'A rushing music, seizing on her dance...'

 Among my birthday presents, and very welcome, was Christopher Lloyd's Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels, a handsome book that will give me hours of browsing pleasure. 

Among Degas's finest pastels – and unusual in showing a performance rather than rehearsals and behind the scenes action – is L'Etoile, a brilliant representation of a dancer caught in the brief ecstasy of inhabiting the dance before returning to the menacing darkness of backstage and the harsh realities of life as a dancer (and, very probably, prostitute: the two tended to go together at the time). Richard Wilbur catches the feel of the picture perfectly in his ekphrastic poem, 'L'Etoile'...

A rushing music, seizing on her dance,

Now lifts it from her, blind into the light;

And blind the dancer, tiptoe on the boards

Reaches a moment toward her dance's flight.

Even as she aspires in loudening shine

The music pales and sweetens, sinks away;

And past her arabesque in shadow show

The fixt feet of the maitre de ballet.

So she will turn and walk through metal halls

To where some ancient woman will unmesh

Her small strict shape, and yawns will turn her face
Into a little wilderness of flesh. 

Birthday, and a Walk

 Well, today another year has come full circle and I achieve (simply by virtue of staying alive) my 74th birthday, as does the great Tom Waits – happy birthday, Tom. Yesterday I was walking with the miraculously resurgent walking group – a short (but sometimes dauntingly muddy) church crawl in southern Northamptonshire, taking in the gloriously named villages of Potterspury, Yardley Gobion and Furtho, the last more a remnant than a village, with a still numinous 'redundant' church, a fine dovecote and the humps and tumps of a DMV (deserted medieval village). Platonic England, if ever I saw it...
  In Potterspury church we happened on the best kind of person you can hope to meet on a church crawl  – not an antiquarian windbag along the lines of the Rev. Lord Henry D'Ascoyne in Kind Hearts and Coronets: 'I always say that my west window has all the exuberance of Chaucer – without, happily, any of the concomitant crudities of his period.' No, this was an old man – 91 years old – who clearly loved his church, which he had been part of since he joined the choir as a boy back in 1940, and who knew every stone of it: indeed he had laid many of them himself, having repaved the whole of the nave and chancel (a six-month job for two men, and beautifully done). It is wonderful to meet someone like him, who in his person and his memories embodies so much of what the Church – specifically the English parish church – is all about. Let us hope it lasts a deal longer yet – or even, like my walking group, undergoes a miraculous resurgence: that would be something. 

Glorious

 Yesterday evening I attended my first Advent service in the cathedral (last year I was at St Oswald's, Ashbourne). It was an extraordinarily beautiful service, beginning, in customary fashion, in darkness, then gradually lit up by candles along the length of the nave and into the quire. The effect was glorious, as was the music that accompanied all this – Bach, Byrd, Palestrina, Weelkes and more, including the Great 'O' Antiphons (O Sapientia, O Adonai, etc). There were the usual Advent readings, and the traditional Advent carols. The choir were on brilliant form, divided between the west gallery and the quire, and as I listened I wondered once again how a Church with so much to offer in the way of beautiful music (and words), beautiful buildings and rich tradition should be in such a state of decline. No doubt there are all manner of reasons – the current rush into managerialism being one of them – but I wonder if the dear old C of E might be wiser to make the most of its rich heritage rather than strive for novelty and 'outreach'. I suspect beauty, spirituality and tradition might prove to have much stronger appeal than lame attempts to follow secular trends or reduce worship to happy-clappy simplicity: there might be more life in Larkin's 'moth-eaten musical brocade' than the Church itself suspects. Certainly the cathedral was packed full last night – so full that I had to sit against the wall of the south aisle (all the chairs were arranged facing the nave aisle, as there was a good deal of processing). The down side of this was that I became much colder than I realised, and I was unable to read the order of service, being too far from the nearest rank of candles. But it was a wonderful service, one of the best I have ever attended. And one of the musical highlights was this glorious piece by James MacMillan, a true modern classic...

Advent

 Advent, and snow on the ground.
Here is a bleakly beautiful Advent poem by – who else? – R.S. Thomas.

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe.  Look, he said.
The son looked.  Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour.  The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent. A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
               On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky.  Many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs.  The son watched
Them.  Let me go there, he said.

Hoarfrost

 The cold snap has well and truly arrived, with clear blue skies and deep frost, and this morning an arrestingly beautiful combination of mist and hoarfrost – the first I've seen in some while. The particular beauty of hoarfrost lies in the way it gives a silver-white lining to every leaf and twig and blade of grass – and spiderweb. Suddenly it becomes apparent how abundant and ubiquitous spiderwbebs are, and what an amazing feat of engineering each one is. When the lines of a web are rimed and thickened with hoarfrost, its's easier to see how, from the spider's point of view, web building is not a delicate affair but sheer hard work. As Kay Ryan puts it, beautifully, in her poem 'Spiderweb' – 

'From other
angles the
fibres look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.'

Practical Criticism the Shane MacGowan Way

 Reading an obituary of the Pogues front man Shane MacGowan, who despite everything made it to the age of 65, I learned much of interest – English prep school, followed by Westminster! Who knew? – but what most struck me was the story, told by a former girlfriend, that Shane lost several of his front teeth attempting to eat The Beach Boys Greatest Hits, Volume 3. I'd like to think this was an act of truly practical criticism – that particular LP is not regarded as much of an addition to the Beach Boys oeuvre, and the record company only released it to make up for disappointing sales of the previous album, Friends. However, MacGowan was under the influence of LSD at the time, and that might be sufficient explanation. 
 Eating as practical criticism, though, surely has some possibilities – eating books (or at least taking a few bites) being the obvious example. I can't find, or call to mind, a single case of this happening (anyone?), but I rather wish I'd thought of it in my student days, when it might have enlivened a dreary tutorial. In my library days, I did have a colleague who in meetings had a habit of munching on the minutes (before his leveraged retirement). There are a couple of cases of bibliophagy in the Bible – one, involving a scroll rather than a codex, is in Ezekiel, the other in Revelations, where an angel tells John to eat a 'little book', assuring him that 'it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey' (and so it proved).
  Anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing Fairy Tale of New York – almost the only secular Xmas song that doesn't set my teeth on edge – even more often than usual this Christmas. 

'Not to be here, Not to be anywhere'

 On this day in 1977, Philip Larkin signed off on 'Aubade', reckoned by many (including Frank Wilson Of Books Inq)  to be his last great poem. He had worked on it for some while, and completed it after the death of his mother, probably the most significant woman in his life. 'Aubade' is certainly his bleakest and most direct expression of the timor mortis that haunts so much of his verse, and Larkin himself described it, aptly enough, as his 'in-a-funk-about-death' poem. His particular, horribly acute fear is simply of extinction, of ceasing to exist. As Larkin acknowledges, this is not a rational fear – 'No rational being can fear a thing it will not feel' – but that doesn't make the terror any less real. While some of us might find 'the anaesthetic from which none come round' quite a comforting notion, it clearly scares the living daylights out of Larkin – 'Not to be here, Not to be anywhere'. There is, of course, more to this poem than the poet's death funk: it is exquisitely wrought and framed to perfection, and it ends on one of Larkin's most beautiful stanzas...

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.