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.