Now playing

Listening to the recording of Bach's Musical Offering by a wonderful group of musicians under the direction of Jordi Savall. This is a collection of fugues and canons on the "Royal Theme" given to Bach by Frederick the Great.

According to James Gaines in Evening in the Palace of Reason, Frederick had deliberately chosen this theme (perhaps written for this purpose by Bach's own son, Carl Philip Emmanuel), totally unsuited to counterpoint, to set Bach up for mockery, and Bach's sacrificial offering is a defence of his, by now old-fashioned, style of music: a passionate and sarcastic response that he knew would not interest Frederick.

If this is so then it is remarkable that such wonderful music should have come from such an unpropitious origin. What a genius Bach was!

The birthday of art

Kandinsky at Tate modern. Wonderfully enjoyable. I particularly loved the first room with his early work. But somehow I never feel drawn to the later Kandinsky as I do to, say, Marc or Macke or especially Klee. These are artists with whom I feel I have some sort of personal affinity, whereas I find Kandinsky can be slightly intimidating. Anyway, a wonderful show. The picture illustrated here is gorgeous.

Then on the same floor an exhibition / installation Celebration Park by Pierre Huyghe.
- A room of suggestions solicited from fellow artists for new days to celebrate. For example: January 17, The birthday of art (Robert Filliou); March 12, If there were only one day, it would definitely not be this one (Francois Roche); October 18, I propose that we should celebrate the sense of anticipation (Jeremy Millar).
- An absorbing film of a voyage to the Antarctic, with music based on the structure of the landscape.
- And a huge room in which two outsize white doors pirouette around the space, sometimes closing and sometimes opening up, but ultimately trapping me and forcing me back out of the exhibition into the foyer as they close off the entrance to the room: I see myself reflected in the brass door-handle as I retreat.

Proposed extension for Tate Modern

And that was once grass on which I scored a spectacular goal in the Bankside Festival soccer tournament! (Well, perhaps mud rather than grass: the rain was torrential, but it was a nice goal: a penalty sent to the keeper's left: he got his hand to it but couldn't keep it out.)
© Herzog & de Meuron / Hayes Davidson

Outside a Vietnamese restaurant

A childhood favourite

As I lie awake in this London heat, I find myself remembering as a child lying awake in my grandparents' house, and the books I used to read in bed here. There was a picture book with a poem which I recall disliking - the strange names and sinister figures, as I saw them, in the illustration, and I was too young to understand the poem. Years later I rediscovered the poem and found it anything but frightening. What a nice man Leigh Hunt seems to have been.

Abou Ben Adhem

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?" The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men."

The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!

James Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

Still Falls the Rain

Heavy showers refreshed us as we walked through London yesterday on another march for peace.

Still Falls the Rain
(The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn.)

Still falls the Rain -
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss -
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet
On the Tomb:

Still falls the Rain

In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us -
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain -
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,---those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear -
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh... the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain -
Then - O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune -
See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree

Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world, - dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown.

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain -
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."

Edith Sitwell

Treading the oaths of peace

By cool Siloam's shady rill
how fair the lily grows!
How sweet the breath, beneath the hill,
of Sharon's dewy rose!

As a child, I remember this hymn in our Sunday church services, with a particularly lovely tune (Belmont, by William Gardiner (1812)) and words (by Reginald Heber) referring to unfamiliar placenames.

Lo! such the child whose early feet
the oaths of peace have trod,
whose secret heart, with influence sweet,
is upward drawn to God.

Well, this is how it appears on the first website where I found the words. Of course "oaths of peace" is a typo for "paths of peace".

I was thinking of this hymn this afternoon as I was one of a few tens of thousands (?) marching through London, protesting against the attacks on civilians in the Middle East and against the British and US governments' refusal to back calls for a ceasefire. And thinking of all the now too-familiar placenames in Lebanon and Israel which appear daily in my newspaper and which featured in the chants of the crowd.

