if art should fail humanity...

If you could find a place
where no one would find you,
if you could paper that place
with a paper to suit you,
if you could make a garden
to surround your lonely place
and live there like a hermit
'til you knew what human was,
if you could send a post card
delivered to my door
to describe in single syllables
what human life is for,
and if the world at large
could be invited in,
I wonder... would that open
your brave new world to sin?
And if you took to painting
would sin besmirch the vision
of your world seen at its best
or seduce you from your crusade for
explicit this, explicit that -- 
in which the vast majority
by definition don't believe.
(Blessed are they 
that have not seen
and yet believe... etc, etc.)

If you could keep your place
for both the secular and holy,
free of false dichotomies,
a land of god and no-god,
seeing god as both a shorthand
and a longhand form of art,
seeing art as sign and semaphore,
a dance with flags and dazzling lights,
unverbalised theology
bringing music to the sights --
a cannabis for scriptural faith...
And if you left your haven
to dance down dirty streets
would it all be out of kilter,
would you need the magic philter,
explicit sex and revelation,
to return you to your station?
If you could paint a tenet
for a faith that's yet to be,
would a fine brush or a wide brush
or a roller set you free?
Would you nurture a small parcel
or a landscape or some scree?
And if art should fail humanity,
where then would prayer be?

Two Sites of Special Scientific Interest

Water
falls into a lake,
backdrop
seen through alders
heard through rustle of leaves,
leaves
haloed in white.

My approach
expands the whiteness
in circles
towards me,
crossing the lake.

Sad that the distance
and instinct  combine
to conjure the fancy:
soap suds  pollutants
only  nearer  to find
a  mix nearly perfect
of   water  unsullied
with lightness of air
support for  two rare
mini-beasts  and  one
water weed.

                  *

All
genetic programs ticking
satisfactorily,
they cover themselves in glory -
and metal oxides -
changing
from benign virus
into living wire,
predestined to arrange themselves
in patterns laid by man
called batteries.
They pack a punch,
sparks bright enough
to replace petrol on all 
roads of this town reborn
tomorrow - when all our cities
will be lit (maybe) by living things
like Vibrio phosphorium -
or cum grano salis, as you might say -
sparkling bacteria
clinging to the outside walls
of buildings 
growing there - and every roof as white
as that pure water in the lake.

What makes us human

Disjointed thoughts sparked by a BBC4 arts series, "British Masters".

Evolution, life's
main chance (maybe
life's only chance),
is too much stressed.

We're changing
the environment
far too quickly
for life forms
to accomodate.

Albert Schweitzer's
great insight was
to have understood
the full meaning of
his: "I am life
that wills to live
in the midst of life
that wills to live."

My father, shaping
wood, observed the
grain before he'd
start - then felt
it as he worked.

"The grain has made
the wood," he'd say,
"the grain respects
the wood - will see
it safe and sound."

All true craftsmen
work in harmony with
grain of some sort.

Is not nature
the grain that
runs through life -
all Life, that is?

Bio-diversity
and the will
to live: which
one drives? and
which is driven?

We are altering
the environment
too rapidly to
feel the grain
responsively...

Playing a great
cathedral organ
Schweitzer was
asked if he was
not afraid that
some notes might
be wrong. "No,"
he replied,"God
does not hear a
wrong note." He

was my first hero,
my first bastion
against the gloom,
and my first saint.
His writings were
pure gold and came
direct from heaven.

I read then differently
now, but still they are
as good and true, as up
to date and wonderfully
fresh as they were then.

His insight led him to
Lambarene to found and
work in a leper colony
and hospital. That was
working with the grain
all right, part of his
"Reverence for Life".

Experiments with Temptation

1

An altar boy, but unconfirmed,
I took a sip of Holy wine
to see what God would do.

2

Early teens
female nemesis.
In my head
I made her my seductress.
Easy to resist her then.

3

Turkish Delight
my favourite sweet.
The last piece I would leave,
testing my resistance.

4

To give up smoking
I kept the baccy
always close at hand.

5

War time in the country.
Staying with my cousin:
allowed to browse his stamp collection.
Tempted by a penny black,
I wrote the story of its life,
how it was cursed,
and all its owners died
whose names were not my cousin's.

6

Teacher telling us how
D.O.G. said d-o-g, said "dog".
Me rising to it,
wondering why it should,
why should it not say "heretofore?"
("heretofore" my latest word,
having heard it on a bus.)
My turn to sound it out.
I can recall the inner conflict...
Damn it all, I can't recall
a sound of what I said.

7

A class of infants
and a decorated  urn
a prohibition against opening
or touching such a special thing.
I leave the room,
the mike records their conversation -
revealing trains of thought
on guilt and on temptation.

This last experiment was one of a series I conducted. I have posted earlier and in detail about another in the same series. You can find it here

For the inspiration for this post I am grateful to Poetry Jam. The prompt was posted by The Butler and Bagman

Poetry, Technology and Google

I've never thought of myself as a Luddite. Not even an incipient one. I spend time trying to keep up with the latest technologies. Some. I say "some", because as long ago as when I first retired, I made the decision to do my best to stay with certain of them, but to let the rest swing by. Keeping up consumes just too much time and energy. Time and energy that I prefer to devote to other things. I made the same decision with regard to charities - for slightly different reasons. So with regard to computing, I do my best. But as for mobile 'phones, I've largely turned my back on them. I do have a phone, one that Alexander Graham Bell would have been proud to own. I can send and receive texts with it. I can make and receive telephone calls. That's it. That's what a phone's supposed to do! Ah, but I also have two grandsons, so I know what an i-pad and a Blackberry are. So, though the effort and the time involved would outweigh the advantages, I am basically on the side of these things. I classify them under the heading of "Good Guys".

Or I did. Until yesterday morning, over breakfast, to be exact. In the Saturday Guardian Review I came upon Nick Laird's column. Always a good read, it was the second revelation of my early morning peruse. Alas, he doesn't write in it every Saturday, but it's worth taking it each week so as not to miss him when he does. He was writing about poetry apps. Now I knew there were such things, at certain times the knowledge has all but tempted me to overcome my resistance and to sport out on a "proper" mobile. You see, I had assumed that the apps in question would somehow give a new slant on Eliot or Pound or allow a new comparison between them. Something like that. Perhaps open up some form of library to the hungry soul. Maybe there are some that do, but no, not the ones of which Nick was writing. They help you to write the stuff. And the stuff, once written, looks like you had no hand in it. It looks - and sounds - as though the apps wrote it with no other help at all. Which is why everybody's effort looks and sounds the same. (Scrub "everyone's" - but you'll know what I mean!) As Nick put it, it looks as though a computer has translated a poor poem into another language and then translated it back again. It might as well have. Strange, that people who would not dream of getting someone else to write their poem and then claim it as their own, have no compunction about getting a machine to do the job for them. And, maybe because it's come from a computer, they feel no necessity to work on it further. Surfing, I have arrived at so much poetry on which I just cannot comment. Maybe if I knew the person concerned, their background and their life story, I could do so, but in the void of cyber space there is nowhere to start. Should I see it as poetry's first stirrings or as therapy? It has never occurred to me - until now - that I should blame an apps.

