Sudden Light

 I used the phrase 'I have been here' before in yesterday's post without thinking: it was vaguely familiar, no more. Checking it out, I find that it comes from a rather lovely poem of Rossetti's  – 

Sudden Light

I have been here before,

But when or how I cannot tell:

I know the grass beyond the door,

The sweet keen smell,

The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,—

How long ago I may not know:

But just when at that swallow's soar

Your neck turn'd so,

Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?

And shall not thus time's eddying flight

Still with our lives our love restore

In death's despite,

And day and night yield one delight once more?

('I Have Been Here Before' is also the title of a play by J. B. Priestley, written at a time when he was interested in theories of time expounded by J. W Dunne and P.D. Ouspensky.)

'I have been here before'

 Summer weather being with us at last, I went for a walk yesterday, a little way out of town. Along the way, I came upon a handsome church standing in a large, well kept graveyard, and had a sudden strong feeling that 'I have been here before'. As I drew near, and walked up the churchyard path, it all came back to me – this was the first church that I found standing open when all others had been (and continued) closed for months on end by the pusillanimous C of E in response to the Covid panic. I had rarely been so glad to find a church open, and, of course, I wrote about it on this blog: here's the link.  All Saints, Alrewas (pronounced to rhyme with 'walrus', and with a root meaning of 'alder swamp') is now what it was then, unpretentious (though unusually wide) and full of interest – including the fragment of wall painting pictured above. This survives high up on the North chancel wall, and according to Pevsner is 15th-century work, showing a bishop and his acolyte. It's not in a very good state of preservation, but I think it is rather beautiful, and I wish there was more of it: it looks like an elegant design. 
  The walking was good, much of it along the towpath of the Trent and Mersey canal, and beyond Alrewas I came to the church of St Leonard, Wychnor ('village on a bank'), which stands alone in the fields, the remnant of a deserted medieval village. And it does indeed stand on a bank, with a fine view over the 'humps and tumps' of the former village and beyond to blue rolling hills. The church was closed, as it usually is, but by all accounts there isn't much of interest inside. When I was walking around the exterior, the sun happened to strike through the building and caught a corner of a stained glass window, illuminating the face of a fox – a curious effect. I learn from the online guidebook that the window of which I was seeing a corner – from the wrong side – was installed as recently as 2007, to commemorate members of the Walker family, and was made by a local craftsman, Graham Chaplin. Depicting the four seasons, it looks like a fine piece of work. Another day I might find the church open and have a proper look. 

Chet 100

 I don't know if the centenary was marked on Radio 3 this morning (it might well have been), but the great guitarist and producer Chet Atkins was born 100 years ago today, in Luttrell, Tennessee. Born into poverty, he was initially raised by his mother, his father having absconded, and got his first guitar at the age of nine, swapping an old pistol and some chores for his brother's broken-down instrument, which was so misshapen that only the first three frets could be used. Later he managed to buy a semi-acoustic guitar with amp, but had to travel miles to plug it in, as his home, like all his neighbours', had no electricity. His innovative style of guitar picking was inspired by Merle Travis, but Atkins was very much more than just a guitar-picker. Here he is, in 1975, playing Scott Joplin. Enjoy...

An Earworm Investigated

 I've long been susceptible to earworms, sometimes pretty outlandish ones – a while back it was John Cale's Hanky Panky Nohow, which took some shaking. The latest pesky squatter in the music section of my addled brain is a hymn – Nearer, My God, to Thee, of all things.
  I think it happened like this: for some reason I was thinking about the sinking of the Titanic – perhaps I had passed too close to the statue of Captain Smith that stands in Beacon Park – and the hymn that might well have been played by the orchestra while the great ship went down entered my train of thought. It was already well on its way to settling in for a stint as resident earworm when yesterday, as I approached the market square, I heard music... I heard, to be specific, a male and a female voice singing, as you have no doubt guessed, Nearer, My God, to Thee, and singing it right lustily. The singers were of oriental appearance – maybe Chinese or Korean Christians – and were clearly deeply committed to their hymn singing. It made a pleasing change from the usual busker fare – but of course it also firmly entrenched that earworm. 
  Reading up about Nearer, My God, to Thee (on the 'know your enemy' principle), I discovered that nothing about it is simple. It is by no means certain that the hymn was played as the Titanic went down – or, if it was, which tune was used: there are three to choose from, one of them, Proprio Deo, written by Arthur Sullivan and favoured by the Methodist church, and two more Victorian settings, 'Horbury' and 'Bethany'. The version lodged in my brain is, I believe, the last named. I learnt, in the course of my researches, that Carl Nielsen wrote a paraphrase of Nearer, My God, to Thee for wind band. It's a rather remarkable piece, culminating in a startling rendition of the Titanic hitting the iceberg...

And here, for good measure, is the moving scene from the 1958 film A Night to Remember in which the ship's musicians (none of whom survived) do indeed play the hymn as the Titanic goes down...

