Pagan Carshalton Rises Again

Carshalton may be XR Central these days, but the place is still pagan at heart (a former Rector, newly arrived and getting his bearings, concluded that we were essentially tree worshippers, and he wasn't far wrong about some of us). On this soggy Saturday morning I found the village swarming with morris dancers of all kinds, some traditionally attired, others more colourfully dressed in a weird fusion of hippy, Goth, Celtic and steampunk styles, with faces luridly painted.

The traditional East Surrey Morris Men, I gathered, were at the heart of the action, along with folk dancers of other kinds, young and old. It was all rather heartening and, yes, very English.

The traditionalists and the more flamboyant modern morrises seemed not to be mingling much. I wonder if there is a schism in the morris world – it wouldn't be the first time. A book I recently had to read for review, The Lark Ascending by Richard King, tells of almighty fallings-out in the world of English folk dance in the Twenties and Thirties, mostly stirred up by one Rolf Gardiner, a man who viewed morris dancing as an expression of the kind of blood-and-soil neo-paganism then in vogue in Germany. Having fallen out with Cecil Sharp, the founder of the English folk revival, Gardiner went on to found a clandestine romantic-fascistic organisation called the English Mistery (later the English Array) which believed that 'our race can be saved and its vigour increased by the revival of instinct and tradition, and by the protection and development of national breeds, on which the existence and continuation of culture depend'. 'National breeds', eh?
Gardiner developed into a rather brilliant agricultural pioneer, whose next organisation, Kinship in Husbandry, evolved into the very successful Soil Association. However, his known affection for National Socialism understandably clouded his reputation. He was even turned down when he volunteered for the Home Guard.                             

Nobel Time Again

I haven't read anything by Peter Handke (though I know a couple of his films), so I have no idea how good he might be as a writer. However, the furore that has greeted Handke's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature is giving me much amusement. This piece in The Guardian is hilarious. Salman Rushdie (passed over again?) is particularly incandescent, but the likes of Hari Kunzru, Slajov Zizek and even Jennifer Egan, speaking for Pen America, run him close. This is clearly an award that has annoyed all the right people, and annoyed them intensely.
  The principal source of all this fury is Handke's idiotic remarks about certain incidents in the Balkan Wars in the Nineties, and his unstinting support for Slobodan Milosevic. These are not the kind of things you'd expect to warm the hearts of the Nobel committee. Nor, come to that, was Handke's call in 2014 for the Nobel literature prize to be abolished as a 'false canonisation'. And, whatever else he might be, Handke is an ageing white European male – just the kind of winner the committee was being urged by all and sundry to avoid, in favour of voices, preferably female, from the Third World. (His co-laureate, admittedly, is a 'dreadlocked feminist' called Olga Tokarczuk, but she is still guilty of being white and European.) Could it be that the Nobel committee believe that freedom of expression and quality of writing trump political correctness? It seems hardly likely, but that is the impression this year's award gives. It's actually made the Nobel Prize for Literature slightly interesting for once.

XR Central

Picture my horror – no don't, it won't be pretty – when I happened on this extravaganza of imbecility just around the corner from my home in the demiparadise that is Platonic Carshalton. A blameless Edwardian semi has apparently been converted into XR Central, painted in hideous 'rainbow' colours, every surface covered with inane slogans and symbols, and an earth rampart covered with white stones ('Act Now!') thrown up in the front garden, along with various items of garden furniture, water features and unhappy-looking plants. The perpetrator of this monstrosity has proudly chalked his name on the pavement outside, and an Extinction Rebellion flag flies high over the lot (now I know where the one in the park came from).
  This invasion of public space by in-your-face assertions of ideology – and always the same ideology (because to its intellectually challenged proponents it's incontestable)  – is fast becoming one of the more tiresome features of modern life. Public space should be neutral, a forum for the whole of the community, not the preserve of strident ideologues. We English used to be very good at keeping our opinions to ourselves, and living peaceably as a result, rubbing along together in an atmosphere of mostly good-humoured mutual tolerance. How all that has changed, thanks to the emotions unleashed by Brexit and 'climate change'.
  Anyway, I hope the council has noticed what has been inflicted on this particular house and will take appropriate action, preferably something involving heavy machinery...

Tulp

Born on this day in 1593 was the Dutch surgeon Nicolaes Tulp, a man who would be no more than a footnote in medical history had he not been immortalised in a great painting by the young Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. In the painting, Tulp (who changed his name from the more commonplace Claes Peterszoon to speed his rise to the upper reaches of Amsterdam society) stands at the right, expatiating on the anatomy of the dead man's flayed forearm and left hand, while his audience direct their gaze elsewhere, on the huge anatomical volume that stands open in the far right of the picture space.
 As W.G. Sebald points out in The Rings of Saturn, this flayed left hand is larger than the right and, bizarrely, the tendons shown are not those for the palm but for the back of the hand. It looks, in fact, like an anatomical illustration taken out of context and appended incongruously to this cadaver. And it is on this cadaver (of a hanged criminal called Aris Kindt) that Rembrandt the great artist focuses his attention, while Rembrandt the brilliant portraitist is focused on the worthies assembled around him. Iconographically this hanged criminal is the dead Christ, and Rembrandt paints him with due attention, with compassion, respect and tenderness. Our gaze, and our pity, are drawn to him in his naked mortality, not to the bizarre exposure of his tendons. That is what raises the Anatomy Lesson from a superb group portrait to a great work of art.
  Sebald speculates that our old friend Sir Thomas Browne, who was pursuing his medical studies in Holland at the time, was very probably present at this dissection. One wonders what he made of it – but of course what he was seeing was the event in life, not The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp.

