Doomscrolling and Tallis

 On the radio this morning I caught a word that was new to me – 'doomscrolling'. It's a word that fits what it describes – obsessive seeking out of negative news stories online. It used to be known as 'doomsurfing'. but nowadays we scroll rather than surf, running a treadmill rather than riding the wavecrests. Before we even had the internet, the phenomenon (or its old-world equivalent) was labelled the 'mean world syndrome' – a belief that the world if a far more dangerous place than it actually is, again as a result of too much exposure to relentlessly negative material. There are certainly many among us suffering from this syndrome: some months ago a survey found that most people believed the death toll from Covid to be around 7 percent. Even now, after many more deaths, the actual figure stands at 0.12 percent. Enough said.
  

 I picked up 'doomscrolling' on Radio 4, but was soon back with my default network – wonderful (mostly) Radio 3. There I heard this rather lovely modern take on Thomas Tallis's setting of Archbishop Parker's metrical translation of Psalm 2 – the work that inspired Vaughan Williams's beautiful Tallis Fantasia. The Spirit of Tallis is written by Christopher Monks and performed here by his ensemble Armonica Consort.  I think it's just the kind of thing we need in these strange times...

Actually, this is a taster video. Oddly the piece on its own seems reluctant to upload (or is it download?). However, it is definitely there on YouTube in glorious isolation, if you feel like seeking it out...

'But once I lived in Gloucestershire...'

 Born on this day in 1881 was one of the most splendidly named of all English poets – Lascelles Abercrombie. His poetry long ago fell out of fashion, along with that of most of the other 'Georgians' (and, from what I've seen of it, its fate seems to have been deserved). However, Abercrombie had a successful career as a literary critic and academic, and he was, for one glorious period, at the centre of a literary group from which two great poets would emerge. The group was the 'Dymock poets', based on and around the village of Dymock on the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border. From 1911 to 1916 Abercrombie lived in a cottage, The Gallows, at Ryton, near Dymock, where the loose-knit circle of poets met, stayed or visited – John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Gibson and the two greats in the making, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. It was at Dymock that the intense friendship between Frost and Thomas – the friendship that was to make a poet of Thomas – was born. 
   Frost's 'Iris by Night' recalls a memorable walk that he and Thomas, 'elected friends', took at Dymock –

One misty evening, one another's guide,
We two were groping down a Malvern side
The last wet fields and dripping hedges home.
There came a moment of confusing lights,
Such as according to belief in Rome
Were seen of old at Memphis on the heights
Before the fragments of a former sun
Could concentrate anew and rise as one.
Light was a paste of pigment in our eyes.
And then there was a moon and then a scene
So watery as to seem submarine;
In which we two stood saturated, drowned.
The clover-mingled rowan on the ground
Had taken all the water it could as dew,
And still the air was saturated too,
Its airy pressure turned to water weight.
Then a small rainbow like a trellis gate,
A very small moon-made prismatic bow,
Stood closely over us through which to go.
And then we were vouchsafed a miracle
That never yet to other two befell
And I alone of us have lived to tell.
A wonder! Bow and rainbow as it bent,
Instead of moving with us as we went
(To keep the pots of gold from being found),
It lifted from its dewy pediment
Its two mote-swimming many-coloured ends
And gathered them together in a ring.
And we stood in it softly circled round
From all division time or foe can bring
In a relation of elected friends.


And Frost's strange, uneasy poem 'The Sound of Trees' was written for Lascelles Abercrombie – 

I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear

Forever the noise of these

More than another noise

So close to our dwelling place?

We suffer them by the day

Till we lose all measure of pace,

And fixity in our joys,

And acquire a listening air.

They are that that talks of going

But never gets away;

And that talks no less for knowing,

As it grows wiser and older,

That now it means to stay.

My feet tug at the floor

And my head sways to my shoulder

Sometimes when I watch trees sway,

From the window or the door.

I shall set forth for somewhere,

I shall make the reckless choice

Some day when they are in voice

And tossing so as to scare

The white clouds over them on.

I shall have less to say,

But I shall be gone.

Later in his life, Abercrombie seems to have looked back on the Dymock years as a kind of lost paradise. In 1932 he wrote:
'I have lived in a cottage in the daffodil country and I have, for a time, done what I wanted to do ... and I have known what it is to have Wilfred Gibson and Robert Frost for my neighbours; and John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Will Davies, Bob Trevelyan, Arthur Ransome, have drunk my cider, and talked in my garden. I make no cider now, and I have no garden. But once I lived in Gloucestershire.'

And then...