If you did not read Nick's article, go raid the recycle bin and reclaim The Review. If you did not take The Guardian yesterday, go raid your neighbour's recycle bin. It really is revealing and explains why so much poetry on the web reads as though it was all written by the same adolescent person. He also makes a plea for more time and effort to go into the writing. This is something I have posted about in the past - and also something I have been guilty of just recently, something I was and am watching, something that is not a permanent state of affairs. The fact is, though, that so much verse on the web is no more than chopped-up prose.

I said that I had had two revelations. The other was from the same Review, but in a book review. The book in question was: "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You", by Eli Pariser. Did you know that if you Google a word and I Google the same word, we will get different results? Maybe you knew that, but I didn't. It is because Google is running our requests through filters it has built of your tastes and mine. Preference algorithms, they are called. They give you and I what Google thinks we'd like to have. In my case it has been spectacularly wrong of late. Interestingly, the suggestion is that there is too much filtering going on on the web, whilst Nick Laird thinks there may be not enough.

In search of spacious poetry

Tate Modern's Turbine Hall:
a space to test conceptual powers -
almost to destruction.
How can an individual fill a space like this?
Though few are called and fewer chosen,
art eschews the easy victory,
prefers to fail at the impossible -
the task a metaphor for that
which faced the Great Creator when
the world was yet an empty shell.

But here in Turbine Hall is space
an ocean might not fill,
space that awaits a single concept, not a world
of possibilities. The thing about
this eeriness is what has gone:
the turbines that once powered a neighourhood.
It's these the installations must replace.
So much has vanished from our world,
our culture, our environment. From us.
We need to give the space that's left
a shape, dimensions, to define its emptiness.

Poetry
can make the poet in us all
think small.
Yet poetry deserves its Turbine Hall,
a fairy godmother to call
and wave her magic wand,
to trace
something gargantuan in us,
in what we stand for,
space
that only poetry could fill. But
what a vastness and what poetry!
Mankind perhaps would end up looking small,
creation grow beyond today's imagination -
but individual man walk tall.

Do not suppose in saying "vastness" I mean "long".
Words do not fill such spaces by their numbers,
but by a coefficient of expansion. This,
the soul, and only it, can give.

The image is from the Wikipedia website

The Kafkaesque World of McAfee - and others

I have never posted a pure grumble before. I shall probably never do so again. This post is an exception!

Why, I ask, do so many software firms like to project an image of a company so technologically savvy that its whole enterprise is so automated from ground floor to attic as not to need the help of real people to run the show? Or is that they are indeed that savvy, and so truly have dispensed with people? Or maybe they suffer from a bunker mentality and cannot bring themselves to poke their heads above the parapet in case some awkward customer might pop up with a reasonable request or complaint? Many of their web sites might have been designed by Kafka on an off day.

I'll explain. Just over a year ago I installed McAfee anti-virus software on my PC. It was not an outstanding success. It may very well not have been the fault of the McAfee software. I rather think there was something on my machine which was not compatible with it. If so, I couldn't find it and so, reluctantly, I uninstalled the anti-virus software. Now, I should have been able to claim from McAfee a refund to compensate for the unused part of the contract. Their web site said I could get my money back, even gave a link to click on to do just that. I tried it. I tried it repeatedly. I tried other links. I went to the site map. I tried every navigational technique known to me. Nothing. They delivered me into a variety of dead ends or nowhere or, by a variety of roundabout routes, returned me to my starting point. Eventually, to preserve my sanity, I gave up, deciding that my mental health was more important than a few quid.

And in a fair and rational world that would have been the end of it, don't you think? But the world is neither fair nor rational, as we are all well aware. And it is particularly not fair and rational in its Kafkaesque manifestations. Perhaps it was my fault. I bought a laptop. I shouldn't have done. The laptop came preloaded with... yes, you've guessed it, McAfee anti virus. I uninstalled it immediately, for two reasons: one, because of the bad experience I had had with the PC; two, because I had bought another anti-virus for the PC which covered me for two machines. That was a year or so ago.

A week ago I discovered that McAfee had taken another £68 out of my credit card account without a by your leave to me or anyone else. They had taken it upon themselves to renew the cover I didn't have and didn't want. They say, in one of the few helpful lines on their web site, that they do this because the majority of their customers want it. Maybe. Maybe not. But what about those who are not customers? Is that the way to tempt them back? And for the rest, they can ask to have the automated deductions deactivated, if they so wish. But should it not be the other way around. Should they not do it unless the customer requires it? How dare they just plunge their hands into someone's pockets uninvited!

I am now in the same Kafkaesque situation that confronted me before. I have found a reassurance that where they have taken money for a renewal that the "customer" doesn't want, they will refund it. Providing, of course, that "customer" can find the link on their web site! I have now been round their loops a few times. I found an email address that seemed to be the one I was looking for. It proved to be an automated address. My email was not seen by a real person. I found another likely-looking address. I am still awaiting an answer from that one, but it is beginning to look as though I have sent it to an automated address that does not give automated replies!

O course, there is always the phone, but they do warn that if I go that route I am likely to be in a queue for half an hour or so. No doubt only to discover that I am ringing the wrong number, and as their Castle is in Ireland it could run up quite a bill, maybe more than the refund's worth. I have spoken to the card company and they say that if all else fails they will take it up for me. It does begin to look as though all else has failed.

This experience just happens to have been with McAffee, but they do not have the monopoly. Other Internet software firms are like unto them, as I know to my cost. It is a condition that does not seem to infect hardware manufacturers - at least, I have not found it so. Why does software bring the worst out of these guys?

On Not Getting It.

I drift in and out of sleep when the show is on, that way I find that it makes sense. (Quote from the comments on a BBC Radio 2 Blog.)

---

David Lister, writing in The Independent a few days ago (26.08) and commenting on the current popularity of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, gave an amusing account of its recent rise and rise. Music generally has been more in demand it seems, which more than one commentator has attributed to the financial downturn and the need which the populace has suddenly discovered for tranquility and a spiritual dimension. Certainly music can supply both of those commodities, but The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain... I am not sure.

According to Lister it has been variously described as Hilarious. Glorious. Original. Well, just about every superlative under the sun. His comments were prompted by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain having been given a full billing in the BBC's Promenade Concert Programme. He went along to see. The occasion occasioned great excitement, he wrote. It was a complete sell-out. There were queues all round the block, he told us. Many, including the director, had brought their own ukuleles along. He made it sound like A Last Night at the Proms.

For Lister at any rate the promise was more than the reality, it seems. He reported that atThe Ride of The Valkyries he smiled. At Beethoven's Ode to Joy he half-smiled. After that the novelty began to wear off. Finally, he admitted, he just didn't get it. Now I have to admit that I have not heard The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, so cannot pronounce upon its achievements, its musicality or anything else. Whether or not I would have got it had I been there, I have no idea. What struck me, reading Lister's column, was the universality of the experience. It is universal in the sense that it happens, has happened, to us all (hands up any brave individual who wishes to claim that he has never been in the position of not getting it) and it is universal in the sense that it is common to all the arts. Maybe there have been times when it wouldn't have been so all-embracing, but today it is.

