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/

 

 

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

Shades of Shoreditch

Let grief be a fallen leaf

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

William Blake

London

It is almost impossible to miss the eyes.  Amongst the passing crowds, I see all shades of life.  The tide ebbs and flows and there are those who seem to swim fast and well and those who look to drown.  

On a Shoreditch morning little stirs at first, and then, as shutters roll and traffic coughs, the cooking fires are lit and tables set; sweepers flick out the dust and bags and boxes accumulate on the kerb and in the gutters.

Doors open and shut.  Figures meet.

Then retreat into some kind of leafy blue security.

She is still there.  On the corner.  I wonder what she sees.  What she likes?  What she could be wishing for?  Or am I being too intrusive?

All around there are insides, and outsides.

In sides are not exclusive.  I can see them.  I am not excluded, so long as I keep my distance.  Life persists.

Though sometimes it seems that the inside is a lonely place:

Unless your own company is enough?

The out sides may be just as lonely, with a need to make contact:

To stand outside, to talk away:

To walk quickly on by, ignoring the myriad messages, the courting couple painted into the doorway:

Or to ignore the lies fired at us from all around:

Pairs.  Or couples.  Friends.  Or lovers.  

Happy couples?

Unhappy couples?

Hapless pairs?

In mono:

Or is this in stereo?

Whatever.  Wherever.  We/they parade.  We are observed.  We want to be seen.  But walls have eyes:

The whole world is watching:

Whether we like it, or not:

In an empty room:

Or on the busy street:

And those doing the watching are being watched back:

With that wariness that goes with our instinctive caution. We are not as far removed from the wild as we think:

Characters in a painted scene, subsumed into an unreal reality:

Innocents, like children, ignorant of the greater picture:

Until we come face to face with two dimensions:

Caught sightlessly in the slightly blurry depths of our graininess:

Frayed by uncertainty:

Or framed by the herring-bones of our anxieties:

Or, perhaps, trapped inside our reflections, mummified by doubts:

Until (if we are fortunate?) age begins to allow us to unravel (in comparison with youth):

And we stumble into the cracks between the paving stones, head scarves, shawls and plastic bags protecting us against the unwanted:

And in the meantime, she is still there, on the corner, in her shrouds, her eyes signifying life, seeking solace perhaps, consuming the cruel world around us as the noisy vortex rips past unconcerned.....

I wish her love.

*****

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet

I see her walking now,

And away from me so hurriedly

My reason must allow.

That I had loved, not as I should

A creature made of clay,

When the angel woos the clay, he'll lose

His wings at the dawn of day.

On Raglan Road

from a poem by Patrick Kavanagh

As sung by Luke Kelly

********

Let grief be a fallen leaf

At the dawning of the day

*****

With thanks to Simon Ellingworth for his inspiration 

and to Michael for his company