15 November 2024

Let us prey....



Gratia dei sum id quod sum....








Many years ago, before I discovered East Anglia, I (occasionally) drank at Ye Old Mitre Tavern in Holborn. This fine old pub (established in 1547) hides away in Ely Court, between Hatton Garden and Ely Place which was, from 1290 to 1772, the London home of the Bishops of Ely, and also, until fairly recently, considered a part of Cambridgeshire.


It took me until 1984, however, when escaping for a day from a course in Cambridge, before I visited Ely itself and had lunch with a young lady friend at The Lamb.  About all I knew then was that Ely was an island 



(my guide was the Venerable Bede: Elge is in the province of the East Angles, a district of about six hundred families, of the nature of an island, encompassed, as has been said, with marshes or waters, and therefore it has its name from the great plenty of eels taken in those marshes.....) and I had heard tell of Hereward the Woke [Wake?  Ed] who is said to have roamed the fens and slept in a reed bed.



At that time, as an impoverished student, I could not afford to enter the cathedral, but since I became eligible for a bus pass and winter fuel allowance, and moved nearer, I have managed to return to the Isle of Ely a number of times in recent years.  So I can now safely say, I Love Ely.....



The town (it was long considered a city as the seat of a diocese, but was officially granted a charter by QE2 in 1974 - it is the second smallest city in the UK , after Wells) has a population of 18,000, and has existed since 673, when Saint [Surely not then a Saint? Ed] Etheldreda, daughter of King Anna [? Ed] of the East Angles, founded a monastery here. The monastery was destroyed by Danish invaders in 870, but was rebuilt and became a famous abbey and shrine.



The 'Ship of the Fens' (as the cathedral has become to be known) took some 300 years to complete, partly because the central tower over the crossing collapsed in 1322 as a result of messing around with the foundations of the new (and glorious) Lady Chapel.



But not to be daunted, Alan de Walsingham (Sacrist, or Clerk of Works at the time) had the brilliant idea of hoisting eight 63 foot long, 17 tonne timbers up to support an octagonal lantern, which, with some later tweaks, still survives as one of the wonders of the medieval world.



Once upon a time the top of the octagon was the belfry, but it was noted that the whole construction creaked and swayed whenever they hit the clappers, so they gave that (ap)pealing idea up.... Nowadays there are just two hundred tons of timber and another two hundred tons of lead capping what would otherwise be a monumental hole in the roof.



In August this year, the artist Sean Henry exhibited 28 sculptures of variously sized human forms, created with bronze, steel, plaster and ceramics and painted with oil and exterior paints, in and by the cathedral. The exhibition, under the title Am I my brother's keeper? reflected the brightly coloured effigies that once were displayed on plinths and tombs in the cathedral but which were hacked and destroyed in 1539 by the minions of King Damian Lewis [I think you mean H8? Ed]


Ursula's Dream (2001)


The curator of the exhibition, Jacquiline Creswell, suggested that it could be interpreted as an enquiry into one's moral responsibility towards others.  The Very Reverend Mark Bonney, Dean of Ely, notes that the niches of the Cathedral would once have been inhabited by sculptures of saints with a capital 'S.' 


Man Lying On His Side (2000)


Sean Henry makes us think again about who are the 'saints'....  The sculptures in this exhibition are not named individuals, they are representative of us all and speak of the interconnectedness of us all and our responsibility one to another.


Hedda  (2018)

Am I my brother's keeper?  Mark Bonney asked himself - yes very definitely I am - and I am deeply challenged by that.


Lying Man (2020)

I am sure that others have been asking themselves the same question since the independent review into the Church of England’s handling of allegations of serious abuse by the late John Smyth was published the other day.
 Keith Makin, who led the independent review said, The abuse at the hands of John Smyth was prolific and abhorrent. Words cannot adequately describe the horror of what transpired.

Seated Figure (2016)

Many of the victims who took the brave decision to speak to us about what they experienced have carried this abuse silently for more than 40 years.


