Great Beards No 1 (O my Hornby and my Barlow)

I'm told students are now referring to me as "Beardie", which is very gratifying. To mark this honour, I thought I would begin a series of reflections on beards in my life.

No 1 - John Taylor, 1971 (and sadly I can't find a picture)

As schoolboys, my friends and I got cheap tickets for international rugby matches at Murrayfield. Scotland weren't doing very well, and in fact I had never seen them win (well, I'd only been watching for two years) at the time of the match against the mighty Welsh in 1971. It was a wonderful match: the lead changed hands many times, and Scotland were leading 18-14 in the last minute. But Gerald Davies scored a fine try near the corner (18-17), and the bearded flanker John Taylor had the opportunity to convert the try. He did so - a splendid kick, Wales won 19-18 and we went home disappointed. In retrospect, what a wonderful Welsh side it was - with J.P.R. Williams, Gareth Edwards, Mervyn Davies and my hero the great Barry John. What a privilege to see that match!

John Taylor risked his career shortly afterwards, if my memory is correct, by refusing selection for the British Lions tour to South Africa for political reasons. I was just beginning to take an interest in politics at the time and I admired him for that.

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro:
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !

(Francis Thompson)

The Ern Malley Story

If you don't know this story, please read the poem below before reading this, as knowing the story may change the way you read the poem.

In 1944 the Australian literary magazine Angry Penguins published some poems by Ern Malley, a young insurance salesman who had died of Graves' disease the previous year. They had been sent to the editor, Max Harris, by Malley's sister, who had found them after his death. Angry Penguins was a Modernist journal which published poems and images by artists such as Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. I first heard of Malley through an exhibition about Angry Penguins at the Hayward Gallery in the 1980s.

Harris was convicted of obscenity over the publication of the poems, after what sounds like a farcical trial. A detective found the word "incestuous" indecent, though he didn't know what the word meant. And a poem which referred to shining a torch anda park at night had to be immoral: "people who go into parks at night go there for immoral purposes".

Malley's remarkable poems were in fact a hoax by two conservative Australian writers, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, who were setting out to discredit Harris and his magazine. They intended the work to be utterly devoid of literary merit, as a demonstration of the pretentiousness nonsense that they considered Modernist verse to be.

The whole affair was rather sad: everybody involved seems to have suffered. But the curious fact is that the poems Stewart and McAuley wrote, intending them to be worthless, are (it seems to me) rather good, probably much better than anything else either of them ever wrote.

So is it possible to write a masterpiece by mistake? That something the author set out to make worthless, can have value as literature? Or did the authors, despite their outward hatred of Modernism, have some subconscious impulse that drove them, against their conscious wishes, to produce these poems?

[I first read of Malley in The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward, and checked the details tonight at "Ern Malley: The Official Website"]

The Ern Malley Story

If you don't know this story, please read the poem below before reading this, as knowing the story may change the way you read the poem.

In 1944 the Australian literary magazine Angry Penguins published some poems by Ern Malley, a young insurance salesman who had died of Graves' disease the previous year. They had been sent to the editor, Max Harris, by Malley's sister, who had found them after his death. Angry Penguins was a Modernist journal which published poems and images by artists such as Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. I first heard of Malley through an exhibition about Angry Penguins at the Hayward Gallery in the 1980s.

Harris was convicted of obscenity over the publication of the poems, after what sounds like a farcical trial. A detective found the word "incestuous" indecent, though he didn't know what the word meant. And a poem which referred to shining a torch anda park at night had to be immoral: "people who go into parks at night go there for immoral purposes".

Malley's remarkable poems were in fact a hoax by two conservative Australian writers, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, who were setting out to discredit Harris and his magazine. They intended the work to be utterly devoid of literary merit, as a demonstration of the pretentiousness nonsense that they considered Modernist verse to be.

The whole affair was rather sad: everybody involved seems to have suffered. But the curious fact is that the poems Stewart and McAuley wrote, intending them to be worthless, are (it seems to me) rather good, probably much better than anything else either of them ever wrote.

