Samara

 Reading (for review) a book about the Great North Wood that once stretched across south London, from Croydon to Deptford, I came across a word new to me – 'samara'. Apparently it's a botanical term for the winged seeds of such trees as maple, hornbeam, sycamore, elm and ash (ash 'keys'). It came into use in the late 16th century and derives from a dog Latin word denoting elm seed – and it sounds far too grand and resonant for the job. 'Samara' is also a given name in Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, a Russian city, and, in the Bible, a corruption of Samaria, where the Good Samaritan came from. Add an 's' and it becomes Samsara, the endless cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound (and a rather nice Guerlain fragrance). But in botany it is simply a 'dry indehiscent one-seeded fruit with a wing-like extension'. 'Indehiscent'? That means the seed remains closed at maturity, rather than splitting open. You live and learn. And forget.

Warner's Edward Thomas and Anne Donne

 One of the more surprising items in Anne Harvey's excellent anthology Elected Friends: Poems for and about Edward Thomas is a poem by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I've read several of her novels (and written about them on this blog), but had no idea she was a poet too. Her Thomas poem is titled 'Edward Thomas Memorial' – 

'Because a young man, petulant and young,
walked this hilltop with strides swinging and strong,
and hid apart
under these trees cooling his hot heart,
and cast his black mood listening to a bird's song;

I who am old, study and city bred,
have climbed hither, slipping in the autumn mud,
and stand here now,
panting for breath, mopping sweat off my brow,
thinking of my first editions and of his spilled blood.'

I'm not sure about that last line, but it's a well made poem, carefully structured, and with something in it suggestive of Thomas's own voice. It recalls a visit to the Edward Thomas memorial stone, which stands on Shoulder of Mutton Hill, overlooking the aptly named Steep, the village in which Thomas and his family lived. It's a place I've been meaning to visit for years, but have never done it yet. 

  Among Sylvia Townsend Warner's other poems is 'Anne Donne', a vivid and very dark piece of work, in which she imagines herself into the mind and body of the poet's long-suffering wife – 

'I lay in London;
And round my bed my live children were crying,
And round my bed my dead children were singing.
As my blood left me it set the clappers swinging:
Tolling, jarring, jowling, all the bells of London
Were ringing as I lay dying –
John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone!

Ill-done, well-done, all done.
All fearing done, all striving and all hoping,
All weanings, watchings, done; all reckonings whether
Of debts, of moons, summed; all hither and thither
Sucked in the one ebb. Then, on my bed in London,
I heard him call me, reproaching:
Undone, Anne Donne, Undone!

Not done, not yet done!
Wearily I rose up at his bidding.
The sweat still on my face, my hair dishevelled,
Over the bells and the tolling seas I travelled,
Carrying my dead child, so lost, so light a burden,
To Paris, where he sat reading
And showed him my ill news. That done,
Went back, lived on in London.'

Anne Donne gave birth to 12 children, five of whom died. The poem is set during the period (1611/12) when Donne was away travelling in France and the Low Countries with his patron, Sir Robert Drury. Anne died in 1617 at the age of 33, after giving birth to a stillborn child. The grief-stricken Donne vowed never to marry again. 

'An uneasy participant...'

 On this day in 1917, Edgar Degas, the artist described by Kenneth Clark as the best draughtsman since the high renaissance, died. He was old (83), blind and more or less alone – the last from choice: he was famously misanthropic (and, it has to be acknowledged, a virulent antisemite). No longer able to draw or paint, Degas spent his last years as a forlorn and solitary figure, wandering the streets of Paris. He had never fitted in: Valéry described him as 'an uneasy participant in the tragicomedy of modern art, mad about drawing', and both halves of that are true. Without the daily struggle to draw what he saw, he had nothing to live for. 
  R.B. Kitaj drew the pastel above from an image in a book, Mon Oncle Degas by Jeanne Fevre, that he found on the Quai Voltaire. 'This old, bitter antisemite in bed, 'Kitaj wrote, 'not only put lines in places which seem more 'right' than anyone else's lines, but, like Michelangelo in his last crucifixion drawings, he uttered a spiritual cry, maybe of anguish at the human shell in imperfected life ... Degas drew so well because he wouldn't give up ... He could never go far enough.'

'Gushes and eddies of wind took the flames this way and that...'

