Ben

Above is Ben Nicholson's Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise, one of my favourites among his paintings, many of which leave me fairly cool. Ben, born on this day in 1894, took off in a wholly different direction from his father, the great (and still underrated) William Nicholson, pursuing abstraction rather than naturalism, and thereby becoming a fashionable and widely celebrated artist, even being enrolled in the Order of Merit, which his father never was. 
  When young Ben was studying at the Slade – along with Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, etc. – he spent much of his time playing billiards. He claimed that the abstract formality of the green baize and the ever changing relationships between the coloured balls stimulated his aesthetic sense. Well, maybe they did...
   The picture above, which is in the Tate collection, mixes abstraction with naturalism, showing the reflections in the window of a Dieppe restaurant – including the face of his then wife, Barbara Hepworth (who bore him triplets as well as a son). The restaurant is long gone, alas, and is now an estate agent's office. 

AI?

 The Making of a Poem, the excellent Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, prints its authors' names in UPPER CASE, above the name of the poem (and why not?). Thus it was that, browsing in its pages last night, I came across a poem written by AI. AI? What? I know everyone's doing it now, but surely not in 2000, and surely not in a Norton anthology...
Indeed not: the poem was the work of a poet who styled herself 'Ai' (the Japanese for 'love', apparently). The poem, in the 'Open Forms' section of the anthology, is titled 'The German Army, Russia, 1943' –
 
For twelve days,
I drilled through Moscow ice
to reach paradise,
that while tablecloth, set with a plate
that's cracking bit by bit
like the glassy air, like me.
I know I'll fly apart soon,
the pieces of me so light they float. 
The Russians burned their crops,
rather than feed our army.
Now they strike us against each other like dry rocks
and set us on fire with a hunger
nothing can feed.
Someone calls me and I look up.
It's Hitler.
I imagine eating his terrible, luminous eyes.
Brother, he says.
I stand up, tie the rags tighter around my feet.
I hear  my footsteps running after me,
but I am already gone. 

As a stark portrait of absolute desperation, I think that is rather good... 
  Ai was born Florence Anthony (in Texas in 1947), and described herself as half Japanese, one eighth Choktaw-Chickasaw, a quarter black, a sixteenth (!) Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche. Well, at least her chosen two-letter moniker simplified things. Her early years were tough and complicated, and it was an assignment at her Catholic school – write a letter from the perspective of a martyr – that first got her interested in the possibilities of writing poetry. Joining the University of California's MFA programme, she worked under, among others, the great Donald Justice. Rising through academe, publishing at intervals, winning awards and finally securing tenure as a professor at the Oklahoma State University, she had the kind of career characteristic of 20th-century American poets. As for her work, what little I've seen of it seems rather too loud and overtly political for my taste – but that poem in the Norton anthology is rather good, if grim.

The Elusive Chase

 Cannock Chase is big – something over 20 square miles of heathland, woods and plantations – and not very far from Lichfield. So you would have thought that by now I would have become a frequent visitor – or at the very least have managed to find it. You would be wrong on both counts: on my first attempt (last year, I think) I found what I took to be Cannock Chase and had a very pleasant walk, but on checking the OS map afterwords I discovered that it was not Cannock Chase I'd been walking on, after all. 
   Yesterday – a wonderfully warm and sunny day – I set out to try again, armed with rather more accurate information than I had had the last time. In mitigation, I should say at this point that I do not drive, so I usually (rashly) attempt these expeditions by bus – and no bus or any other form of public transport delivers you on to Cannock Chase itself. However, it was entirely my own fault that I started off by misreading my map and setting off on a wholly unnecessary detour – fairly brief, but made that annoying bit longer by some humorist having turned a footpath sign through 180 degrees. After a while, I arrived at a location I took to be the veritable gateway to Cannock Chase, but all I found was a spinney with a brook running through it, an uninviting view of fir trees, and no indication of which way was likely to take me on to the wide open spaces of the Chase. After a little (too little, as usual) thought, I changed my plan, having identified what looked like a good walk to another destination altogether – which, for a wonder, I reached without once going astray. Unfortunately, the walk was through a kind of landscape all too common in Staffordshire – sheep pasture and arable, with narrowly circumscribed footpaths and rather little in the way of (wild) flora and fauna. All rather dull, especially for one spoiled by having wandered too long on the Surrey hills and downs. Cannock Chase, I'm sure, has much more to offer – if I ever manage to penetrate its mysterious force field. Having re-examined the map, I now feel pretty sure that next time I'll make it... I'm probably wrong.
   Anyway, as I said, it was a warm and sunny day, and I was rewarded with my first orange-tips of the year, and my first blackcap, singing away lustily – a song 'full, sweet, deep, loud and wild,' as Gilbert White described it. And the blackthorn was in full bloom, and here and there larks were singing as they rose into the sky.
   The weather is even warmer and sunnier today, and, after visiting the dentist, I took a stroll around the wilder parts of St Michael's churchyard, where holly blues, orange-tips, speckled woods and the ubiquitous peacocks were flying (as they are in my garden). Yet again I failed to find the grave of Philip Larkin's parents: I know I found it once, and photographed it, but since then I have drawn a blank on every visit. After this, I had to shop at Tesco – a grim place, but with a superb view of the cathedral – and on the way out I glanced, as I always do, at the discarded books that satiated readers leave for others to pick up. Today I was startled to see the selected poems of the 15th-century Scottish 'makar' Robert Henryson (Carcanet paperback). I was not tempted: reading the English Chaucer at university was painful enough, the Scottish one still more so. Dostoevsky's The Devils was also on the shelf, but I passed on that one too. There is enough suffering in the world. 

