The way things are

There is a lot of optimism, not all of which I share. Ian Dunbar, 61, a physicist, said: “Actually, I think humanism is on the verge of a breakthrough. It only feels as though it’s under threat because faiths are hurting and lashing out.”

Ultimately though, I saw it much more as a call to arms than a reason to be cheerful. There has never been a more important time, if you are secular, to say so. Call to arms I mean metaphorically, by the way. Nobody take up any arms, ok?

Zoe Williams, The Guardian, Saturday 9 August 2014

John Hagee

I have never read Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian, the title of which was of its time, and – if written today – would probably be something like The Delusion of the Supernatural. I confess to sometimes finding the whole topic extremely tedious, but when I hear talk – and see murderous approaches to – the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate, or listen to the ‘hellfire’ rhetoric of American televangelists, how can I let the matter rest? It is said that religion is good for good people. I understand that, and of course such people do indeed lead good lives. They are, I imagine, content with their beliefs, and do not proselytise. However, I think it true to say that the majority of ‘true believers’ are not at all content to keep their beliefs to themselves. And let’s be honest, we know this to be true: existential doubt drives people to attempt to convert the whole world to their beliefs, because they find they cannot bear to live with uncertainty (and Keats’ ‘negative capability would be incomprehensible to them – total anathema, if the truth be told).

Well, we all dwell under the cloud of unknowing, and our existence is a riddle and an enigma. In over two thousand years of conceptual thinking we still have no answers to the major ontological questions, and I doubt that we ever will. We live in a postmodern world from which there is no going back. ‘Truth’, with a capital ‘T’ has, it would seem been fatally undermined; reduced to a will–o–the–wisp; abrogated; made redundant; and relegated to the dusty shelf entitled ‘Illegitimate Questions’ – in the spirit and letter of Wittgenstein’s approach to such matters. This is a hard lesson, but those who cannot accept it must still live in the Universal State of Doubt. 

Shall we still clutch and cling? It is too late: the religions of the world have all gone under the sea.    “It is impossible to love life, Freud intimates, without loving transience”, writes Adam Phillips. Exactly so. Yet still we hanker after that which has irretrievably gone, and so spoil and darken our days. Is it not better to let go? We live for moments. And that, I think, is the healthiest and best way. Out out with the dreary suburbs of convention and certainty!

Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.   

Emerson   

Endnote:  I have quoted the following passage before, but for those who think that some great impoverishment must follow from the excision of religion from life – that its poetry will evaporate, and leave us bereft of mystery – this quite startling piece of writing should change their minds:

Culture…does not take up any dogmatic attitude with regard to the existence, or non–existence, of God or of the gods. It recognizes irrational hopes and fears. It takes account of many rumours caught on passing winds, of many voices heard in solitary places, of many reef–bells over strange waters. It allows for queer second–thoughts and for startling, mysterious intimations that escape all logical capture. 

John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture  

                          

Selling out

A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is an age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere. Kierkegaard, The Present Age (1846)

I could say that I do not know why I am always deeply disappointed when a well–known or famous actor gives a voice–over to a television advertisement. But I do know why: it represents – to me at least – a cheapening and selling out (of art and talent) that I simply cannot stomach. And I am not only thinking of actors. There is a certain poet, of a certain age, who lends a distinctive voice to the advertising of a certain supermarket. Can you imagine Keats doing this, or Thomas Hardy, or Wilfred Owen? No, I didn’t think you could.

What though of two of our finest Shakespearean actors – one of whom is also a fine Becketian actor – following the same path. Such lack of integrity I find almost stupefying. And just how much money do these people need? A false sense of values seems to have come home to roost.

“You’d do just the same.” Oh no I wouldn’t!

Gaza & Israel: another war to end all wars?

Note: I have rewritten this piece, given that it originally contained references to the Holocaust and the Shoah which were both inaccurate and insensitive 

Gaza: pity the children

All my life as a thinking adult – immature at first, leading now to some semblance of maturity – I have hoped for peace in the Middle East. Ah, blind fool and ingénue that I have been! I might as well have been eyeless in Gaza, limbless in Aleppo, headless in Mosul . . . “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.” Well, the stones of Syria grind exceeding fast. As for Gaza, is it has just suffered a second pulverization. When Israel is angry it destroys the infrastructure of its enemies – in Lebanon as in Gaza; and the heart of Netanyahu is set in stone. This intransigent man was always a danger, and it was a black day for Israel and its neighbours when he came to power.  

