Addendum

 The Easter Day Solemn Evensong in the cathedral was a beautiful and richly satisfying service, with the choir on top form – Stanford's wonderful setting of the Magnificat and Handel's glorious Worthy Is the Lamb the high points.
I've found lately that it's impossible to attend a religious service without the mind turning to the recent terrible events in Israel. The Old Testament readings have a new, and potent, resonance – and this was certainly the case with today's reading from Ezekiel 37, in which God takes the prophet and sets him down 'in the midst of the valley which was full of bones ... And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live, and I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.' Through the 'prophesying' of his prophet, God brings the bones back to life, 'and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land.' 

Easter

The day has come, and it's time to wish a happy Easter to all who browse here.
The painting is Edward Burne-Jones's The Morning of the Resurrection, completed in 1886. An unusually muted treatment of a subject more often depicted in triumphant terms, it shows a slightly hunched Jesus standing at the edge of the composition, his head turned away from the viewer to engage with the terrified Mary Magdalen, whose figure and gesture dominate the picture. Mary is flanked by two symmetrical angels, both looking full of trepidation.  A dubious, even reluctant resurrection?
  I know I've been posting a lot of R.S. Thomas lately, but how could I not on Easter Sunday? Here is his take (one of his takes) on the resurrected Christ...

Suddenly

As I had always known
he would come, unannounced,
remarkable merely for the absence
of clamour. So truth must appear
to the thinker; so, at a stage
of the experiment, the answer
must quietly emerge. I looked
at him, not with the eye
only, but with the whole
of my being, overflowing with
him as a chalice would
with the sea. Yet was he
no more there than before,
his area occupied
by the unhaloed presences.
You could put your hand
in him without consciousness
of his wounds. The gamblers
at the foot of the unnoticed
cross went on with
their dicing; yet the invisible
garment for which they played
was no longer at stake, but worn
by him in this risen existence.

Good Friday

 It's Good Friday, and I feel I haven't put up any music for a while, so...
Here is the sublimely beautiful final chorus of Bach's St Matthew Passion. 

[The picture is a detail from Tintoretto's magnificent Crucifixion in the Scuola di San Rocco, Venice.]

Inchbold

 On a cold, grey, relentlessly rainy March day – one of far too many such days this month - it's good to be reminded of how glorious March can look when the sun is shining. I don't think many paintings capture the crispness and intense clarity of early spring sunlight as perfectly as John William Inchbold's Study in March, which lives in the Ashmolean.
  Inchbold was not one of the Pre-Raphaelites, but was clearly working along similar lines, and he attracted the praise and patronage of Ruskin, with whom he spent some time in Switzerland. Despite such patronage, he seems to have had a difficult career, perhaps reflecting a 'difficult' personality,  and he rarely had enough money for comfort.
  He was a fine painter of sea and sky, as in this view of Anstey's Cove in Devon...

And here he captures the sea and sky of Venice in the luminous On the Lagoon...

In Venice, Inchbold even found water indoors, sketching An Inundation at St Mark's in, appropriately enough, watercolour...

Inchbold spent much of his later life abroad, partly for financial reasons. According to his somewhat snooty Wikipedia entry, 'a year or two before his death he had returned from Algeria with a large collection of sketches, in which the ordinary defects of his manner were less apparent'. What those 'ordinary defects' were, we are not told. 
  He died in 1888 at the age of 57, and Swinburne, a long-time friend, wrote an effusive funeral ode for him. It begins 'If far beyond the shadow and the sleep/ A place there be for souls without a stain...'