Easter

'Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.
Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.
Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.'

Easter greetings to all who browse here.
The painting above is 'Noli Me Tangere' by the Bolognese mannerist Lavinia Fontana. She has gone even farther than Rembrandt in identifying the risen Christ as a gardener; here, he is fully kitted out with a rustic straw hat, a coarse, belted smock, and a serious-looking spade. The spiritual meaning of this identification of Jesus is that Christ is the gardener of the human soul, eradicating what Bob Dylan calls 'the weeds of yesteryear' and planting 'the flourishing seeds of virtue' (as St Gregory the Great put it). It's a teaching that passed out of fashion long ago, but the image can still turn up in unlikely places – none more so that this passage from Ronald Firbank's Valmouth:

With angelic humour Mrs Hurstpierpoint swept skyward her heavy-lidded eyes.
'I thought last night, in my sleep,' she murmured, 'that Christ was my new gardener. I thought I saw Him in the Long Walk there, by the bed of Nelly Roche, tending a fallen flower with a wisp of bast.... "Oh, Seth," I said to Him... "remember the fresh lilies for the altar-vases... Cut all the myosotis there is," I said, "and grub plenty of fine, feathery moss..." And then, as He turned, I saw of course it was not Seth at all.'
'Tending a fallen flower with a wisp of bast...' – a phrase that often returns to me when I'm working in the garden...

But here, for Easter Sunday, is R.S. Thomas –

Resurrection

Easter. The grave clothes of winter
are still here, but the sepulchre
is empty. A messenger
from the tomb tells us
how a stone has been rolled
from the mind, and a tree lightens
the darkness with its blossom.
There are travellers upon the road
who have heard music blown
from a bare bough, and a child
tells us how the accident
of last year, a machine stranded
beside the way for lack
of petrol, is crowned with flowers.

'After a while your mind's a macédoine...'

 When John Ruskin first visited the Alps, at the age of fourteen, his father took care to entrust him to a reliable and expert guide, Joseph Marie Couttet, with whom the young Ruskin soon formed a close bond, which lasted throughout Couttet's life. The Alpine guide even accompanied Ruskin to Italy, to attend to practical matters and generally take care of him. 
  Ruskin recalled their first Alpine venture, an ascent of Mont Buet, with Couttet on foot, leading his young master on a mule. Despite suffering from migraine, sunburn and painful eyes, Ruskin found the experience magical, and was instantly captivated by the Alpine scenery – a taste he never lost; he visited the region around thirty times in his life. When he heard that his old guide was dying, Ruskin made a detour to visit him, and afterwards wrote: 'I am tired, full of anguish and sadness. The death of my old Couttet weighs on me like all the snows of Chamonix. How lonely I am at his passing. My dear old guide of Chamonix. He who said he would give me just nine sous a day to herd cows, because, according to him, that was all I was good for...' A few years later, Ruskin wrote about Couttet again, recalling how 'after the meal, once he'd had his half-bottle of Savoy wine, it wasn't unusual for him to give me a philosophical lecture as we drove up a peaceful valley in the afternoon light. And after I'd tired him out and provoked him with my views on the world, my joys and his own, he would slide down to my valet beside me and murmur, shrugging his shoulders: 'Le pauvre enfant, il ne sait pas vivre.' The poor child doesn't know how to live. He was right: life for Ruskin seems to have been a relentless struggle, driving him constantly to the edge of nervous collapse, as his ferocious work ethic, and who knows what demons, drove him to a level of overwork and over-commitment staggering even by Victorian standards. 
  Couttet's perceptive remark appears as the epigraph to this poem by Dick Davis (from Belonging), in which the poet considers once again the possibility, or impossibility, of living happily –


'Live Happily'

'Le pauvre enfant, il ne sait pas vivre' 

After a while your minds a macédoine 
Of muddled poems, stories, paintings, music,
And pointed admonitions by the dead
Who seemed to know what they were saying meant. 