Stan's Day, Father's Day

 Well, here's a coincidence: today is Father's Day (I've just been enjoying Vikingur Olafsson's From Far Away, a gift from my daughter far away) – and it's also the birthday of Stan Laurel (born 1890). Here, to mark both dates, is some delightful footage of Stan visiting his father and stepmother in West Ealing (my birthplace!) in 1932. Enjoy.

'Nothing amuses more harmlessly than computation'

 Lichfield continues to honour its greatest son. A newly restored statue of Samuel Johnson – a miniature version of the great sculpture that broods over the market place – has been unveiled at the King Edward VI School. At the unveiling ceremony, an officer of the Johnson Society read from a letter Johnson wrote to 'a young girl', in which he encourages her to continue with her study of mathematics – a fitting choice, given the setting. This letter was written to Sophia Thrale, one of Hester Thrale Piozzi's daughters, and was only recently discovered, by chance, among a bundle of forgotten papers tucked away in a cupboard in a Gloucestershire country house. It was sold at auction, and is now where it belongs, in the care of the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum. 
Here is the full text of the letter:

Dearest Miss Sophy,

By my absence from home, and for one reason and another I owe a great number of letters, and I assure you that I sit down to write yours first. Why you should think yourself not a favourite I cannot guess, my favour will, I am afraid never be worth much, but be its value more or less, you are never likely to lose it, and less likely if you continue your studies with the sure diligence as you have begun them.

Your proficiency in arythmetick is not only to be commended but admired. Your master does not, I suppose come very often, nor stay very long, yet your advance in the Science of numbers is greater than is commonly made by those who for so many weeks as you have been learning, spend six hours a day in the writing school.

Never think, my sweet, that you have arithmetic enough; when you have exhausted your Master, buy Books. Nothing amuses more harmlessly than computation, and nothing is oftener applicable to real business or speculative enquiries. A thousand stories which the ignorant tell, and believe, die away at once, when the computist takes them in his gripe. I hope you will cultivate in yourself a disposition to numerical enquiries; they will give you entertainment in Solitude by the practice, and reputation in publick by the effort. If you can borrow Wilkins’s Real Character, a folio which the Booksellers can perhaps let you have, you will have a very curious calculation, which you are qualified to consider, to show Noah’s Ark was capable of holding all the known animals of the world, with provision for all the time in which the earth was underwater.

Let me hear from you again. I am, Madam, Your Humble Servant

Sam: Johnson

 

A Novel with No Moving Parts

 More bookshop serendipity: in the selfsame charity bookshop where I recently picked up Death in Rome – 'the most devastating novel about the Germans that I have ever read' (Michael Hoffman) – I spotted another novel from the German-speaking world that I had never heard of, by an author I had barely heard of: Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard. Reading the notes on the author, I discovered that Bernhard's literary career was one long assault on the 'mindless cultural sewer' of Austria, and that in his will (he died in 1989) he forbade any further publication or performance of his work in Austria.
  How could I resist? It was clearly time to move on from the Germans to the Austrians... However, Old Masters is a very different book from Death in Rome. To begin with, it has no chapters or even paragraph breaks, but consists of one 240-page-long paragraph, in the course of which it would be fair to say that, in terms of action, almost nothing happens. It has, as Michael Hoffman has said of all Bernhard's novels, 'no moving parts'. The funny thing is that it is all ridiculously, mesmerically readable – which is all the more surprising as the body of the novel consists entirely of one long rant (punctuated by 'Reger said' at well judged intervals, like the 'Austerlitz said' in Sebald's Austerlitz). The ranter is one Reger, an 82-year-old music critic, who every other day comes to the Bordone Room in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and sits on a bench staring at a particular painting, Tintoretto's Man with a White Beard. Reporting Reger's endless rant is his friend, Atzbacher, who fills in some background, particularly about the widowed Reger's bereavement (though we are told almost nothing about his late wife). How does Bernhard make a readable novel out of this, you might well ask – as I do myself. And yet, as Reger rails against the Austrian state, Church and politics, human nature, the woeful deficiencies of just about every work of art and literature, however exalted (excluding only Schopenhauer, Goya, and this one painting of Tintoretto's), the weather, the Austrian newspapers, and even the state of Austrian public conveniences, I kept on reading, and in the end, against all the odds, enjoyed it. Old Masters is subtitled A Comedy, and there is certainly a comic element in such comprehensive, all-embracing railing conducted at such a level of ferocious, insistently repetitive hyperbole (nothing is stated without being reiterated half a dozen times in slightly different but equally hyperbolic phrasing) – and there is a kind of music, a strangely calming music, in it. I suspect that what is going on is very cleverly and subtly controlled by an author who knows just what he is doing.  It's not a book I'm likely to read again, or to keep, but I know it will stay with me – as Death in Rome has. Both are memorable reading experiences, even if not ones you'd wish to repeat. 
And now it is definitely time to move on from these German diatribes into calmer seas. English seas probably – I'll see what's on the shelves today...