Why do I not love thee well, when I am nuts on yon?

How many very beautiful objects can you think of? And how many very ugly ones? For objects read things, entities, items, doodahs, whatsits, whatever comes to mind as long as it is non-human - let's not get personal about this! Spend a couple of minutes on each and see what you come up with. Or see how long it takes to find three. Whatever suits. If you have the time to spare, do that now, before reading on.

Now I'll stick my neck out and suggest that you found the beautiful thingummyjigs much easier to come by. Further, I'll warrant that your characters for the ugly attribution are most likely to be works of art or architecture, and that your lovelies are natural objects or works of engineering. Of course, I'm on a hiding to nothing here, and your ugly customers could well be creatures of a nasty disposition or countenance or both, but then again, some of the nastiest are actually very beautiful - viruses, etc. And if I am wrong, I remain unrepentant.

No sooner had I posted my most recent effort on What is art? - The Blind Men and the Elephant than I decided to watch the first in the BBC 2's new Saturday evening series What is Beauty, which I had recorded. As I watched it began to occur to me that perhaps I should follow my art post with one on beauty, the two ideas being so intertwined. Almost synonymous, you might think. Even so, it might have got no further than the passing thought, had not two comment on the post suggested the same thing. And so I turned my thoughts more seriously towards such a post.


And almost the first thing that occurred to me was how very much easier it was (for me) to think of very beautiful objects than very ugly ones. Maybe it is a reflection of how privileged we are in the West, for ugly things and awful environments certainly abound in the world, but I still think that, taking the world as a whole, they are probably outnumbered by those we might designate as beautiful. I do recall a conversation with my first boss (a fill-in job between school and college), a disagreement about Darwin and his Origin of the Species. He had given an example of something or other, and I thoughtlessly replied (something like) Ah, but you're talking about a very beautiful flower!.
He came straight back with And do you know of any ugly ones? A silly, rather trivial remark to have stuck in the memory for such a length of time, especially when I can no longer recall the rest of the argument, but stuck it has, and it seems to have coloured my thinking to some extent. To such an extent, in fact, that at times I'm not even sure that there is ugly.
There is frightening, disturbing, alien, unattractive, repulsive, hideous and many another, some of them terms which seem synonymous with ugly, but about ugly I remain unconvinced. Think of a slum scene, for example. We would unhesitatingly call it ugly, though it might well be that its repulsiveness derives from the horrors associated with it, rather than from a purely visual effect. I think how there was a time when all these adjectives would have been applied to somewhere like The Lake District. No one then saw beauty in woods and mountains, not until the Romantic poets and others saw it first. Before that, anything that smacked of wilderness was a dark place of great danger to be avoided at all costs. Everything about it was hideous in the extreme. Of course, all these concepts are subjective as are, for example, colour: your magenta, viridian and rose madder are probably nothing like mine, though we shall never know for sure.

So what is this thing we call beauty? Or would it perhaps be easier to turn our attention first to ugliness? I had thought to do so, but in a sense maybe ugliness is just an absence of beauty the way darkness is not an attribute in itself but an absence of light. Matthew Collins, the presenter of What is Beauty, detailed what he saw as different forms of beauty. He picked out the beauty of nature, of people (are they not part of nature?), light, spontaneity, the beauty of Contemporary Art galleries (an interesting theory of his own was that where once the exhibits in a gallery were beautiful and would special-up their environment, now they have no need of beauty and so all over the country the most stunningly beautiful galleries are being provided to special-up the works!) and others.

I think I see it more simply. First of all, it seems likely that beauty as we perceive it - all beauty - is an off-shoot of the sexual drive. As such it would have bestowed great evolutionary benefit by encouraging the passing on of good genes. The degree to which the emotions associated with the perception of beauty became applied, first to artefacts and symbols (most probably) and later to objects of other kinds would have been dependent on our developing intellect, as was - and is - the case with all the emotions. It is intellect that differentiates and decides which emotion is felt: a small man punches me and the emotion I feel is anger; a man bigger than me hits me and what I feel is fear. There is also a cultural element, of course.

It does seem that there are certain configurations of line that are perceived by our brains as inherently beautiful and others that have a negative charge. In my art school days a number of us were commissioned to paint some murals in a large mental hospital. One student produced a scene of boats on a beach. A psychiatrist came each day to check that there were no masts crossing the horizon - a configuration, he maintained, that would have had a negative effect on the mental stability of some of his patients. It is likely that other configurations, of shape, colour, proportion, texture and so forth, have their own contributions to make in one direction or the other.