So is it possible to write a masterpiece by mistake? That something the author set out to make worthless, can have value as literature? Or did the authors, despite their outward hatred of Modernism, have some subconscious impulse that drove them, against their conscious wishes, to produce these poems?

[I first read of Malley in The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward, and checked the details tonight at "Ern Malley: The Official Website"]

A poem by Ern Malley (1918-1943)

(I'll write about the story behind this poem tomorrow.)

Petit Testament

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weeps gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinite. Beyond is anything.

Why do I enjoy parodies so much?

I've always enjoyed parodies like Chard Whitlow below. Why? Isn't parody a purely destructive art form? The comedian mocking the deeply serious artist? The triumph of the frivolous over the important?

Well, sometimes a parody can be vicious. For example, the recent leaked New Labour memo about Tony Blair's possible departure from office:

"As TB enters his final phase he needs to be focusing way beyond the finishing line, not looking at it. He needs to go with the crowds wanting more. He should be the star who won't even play that last encore."

If this were a deliberate parody it would be devastating. The fact that it is apparently a real document just shows how remote from reality our politicians can be.

But most literary parodies show afection for the form, and writer, they parody. Do I like Chard Whitlow because it brings Eliot down to my level? Does it make me feel better to see poems that are too difficult for me treated in this way? Do I feel good because I'm clever enough to "get" the jokes?

There may be an element of all these things, but I like to think that there's some value in parody. A good parody, like Chard Whitlow, sheds light on the original in some way. I feel Reed's poem does bring me closer to Eliot: it's inspired by love.

I think tomorrow I'll post something of Ern Malley's. Now there's a sad story.

CHARD WHITLOW

(Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript)

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again— if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.

There are certain precautions— though none of them very reliable—
Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.
I think you will find this put,
Better than I could ever hope to express it,
In the words of Kharma: "It is, we believe,
Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell."
Oh, listeners,
And you especially who have turned off the wireless,
And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,
(Which is also the silence of hell) pray not for your selves but your souls.
And pray for me also under the draughty stair.
As we get older we do not get any younger.

And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

Henry Reed (1941)

Some thoughts on this, to be posted later.

Many happy returns!

Happy birthday dear H (without whose example and encouragement this blog would not exist, and who, more importantly, introduced me to Dulce de Leche ice-cream). Feliz cumpleanos!

A riddle-sonnet

Dear friend! Serene amidst the stream of words
You swim, and, blind yourself, help others see;
Transform the babbling brook and chirps of birds,
And sing the doves’ delightful song to me.
Not all you say makes sense, and now and then
You err: a Sonnet from the Portuguese
Which hides in Spanish is beyond your ken
But only you can help me cross high seas
And barriers of foreign tongues. Just so
Cosmographers with strings and superstrings
Can glimpse the secrets of the world’s great flow
In language barely understood: the things
We humans think we know are much the same,
Dear fish, as playing your blind unthinking game.

Click here for the solution to the riddle.

L'Hippocampe

I've just watched this wonderful 1934 film by the Surrealist Jean Painlevé (son of the great mathematician Paul Painlevé, who was twice Prime Minister of France). These amazing creatures, drifting serenely, clasping reeds and each other with their tails: impossible not to anthopomorphise. (And of course it's the male who gives birth, as we see in Painlevé's delightful film.)

Lorna Graves

I bought these from the ceramic sculptor Lorna Graves many years ago. What I loved was the very strong sense of significance they have, that there is much more than the physical presence. The word I have always associated with them is "talismanic", so when Graves died recently I was not surprised to read the following in Judith Palmer's obituary:

"Graves was fiercely secretive about firing her work, finding it an intense, emotional and private process. Her studio assistants always suspected that the pyre of leaves and wood-shavings traditionally burnt in Raku was also being stoked with less conventional combustible materials such as favourite found objects and personal artefacts, which would imbue the sculptures with almost talismanic significance."

A Day in Oxford

Sadly, in meetings all day so no time to buy books or CDs.

What delight!

Delivered by courier this evening! To be enjoyed at breakfast with maple and pecan crunch cereal and Tesco's soft croissants! The anticipation of this brain-fuel will make getting out of bed easier this autumn.

Thank you so much H! And F!