Despite the efforts of some individuals to bring the abuse to the attention of authorities, the responses by the Church of England and others were wholly ineffective and amounted to a coverup
.


So what has this to do with Eels, you ask?  Well.... Eels are slippery.  


And Stephen Conway who was Bishop of Ely for 13 years, before being translated to Lincoln in July 2023, had this to say on November 11th:
The victims and survivors of abuse are at the centre of my prayers as this Review is published.


In light of the Review, I understand that there were further actions I could have taken following my reporting of the disclosures made to us in the Diocese of Ely about John Smyth. I am sorry that I did not pursue these actions at that time
.

The Bishop's House

On November 12th Stephen Conway published another statement, saying: I am clear that I did all within my authority as a Bishop of the Church of England, bearing in mind that I had no authority over an entirely independent province on another continent.


I acknowledge fully that my fault was in not rigorously pursuing Lambeth about that province-to-province communication, and for this I am deeply sorry.


On November 13th the Rt Revd Dr Dagmar Winter, Bishop of Huntingdon and currently Acting Bishop of Ely, responded to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury following the publication of the Makin Report. Any of us who have read even only parts of the Report, he said, will be sickened and saddened beyond words, also angered, both by the abuse and by the failings within our church in effective safeguarding..... At times like this, it can be hard to be a committed member of the Church of England. This kind of moral trauma to the church's faithful servants is part of the wickedness of what has happened.


Yesterday afternoon saw the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. His decision shows the seriousness with which he takes the criticisms contained in the Report and demonstrates his willingness to take personal and institutional responsibility for the failures identified. I am grateful to him for this, as I am also conscious of his burden of leadership and his achievements over the years.


We should be clear that the Archbishop’s resignation does not alter the safeguarding challenge for the whole church. Our only proper response can be a renewed and ever more determined commitment to safeguarding, to the implementation of new recommendations, to our support of our Parish Safeguarding Officers and to our Diocesan Safeguarding Team.....

Am I my brother's keeper?  



I came late to the TV series, Wolf Hall [Woolfall?  Will ful? Ed] and am only now catching up.  I won't offer an opinion on the quality of the entertainment, but Peter Kosminsky, the director of the series, said: This is a first for me..... It is about the politics of despotism, and how you function around an absolute ruler....

Does that ring any bells?


Ring them bells St Peter
Where the four winds blow
Ring them bells with an iron hand
So the people will know....

Bob Dylan
Ring Them Bells


Although I have been enchanted and fascinated by the magnificence of The Ship of the Fens, Perhaps visiting these places should make us think a little more about some of the darker corners of human experience?  It is estimated that 300 workmen died whilst working on Ely cathedral.  And how many others have suffered at the hands of one religion or another?


Perhaps it is no longer acceptable to say: But by the grace of God I am what I am.  Those words, in Latin (Gratia Dei sum quod sum) are inscribed above the entrance to the Bishop West Chantry Chapel in Ely Cathedral, which dates from 1534 and lies at the end of the South choir-aisle.  Sean Henry placed several figures in this chapel in conversation with each other in his exhibition.  



Jacquiline Creswell suggests that within the context of a sacred space, Am I my brother's keeper? [was] a portal through which bridges may be built between people both inside and outside the community, helping to open up discussion about our shared humanity OK. Fine. But the idea that we are what we are by the grace of God seems like an excuse to me.

Not one of Sean Henry's

Whatever happened to mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa? 

Let us prey......?

******

Ely Cathedral - December 2020



******


12 November 2024

Some passing waves

Byron in Italy

 

I wrote this article in 1983, and it was published (in English and Italian) in the second number of the first volume of the Sheraton Italia Magazine, with the following (slightly fanciful) by-line:


English-born Richard Gibbs has been living and working for the past seven years in Rome. He is a professor of English Literature, a free-lance journalist and one of the owners of a new English pub, located on Via della Madonna dei Monti (near Via Cavour) in the historical centre of Rome.