Butterfly Brouhaha

It's the Stones in Hyde Park all over again (or the Somme!). The 'artist' Damien Hirst has released a new series of works made with geometrically arranged butterfly wings – the kind of kitsch polychrome mosaics that were popular with the Victorians (yes, he's that cutting edge) – and controversy is raging in the sort of places where this kind of controversy usually rages. These particular works are made with large numbers of butterfly wings, imported from butterfly farms in tropical countries – farms which, Hirst's defenders claim, were set up in order to curb the highly destructive illegal butterfly trade. 
 We've been here before with Hirst, who as far back as 2003 was the UK's largest importer of exotic butterfly parts. His 2012 exhibit In and Out of Love caused a bigger outcry – and no wonder. It consisted of two windowless rooms full of huge numbers of live butterflies, and was part of the gigantic Hirst retrospective that ran for a depressing 23 weeks. In the course of those weeks, around 9,000 butterflies died, many of them trodden underfoot by visitors. The butterflies used, which were bought from UK butterfly breeders, were Caligo and Heliconius species. In the wild these live for up to nine months, but at the Tate they lasted only a matter of hours or days. This Telegraph report on the furore includes probably the only statement by a PETA representative that I've ever agree with: 'Damien Hirst's quest to be edgy is as boring as it is callous.' Indeed.

Butterflies and Bungee Ballet

Well, that was good. There's nothing like a few days walking and church crawling in France to restore the spirits, reward the palate and punish the liver. I was with my brother and a friend in Brittany and over the border in Normandy, and our wanderings began with a walk along the spectacularly beautiful Breton coast near Cancale – where, on a breezy day of sun and (mostly) cloud, a fine flurry of fin de saison butterflies greeted us: Red Admirals and Painted Ladies in abundance, Speckled Woods, Common and Holly Blues, a Comma, a Brown Argus, and a wealth of Whites, Small and Large... This was followed by a lunch of superb oysters at a thriving huitrerie, and then into St Malo for the evening and night. Next day inland to Dol-de-Bretagne, a delightful small town with a fine, if architecturally puzzling, cathedral, many medieval buildings, and a good claim to be the ultimate home town of the Stuart dynasty (via the Fitzalans).
 Our next destination was Mayenne, just inside Normandy, and on the way there we had yet another demonstration (if any were needed) of how inexhaustibly rewarding even the more obscure corners of France can be. Breaking our journey at Fougeres, a small town of which none of us knew anything, we discovered that it has, among other attractions, one of the most extensive and spectacular castles you could hope to see anywhere. Mayenne, too, beautifully sited on the river of the same name, has a pretty impressive castle, though on a much smaller scale, and an imposing, much rebuilt basilica. And so it goes on: the following morning, en route to Le Mans (where I picked up the TGV to take me, ultimately, back to London), we stopped at Evron – another small town of which we knew nothing – and discovered that it is home to one of the finest basilicas in Normandy. Unfortunately we weren't able to take a proper look inside as a funeral was going on. Also going on, against a cinema-style white screen outside the basilica were rehearsals for a kind aerial dance show, or bungee ballet. Three very agile young ladies were practising some breaththaking vertical dance moves and acrobatics, rising and falling and swinging from side to side on their bungee ropes. Ah France, France...

On the Beach and In the Stacks

When would you say this photo was taken? Sixties? Seventies?
 In fact, it was taken in 1913, using the autochrome colour process, by Lt-Col Mervyn O'Gorman, a man of many parts who did much to ensure that Britain had something like a fighting air force when the Kaiser War came along. Later in his career, he took a keen interest in road safety and was instrumental in getting the first Highway Code published. And, in 1913, he took a series of photographs of his neighbour's teenage daughter, Christina, dressed in red and with her hair down, striking hippyish poses on the beach. He also made etchings and linocuts, and published a volume of poetry with the deeply unpromising title Verses Gloomy and Gay.
 I came across the name of Mervyn O'Gorman while browsing in one of my current bedside books, Florian Illies's 1913, where I also discovered that in that year Marcel Duchamp, fresh from his succès de scandale  at the Armory Exhibition in New York, did what the finest minds and choicest spirits of every generation do and became a librarian. He took a position as Assistant Librarian at the Sainte-Geneviève library in Paris, and spent most of his spare time playing chess, going on to represent France four times at the Olympic games. There's the making of a pub quiz question there, I think.
 But now I'm off to France again for a few days. A bientot, mes amis...