Beyond these there are attributes that are seen as inherently beautiful, symmetry being an important one. Again, a symmetrical face is often a pointer for good genes. (I would like to point out here that my markedly asymmetrical head is the exception that proves the rule.) Repetition - as in the reiterations of a fractal, in a simple repeating pattern or a texture - is another.

---

My apologies for leaving out details of the images. In order of appearance, they are:-

A Francis Bacon portrait.
The Rape by Magritte.
Two holiday snaps of Norway,
The Agony in the Garden by Giovanni Bellini
and a work by Odilon Redon.

The Blind Men and the Elephant.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, "Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
" 'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"


Is art, do you think, like love: something that we recognise for what it is when we run into it, but deucedly hard to define? Or is it more like religion: we know, within limits, what it is, and what it is supposed to do, but not where it comes from - except that it has something to do with the very oldest part of our brain and its now long-forgotten, mystic past?

I ask the questions after reading an article by Richard Eyre in which he addresses these questions. Or to speak more accurately, he recently gave a speech at the opening of a new theatre at The Cheltenham Ladies College, an edited version of which was published in The Independent. Understandably, the first half of his speech - or at least, the edited version of it - was devoted to the theatre and was in large part autobiographical. But then he weighed in with: Why do we need theatre? In fact, why do we need the arts? and a little later: But what do we mean by "art"? A simple enough question, one which we perhaps should ask ourselves with some regularity. He then proceeded to outline his definition and began to carry me along with him, mentally nodding in assent at the points he was raising.

First of all, though, what it is like: passionate, complex, mysterious, thrilling; and then what it does: tells us the truth about ourselves, helps us to fit the disparate pieces of the world together, helps us to try to make form out of chaos; and then, finally, what it must and must not be: has to be ambitious, not satisfied with wanting to please, has to struggle against mediocrity, aspire to be excellent, must have form, there has to be complexity, there must be mystery, must be serious, can't be trivial,there has to be an element of pleasure, of sensual enjoyment (though, unusually, there was no actual mention of beauty), there has to be a moral sense...

Nothing there to disagree with, but as I read on, I found my mental nods turning to frowns of concern. I was reading some sort of creed, it was becoming too prescriptive. Now, I'm adding a can't of my own: for me, art cannot be prescriptive. But I still had a problem: I agreed with the individual points he was making (mostly), but not in the context in which he was making them. Not in answer to the question What is art? For me, he was answering some other question. He seemed more on the right track, though, when he began to speak of art as something that gives form to life and to the world in which we live. And then again when he credited it with the ability to give the world and its threats and bullying ways a human scale. So much in politics, technology, science and human relationships is mega these days, and seemingly beyond our emotional resources to tackle. Art can step in at that point. By its fruits shall you know it. But art is a very complex elephant indeed, with many trunks and tusks and tails etc, and it is his use of the imperative that worries me. Too many musts. If he had said art must be or do at least one of these... but the implication was that it had to be comprehensive.

And then somewhere into my thinking there floated the matter of Sir Andrew Motion and his poem An Equal Voice, written and published (in The Guardian) as a tribute to the war veterans for Armistice Day. The poem was well received until Ben Shephard, who had spent ten years collecting the reminiscences of veterans for his book A War of Nerves accused Motion of plagiarism, of having lifted 17 passages from his book and stitched them together to produce his poem.

The following were given as an example:-

First, this from A War of Nerves:
"War from behind the lines is a dizzying jumble. Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust reports..."
"marching men with grimy faces and shining eyes..."
"bloody clothes and leggings lying outside the door of a field hospital..."
"I have been in the front line so long, seen many things..."

Then this from Andrew Motion's An Equal Voice:
"War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble. Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust reports..."
"marching men with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes..."
"bloody clothes and leggings outside the canvas door of a field hospital..."
"I have been away too long and seen too many things..."

Andrew Motion's reply was that "all real artists are magpies". Be that as it may, it did open up in my mind the whole question of found art and how it is reconciled with whatever definition, explicit or implicit, you have for the act of art-making and its outcomes. Of course, we could say the same for any one of scores, perhaps hundreds, of art's various genres. If, with Richard Eyre, you believe that art to be art must demonstrate a mastery of some supreme skill, then you may have to rule out found art. Unless you are prepared to argue that the ability to see a poem in, say, a passage of prose, is sufficient skill in itself.