I do not condone any acts of terrorism by any group. It is true that Hamas deliberately provokes, yet ninety–nine per cent of its pathetic rockets are dealt with by the Iron Dome; and fighters emerging from the Hamas tunnels are killed with almost unerring accuracy. And then one Israeli soldier is presumed captured, and Israel goes practically insane with a retaliation that further traumatises countless Gazan civilians (hammering hatred into the young: cutting off the heads of the fabled but deadly Hydra). It is all too much – truth to tell it already was in the last two wars in the Lebanon and Gaza (and Lebanon was crushed over the heads of the legitimate enemy, Hezbollah). The world has lost patience; I have lost patience. The illegal settlements are spread – as I cannot help but see it – as a deliberate strategy: to make any Palestinian state worth little more than an olive tree whose crop is too poor for the market. Yes, the suicide bus bombings – which reached their peak in 2002 – made me sick to the stomach (as did the IRA bombings of the 1970s). All of these acts were evil (those historically of Irgun included). Well, here is something: all of these actions were vitiated by the belief that it is acceptable to kill innocent people for some greater purpose. But then, as we know, people do not care much for one another – some people, that is. “And what about the bombing of Hamburg?” I hear you ask. Well, there was a holocaust: and we have a statue of “Bomber Harris” – how truly wonderful that is. Melt it down, I would be inclined to say (but please do not turn it into ploughshares, because they would forever have about them a charred corpse–like quality: that deep bitterness instilled daily into the souls of so many by the utter futility of war; and of visits to the charnel house so frequent that hope runs dry in the sands of despair). Still, the manufacture of weapons is good for business, is it not? And, as the honourable Baroness Varsi says, having supplied the killing machines – ‘defence weapons’, that is – we then send out doctors and medical supplies to attempt to treat those who have been injured by the very weapons that we – and the usa – have supplied.  Vested interests rule the day, and

. . . the grim wolf with privy paw 
Daily devours apace, and nothing said; 

Anti–Semitism still runs deep under the surface in Europe – as elsewhere – and at the moment this gross tumour of the mind is finding plenty of fuel to keep it bright and burning. The world, it seems, is abandoned to the actions of human beings – and the omens are not good. 

As for a moral compass, every time we forget Kant’s Groundwork to a Metaphysics of Morals we will go astray. Almost everything we need to know is in that book (even though we should not go as far as telling the truth to the famous ‘axe–murderer’).

Home life in the post–war years: I

I have written about my childhood before. Perhaps too much. I don’t know. But I think at least that there is more I can say about our living conditions. To situate this in time and place,  I am writing (talking?) about the late 1940s and early 1950s in St Leonards–on–Sea, in East Sussex – in Pevensey Road, to be precise. We lived in the basement flat of a four–storey semi–detached house, built, I would imagine, between the wars (I and II, for as long as that will make sense to people). And I further imagine that we were living in what had been the servants’ quarters. And yet, can that have been true? It seems questionable, because each floor was a self–contained flat, with a very public and utilitarian staircase running up the centre. But perhaps each of the flats was served by the same servants. Certainly the coal was delivered – by horse–drawn lorries – to our capacious cellar; and so was presumably carried up to the other flats (we bought it by the sack load, and the work must have been as back–breaking for the men as the old metal dustbins). However, we did not supply the other flats, and I presume that they used electric fires (with one, two, three, or four bars).

Mum, dad, and me in front of the steps
leading to the entrance hall

Our flat was surrounded by an ‘area’ which took the form of what might be described as a trench, with concrete walls and base – about four feet deep and three feet wide. So that when you looked out of the sitting room windows at the back, your eyes were not far short of being on a level with the lawn. Quite why the house was built like this I do not know, but it had one great disadvantage: we were flooded beneath the floorboards after heavy rainfall – which in turn forced slugs to take refuge through the cracks. . .   

We had only one bedroom, and when I was too old for my cot, I had a bed in a corner of the sitting room – which also served as our dining room. Neither I nor anyone else thought there was anything strange in this arrangement: we did what we could in the space that was available.

Our kitchen was not very inviting. As I remember, it had pale green distempered walls and brown floor lino (I do not think any other colour was available at the time). Probably we had a larder, but I cannot remember. We did not have a fridge, and so shopped most days of the week. The pipes were of course lead, and seemed to favour the kitchen as a place to burst in the winter. We had a gas cooker, and my mother quite often used a pressure cooker, until one day it blew up and splattered its contents onto the ceiling.

