'To profess what he does not mean, to promise what he cannot perform...'

 Reading this passage in one of Johnson' Rambler essays (No. 79), it is hard not to apply it to the present day, when we find ourselves ruled by a caste of 'experts' who are more often wrong than right, and by a deeply unimpressive political class who seem incapable of doing anything beyond firefighting and self-preservation: 

'The world has long been amused with the mention of policy in publick transactions, and of art in private affairs; they have been considered as the effects of great qualities, and as unattainable by men of the common level: yet I have not found many performances either of art or policy, that required such stupendous efforts of intellect, or might not have been effected by falsehood and impudence, without the assistance of any other powers. To profess what he does not mean, to promise what he cannot perform, to flatter ambition with prospects of promotion, and misery with hopes of relief, to soothe pride with appearances of submission, and appease enmity by blandishment and bribes, can surely imply nothing more or greater than a mind devoted wholly to its own purposes, a face that cannot blush, and a heart that cannot feel.' 

Candlemas

 Today I was in the cathedral again, for Candlemas, the service that commemorates the presentation of the infant Jesus in the temple (and the Purification of the BVM, if you like that kind of thing), and is also the hinge between Christmastide and Easter. It was a beautiful service, as ever, with the choir on top form. They sang, among other fine things, Tallis's O Nata Lux and Nicolas Gombert's Hodie Beata Virgo, a lovely piece which I don't remember hearing before. The Old Testament readings were, as so often, rather troubling, but the story of Simeon and Anna, as told in Luke, was as moving as ever: 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word...' We all processed with lighted candles to the font for the collect and Britten's A New Year Carol. The paschal candle was lit, the final prayers said, the organ struck up a Bach prelude and fugue (BWV545), and we were out into the chilly evening. There was still light in the sky, and the western horizon was turning a beautiful carmine pink. 

The Great Inhaler

 I see that the government, having nothing better to do, is thinking of banning the sale and use of nitrous oxide, the 'laughing gas' so popular with the nation's youth. Naturally, this news puts me in mind of inhaler extraordinaire Humphry Davy, the great chemist and inventor, who in his youth was swept away, like many others (Coleridge and Southey among them), by the craze for the newly discovered gas. Here is my account, from a few years back, of Davy's remarkable appetite for nitrous oxide: 

'At the Pneumatic Institute, the brainchild of Dr Thomas Beddoes (father of that strange poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes), in Bristol, the young scientific whiz kid Humphry Davy was throwing himself into the grand project of experimenting with Nitrous Oxide. The hope was that it would have near-miraculous therapeutic properties - and who knew what other uses - and Davy was keen to experiment on himself (as he had already done with Carbon Monoxide, with very nearly fatal results) to find out its effects.
 'After inhaling four quarts, Davy noted 'highly pleasurable thrilling, particularly in the chest and extremities. The objects around me became dazzling, and my hearing more acute... Sometimes I manifested my pleasure by stamping or laughing only; at other times, by dancing around the room and vociferating... This gas raised my pulse upwards of twenty strokes, made me dance about the laboratory as a madman, and has kept my spirits in a glow ever since.'
 No wonder he was keen to press on. 'Between April and June I constantly breathed the gas sometimes three or four times a day for a week... I have often felt very great pleasure when breathing it alone, in darkness and silence, occupied only by ideal existence.' What, he wondered, would be the effect of an overdose? After inhaling a full six quarts, he noted that 'the pleasurable sensation was at first local, and perceived in the lips and the cheeks. It gradually, however, diffused itself over the whole body, and in the middle of the experiment was for a moment so intense and pure as to absorb existence. At this moment, and not before, I lost consciousness; it was, however, quickly restored, and I endeavoured to make a bystander acquainted with the pleasures I experienced by laughing and stamping. I had no vivid ideas.'
 Pressing on, he was soon making use of a portable gas chamber designed by James Watt, which enabled him to inhale eight quarts over a planned 75 minutes before being released from the chamber (with his pulse at 124, his temperature 106 and his face bright purple) and given a top-up of 20 quarts of pure gas. 'The sensations were superior to any I ever experienced. Inconceivably pleasurable,' he noted. 'Theories passed rapidly thro the mind, believed I may say intensely, at the same time that everything going on in the room was perceived. I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals, I was indignant at what they said of me and stalked majestically out of the laboratory to inform Dr Kinglake privately that nothing existed but thoughts.'
 After some more experiments testing the effects of combining alcohol with nitrous oxide - it seems it's good for hangovers – Davy ended this self-experimenting phase, happily unscathed and with his mind sharper than ever.'