 This was a happy find – a classic 1950s public information bookmark warning of the dangers of fire – and it could hardly have been in a more appropriate book: Christopher Hibbert's King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780 (published 1958). This is a book full of colourful descriptions of raging infernos, created by the anti-Catholic (and anti-pretty much everything else) rioters as they rampaged across London, burning great swathes of the city, freeing prisoners from the gaols, and wreaking wholesale destruction. The Gordon Riots are something I knew very little about, beyond some vague memories gleaned from trying to read Barnaby Rudge. They certainly put our contemporary notions of civil disorder in perspective: we are lucky to live in a very peaceable age, and the only taste of seriously destructive rioting we've had in recent times was the August 2011 outbreak, largely the result of police inaction. Here is Hibbert's description of an incident in the 1780 riots, the firing of Langdale's distillery – 
'As the buildings leapt with a roar into flame, a gentle wind came up ... gushes and eddies of wind took the flames this way and that, wrapping the streets in fire and setting alight houses further down Holborn towards Fleet Market, until the whole district looked, as Wraxall* said, "like a volcano".
  The fire was given an added and ferocious life by a fire engine pumping through its hose not water but gin from the stills in Langdale's cellar. Another engine, capture from its operatives by an enterprising old cobbler, was pumping up gin into buckets, while the cobbler did a good trade selling it to the spectators of the havoc at a penny a mug.
  Others, unwilling to pay for what they could get for nothing, ran into the raging building and down the stone steps into the cellar and came up choking, with blackened faces and bloodshot eyes, carrying untapped casks of gin, or pails and jugs, bowls and even pig-troughs overflowing with this most valued anodyne. Soon, even this effort was unnecessary, for as the heat below ground became intense the stills burst and overflowed and the gin came gushing up into the streets and ran in warm streams in the gutter and between the cobbles, joining a flow of rum pouring out of an enormous pile of staved-in rum casks. Delirious with excitement, the people knelt down and dipped their faces in the river of fiery spirits and gulped as much of it down as they could before it made them choke and burned their throats like acid. For the gin was in its raw state, unrectified. Wraxall saw men and women lying down prostrate in the streets incapably drunk; some of the women had babies in their arms or struggling near their insensible bodies, screaming in terror or in pain. Several staring, wide-eyed figures lay on their backs in grotesque postures, their faces blue, their swollen tongues will wet with poisonous liquid. 
  Below them in the cellars, trapped now by the fire, were the scorched bodies of men and women overcome by the fumes and the smoke, burning to death. And in the warehouse, too drunk to get out when the flames leapt in, other men and women could be heard screaming and shouting and giggling, scarcely aware of what was happening to them or too drunk to care.'
[* Nathaniel Wraxall, an eye-witness.]

Henry Thrale's brewery and distillery could easily have suffered the same fate but for the 'astonishing presence of mind' of the manager Mr Perkins 'in amusing the mob with meat and drink and huzzas'. Mrs Thrale told her friend Dr Johnson that 'our brewhouse would have blazed in ten minutes when a property of £150,000 would have been utterly lost'. This huge sum – the equivalent of about £13 million today – was in fact an underestimate: when the brewery was sold after Henry Thrale's death in 1781 it fetched £185,000. 

Raining Conkers

 Yesterday, on my return from the 'city of philosophers'*, I went for a relaxing stroll in the park where, in my first autumn in the suburban demiparadise (sixty-plus years ago), I climbed trees and gathered conkers with my new friends. It was an Indian summer, I remember, very much like the one we're now enjoying.
  The horse chestnuts in the park, having fought off various recent afflictions, are again heavily laden with conkers. A dog walker warned me, as I strolled under the trees, to look out for falling conkers – a warning I didn't take too seriously until, nearing one of the older trees, I heard the sounds of what seemed to be a heavy aerial bombardment of conkers – they were falling  in their dozens and hundreds, hitting the ground like a nutty hailstorm, and indeed posing some danger of a painful bump on the head (it was a tall tree and the conkers seemed mostly to be coming from high up near the crown). I had never seen anything like this rain of conkers, and wondered what on earth had brought on such a sudden dramatic drop. I soon knew the answer: hearing a piercing squawk and looking up, I saw that high up in the tree a party of ring-necked parakeets were having a high old time, shaking the upper branches and letting loose fusillade after fusillade of conker artillery onto any unsuspecting passers-by. They are, I believe, the only birds who eat conkers, but yesterday they were clearly more intent on having fun than eating. I gave their tree a wide berth, and came away unscathed.
  This wouldn't have happened in my boyhood, when the only parakeets we saw were in cages. If it had, though, we would no doubt have returned fire with a will. 

* 'Sir, we are a city of philosophers: we work with our heads, and make the boobies of Birmingham work for us with their hands.'  Sam: Johnson.

Review

 I've just realised that I haven't posted my latest contribution to the Literary Review (not that I post them all) – a review of a mind-boggling new book by Henry Gee, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters. It went out under the apt title 'What Will Survive of Us?' Here it is...

