Cultural Learnings of England for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Turkmenistan

Ever since discovering that this blog is more popular in Turkmenistan than in the UK – indeed is currently challenging Norway for the top spot among Nige-following nations – I have been scratching my metaphorical head. What on earth can it mean? Turkmenistan is a sparsely populated central Asian country where only five per cent of the population have access to the internet and where communication with the outside world and its media is firmly discouraged, satellite dishes having been banned in 2015. I would surmise also that most of Turkmenistan's population have little or no English. Still, I extend a cordial welcome to all my readers in that distant Stan – where one of the main cities, I note, is rather charmingly called Mary. Mary was previously called Merv, so that's a great improvement. Once an important oasis on the Silk Road and a 'crossroads of civilisation', Merv – or rather Mary – is now home to the Turkmen State Power Engineering Institute (definitely one for the bucket list) and, er, the world's largest yurt (below). Funny old world.

An Aurelian's April

As forecast, the weather broke overnight, much rain has fallen, and the temperature has plummeted. But what an April it has been – so many days of unbroken sunshine and warmth, and, as a result, so many butterflies! Surprisingly I have seen more butterfly species this month than in any April I can remember, even beating last April's total. And this has been achieved during the Great Lockdown, all within a radius of a couple of miles from home. There's surely a lesson in this: that there's more on your doorstep than you might think, and that the more closely you look, the more you find. This month I have seen Grizzled Skippers and Green Hairstreaks on land where I would never have thought to look (and, in the case of the Green Hairstreak, in greater numbers than I've seen in any one place) and an early Painted Lady in a most unlikely location. I've also enjoyed the extraordinary abundance of Peacocks, not to mention Brimstones, Holly Blues and Orange Tips – and another sighting of an early Hummingbird Hawk moth. All in all, I have seen so far this year – drum roll, please – 18 butterfly species. Add two day-flying moths that tend to get counted as honorary butterflies (the aforementioned Hummingbird and several Cinnabar moths) and that's a grand total of twenty – what an April!

'a continual courtesy between the Heavens and the Earth'

Writing from Teignmouth on this day in 1818, Keats tells John Hamilton Reynolds that
'We are here still enveloped in clouds – I lay awake last night listening to the Rain with a sense of being drown'd and rotted like a grain of wheat. There is a continual courtesy between the Heavens and the Earth. – The Heavens rain down their unwelcomeness and the Earth sends it up again to be returned to morrow.'
  This sounds like the kind of weather we're promised here for tomorrow, but today, happily, it is still dry and relatively warm. Best make the most of it...
  It was also raining hard in Cardiff on this date in 1997 – raining so hard that a one-day cricket match between Glamorgan and Warwickshire had to be abandoned, with Glamorgan still needing 65 runs to win. For the first time ever, a mathematical formula was applied to determine what the result would have been if the game had continued – yes, this was the birthday of the incomprehensible Duckworth-Lewis Method, named for the pair of statisticians who devised it.
  In 2009, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and Thomas Walsh of Pugwash got together under the name of the Duckworth Lewis Method and brought out an album described by Hannon as 'a kaleidoscopic musical adventure through the beautiful and rather silly world of cricket'. 'Beautiful and rather silly' also describes the album quite neatly. Towards the more beautiful end of its range is this evocative, wistfully melancholy song, Mason on the Boundary. I am conscious it will mean next to nothing to many of my readers – of whom, according to my stats, I have more in Norway, the U.S. and Turkmenistan (Turkmenistan?!) than in the U.K. – but give it a go...

Ella

Ella Fitzgerald – for my money the greatest female singer (non-classical) of the twentieth century – was born on this day in 1917. She was (to quote Leonard Cohen out of context) born with the gift of a golden voice – a voice like no other, with an astonishingly pure tone, almost like some unnamable musical instrument. She put this voice in the service of an extraordinary musical sensitivity that ensured her phrasing and timing were always exactly right for the song she was singing; no one could put a song across with such sensitivity and fidelity as Ella (except perhaps Fred Astaire, but he didn't have the voice). And, as if all that wasn't enough, her enunciation was also perfect. Here she is, demonstrating all these gifts and abilities to the full in a Rodgers and Hart classic from the Great American Songbook – one that has a strange extra resonance in this time of New York lockdown...

 

Birthdays and Butterflies

Today, St George's Day, is the putative birthday (in 1564) of William Shakespeare, a poetic and dramatic universe in himself – can anything more be usefully said about him, or asked of him? An awestruck silence is perhaps the most appropriate response – that and continuing to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest his works. As Matthew Arnold put it, 'Others abide our question. Thou art free. / We ask and ask – thou smilest and art still, / Out-topping knowledge.' He dramatises everything and states nothing; he is hardly there.
  As it happens, today is also the birthday (in 1901) of the evolutionary geneticist and lepidopterist E.B. Ford, author of the first of Collins's great New Naturalist series – Butterflies. I've written about Ford – a most extraordinary character – before on this blog. Today I use his name as a shameless link to my latest Nature Notes update...
  Yesterday, then, I took my state-sanctioned constitutional on an area of local downland, and had the wonderful surprise of seeing two of the loveliest of spring butterflies – neither of which I expected to find, and neither of which I had seen there before. First, the tiny, moth-like Grizzled Skipper, and then the beautiful Green Hairstreak with its emerald underwing (both are pictured in this post from last year). This has been a very good April for butterflies (and moths – I saw another early Hummingbird Hawk the other day) – and it's not over yet.

Abundance

This has been a quite extraordinary spring for peacocks – the butterflies, that is. I can't remember when I last saw so many at this time of year. This morning, strolling on a local common, I must have seen well over fifty in less than an hour, and there were so many basking on the paths that I had to be careful not to tread on any (some of them are getting sluggish now). I recall that there was a big emergence of peacocks quite late last summer, and this springtime abundance must be the result of a successful mass hibernation – and a very beautiful result it is too.
  There had also been a mass emergence of something else this morning – tiny longhorn moths (Adela), with their implausibly long antennae (as pictured above). There were huge numbers of these little beauties dancing about in the sunlight in a wooded part of the common. I had never seen them in such abundance before. And talking of abundance, aren't there a lot of hover flies, bee flies (Bombylius) and all manner of bees, large and small, this spring? Amid all the talk of a catastrophic loss of insect biodiversity, this is very gratifying.

Redon

That strange artist Odilon Redon was born on this day 180 years ago. He first came to public attention thanks to J.K. Huysmans' decadent classic A Rebours (Against the Grain / Against Nature). In it Huysmans describes a number of mysterious drawings by Redon, concluding 'These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.'
  Much of Redon's work does indeed defy classification, especially his visionary works Les Noirs, rendered entirely in shades of black. However, from the 1890s he favoured oils and pastels and his works became more accessible – especially his flower paintings. The one above is Bouquet in a Vase. It hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is characteristic in its strong, contrasting colours massed together non-naturalistically against a subdued, vaguely mysterious background.
  Redon's flower paintings never feel as if they've been painted from life, as if the artist is content to engage with what is before his eyes: rather he is looking through the flowers to something else – that something probably being his own psyche. His aim, he said, was 'to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible'. He believed that his works 'place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined'. This approach stands in complete contrast to that of Edouard Manet (whose flowers last turned up here on Saturday), who was content to show what wonders could be achieved through intense attention to what was present before his eyes, allied to prodigious painterly ability. The mystery of the world, as Oscar Wilde said, is in the visible, not the invisible. For all their mystical aspirations, Redon's flower paintings seem merely decorative when compared with those late masterpieces of Manet. Manet's flowers are emphatically there; Redon's seem more like figments.