Which leads me again (I have raised it before, as no doubt the chorus of groans, could you but hear them, would indicate) to the question of what do you do when confronted by an alleged or intended work of art that you truly do not get. I am not referring to an encounter with a piece of art that just doesn't happen to be to your taste - I can be an even bigger bore on "taste", but that's not for this post, you will be pleased to hear. No, we are not talking don't like, but truly don't get.

I have in the past waxed prosaically about the poverty of the instruction I was given at school concerning all things aesthetic. Okay it was war time and there was a dearth of good teachers, but nowhere and at no time were we given any clue as to how to approach art, poetry, drama, music or any other art form that life might one day have placed before us for our approval. So far as literature was concerned the approach was that of good old comprehension. Well do I recall moments such as the following from a reading round the class session:

Me: Lady, you are the cruellest she alive if you will lead these graces to the grave and leave the world no copy. (Quoted from memory.)

Dicky Bird: What did he mean by that, King?

Me: He wanted her to have her portrait painted, sir.

Roars of hysterical laughter from the class. (An unusual success for me.) Roars of something quite different from Dicky Bird - and the rest of the session spent sitting in the corridor.

Not the sort of teaching - nor the sort of behaviour on the part of the pupil, I admit it - likely to send you out into the world equipped to cope with the difficulties of Eliot's Waste Land or post-modern literature - and remember, as I sometimes forget, That Eliot had written The Waste Land some 25 years before this, also that we were then well into the period of Post Modernism, we who were still reading The Jackdaw of Rheims, Lochinvar and other such versifications. I never did hear any mention of Eliot within those hallowed walls, much less Ezra Pound. What chance then, that Marcel Duchamp's famous "Fountain" - for which think: urinal? might get an airing in the art room?

There is an oft reiterated question which to my mind brings this whole question sharply into focus: "Ah, but is it art?" We have all asked it at some point, I guess, if only to evade a more difficult or soul-searching response, but it is a question which says more about the questioner than the questioned, for it is saying , in effect: "Yes, I do see that this found object, or this installation, or this whatever it may be, has something about it, but please point out what it has, specifically, that rings my art bell, falls within the parameters that for me define what is and what is not art.

Art must have its boundaries. Only the true anarchist thinks otherwise, but there always will be works and artists pushing at those boundaries. It is as though we have our own internal Venn diagrams. There is a circle for art (or maybe several), one for poetry (or maybe several), another for philosophy (or maybe several), and so on. We are confronted with an installation and the brain clicks in, weighing up the possibilities, where does this one fit? Maybe it goes in one of the overlaps, it's both this and that as well...

Back in my fourth paragraph I asked the question: what do you do when confronted by an alleged or intended work of art that you truly do not get. We must have our boundaries, but surely we must keep them flexible. When something truly original comes along it will not quite fit, for it will be something you had not foreseen when drawing up those boundaries. Indeed, by definition it will be something that no one had foreseen. So what could be the response? You could ask yourself: What preconceptions do I have, what assumptions have I made in the past that are preventing me from getting it? (The answer may be none, of course, the fault may not be in you, it may be another case of the Emperor's New Clothes.) The first occasion on which I can recall the question arising was back in 1952/3. What I recall is a public furore over Reg Butler's sculpture The Unknown Political Prisoner. (Butler is shown with an earlier version of the work, in my first image.)Had it ever been built it would have risen 300 - 400 feet in the air. It was, Butler said, specifically in memory of all who died in the concentration camps. The final maquette was destroyed by a Hungarian refugee whilst it was on display at The Tate Gallery. Everyone had a view about it. Few were complimentary. I cannot recall any work of art before it being given such a high profile. Certainly nothing to do with the arts had ever caused such controversy and consternation in our rather typical (I would think) household. The media then were not what they have become since, of course, but such as they were they went to town on it. It was exhibited at The Venice Biennial and at The Tate Gallery. Everybody that I knew - and I knew no-one who was in the habit of showing any interest in, let alone speaking about art - was talking about it and asking: But it's not art - is it? I, for my part, was thinking: Mmmmmm, it's got something... but it's not sculpture! Sculpture was solid. You chipped it out of a socking great block of granite. This was something, alrighty, but not that!

But then another thought dawned, a really transformative thought (I could have written about this for my contribution two post back): it's not beautiful in the normally accepted sense. I had to come to terms - for I was by then determined to fit The Unknown Political Prisoner into my Venn diagram labelled Sculpture - with the fact that it had nothing to do with beauty per se. Nothing to do with seeing in the visual sense at all - other than the fact that you had to see it for the brain to register it. So then scrub beauty, scrub the idea that art MUST have to do with beauty, scrub the idea that sculpture has to be something solid, like a gravestone - or bigger - and then.... well, and then, what? Does accepting all those modifications to the boundaries of your mental Venn diagram open the door to something else? Is that one of the obstacles that have prevented you from getting it? Does the work now offer you something that had not occurred to you before? Does it give something by way of compensation for the treasured belief(s) you might have surrendered?

I know what Dicky Bird would have advised. He would have said to read around the subject, the artist or the work - if the latter is big enough, important enough to have had books written on it. Much more chance now, of course, with all the reference materials of the Internet at our disposal. There are those - and sometimes I am one of them - who will see a problem here. The work of art should stand by itself, without explanation, without reference to the fact that the artist's wife had just suffocated their two children or what ever. And so it should, but for those who are of another time or culture, and so not immersed in the power and spontaneity of the artist's sources, who don't know the symbolism, the history, can't see the parallels, or for those who are faced by something new in the history of art, it can help to have notes - such as those on The Waste Land, for example, though they are hardly sufficient, given the extraordinary number of references. Indeed, unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Eliot's references it might be considered essential to do a great deal of reading around the subject - eventually, though not for the first reading(s) I would suggest. Let it sink in first. Let the words and their cadences do their work before looking further afield.

What would Dicky Bird have made of this, I wonder: from The White Threshold by W.S.Graham.

Let me always from the deep heart
Drowned under behind my brow so ever
Stormed with other wandering, speak
Up famous fathoms well over strongly
The pacing white haired kingdoms of the sea..

I walk towards you and you may not walk away.

Always the welcome-roaring threshold
So ever bell worth my exile to
Speaks up to greet me into the hailing
Seabraes seabent with swimming crowds
All cast all mighty water dead away.

I rise up loving and you may not move away.


I know what Dicky Bird would have done. He would have written out a prose translation or equivalent of it. It wouldn't have done him much good, I think. I found it completely incomprehensible first time I encountered it. No strategy unlocked it. Only let it sink in from repeated readings did any good. (You might think that the poetic equivalent of drifting in and out of sleep. I wouldn't feel inclined to argue, but it worked for me - I think!) Whatever. You just have to find your own way in. There's no right way and wrong way. If Graham could have written it more simply, I am sure he would have. Interestingly, when I went to look up the quote, I found these words by Graham:-

The most difficult thing for me to remember is that a poem is made of words and not of the expanding heart, the overflowing soul, or the sensitive observer. A poem is made of words. It is words in a certain order, good or bad by the significance of its addition to life and not to be judged by any other value put upon it by imagining how or why or by what kind of man it was made.

I think Dicky Bird would have felt more comfortable with this from Tom Thumb by RF Langley - though maybe he should not have!