Clothes airer: on pulleys, so
that  it could be raised
to the ceiling

Our bathroom was even less inviting than the kitchen. There were no niceties: just a gas boiler (geyser), a galvanised tub, a mangle, and a clothes airer. Washing machines and tumble driers were unknown to us; so my mother had to use the galvanised tub (which also served as our bath), and washing tongs to ‘agitate’ the dirt out of the laundry, by a kind of gentle pummelling – up and down in the water. Then: through the mangle, and onto the clothes airer; this was then hoisted up to the ceiling.

Our toilet was one of the old fashioned chain–pull types, and quite efficient given that the tank was very high up, so giving    a full flush. I used to give the chain three gentle pulls before the full pull – one of those odd, slightly superstitious things that kids tend to do.

One, quite small, room was given over to my father’s workshop (metalwork), in which there was a lathe, a drilling machine, and a grinder (as illustrated in the photo). Before that, he had rented a workshop in Hastings. He was a very fine engineer, and could make components that were accurate to within a tenth of a thousandth of an inch. (A book he wrote about screw cutting in the lathe has never been out of print since he wrote it thirty years ago, and an invention of his – the swing–clear boring tool holder – is still on the market today.) He also made a model cable car, which travelled from skirting board to ceiling in our sitting room. Such was the nature of our home!

I was happy in this home, but happier still when we bought a semi–detached house in 1958: for £1,750. It was not until a few years later that my father earned the then magic figure of £1,000 per annum.     

My mother and me, pre–St Leonards’ days.
Place unknown

   

“Whereof one cannot speak . . .”

We have long had a seemingly intractable problem in our attempts to find a word which will effectively and unambiguously describe – or signify – those experiences which used to be called ‘transcendental’, and which never anyway belonged to the realm of science. How can we give voice to these things without appearing either ridiculous or completely misunderstood – that is to say, either ‘woolly’ or in hoc to some absurd (and doubtless pernicious) sect? Jonathan Bishop, in his Emerson on the Soul (Harvard, 1964) eloquently describes the problem:  

How can we understand what Emerson meant when he so variously argued over a lifetime that the only thing of value was the active soul? One had best start with the word “soul” itself. Any sentence worked out to concentrate in little the whole of Emerson’s doctrine about human possibilities would need the word for a grammatical subject. But its contemporary connotations are all wrong—religiosity, gentility, hypocrisy—“soul” has a whole set of unhappy associations. Yet in the midst of prejudice a second thought can remind us that we have lost something by the modern degradation of this word. There is nothing that will really replace its useful chord of meanings. [My emphasis]

That last sentence is, I think, rather wonderful. I agree that it’s impossible to use the word ‘soul’ publically – without being misunderstood – but I see no problem in using it privately. But it is – to use Terry Pratchet’s words – something of an ‘embuggeration’ that we cannot use it in conversation. Another possibility occurs to me: we could talk about our ‘being’ – that is, everything about us that is subjective, quirky, ‘dis–integrated’, messy, unique, unresolved, irrepressible, and – in a word – represents the finally unclassifiable us. Yet, the concept of ‘being’ essentially belongs to Existentialism, and although it is a useful technical term within that philosophical movement, it hardly has general currency today. Moreover, it sounds pretentious, and can hardly be considered a serious candidate in any attempt to replace ‘soul’.   

The same problem attaches to ‘mysticism’. If anything, New Age mumbo jumbo has pretty well put paid to this word or concept. However, it has to me a perfectly respectable place in both language and experience. There are times when we have experiences which are so overwhelming that language ‘breaks down’. I would describe it like this: our consciousness is flooded with some experience so immediate that we are – so to express it – given a meaning that we could never put into words or describe to another person. Perhaps Wordsworth came closest to describing this in the famous lines from ‘Tintern Abbey:

Turner, Tintern Abbey, West Front. c 1794

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. 

This could of course be described as a ‘spiritual’ experience. But in a primarily secular (occidental) world that too seems somehow weak – almost, lame – and does not do justice to the depth of Wordsworth’s emotion. Equally, revelation will not do. Because there is nothing biblical in Wordsworth’s lines: we are not given ‘a truth from on high’, but a report in poetry of the immediacy of the emotions  that went through Wordsworth’s mind in the particular ‘earthbound’ situation in which he found himself. In other words, they are not the thoughts of a monk living in a silent order.