South Bank at night

South Bank Centre from Waterloo Bridge. The Hayward Gallery's current exhibition includes Bridget Riley.

Roman de Fauvel

Remembering John Fauvel (1947-2001)

More Early Music today, starting with Fretwork performing Agricola (although the programme notes talked about Agricola as an instrumental composer, it was the chansons, beautifully sung by Michael Chance, that I liked best). Fretwork also played their share of Fabrice Fitch's Agricologies , which were entertaining and appropriate. Fitch was inspired, curiously enough, by David Smith's sculptures using found farm implements, which Smith called Agricola. This was followed by more beautifully singing, Emma Kirkby and Anthony Rooley performing Dowland to illustrate an interesting talk by Rooley: sadly a broken lute string deprived us of all but the first verse of the last sing.

But the big event of the day was The Clerks' Group, performing music from a manuscript of the early fourteenth century satirical poem, the Roman de Fauvel. This was performed with an excellent modern version written by Ian Duhig. Fauvel is a horse, named acrostically after his vices (Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, Lascheté). Raised by blind Fortune from the stable, he hopes to marry Fortune to ensure his continued good luck, but instead marries her daughter Vainglory. All the courtiers are anxious to curry the powerful Fauvel, hence the English phrase "to curry favour".

Ironically, the disreputable Fauvel shares his name with one of the people I have most admired. John Fauvel was a historian of mathematics who inspired us all and was universally loved. His influence continues.

Addendum

In my previous post I forgot to mention the last concert of the evening: Friederike Heumann (viola da gamba) playing Marais, finishing with a splendid performance of Les folies d'Espagne. An excellent way to finish the day.

Earlier in the day I had read an obituary of the remarkable Syd Scroggie, who died in his late 80s. A mountaineer, he was blinded and also lost a leg in 1945 but that didn't keep him away from the hills. He also taught himself Latin and Greek (using Braille) and wrote poetry, much of "sensitive beauty" but some apparently not repeatable in polite society. An inspiration.

Multimedia, art, music - Saturday in London

The day started with a visit to a multimedia show in Deptford - outstanding work by some of our recent graduates. (Amazing to see them so early in the morning - I thought multimedia students didn't do mornings!)

Then on by bus to the South Bank. (Possibly one of the very buses seen here on Waterloo Bridge.)


Visitors were enjoying this artwork by Jeppe Hein. Jets of water randomly switching on and off create rooms in which one is confined until one of the walls suddenly disappears, cueing a mad scramble to get in or out before it restarts.
On to the music - Charivari Agréable playing Telemann and others; polyphony from seventeenth century Portugal; then the sensational band La Serenissima playing Vivaldi Concertos - Adrian Chandler making light of some very virtuosic writing for the violin, and Mhairi Lawson with her gorgeous voice throwing off some beautiful and dramatic arias:

Alma oppressa
da sorte crudele
pensa invan mitigare il dolore
con amore
ch'e un altro dolor.

Deh, raccogli al pensiero le vel
e, se folle non sei ti dia pena
la catena dei pie, non del cor!


And finally the journey home through night-time London.

Flow my tears

Spending this weekend at the South Bank's annual Early Music Festival. ("Early", quite rightly, being a somewhat flexible term: we had Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn last night, and tomorrow we're hearing music written in 2006.) With ten concerts in three days, there won't be much time for blogging.

Last night's second concert had the beautiful voice of John Potter singing Dowland, with a wonderful group of instrumentalists: Milos Valent (baroque violin, but sadly no viola due to the current restrictions preventing musical instruments being taken on planes), Stephen Stubbs (lute), Susanna Pell (bass viol) and John Surman, whose clarinet and saxophone, even if they offended my purist neighbour, I thought sensational in passages like this from Flow my tears:

Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,
Learn to contemn light
Happy, happy they that in hell
Feel not the world's despite.

On my way home

Seeing the smaller vehicle raise itself up insect-like to allow the larger to reverse into position between its legs.... I've been reading too much of Dr Tatiana.

Contemporary Cosmology and the Meaning of Life

OK. I've been an atheist all my adult life. I accept that we live in a world without the meaning which some religions provide. There have been (sadly short) period when love has seemed to provide a meaning, but I know that that's just my genes playing their effective trick.