We should accept the obvious facts of physics.
The world is made entirely of particles in
fields of force. Of course. Tell it to Jack. Except it
doesn't seem to be enough tonight. Not because
he’s had his supper and the upper regions are
cerulean, as they have been each evening
since the rain. Nor just because it’s nine PM and
this is when, each evening since we came, the fifty
swifts, as passionately excited as any
particles in a forcefield, are about to end
their vesper flight by escalating with thin shrieks
to such a height that my poor sight won’t see them go.
Though I imagine instantly what it might be
to separate and, sleeping, drift so far beyond
discovery that any flicker which is left
signs with a scribble underneath the galaxy.

If you're still with me, you deserve a medal, but instead I am giving you a challenge: to find something that would not normally be associated with art, poetry or music but which when brought into focus by you begins to work on you in some way that might make it a candidate for one of the art circles in your inner Venn diagram. Which is to say, can you find a piece of found art? It could be a phrase on a corn flake packet, a snatch of conversation overheard in a shop, a mis-shapen potato, a smashed-up car or a workman's tool of some sort. It might be a sequence of sounds recorded on a country walk. (No, why country? Might just as easily be in some town centre.) You get the idea, I'm sure. Something that did not start out as a piece of art, but which, now that you have picked it out and shone your light upon it, begins to act like one. I, for my part, am going to cheat. I already have mine. Two posts ago I posted some pictures from a day spent at Wisley. One of many remarkable interludes from that day was walking among the fruit trees. At one point we sat down for a few moments. A family came by, and one member of it, a girl of - I would guess - about eight years, was pointing to the pears and saying what they suggested to her. (Thinking back to my childhood and climbing ladders to pick the fruit, I could not but be impressed by the fact that all - and I do mean all - of it was within reach, could be picked from the ground, most of it by a child.) This particular child was letting her imagination rip: this pear was an old man's head; another was sand castle. Amnd then this:
Look mum, a honey bubble dripping from a spoon! So we could argue about the word dripping being used of a bubble; maybe she had conflated two images, but not only was the phrase couched as a perfect iambic pentameter, but she spoke it rhythmically and the image was exactly right: the colour, the shape, and the sun imparting to it the appearance of a slight translucence. So it's not a world-beater, but if I come up with a better one, I'll post it for sure.

Copy that, copycat! Lascaux and all that.

This is another post for which I have to thank something seen in the media. Tom Lubbock has a regular column in The Independent titled Great Works. Last Friday he used it to discuss The Lascaux Cave Paintings, or rather, the Lascaux Paintings and some interesting points relating to the copying of art works. Or rather Lascaux ll and some interesting points relating to the copying of art works.

Let me explain. It is well enough known that these amazing cave paintings were created around 17.000 BC, that they were discovered by three teenagers in 1940 and found to contain over 1,500 separate images. It is also generally known that in the 50's they were found to be suffering rot damage as a result of the continual passage of visitors. In 1963 they were closed to the public. In the eighties two nearby caverns were opened in which had been created actual-size, three-dimensional replicas of the two most important caverns. These were as near perfect as human skill could make them - for they were not copied technologically, not photographically, but painted on to the bare rock surface as the originals had been and using the same materials and techniques. Since then, these are what the visiting public have seen - Lascaux ll, as they are known.

At first, the plan appeared to have worked; the paintings began to recover. But it did not last. They are now deteriorating so rapidly that it is no longer a question of who can be allowed in to see them, Before long there will be nothing to see, they will have ceased to exist. I had not realised that the situation had become that bad.

It is this circumstance that has led Lubbock to a discussion of the issues which I have found so fascinating. He refers to Walter Benjamin's contention that there are two forms of copying: one in which the copies exist only to be viewed - photography and the cinema, for example. That is their raison d'être: to be looked at, for whatever purpose - pleasure, information etc. Not so with the Lascaux paintings. They come into his second category of ritualistic images in which their very existence is all that matters. Of course, what exactly the Lascaux paintings were for has been the subject of speculation since the forties and cannot be finally resolved But the suggestion that seems to have become the current favourite (and seems to me most likely) is that this most fantastic of all installations was not primarily intended to be seen at all. That was not its raison d'être. It probably was visited, might even have been used in rites, including those of passage (as some suggest), but was intended first and foremost for the spirits. Its chief purpose was simply and solely to exist.

But now we are reaching the point where it may no longer exist in any meaningful way, and the interesting question which Lubbock has raised is whether, in the non-existence of Lascaux I (if I can so term it) we would be better or worse off having Lascaux II. Would it be preferable to have only Lascaux II or to have nothing? There is a sizeable body of purists (my term) who think it would be preferable to have neither. I have never been a purist and my instinct was mentally to vote accordingly, but then I thought again... and thought I saw what they were driving at. Lascaux II is not an exact copy. It couldn't be. As I have pointed out, it is not a reproduction from a flat surface to a flat surface.. One of the special wonders of the original (Lascaux I)paintings is the way in which those early artists utilised individual rock formations, turning them into features of the creature to be represented or using them to emphasise such features. Magical touches like that cannot be copied, if only because each rock form is unique.

So the question remains: when (sadly, not "if") we are left with no Lascaux I, will we then be better off having or not having Lascaux II? Here is a parallel (or parable, should you prefer) that occurs to me. A manuscript is unearthed of a previously unknown long poem. It is obviously a work of major importance and (quite obviously) the only copy extant. But intense research shows it to be a translation. The only copy of the original in the original tongue, scholars learn, was lost. It is the translation or nothing that the world has been bequeathed. You are ahead of me, I know: Is the world worse or better off for having this translation? Or maybe neither better nor worse off, for what it has is not the original poem but something else?

Lubbock takes this absorbing conundrum one step further by pointing out that ever since the day that it was finished - and possibly before that - Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper has been deteriorating and threatening to finally disintegrate in a shower of scurf-like fragments. Nothing more can be done to stabilise or in any way save it. Should they create a Last Supper II?

Inspiration

The Weaver of Grass has issued a challenge for this week to anyone interested - a meme: a post on those people who have been the greatest sources of inspiration. As most of you will know, my main interests are painting (and the visual arts in general) and poetry. The question therefore resolves itself into: who, in these two areas particularly, has most inspired me.

I think it might help if I said straight away that I have never been inspired to paint a particular picture by another painter. Similarly, no poet has ever provided the inspiration for a particular poem. I have occasionally been inspired by a painting to write a poem - and less often by a poem to paint a picture, but apart from a couple of exceptions (the second of which I will get to later) that has been the whole extent of it.

The first exception has to do with child art. At various times during my teaching career I was inspired by a young child's painting to put brush to canvas, nearly always with predictably frustrating results. Never did I get within a million miles of what the child's painting had inspired me to attempt. Whoever first discovers what it is that the child artist loses as s/he matures and then first discovers how it may be preserved will be responsible for enriching the world immeasurably.

Of course, poets and painters whom I admire have helped me along the way, though I do not think I would go as far as to call it influence, let alone inspiration. I will give you an example and you can judge for yourself. One of my heroes from the world of poetry is Seamus Heaney. Some years ago I was inspired to write some poems about my father who had just died. He had been a golf club-maker by profession, beginning in the days when they were made by hand. He could take a block of wood and shave it away to be left with, not just a club head, but a particular club head for a particular professional, capable of lifting the ball into a desired angle of flight. Later, when machines took over, he made the prototype for the machines to copy. He was also much in demand among professional golfers whenever they would require repairs or modifications to be made.

