An Olympic Anniversary

 On this evening 14 years ago, I was watching, aghast, the television coverage of the London Olympics opening ceremony. My memories of it are mercifully vague, though I do of course remember the James Bond stunt with the Queen, all those nurses prancing about in celebration of that envy of the world, our NHS (which the Man in the T-shirt now assures is about to collapse, unless Social Care is sorted out – good luck with that, Andy). And naturally there was much celebration of the arrival of the Empire Windrush – the greatest moment in our postwar history – and somewhere along the way Kenneth Branagh in a stovepipe hat as Isambard Kingdom Brunel – and was Mr Bean there somewhere? Enough – I'd rather forget. Writing the morning after, I think I was actually quite generous...   

'It was the poor old Queen I felt sorry for – obliged to participate in that puerile James Bond stunt, then sit through yet another dreary pop concert and an endless parade of grinning athletes. You could see she wasn't really enjoying it, not the way she enjoyed the Jubilee flotilla – or Epsom, come to that. She must have been thinking wistfully back to the 1948 Olympics, and wondering where it all went wrong...
  As for the content, such as it was, of Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony spectacular, this came across (to me at least) as little more than a sentimental, politically correct primary school History lesson - appropriately enough for a Games whose logo was clearly the product of a primary school design project. Yes, the Boyle extravaganza was bold, brash, bizarre, bonkers, and a truly astonishing technical achievement. But to me it all had a weirdly post-apocalyptic feel, as if the survivors of some great collapse had come across a machine whose levers they could press to make it work – but they no longer knew what it was for, what it meant. It seemed the expression of an absence, a loss – but executed in the most extravagantly triumphant and positive terms. Very very strange...'

The dear old Queen was also probably reliving the horror of the equally extravagant, bizarre and empty spectacle of Millennium Night at the Dome, on which occasion she was surely wondering what had gone wrong since the Festival of Britain back in 1951, when her country still had a proper, historically informed sense of itself. Ah well, those days are gone – and so is our Dear Old Queen, alas...

'It is not like this at all'

 On this day 60 years ago, the New York Poet Frank O'Hara died, following a bizarre night-time accident in which he was run over by a jeep on a Fire Island beach. The literary world was shocked, and his friends thrown into convulsions of grief. At his funeral John Ashbery, fighting back his tears, read 'To the Harbormaster', perhaps O'Hara's finest poem: 

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught   

in some moorings. I am always tying up   

and then deciding to depart. In storms and   

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide   

around my fathomless arms, I am unable   

to understand the forms of my vanity   

or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder   

in my hand and the sun sinking. To   

you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage   

of my will. The terrible channels where   

the wind drives me against the brown lips   

of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet   

I trust the sanity of my vessel; and   

if it sinks, it may well be in answer   

to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Some while after the death, his friend James Schuyler wrote an elegy for O'Hara, 'Buried at Springs'. It's an oblique, considered, surprisingly pastoral work, written at the painter Fairfield Porter's home on Great Spruce Island (which O'Hara had visited some years before)...

There is a hornet in the room   

and one of us will have to go   

out the window into the late   

August midafternoon sun. I

won. There is a certain challenge   

in being humane to hornets   

but not much. A launch draws   

two lines of wake behind it   

on the bay like a delta

with a melted base. Sandy   

billows, or so they look,

of feathery ripe heads of grass,   

an acid-yellow kind of

goldenrod glowing or glowering   

in shade. Rocks with rags   

of shadow, washed dust clouts   

that will never bleach.

It is not like this at all.   

The rapid running of the   

lapping water a hollow knock

of someone shipping oars:   

it’s eleven years since   

Frank sat at this desk and   

saw and heard it all   

the incessant water the   

immutable crickets only   

not the same: new needles   

on the spruce, new seaweed   

on the low-tide rocks   

other grass and other water   

even the great gold lichen   

on a granite boulder   

even the boulder quite   

literally is not the same

      II

A day subtle and suppressed   

in mounds of juniper enfolding   

scratchy pockets of shadow

while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump—

stands shadowless in an overcast   

of ripe grass. There is nothing   

but shade, like the boggy depths   

of a stand of spruce, its resonance   

just the thin scream

of mosquitoes ascending.

Boats are light lumps on the bay   

stretching past erased islands   

to ocean and the terrible tumble   

and London (“rain persisting”)   

and Paris (“changing to rain”).   