There is, I believe, nothing to beat going back to basics at such times, and for me basics often means child art or primitive art. I don't believe I have ever met a child who was worried about what art was for. The purpose of pretty much every other man-made thing in the universe worries them - but not art. So I go back to Raymond. I do believe I have blogged about Raymond before - though I may have called him by a different name. Raymond, though, was his name.. Raymond was eight years old, or thereabouts, backward (illiterate), but bright. He was in what these days we would call the Special Needs class, but was then known as the Remedial class. I was a brand new teacher fresh out of college, the last person on the staff who should have been given that group (because the least experienced), but the only one to volunteer. By such considerations are the fates of the innocent decided. It was a Friday morning (I think!) and our first lesson was science. I had to introduce them to the latest theory about how the universe came into being - not what you're thinking, for back then it was Continuous Creation. (A pupil once asked me if I was alive in the Stone Age. More than that: I go back to before The Big Bang!) The lesson concluded and it was time to troop into the hall for assembly. There the head gave us all the Creation of the world from The Book of Genesis. Raymond was becoming distressed. Following on from assembly we had a short choosing period. Raymond asked if he could have two large sheets of drawing paper. I agreed. He taped them together, then turned them over and began to paint. He didn't have long, didn't need long. Very soon he had a fantastic landscape covering the sheets. There were mountains, rivers, a valley, trees, a sun in the sky, stars - and two moons. In the valley were two figures, a small figure pointing up at one of the moons and a large figure looming over him and with his arm stretched out towards him, palm uppermost. His distress was evaporating markedly as he worked.

Tell me about it, I said. The little man, I was told, was Adam. He was pointing at one of the moons. (The Russians had, only a day or two before, launched their first Sputnik.) Adam was saying to God: See, I put that one up there! So I asked him what God had to say to that and was told: He said, "And I just made this little spider. Now beat that!" The consensus of opinion on the staff and elsewhere was that the dialogue could not have been Raymond's own. He had probably heard it somewhere. At home, maybe. Or at church. He'd picked it up somewhere. Yes, he probably had, but in my book he had processed it and made it his own. Yes, all true artists are magpies, but it's what you do with the stolen milk bottle tops that counts - and that may depend on why you stole them in the first place.

Have I answered the question? Have I defined what is art? No, I don't believe I have - and I'm not sure that I could, not to my own satisfaction. I have simply given an example of what I believe to have been a piece of art by anyone's standard, adult or child.

The Glass Room

When Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall won this year's Booker Prize, by all accounts so convincingly and deservedly (for I have not yet read it, though I am about to put that right), there arose a persistent rumour that the judges had unofficially placed Simon Mawer's Glass Room in second place. It caused some commentators to raise again the question of whether it wouldn't be better in future to split the prize money in to three and award first, second and third prizes. (And interestingly enough, I was reading only a couple of days ago that the French equivalent to our Booker awards the winner a cheque for a measly ten euro. The award is no less coveted, it seems.)

It so happens that I had The Glass Room in my to read pile and took it with me recently for my holiday reading. It's a cliche I know, but I genuinely could not put it down - not for long at any rate.

The focus for the story is pre-war Czechoslovakia, though it begins in Venice where Liesel and Viktor Landauer (of Landauer car fame and wealth) are on honeymoon and where they meet and become friendly with a stranger by the name of von Abt, who proves to be an internationally regarded architect. Viktor suggests that von Abt might like to design a house for them. The suggestion excites von Abt and both men become enthused by his idea of a house of the future. "Ever since man came out of the cave he has been building caves around him, he cried. Building caves! But I wish to take man out of the cave and float him in the air. I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit."

Glass space, Glassraum. It was the first time Liesel had heard the expression..

As you might have guessed, the house becomes the hub of the story. There was such a house, though how much of the story is based upon the people and events associated with it, is difficult to guess. In the story the house becomes a metaphor, indeed a series of shifting metaphors. At first it stands for the optimism with which the story's three main protagonists regard the future. The two men particularly, have no doubt that the new style of house will breed a new way of thinking and living. The house will prove to be Abt's great masterpiece with travertine floors and an internal wall of onyx in a room composed entirely of glass. In such a house the way a man thinks and lives will become more open and transparent, more honest, more worthy.

By the time the plans arrive Liesel is pregnant. Viktor explains them to his wife: "He wants to build a steel frame. Apparently there will be no load-bearing walls at all, just the whole thing hung on a steel frame. And where the uprights pass through the interior he is proposing to clad them in chrome. Gladzsend, he calls it. Shining. Hard steel rendered as translucent as water." Viktor pulls a letter from his pocket and reads: "Steel will be as translucent as water. Light will be as solid as walls and walls as transparent as air." But before the baby is born Viktor is having an affair with a woman called Kata whom he met by chance in a park, she asking him for a light.