During the drafting of the poems I recalled some of Seamus Heaney's early poems. Digging was one. In it he spoke of his father's use of the spade as if it had been the tool of a craftsman, which of course it had been. He contrasts this with his own determination to be, not a farmer, but a writer. It ends:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Another such poem was Follower. in it he compared the way as a child he had followed his father at his ploughing, admiring his skill with the horses and his eye for a straight furrow. The poem went on to compare that with his own awkwardness (I stumbled in his hobnailed wake an d how later, in his father's old age, it is he, the father, who keeps stumbling / behind me, and will not go away. There were other works by Heaney that sprang to mind: poems conveying the characters of various craftsmen and the flavours of their crafts or describing their skills. I did not consciously use these, but, as I say, I remembered them and they helped. Certainly I would not claim to have been inspired by any of them. The inspiration came from my father.

Taking another slant, there are a few poems I would dearly loved to have written. (That might make an interesting meme: which works do you wish you had written - or painted or composed or whatever.) The one above all that I would dearly love to claim for myself is Hugh MacDiarmid's fabulous long meditation, On a Raised Beach. Never could it be said though that it had inspired me - or ever would. Quite the reverse, in fact. Let me put it this way: if I had lain on that inland beach as MacDiarmid did and had I been inspired as he was to write a meditative poem about it, my knowledge of his poem would have killed stone dead (pun not intended) any inspiration that the experience might have produced. His poem is so out beyond and far above anything I might contemplate attempting that the thought of doing so would never occur.

And now to my second exception (the one I said I would come to):- As a lad of eleven or twelve or thereabouts i had a passionate interest in cycling. Touring to begin with, the cycle speedway: stripped-down bike, saddle low over the rear wheel, handlebars up-turned like backward-facing horns, one foot on the cinder track, slewing round makeshift tracks on bomb sites and the like. Then came time-trialling, and finally the beginnings (in this country) of what we then called massed-start racing, mainly on disused airfields and private estates. Somewhen about that time I discovered Masefield, I can't remember how or where, maybe at school, maybe not. Specifically, I discovered Reynard the Fox, a long, rather Chaucerian (as I remember it) poem about a fox hunt, told from the point of view of the fox. I think I can truthfully say that it inspired me to write ... but what I wrote, Oh dear, it was a dreadful parody purporting to tell the story of a massed-start cycle race. The really dreadful thing about it is that I can still remember whole sections of it. It was that bad, it was unforgettable. Worse yet, it was published. Only in the club magazine, nothing national, but for that to have been my first published work...

Here, in an act bordering on total abasement, are the opening lines:-

Don Boyd had broken from the pack
of milling wheelers all intent
on doing their best to bring him back,
now spurred by his clubmates' frantic cries
he thrust with his aching, unwilling thighs...

See what I mean! Not wishing to turn embarrassment into humiliation, I will leave it there. Inspiration means different things to different people. To me it simply means having been given a workable idea. I think I was given a workable idea, even though I didn't get the idea to work. Can you be inspired to write a dud? I think you can. I think I was.

But there is a higher form of inspiration, I would suggest: there is the artist or the work of art that inspires you, not to produce a particular painting, poem, piece of music, whatever, but to go that road, to take up that art-form and to follow where it leads. Unbelievably, perhaps, the poem that did that for me was Plato's Dialogue The Republic which I had, also around the age of eleven or twelve in E. V. Rieu's translation (Penguin edition). I was totally thrilled by it and I attribute my passion for poetry to... well, I don't know, should it be Plato or Rieu?

Meanwhile I was incubating a passion for art, without really being aware of it. A good deal of bad health meant that I was often confined to bed for longish spells. Drawing was a life-line. But then I went - probably was taken, but if so I can't remember by whom - to the Tate Gallery. There I was introduced to William Blake (his Beatrice is shown above), Samuel Palmer (the first image below is of his In a Shoreham Garden), Graham Sutherland (a typical image is shown below right), Henry Moore (his war drawings of people sheltering on the London Underground - penultimate image) and John Piper (final image). I suppose the big three were Palmer, Sutherland and Piper. They have never lost their magic. They took me to art school and on to college, confirming me in my desire to teach art - which I never did, but that's another story.

Facing it.

Publication of the three short-listed portraits for this year's BP Portrait Award set me thinking about the possible justifications for such a high profile award for a branch of art much regarded as one of its Cinderellas. On the one hand the competition is very popular with the public. On the other, that same public seems to rate portraiture much as it rates still life: charming, but little more. Many artists (apart from portrait painters, of course) seem to rate the competition as an irrelevance. The fact that all the submissions are traditional-style works with not an abstract or an even a remotely avant-garde painting to be seen, might be taken as confirmation of that stance. (In fact the competition was founded specifically to combat the wave upon wave of modern and modernistic works flooding on to the market.) Others consider the whole concept of competition to be out of place in the context of art. However, my interest just now is with portraiture itself and not with the competition - though I will just add that the exhibition is invariably of a very high standard, and this year's short list promises that it will be so again. The entries will be on show in The National Portrait Gallery from the 18th June until the 14th September.

When speaking of portraiture in this context I am ignoring the corporate side of the family, the public representation of the great and the good, the pontiff and the general, the local dignitary in his fine robes, perhaps holding the symbols of his office. I am focussing entirely on the private portrait, the one over which the artist has control and is not in hock to the sitter or his patrons.

It is often said that the human figure is the most difficult of all subjects to render in visual terms. It isn't, of course, the difference between representing Uncle Ben on canvas and, say, a fox, is that we understand in greater detail and with more certainty how a human being (Uncle Ben) is constructed than how a fox is put together, we are more aware of his proportions and contours and what is normal and what outside the norm than is the case with the fox. And even if we take, not a fox but a pet as the example, the argument still applies. No matter how much we may love our dog or our cat, the clincher is that we have never been one, our critical faculties are not engaged to the same expert level. And so we are more confident that we know what is possible or what is right and what is a mistake or a distortion. our judgements have more authority. That is why life drawing, clothed or unclothed, was traditionally the linchpin of art training. (It is not so nowadays, I understand. Art schools are dropping it from their curricula because students are refusing to attend the classes.)

The same factors are at work in the case of portraiture as in that of life drawing, but others come into play as well. As a species we are really very adept at discerning character in a human face. Some individuals, indeed, pride themselves on having such abilities to a particularly marked degree, but all of us are probably reasonably efficient. However, reproducing in paint what we claim to be able to discern - or maybe only intuit - in the flesh is another matter. Even so, the one who could not have painted the portrait, could not have hoped to catch the likeness can maybe see at a glance if the character conveyed is one that hangs together, is a possible, even a convincing portrayal. Even more exacting, and from the same - if heightened - criteria, is the self-portrait. Paul Klee wrote: Art does not represent the visible, it makes visible and to my mind there must be an element of making visible in any work of art.

We must never forget, however, that the portraitist, and especially the self-portraitist, may have a hidden agenda no less than the painter of corporate portraits. Two of the finest show this very clearly. Rembrandt painted dozens of self portraits, more probably than any other artist of his standing, and in each one he is depicted trying on a different role. Rubens painted only four, spread out through the course of his career, and in each he is the same as in the other three. Age did not weary him - or take any sort of toll, so far as his portrayals of himself were concerned. Not a bad way to reassure yourself in life, I suppose.