This hymn disappeared from the Church of Scotland's hymnal when it was revised during my childhood. I don't know why - perhaps just because "Siloam" was too obscure for modern congregations. I wish it were possible that the names of these villages in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, where almost 400, mostly civilians, have died this week, might soon have vanished from our headlines.

By cool Siloam's shady rill
the lily must decay;
the rose that blooms beneath the hill
must shortly fade away.

The First Men on Mercury

This is a favourite of mine by Edwin Morgan, who was one of the poets at the first poetry reading I ever attended. (The others were George Bruce, Robert Garioch and Pete Morgan: it was quite an evening!)

The First Men on Mercury

-We come in peace from the third planet.
Would you take us to your leader?

-Bawr stretter! Bawr. Bawr. Stretterhawl?

-This is a little plastic model
of the solar system, with working parts.
You are here and we are there and we
are now here with you, is this clear?

-Gawl horrop. Bawr Abawrhannahanna!

-Where we come from is blue and white
with brown, you see we call the brown
here ‘land’, the blue is ‘sea’, and the white
is ‘clouds’ over land and sea, we live
on the surface of the brown land,
all round is sea and clouds. We are ‘men’.
Men come –

-Glawp men! Gawrbenner menko. Menhawl?

-Men come in peace from the third planet
which we call ‘earth’. We are earthmen.
Take us earthmen to your leader.

-Thmen? Thmen? Bawr. Bawrhossop.
Yuleeda tan hanna. Harrabost yuleeda.

-I am the yuleeda. You see my hands,
we carry no benner, we come in peace.
The spaceways are all stretterhawn.

-Glawn peacemen all horrabhanna tantko!
Tan come at’mstrossop. Glawp yuleeda!

-Atoms are peacegawl in our harraban.
Menbat worrabost from tan hannahanna.

-You men we know bawrhossoptant. Bawr.
We know yuleeda. Go strawg backspetter quick.

-We cantantabawr, tantingko backspetter now!

-Banghapper now! Yes, third planet back.
Yuleeda will go back blue, white, brown
nowhanna! There is no more talk.

-Gawl han fasthapper?

-No. You must go back to your planet.
Go back in peace, take what you have gained
but quickly.

-Stretterworra gawl, gawl…

-Of course, but nothing is ever the same,
now is it? You’ll remember Mercury.

How a tiny insect can upset the best-laid plans

Well, tonight my friend A came around to hang a painting I bought at her recent Open Studio.

But a couple of days ago she was bitten on the foot by an insect, it swelled up and for some complicated reason this meant she couldn't bring the essential item for hanging the painting. (I leave these things to the professionals, so I'm not quite sure of the details.)

So we spent the evening drinking wine and listening to the wonderful Philippe Jaroussky on CD. (What a sensational voice! And, judging by the concert at which I heard him live, a personality to steal any show. A star of the future, for sure.)

So no new painting to show off yet. Hopefully, in a few days time, there will be something to report. But at least she said all the right things about my re-upholstered chairs - a great success!

Coming tomorrow

Well, my last acquisition [see entry "A new arrival", 8 June 2006]has not been very popular with visitors either to my flat or to my blog. Let's hope that tomorrow's new arrival fares better!

Flowering again

This poor begonia, despite being insufficiently loved, persists in producing flowers.

Leafy Lewisham

Monstrous Moonshine and understanding the universe

At a time when world events are yet again showing the human race at its worst, I have been reading about one of our great achievements, the Classification of the Finite Simple Groups. The 26 sporadic simple groups are beautiful abstract structures: the largest, the Monster, has 808, 017, 424, 794, 512, 875, 886, 459, 904, 961, 710, 757, 005, 754, 368, 000, 000, 000 elements. (This number is so enormous that I have had to insert spaces after every three digits to avoid it destroying the presentation of this web page.) I find it wonderful that human beings can have any comprehension of such things.