Let Us Now Praise Fat Men

Remember Robert Morley? Once seen, he was hard to forget, with his startled-owl eyes, bushy eyebrows, thick lips, quivering jowls and triple chin above a mighty belly. He was, in a word, a fat actor, and he enjoyed a long and successful career, not only in character and comedy parts. Morley was a product of a time when there were far more fat actors around – Sydney Greenstreet, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, (late) Orson Welles and, nearer our own time, Zero Mostel and Richard Griffiths, not to mention fat ladies Margaret Rutherford and Hattie Jacques, or such vintage comedy fat men as Oliver Hardy and Roscoe Arbuckle. Nowadays, if you see a fat man on screen, chances are it's a normally built actor engulfed in a prosthetic fat suit – and you can usually tell, not least because a man in a fat suit doesn't move in the manner of a fat man accustomed to carrying weight and unencumbered by prosthetics. 
   If anyone was ever going to dedicate a poem to Robert Morley, it would have to be Les Murray, the great Australian poet, who was himself decidedly corpulent. His 'Quintets for Robert Morley' salutes Morley as a representative of the legions of fat men who have always been, Murray contends, at the cutting edge of civilisation (and, in those cases where they weren't, the world would have turned out better if they had been)...

Is it possible that hyper-
ventilating up Parnassus
I have neglected to pay tribute
to the Stone Age aristocracy?
   I refer to the fat.

We were probably the earliest
civilised, and civilising, humans,
the first to win the leisure,
sweet boredom, life-enhancing sprawl
   that require style.

Tribesfolk spared us and cared for us
for good reasons. Our reasons.
As age’s counterfeits, forerunners of the city,
we survived, and multiplied. Out of self-defence
   we invented the Self.

It’s likely we also invented some of love,
much of fertility (see the Willensdorf Venus)
parts of theology (divine feasting, Unmoved Movers)
likewise complexity, stateliness, the ox-cart
   and self-deprecation.

Not that the lists of pugnacity are bare
of stout fellows. Ask a Sumo.
Warriors taunt us still, and fear us:
in heroic war, we are apt to be the specialists
   and the generals.

But we do better in peacetime. For ourselves
we would spare the earth. We were the first moderns
after all, being like the Common Man
disqualified from tragedy. Accessible to shame, though,
   subtler than the tall,

we make reasonable rulers.
Never trust a lean meritocracy
nor the leader who has been lean;
only the lifelong big have the knack of wedding
   greatness with balance.

Never wholly trust the fat man
who lurks in the lean achiever
and in the defeated, yearning to get out.
He has not been through our initiations,
   he lacks the light feet.

Our having life abundantly
is equivocal, Robert, in hot climates
where the hungry watch us. I lack the light step then too.
How many of us, I wonder, walk those streets
   in terrible disguise?

So much climbing, on a spherical world;
had Newton not been a mere beginner at gravity
he might have asked how the apple got up there
in the first place. And so might have discerned
   an ampler physics.

['Quintets' is another word for 'quintains', stanzas of five lines that can follow any rhyme scheme or meter. Shelley's 'To a Skylark', a most un-Murraylike celebration of weightlessness and insubstantiality, is also written in quintains.]

The Walk

 So I walked. I walked, in fact, from Dover to Canterbury, in three stages, following various pilgrim routes and long-distance paths, and it was a great walk. 
  We began on Thursday, in cold sea fret, doing little more than strolling around the mighty castle and its precinct, with its ancient church – hideously redecorated and far from numinous – and the Roman pharos that served as its bell tower. The walking began, in lightly hungover conditions, the following morning, and the first challenge was to get out of Dover, which, for all its peppering of architectural and historical gems, is an all too typical depressed and depressing English seaside town. Once through the outskirts, though, and out along the Dour valley, things picked up rapidly, and the afternoon walking was good, despite cold and persistent rain accompanying us, and despite the necessity of a stiff climb up to the downs. Returning to Dover, we found many of the previously closed churches opened for an evening event, and were able to see inside even the little St Edmund's Chapel, a tiny 13th-century building that somehow survived the Reformation, wartime bombing and even the city planners.
 The countryside showed to better effect on Saturday, with intermittent sunshine on the blackthorn and cherry blossom, celandine, daffodils, primroses, violets and glorious drifts of wood anemones. Mud and flood posed problems from time to time, as they often do at this time of year, especially after much rain, but the churches were almost all open, and full of interest: one, the extraordinary Romanesque survival of St Nicholas, Barfreston, is an absolute gem, 'the Kilpeck of the South', richly carved with religious and mythological figures, zodiac symbols, labours of the year, cavorting beasts, crude faces, abstract and natural forms, all united in an elegant overall design, the work of very superior masons and craftsmen. That's the South door, with its intricately carved tympanum, below...