The images, in order, are: "Manuel" by Annalisa Avancini, "Tom" by Michael Gaskell and "Changeling" by Peter Monkman.

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I have been challenged to the following meme by Lizzy Frizzfrock, so here goes...

1. My current obsession, in so far as I have one, is the poetry of W.S.Graham.

2.The item ofclothing I wear most often is probably the oldest shirt I possess.

3.What's for dinner - hopefully either a curry or red snapper.

4. I prefer to listen to either Bach (J.S.) or Benjamin Britten.

5.A word of thanks to Lizzie for thinking of me - I just hope that she will not be disappointed with the result (or the time I've taken to respond).

6.Favourite vacation spot Don't have one really, we tend to make for places we have not been before. Northern Italy of the Norwegian Fjords come closest.

7. I am reading Grey Gowrie's "Third Day : New and Selected Poems" and "Stepping Stones : Interviews of Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll".

8. Four words to describe myself: impatient, optimistic, impractical, forgiving.

9.Guilty Pleasures: Single malts.

10.First spring-cleaning thing: the computer

11. I look forward to finishing my current project, whatever it happens to be - even though I know I shall hate having finished it.

12. I guess I am now supposed to tag a chosen group of fellow bloggers, but instead I am going to demonstrate my independence of spirit and make it an open tag for anyone who would like to take it up. Please leave a note on my blog, though, if you decide to do so.

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Whilst on the subject of Facing it and alluding to the post immediately before this, we had our two grandsons for their weekly meal yesterday, the conversation turned to Palestine and Gaza, the younger of the two (18) said: "Well, we caused it Grandad, after all that Hitler did to them, we did the same. It was us who put them in that mousetrap and left them with their enemies." I have never doubted our complicity, but hearing it put that starkly and that particular spin on it... I have not quite gotten over it yet. Is that the way the younger generation sees it, I wonder?

Seven Jewish Children

In the first drafting of my poem The White Crucifixion (Scroll down to the previous post) I included the bombing of Gaza as a latter day Guernica, but rather quickly removed it as it seemed to me to complicate the issues without adding very much to them. However, the play Seven Jewish Children being in the news again has caused me, if not exactly to interrupt my intended programme, at least to modify it enough to bring you the full text of this eight minute play. It was written as a quick response to the bombing, and the author, Caryl Churchill has released it for free performances and readings on condition that a collection is taken up on behalf of the people of Gaza. If you would prefer to hear a reading of it by Jennie Stoller, you can do so on The guardian website (guardian.co.uk/video). There are also video links here

1
Tell her it’s a game
Tell her it’s serious
But don’t frighten her
Don’t tell her they’ll kill her
Tell her it’s important to be quiet
Tell her she’ll have cake if she’s good
Tell her to curl up as if she’s in bed
But not to sing.
Tell her not to come out
Tell her not to come out even if she hears shouting
Don’t frighten her
Tell her not to come out even if she hears nothing for a long time
Tell her we’ll come and find her
Tell her we’ll be here all the time.
Tell her something about the men
Tell her they’re bad in the game
Tell her it’s a story
Tell her they’ll go away
Tell her she can make them go away if she keeps still
By magic
But not to sing.
2
Tell her this is a photograph of her grandmother, her uncles and me
Tell her her uncles died
Don’t tell her they were killed
Tell her they were killed
Don’t frighten her.
Tell her her grandmother was clever
Don’t tell her what they did
Tell her she was brave
Tell her she taught me how to make cakes
Don’t tell her what they did
Tell her something
Tell her more when she’s older.
Tell her there were people who hated Jews
Don’t tell her
Tell her it’s over now
Tell her there are still people who hate Jews
Tell her there are people who love Jews
Don’t tell her to think Jews or not Jews
Tell her more when she’s older
Tell her how many when she’s older
Tell her it was before she was born and she’s not in danger
Don’t tell her there’s any question of danger.
Tell her we love her
Tell her dead or alive her family all love her
Tell her her grandmother would be proud of her.
3
Don’t tell her we’re going for ever
Tell her she can write to her friends, tell her her friends can maybe
come and visit
Tell her it’s sunny there
Tell her we’re going home
Tell her it’s the land God gave us
Don’t tell her religion
Tell her her great great great great lots of greats grandad lived there
Don’t tell her he was driven out
Tell her, of course tell her, tell her everyone was driven out and
the country is waiting for us to come home
Don’t tell her she doesn’t belong here
Tell her of course she likes it here but she’ll like it there even more.
Tell her it’s an adventure
Tell her no one will tease her
Tell her she’ll have new friends
Tell her she can take her toys
Don’t tell her she can take all her toys
Tell her she’s a special girl
Tell her about Jerusalem.
4
Don’t tell her who they are
Tell her something
Tell her they’re Bedouin, they travel about
Tell her about camels in the desert and dates
Tell her they live in tents
Tell her this wasn’t their home
Don’t tell her home, not home, tell her they’re going away
Don’t tell her they don’t like her
Tell her to be careful.
Don’t tell her who used to live in this house
No but don’t tell her her great great grandfather used to live in
this house
No but don’t tell her Arabs used to sleep in her bedroom.
Tell her not to be rude to them
Tell her not to be frightened
Don’t tell her she can’t play with the children
Don’t tell her she can have them in the house.
Tell her they have plenty of friends and family
Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands of their own
Tell her again this is our promised land.
Don’t tell her they said it was a land without people
Don’t tell her I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.
Tell her maybe we can share.
Don’t tell her that.
5
Tell her we won
Tell her her brother’s a hero
Tell her how big their armies are
Tell her we turned them back
Tell her we’re fighters
Tell her we’ve got new land.
6
Don’t tell her
Don’t tell her the trouble about the swimming pool
Tell her it’s our water, we have the right
Tell her it’s not the water for their fields
Don’t tell her anything about water.
Don’t tell her about the bulldozer
Don’t tell her not to look at the bulldozer
Don’t tell her it was knocking the house down
Tell her it’s a building site
Don’t tell her anything about bulldozers.
Don’t tell her about the queues at the checkpoint
Tell her we’ll be there in no time
Don’t tell her anything she doesn’t ask
Don’t tell her the boy was shot
Don’t tell her anything.
Tell her we’re making new farms in the desert
Don’t tell her about the olive trees
Tell her we’re building new towns in the wilderness.
Don’t tell her they throw stones
Tell her they’re not much good against tanks
Don’t tell her that.
Don’t tell her they set off bombs in cafés
Tell her, tell her they set off bombs in cafés
Tell her to be careful
Don’t frighten her.
Tell her we need the wall to keep us safe
Tell her they want to drive us into the sea
Tell her they don’t
Tell her they want to drive us into the sea.
Tell her we kill far more of them
Don’t tell her that
Tell her that
Tell her we’re stronger
Tell her we’re entitled
Tell her they don’t understand anything except violence
Tell her we want peace
Tell her we’re going swimming.
7
Tell her she can’t watch the news
Tell her she can watch cartoons
Tell her she can stay up late and watch Friends.
Tell her they’re attacking with rockets
Don’t frighten her
Tell her only a few of us have been killed
Tell her the army has come to our defence
Don’t tell her her cousin refused to serve in the army.
Don’t tell her how many of them have been killed
Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed
Tell her they’re terrorists
Tell her they’re filth
Don’t
Don’t tell her about the family of dead girls
Tell her you can’t believe what you see on television
Tell her we killed the babies by mistake
Don’t tell her anything about the army
Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army.
Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why
not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn’t she know? tell
her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she’s got
nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell
her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them,
tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them,
tell her we’re the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can’t talk
suffering to us. Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog
of war, tell her we won’t stop killing them till we’re safe, tell her I
laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they’re animals
living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out,
the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don’t care if
the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re
chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in
blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.
Don’t tell her that.
Tell her we love her.
Don’t frighten her.