The Monster arose from the most abstract speculation. But it gave rise to the most mysterious discovery in modern mathematics. John McKay noticed that the number 196,884 arose in a series connected with the j-function in a completely different branch of pure mathematics, while the dimension of the smallest irreducible representation of the Monster is 196,883.

(This is John McKay's signature in my Visitors Book.)

This and other numerical coincidences suggest that there are deep, and still not understood, connections between apperently different areas of mathematics. And recent work in superstring theory suggests that the Monster is intimately connected to the deepest secrets of the universe. It may be that without the unlikely existence of the Monster matter as we know it could not exist: the 26 dimensions of string theory arise from the group theory.

It may all be Moonshine, or it may be that we are on the verge of a new understanding of the universe. In either case, the human ability to investigate such deep structures contrasts horribly with our inability to live at peace with each other.

They're back!!

My re-upholstered chairs are back! At last my visitors have somewhere to sit.

A process which I had postponed for fifteen years because I could not face the choice of material and dreaded the upheaval necessary to get the furniture out of my flat turned out to be reasonably painless, thanks to the friendlines and good humour of everyone involved. Many thanks to all who helped: Hilda for choosing the fabric and, by email, the gimp*; Alison for encouragement; Sharon for measuring; those who so cheerfully and effortlessly handled the terrifying job of taking heavy and unwieldy furniture through an upstairs window with only a tiny ladder; and Jackie of Lewisham Council Pest Control department (don't ask).

*A few weeks ago I would have had no idea what this word meant.

A literary influence - "designed by Germano Facetti"

A few weeks ago I read of the death of Germano Facetti. It was a name that had once been very familiar to me. He designed Penguin Books when I was young: I remember when I first started reading seriously I was instantly attracted to Penguin Modern Classics. When I browsed in bookshops it was these that I immediately sought out: Facetti's use of paintings on the cover not only coloured by reading of the books but also surreptitiously introduced me to art. I don't know if he designed all the covers above - when I read the obituary I thought I remembered the name from so many book covers but not all of these credit the designer. Nevertheless it was the visual identity that Facetti created for these books which guided my book buying and my reading in my most impressionable years.

A night-time puzzle

Visiting Oxford - woke up during the hot night in my college room to be puzzled by the sight below (as seen looking up from the bed with the wall immediately on the right):

Question: The picture was hanging straight when I went to bed (and I hadn't disturbed it). What has happened?
It took me several minutes to work it out - for the solution see the COMMENTS link below.

A life-saver

Not very long separated these two pictures. London has no right to be so hot.

Now playing - Aquí podemos comenzar!

Perhaps
Because you're used to dealing in grey
You'll be blinded by the sun for a while -
But that will pass, and
Afterwards, you'll see all the colour.
My love, let's stay here!
My love, look, look into the heart of the flower
And understand the truth (heart's truth, they call it)
Abandon the past, leave it cowering in the mud
Because this, this is where we begin!

(From Quedémonos aquí: lyrics Homero Expósito translated by Ann McFall, music Héctor Stamponi)

Zelig

At a talk about computer art I meet a computer scientist. We introduce ourselves: he knows of my doctoral work in pure mathematics many years ago. I've never before met anyone, even amonst mathematicians, who's heard of my work, so this is rather a shock.

As it happens earlier this week I came across my doctoral thesis, which I hadn't opened for twenty years. I was out of my depth, but I don't think that can be seen from the thesis. I can blend into whatever company I find myself. Amongst mathematicians, even if I'm not a creative mathematician, I can pass myself off as one. Amongst artists, I can talk intelligently about art; at a concert recently I found myself discussing coherently a new piece of music with a distinguished pianist when I really didn't understand it at all.

This chameleon-like ability to fit in is useful but obscures my identity. What is the real me? I'm not a mathematician or an artist or a musician. I feel that I'm a collection of mirrors which reflect back the interests of my friends and the people around me: I don't know how to find the essential me behind the mirrors. If indeed there is anything there at all.