 

I had a particular interest in Noel, George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale, as in 1980 I had named one of four new Houses at St George’s English School (where I taught) after him.  The then Headmaster, Hendrik Deelman, decreed that, among other criteria, the names (of the houses) should preferably be of people, probably historical figures, with whom pupils will be proud to be associated and about whom much of interest can be said......

 

When I proposed Byron for mine (the others were Drake, Livingstone and Newton) the Headmaster objected and attempted to block my choice.  I insisted, however, on the grounds that despite a physical handicap (he was born with a short Achilles’ tendon which made running difficult) Byron achieved great physical feats in swimming and riding in particular, and not only supported Italian liberty but died assisting the Greeks in their struggle for freedom.  You want a hero?  Find me a better example.....  Hendrik, to his grumpy credit, acquiesced.

 

Here is the article:


Byron in Italy


Portrait of Lord Byron by G Sanders (1807)
Courtesy of Sir Joseph Cheyne
The Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome

The literary links between Britain and Italy are many and various and deep-rooted.  Perhaps the earliest connection was Julius Caesar’s account of his invasion, which depicted the Britons in their true-blue glory.  However, it was not until the Middle Ages that the traffic of impressions and influence really began. Whether or not Chaucer met Boccaccio in Florence will never be known.  But the Italian influence on Chaucer was marked.  As ‘Pilgrimage’ became more popular – and safer – and as printing made literature more exchangeable the dissemination of ideas grew.

 

Italy has always been an attractive place of northerners.  The stabilisation of Europe under the Caesars and the popularisation of Greek drama in Latin form must have played many a part as did the immensely important role of Rome in the Christian Church, but not all pilgrims are saints, and many with pious hopes also had pedestrian appetites, and so the dissolution of cultures continued.

 

Civilisation, climate, Christianity and curiosity all played major parts in bringing artists and writers, ladies and gentlemen, to Italy.  From the seventeenth century on, with a snowballing increase in more recent years, the tourist trade has developed, and everyone with his sketch-pad or her note-book, or nowadays with the video-camera [smart-phone? Ed] tries to capture a little of the country for the folks back home.

 

Among the millions of visitors Italy has had have been some of the greatest figures of literature, as well as myriads of their acolytes. Certain of their books are still well-known and a few are still quite readable.  Dickens’ Pictures from Italy ranks high as a subjective piece of journalism, determinedly anti-Catholic and yet refreshingly enthusiastic (his appreciation of the effect of the Trevi Fountain contrasts markedly with his denigration of St Peter’s), while Henry James’ Italian Hours is pompously unapproachable, a weak moment in self-appreciation.

 

Direct responses to the country are less available than the influences to be found in novels and poetry, and drama, however.  Many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in  Italy for example, and the Petrarchan sonnet is a major form in English verse.  The Duchess of Malfi, Keats’s Isabella, Forster’s A Room with a View are three examples of works with obvious connections with Italy, but there are many more.

 

One of the most striking relationships between a British literary figure and the people and literature of Italy is that of Lord Byron.  It is now [November 1983, Ed]. Nearly two hundred years since his birth and short, stormy life, and countless books have been written about him, but there is still a great deal of prejudice in circulation against him and at least as much myth.

 

His great strength was activity: he was not content to stay at home and mop his brow in aesthetic ecstasy.  Byron did things like swim the Hellespont, the Tagus at Lisbon and the Lagoon at Venice.  He travelled extensively in Greece and Albania as a young man, helped the cause of Italian liberation in his maturity, and died at Missolonghi from a fever (doctors reported) contracted during the Greek campaign against the Turks [which he partly financed from his own purse, Ed].

 

A few years ago, in Genova, I was trying to locate the villa in which the Dickens family had lodged for almost a year in the mid-19th century. I knew roughly where it was and thought I might have found it, though I also knew that it might have disappeared long ago.  Dickens had composed The Chimes, one of his popular Christmas Books, whilst living there, and years later, when he died, the bells of Genova had tolled for him, and the local newspapers had announced that Nostro Caro Carlo Dickens è Morto! I asked in an old, Dickensian haberdasher’s shoop whether the two old ladies (undoubtedly residents of the area since the mid-19th century!) knew anything about this famous scrittore inglese?  They turned the name over a few times, shaking their wise old heads.  Eventually I got an answer: Charles Dickens – no....  But Byron, yes!  He lived over there.... And indeed, he had lived in that street briefly in 1823, prior to his fatal departure for Greece.