And so to Easter...

This post has become in part a continuation of my previous one on Myth. That was not how it started out. I had intended to present merely those Easter images that over the years, and at different times, have moved and influenced me to the greatest degree. I was resolved to simply post them and let them speak for themselves. That is not what happened. First, a bit of personal history.

The first image I can recall seeing that - in my mind - had anything to do with the Easter story was Holman Hunt's The Light of the World. "But," I hear you object, "it has nothing to do with the Easter story." And neither does it, which is why I inserted the phrase in my mind. I have no idea how it came to be so associated, but it did.

Moving on, and some few years later, on a visit - I think my first - to The Tate Gallery, I bought a poster-sized print of Salvador Dali's Crucifixion - the one depicting Him and His cross floating, rising, rocketing, soaring - I was never quite sure of the most appropriate verb - above a sleeping world. I saw this as a statement that Christ was the active participant in his passion, that he was, if not triumphant, then at the very least, the hero of the action. It was also smack, bang in the middle of my surrealism phase, so that may have had something to do with it.

Just recently I have been moved by his other crucifixion, the one featuring the blocks which seem to have offended many traditionalists. I can quite see how that might be so. I have to admit to having been shocked myself when I first saw the image, but now it just seems full of power and - I would even say - majesty.


Between those two, though, three others were to hold sway in my imagination: the Stanley Spencer, the Mathis Grunewald and the Graham Sutherland. These, however, did not fall into line and form a neat progression somehow reflecting my progress from A to B. They skirted around each other, permanent rivals vying for my favour.

It was at this point as I thought about what to post that it occurred to me that Easter is a perfect example of one of the most common myths in the history of man's thought and faith. Indeed, it seems to be universal. The myth of descent and ascent, the going down and the rising again. William Blake thought that all gods were creations of the human poetic genius and pointed out that they have had a political function in the control of the populace, but more importantly - certainly for us now - they have a poetic function. We usually speak of it as being to explore our humanity, but he pointed out that beyond that it actually creates the humanising aspects of the self.

So the Easter story is but Christianity's take on the myth of descent and rising again, the myth that occurs also, for example, in the narratives of Orpheus and his descent into the underworld. St Paul, telling the gospel story, shows no interest in the domestic life of Jesus. There is no biography to speak of. He plunges straight in with a powerful poem of Christ emptying himself and taking the lowest form of humanity, then soaring heavenwards to take the most exalted place of all. This is a myth that has been taken and adapted by the modern day psychiatrist. The patient is taken down into the murkiest depths of his or her unconscious in order to rise again and be made whole.

Traditionalists - and especially traditional Christians - will - complain that I have told only half the story, that I have focussed on the death at the expense of the resurrection, whereas it is the latter that is at the heart of the Easter story/Easter myth. And they would be correct to make that protest.




The fact is that I can think of no work of art depicting the resurrection that has moved me in the way that these images of the crucifixion have moved me. This morning (Wednesday) The Times stole my thunder with a four page insert on Easter art, one heading in which read: Artists Still Overshadowed by the Cross, however it turned out that it did not mean what I at first took it to mean. Even so, they were able to come up with only two versions of the resurrection: Fra Angelico's and that by Piero della Francesca. Furthermore, in their list of the top ten works was only the Francesca. They were also the only two to occur to me. The Francesca I greatly admire, but beyond that it leaves me cold. Even after reading the Times's worthy text on the significance of its various aspects, it fails to move me as these others have moved me. The Angelico I do appreciate, it does resonate with me, but still it has never had the deep emotional - and lasting - effect on me that my other selections have had.

I do find it incredible though, this imbalance between great deaths an d great resurrections, if I can put it that way. You could argue that the artists of the past were doing the bidding of those who commissioned them, and were not free agents in this. But that makes it more unlikely, not less, since the commissioning agent was usually the church, for whom the resurrection is at the very heart of all faith - and not just Easter.



And what of this fugitive from my past? Can anyone come up with a role for The Light of the World in the Easter story? I'll make it an Easter challenge!

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And to each one of you out there in blogland, may you have exactly the Easter you would choose for yourself.

Myth and Me.

Myths are all around us. There are those who think it is not so, that myths belong to a previous age, an ancient, pre-scientific time. But in fact, we encounter them everywhere: ancient myths and modern myths, myths of religion and myths which spring from science itself and from scientific enquiry, myths from business and from politics. Tales to give racial or social significance and cohesion. And there are family and private myths - stories that do the same on a domestic or personal scale. Narratives to maintain the individual psyche. Some may become loose canons and end up fragmenting what they should bind: the myths of racial purity and racial supremacy, for example, which devastated large areas of the world during the previous century.

When I was growing up there were those in the extended family who would tell me of the myth of infinite human progress and perfectibility. That particular myth was already dead, of course: killed by the first World War and buried by The Second, as an uncle of mine would have it, but they still believed it, they had been brought up with it. I found it a seductive myth, even if I never did quite take it in. There were others : the myth of Papal Infallibility was one. I never did get my head around that. Like unto it was the myth of the infallibility of British Justice. Some, I think, thought me almost a traitor because I would not swallow that one - and strangely, I have no idea what prevented me: I had no obvious reason, no evidence at that time not to believe. Years later, of course, when the great backlog of miscarriages of justice began to trail through our High Courts, I felt some vindication. The Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, The Birmingham Six and many, many others. So not all myths are good. Some have served their purpose and now work against it. We have to be careful which myths we assimilate.

It is through myth, I believe, that poetry and religion shake hands. Wallace Stevens wrote that poetry had supplanted religion, but I see it more as a handing on of a baton - perhaps only temporarily. We have to remember, though, that religion is not myth, even if myth is religion. Myths are not stories which are not true. neither are they true stories, they are truths told in stories. They are not fables about non-existent entities, but revelations concerning realities.

We live in a world that we do not fully understand. There are powers at work that are beyond us. This is so even for the scientists at the cutting edge of discovery, perhaps especially so for them. But we - and they - must try to understand. Furthermore, this world that we do not understand is changing in ways that we do not understand, and so we are striving - before it is too late - to create the myth that will look back to remind itself of our origins, even as it looks forward and attempts to tune our hearts (some might prefer to say souls) to that which we are becoming.