So I'm comfortable in a meaningless universe. I'm happy that short-term human constructs such as art, poetry and music, love, the struggle for justice, equality and fairness provide enough short-term meaning to live by.

I can accept quite happily, I think, (as Einstein couldn't) the randomness of quantum mechanics. But Everett's many-worlds theory, that every time any of us makes a choice two branches of history are created, so that all possible choices are made in one of the very many worlds, upsets me. If worlds exist in which I take every conceivable action, why, in this world, not just stay in bed.

And now I really dislike the implications of some contemporary cosmology. I can't argue with the impeccable logic that in an infinite universe there are copies of me in many different worlds; that my life is duplicated exactly again and again across the multiverse. I'm used to infinities: I can see the implications. But I don't want to believe it. A Godless meaninglessness is one thing: but this is just ridiculous. [And at the moment I type this Jove sends his thunder.]

I can't accept multiple infinite universes with equanimity. So I have to conclude that the comfort with which I thought I embraced atheism is illusory. Deep down below my consciousness I guess want meaning.

Part of my bookshelf

The painting is by the wonderful Vanilla Beer - who has a show coming up at the Union Club, Greek Street in London in early October. Or check out the book of her food paintings, Prenez, Mangez et Vivez.

Understanding the Universe

Two books at the top of my bedside pile make an interesting contrast.

My current insomniac re-reading is Olivia Judson's wonderful Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. (A staggering book: if we human's think our sex lives are complicated, we should consider the sponge louse, for example.)

Evolutionary biology is surely the most fascinating and important area of modern science. The changes in our understanding of the lives and behaviour of our fellow earth-inhabitants must profoundly afffect the way we know ourselves. And this subject is so new: DNA analysis has undermined much we thought was known twenty years ago and revealed the rich and complex strategies males and females of all species adopt to promote the survival of their genes.

And although the principles of Darwinism are clear and simple, our knowledge of the complexities of the practice comes from observation and experiment: exactly how we believe science should be.

And so I come to the second book: Peter Woit's "Not even wrong: the failure of string theory". Woit's argument is, at least in part (I haven't read it yet, so this comes from the reviews), that string theorists are abandoning the most sacred tenet of modern science: they are promoting string theory because of its mathematical beauty rather than because it matches experiments, saying "this is so beautiful it must be true". The rejection of the belief that the world could be understood by abstract thought without reference to reality is seen as the key to the so-called Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and the Birth of Modern Science.

Now, I am attracted to string theory as the key to cosmology because I love the group theory on which (I believe) it is based. The idea that the structure of the Monster, the most fascinating group of all, is what allows the universe or multiverse to exist, is wat determines that we live in ten dimensions, is irresistible.

I admit that I am at heart in some ways a pre-Baconian, that I prefer pure thought to experiment (my affinity is with pure mathematics, and physics has never much interested me). I was delighted when string theory put the most abstract pure mathematics at the centre of contemporary cosmology. But I have to agree that "It's so beautiful it must be true" is not science. Correspondence with reality, and the generation of testable predictions, must be the test of a theory. If I understand correctly, Woit is saying string theory does nto make testable predictions.

Is string theory really turning its back on three hundred and fifty years of modern science? I'm not remotely qualified to judge. But it's ironic that when our understanding of human behaviour is being enhanced by the interaction of theory and experiments in accordance with the Baconian model of science, the subject on which that methodology first threw great light may now be reverting to an older mode of thought.

On his blindness (my relationship with my spectacles)

At primary school, being smacked by the teacher for supposed stupidity when I failed to interpret the pictures on the wall that I just couldn't see.

The excitement of the anticipation of my first pair of glasses, at seven or eight. But no memory remains of how I felt when I first wore them.

Sixteen years old, emerging from the opticians and, walking to the station, seeing details of buildings I had not been aware of: an instant improvement to my sight I have hoped for with every new pair since but have never experienced again.

Eighteen, a tennis match, mixed doubles with John and two of his friends, and, mortifyingly, hitting not a single return in the centre of the racquet: not realising until days later that this was because I wasn't yet used to my brand new spectacles.

One pair of my spectacles still to this day, I imagine, on the bed of the River Cherwell, lost in a punting mishap, now playthings for dear BabelFish and his chums.

My spectacles, indispensable friends and trusty companions. In intimate contact with me from the moment I wake to the end of the day. No lover so close, nor so easily discarded when the replacement arrives.

When the phone rings at night, I first reach for my glasses: without them I cannot hear clearly, even on the phone. (No doubt my brain is distracted by attempting to make sense of the blur.)

I remember reading Patrick Trevor-Roper's The World through blunted sight, and realising how much my short-sightedness has influenced my progress, metaphorical and literal, through the world. As a child, how much more pleasant to look at a sharply-focused book close to me than a blurred landscape through the window: so no wonder I'm bookish rather than an outdoor type. And how much more pleasant (and less distracting for my brain, as above) to walk looking at the sharp, clear ground at my feet than at the confused mess of a distant prospect straight ahead: hence my poor posture and downcast mien.

And now my friends, by the miracle of laser eye treatment, are dispensing with glasses and lenses. And tell me how wonderful the result is. Why don't I do likewise? Not squeamishness - I can endure the dentist with equanimity, and by all accounts that is much less pleasant. But my short sight is part of me, and my spectacles part of my identity.

I like to hide behind them (even if I am grateful to my female friends I and C and A, who rejected the heavy frames I wore in the past and have successively chosen for me ever more slender, less masking ones).

Ostrich-like, I am, in my shyness, relieved that, since I cannot see other people's faces clearly, they cannot see mine.

I am happy that I cannot see effects of age when I look in the mirror, and that I do not notice the dust and dirt in my flat and need not waste too much time on futile housework.

I can survive the occasional disorientation when I take my spectacles off and, half-blind, cannot find them.

I can blame my poor vision for my failures, spectacle-less, on the football field.

So, although I have the opportunity to improve my sight and forget my dependence on these optics, I don't even consider it. What myopic timidity and lack of vision!

A message from a past self

I moved some old papers today and an index card fell out, with two quotations in my handwriting from, I don't know, twenty-odd years ago or longer.



Google can't find the former but tells me the latter is Hopkins. I have no recollection of when or why I wrote these down, or how I came across them, beyond a vague and probably quite wrong feeling that perhaps I found them in an essay by Forster. I did learn to record sources at an early age, so perhaps this is from my schooldays, though the ink suggests the fountain pen my mother gave me in my first year at University.

I'm not sure that I like the youth this card suggests I was!

Patapadoum!

In the post today a wonderful surprise from my friend Nil - this CD of music for an art show on Bastille Day. La Marseillaise is put through a variety of entertaining treatments by Mark Lockett.

It's fab - thanks, Nil!

Listening to Winterreise

I listened this afternoon to Schubert's Winterreise (sung this time by Christine Schäffer). A young man, rejected in love, travels from society, from sanity, into the desolation. There is no hope anywhere in the cycle, nothing but the most intense despair over the human condition. There's no concession to optimism, only a ruthless inevitabliity. The music is by a young composer who knew himself to be dying of a terrible disease.

This music ought by any rational analysis to be quite unbearable: but it's not. It's deeply emotional but somehow very positive.

Is this the greatest music ever written? I think of Bach, but Bach was writing solely for the glory of a God I don't believe in (and yet his music still speaks to me). Perhaps no music other than Winterreise so fully accepts the hopelessness of life in a godless universe and makes it tolerable.

Drüben hinterm Dorfe
Steht ein Leiermann,
Und mit starren Fingern
Dreht er, was er kann.

Barfuß auf dem Eise
Schwankt er hin und her;
Und sein kleiner Teller
Bleibt ihm immer leer.

Keiner mag ihn hören,
Keiner sieht ihn an;
Und die Hunde brummen
Um den alten Mann.

Und er läßt es gehen
Alles, wie es will,
Dreht, und seine Leier
Steht ihm nimmer still.

Wunderlicher Alter,
Soll ich mit dir gehn?
Willst zu meinen Liedern
Deine Leier drehn?

My mother's garden

www.flickr.com

A trip to Scotland