  Also open whenever we happened on them were the pubs, and each of those we visited was a lively, friendly and genuinely local 'local' – proper English pubs, though one of them, surprisingly, was run by a Turkish family, with the glamorous young daughter at the bar and the matriarch cooking up excellent Turkish food in the kitchen. This was all very heartening, in all sorts of ways. Despite what is going on in some of our cities, a deeper, nicer England endures. 
  I shan't attempt even to outline the wonders of Canterbury Cathedral – Pevsner takes 60 pages – but I was struck anew by its sheer magnificence, by how much there is of it, and how many are its beauties. One that caught my eye, almost incidental amid such splendour, was a fine, decorous memorial to the great Orlando Gibbons [below] on the North wall of the nave. Gibbons was at the cathedral in 1625, organising the music for a service blessing Charles I's marriage to Henrietta Maria of France, when he died suddenly, 'of an apoplexy', and was 'transcribed to the celestial choir'. 

  To return to Dover, Auden wrote a fine poem about the port as it was shortly before the war – very different, but recognisably the same place...  

Dover

Steep roads, a tunnel through chalk downs, are the approaches; A ruined pharos overlooks a constructed bay; The sea-front is almost elegant; all the show Has, inland somewhere, a vague and dirty root:     Nothing is made in this town. A Norman castle, dominant, flood-lit at night, Trains which fume in a station built on the sea, Testify to the interests of its regular life: Here dwell the experts on what the soldiers want,     And who the travellers are Whom ships carry in or out between the lighthouses, Which guard for ever the made privacy of this bay Like twin stone dogs opposed on a gentleman's gate. Within these breakwaters English is properly spoken,     Outside an atlas of tongues. The eyes of departing migrants are fixed on the sea, Conjuring destinies out of impersonal water: 'I see an important decision made on a lake, An illness, a beard, Arabia found in a bed,      Nanny defeated, Money." Red after years of failure or bright with fame, The eyes of homecomers thank these historical cliffs: 'The mirror can no longer lie nor the clock reproach; In the shadow under the yew, at the children's party,      Everything must be explained.' The Old Town with its Keep and Georgian houses  Has built its routine upon such unusual moments; Vows, tears, emotional farewell gestures, Are common here, unremarkable actions      Like ploughing or a tipsy song. Soldiers crowd into the pubs in their pretty clothes, As pink and silly as girls from a high-class academy; The Lion, The Rose, The Crown, will not ask them to die, Not here, not now: all they are killing is time,      A pauper civilian future. Above them, expensive, shiny as a rich boy's bike, Aeroplanes drone through the new European air On the edge of a sky that makes England of minor importance; And tides warn bronzing bathers of a cooling star     With half its history done. High over France, a full moon, cold and exciting Like one of those dangerous flatterers we meet and love When we are utterly wretched, returns our stare: The night has found many recruits; to thousands of pilgrims      The Mecca is coldness of heart. The cries of the gulls at dawn are sad like work: The soldier guards the traveller who pays for the soldier, Each prays in a similar way for himself, but neither Controls the years or the weather. Some may be heroes:      Not all of us are unhappy.

 

The Walking Cure

The first day of spring, and I have succumbed to what we medical men call a stinking cold (Coryza odorata). This is especially annoying as tomorrow I am heading for Kent – 'Kent, sir – everybody knows Kent – apples, cherries, hops and women,' as Mr Jingle sums it up – to spend a few days walking in agreeable company. A cold, stinking or not, won't stop me, and the walking will surely speed my recovery – Solvitur ambulando, as they say: a phrase on which I dilate in my forever forthcoming book (the ostensible subject of which is butterflies). Here, to give you something to read if I fall silent over the long weekend, is an exclusive, never before seen extract: 

There is a Latin saying, Solvitur ambulando (it is solved by walking), which originally had a philosophical meaning, referring to problems that can be solved by practical experience or demonstration. Diogenes the Cynic is said to have applied it literally, refuting Zeno’s paradoxes about the impossibility of motion by getting up and walking away (much as, many centuries later, Samuel Johnson addressed Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the immateriality of objects by kicking a large stone and declaring, ‘I refute it thus!’). Over time, solvitur ambulando took on a wider meaning, one more related to the beneficial effects of walking, an activity that can indeed play a useful part in solving problems, if only by stimulating thought (I’ll be returning to that theme shortly). The phrase got a new lease of life when the travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin used it in The Songlines, having picked it up from his friend and mentor Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor was a heroic walker (and self-mythologiser) who in his youth had travelled on foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, and Chatwin was a man who ‘passionately believed that walking constituted the sovereign remedy for every mental travail’. When he heard Fermor use the Latin phrase, it went straight into his notebook, and re-emerged in The Songlines, a book about the ‘songlines’ or ‘dreaming-paths’ of aboriginal Australians that celebrates the deeply human, richly satisfying activity of walking about.
 Butterfly watching is, in essence, a form of walking – not, like golf, ‘a good walk spoiled’, but rather a good walk greatly enhanced by the chance of seeing some very beautiful creatures. Walking brings with it all the pleasures and benefits of being in the open air and in motion – a particular form of motion, the steady, easy pace of walking. Unlike running, walking takes us slowly, at a human pace, through the landscape, with time to take in the sights and sounds and scents of nature, to enjoy them all and reap the benefits. I need hardly add that the kind of walking I am talking about here is not the Serious Activity, involving specialist kit, objectives and challenges, that drives some across the landscape, hideously dressed and with grim purpose in their eyes – no, it is more like a form of sauntering. The American sage Henry David Thoreau, in his essay/lecture on ‘Walking’, declares that ‘I have met but one or two persons in my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering…’ He goes on to give a fanciful account of the origins of the word ‘sauntering’ (‘from idle people who roved about the country in the middle ages, and asked charity under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land’), but never mind: Thoreau, one of the greatest, most observant and receptive of walkers, commends sauntering as the ideal form of walking. Watching butterflies is a kind of focused sauntering: walking with a purpose, yes, but one that is fluid and unpredictable, that might lead us anywhere or nowhere, and will abide no rigid programme. It is essentially walking for pleasure, but it brings with it tangible benefits. I have mentioned the health benefits of walking above. It is also, importantly, something that stimulates mental activity, for the rhythms of walking are the rhythms of thought. There is no better way of thinking through a problem than taking a walk. I’m sure I am not the only writer who gets most of his better ideas and composes most of his better passages when walking: I even had the idea for this book (which may or may not turn out to be one of my better ones) while walking – among butterflies, needless to say. Walking – especially walking alone – offers a kind of suspensive freedom in which the mind can operate more freely than when hemmed in by circumstance and moving to rhythms imposed by necessity. Nietzsche, who was a prodigious walker, believed that ‘All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking’, and once wrote an entire book (The Wanderer and His Shadow) from notes made while on his epic walks. Never one to understate his case, Nietzsche counselled his readers to ‘give credence to no thought that is not born in the open air and accompanied by free movement’, and even declared that sitting still was ‘the real sin against the Holy Ghost’. Kierkegaard, a philosopher of a less fire-breathing disposition than Nietzsche, wrote in a letter that ‘every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it … but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill … Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.’ Solvitur ambulando indeed.