So where does that leave the great metaphor which is the house? There is irony now in talk of honesty, transparency and openness. Over the course of the story the house will become a metaphor for other concepts (tranquility, illusion, dream), for these are the dark days before W.W.II, and although Liesel is Aryan, Viktor is Jewish and they have to flee, leaving the house which has come to mean so much to them. Before that moment arrives however, the pressure of external events causes Kata to be taken on to look after the young child, much against the wishes of Viktor who has considerable anxieties about the move. However, Viktor arranging papers for her to allow her to accompany them, initially to Switzerland. Sadly, she does not make it across the border.

There follows a confused period in which the house is first confiscated and then changes hands and purpose several times. For a while the Nazis have it for their own particular brand of research - into racial characteristics. It becomes a clinic and a refuge for handicapped children. Viktor's one time chauffeur becomes a self-appointed janitor with eyes on the black market. Then comes the cold war and, eventually, the collapse of Communism clearing the way for the return of the family - but a very changed family. Doctor Tomas, who had run the clinic, had had a firm belief that the past is an illusion. He had also shared (unofficially) the glass room with a girl called Zdenka, letting her hold her dance classes there, in return for which she would dance for him, and for him alone, each evening. Tomas had found it very disturbing that the Glass Room possessed a past, that it had not always been this sterile gymnasium, this fish tank in which Zdenka danced for him, this room of glass and quiet." Dr Tomas had maintained that there is no such thing as time. Past and future are both illusions. There is only a continuous present.

The author includes an Afterword, which for me threw further light on the metaphor and on his thinking, though I think I would have preferred to read it first. I am therefore including it, almost entire. He writes:-

The title of this book, The Glass Room, needs some explanation.It is, as is clear, a translation of the original German - Der Glasraum. Raum is, of course, "room". Yet this is not the room of English, the Zimmer of our holidays, with double bed, wardrobe and writing desk beneath a print of some precipitous Alpine valley. Within the confines of the Germanic "room" there is room for so much more. Raum is an expansive word. It is spacious, vague, precise, conceptual, literal, all those things. From the capacity of the coffee cup in one's hand, to the room one is sitting in to sip from it, to the district of the city in which the cafe itself stands, to the very void above our heads, outer space, der Weltraum. There is room to move in raum.

So: The Glass Space, perhaps; or The Glass Volume; or The Glass Zone. whichever way you please. Poetry is what is lost in translation, as Robert Frost so memorably said. So we do our best with this sorry and thankless task, aware that we will be condemned for trying and condemned for not trying. Take it as you please: The Glass Room; der Glasraum.

So have I any quibbles, regrets, carping comments? Well, certainly nothing that is more than nit-picking. There was not much in the way of character development that I could see, and that is something I look for in a novel, but it is something for which this particular story offers very little in the way of opportunity. People disappear for years and come back changed, it is true, but the change occurs off stage, not in front of the reader. There is, though, one exception: you might say that the house, der Glasraum, is the chief protagonist, and we do watch its character change and develop considerably.

Haiku (somewhat calmer) moments from the deep.

Sea swell and gentle roll,
but in the on-board swimming pool,
a giant tsunami.

From the sea, the sun's glare.
The wake of an inflatable
drives shards of darkness to its heart.

Small tugs nudge a massive vessel
into leaving its safe haven
for the open sea.

Thick smoke to starboard...
as if the crew had need
to simulate disaster!

Night orchard now, the sea's
white blossoms brush the windows.
Unseen branches jar the glass.

White horses crest the waves.
Behind them, riderless,
dark troughs for chariots.

Inclement weather.
Lifeboat drill is held indoors.
Boat 2 is in the lounge.

A midnight roll.
My tumbler and its contents
have joined me in the bed.

Another swell, but this one
merely shifts the distribution
of my weight from shoe to shoe.

In mimicry of pilot fish
gulls' shadows swim before
dark porpoise-shapes.

Deafening, the noise
a cable makes. For sure
an anchor chain could make no more.

