “worried and worrying” look; mine, inherited from my father; his (Picasso's) I don't know, it may just have been his from childhood or developed later as a result of a precarious lifestyle, but that this look was habitually his has been testified to by friends who knew him; and so I imagine too the charge of being worried was levelled at him when he wasn't at all, or that he was always responded to as if he was. Yes; the “worried and worrying” look is – whether true or not – both a curse and a benefit, but it perhaps suggests – if nothing else – a determined struggle: a rock pushed up and rolled down, and pushed up again, the same hill; and a struggle too against the medium which has been chosen to represent it: stone, wood, clay, plaster, water-colour, oil, photography, verse, prose, music, dance etc. Dry, factual; straight. Lyrical, poetical; fiction. What is seen by or impressed upon the mind. The struggle free and flowing, or arduous and prickly, but always accompanied by the same “worried and worrying” look. The face etched, creased, with worry lines; its expression strained, perhaps struggling against the other range of emotions it wants to express; the light withheld a little in the eyes, in the shape of the lips; and though a description of that person's nature is supplied, which suggests they were less worried than they appeared, still that look becomes their most mentioned characteristic, for the face, perhaps it is thought – like the eyes, reveals the soul.

Written March 2022.

Picture credit: Portrait of Pablo Picasso, 1956, Marevna (Marie Vorobieff). (Source: WikiArt).

Theory

See things as they are (Realism); paint as you think, not as you see (Cubism); destruction is also creation (Dadaism); paint your dreams, your hallucinations, the inner world of your imagination (Surrealism). All art movements feeding, bleeding into, blending with the next. A nude, a landscape, an object straight; a portrait, a day or night scene, a still life in fragmented parts. Pre-war, the future coming through; post-war, the future here, but wait! there's more. Effort made and no effort made to adapt to the current trend: the line, the brush-stroke, the use of colour etc., by the various artistic personalities (the pleasing, the difficult), who either basked in the publicity or shied from it; who bartered their lives as they bartered their art.

Written March 2022.

Picture credit: Portrait of Maurice Utrillo, 1921, Suzanne Valadon (source: WikiArt).

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.

Jacob Flanders, A Potted History II

Jacob at the British Museum, in a compartment, sandwiched between Miss Marchmont and Fraser – a seeker and an atheist – transcribing a passage from Marlowe. At closing time, he returns his books; observes Miss Marchmont wave and mutter to the Elgin Marbles; and joins the line – in the hall – to receive his walking-stick. It's raining.
Jacob sitting at his table with his pipe, his book, reading a dialogue of Plato's. It draws to an end, stowed in Jacob's mind.
Or, Jacob in a room, above a mews, somewhere near the river, between two and three in the morning, watching fifty excited people; then striding home exhilarated to let himself in with his latch-key at his own door; and so bring into his empty room ten or eleven people he had not known before. So to bed.
A new day. Jacob engaged upon a chess problem, the board on a stool between his knees: which to move from their square – the white queen, the white knight, perhaps the bishop?
And now Jacob is in Leicester Square, being casually introduced by Nick Bramham the painter to Fanny Elmer his model. Very awkward was Jacob; said little but the little he said – Fanny thought – was firm. She fell in love.
Here Jacob goes abroad – to Paris. Where in the company of two painter men and a Miss Carslake from Devonshire he has scraps of conversation concerning art, or London's pigeons; and joins them on an outing to Versailles. His letters to Mrs. Flanders, near Scarborough, England, told none of this. Paris, a very gay time.
Now to Italy, a train journey, seen through Jacob's eyes: striped tulips growing; a motor car packed with Italian soldiers; trees laced together with vines – as Virgil described. Here a station, women in high yellow boots and pale boys in ringed socks. There sharp-winged hawks, flying, circling, diving over roofs. Peaks covered with sharp trees; white villages crowded on ledges; a whole hillside ruled with olive trees and red-frilled villas. A scenic landscape; all seen from a damnably hot carriage with the afternoon sun beating full upon it.
In Greece, Jacob got lost in back streets; read advertisements of corsets; and wondered why he wasn't in Rome. Jacob was a picture of boredom, of gloom. He wrote to his mother; to Bonamy; told Betty Flanders nothing she wanted to know, and made Bonamy sigh as he laid aside the thin sheets of notepaper.
On the way to Olympia Jacob sees Greek peasant women among the vines, old Greek men sipping sweet wine; sharp bare hills and between them blue sea. Out of England, on one's own.
An English boy on tour, leaving his hotel at five (in the morning) to climb the mountain; breakfasting early to look at statues; walking up Greek hills at midday. A young man in a grey check suit invited by other hotel guests – the Williamses (Evan, Sandra) – to “come to Corinth, Flanders!” Jacob accepted and went; to be surprised by Mrs. Williams' direct manner and dress: she wore breeches under her short skirts.
The Williamses had been to Athens, Jacob went all the same. It struck him as both suburban and immortal; continental and rustic. The yellow columns of the Parthenon – all silent composure – could be seen at all hours. More statues, more landmarks, pestered by native guides. At sunset – the sky pink feathered – the ships in the Piraeus fire their guns; women and children troop back to homes. Jacob morose; he seldom thought of Plato or Socrates; but was drawn to the architecture; although more consumed with his love for Sandra Wentworth Williams.
He climbed Pentelicus; he went up the Acropolis; he sat overlooking Marathon thinking about politics; he watched French ladies below opening and shutting their umbrellas – rain or fine weather? Damn these women! They spoil everything, Jacob thought.

