An Ill Wind

I don't know what it is with me and the West wind - and I'd very much like to hear from anyone else similarly afflicted - but whenever the wind's blowing seriously in that direction, I pretty much go to pieces. The West wind has been blowing hard and strong and unremittingly across the Southeast for days now, with no sign of dropping, and the result is that my brain's turned to mush, I feel weirdly dissociated, even tireder (and more irritable) than usual, and unable to perform the simplest task without a high chance of mucking it up and, as like as not, injuring myself in the process. A few days ago, I managed to slice deep into my right index finger tip with a pill cutter (don't ask), then on Saturday morning I stuck the end of a small but very sharp kitchen knife into the next finger along - while simultaneously burning my toast - then followed up by cutting my right nostril while shaving. This, believe me, is one of the worst places to cut yourself, as it bleeds and bleeds and it's an impossible place to stick a plaster... Yesterday, with that wind still blowing, I foolishly went for a walk on my beloved Ashtead common, which I surely know like the back of my hand - but no, I managed to get quite lost, not once but twice, with no idea where I was or what direction I was going in. Yes, that wind had undone me again. So far today, I've been all right, apart from very nearly taking an embarrassing fall on the stairs at the Underground station. But Zehpyrus is still gving his all and I await developments... Meanwhile, what I want to know is this - is it just me? There doesn't seem to be a recognised West Wind Syndrome, and I can think of no instances in literature - that overblown(!) ode of Shelley's is no help, and the wind that blows through Bleak House and puts Mr Jarndyce out of sorts is an East wind, and probably symbolic. So - any ideas?

Jacobson and Mabey

There was a double treat on the radio this morning, with Howard Jacobson - always good value - on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, immediately followed by the great 'nature writer' Richard Mabey on Radio 3's upmarket version of DID - Private Passions. The focus of PP is firmly on the music rather than the life, though Mabey did speak a little of his schooldays (Berkhamstead, unhappy, musical) and the bout of depression so eloquently described in Nature Cure. His choice of music was extremely wide-ranging and full of wonderful unexpected sounds, from a beautiful Dowland love song to full-throated Corsican male polyphony, Butterworth's heartbreaking Is My Team Ploughing? and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in full flow. But the most extraordinary sound of all was David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sings and a jazz clarinettist, improvising over the song of that jazziest of British birds, a Marsh Warbler. I haven't been able to find a (free) link to the piece itself - it's called Soo-Roo - but you can hear the Private Passions programme on the BBC iPlayer here. Mabey fans (I'm one) won't want to miss it.

Over on the Dabbler...

The 1p Book Review is me on Malone Dies.

Wildwood Nostalgia

I am, as readers of this blog will have noticed, a lover of woodland - but I really can't see what this fuss is all about. The Forestry Commission is, after all, the body that for decades disfigured, denatured and closed off vast swathes of the British landscape with its huge conifer plantations (on which they are barely able to turn a profit). I suspect that, so long as there's some regulatory framework in place, almost any system of woodland ownership would be preferable to the Forestry Commission's dead hand. And yet this is sudddenly the cause du jour of well-meaning, theoretically country-loving Middle England, which is now seething with indignation as it envisages wholesale deforestation by ruthless, cigar-chomping capitalists. I fancy this is the latest manifestation of that strange English malaise, Wildwood Nostalgia, based in a myth of a lost woodland paradise, a sentimental notion that it's somehow an offence against nature to cut down a tree, historical myths (like the wholesale loss of woodland to build the Tudor, then the Georgian fleet) and a fundamental ignorance of how woodlands work. They work - and become the kind of woodland we want - by being exploited and managed, not by being left alone. Leave a wood alone and you soon discover what wildwood is like - not the kind of place you'd care to take a walk in, even if you could penetrate it. The things we value most about woodlands - the rides, the coppices, the coverts, the underbrush and standard trees, and all the wildlife that goes with them - are the products of the hand of man, not of unguided nature. Butterflies in particular have suffered steep decline in recent decades not because of more woodland management but because of less, resulting in loss of open space and sunlight at key stages in their development - a wildwood would have very few butterflies, if any. Our woodlands need to be managed - and exploited (they are the ultimate sustainable resource) - not treated as a division of the leisure industry, artifically preserved as a kind of sylvan Disneyland.

A Great Librarian

A red letter day for librarians and ex-librarians, for on this day in 1600 the great pioneering librarian Gabriel Naude (I can't do accents on Blogger posts for some reason) was born. He established the first library in France to be open to all comers, with no references required - and of course he wrote the ground-breaking manual, Advice on Establishing a Library (1627). For a more recent work on a similar theme, I commend this one.

Big Questions Unsatisfactorily Answered

What are the Big Questions of life? (Actually, that in itself might just be one.)
They often present themselves as (1) Who Am I?, (2) Where Did I Come From?, (3) Where Am I Going To? and (4) What Is It All For?
Far be it from me to attempt to answer them - but hey, why not? Here's my stab at some kind of answers...

1. Who Am I? I am the I asking this question. If there's one thing that's certain, it is that I am I and no other.

2. Where Did I Come From? and 3. Where Am I Going To? Here's the Venerable Bede:

'The present life of man, O King, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another. Whilst he is within, he is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.'

In other words, out of darkness and mystery, back into darkness and mystery.

4. What Is It All For? Ah yes, the biggest of the big ones. Being dubious of any overarching plan and suspicious of any scheme of things that subjugates the human individual - a universe in itself, and full of unplumbed mysteries - to a larger purpose, I incline towards something like Keats's view of 'why we are here', as expressed in his great letter of February-May to his brother and sister, which begins with the poet getting a black eye the first time he takes a cricket bat in his hand, and goes on, through many wonders, to this:

'The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitary interposition of God and taken to Heaven-What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you Please "The vale of Soul-making". Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say 'Soul making' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence- There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions-but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. I[n]telligences are atoms of perception-they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God-How then are Souls to be made? How then arc these sparks which are God to have identity given them-so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence? I- low, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because 'I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystiain religion -or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation-This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These three Materials are the Intelligence-the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive-and yet I think I perceive it-that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible-I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read-I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School-and I will call the Child able to -read, the Soul made from that School and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds expe rience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the Lives of Men are-so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the Sparks of his own essence-This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity-'

That, tentative and questing as it is, will do me. For now.

Art Project

I've been having a look at Google's lastest gizmo - the Art Project. It's fun (when it's working) and looks to be a handy way of taking a close-up gander at individual paintings (a useful adjunct to The Dabbler's National Treasures?), but the Explore the Museum feature is - like most virtual tours - rather disturbing, especially the up-down arrows that enable you to examine the floor and ceiling (you could simulate falling to the floor in a fit of Stendhal Syndrome). Of course it might be useful if you're planning a spectacular art gallery heist...