Memorable

Well, finally I did disappear (see Going, going, gone 20/10/09). We disappeared, Doreen and I, more in the way we had hoped and less in the way that I'd feared. We had, long ago, I can now reveal, booked ourselves on a cruise to coincide with the refurbishing and alterations to chez nous. The reason that I would not speak of it before was a fear amounting almost to a certainty that it would not take place. Almost from the time we booked it, we each had a series of health issues any one of wish could have put the kibosh on the holiday. I told myself it would not happen ad quietly hoped that it would. Other events overtook us which began to seem like omens. And then a few days before we were due to sail, the ship, docking in Manhattan, had a disagreement with a concrete bollard and came off second-best. The trip seemed off, then on, then off and eventually on but delayed a day or two. It was in fact delayed two days

And so finally we left the house to the tender mercies of the decorators, electricians and others, to make our way to Southampton, to the Saga Ruby. We had cruised before , but on her sister ship, the Saga Rose. Two very rough days in the channel and across the Bay of Biscay left us wondering what perversity in our natures had led us to choose to cross Biscay at the end of October. (A word of advise: don't.) On the second day we ordered toast and coffee from room service. The ship decided at that point to do a double skip sideways. The tray sailed through the air and crashed to the floor. It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase half a cup of coffee. Not one piece of crockery escaped. The wind by then was gale force 8/9.

As if to compensate us for the rigours of those two days, The Mediterranean gave us ten glorious days of sunshine and cloudless skies, at times a little too hot.

At Cadiz we were taken to a winery and treated to a display of genuine Flamenco Dancing. The dancing was breathtaking. Partly, no doubt, because we were inches from the stage and had just finished the first tasting. I took numerous photographs - you can imaging - which no doubt would not have been technically brilliant, though far superior to those I took after the second tasting. Unfortunately, the memory card developed a fault (nothing to do with the tasting, I assure you!) and I have been unable to access them. Does any good soul out there know of a method to retrieve such images?

The sting was in the tail, though: returning across Biscay, the wind a mere force 7, but the sea feeling much rougher than the previous 8/9, Doreen was quite ill and had to spend all of Tuesday in bed. The final (nearly!) "highlight" came at 4 am when we were hit by a huge wave (shades of Hokusai!) which lifted the bows of the ship (where, as it so happened, yours truly was sleeping), stopping it dead in its tracks and doing - we were told - a great deal of damage around the ship. Not, though, to yours truly, the worst that happened to us was that a larg(ish) and very heavy safe mounted just below eye-level in one of the wardrobes crashed through the doors of said wardrobe and landed upside down inches from the foot of my bed - and feet, of course! It quite woke me up.

Other highlights were meeting up with the Saga Rose on its last journey and a day of celebrations beginning with a church service, led by Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and culminating in a spectacular firework display.

We made it home on Wednesday. The workmen had long gone, the boxes and the innumerable layers of dust were undisturbed. For the most part they remain so. I still feel like a monk, but now in a cardboard cell.

Of course there were others, not least the gastronomic delights, the chef's ice sculptures (shown in accompanying photographs - no more than snaps, really)and the various ports of call.


What a lovely homecoming, though, to discover that so many of you had thought it worthwhile to comment in my absence. So far beyond my expectations, that. Thank you all so much. I have posted replies, though not as personal as I would wish, time being at a premium at present with all these boxes now to unpack and much to be done before I can access my books.

Blind Trace

Back in February I re-posted a much older write-up of an exhibition I had seen of the later work of Victor Pasmore. My post was called With Eyes Tight Shut, for the images exhibited were a selection of those seen and painted by Pasmore with his eyes closed. I had known Pasmore's work many years before when he had been a very different painter and I was immensely impressed with these later works.

Maybe ten years or so before that I had developed a tremor of the arms. It is nothing nasty, a genetic thing which my father suffered from and which has begun to show itself in my brother. It was and is more nuisance than sinister. Among other inconveniences it greatly interferes with my ability to draw. After seeing the Pasmore exhibition I experimented for a while with drawings and paintings of the images that appear when I close my eyes, and I blogged about this for I was interested in comparing my own experiences with those of others. Not surprisingly perhaps, I found that there seemed to be very little conformity in the images, each person's images were as individual to them as their dreams. At the same time I flirted with a way of drawing that I had heard about in my student days, but not tried, a method that involves not looking. But other issues overtook me and I did not pursue either interest for long. Recently, I decide to try this method of drawing. It was not a serious attempt. I tried it out on a scrap of paper just before going to bed - a quiet time when I would normally have been reading or maybe watching a T.V. program I had recorded.

Then came one of those synchronicity thingies when The Guardian newspaper, produced a booklet on How to Draw which was given away with the Saturday edition of the paper. I almost did not look at it, assuming that it would consist of those cringe-making formulas for drawing horses, trees, flowers etc. A this-is-how-you-do-it treatise. Fortunately though, I did look at it - and it wasn't that at all. In fact, there was a small feast of excellent articles by established artists (innovative art tutors the book called them) and students telling - amongst other things - how they go about their drawin gs and why they do it that particular way. And yes, among these was the draw-but-don't-look idea. Indeed, there were several versions of it.