 

Byron holds people’s imaginations because he was generous and vigorous, outspoken and brave.  His life was distressing to himself and to some others but it was presided over by an energetic and essentially truth-loving spirit.  As Peter Quennell (a literary historian famous for his work on Bryon) has said, Three-quarters of Byron’s verse is, at any rate from the modern point of view, quite remarkably bad, yet, as a significant literary figure and as an exceptionally interesting and unusually ill-fated human being, Byron can never cease to command our attention, exhorting our sympathy even at moments when we are inclined to like him least.

 

Although he did not write much about Italy, apart from the famous lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgimage that describe Venice, Florence and:

 

Oh, Rome! My Country!  City of the Soul!

The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,

Lone mother of dead empires! And control

In their shut breasts their petty misery.

 

much of what he wrote was inspired by what he saw or read here.  Don Juan has precious little to do with Italy (and nothing to do with Mozart’s Don Giovanni) but it is written in a romping ottava rima that he had learnt from reading Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and it was nearly all written while living in Italy.

 

The prejudice that marks Byron as a licentious libertine, and which brands all romantic poetry as unreadable gush, is one of the main objects of Byron’s satire, and it is most often found in the mouths of those who have never read a line of his.  In fact his work is often witty, readable, and (even) moral, and often contains entertaining thoughts as well as amusing stories, though he never tried to overdo it, as he wrote at the end of the first Canto of Don Juan:

 

But for the present, gentle reader! And

Still gentler purchaser!  The Bard – that’s I –

Must, with permission, shake you by the hand,

And so – ‘your humble servant, and Good-bye!

We meet again, if we should understand

Each other; and if not, I shall not try

Your patience further than this short sample –

‘T’were well if others followed my example.’

 

*****

 

In case you are not persuaded, may I call on Kenneth Clark’s support?  On page 307 of Civilisation, he wrote: appearing when he did, the tide of disillusion carried him along, so that he became, after Napoleon, the most famous name in Europe.  From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin, or great men of action like Bismarck, down to the most brainless schoolgirl [careful, Ken!  ED] his works were read with an almost hysterical enthusiasm.....  Byron, who was very much a man of his time, wrote a poem about the opening of a prison – the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon. He begins with a sonnet in the old revolutionary vein – Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeon’s, Liberty!  But when, after many horrors, the prisoner of Chillon is released, a new note is heard:

 

At last men come to set me free;

I ask’d not why, and reck’d not where;

It was at length the same to me,

Fetter’d or fetterless to be,

I learn’d to love despair.

 

Since that line was written how many intellectuals down to Beckett and Sartre have echoed its sentiment.....  [However] this negative conclusion was not the whole of Byron.  The prisoner of Chillon had looked from his castle wall onto the mountains and the lake, and felt himself to be a part of them.  This was the positive side of Byron’s genius, a self-identification with the great forces of nature: not Wordsworth’s daisies and daffodils, but crags, cataracts and colossal storms: in short, with the sublime.....


*****

 

I rest my case.  A final quote from Don Juan, Canto XV, stanza 99 [which, for the record, I read whilst wild camping on Corsica some 45 years ago]:

 

Between two worlds life hovers like a star

‘Twixt night and morn upon the horizon’s verge.

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be! The eternal surge

Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar

Our bubbles. As the old burst, new emerge,

Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves

Of empires heave but like some passing waves.

 

 

Byron House, 1994

 



6 November 2024

A Modest Celebration

All you need is.....