 Oh, the irony! The morning after my first experiment with the health-giving elixir Cynar I woke up with a weird and disorienting visual impairment. Ever alert to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, I drew no connection between the drink and the symptom, but decided I had better break the habit of a lifetime and see a doctor. I managed to secure that precious thing, an urgent appointment, and this resulted in a session of telephonic triage and a prompt referral to the local eye unit. There my eyes were tested at punishing length and found to be perfectly all right, and the baffled medic referred me elsewhere. I staggered home feeling thoroughly unwell, continued to do so for around 24 hours, then woke this morning in my usual state of butcher's dog-level fitness. Today I have an optician's appointment, which seems more than a little de trop after all that. More investigations will follow, but this is the last I'll say about the matter – I'm sure none of us wants this to turn into that kind of blog...

Cynar

 In my unceasing quest for medicinal liquors, I've landed on Cynar (pronounced 'Chee-nar'), a magical elixir created from a secret recipe as recently as 1952. Thirteen herbs are involved, but the key ingredient (as the label suggests) is artichoke – and the beauty of the artichoke is that it is good for the liver. So, even as the alcohol is punishing your liver, the artichoke is bringing healing and relief. Or so I would like to think... The good news is that Cynar is delicious, like a darker, less sweet Campari, with a greater depth of flavour and a lower alcohol content (16.5%), so that you can drink more of it – which is what I definitely want to do. So far I've drunk it long, with soda, a dash of orange juice and a slice of orange. I'm looking forward to trying it straight on ice as a digestif, and perhaps in place of Campari in a negroni. Cheers!
  By the way, the chap in the picture is the Italian actor Ernesto Calindri, urging us to take Cynar 'against the strain of modern life'. Sound advice, I'm sure. 

Michelangeli

The great pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was born on this day in 1920 (I must have missed the centenary). Here he is demonstrating his effortless technical perfection and exquisite musicality in playing Domenico Scarlatti. This is beautiful music, something we're all going to be in need of as the lockdown lid comes down on our lives yet again – enjoy...

 

Parents and Children

 Well, I've finished reading another book. This one was Parents and Children by Ivy Compton-Burnett – I think the only one of hers I've read this year, so my addiction must be under control. It's an unusual one too – unusually long, at 280-plus pages, and (by ICB standards) unusually mellow in tone; there's even something very like a happy ending. The cast of characters is also unusually long: there are Eleanor and Fulbert (great name) Sullivan; Fulbert's parents, Regan and Sir Jesse, in whose house Eleanor and Fulbert live; Eleanor and Fulbert's nine children, ranging in age from three-year-old to young adult; the nursery staff and tutor; the nearby family of the Cranmers (four adults); and the mysterious Marlowe siblings who live in genteel poverty on the fringe of the Sullivan estate. 
   With all those characters to bring to some kind of life, Ivy needs more space than usual, especially as she limits her fictional resources, as always, to dialogue and little else. Her great triumph is to fully characterise each of the Sullivan children, so that by the end we feel we know them as individuals. The youngest, Nevill – surely one of the most vividly drawn three-year-olds in literature – makes it easy for us by always referring to himself in the third person. Each of the others also has their own way of expressing themselves in words, and in the course of the novel we get to recognise each voice. Always an acute observer of children, ICB is at her best here. The characterisation of the adults is equally sure, and there are some fine comic scenes, with much less darkness apparent than in most of her novels. Parents and Children was published in 1941, at a low point in the war when Britain stood all but alone against the Nazis – but outside events, however large, seem never to have impinged on Ivy Compton-Burnett's perennially Edwardian fictional world. This might be one of the reasons why her novels were at their peak of popularity during the war.
   As for the plot of Parents and Children, it's the usual shamelessly rickety contraption. Fulbert has to go to South America on business and after a while is reported to be dead. But is he? Suffice to say that in his absence things move fast... The climax comes with a breakneck succession of confrontations and revelations that leave everyone reeling – or rather talking about it all at length. 
'"So the truth has escaped," said Daniel [one of the older children], "and with its accustomed dispatch."
"And we find that our feelings do not go beyond speech. And we are glad of that. The speech will be a relief. We are looking forward to it."'
Parents and Children is of course astringent, but never harsh. By its author's standards it is unusually readable and straightforward. Well, almost straightforward.

New Year's Day

 On this day in 1957, Philip Larkin greeted the new year with this touching and beautifully made poem – 

Love Songs in Age

She kept her songs, they took so little space,
  The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
  And coloured, by her daughter –
So they had waited, till, in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord
  Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
  That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
  Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
  To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.

'Love Songs in Age' was one of three Larkin poems read at his memorial service in Westminster Abbey. The others were 'Church Going' and 'An Arundel Tomb'. Between them, I think, these three show what is best, and most humane, in Larkin's verse.