One thought I had nursed when experimenting with this was that maybe it would give my drawings a bit more life and freedom of line. It didn't - or maybe I should say that it hasn't yet, for it is early days. What it did do, though, incredibly, was circumvent the tremor. The drawings made by this method show no sign of the shaky hand syndrome that has become so noticeable in my drawings generally, to such an extent that I had almost stopped making them. This took on added interest when I read that when Chenai - one of the model students - tried out the technique his hand became exceedingly shaky. He did, though, insist that you should hold the pencil out at arm's length to draw, which I have not done.

The method, then, is simply this: that you do not look at the paper on which you are making your marks. You look continually at the subject and nothing else. I have now modified that slightly but importantly - for me, at any rate, it has proved important. I do not look at the drawing whilst I am making a mark. I will look occasionally to reposition the pen or pencil. So for example, having just finished drawing the right eye I will look at the paper for the purpose of transferring the pen to the other eye, but then look away before beginning to draw. An alternative aid I have introduced is that when beginning, say, an ear, I may use a finger of the non-drawing hand to mark the start point, so that I can return to it if need be.

The self portrait shown here is my first two attempt using the method. I used the method in its pure form - no looking whatsoever. It is rather crude, to say the least. There is none of the liveliness of line I had been hoping for, and the shape of the head is not correct, which indicates to me that my body image is not what it was - not surprisingly perhaps, for the body image is yet one more thing that deteriorates with age. (In this connection, what I mean by body image is the awareness of the position of the individual body parts in space and their relationship to each other. Can you, for example, touch finger tips behind your back at the first attempt?) So, is not a good likeness and it is not good from a drawing point of view, as a piece of art. Nevertheless, it is, as I say, early days, and I do think the method has possibilities.

Hopper's America

Edward Hopper's famous Night Hawk canvas

He felt the weight of prairie vastness in the urban space,
the loneliness such sparseness of expanse can bring,
the seep of grassland into city wariness, the way
great distance can be squeezed into a downtown street.

He saw the spaces infiltrating neighbourhoods
like wedges prising could-be friends apart, or solid hedges,
impenetrable, keeping people in. For hedge, a block
of darkened pigment: loneliness, a figure gaoled in light.

His landscape was a tableau frozen from time's stream,
a known world, stranger than we'd known, where nothing moved.
There were no doors, no corridors, no exits from the bleakness
and no absconding from his silent dream. No recoil to reality.

Always, it seemed, an unknown ghost was waiting to appear.

If I had never read Heaney...

He appeared on the hill at first light. The scarp was dark against a greening sky and there was the bump of the barrow and then the figure, and it shocked. I thought perhaps the warrior buried there had stood up again to haunt us. I thought this as I blew out the lanterns one by one around the pen. The sheep jostled and I was glad of their bells.

He came down towards me, stumbling down over the tussocks of the scarp's slope that was cold and wet still with the night, and I could see he was a soldier from the red tunic that all the army now wore, it was said. He stopped at a distance. He had that wary look of one used to killing. His face was dark with dirt, and stubbled.

Deserters had been known to kill. I went on blowing.

He watched me all the time. Then as I turned towards him, he looked away and down into the valley where the village was beginning to smoke.

I saw him side on and I recognised him.

"Gabby," I said.

He turned.

"I wondered when," he murmured, so I could hardly hear. He was the tiredest man I have ever seen.



I first read Ulverton by Adam Thorpe I suppose five or six years ago, maybe more. It became famous as the book that did not win the Booker. More than one author has bemoaned the fact that if Ulverton could not win it, what chance have the rest of us? That opening scene has haunted since my first reading. The very mention of the book's title summons up my images of that scene. I have read the novel a couple of times since, but it never loses its power or its freshness so far as I am concerned. I say novel, but is it? Its subject is the story of a fictional village over three centuries, but whether you see it as a novel or as a collection of short stories relating to the people of Ulverton and the surrounding hills close to The White Horse, is, I suggest, largely a matter of taste. Most will settle for it being a story, and I have neither doubt nor difficulty with that, but here's another suggestion: you could see Ulverton as a collection of prose poems, for in many respects that is what they are.

That being so, it seems almost unbelievable to me that, but for another amazing example of the Internet's synchronicity, I might even now not have been made aware of the fact that Thorpe has a total of four volumes of poetry to his name. Worse. Research has elicited the fact that he was a poet first - and I knew not!