To me poetry and myth seem inseparable. Poetry at its best shares the mythic quality that lies at the heart of religion. A narrative becomes mythic when it has a discernable truth running through it like a vein of gold through a landscape. Poetry and religion are the two alternatives, the two main tools at our disposal to mine that vein. What poetry brings to the task is its focus on the vein, its refusal to be led astray by the extraneous, more prosaic facts of the narrative. Poetic truth is mythic truth, and myth, as I have stressed, is religion. Margaret Whyte has said of myths; without them, we were born yesterday. They are indeed, our history, but that is not to imply that they carry historical truth. They express our root,. they picture us as we were and in that picture we see ourselves for what we are.

And the great dynamo driving all these myths is death. People the world over are coming to terms as best they may with what for the individual must be life's biggest fact of all. They have always done so, of course, but in modern times there has been an increasing tendency to find the official myths wanting, and these being Do-It-Yourself times, for the individual to attempt to find a bespoke narrative. To some extent the days of the one-style-suits-all have passed. Possibly people in past times did the same, but were more reticent about it, not wanting to break ranks - or be excommunicated or burnt as a heretic. I have reached the age at which it begins to seem more and more urgent to thrash out an exit strategy. I can recall the moment when the fact of death first became a reality for me. It was war time, so I had heard a lot about death and people being killed, but it was all very remote, like a film that didn't hold my interest. For me and for my friends war was fun. We went out mornings after air raids looking for shrapnel, even bits off aircraft if we were lucky. I was at Junior school, so would have been between 7 and 11, probably somewhere around 8-9. I was walking home from school with my friend - he who was the subject of my poem Pistol-Whipped - when we came upon a dead fox and a dead rat. We said it was a rat, but upon reflection it could have been a large mouse or other rodent. They had both been skinned, the fox, I think expertly, the rodent perhaps not so well. It was a traumatic moment, but the trauma passed very quickly. My friend pointed out how like a map the fox's body was with its veins and arteries and its bumps and blemishes - plus a few scratches which we immediately decided were claw marks. The devil's! - and soon we were concocting stories as to how the two animals had met their deaths and how they had come to end up skinned. I do remember that soon after this there were dreams and fantasies about death, which over the years, as other deaths (and the mythic teachings of Christianity) were assimilated, began to assume the shape of a private myth. At some point in the last 20 - 30 years poetry took over the organising-integrating role from religion. Impossible to say exactly when or how this happened, but soon after that I began to read Wallace Stevens and to discover that he had trodden a similar path. Not the same path exactly, for I did not feel, as he did, that poetry had to fill the gap left by an empty Heaven. It was simply that it worked more efficiently for me.

An Experiment

I am hoping with your help, O good and faithful friends of the blogosphere, to test a pet theory of mine. It was revived for me when I recounted in my previous post the odd anecdote of Kandinsky finding in his studio what he at first took to be an unknown masterpiece.

You may, alas, not qualify to be a participant in my experiment. To do so you must be UNfamiliar with Marcel Duchamp's painting of a A Nude Descending a Staircase. If you are at all familiar with it, I would still appreciate knowing what you think of the experiment.

I will make the theory apparent after the experiment. For now It is enough to know that below are tow versions of Nude Descending a Staircase, only one of which is as Picasso painted it.
I would like you to say which you think is the true version. Simple as that. The ideal would be to make the decision at the instinctual level. Not to puzzle it out, but to respond in that way would really require the images to be larger yet to see them together. I will leave you to make the necessary accomodations. Depending upon your browser, the ideal may not be possible.



























Please do not scroll further than the bottom of the second picture until you have decided.

















The correct version is to be found HERE

The pet theory I was hoping to test is that the way we "read" pictures is very much influenced by the way we read - i.e. from left to right in the case of western traditions.

(It would perhaps be too much to hope that some visitors might stray on to the blog who were brought up reading other than left to right.)

The theory here was that a slant thus / would be taken as ascending, whilst \ would indicate descending - as per our "steep hill" road signs.

Kandinsky did it first...

... unless you know better, of course. I didn't. In fact, I had no thought of posting on Wassili Kandinsky until a few days ago, researching Chagall in a somewhat hefty tome of over a 1000 large pages (Art of the 20th Century - part of a retirement present from my former colleagues) I came across an article entitled With Closed Eyes. I almost couldn't believe mine. As those of you who know my post with almost the same title, With Eyes Shut Tight, might well understand. As you will have surmised, the article in question was not about Victor Pasmore, one of the twin subjects of my post back then, but Wassili Kandinsky. Reading the text I became even more engrossed, for it seemed to throw some light on the phenomenon that had formed the other half of my post, those images we see after closing our eyes. I do not recall ever having looked at the page in question before, and it is quite possible I had not. It is a book I dip into, and being of the size it is, there are probably other pages I have missed. I was also intrigued by two reproductions accompanying the text. The year (each of the book's pages deals with a specific year, the number of pages devoted to each year varying in accord with its significance) was 1944. Kandinsky had died on December 3rd of that year after coping with failing health since early March. By the summer his eyes had become almost permanently half-closed. After his death his widow Nina explained that He possessed the rare talent of being able to represent in his mind the world of his paintings with their colours and their forms, exactly as he later set them down on canvas. It has been suggested that these forms, their myriads of rings swimming across the surface of the work, were the effects of phosphenes that can be impressed on the eyeball when the eyes are closed. Towards the end of his life Kandinsky would have been painting what he was seeing with his eyes closed.


That might suggest that he lost his grip on reality to some extent, but Nina says not. What may not be generally known is that Kandinsky is credited with producing the first pure abstract painting, a watercolour. There is a story that goes with the event. It is that he had returned to his studio after a day painting in the countryside, to discover that someone had left a canvas propped against the wall at the far end of the studio. He was amazed at the painting, which he immediately recognised as a masterpiece, and amazed that anyone should have left it there while he was out. He approached it excitedly, only to be confronted with the fact that it was but one of his own, though on it side. The way he told it was that in that moment he realised the harm that had been done to his art by figurative painting.

Until the age of about forty (somewhere around 1906) he produced some of the most superb landscapes. For a while after that there came a period of equally superb watercolours. A few quotes of his I think worth passing on:

Of all the arts abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have heightened sensitivity for composition and for colours, and that you be a true poet.

I applied streaks and blobs of colours onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could...

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

There is no must in art because art is free.

Party Time

This post really follows on from the second part of my previous post, in reply to which several of you, either in the comments or by email, made the point that drawing involves putting in only the important lines. In other words, it is essentially an excercise in leaving out. The trick is in the deciding which is which, which are the lines of stress and which the lines that just confuse and muddle the work. This is an excercise intended to make you an artist in seeing, as it was once put to me. A Picasso in seeing, maybe. It is really no different from what I described last time.

If you are skilful or confident enough to draw freehand, there is no problem. Do that. Choose one of the images I give below and try to draw no more than twelve lines to convey its essence.

If you are not yet at that stage copy an image into your graphics program, but not straight into it. Open the program with a background layer first, then copy the image into it as a new layer. Now place another layer on top of the image, either a transparent layer or one sufficiently transparent for the image to show through.Now, making sure that the top layer is the active layer, draw in your lines. When you are happy with it remove the image layer, leaving just your lines. (Of course, you could do this using tracing paper, but it is much easier to remove lines and change tings using the programme.)

When you are happy with the result, try again, using fewer lines. The challenge is to use the smallest number of lines possible.




And the Party stuff? Ah, yes, well, with just a little judicious adaptation, it can make for a good party game, should you be planning the right sort of party.