The flamboyant Davy, whose lectures and spectacular demonstrations attracted huge audiences, was a Cornishman, and Cornwall remains very proud of him. Here is a link (hope it works) to a very jolly song about him by Brenda Wootton – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpMZDQlRq5g

Holocaust Memorial Day

 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is impossible,' as Theodor Adorno didn't say. What he did say was 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric', and he was later to modify even that statement. Not that it matters. Perhaps it would be truer to say that to write poetry about Auschwitz, i.e. about the Holocaust, is impossible, or all but impossible, and arguably barbaric too. The best art created from those unimaginably terrible events has tended to be documentary in nature, like the almost unbearable Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film.  Poetry, I think, can only approach such a subject obliquely; it is literally obscene, its proper place is offstage. To mark the day, here is Geoffrey Hill's very oblique Ovid in the Third Reich, in which he places the exiled Roman poet in Hitler's Germany, trying to live with his conscience, loving his work and his children, celebrating 'the love-choir', but knowing 'the ancient troughs of blood' are too near, and that he is among the damned, or something worse. He might be taken to represent all those 'ordinary Germans' who managed to live with an unspeakable, and unspoken, knowledge... 

I love my work and my children. God   

Is distant, difficult. Things happen.   

Too near the ancient troughs of blood   

Innocence is no earthly weapon.

I have learned one thing: not to look down

So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,   

Harmonize strangely with the divine

Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

The poem has an epigraph from Ovid's Amores – 'Non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare, Solaque famosam culpa professa facit', which might be translated as 'He does not sin who can deny his sin, Only the admitted fault brings dishonour.'

See also today's Anecdotal Evidence. 

A Simian Nigel

 I was amused to learn that a newborn monkey belonging to an endangered species, the Cotton-Top Tamarin, has been given the 'endangered' name of Nigel. As an endangered Nigel, I have to applaud this gesture, though my own feelings about my Christian name are at best ambivalent, and I wouldn't be too sorry if it died out. Indeed, I have written about the Nigel question on this blog before, e.g. here and here... 

The Ghost in the Garden

 At Christmas I was given a book that I had never heard of, and which turned out to be, for most of its length, a fascinating and absorbing read. The Ghost in the Garden by Jude Piesse is about Charles Darwin's childhood garden at The Mount, the family home in Shrewsbury, a garden of which only tantalising traces remain today. This garden, memories of it and impressions and ideas derived from it, followed the great naturalist through his life, Piesse argues. It was a kind of lost paradise, where he collected bird's eggs and pebbles, climbed trees, learned about flowers and insects and pigeons, and fished in the Severn, and it was also, with its ample evidence of the interconnectedness of all things in nature, a seedbed of Darwin's interests and theories. It was in his mind throughout the Beagle expeditions, as evidenced by letters to his sister, and when he created his new garden at Down House in Kent. It was at his childhood home that he wrote, in 1842, the first outline of his theory of how evolution worked. 'Darwin's childhood garden is not just Darwin's after all,' writes Piesse. 'It is a tangle of experiences that both shaped and exceeded him; a hatchway of interconnecting pathways – both man-made and natural – that lead into the future and back to the past.'
  Jude Piesse gives a vivid account of her explorations and researches, building a rounded picture of the life of the garden and of the young Darwin. All this is told in parallel to her return to Shrewsbury, her home town, her feelings for it, and, in particular, her new life as a mother – just the kind of thing that usually puts me off a book of this kind, but here it worked wonders. The author's rediscovery of a child's-eye view of the world through her own children's experience chimed perfectly with her exploration of the young Darwin's own discovery of the natural world around him. The weakness of the book is that, like so many, it is too long, so that towards the end Piesse seems to be following some pretty tenuous threads and bulking out her material. This is a shame, as the book as a whole does a great job in bringing Darwin's childhood garden to the fore as a hugely important influence in his life and work, and it does so in an imaginative and original manner. At three quarters of the length, it would have done the job even better. 

Manet Day

 Edouard Manet's birthday has come round again – 191 today – and I nearly forgot to mark it. I'll post this one simply because I like it – the pink of the dress, the loose and easy brushwork, the girl's resigned expression, the feel of nothing much going on, just waiting, lighting a cigarette and forgetting about it... The picture, painted around 1877, is called in English Plum Brandy, but in French simply La Prune (the plum), and it depicts a plum soaking in brandy, a popular drink of the time (which the girl also seems to have forgotten about). My own idea of plum brandy is slivovitz, the fiery damson spirit that I discovered in Croatia in my youth, but that's another story...