I recently began to re-read Ulverton once more and almost immediately was introduced to his most recent collection of poetry - from five years back! - Nine Lessons from the Dark. To have been so totally unaware of such a treasure from the pen (or keyboard) of one so greatly admired for his prose (or prose poetry) must count as some sort of offence against poetry's Highway Code, I'm thinking. Following without due care and attention, perhaps. Something like that.

Speaking of following, brings me immediately to what was both an encouragement to read and a disappointment: his debt to Seamus Heaney. Discipleship is perhaps too strong a word, but he treads a similar path and in many places the sound of his footsteps echoes those of his hero. The disappointment is not Thorpe's fault. If I had never read Heaney on The Grauballe Man:

he seems to weep
the black river of himself

I would have thought infinitely more highly of Thorpe on The Tollund Man:

Tollund was pickled
in his own ghost, petrified

to an absorbed, ebony drape
of self...

Like Heaney he derives much from the Danish bodies preserved in their peat bogs, but there is more than one way of looking at that. You could view it as a cheeky mining of the seam which Heaney has made his own; you could see it as showing the courage to follow his own muse no matter where she might lead; or you could think it an act of discipleship. Alternatively, you could look at the differences. Heaney was writing against the background of a troubled and violent Ireland, and saw the bog people and their brutal deaths as a metaphor around which to build confessional verse. Thorpe is interested in the bog people as an aspect of the natural world and the site as a place where he unintentionally terrified his son. A touch of humour, the natural world, the seriousness of human sacrifice and the abject fear of a small boy all somehow retain their true characters, their own realities.

I sensed as a medium might
in some Islington cabal

a second presence, no more than a hint,
watchful of me.

But later he draws on Heaney again with his description of the body:

the body shrivelled to the leather
of its stitched hood, stubble

that gave the vexed, late-
night look under the calm

of someone who did not scream.

But do I detect borrowings - echoes, let's say - as between the poems and the prose? Well, yes, and why not, indeed? Some are mundane. For example, the second chapter (or story) of Ulverton is actually a sermon. It begins:It was not snowing when we set out.
For good measure, a half page further down we read:
'Twas not snowing nor in any ways fowl when we set out.
Cairns, the first poem in Nine Lessons from the Dark begins: And the sky was clear when we started out. Of course, the similarities do not end there: the implied threat in each of those statements is realised only too forcefully. The stories have more than their opening statements in common.

One other example may suffice. Thorpe likes a good piss, or he imagines that the country folk of 1712 did, or he imagines the reader will think the country folk of 1712 did. And for all I know, in cruder times they did. It sounds authentic, and may well be so. I am getting round to the fact that one of my favourite poems from the collection is Productivity which explains at one point the (eighteenth century) countryman's method of putting a bloom on the horse's coat:
a wet of piss on the chaff
would make the coat shine.
An echo, if you like, of the third chapter (or story) in Ulverton, which has the character of a journal or a diary has this passage:
Today I caught the maid at her offices. She was pissing within the dairy and not, as instructed, upon the dung-heap which is hidden from general view. Being midway through her passing of urine she made no effort to hide herself and I was afflicted with a view of her private place, which, unlike my wife's, is crow-black.

There is more than a touch of pastiche, I think, particularly in Ulverton and the use of a slightly archaic language which I, perhaps in ignorance, find compelling.

Going, going, gone...

Caitlin Moran in yesterday's Times cried Goodbye, cruel world. I'm off to live on the internet. Not for me, such luxuries. My cry is Adieu Fair web, I'm off to re-engage with the unpalatable real world. Or maybe it will prove neither cruel nor unpalatable. I shall write more on that anon.

For now I remember how I used to speculate as a boy about what it would be like to be one of those medieval monks who contrived to get themselves walled up in some monastry or castle for some grave crime or sin. I am beginning to find out. I am almost there. There remains a chink in the growing wall of boxes, books, small items of furniture and other portable artefacts from downstairs, a chink just large enough to squeeze through. But not for much longer. Any moment now the electrician and the decorator will arrive to begin the ground floor's makeover. Then the invasion of my small junk room-cum-study-cum-computer room will be complete. I must retreat to saner areas, vanish from the internet before I vanish from the physical world completely. Fare thee well, oh friendly web! Adieu good friends for the space of half a moon at the most - or so I have been reliably informed by the decorator using his well-polished trust me, I'm a builder tone of voice.

But not all is lost. I have scheduled posts to appear, almost as normal, though at intervals a day or so greater than my usual, and I hope to see any comments left, though alas, I doubt I will get to answer them.