Picture credit: Poppy, P R Francis

See Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf. 

Written February 2022.

Jacob Flanders, A Potted History I

Once more drawn into Jacob's net, Virginia's web. Scarborough. Widowed Betty Flanders and fatherless Archer, Jacob, Little John, whom Captain Barfoot visits every Wednesday; his wife Ellen, in her bath-chair, left in the care of Mr. Dickens.
Then Cambridge 1906, Jacob aged nineteen, in King's College Chapel, winking at Timmy Durrant; lunching with George Plumer, Professor of Physics, avoiding his cold grey eyes.
Lights later burning in three rooms: Greek, Science, Philosophy. Behind walls young men reading, smoking, sprawling in chairs – legs hooked over chair-arms – or over tables, writing.
Jacob astride a chair, eating dates and laughing. Jacob at the window, smoking his pipe, as the last stroke of the clock sounds: Good Night.
So to the sea – Jacob and Timmy – where the Scilly Isles, like mountain-tops – are sighted; where Shakespeare, knocked overboard, went under.
The mainland then, smelling of violets. White cottages and smoke. To dinner at the Durrants – the bell had dinned: Cutlets! And afterwards deaf old Mr. Clutterbuck, on the terrace, had recited to Miss Eliot, the names of the constellations; she shifted the telescope: “Andromeda.” Mrs. Durrant, bored by stars, in the drawing room, wound a ball of wool.
And so to London – always a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor. There's Jacob! Getting off an omnibus, pausing before he enters St Paul's; reading his essay aloud to a young man with a Wellington nose; throwing rejection letters into a black wooden box – his name in white paint – and shutting the lid.
Jacob awkward, yet distinguished-looking. Jacob at twenty-two, filling his pipe, sipping his whisky.
Jacob holding frightfully unhappy Florinda upon his knee; her face hid in his waistcoat.
Jacob again with Timmy Durrant talking, then shouting, unintelligible Greek at dawn. Again with Florinda listening to her prattle; walking the streets with her on his arm.
But here again is Mrs. Durrant, thinking she is too severe. And her daughter Clara. Miss Eliot too. A party – the piano in tune. So much to look at, so many people talking: Timothy Durrant to Jacob, then Elsbeth Siddons sings. Clapping. Mr. Clutterbuck there; Mr. Carter plays Bach. A musical evening.
Morning, Jacob slams his door, buys his paper, makes his way to the office: a desk, a telephone...signs letters all day. Another in a pale blue envelope waits at home, lays on the hall table, addressed to Jacob Alan Flanders. From Scarborough, his mother's hand.
But Florinda's visit first. A little creak, a sudden stir. Then Jacob reappears in his dressing gown; Florinda arranges her hair as Jacob opens his letter and reads.
Florinda seen that same night with another man. Jacob stood, under an arc lamp, motionless; its light drenched him from head to toe. Cut to Jacob alone in his room.
Cut to Jacob dining with the Countess of Rocksbier, a rude old lady, tearing at the chicken – with Jacob's permission – with her own hands. Cut to Jacob galloping over the fields of Essex, losing the hunt, finding them at the Inn.
Cut to Jacob arguing with Bonamy – the young man with the Wellington nose – as unreliably reported by Mrs. Papworth: she heard words, all long words – book learnt she thought – in a loud overbearing tone; stamp stamp stamp. Mr. Sanders, no Flanders she meant had broken the coffee pot, smashed it was on the hearthrug.
A calmer scene: Jacob 25, the youngest in the room, handing the wrong plates at tea. Miss Perry, a spinster of 66, clasping the kettle holder to her breast: “Home every afternoon – except Thursdays.”
A curious one: Laurette and Jacob, side by side, in two large green plush chairs. An intelligent girl, a respectable room, a reasonable conversation; Madame saw him out.

Picture credit: Poppy, P R Francis

See Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf. 

Written February 2022.

Memory Lane

Reading the first of Leo Tolstoy's trilogy Childhood has led me once again down my own memory lane.
It started with games: rowing on a summer lawn, with oars, in an inflatable dingy; making with chairs, cushions and blankets, outside or in, tents, even a car, with a circular tea tray as a steering wheel; playing schools on the wooden staircase – one stair a seat, another a desk; building on the school playing fields a plan of a house – rooms, doors, windows – in mown grass and pretending to be grown-ups, like those on Eastenders, with fake cigarettes hanging from lips which gave out talcum powder smoke.
The praying of the Holy Fool Grisha brought to the fore my holiday attendance of Latin Mass, with its repetitious kneel, sit, stand to the united utterance of the congregation; as well as that of my own bedside prayers, kneeling on a sheepskin rug in what used to be my uncle's room in a house near the sea.
And the selfless love of Natalya Savishna made me think of Nan, my mother's mother, the inventor of games, the teacher of imagination.
His sketch Parting the hardest to read for here I relived too all that I felt in such instances: the goodbye hugs, two figures standing on the drive waving, or one with a handkerchief window-framed, the lump pressing 'so hard in my throat' as we pull, then speed away, turn the corner, gone.