Delicate day, setting the bright

of a young spruce against the cold

of an old one hung with unripe cones   

each exuding at its tip

gum, pungent, clear as a tear,   

a day tarnished and fractured   

as the quartz in the rocks

of a dulled and distant point,   

a day like a gull passing

with a slow flapping of wings   

in a kind of lope, without

breeze enough to shake loose   

the last of the fireweed flowers,

a faintly clammy day, like wet silk   

stained by one dead branch

the harsh russet of dried blood.  

Christina the Astonishing

Today is the feast day of St Christina the Astonishing, a 12th-century saint from Sint-Truiden, in what is now Belgium. Having suffered a massive seizure of some kind, she was taken for dead, but in the midst of her funeral service 'she arose full of vigour, stupefying with amazement the whole city of Sint-Truiden'. She had, she said, visited Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, and now, on her return, she could not bear the smell of the sinful people gathered in the church. She duly levitated up to the rafters to escape the stench, and hovered there for some while. 
  On returning to terra firma, Christina embraced a life of extreme destitution and privation, shunning human contact and seeking out anything that would cause her to suffer. According to accounts of her life, she would throw herself into burning furnaces, suffering agonies but emerging quite unhurt. In the depths of winter she would fling herself into the river Meuse, spending hours or even days in the icy waters, praying and begging for mercy. Sometimes she would allow herself to be carried down to a mill, where the mill wheel 'whirled her round in a manner frightful to behold', but of course she emerged unscathed. This – and absolutely nothing else – Christina had in common with the far from saintly Laurence Sterne, who, as a boy in Ireland, had once fallen into a mill-race and been carried right round the wheel (had 'been through the mill'), but emerged, like the saint, quite unharmed. 
  In later life Christina the Astonishing quietened down, living, surprisingly, to the age of 74. Fans of Nick Cave might recall that he tells something of her story in his song 'Christina the Astonishing', from the 1992 album Henry's Dream...

  

5,002: All These Birds

 I've just noticed that I have now exceeded 5,000 posts on this blog – Butterflies, Proms, Ibsen was number 5,000. I would never have seen that coming when I tentatively launched this Hedonic Resource on the world back in 2008. 
   Anyway, I reckon it's time for a poem, so here's a gem by Richard Wilbur. In the collection Things of This World (1956), 'All These Birds' comes immediately before 'A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra' (IMHO his finest poem), and there is a similar energy in the way the stanzas flow into each other, building to a great affirmation of the primacy of imagination and of love. 

All These Birds

                 Agreed that all these birds,
 hawk or heavenly lark or heard-of nightingale,
        Perform upon the kitestrings of our sight
        In a false distance, that the day and night
        Are full of wingèd words
                                                gone rather stale,
               That nothing is so worn
               As Philomel’s bosom-thorn,

               That it is, in fact, the male
Nightingale which sings, and that all these creatures wear
        Invisible armor such as Hébert beheld
        His water-ousel through, as, wrapped or shelled
        In a clear bellying veil
                                            or a bubble of air,
               It bucked the flood to feed
               at the stream-bottom. Agreed
               That the sky is a vast claire
In which the gull, despite appearances, is not
       Less claustral than the oyster in its beak
       And dives like nothing human; that we seek
       Vainly to know the heron
                                                (but can plot
               What angle of the light
               Provokes its northern flight.)
               
               Let them be polyglot
And wordless then, those boughs that spoke with Solomon
        In Hebrew canticles, and made him wise;
        And let a clear and bitter wind arise
        To storm into the hotbeds
                                                 of the sun,
              and there, beyond a doubt,
              Batter the Phoenix out.

              Let us, with glass or gun,
Watch (from our clever blinds) the monsters of the sky
        Dwindle to habit, habitat, and song,
        And tell the imagination it is wrong
        Till, lest it be undone,
                                           it spin a lie
               So fresh, so pure, so rare
               As to possess the air.

               Why should it be more shy
Than chimney-nesting storks, or sparrows on a wall?
         Oh, let it climb wherever it can cling
         Like some great trumpet-vine, a natural thing
         To which all birds that fly
                                                  come natural.
               Come, stranger, sister, dove:
               Put on the reins of love.

The 'Water-Ousel' is the bird we call the Dipper, and the reference is to a passage in Buffon's Natural History of Birds describing the Dipper's habit of walking about on the bottom of fast-flowing streams. 'We are indebted to M. Hébert,' writes Buffon, 'for the first account of this extraordinary habit, which I know not to belong to any other bird.' But who was this Hébert? Surely not the fervent revolutionary Jacques Hébert – or did he pass the time watching birds when he wasn't engaged in guillotining aristocrats and attempting to destroy Christianity? 
   As it happens, I was watching a Dipper by the river in Buxton, back in number 5,000. 