Arthur Koestler, in his second autobiographical work, The Invisible Writing, refers – as he does in his suicide note – to what he describes as the “oceanic feeling”:  

The “I” ceases to exist because it has, by a kind of mental osmosis, established communication with, and been dissolved in, the universal pool. It is the process of dissolution and limitless expansion which is sensed as the “oceanic feeling,” as the draining of all tension, the absolute catharsis, the peace that passeth all understanding.

This book was published in 1953, and for many years the “oceanic feeling” was in vogue among the ‘thinking classes’, and seriously considered as a contemporary equivalent to replace what would have previously been described as a mystical experience. But it didn’t stick, and – like Malcolm Muggeridge and London smog – can only be found on the dusty shelves of the minds of people of a certain age.

It is impossible now, I think, to revive either ‘soul’ or ‘mystical’. Still, I shall keep these terms to myself, given that, indeed “there is nothing that will really replace [their] useful chord of meanings.” And these things are anyway, ineffable . . .

Thomas Gainsborough, Tintern Abbey, 1782

   

Painting the Moon

I wrote this piece some time ago, but for some reason never got around to posting it. I've made a few statements in the first two paragraphs which I believe to be true, but which are not based on scholarship. If any reader has more knowledge of the subject I would be pleased to hear about it. I'm not concerned about 'being right'! 
_____________________________________________________________

Turner, Moonlight, a Study at Millbank, 1797

Before Turner (1775–1851) the moon is — to all intents and purposes — absent from western painting (and somehow, even the 17^th century Dutch landscape painters seem never to have ‘seen’ this conspicuous lunar phenomenon). Why Turner should have been first in the field was, I think, almost undoubtedly due to his indefatigable study of all aspects of the natural world. He looked, as no one before him, at the sky, the sea, trees, plants, and the geological structure of landscapes. 

It was therefore inconceivable that the moon should escape his notice; and by the time of his death he had included it in more paintings than any artist before or since. Moreover, when Turner’s paints the moon it is always fully integral to his compositions. It is never simply an adjunct to his compositions which might have been placed almost anywhere in the sky. This is clearly demonstrated in Moonlight, a Study at Millbank, 1797. The Moon is perfectly placed between the furled sail on the left and the full sail on the right; and the evening star, tiny as it is, is just sufficient to ‘leaven’ the brightness of the moon.

 Ford Maddox Brown, Carrying Corn, 1854–5

                                                         

It seems inconceivable that subsequent and contemporary painters were not influenced by Turner, and one of the finest of these was Ford Maddox Brown. This can be seen in his masterly painting, Carrying Corn, 1854–5, Oil on panel, 7 ¾ x 11. The moon in this painting is comparatively pallid: what used to be called a ‘day moon’. Nevertheless it is essential to the composition: it has a dynamic relationship to the two rounded trees on the left (which seem almost to be playing shuttlecock with this far–distant ball of rock). It even relates    to the broad curve between the turnip field and the hay field, as if it were exerting a gentle ‘pull’ on this calm ‘tide’ of green and yellow. ‘All great art is subtle’, Ruskin wrote, and Carrying Corn is a paradigm example of why this should be so. 

Before turning to a painting in which the moon forms an essential part — in a way that would have been beyond the sensibility and imagination of Turner —  it is worth considering John Linnell’s Harvest Moon,

John Linnell, Harvest Moon, 1858

1858. As with Ford Maddox Brown’s Carrying Corn, Linnell has been very careful to balance his composition, and equally the moon cannot be removed without rendering the painting dull — for all the brightness of its colours. Five things are notable: the top of the tree forms a fine subtle crescent, tilted towards the moon; the three sheep in the field are like stars, and make a subtle connection between the moon and the main group of figures; the seated woman placed almost immediately beneath the moon, directs her attention towards the approaching figures, and so helps to maintain the ‘circularity’ of the composition; and finally — as with Ford’s Carrying Corn — the moon is so placed above the hay–field that it is as if as if it were exerting a pull on it.