In all this incommodious welter one
Phrase comically recurs to me, the flourish
With which Domenico Scarlatti ended
The dedication of his published work –

'Vivi felice' ... 'Vivi felice',
Which I've not done yet, or seen clearly how
I'd manage to. Time's running out, his bright 
Arpeggios remind me ... running out ...


Which surely calls for a little Scarlatti – here's the ludicrously talented Yuja Wang playing the Sonata K455. Enjoy.

Moore Music

 Last night on the vintage music quiz Face the Music – an awful smugfest, really, but strangely compelling – the guest was Gerald Moore, who had recently celebrated his 80th birthday. As well as being probably the finest accompanist who ever lived, Moore was blessed with a genial personality, a sense of humour and a talent for anecdote. He soon had Joseph Cooper and the panellists – Robin Ray, Joyce Grenfell and the humorist Paul Jennings – reduced to helpless laughter with his memories of the early days of studio recording and much else. After the show was over, my mind turned to his wonderful Schubert recordings – and to this, his own arrangement for solo piano (no voice) of 'An Die Musik'. Enjoy...

Graphite and Rubber

 I've always liked pencils – the look, the feel and the smell of them – and the best pencils are surely those with a nice sharp graphite point at one end and a little eraser conveniently placed at the other. Who first came up with that bright idea? Well, as it happens, it was on this day in 1858 that one Hymen L. Lipman registered the first patent for such a pencil. He was the leading stationer in Philadelphia, where he also launched the first envelope company in America. In 1862 he sold the pencil-eraser patent to Joseph Reckendorker, who rashly sued the German company Faber for infringement. Alas, after due deliberation, the Supreme Court ruled against him and declared that the patent was invalid because it was simply a combination of two already known things with no additional use. Oh dear. 

   Vladimir Nabokov loved pencils, and they turn up more than once in his writings. In his autobiography Speak, Memory, the young Vladimir, lying in bed with a childhood illness, visualises his mother entering a stationer's shop and coming out with her footman carrying a pencil – which must surely be a giant pencil. And then there she is, by his bed, bearing the gift of a gigantic, four-feet long Faber pencil that had hung in the shop window (and was, Nabokov was delighted to discover, a working pencil with four feet of graphite inside).  
   In chapter 3 of Transparent Things, Hugh Person finds a pencil in the half-open drawer of an old desk, and suddenly, in a vertiginous bravura passage, we have the whole history of that pencil...

It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid ten years ago by a carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool that he never found. Now comes the act of attention.

In his shop, and long before that at the village school, the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood. A knife and a brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate of the shavings, each mauve on one side and tan on the other when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose wide, wide dispersal is panic catching its breath but one should be above it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse terrors). On the whole, it whittled sweetly, being of an old-fashioned make. Going back a number of seasons (not as far, though, as Shakespeare's birth year when pencil lead was discovered) and then picking up the thing's story again in the "now" direction, we see graphite, ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay by young girls and old men. This mass, this pressed caviar, is placed in a metal cylinder which has a blue eye, a sapphire with a hole drilled in it, and through this the caviar is forced. It issues in one continuous appetizing rodlet (watch for our little friend!), which looks as if it retained the shape of an earthworm's digestive tract (but watch, watch, do not be deflected!). It is now being cut into the lengths required for these particular pencils (we glimpse the cutter, old Elias Borrowdale, and are about to mouse up his forearm on a side trip of inspection but we stop, stop and recoil, in our haste to identify the individual segment). See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd, a shot of the shepherd's father, a Mexican) and fitted into the wood.

Now let us not lose our precious bit of lead while we prepare the wood. Here's the tree! This particular pine! It Is cut down. Only the trunk is used, stripped of its bark. We hear the whine of a newly invented power saw, we see logs being dried and planed. Here's the board that will yield the integument of the pencil in the shallow drawer (still not closed). We recognize its presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes.

Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us! But he won't, oh no.