‘Once upon a time…’ The opening words of Henry Gee’s new book give notice that what follows will be a story – and a dazzling, beguiling story it is, told at exhilarating pace. The scale is apparent from the first of a set of mind-boggling timeline graphics: this runs from the birth of the universe at the bottom of the page to ‘Extinction of life on Earth’, near the top, alarmingly close to the dotted line of ‘NOW’. This is a book to give you a new, dizzying perspective on such small matters as human civilisation. ‘Against the backdrop of geological time,’ Gee reminds us, ‘the rise of humanity is of negligible significance.’ We’ll be gone in a while, leaving barely a trace behind . The ‘carbon spike’ we have contributed to, and which causes us so much anxiety, is high but very narrow, ‘perhaps too narrow to be detectable in the very long term’. Besides, taking the long view, ‘life on Earth, with all its drama, all its comings and goings, is governed by just two things. One of them is a slow decline in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The other is the steady increase in the brightness of the Sun.’ Unlike carbon dioxide, oxygen might be thought of as an all-round good thing, essential to life on Earth. And yet it was a sudden surge of free oxygen that caused the Great Oxidation Event, unleashing the first of many mass extinctions that pepper the history of this planet. All that oxygen scrubbed the air of the carbon dioxide and methane that were keeping Earth warm and launched the first and longest ice age – 300 million years during which the planet became ‘Snowball Earth’, covered from pole to pole with ice. ‘And yet,’ observes Gee calmly, ‘the Great Oxidation Event and subsequent Snowball Earth episode were the kind of apocalyptic disasters in which life on Earth has always thrived.’ Eighty million years of ice ages only encouraged life to keep on coming back, sometimes in decidedly strange forms. I must admit I had never heard of Lystrosaurus, an animal with ‘the body of a pig, the uncompromising attitude towards food of a golden retriever, and the head of an electric can opener’ – and yet, for millions of years after the End-Permian mass extinction (yes, another one), nine out of every ten animals on Earth was a Lystrosaurus. Nor had I heard of stromatolites, mounds of slime and sediment that, early in the history of life on Earth, became ‘the most successful and enduring form of life ever to have existed on this planet, the undisputed rulers of the world for three billion years’. Dinosaurs, on the other hand, are animals that every child has heard of. These hugely successful creatures filled every evolutionary niche, leaving little room for much else, including the early mammals, who had to wait until the dinosaurs finally died out before they could ‘burst forth, like a well-aged champagne, shaken beforehand, and inexpertly corked’. A profusion of fast evolving and diversifying mammals took over from the dinosaurs. They included what Gee calls ‘a group of leftovers … an assortment of scrappers that included rats, mice, rabbits and, seemingly almost as an afterthought, the primates’. These small, fast-moving creatures with forward-facing eyes, inclined to curiosity and exploration, would, eventually, give rise to Homo sapiens. But the emergence of modern humans could so easily not have happened. Around 200,000 years ago, the last survivors of the species were confined to an oasis on the edge of what is now the Kalahari desert. And yet, Homo sapiens squeaked through, saved by a period of warming that turned much of the surface of the planet into rich grassland, teeming with game. The author begins the last chapter of this hugely enjoyable page-turner by paraphrasing Tolstoy: ‘All happy, thriving species are the same. Each species facing extinction does so in its own way.’ This chapter contemplates the future – a future that will, of course, not include Homo sapiens. We have already incurred a massive ‘extinction debt’ by damaging our own habitat; our population is likely to start falling by around 2100; and our genetic variation is woefully insufficient. We’ll be gone within the next ‘few thousand to tens of thousands of years’, but life will go on, with more ice ages, more extinctions, until eventually, in maybe a billion years, the story of life on Earth will be over. Viewed in the kind of vertiginous perspectives Gee opens up, our human presence looks vanishingly insignificant. And yet we have huge significance as the first and only species to be aware of itself. We owe it to ourselves, and to our fellow species, to conserve what we have, to make the best of our brief existence. ‘Do not despair,’ the author concludes. ‘The Earth abides, and life is living yet.’

Kay Day

 This blog is not going to let Kay Ryan's birthday pass unmarked. Incredibly, she is 76 today – long may she live and write yet. Here, again, is the first poem of hers I posted (back in 2010) – one that I think displays her unique gift perfectly: wise, succinct, beautifully crafted and utterly distinctive...

Carrying a Ladder

We are always

really carrying

a ladder, but it’s

invisible. We

only know

something’s

the matter:

something precious

crashes; easy doors

prove impassable.

Or, in the body,

there’s too much

swing or off-

center gravity.

And, in the mind,

a drunken capacity,

access to out-of-range

apples. As though

one had a way to climb

out of the damage

and apology.