Ivy

 Just for the record – I recently wrote a piece on Ivy Compton-Burnett for Engelsberg Ideas.
Here's a link...

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/ivy-compton-burnetts-forgotten-genius/ 

Butterflies, Proms, Ibsen

 I spent most of the weekend in Derbyshire with my cousin, revisiting Buxton – the riverside gardens really are very fine – and, yesterday, taking a walk in and around Bradford Dale. As we wandered amid an astonishing abundance of butterflies – painted ladies, peacocks, red admirals, commas, gatekeepers, meadow browns, ringlets, blues and whites (sadly only one tortoiseshell) – it occurred to me that I haven't really said anything about this wonderful butterfly season. The profusion of painted ladies is not quite as prodigious as in the annus mirabilis of 2009 (when an estimated billion of them swept over the country), but I'm sure in many places it is not far short – and peacocks are having a remarkable year, with huge numbers of early fliers followed by even larger numbers of high-season specimens. It seems much the same could be said of most species – thanks largely to the summer being properly warm – so I'm wondering how the alarmists of Butterfly Conservation will spin this one into a bad news story. No doubt they'll rise to the challenge...
   Also in Derbyshire, we watched the First Night of the Proms, enjoying the Copland and Gershwin, the staggeringly talented Yuncham Lim playing Ravel, Finzi's rarely performed For Saint Cecilia – and conductor Dalia Stasevska's kimonos. Then they went and spoiled it all with the finale – the joint forces of the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra belting out the dreary and tiresome 'Wonderwall'. Surely, with the music of Oasis being so closely associated with 'Andy' Burnham, the BBC could have stopped this happening on the eve of his coronation. It felt very like a celebration, and the BBC has surely swooned more than enough over the King of the North.
  And we also, for reasons that I won't go into here, watched on BBC iPlayer a 1982 production of Ibsen's Little Eyolf, starring Anthony Hopkins and Diana Rigg. It's a play I had never seen before, and the first act, in which everything happens, struck me as completely bonkers. The next two acts, in which everyone talks, did nothing to improve my opinion of Ibsen, a playwright whose works I once studied but am, alas, unlikely ever to return to. Still, it was a great weekend 

Max Gate

 Well, my impulse purchase of Damien Wilkins's Max Gate turned out to be a good one. Since I last mentioned it, I have finished reading it (at my usual snail's pace), and found it thoroughly enjoyable (apart from a few jarring anachronisms – 'Okay', 'in denial', 'basically'). It's actually the second Thomas Hardy-related novel I've read, the other being Howard Jacobson's scabrous Peeping Tom, the narrator of which is obsessed by Hardy, whom he regards as a 'prurient little Victorian ratbag' – a case he makes rather effectively. Hardy doesn't come out of Max Gate too well either: the great man is self-absorbed, touchy, obsessed with his reputation and his legacy, grossly insensitive to those around him, especially the women (unless he has a crush on them), and apparently more caring about animals than his fellow humans. The narrator, Nellie Titterington, a housemaid, is very clear-eyed about her master, but she is telling the story with the benefit of hindsight: the action is set in 1928, and Nellie, who escaped domestic service, is writing some decades later. 
   The second half of the book is more interesting than the first, as Florence Hardy, the author's unfortunate (and much younger) second wife, comes to the fore. This poor woman, condemned to type out her husband's autobiography in the third person and pass it off as her biography of him – and obliged to endure his fixation on his dead first wife and his moping over a young actress – is in an awkward position, having begun life at Max Gate as Hardy's typist, so she has some fellow feeling with the servants, and they with her. The other major figures in the narrative are Sydney Cockerell and Sir James Barrie, who are hovering around the dying author, determined to secure him a burial in Westminster Abbey, despite his wish to be buried in his family plot. Florence has a sad crush on Barrie, and Nellie pities her for being 'married to a corpse and swooning over a bronchial eunuch'. The story of what happened to Hardy's body is well known, and has perhaps been slightly embroidered, but it makes a good, if ghoulish, tale (told in a less extreme form here). Wilkins creates a strong sense of place and time, and handles all this material deftly enough, though he has sometimes to modify the narratorial voice with moments of omniscience. The book works well as a black comedy, as well as a convincing window on the airless world of Max Gate, and it is, as I said, a thoroughly enjoyable read.