So trust me, I'm a blogger: I shall return!.
Farewell good friends.

Art for My Sake!

Henry Darger's Me to the Moon

Back on the 3rd of April this year I posted a poem of mine looking back to an obsession I had in childhood with a make-believe world of subterranean tunnels, caves, vertical shafts and the like. I had dreams about this world. Indeed, although I can no longer be sure, I think it may have all begun as the result of a dream. The world became an essential part of my my play world, though the games that resulted were for just one player. Me. I had fantasies about this world and about it dozens of secret entrances, all cunningly concealed, each by a different device, mostly natural, such as an old tree stump covered in ivy. I drew intricate plans and maps of my world, made several large paintings and at least one model. At that time I was suffering a lot of bad health and had to spend long periods in bed. I developed ways of folding and rolling the bed sheets to model my underground tunnels and built caverns between sheet and blanket. I suppose that had my obsession lasted into adulthood the appropriate response to it would have been for me to build installations to interpret to others what was going on in my head.

Earlier this year the Haywood Gallery in London held an exhibition of installations purporting to do just that. The exhibition was called: Walking in My Mind. Ten internationally recognised artists prodused works by means of which they hoped to convey to the gallery's visitors just what it was that was taking place inside their heads.

That seemed hopelessly optimistic to me, but now there is a gallery dedicated to going well beyond that brief, but paradoxically, with a somewhat greater chance of success - or so it seems to me. The Museum of Everything, newly opened in a disused dairy close to Regents Park in London, displays works made by artists for themselves and for themselves alone. These are works that for the most part were made for the artists' eyes only, works that spring from and feed the artist's fantasies and have no other purpose. Many of them are whimisical it seems, some verging towards the dark. But I stress: the one thing they have in common is their intended privacy. There is, or was when they created their works, absolutely no intention to communicate - and is not that intention an essential element in the making of a work of art? The exhibition contains, for example, works from a vast collection that was discovered by the late artist's landlord. No one other than Darger knew of their existence prior to his death. Henry Darger has since become rather well known - given that that was not part of his game plan - for his Vivien Girls, delightful creatures, nude for the most part, who are pursued through his paintings by absolute evil on account of their intrinsic goodness.

It was in reading about this exhibition that I was reminded of my childhood indulgences. Among the 95 artists whose works are currently on display are Calvin and Ruby Black, a couple who lived in the Mojave Desert where they created their own miniature world, a wind-powered city with the endearing name of Possum Trot. (Sounds like the name of a blog, does it not?) They populated it with lovingly made wooden dolls dressed in beautifully hand-crafted clothes. The parallels with my subterranean world seemed amazingly close, though in my case the population changed a few times: originally it was inhabited by the military, a special military with a brief to save the world, later it was given over to International Rescue (yes, really, I was the first, though there were no rockets). Then a mutant strain of humanity who had been subject to a death ray that had not quite worked. None of these proved as satisfying as the army, however, so finally they recaptured it.

So what is all this nonsense in aid of, then? I have already given a clue in a question I raised earlier: Is not the intention to communicate an essential element in the making of a work of art? I have been trying to think of precedents, but I have not exactly come up with an armful. What other examples can you think of for art-making in which no thrid party is involved, just the artist and his work? Where the art work has no role in communicating something? I thought of Cave art, but we cannot be sure what that was all about. Magic has been suggested, to give the hunter greater skill and more success. But the bones in the caves were not from the same animals as depicted on the walls - in many cases. Spirits are another suggestion. The works were not meant to be viewed, not even by the artist, which is why they were painted in such inaccessible places. The important fact - the only fact that mattered - was that they should exist. Somewhere. In and for themselves. Rites of passage is another suggestion. In which case they would be expected to convey something, to communicate. But we don't know. Ikons, I thought of, but then decided that of course they communicate, not something new from the artist, something familiar via the artist, but they communicate all the same. Child art, I thought of, and then found myself argueing against myself. I began by thinking about my tunnel-world. I never did think of it as art. Not even the paintings I made of it. And then it struck me that I didn't think of any of my other paintings as art, either. Not until... and then I realised that I have no idea at what stage I first began to think of my paintings as art. We all know that the child is a fine artist. And then he stops. Why? Could it be because he begins to think of his art as art? Begins to think in terms of others, trying to say something to others, and loses the freshness of having to satisfy only himself?

So: Can you think of any other examples of private art? Non-communicative art? And is it art? Can it be? Or does art have to be at least endeavouring to communicate? If so, what objectively distinguishes the two conditions?