My last example is Paul Nash’s Pillar and Moon, 1940. Paul Nash was the only British painter who truly

Paul Nash, Pillar and Moon, 1940

took his place among the European surrealists — Dali, Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Andre Breton, Giorgio Chirico, Jean Arp, et al — and was described by Andre Breton as, ‘The master of the image’. Pillar and Moon is not exactly surreal, yet the relationship between the earth–bound globe (‘balloon’) and its celestial counterpart of orbiting rock has a poetic ‘correspondence’ never before essayed in painting — specifically in terms of the moon that is, not as a generality about correspondences in art. Roger Cardinal describes Nash’s objective as precisely as is possible:

[For Nash] it is the sensation, the feeling of the right association which matters. The matching of objects in a telling metaphor can never be mechanically measured ... Rather, it needs to be grasped intuitively. One cannot defend Nash’s correlations any more than those of Magritte, other than by saying that they do achieve an incisive and persuasive impact, a sense of ‘rightness’.

The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash. Reaktion Books, 1989

 Photograph by Paul Nash, used as basis of Pillar and Moon

Smoking on buses / The pull of sea & land / The displacement of desire

1

I cannot now remember when smoking was banned on buses in England, but I do remember (as you may if, as the phrase goes, you are ‘of a certain age’) that in the 1940s and ’50s smoking was allowed on double–deckers (upstairs only). And – on Maidstone and District buses, at least – there was an additional sign at the front of the top deck: Expectoration prohibited. Such ponderous, near–euphemistic wording! Clearly, the members of the bus company board simply could not bring themselves to use the plain and common word, ‘spitting’ – presumably on the grounds that this would cause offence to passengers of a more delicate sensibility. Yet those most likely to spit had doubtless never come across this (strictly medical) term. Anyway everyone seemed to know what it meant, and perhaps in a certain sense it became as much ‘sign language’ as a word. Certainly I do not remember any conspicuous hawking among the ubiquitous cloth–capped smokers. Hawking has several meanings, and in the Urban Dictionary refers to the practice of girls or women who stare hard and persistently at a guy in the hope that they will ‘hook up’ with him (or ‘hook him’, perhaps!).

Hobby Horse

Trade–off

in the school yard –
soccer cigarette cards
equals five stones plus my sixer
conker.

Brian Strand

The subject of cigarette cards – which came ‘sight unseen’ with the packet bought – were many and varied. Probably footballers were the most popular, but others included aeroplanes, butterflies, flags, jockeys, kings and queens. Adults of course bought the cigarettes, but it tended to be children who collected them. The first were produced in 1875, and continued to be produced during the first three decades of the twentieth century, but post ww2 the practice dwindled. I remember finding some in my aunt’s house. They held a certain fascination for me, but that was all. However, thousands are extant in collections. They can still be collected via dealers, but it is now adults who collect them.  

2

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

From Relic, Ted Hughes

Rock–o–Nore, Hastings Old Town

I’ve quoted these lines before, and I love this poem for its excoriating truth (even though the beach–loving child in me may be cut to the bone). Neither the calm nor the rough surface of the sea gives any hint of the predators that inhabit its depths (and its shallows). It is fortunate that our aesthetic and imaginative responses to seascapes (and landscapes) are not vitiated by these realities. And so strong is our attachment to certain land– and seascapes that we ought to better understand the plight of refugees. Even those who are eternally grateful for their freedom – from the fear, tyranny, and downright brutality of vicious regimes – will nevertheless very likely feel a deep and heartbreaking dissociation from the land that bore them. Family and place – oftentimes far from fortuitous – never leave us. That at least is my experience; and I guess that it is yours too.    

Once we had a country and we thought it fair, 
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there: 
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now. 

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew, 
Every spring it blossoms anew: 
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that. 

From Refugee Blues, W. H. Auden

3

There are times when we do not have to work hard to understand either a poem or a painting. Below are examples from Shakespeare and Nicolas Lancret, both of which are – in a sense – perfectly interchangeable. Few are likely to misunderstand either . . .

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! 
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back. 
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind 
For which thou whip'st her.

King Lear (IV, vi 157–60)

Les Lunettes, Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743). Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts

My first thought on looking at this painting was, “Why dedicate so much time to the depiction of a single subject?” After all, it is such that a Rembrandt, a Goya, or a Kollwitz could have drawn in the space of a day – and to equal effect. Yet it is beautifully painted. The whipping nun and the trussed youth both lean to the right – which movement is subtly countered by the gaze and shield–like habits of the group of nuns to the left. All directs our attention to the figure of the youth (whose red breeches provide the most important colour highlight).