It is a dull, misty morning. As is often the case these days, my mind clicks and whirrs as if it is in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, little impulses flickering around like grains of sand in an old tin, the platelets colliding and then sticking as I worry about amyloid-ß plaque formation, and in amongst this turmoil I hear snatches of songs and echoes of poems once learned:

MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

W B Yeats
EASTER 1916


I walk out in the dim day, wondering about this world and how it has seen plague and war ever since we began to civilise ourselves.  I have often thought how fortunate I have been not to have been in some other time, some other place. I kick myself for my superficial and trivial mind, and then lapse into a kind of torpor, before another thought emerges.  Did Alexei Navalny die in vain?  And why did this occur to me?  I face the wall:



And Robert Frost comes to mind:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down

 

Robert Frost

Mending Wall


And then walking on, I see the village church spire probing the mist above.  Why can't I believe in something?  Anything?  Did the saints all die in vain?



Those poppies round the gate - the messages of love - those who fought and died, or perhaps, just died - what is this life if full of care?  I must snap out of it.  The news - today's news - will soon be forgotten.  Please?

George Harrison comes to mind.  He said this about a song he wrote: Sometimes you open your mouth and you don’t know what you are going to say, and whatever comes out is the starting point. If that happens and you are lucky, it can usually be turned into a song. This song is a prayer and personal statement between me, the Lord, and whoever likes it.

I like it:

Give me love, give me love

Give me peace on earth

Give me light, give me life

Keep me free from birth

Give me hope, help me cope

With this heavy load

Trying to touch and reach you with

Heart and soul

 

George Harrison

Give me love (Give me peace on earth)


I walk on, the damp clinging to me, smoke from an early bonfire drifting lazily around me.  There is someone on the allotments before me.  Tim Mann stands and leans on his hoe, and we exchange greetings.  It is a moment of hope.  The only other person in the world for the moment and we share thoughts on the way the world is turning.  How strange that on this dull morning the one person I meet speaks in a language I understand, and says things that I can comprehend, things that seem to chime with things I would like to say too.

They'll try to teach you how to stop shining. 

And you, instead, must shine on. 

Tim Mann to his 10 year old self


I am lifted up.  Perhaps all is not lost?  Sanity is not entirely dead.  While there are the empty spaces - the desolation:




There are also flowers that bloom:




And, to put it coarsely, there is hope that something fresh may grow out of the shit:



Another song comes to mind. I remember seeing the Beatles perform this in July 1967 on a TV show that went simultaneously around the world. And I remember seeing a counter ticking, as the 200 millionth birth in the United States of America arrived. There are now nearly 350 million persons in the USA. Isn't that crazy?  In my short lifetime, the number of us on this planet has gone from around 2.5 billion (when I was born) to approximately 3.5 when All You Need is Love was recorded, to 8.2 billion today.  (That's a lot of gravestones, Ed.

Nothing you can make that can't be made
No one you can save that can't be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn
How to be you in time
It's easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

 

John Lennon/Paul McCartney

All You Need is Love



OK I may be blinding myself with gossamer dreams (look what happened to John? Ed.) but there has to be hope, and there has to be love (Though maybe that is what you are missing this morning? Ed.)

I walk on.  The path enclosed in weedy growth, the sky so dense that the Pink-footed geese are confused, their two- or three-syllable scratchy honks sound worried as they flap in chevrons through the murk:




But then, back in the village, I dream there is a rainbow over the cottages. Is this a portent of better things to come, or a symbol of an impending storm?



Truth is, I don't know what to make of it.  I cannot make sense of my life, let alone the bigger picture. W B Yeats comes back, his gravestone in Drumcliff suggesting that perhaps we should not take everything too seriously:

Cast a cold Eye 

On life, on Death.

Horseman pass by!


This evening I will stage a modest celebration.  I will light a bonfire and I will burn away confusion and regret. No effigy will be consumed, for that is not the way.  I will try to give thanks for good.  We can but try....


Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love

There's nothing you can do that can't be done
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn
How to play the game
It's easy


 

There is music in the midst of desolation
Laurence Binyon

 


“We are all the same, to notice our similarities is to celebrate it in others. It is to celebrate ourselves and each other as being human.”

Tim Mann


And for more about Tim, please see his website:

 https://timmannartist.com/introduction/

 



 


3 November 2024

I'll see you in my dreams

I know what I like....