Picture credit: A lane near Arles, 1881, Vincent van Gogh.

See Childhood, Boyhood, Youth by Leo Tolstoy (Penguin Classics 2012, translated by Judson Rosengrant). 

Written February 2022

War-loom

From eye to ear, to Heaney, to his translation of Beowulf. To historical similarities, to modern pictures of warfare. To conquest and colony; to behaviour admired is the path to power among people everywhere, until behaviour despised leads to a fall. To politics being played as the Russians massing on the borders (of Ukraine) threaten to attack, and there's no united effort to rally the defence. The watchman sees no-one new approaching; the few British soldiers already there flourished at him on arrival training and equipment, not direct involvement. There is no hero, no Beowulf to take on Putin.
Is the Lord weaving on his war-loom peace and safety for the Ukrainians? (Man failed the Afghans.) But perhaps people do not think Putin has the will, though he has the might, to invade? Dialogue, they say, by which they mean giving in, will take the threat away. They forget Hitler. And Stalin. And Mussolini. They forget all the wars, the fights of old. They don't know their kings and queens, their presidents and prime ministers, their political and revolutionary leaders, their military commanders etcetera. It is all propaganda: truth and lies; fear and diplomacy. Russia claim they are not a threat – so why have they massed force there?; Ukraine say they are not threatened – because if war is declared who will help them fight it? Both state the media is portraying – to its NATO-joined peoples – an exaggerated story.
If the Lord, like the people, has no appetite for war, and worries more about the economy, he may yet weave on his war-loom the price for freedom: Putin will move his borders.
Endure your troubles Ukraine; bear up. Prodded, cornered, beaten; caught in a brutal grip – an iron fist, crushed. Elected rule toppled, the Wolf elated.
A too liberal hand weaves the outcome of non-combat; applies, too easily, the poetry, the spirit of Beowulf to the situation.

Picture credit: Lydia at the tapestry loom, 1881, Mary Cassatt (source: WikiArt).

See Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney.

 Written January 2022.

Fry

Roger Fry refuses to be pigeon-holed as do I. Roger Fry is not a man of the world, just as I am not a woman of it. Roger Fry holds something in reserve, detaches momentarily from conversation; again I see the similarity in myself. The impulse to be more forthcoming is checked; the mind wanders someplace else.
But Roger Fry, unlike myself, has a reputation – as lecturer, as art critic – to live up to. His Word, sometimes dictatorial, often ridiculed, was read, was listened to, and whilst it divided rather than united opinion in 1910 it was firm in the conviction that Post-Impressionism was, would be, a thing. And so it proved, for attitudes shifted, though the growth was perhaps more gradual than Roger Fry anticipated. The pictures stayed the same, the public changed, although too late for some of the artists concerned. But still, the appreciation we now feel runs deep.
Roger Fry was indeed the Father of British modern painting.

Picture credit: Roger Fry, self-portrait, 1928 (source: WikiArt)

See Roger Fry by Virginia Woolf. For a more contemporary, up-to-date perspective read Frances Spalding. 

Written January 2022.

Wildest Regions

When I found Goethe I didn't know there was a Humboldt – his mention in Elective Affinities escaped me – so I paired G with Attenborough, had the two meet and converse in my head on nature; and now I realise, some time later, Goethe found a like-minded soul in Humboldt. The age difference no obstacle, one sparked the other, whether together or apart. They regularly corresponded and Humboldt sent Goethe his publications, plunging both into the wildest regions.

*

And now I too have plunged into them – these wildest regions – and crossed, like Humboldt, all disciplines and barriers. I have caught Richard Holmes' bug: fallen completely for certain periods of time and all its notable characters, of which there are many. My reading net cast ever wider, to read of men – and it usually is men – who shaped minds, and whose minds were shaped by other men's minds.
Alexander von Humboldt shaped many: fellow science enthusiasts, thinkers, writers, poets, artists, musicians, politicians, leaders of countries and revolutionary parties. He gathered to himself people – the established, the up-and-coming – determining or helping them advance their careers. For, throughout his life, Humboldt preferred to collaborate rather than protect his own line of thought or work. (Professional science, I think, has lost some of this generous, collaborative approach; each science staying within its distinct discipline, and stalling, therefore, its own progress.) And yet he fails to enter into our head or vocabulary as Darwin does. We learn of him through Darwin, through Lyell, through Emerson, through Thoreau, through Poe, through Goethe, through Jefferson, through Bolívar, when Humboldt's hugely influential figure should instead lead us to these men.
One great mind, it seems, is replaced by another succeeding it, perhaps by its protégé, until in a more distant day it is revived.

Picture credit: Schiller, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt with Goethe in Jena (source: Wikipedia).

Adapted from journal, January 2022.

See The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf.