Dennis Severs’ House

Visited Dennis Severs’ house a little while ago. In Folgate Street, tucked away amid modern City high-rise and the backside of Spitalfields. It’s open only very occasionally, a fact I like; makes it more of an effort to get at, which always makes things special. The house was bequeathed, on Severs’ death, to the Spitalfields Trust, and is now looked after, and tenanted, by those who knew him. The chap on the door, who used to live there as a guardian/tenant himself, is at pains to tell you to move around it quietly: ‘It is not a museum, and it’s not the National Trust,’ he said. It is more like a work of art in time, an installation, a happening. As the artist-creator of this ‘living canvas’ wanted his visitors to understand, ‘You either get it, or you don’t.’

Severs, an American by birth, but with a fascination for England from his teens, moved over in the ’70s, and into this old Georgian house, behind Spitalfields’ market, a decade after the self-styled ‘living sculptures’ of Gilbert & George had moved to Fournier Street, nearby.

When I returned to London myself, another decade later, many of these old houses were still neglected, boarded up. I was then staying in a squat in Camberwell Green, settled in years previously by antipodean friends. Owing to the fact of them having been there so long (along with its only legal tenant, a sweet, reclusive widow in the basement flat, in her nineties, housebound, and glad of our company) they had reached the 12-year ‘right to ownership’ status. Though the council hadn’t bothered with the squat till now (during Thatcher’s underfunded, sorry, social housing scheme, it was awaiting ‘redevelopment’, as it turned out, selling on), they sprung to life, threatening both squatters and the old girl, who’d lived there all her married life, with eviction. Court case notwithstanding, the squat was a grandiose, four-story early Victorian affair, and while there was plenty of life going on south of the river, it didn’t suit me. The rickety backstreets around Brick Lane, with their charmingly derelict, 18th-century weavers’ cottages, was where I wanted to be. So I regularly hiked over on a Sunday, to buy beigals enough to see us through the week, and to check out the treasures on the market stalls. (This was before the market became ‘fashionable’, the trendy youth moved in and the barrow-boys moved out: it had a glorious ramshackle character and its stalls then still sold an amazing variety of ‘junk’.)

At that time the barrow-boys turned up at 4 or 5 in the morning, which on occasion I did too; it’s a great time for exploring - a city has a thrilling, secret character at such an hour. I loved being there while they were setting up: I’d listen to the banter over a bacon sandwich in the tiny grubby Cheshire Street caff (now a ‘retro’ shop), which served tea thick and strong enough to stand your hair on end. I’d look at the boots at Bateman’s, and the musty old clothes of the huge old Jewish trader’s shop next door who, the whole time market was on, never seemed to stir from his chair in front of the door. There were real treasures to be had, too; I once bought a grimy necklace for a tenner, of pearls and amethysts the size of peas. Lovely, delicate, Quattrocentro colours, which was what appealed, but even I could see the pearls were real. (Real pearls, like most natural objects, have a certain quality to them that just can’t be faked. A sense of ‘life’ - what, I suppose, the Chinese might call its Qi – though I’ve my own pet theory. Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ is a nice elaboration on this, but, tsk, there I go, losing the thread.) ‘Genuine Victorian, that, love,’ said the bloke on the stall, who knew it too, ‘Just needs a bit of a clean.’ When I really did lose the thread, about a year later, and had its beads restrung, the pretty thing was valued at thirty times its price.

Back to Folgate Street, which is where we were headed, before the pretty shiny things sidetracked us, like magpies. So, Severs moved in, in the 1970s, only tenant in a row of boarded-up houses. Undeterred either by a dog carcase in the basement room (killed on the road, he supposed, and shoved in through the broken window), or, the first morning after his arrival, on his way to scavenge left-overs at the market (which then still had two perpetually-smouldering bonfires, with tramps gathered like ‘a nightly installation’ around them of a night - ‘I named the tableau The Burghers of Calais‘, he wrote), rounding the corner on Elder Street to find a tramp impaled upon a railing. Perhaps Severs slightly exaggerates - carcases aside, it all adds to local colour. He slept in each of the ten rooms, one after another, to let their history ‘reveal themselves’ to him. Then he set about recreating what he saw (working, as he put it, ‘from inside out’ ) with the help of his spiritual tenants, Edward and Mrs Jervis.

The house is a marvel of interior furnishing, and a fascinating exercise in rethinking a ‘home’. Like John Soane on speed, Severs collects and clutters, loading it with stuff to bombard the senses, responding always to what he perceived as its ’soul’ and ‘the spaces in between’.

‘I can only dig in the air for the core of a subject and then work outwards from there,’ he wrote. I understand what Severs means, my own thinking is the same. Like medieval gardeners, who related everything, from the correct distance for planting leeks (a hand span) to measuring the girth of a tree (by arm span), to a man’s own reach, the Georgians based their proportions likewise upon the stature, and beliefs of the man. The best architecture, and art, in my view, always comes back to this: how it relates to the man who inhabits it.

I won’t spoil your pleasure by leading you through the Hogarthian tallow- and lavender- and must-scented rooms Severs created. The artist himself provides pointers enough, should you care to visit (related more fully in his posthumously-published book). But although all the rooms have things to engage one’s attention, including a real, chirping, caged canary, I was ‘caught up’ by it most successfully, and perhaps unsurprisingly, in those two extremes of a house in which I myself always feel most at home: basement scullery and rickety attic. Reaching its attic, up winding stairs hung over with linen drawers and chemises, I came to a room, a shotgun at the door, and its ceiling collapsing in a state of dereliction, in which hung a small painting of a one-eyed man. I began to see where the Jervises were going. In the final room, a scene of hopeless poverty and disarray reminiscent of Doré (or Arthur Morrison’s Child of the Jago), a very real stench of decay gradually penetrated my senses. I sniffed at myself surreptitiously (I’m older than I was, and one can never be too sure). Then I saw it, tucked away, amid unmade bed and rotting cabbage. Phew. The stench was it, and not me. I don’t think the National Trust runs to full chamberpots; its presence said much for the authenticity of the place. (A relief, that for once the dreary old bones of Health & Safety hadn’t stuck its nose in.) It was no doubt filled, in the true spirit of the ‘Game’ by the current tenant/guardian of the Jervises’ place. Unless, as Severs would have it, it was by Jervis himself.

One’s receptivity to places such as this often depends on mood. I’m a little nostalgic, myself, at the moment, for various reasons, so perhaps more receptive than usual to its magic. I’ve no photos of Severs’ place, so here instead is a photo of my own. A magical atmosphere is what draws me to it, as it was Dennis Severs to his. The trick with magical things is not to clutch at them too eagerly, the more you worry them, the more surely they vanish. It’s something I don’t always manage, my restless mind too often fiddling and poking in spite of my better sense. Best, as with all sweet things in life, to just take a few steps back and let them suffuse you. Dennis Severs’ House is a charming exercise in this.

Dennis Severs’ House http://tinyurl.com/4ny9

Update, 30 June. Come in, sit down… I’ve just been sent a picture, and YouTube link, by the nice chap on the door. So here it is, by photographer Rebecca Miller. It captures well the look of the place, but perhaps not quite its atmosphere, which is often a very personal matter, one of mood and moment.

YouTube. http://tinyurl.com/3tr9uq

East

My two local churches, St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green and St George in the East, were both in the news recently, for the fact of their priests, Rector and Canon respectively, having each taken a bit of a drubbing from some local lads. I admired the forbearance (as reported in the news) of both men towards their attackers. Both showed a sensitive restraint more than I myself could ever muster. I wouldn’t have noticed perhaps if it weren’t that they were from ‘my’ churches, and so I feel something of a fondness for each.

St Matthew’s was ‘in my family’ for generations: Huguenots who, over the period of a hundred or so years, from when they first set foot on (what possibly was, then) London soil, moved barely further than half a mile of each other. Silk weavers, stick makers, leather sellers, turners: sturdy, devout, Protestant tradesmen, all christened, married and buried there in St Matthew’s Bethnal Green. It’s imposing and beautifully restrained Georgian solidity reflects the hard-working sturdiness of its congregation. The children too, growing up to become stone-the-crows cockneys, never moved far. I’ve always admired my grandfather Tom, whom I never met (dying just days before my own birth), for having - as a young man - been moved, with others, to go and lob stones at Oswald Mosley’s crew – he whose clipped and booted Blackshirts paraded down Cable Street in 1936 (the same day Tommy’s baby daughter turned two); as the rapid swell of Fascism threatened to engulf all Europe. There are times when it pays to be intolerant. And that, for my grandad, was it. It still strikes me as odd that a decade ago, that I should accidentally find myself (having had something of an itinerant youth, and never living in London after the first two weeks of my birth) buying a house which I would find out afterwards is no more than four streets distant from where Tom himself was born. All I knew was that this part of town was, indeed still is, the only place in the world where I have ever truly felt I ‘belong’. Its streets are in my blood, and I watch their goings-on - their degeneration and their development - with a proprietorial affection I have yet felt nowhere else. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner. Or maybe there’s something genetic going on.

So it was with dismay I watched Council redevelopers muscling in on the lovely secluded churchyard of St George in the East, which backs onto Cable Street and fronts the Ratcliffe Highway. I see Hawksmoor’s wedding-cake turret from my bedroom window, and have stolen joyous private public hours, on a blanket with a book, in the shade of its fine trees and its elegant proportions. The quaint ‘Nature Study Museum’ with its Swiss-chalet-like roof (now long since boarded up and rapidly disintegrating), has always particularly appealed to me. Originally a mortuary (c.1877), it was converted in 1904 by an Edwardian rector as his way of introducing botany and beauty to deprived slum children. The idea of that in itself is charming. I would love to see it once again restored for the purpose. Receiving more than 1000 visitors a day, it lasted till the Blitz, when its doors were shut, and all the local kids were evacuated into real country.

My last visit there was on one of our sunnier Spring afternoons. A few boys were playing football and helped themselves to poppy-wreaths to use as goal-markers. I didn’t much mind, personally, but I did think then (it was young Asian kids) about our inability to respect others’ beliefs. When I heard about the attack on the poor priest (which escalated over a football), I did wonder if it were the same lads. The fact of them being Asian has nowt to do with it, except in that I often think about how disconnected these local boys must feel, many of them first, second or third generation British, ghettoised as they are through poverty, job opportunities and - that Achilles heel of British society - class. Like so many of our youth. But living as they do in the poorest borough in the country, and with their own religion - they are predominantly Muslim - come to the forefront for all the wrong reasons, these young boys also strike me as particularly vulnerable.

It makes me uneasy to think about the relationship between genes and place. In the same context as Mosley, it just doesn’t feel right. It unsettles me that I should feel any sense of belonging, simply due to being on the same streets where my ancestors lived, rather than through any intellectual/emotional choice of whom I align myself with. History is bunk, or is it Genealogy that is? The latter makes me uneasy, yet I am not quite convinced. Regardless, the matter of increasing numbers of disaffected folk, disaffected through a diminishing sense of ‘belonging’, to a disintegrated society apparently evolving into something few seem to want or understand, is not one to ignore for the sake of political correctness, nor for the working of those figures for political gain. Just as one may appreciate the beauty of a church, and the right of others to worship there, while being an atheist, so one can cherish the streets where one lives, and their history, without being a nationalist. The promotion, in the recent mayoral elections, of a British National Party candidate to a position of authority (however slight), is something that should fill us all with horror. Disaffection with our society is what leads to the likes of Mosley, and to the present-day insidious threats to our equality and well-being, like our own response to ‘Terror’. It is something to watch closely: Fascism can tiptoe in in less noisy shoes than we might imagine. Power often lies not so much in what actually is done, but in successfully generating, or exploiting, a state of resentment, apathy and fear.

I needn’t have worried on St George’s account. About his grounds, at least. Its restorers have made a fine job there (well done, you boys of Tower Hamlets council), refurbishing them with restraint, sensitivity and care. For once ‘Disgruntled of Whitechapel’ can happily lay down her grumblin’ pen.

The Diving Bell & the Mosquito

Went last night to see Julian Schnabel’s latest film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the best-selling book by former Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, written in the blink of an eye - which, I can tell you, is a lot longer than that sounds. His story is, in one sense, a monument to existentialism. It brought to mind some words of Sartre, which I copied into my diary on the day of his death in 1980. They have resounded in my head like a call to arms ever since:

Man… exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is thus nothing other than the whole of his acts, nothing other than his life.

Sartre’s words are a little harsh, perhaps. And kind of hard to live up to – I’ve spent a great deal of my time feeling barely alive. While I understand his words far less now than I did as a girl of fifteen, I feel even more, with another twenty-odd years of experience chalked up on the great slate, that he takes little account of the external aspects of our lives: the incidents, the accidents, the chance, which so colour, and so significantly, our existence. Yes. Some very odd years. There are some things we just can’t plan for.

But then in a sense he is right. Bauby’s book was his final act. Following a massive stroke which left him suffering from the rare ‘Locked-in Syndrome’, Bauby was unable to move, though his brain was fully alert, and unable to communicate save by blinking his left eyelid. His book (and Schnabel’s film), is a testimony to his efforts to continue to engage with life, like a drowning man. He died just days after it was completed.

His story, sad as it ever is for a man to lose his life young (at 42), appeals not least because we can so easily empathise with his condition. We are, to a greater or lesser extent, each of us imprisoned in our own ‘diving bell’, unable to communicate, or act, as we might wish: through clumsiness in self-expression, through circumstance, or fear, or because, as so often the case, no one is really listening. Yet always in the sphere of our minds, unhampered by such external realities, as Bauby quickly realised, the butterflies of our imagination can fly free.

***

I almost ditched this blog, this week, I was made so unhappy in reading about ‘the Mosquito’. A reported 3500 already in use across Britain. It is, make no mistake, a weapon. And an infringement of our rights, as citizens, as human beings, to move about freely. As a friend of mine remarked, if the folk who installed them were instead to turn water-guns on the ‘youth’ they intended to keep at bay, would there not be a massive outcry? They would surely not be allowed. Or would they? The fact that this means of assault is invisible makes its actions less easily monitored and thereby far more pernicious. It is possibly more dangerous in the long term than a water-cannon – who knows? Has anyone done any proper research on its effects – in prolonged use: on babies, on epileptics, on the mentally ill? If it were a racial group that were being so targeted - could it have been passed for use? We seem to be forgetting, and perhaps this is part of the cause of the trouble – that teenagers are humans beings too. In fact its potential for physical harm is of secondary importance: as a means of targeting and restricting the movements of one section of society by another, the use of the Mosquito is, more than anything, a shocking betrayal of our civil liberties and an inexcusable abuse of power.

Bowing under the weight of such abuses, it seems self-indulgent to write about art and ideas and such. I should be standing on a soapbox and shouting my head off – outside Parliament perhaps, if that right hadn’t also recently been neatly curtailed. Bauby’s tragedy is a lesson to us, to cherish what means of communication we have. The luxury of free speech may be running out. To do nothing, to say nothing, while such abuses are becoming more and more commonplace, is not to engage with life. In this sense Sartre was right. If we will not each take responsibility for, and fight to preserve, the quality of our lives, we might as well not be living at all. Call it protest if you will: the film to me was a timely reminder, with the great iron boots of ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter-terrorism’ rapidly pulling us under.

http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/

Till human voices wake us…

Haven’t written for a bit, as I’ve been wasting time in Second Life and consequently wasting a little less time in this First one. (Hah, don’t that rustle up an interesting philosophical question?!) Sounds kind of switched on, huh? Don’t you believe it. I may stride forth as purposefully as an ethereal Joan of Arc, but I’m as near virgin of the virtual world as Joan was in her virtuous one.

I acknowledge - and am impressed by – the cunning technology which has allowed clever folk to invent this yawning landscape, in which I stride, jump, gesiculate, fly, or ‘always run’ if I choose (Crikey. Run? And why? We are, it seems, in as much of a hurry here too. Here where there’s no question of time running out, for we can yet create a Third Life, then a Fourth…) Or indeed, crash. First impressions were a little disappointing, for Second Life, it seems, pretty much mirrors our experiences in this First one. In part that’s down to me I daresay – I find I’m as antisocial, as gauche and shy, in SL as in this one. But then, hurrah! - I discover the art of dressing myself and transporting myself and everything takes on a new shape. (Would that this were possible in the real world!)

I’m laughing. For Second Life reminds me of those old Charles Atlas adverts, where the weedy fella gets sand kicked in his face for one last time, before cottoning on to Charles’s new-body-new-you morphing programme and learning how to take on the world with style. In Second Life, my hair can be as thick and long as to befit a Wella model, I can be as tall and slender as current fashion dictates (how many in SL, I wonder, have made themselves FAT? We care as much about being liked here as in the real world); I can always be appropriately dressed and my hems will never run. Unless, of course, I prefer otherwise, in which case I may be as grungy as I choose without offending either my clients, my neighbours, or my maiden aunt.

And there’s the attraction. Of course! We all secretly fret about our inadequacies and SL – oh joy! – lets us dance quite free of them. But sadly, in a rather limited way. For a ‘virtual’ world, which to me implies a scope as expansive as our minds can imagine, Second Life is still a world very much defined by the rules and limitations of this one: signposts abound, walls may not be traversed, there are ‘no fly’ zones, and panic buttons for reporting abuse. As I write, I am somewhere in the middle of the ocean, being ‘teleported’ back to homebase, for disobeying a sign which said ‘Danger, Keep out!’ It was in the Rimbaudian ‘Toxic Garden’ for goodness sake! D’ye suppose our wan mate Arthur did nae bend the rules a little? Tsk! I have always been a terror for poking my fingers in odd corners. And if you may not explore freely in the virtual world, where can you?

Of course SL is highly commercial – ‘real estate’, tourism, sex and branding are as big business there as they are here. Maybe I am missing the point, but seems to me there’s quite enough of all that in First Life, and it is tiresome enough first time round. But, though I have not got to this yet, it seems there is also some useful educational stuff going on in SL too, as well as its ‘mere’ gaming potential. And that’s cool.

But I have come to the conclusion that the worth of the virtual world – and virtual world technology, if it comes to that (however clever) – is only as much it works with the real world. By this I mean: that it goes where our real selves cannot, but we can also come back from it. A true Second Life is one where our minds may range quite freely, unbounded by convention, unrestricted, as we are ourselves, by material and physical concerns. But it should not be a substitute for this one. Virtual relationships are only relationships to the extent they translate to the real world – where folk hold real meaning for other people and cannot be dispensed with at the click of a button. There is no substitute for real human warmth, which we need as much as we need blood coursing through our veins. (This, of course, applies to all social networking sites as much as Second Life.) There are real dangers: my seeing inside the Kremlin, in SL, or an Arab desert medina – or an Amsterdam brothel for that matter – does not mean I have been there in real life and any impressions I form in this way are false ones. Just as with telly, we can too easily forget that these are mere ‘impressions’ - of a world diluted through the invention and imaginings and selective editing of other folk, all with their own agenda. And as my initial impressions of SL bear out, most folks’ imaginings are rather limited. First Life is much more vivid.

Doubtless I am too susceptible for a virtual life (or indeed a virtuous one). After three hours in SL, I emerge into the city streets and find myself walking and talking like an automaton. This worries me. I have such a keen sense of the ‘real’ and how necessary it is. Passing through the ‘Ditch last week, amid all the kaffuffle and folk with ears and fingers taped to their mobiles, and thereby less present in the world immediately around them, it suddenly struck me how little people seem to care any more about losing touch with ‘reality’. Then it occurred to me that perhaps it is I who is the oddity, that the world has indeed moved on. Huh, wise up, missy, welcome to Brave New World. Whatever, I stand by my instincts. They matter. Enormously. The key danger, it seems to me, of Second Life – or any other virtual reality of a technologically or chemically-induced nature, is not the paedophile ‘groomer’, ID fraudster, spammer or any other ‘monster’ waiting to pounce (we’ve always had monsters and dragonnes in every sphere of life – though a bit more rigorous cony-catching on the web would not go amiss), but the way our virtual behaviour affects every one of us. How we view the ‘real’ world and our fellow human beings. The danger lies at that crucial point inbetwixt, where Virtual Life interacts with Real Life, and falls short.

Perhaps this has always been the case. Had we but world enough, and time… I am reminded here – as so often, for they seem to be a recurrent theme in my life (both, you note, are love songs) – of two of my favourite poems. In terms of SL’s possibilities, Marvell’s Coy Mistress:

We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain…

In practice, probably not. It seems our invention is rather more limited. And, as for our realities, see Prufrock:

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The naked and the dead

Or something like. Nipped across to the Courtauld on Sunday to take in Sickert’s Camden Town Murders before the show closed. Hadn’t been paying attention, it had kind of passed me by. Was as fascinating, in all its fleshly flesh, as I was hoping. His viscerality is - well, the sort of D. H. Lawrence of the painting world, if David Herbert hadn’t also been that himself. Though his subject matter is generally more ‘Society’, more RA and less earthy, than Mr Lawrence, whose (written) work I much admire, despite its sometime weaknesses and overbearingness. With a somewhat nastier element. Mr Lawrence always keeps his feet in the soil.

Frustratingly, it is hard to see Sickert’s paintings now without thinking of Patricia Cornwell and the ‘Ripper Connection’. I hate it when folk do that. Like someone I knew slightly who emailed me recently (after an interval of more than a year), quoting a part of Blake’s Sick Rose at me, in a manner that was, frankly, obscene. The poem I’d once mentioned as being one of my favourites, and no doubt he thought his take on it was amusing. He was wrong. What I took umbrage at was not his obscenity, I am hard-bitten enough for that, but at his tainting for ever what was – is – a wonderful poem. There are many faults one may forgive in a man. Callousness is not one of them.

So. Trying to put aside the question of whether ‘Walter’ was in fact ‘Jack’, I found much in the paintings to impress me. Not as ’sinister’, to me, as folk like to make out. Cornwell sees these works, it seems, as callous – betraying a misogynistic brutishness entirely fitting for the (as she’d have it, likely) perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders. Certainly, they are disturbing: his light can be unrelenting, his narrative seamy, his interiors claustrophobic, his emotion intense. These are in no way ‘pretty’ scenes. But his Lit de fer, 1905, La Hollandaise, the lovely The Iron Bedstead, both c.1906 – are these brutish depictions of women? Not to my eye.

We judge his nudes from an age with a preference for thinner women: there is nothing in Sickert’s painting of flesh which says he finds their meatiness unpleasant. It is admirable, in my view, to want to see things as they are. And to me, his raw treatment seems to give their fleshiness a validity. His women have personalities, something so often missing in the vapid waifs favoured by many of his contemporaries. I find something far more disturbing, myself, in the works of artists such as Waterhouse who pose their women in Greek tableaux, exposing pert breasts while glossing over genitalia as if nature were ugly and ineffectual, rather than an animal and necessary part of us. (http://tinyurl.com/y682jg) So why should we see Sickert as a misogynist and not Waterhouse?

Sickert, of course, was not the first to look at women as urgent sexual beings. With Dejeuner sur l’herbe and The Origin of the World, both brilliant, neither Manet nor Courbet could be accused of pussyfooting on the subject of women’s sexuality, or rather, man’s portrayal of it.

But Sickert’s painting is, I think, not on the level of these. He has neither artist’s range nor facility. But his are still intriguing works. He dwells in a sinister world. And he is fascinated by women’s sex. Cezanne too went through a similar preoccupation: his brilliant early painting, The Abduction (http://tinyurl.com/2nhbxu), portrays animal urges in as visceral a manner (though here too, he gives the sketchiest reference to a socially acceptable ‘classical’ setting) and he then moved on. Sickert’s limitations for me are in that he is perhaps too embedded in his music-hall society, his work reeks of the Victorian prurience that led him into London’s seamier backstreets (and Gladstone, into taking the girls off them.)

But even in the Camden Town murders his brutishness, it seems to me, is not directed at the women but at the situation. The atmosphere is oppressive, certainly. Yet he does not seem to be siding with the male figure/murderer but rather, portraying prostitution/a murder as it most probably often is: clumsy, brutish, stupid, and non-’dramatic’, with the dull realization that comes with daylight. It is like the difference between an on-screen fight – with the kapow!s and perfectly-placed left hooks – compared with the in-much-too-close flailing and panting and kicking of a real-life scrap. Sickert doesn’t pull his punches. But I am not sure they are entirely aimed at women.

In L’Affaire du Camden Town, 1909 (see http://tinyurl.com/2krcca – images not shown for copyright reasons), a male figure stands over a women’s naked body, which is both splayed and turned away. The ambiguity of the pose itself is a little odd, at once self-protective and exposing. A related sketch of around the same time (Conversation, 1909) shows a woman seemingly in conversation with this nude on the bed, ie the onlooker here is a ‘benign’ presence.

And in another sketch the nude’s facial expression is open, visible, ‘active’ (we can therefore engage with her), whereas in the painting her face is hidden – she has become passive, an object. Did Sickert read of the murder, and work up an existing drawing? It’s an interesting development, psychologically. Yet it seems to me it is not Sickert’s misogyny at work but that he is more interested in the relationships of his subjects: client vs prostitute, clothed vs exposed, conscious/brooding vs sleeping/dead. As for his subject matter – is it really any worse than the Rape of the Sabines? No. And he is no worse than his audience who devoured titillating tabloid descriptions of such scenes. In 1908 as now. It is just that in Sickert the painter the tunics and the classical pose have been finally discarded. His is a hard, an introspective, and more domestic eye. Albeit somewhat prurient. Though having said all this, I much prefer his pupil Harold Gilman, with his greater, softer, and altogether more delicate humanity (http://tinyurl.com/3bohaz).

Following this, to the Photographers’ Gallery, and a display in medium-ship as part of their Harry Price show. As entertainment, it was disappointing. No great relevations were revealed. And as education, likewise. But I felt sorry for the man, facing an audience who were clearly critical, and, in some quarters, perhaps even a little hostile. Beginning his talk with the question ‘how many of you here don’t believe in the Afterlife?’, he was clearly taken aback when a whole wave of hands went up. As he ‘offered’ names and descriptions for his audience’s acceptance and was met with repeated ‘No’s he began to falter. I was reminded of something I once read, of Lady Day performing at Carnegie Hall and commenting that the audience were simply waiting for her to fall into the orchestra pit.

There wasn’t even any great jazz to contend with. Though a fair bit of jizzing, it has to be said. Performing before a semi-hostile audience with walls full of such sexually-charged images as those by Antoine D’Agata would have been a challenge for the most spiritual of mediums. As we left my friend admitted she had spent most of the evening with her eye focused on a small photo of two (inverted) people fucking. A rather graphic, animal scene, and no love lost there. Strangely, I had found myself drawn in just the same direction. Oh dearie me. What would Margaret Rutherford have said? When the way of all flesh is so diverting, is it surprising the spiritual world barely gets a look in?

Thanks to Sue Bond Public Relations for use of the Sickert images. All images © Estate of Walter R. Sickert/DACS 2007

Keep Dedalus alive

I’m not much of a one for online petitioning, or for hijacking these forums for such purposes, but I’m all in favour of keeping independent publishing alive, in a shrinking, over-monopolised world.

Dedalus chases ideas, reaching out after the surreal, the ethereal, for those whose dream. Produce some fine translations of often-obscure European works which might otherwise be overlooked. Maverick boys, with a taste for the occult and the seamier side of life, they have an earthier side too. And they work hard to promote new writing. Robert Irwin’s Exquisite Corpse is still one of my favourite modern novels, for delving into the crazy (and somehow, in its English counterparts, cosy and slightly frowzy) world of the Surrealists and Dadists, set in this city, among places that I love.

Dedalus has received funding from the Arts Council for a good while now, and it’s about to be cut. Yes, one would hope that they could fund themselves. Theirs is a commercial enterprise after all. But it is also is a niche market, run by folk who love fine and interesting writing, for those who wish to read it. Competition is increasingly fierce as publishers are bought out one after another, seemingly run by marketing men for a quick turnover, no longer by readers and writers. Even the Charing Cross Road, with its dusty secondhand bookshops, is suffering, a shadow of what it once was, in the face of all the gloss.

There are many things to get upset about, more than enough troubles to campaign for. But we should act on things that are dear to our hearts (and reserve some empathy for those which aren’t). An active, fluid, independent publishing scene run by people who really care about books is one that is very dear to my own. We need independent thought. Free speech. Free process. Individualism. For our individualism is what, as human beings, keeps our spirits alive and brings life to society. Please sign.

http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/16111.html

Why birds sing

December. In the Orne again. Long walk in the mornings, past frozen fields with pools of ice with swirling amoeba patterns in them and trees bare and floret-like against the sky. My head buzzing with ideas. Mind both expands in the open and at the same time narrows, there what I become interested in is the tactile physical stuff.

It is just replacing one culture for another. Was studying some trees, how their shapes interrelate against the sky. The natural canvas. It’s all aesthetic. No different, I suppose, to doing the same thing with a painting: movement, thrust, colour, interrelationships. I continually wonder what it is we need in nature, why it quietens our mind. It is so much more, so much bigger, than what we are ever able to create ourselves.

Been reading David Rothenberg’s Why Birds Sing. It is about just that, and packed full of wonderful ideas. Recommend it to anyone with the sense to step away from the computer and get outside in the open air for half an hour: Listen up. Listen well. It makes the thoughts in my head chatter as excitably as those starlings on the telegraph wires. I sing therefore I am.

I sing because I can. On the Poitiers–Ruffec road the day before New Year’s Eve. 11.30 at night, icy, pitch black. We were driving at a speed well below the route nationale maximum when two tawny wild boar suddenly materialised just in front of the headlamps. Prehistoric shapes. Impossible to stop. I turned my head from the inevitable impact, and back again to see it – for it seemed, as these things will, to happen in an intense slow motion. The impact for ourselves was extraordinarily slight – I jolted forward only an inch or so in my seat as 400 lbs of boar came hurtling over the bonnet and off into the verge. Yes. 400 lbs. Car was a write-off. The poor beast was nearly as wide as the vehicle, putting out both headlamps and tearing the bumper away with his great carcass, embedding his flesh in it. The ramassage driver, as we later rode to his garage in the front cabin of his tow-truck, phlegmatically remarked that accidents happen all too often with the sangliers (who, unlike most animals, seem to have no road sense, and, I thought, why should they?). This was was of little comfort, knowing we had, to judge from the wreckage, almost certainly killed the wonderful beast, who disappeared into the night as suddenly as he’d appeared. It was a curiously surreal incident; H said, like one of those scenes with the eye in L’Age d’Or, his own looming huge in our consciousness as he eyeballed us seconds before the impact. An odd association but I knew exactly what she meant. So my toast this New Year was not only for my friends (and we four in the car who were lucky and grateful to be alive) and for the world in general, but also for this poor, thwarted, unroadworthy creature. Ugly, hunched, harried, hunted, and majestic, surely, at times, even the wild boar sing.

Seeing is believing

Why would I want to leave this city?

I tell you, walking through it at night is magical. Conversations with barrow boys on their way home via London Bridge. A mouse foraging for food inside a paper bag and making it dance, mysteriously, on a park bench. The dome of St Paul’s, luminous in the moonlight. The Hung, Drawn and Quartered (yes, that’s where it happened), the Tower. A city teeming with life, a hidden world, and death.

It’s been a most curious week. First off, there’s the Photographers’ Gallery exhibition, ‘Seeing is Believing’ http://tinyurl.com/2ykaue. Delighted by images from the collection of Harry Price, who in 1925 established a National Laboratory for Psychical Research. Wonderful stuff. It’s the prosaic nature of the spirit world and its followers that gets me – the sober bourgeoisie dabbling in the nebulous arts in overstuffed suburban drawing rooms. Oh Mr Price! Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirit was spot on. Sample captions: Guy L’Estrange. Great Yarmouth. Trumpet levitated, 1928, or, for a photograph depicting, inexplicably, a simple wooden stool with a dismembered ghostly hand attached: Nothing was recorded on the back of this photograph. Indeed. There are contemporary ‘other world’ photographers too: Tim Maul’s fascinatingly ‘dull’ photographs of locations with a ‘psychic’ aspect to them are a modern example. I get the feeling the spirit world mostly dwells in Croydon.

Following this I went to a talk by Alan Murdie, of the Ghost Club http://tinyurl.com/yqbqdx – the oldest one in existence, established in 1862 (Dickens, Yeats, Julian Huxley, Sassoon and, appropriately, Peter Cushing, among its previous members). I should perhaps steer clear of this sort of thing, my mind runs away with me at the best of times. Our ‘Spectre Inspector’, as he called himself, told me that there were some folk who attracted such things to them. That I might be a likely type. And how.

I found his talk fascinating, not least for the fact of there being regular folk out there engaged in irregular matters. A believer, after thirty years or so of investigating such things, still Murdie debunked ghost photography as, he said, cameras weren’t yet quite up to the job of detecting the ethereal. Yup. He finished the talk, unfortunately, at the point where, for me, it got most intriguing. Those old photographs of whispy visions were pretty enough, but none had the impact of the last he showed, of a troubled young woman with telekinetic abilities (poor Tina Resch, of the Columbus Poltergeist case, now banged up for murder). She recoils, face contorted, from a telephone flying in front of her. Genuine or not, it is psychically mighty disturbing and by far more interesting – to me – than a bunch of hazy double exposures and a lot of wishful thinking.

Later in the week, visiting a dear friend in hospital, while his partner, perhaps to distract herself, as he lay in a morphine-induced fog, told me about her evangelical mother, who has the ability to ’speak in tongues’.

This was followed by Christmas Revels at Middle Temple. Yes, that Temple, of the Da Vinci Code and all. They have, as well as a string of Van Dykes adorning the walls, ‘the Box’ which is actually a table, made from the hatch of the Golden Hind. I don’t doubt it. The Hall goes back that far. Drake hung out there. Dickens too. The very first performance of Twelfth Night took place there (though the acoustics, under that wonderfully vaulted ceiling, are terrible, and as those Elizabethans did like to chat through things I’m sure much was missed by many.) Bangers and mash for tea. Of course! School dinners. The ‘Benchers’ (elderly, high profile judges) doing skits in the costumes of Richard III. It was an uneasy, curious mix for me, armchair socialist, in such hallowed halls. I felt privileged to see it, and at the same time from a different place, I, who feels like second cousins with the world, always at one remove, as it were.

My week ended with an evening at a friend’s house, where the three of us got on to discussing our various ‘psychic’ experiences. J, a rationalist, none the less documents (delightfully, on old-fashioned index cards) her ‘coincidences’. Gluts of these, she says, occur in clear three-month cycles. She described how, a few weeks after giving birth to her son, sitting alone with him, at home at night, in a ‘half-slumber’, the room was peopled by ‘noisy relatives’. V. also described a similar scene, where, again in ‘half-slumber’, his hospital room was suddenly crowded with spectral visitors. Silent but noisy, they both said. You see, he went on, this is the thing about magic: it always occurs in that half-way state, for us in our half-slumber, neither awake nor asleep, or at twilight or dusk. Or, like the magical mistletoe, growing half-way up a tree. It belongs to that place in between, he added. Oh, I thought. Inbetwixt.

The long view

Awake at 4.30 am this morning, I was thinking about my friend J., with whom I share my house. It struck me that, though our lifestyles are in many respects rather similar, in outlook there is a crucial difference. I likely have her wrong, but it seems to me she believes that the world is the world and does its own thing, some greater, external authority of which she is but a tiny part; therefore what she does has little impact, and, being a modest lass, she feels she has nae right to ‘rock the boat’. I, on the contrary, believe most strongly that the world is but one big shifting mass composed of individuals, like myself, born entirely equal – yes!!!– and autonomous. But interactive, like cells. ie. that we create our own worlds, by and large, have no rights over one another, and yet how we each conduct ourselves has a direct impact on the chaos as a whole. There you have it. I declare myself: anarchist at heart, existentialist in spirit, outwardly a moderate, and a rather lazy one at that…

Our difference is doubtless much shaped by geography. J. is a Scots quine, of the modest-mannered rural farmers and fisherfolk north of Aberdeen. Hardy sailors, they don’t rock boats by tradition. On the other hand, I moved around a good deal a a child. This ex-pat upbringing instills in one an acute sense of being an outsider. Naturally shy and introspective, you might think the necessary adaptibility of this tinker lifestyle would make me more outgoing. Not so. In fact, it may have had the opposite effect: I learned to carry my own private world with me, and now look at ‘the real world’, as it were, from inside out. I collide with folk from time to time, like those splendid amoebas, or cell mitosis in reverse, or as in one of those graphs with overlapping circles http://tinyurl.com/266lg2. Ideally, to find some wonderful things happening in the colourful spaces in between. Inbetwixt.

How we interact with the world seemed the theme of my Thursday evening too, spent at open studios on the Isle of Dogs. Trinity Buoy Wharf http://tinyurl.com/yr2lcm is poised in the darkest recesses of this splayed giant’s nether regions. Although these recesses are not so far from my house (I dwell a fraction closer to its centre; in, you might say, the hairier section of its belly), I had not visited before. Glad I did.

I found myself alone in the lighthouse, with the hypnotic Tibetan bells of Jem Finer’s Longplayer http://longplayer.org/. Undisturbed, reflective, looking out on a dark and windswept Thames, it was a magical half hour.

It brought me back to Baselitz and the cynicism of our age, so refreshingly lacking here. The idea of creating anything to play ‘without repetition’ until 2999 is wonderful. I confess to a little skepticism too, and doubt we – or the lighthouse at least – will still be standing. One can but hope. And work towards it anyway.

This positive, forward-looking spirit is carried throughout Trinity Buoy Wharf, which houses the studios of artists of various disiplines, many of whom are working with sustainable design. I was impressed by Mooch Design http://tinyurl.com/2c3k3d particularly their idea of the ‘growing plant installations’ for Marks Gate, sadly still awaiting funding. And in Studio 13 (damn my eyes, I forgot to take their name!) was a delightful Aladdin’s Cave – though most neatly ordered! – of glittering, glowing things: boxes and boxes of ‘rubbish’ – plastic, tin, whole shelves of riveters, waiting to be turned into bags and dresses, bits and bobs. Well done.

In the spirit of recycling, Jonathan Burton’s interesting wordpress blog led me on to http://www.picturesofwalls.com (thanks, Jonathan!) I’ve scarce been able to peel my eyes from it since (see http://tinyurl.com/2tl48l ). These sites can be more than entertainment, they make you connect with folk. They open your eyes. They make you realise the interconnectedness of things. And that aside, most folks are kind of wacky, so they’re a whole lot of fun.

“I have everything. I will always have everything”

Greed. Love. Redemption. Folly.

We learn something from everything we do, and last night this for me was The Soldier’s Tale at Wilton’s Music Hall. What a treat. Stravinsky, and the cast of Academy of St Martin in the Fields in a wonderful performance.

I wrote of this before. It felt so special to me, the idea of it, I had to see it. Sometimes you get a sense of the rightness of something that defies explanation. And apposite, but that is by the by. I was predisposed if you like, but still. It was all I hoped it would be - brilliant and painfully modern - why is it Stravinsky still feels so modern?

“I have everything. I will always have everything” : the Soldier’s is a Faustian tale, of wanting too much, and not recognising the truth worth of things. Until it is too late. My own moral lesson.

Stravinsky! – in the wonderful , dilapidated and beautiful Wilton’s. The world’s oldest surviving music hall, it has an atmosphere like no other place I know. The scent of mulled wine permeated its peeling halls. As for the show, the music, of course, was brilliant. The piece allows the musicians to really engage in the action, for once, rather than play as blind accompaniment from their usual spot in the orchestra pit, which I always think is a shame. Tiny, spirited Agnes Vandrepote’s antics were a pleasure to watch – bringing to mind those wide-eyed and comical rouge-cheeked Petrushkas. But I was most impressed by Anthony Marwood who both acted and played the violin (rather than just mime the playing, as is, I understand, how the role is usually performed). He was fine. And his soft, reserved, English, bemused, and rather First World War-looking features fitted him to it perfectly.

So nice to see such a performance that managed to be adult, intelligent, and wonderfully frisky at the same time. But then that is Stravinsky all over. What a joy.

Stravinsky – and Ramuz, the novelist with whom he wrote the piece in 1917 – had the idea for a small travelling theatre, which would work within the restrictions – and dislocations – of war. I would love to have seen this. Stravinsky was in Switzerland at the time, and cushioned from the actual horrors of the Front but, like bullets ricocheting, its impact penetrated society at large. Like so many others, I have a fascination with the Great War, the unparalleled horrors of which threw up such an extraordinarily rich range of human emotion. It had a huge creative impact on the arts. A ‘fertile breeding ground’ is entirely the wrong phrase to use in the context of war, which breeds only worms, but there is no doubt that for men, hurtled through experiences no one should face, and living on their fingertips, such heightened emotion can generate much creativity. Equally, it can numb. What it won’t do, I believe, is leave one untouched. (And if it does, then we are not human!) And therein, it occurs to me, may lie man’s fiendish proclivity for war: perhaps it is simply his need to really feel, to really engage with life. And what is Art but our way of expressing what it means to us to be alive?

Getting on the Banksy wagon

East End Life, my local council’s paper, last week published a short piece on the artist Banksy asking, what do you say, should he be cleaned up? Having first declared that his work was, like any other grafitti, vandalism, a crime, and to be painted over, it now seems Tower Hamlets are getting cold feet (and potentially fuller coffers?*) in light of the fact that his work is now selling in the hundreds of thousands. For prices as artificially inflated as the more ‘conventional’ studio artists in fact. Banksy’s doing quite nicely for himself. His latest, on the walls of the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, was apparently agreed with the property owners of the Club beforehand, by his ‘PR agent’ no less. http://tinyurl.com/2soqf6 (And, if I’m not mistaken, one appears, quite prominently, in the newly-released film of Monica Ali’s book, Brick Lane. Hmmn. Royalties? I wonder.) Now, now, Banksy, are you selling out?

Banksy’s work is of course well known round the East End; his work ‘litters’ the back streets where I live. Not only his of course, there’s a whole host of grafitti: fine, clumsy, raw, funny, disrespectful, obvious, off-beam – and some too self-consciously ‘cool’ for words. (Check out, for example, Son of Pepys’ terrific Street Art photos on Flickr (http://tinyurl.com/2sy33w.) As well as, along Brick Lane for example, the occasional little figurine and such attached to the wall. I have my own favourite pieces. And I still recall the impact of ETA’s Snoopy – with bloodied pickaxe – I came across some 15 years ago, suddenly, at night, on a dark wall in the Basque country. Shocking. Brilliant. Resonant. But then I’ve always loved grafitti, ever since, as a child of six, I was taken to the Tower and saw the carved inscriptions – in fascinating antique letter-forms – of those there imprisoned, whose subsequent too-short histories lent such poignancy to their scribblings. Protest and survive? Sadly, not always.

The emotional potency of graffiti was brought home to me two years later, when (with a great sense of daring for such a shy child) I stood beside the drinking-fountain at playtime and wrote ‘SEX’ on the wall. Like uttering one’s first swear word – which I’d earlier done and held my breath, waiting for the sky to fall in – something in this small act was so powerfully charged. My wee crime was, unfortunately, overseen by my ‘best friend’, and my lame (though rather clever, so I’d thought, at the time) attempt to pass it off: ‘no, honest! it’s Latin, for Six.’ didn’t hold, and quite rightly. But for two long, fearful, weeks, the vindictive bint blackmailed me into doing her maths homework with the threat that she’d tell. Until at last I grew tired of this and said, ok, you go right ahead. She didn’t of course. But the experience taught me some valuable early lessons: 1. even ‘friends’ aren’t always to be trusted, 2. don’t give in to blackmail, esp. if it involves figures. And, oh yes, 3. don’t do crap things you’re afraid to own up to.

…

At present there are piles of russet and olive leaves ‘littering’ our grey inner-city streets. They frisk about in the wind, and look and sound beautiful. T’is the season. Every other morning for the past week, I have been disturbed by the noise of what sounds to me like a very sick car being revved, and revved repeatedly, for the best part of an hour. One morning, thinking, ‘right, mate, you are bang out of order’ (mostly because I like the expression), I jerked open the front door fully intending to go over and give him a piece of my mind, only to find that things were in fact very much ‘in order’. That it was no car at all but some chap, hired by TH council in its wisdom to dispose of the nuisance leaves with a great vacuum cleaner-type thing. Now, really, I ask you!, how are these leaves, playfully frisking about, more disturbing than that racket? There is pleasure in the sound of sweeping brushes. And none at all in this. As for its carbon footprint, dear Tower Hamlets – my newly fashionably ‘green’ council? This seems a ludicrous example of technology for its own sake. Tsk! The world on its head.

I will complain to the council. Of course. ‘This is not what I pay my tax money for’ etc. For them to worry unnecessarily about so-called ‘litter’, when there are far more serious concerns to do with the ills and impotency of inner city living in one of the poorest boroughs in the country? Protest and survive? Banksy’s got a great eye for the absurd. Grafitti is just one means of protest; I am not sure it ever brings about change. But it is a more creative (and potentially lucrative, it seems) way of venting frustrations or expressing one’s sense of the ridiculous than sticking needles in your arms or smashing in car windows, some of the alternatives round here. As for complaining to the council, perhaps if I was earning as much as Banksy presumably now is, TH might pay attention. We’ll see. So keep it up, Banksy. And viva la revolucion!

*to quote the Beeb: ‘A spokeswoman for Tower Hamlets Council said it had not thought of selling the potentially valuable artwork to help raise money for council services, but did not rule out such action being considered in the future.’

…

Update, 12 January.

Back on Pollard Street again. Made me laugh, the new addition. Nice one, Mister Banks.

The Psychopathology of everyday life

This morning a funny thing happened on my way to the kettle. A brown envelope was pushed through my door. What can this be? I wondered, and picked it up. Inside was a flyer for Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale, soon to be shown at the old music hall just around the corner. Wilton’s is an extraordinary space, and of course Stravinsky is Stravinsky.

But more extraordinary still is that just yesterday I was looking at this same flyer, which has been sitting on my mantelpiece for more than a year. There was something so romantically alluring in the picture of the handsome violinist in his WW1 uniform, and the Faustian plot, that I had propped it up there, very much wanting to see the show. But the performance came and went, and I missed it through simple lack of organising myself to see it, though I thought of it nearly every day, yet something always stopped me taking action. A Freudian slip (or just bollocks!), you might say. For it was one of those events that strike a chord in your brain: something about it seemed magical, as though the show were intended for me. And I missed it.

Reading Freud recently (http://tinyurl.com/ynpnl) on the mental omission of things which hold a significance for you was interesting in this respect. Why had I missed out on something I wanted so much? This morning, not half an hour before receiving the new flyer, I was reading an excerpt from Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by the brilliant Oliver Sacks (http://tinyurl.com/ynpnls) – about memory loss, love and music. Which had led on to thinking again about Freud and how we might subconsciously jeopardise what is important to us.

Double jeopardy. Yesterday, aching over the perceived diminishing of a new and magical friendship with someone, only recent but one quickly grown very dear to me, I was looking at the flyer again, with the usual self-recriminations one has in these moods, about self-inflicted loss and missed opportunities: See? even this! if you’d only… and, another thing you screwed up! When it could have given such pleasure…

The flyer of this morning is in word and image the same as the one on my mantelpiece, except that the concert dates are a year apart. Doubtless I pay too much attention to magic in life: this coincidence is surely a simple case of a money-saving reprint, its producers capitalising on something that, presumably, was a success the first time round. But for me, in the circumstances of my current sense of loss, it felt like a magical moment. It was as if I were being given a second chance to correct something I screwed up first time round.

One doesn’t always get second chances, especially in matters of love and friendship, whatever we whist. One can but hope. But leastways with The Soldier’s Tale, second time round, I can make sure I don’t miss the show.

Battlenotes

Just returned from Battle, and Bonfire. Some four centuries years later and they’re still burning the Guy.

Bonfire isn’t really about Guido Fawkes or any other anti-establishment rebel (however odd, yet it remains pertinent as a symbol of religious and socio-political intolerance – on all sides). Battle Bonfire felt extra special for taking place on the actual soggy ground where, even further back in England’s history than Guy, one Guillaume gave our Harold a proper poke in the eye with a very sharp stick and then nicked his crown. And doubtless on the eve of that battle also, as last night, fires were burnt and flaming torches were carried and silhouettes loomed in the darkness. It was, for me, an evocative scene.

No, Guy Fawkes’ Night is not really about history. It is about that thing within us which thrills to the sight of Bonfire, thrills to the great glorious technicolour crackers whizzing and spluttering in the sky. They look like sea anemones, their trails of smoke like giant ghostly corals. Sometimes I am so awed by them, I can’t breathe. Whoever invented the ones which explode and dart sharp sideways with a screeching wheezing noise – like giant silver spermatazoa lighting up the sky, I take my bobble hat off to him. What a swell (and most brilliantly existential) job.

I forgot to take my camera with me, darn it. Not that it could ever do justice to the sensations of being there. My mobile camera gives a dismal picture. But oh lordy, how pleased was I, to find, fuzzy or not, I had captured these little musical notes falling from the sky.

Our battles, real or imagined, can be tough going. Fireworks are brilliant, like impetuous little souls; for one short luminous moment they propel you into childhood again; you marvel at the magic at the world, and everything feels ok. For our own little silver spermatazoa, life is one brief flare before we are plunged again into eternal darkness. Would that we could all shine so brilliantly before our own light is extinguished.

Grandpa’s painting

Been on holiday in the Orne. Well, holiday is perhaps a misnomer for I was scarce sitting around idly lapping up the sun. Instead I was figuring stuff. My ‘future’ – to be precise. In a mentally ‘hands-off’ sort of way, you understand, the leap-before-you-look type that is so necessary and refreshing sometimes. While the actual hands were getting covered with muddle, and nettle stings, in helping my folks knock their orchard into shape, creating a potager out of a bare patch of fresh-ploughed soil. And contemplating the possible conversion of a tiny dilapidation into a retreat for myself, on the strength of a handful of coppers and callouses. Hope is a powerful tool.

Marvellous to get out into the fresh air and the sun, to graft till one’s muscles are sore. I don’t think much to the virtual life, truth be told. Too physical a person. I want fresh, sharp, scented, air.

I tried not to think while I was in the Orne. Scarce looked at a painting or book all the while. And, a touch worryingly, perhaps, I did nae mind at all. Living by a more natural calendar, falling into bed in (mostly) early evening and (mostly, again) rising at soon after dawn, was just splendid. Waking hours were spent out of doors. Urban sophistication? I scarce missed it at all.

So it made me think of the role culture plays in our lives, in mine, when one evening we sat listening to Guy Derosier’s excellent Riviera de Haiti. Such a fine voice and evocative music. It didn’t jar with our surroundings at all, which was, that evening, steady rain and the smell of the cow sheds. Though it brought a great wave of nostalgia from the folks for the West Indies of the ’60s. It made me think about how we wrap up our lives, our culture, our memories, carting them with us wherever we go.

We all find our own culture. It all fits in.

In my room hung a painting by my grandpa. By the time I knew them, the old folks, they seldom went out. But in their time they’d enjoyed Culture as much as the next Surrey-dwelling gentlefolk. The Ballet. A Book at Bedtime. Exhibitions – the Impressionists and such. Niceness. This bad painting gives me pleasure. I smile, to think of George labouring at it – copying it, I imagine from some old postcard. Look at the faces of the girls in the background! The mischievous old boy was having a laugh.

As was the maker of this other bit of ‘art’, which I stumbled across in the Orne, outside a cemetery of a nearby village.

A Chacun Sa Forme, the sign said. And ain’t that the truth. Joy to it.

Art & atrocity: the Chessboard Killer

Last Friday, glancing through one of the many free ‘news’-papers that litter our public transport, a short article caught my eye: ‘Chessboard killer’ in court for 49 murders.

It concerned 33-year old Alexander Pichushkin, who over a five year period had done in this many people (he claims 63) in the Bitsevsky Park district of Moscow’s southern suburbs.

The strapline, of course, caught my attention. And the young man’s face – photographed through the hatch of his cell door – brutal, introspective, haunting. A great slavic bruise of a face, such Soutine might have painted.

There was poetry in the method with which he pursued his madness. The germ of an idea for a story, or a composition, Ugh! Poetry?! But yes. Pichushkin – or as he was reported – was like some character straight out of Dostoevsky:

‘For me, a life without murder is like a life without food,’

Pichushkin’s strategy, which he was rapidly fulfilling, was to tag the date of a murder he’d committed to each square of a (drawn) chessboard, with the intention of completing the full set. He apparently felt he was doing his victims a favour:

‘I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world.’

Not, so State psychiatric tests conducted before bringing him to trial concluded, the words of an insane man.

Preserve us. What is then insane?

His story got me to thinking about our ‘coping mechanisms’, the way in which we all order our lives, to try to make sense of the chaos. In latching his killer instincts to chess – the game requires a cool head, an ability to think ahead, strategy, not characteristics one usually equates with killers – he was displaying creativity of a sort. A sort gone insanely wrong.

Who knows, with a consciousness as intense as his, Pichushkin might otherwise have found a more fulfilling life as an artist. Last week too I was at the Royal Academy’s Baselitz, who, along with those other artists on which he drew, Goya, Dix – Soutine, if you like, shared a fascination with probing into the recesses of death. Paintings of War. Carcases. Dismemberment. Physical morbidity. Or, as with Munch, an emotional, claustrophobic morbidity. This and Pichushkin made me think –

– of three days I once spent in the Imperial War Museum sifting through stacks of photographs – enormous plates ! – of the First World War. The mudfields of the Somme. There was more than horrifying in these images. It was gutting. Yet even so, there was no doubt either that many of these images were also beautiful.

And that the photographers knew it too.

Death, far as the eye can see. Chanced on, in all its tragic horror; rearranged in some cases, to suit the composition, the artist’s eye editing and rearranging Death. Of those war photographs, the most telling, most disturbing, were those which could not have possibly been staged: in particular the terrified look in the eye of an ambulance-horse as it struggled, belly deep in mud, through a corpse-strewn crater.

This feels wrong. For Christ’s sake, we should say, suffering is not beautiful! But centuries of Crucifixions – in all their twisted, glamorised, sanitised and prurient glory – give the lie to that. As some of them are very beautiful indeed.

There is an intense and uneasy, and longstanding, relationship between art and atrocity. Perhaps we have no right to work with such images. To distort the suffering of others for our own ends. But we do. We look on, albeit between our fingers. Shocked. Horrified. Titillated. Protesting. Such violence is both confirmation and denial of our own mortality. Always that sense of ‘there but for fortune go I’. But one is never quite sure if that feeling is humility – or just sheer relief.

Atrocity sits uncomfortably on our polite gallery and drawing-room walls. It is not ‘nice’ but it is certainly traditional. The use of such images is a vexed moral question, and the reason for it could be debated endlessly. But, while I am not promoting the idea of art as catharsis, whatever the reasons for our preoccupation with violence, one thing is certain. Such preoccupations are so much more constructively worked out on canvas and words than in life.

Baselitz

Yesterday evening to the launch of Baselitz at the RA. I have mixed views of this man’s work. He brings to mind Oscar in The Tin Drum, screaming and screaming. Part of you feels sorry for the little fella. He’s a curiosity. You watch his antics; you want to poke and prod him, to see what all the fuss is about. To join in maybe. But your other reaction is that of the weary grown-up: Come on now! Stop making all that fuss! You soon grow tired of the noise and the mischief making.

Where Baselitz interests me is where the art he often draws on interests me. He is visceral, as Dix, Munch, Goya are visceral. His work is – sometimes – like looking at an open wound. In your own flesh. It is both repellent and thrilling at once: oh! breathe! is that your blood and bones you see in there?! But we are not sure we want to look for long. It makes us feel queasy.

Mostly Baselitz makes me take the more adult response. I want him to ‘grow up’, to stop crying out so persistently for attention. I am not quite sure this is entirely his ‘fault’. The age we live in is a very self-centred (and attention-seeking) one, and the art market is – like the rest – a vastly over-competitive world. Painting is big business. The rewards of success are great. And Time has speeded up to the point where we are now afraid to waste too much of it in labouring long over our work: we hear the wingéd chariot close on our heels. We watch as younger, faster, competitors overtake us. But Art is not a race. There is no ‘finish line’. And the over-exposure of our success makes one’s head giddy.

As does lack of air. Munch, in this respect, makes me claustrophobic. Yes, I empathise, I feel all those emotions. He examines them with the intense eye of the microbiologist. And it needed to be done. But oh lord! it’s like some long tedious romantic argument, one that’s never going to get resolved. Please let’s open the window and let in the fresh air.

But I feel Munch, unlike Baselitz, was not cynical, was not setting out to shock, and doesn’t rely on high-impact for effect. One can look at his work for longer. I might be doing Baselitz a disservice, but looking at these canvases yesterday (their crudeness moderated and made more palatable by tight neat wooden frames!) I saw little to persuade me otherwise. I’m not saying I didn’t ‘like’ them (I’ve always had a strong stomach) but I disagree with Nicholas Serota who, in his speech, said that great art was great not least because it shocked.

No. Great art is great because in it the artist reaches far beyond the level of his own preoccupations and self-interest to create works with an enormous, universal, relevance. Goya – clearly an influence on Baselitz, and references to his work were everywhere – was one. He can illustrate specifics, as in his Disasters of War, but its scope is monumental. This is something not easily done. And however much a ‘protest’ the Disasters of War might have been, it doesn’t give one the sense of being done just ‘to shock’.

Baselitz is an interesting fella, and certainly a snazzy dresser. The Germany he came to adulthood in was one of ‘Don’t mention the War’. It is not surprising that his reaction to it should be that of the stifled teenager. It is not surprising that he should feel appalled by what his countryfolk had done. It is not surprising that this should come into his work. To want to turn the war back in their faces with a ‘Fuck You’ stance is almost inevitable. And surely this was felt by many.

In my view the Holocaust – and the disasters of our war – was responsible for more than extinguishing the lives of masses of innocent people, Jewish or otherwise. It also extinguished in us for ever our sense of rightness, our sense of permanence, our sense of future. We are human, animal, no longer immortal beings in God’s image. We are grotesque. We are fallible. We are bloodied. We are devalued. Like living under a death-sentence, it made us self-interested. It made us cynical. We have looked inside ourselves and what we have seen is animal gore. If Baselitz touches on the war with his Dix-like references, his swastikas, his hounds, and his brutal woodsmen, he reaches much closer to it, unwittingly I think, in this ugly post-war horrified cynicism.

The limitless view

At Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower yesterday as part of the weekend’s Open House http://tinyurl.com/2mb2z7 From the 24th Floor, and high above the noise of the incessant Blackwall traffic, the views are spectacular. Built in ’streets’ just a single flat deep with enclosed walkways every third (?) floor, the flats have windows front and back, providing light and access to the constantly-shifting panorama of London spread before them.

Apart from this, and the already-period quaintness of the fittings (how soon a rosy-visioned ‘quaintness’ sets in, when we are removed, by time, choice or circumstance from a person, a place, or a situation), there was little to recommend the flats inside as living quarters: small, square and poky and, it seemed to me, rather unimaginative space. Not ideal for the families, many with small children, who are housed there.* In my view humans (and indeed all animals), as sensory active beings, are not at their best contained in small concrete boxes, stripped of all reference to the natural world. Our children especially, need light, fresh air, greenery and freedom to move.

95% of the building, our guide said, is still local authority housing (though on the strength of the Trellick redevelopment, this will probably soon change). Some of the local residents eyed us ‘Open Housers’ curiously as we traipsed through their home, and I was reminded, uncomfortably, of accounts of well-intentioned but wealthy Victorian do-gooders visiting London’s poorer districts. I wondered if they were all consulted, and how they felt about living there. It is all very well for us to patronise places, like tourists, to admire the architectural features, to take in the view. But great architecture must always meet the needs of the people who live in it. In the end, it is people who bring buildings to life.

Full marks, though, to Goldfinger for providing the light and the view. This is the building’s strength. We city-dwellers are too often hemmed, like rats in cages, into squared-off tower blocks too small for our comfort. Environment, our finances and, increasingly, governmental controls, restrict our movements (and thereby too often our sense of own freedom to take action), but at least, whatever our circumstances, rich or poor, our mind remains our own – and this can always expand into the limitless view.

*though I understand Goldfinger had great plans for a concierge system, and proper communal areas, thwarted for lack of funding – and vision – from his backers.

In the realm of the senses

My first, my strongest, my happiest and my worst memories are all SENSORY ones. For someone whose life is spent so much in the sphere of WORDS and IMAGES I find this curious.

My earliest memory is as a toddler, encountering (for the first time I suppose) a bed of tiny dark kittens, writhing and mewling over each other. And the awareness that (looking round to my mother for approval) – yes, I might touch! this animal loveliness. Great excitement, extending my fingers into that nest of glossy dark tabby fur and feeling it, squirming, soft and silky against my skin.

And from that same time – a family holiday to Waterford – playing among the rock-pools on the Irish coast, distracted by the little transparent shrimps moving in the tiny pools, the limpets clinging to the rocks, the smell and deliciously-icky slime of the seaweed, the brightness and warmth of the sun, the cool water lapping at my ankles. The photographs show me, pink and bare, chasing after my sister. But my memories are always of me in isolation.

And then a darker memory, but equally joyful, of being alone and idling at the outer side of the boundary wall of our front garden, that separated our home from those around. This wall was, to me, of magical Jack and the Beanstalk proportions, perhaps six foot in height, a dry stone wall of locally-quarried slate, charcoal in color and pleasingly cool and hard in texture. There was something thrilling about it, with its dangerously sharp edges that might cut a careless child’s head open (and on another later occasion, did), the activity I was engaged in – which was rolling abandoned spiders’ webs onto a matchstick (and marveling at this dolls’-house-sized grey candyfloss) – and of knowing I was out of range of the watchful eye of my father. But my memory, again, is one of isolation and utter concentration, of my activity, a total absorption in the senses.

I have always thought the senses to be an extraordinary thing. How our conscious experience of them works in isolation, our focus narrows, and one becomes aware of the taste of a object, and then, as our focus shifts, of the way it feels or looks. It is rare that we consciously experience many senses at one time, although in fact, like smell and taste, they are all intertwined. And the correlation between them is fascinating. That, for instance, colours have a sound (to me, lemon yellow is fine and high pitched, chestnut brown deep and resonant), and sounds have a taste or feel. Sex is one of the few occasions where, wonderfully, as an adult, one may totally immerse oneself in all the senses at once. But to immerse oneself in this way involves a stilling of the mind from active conscious thought, from fear, and from obstacle-course-building, which we are less equipped to do as adults, than as children, with their supreme ability to focus, and their heightened awareness of their own physicality. Like many things in life it seems the wrong way round. We are born ‘free’: keen, focussed, uncomplicated, marvellously sensory beings. As we grow we – particularly we city-dwelling folk – over-complicate and over-sensitize our lives, overload our senses until we become almost numb. In an ideal world our lives would become simpler the more we learned, our focus would grow keener, our sensory experiences more acute (enriched too by memory), and our enjoyment greater.

The realm of the senses is simple, unhurried, fertile, and magnificent. Joy to it.

Black as tar

  

I’ve a friend who is an astrophysicist, whose speciality is exploring black holes. On our first meeting, years ago, I said to him (we were attempting a foxtrot at the time) : hey, isn’t it kind of depressing? When he asked what on earth I meant I said: you spend your entire life working toward some breakthrough, see? And eventually…Eureka! You’ve cracked it! Brilliant! Now you can all go home. Only to find that that knowledge is quickly superseded by another discovery that the world IS flat after all. Unfazed by my muckle-mouthedness (kindly chap, and I suppose he comes across all sorts of alien life forms in his line of business), he just laughed. No no!, he said, knowledge is not static ! It is the most exciting thing in the world! Or words to that effect. I admired his perseverance, in dance as in life. I alternate myself between this thirst for knowledge and being struck by the utter pointlessness of the attempt. Being a somewhat modest lass, and acutely aware of our position as tiny specks in an inconceivably vast system, my feeling (half the time) is that we haven’t a hope in hell of ever beginning to understand it, as our ‘knowledge’ is only ever going to be on our terms and within our own very limited capacity for comprehension. So instead I am content (but only half the time, as I say) to sit, all Zen-like, hands folded quietly in lap, absorbing – much as Eliot’s Pole transmits – the overwhelming wondrousness of it all: through my hair and fingertips.

On 10th September Cassini sent back pictures from their fly-by of Saturn’s two-toned moon IAPETUS. http://tinyurl.com/2uj6m Wow. These are extraordinary images and no mistake. They awaken in me my changeling self who wants to run around shouting wheeeee! and tip the buckets over and find out everything going on there is to find out. CICLOPS’ press release which accompanied these images speaks of ‘the moon’s yin and yang – a white hemisphere resembling snow, and the other as black as tar.’

We overwhelm ourselves with science and technology, forging ahead without ever stopping to think WHY. Like children who build a go-cart, and then find themselves hurtling downhill at a speed over which they have no control (child-like, it’s no accident that one of the most over-used words on the internet is ‘awesome’). And then, when we have forged ahead and made our ‘discoveries’, we are stopped in our tracks by the immensity and sheer POETRY of it. This is what I love about all this. The language of it. We name our asteroids and galaxies after Greek gods (somehow so much more pleasing and memorable than NGC6992), and write about them, our hard-nosed scientists, in the language of Homer, Jules Verne, or Spock.

Still Life

Tom posted a twitter last night about the artist MARTIN KLIMAS: http://www.martin-klimas.de/ and – http://tinyurl.com/ytvgvz – about one work in particular.Tom has a mind like a jam sieve, one of those conical metal objects into which you heap the cooked fruit – containing pith and pulp and seeds and the tasty fleshy parts – and out comes a steady stream of pure crimson jelly juice. And he is generous with it too, skimming off and feeding me warm spoonfuls of the most nutritious tasty stuff.

Which reminds me, it is time to be out gathering those brambles, elders and sloes now weighing down our hedgerows. Joy.

There is something in this work by Klimas which strikes me as glorious and so 21st-century a way of looking at our world. He has taken an object, a simple, factory-made figurine of three hummingbirds round a honeysuckle – and to me the creation of such objects is in itself an extraordinary thing – and dropped it on the floor. (I think of the disapproval of countless women the world over to whom these mean much, treasures purchased and placed on top of their telly, to be endlessly dusted. Or ignored.) Photographing this (deliciously luridly painted) object at the very moment of breaking is a beautiful thing. In this split second – and this alchemical element of time and movement in art is specific to our age – these clay birds detach from their flowers and are forcibly hurled into life. Such is the magic of destruction and creation. That endless cycle, it’s never still at all.