The Victoria Memorial, by Thomas Brock

Like it, or not.  Call it what you will.  Art is all around us.  And there is more of it every day.  Whether you perceive it in the natural world:


Knot in their thousands over The Wash (but is it art?)

Or someone sticks it in front of you.  Time Horizon at Houghton Hall is an interrogation of its site through a form of acupuncture.  By sticking foreign objects into a living body - the earth - it seeks to revitalise it, inviting them to think about what lies below, beneath the apparent surface of things; (Artist's Statement.)


One of a hundred Antony Gormleys in Time Horizon
at Houghton Hall, Norfolk.

[I can do that, too, Mr Gormley, even without taking my clothes off:]


Self portrait in Time is Horizontal,
 at Holm Beach, Norfolk

Around 46 years ago, Wafa, a young Palestinian woman, gave me a birthday present.  It was Edmund Burke Feldman's book, Varieties of Visual Experience.  In his Introduction to the Functions of Art, he asks, How can we explain their (the visual arts') survival, and indeed their prominence, for so long under such varying circumstances and among so many diverse peoples?


Meeting myself coming back

Feldman suggests that art is practised and prized because it satisfies vital personal and social needs.....


Woman and Child, 2024, by Martin Skalicky

He goes on to say that art continues to satisfy, (1) our individual needs for personal expression,


Graffiti and a view of Brno

(2) our social needs for display, celebration, and communication,

{and this picture reminds me of an Australian I met in Rome nearly fifty years ago, who  claimed the unforgiving chat-up line, Hello Sheila, I've got a whip at home....


Portrait of Mrs Marie Ruzickova, early 1920s,
by Linka Prochazkova
and (3) our physical needs for utilitarian objects and structures.


Žlutý kopec Water Tanks, Brno

It takes all sorts.  I couldn't live in an art gallery:


Nor could I live in a palace like the Albertina in Vienna:


I would soon get into trouble for misbehaving, or not quite understanding the protocol, like Martin:

Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself, 1989
by Martin Kippenberger

But I could survive with a Monet in my bathroom - Amanda loved these pictures:


The Water Lily Pond, c 1917 - 1919, Claude Monet 

Though I couldn't be doing with these. What is with the déshabillé?


L'émotion by Ferdinand Hodler

No. I know what I like (I may not know much about.... you know....)  And I like this hare. I love the way that Dürer got it to sit still for long enough to get the whiskers right:


Young Hare, 1502, by Albrecht Dürer

When all is said, undone, (sic) art has its place in our confused and confusing world.  The more it is repressed, the more cuts a government makes to its welfare, the more there will be. And, as the population explodes, so does the variety of and need for art.  And just as there are many different types of us (even Gormley used 23 different castings of his own body for his 100 cast-iron body forms at Houghton) - just as there are many variants of being, there are variants of the visual (and other) arts.  To suit  every taste, (and some distastes as well?  Ed.


We model the natural world to bring it closer, to remind us of its wonder:

Reflections and a Charcoal drawing by Roberto Longo

We celebrate the human form:




Or, maybe, we walk on by, reading a book:



Me, I like to find art in my surroundings.  Though is that art?  (Does it matter? Ed). Up a church tower in Tabor.....


Don't take the seats, Leave them where they are

And I love the colours of autumn leaves, scattered here on a stairway in Karlštejn castle in Czechia.




Or, as here, caught in mid fall:




And I love the patterns of shells and pebbles in the sand at low tide on a Norfolk beach:




Just as I also love the creative dreams of artists, who, against the rules of reality, rectangularise the world and flatten it into two dimensions while suggesting more, painting the mystery of white against the canvas, as in this wonderfully eery picture in the Albertina:


Landscape with Lanterns, 1958, by Paul Delvaux

Yes, whatever happens, I will see you in my dreams:




Whatever may cause those dreams.....  There is art in nature.....




At least so I hope.  Let us pray......


Praying Hands, by Albrecht Dürer


Now sit back and enjoy:

https://youtu.be/hNRHHRjep3E?feature=shared