Autumn into Winter

Miraculously beautiful morning today. Set off in the dark in the slightly fogged-up car after scraping ice from the windscreen and side windows: the ice is always crustier on the west-facing windows, for some reason - more ridges, requiring more elbow grease. Once the light started fading up above the motorway, it turned into a chillily beautiful, Hardyesque pastoral scene: a great arc of peach-coloured pre-dawn sky grading into grey-blue overhead; sheep on deeply-frosted fields; hilltop trees black against the glow, and, once there was enough light to free them from their silhouettes, all the trees and hills and distances blended and softened by frosty haze; mist curling like smoke off half-glimpsed watercourses next to the motorway where the bush-cover broke and a culvert passed under the roadway; and then the enormous orange-gold disc of the sun, sudden as you crested the ridge, unlookable at; in the rear-view mirror, the squinting face of the driver in the van behind, his cabin all lit up and unnatural-looking with golden light.

Nice.

Snow in April

A very chilly, sunny Sunday morning in April; the snow on the trees starting to melt, falling from the branches and slithering down the back of my neck as I cycle around the lanes; new lambs bleating and wondering 'what the baaaaaa is this?

Snow in April 1
Snow in April 2
Snow in April 3

Epiphanies Like London Buses

You know how it is: you go weeks and weeks without a single epiphany, and then two of them come along at once. Well, maybe not simultaneously - let's say a week apart. And neither of them was red, it must be said, or had numbers and destinations displayed on the front. Those things apart, these epiphanies were uncannily like London buses. Uncannily so.

Epiphany number 1 was about music. Namely, that it is an amazing, rich, life-enhancing and rewarding thing. I've known this before, I think, at various times in my life, but two things have (joyously) reminded me of this in the past couple of weeks.

Firstly, there was the performance of Hadyn's The Creation at a church in a village a few miles from where I live: this performance was a joint effort on the part of the amateur choral society from a nearby town and a group of professional musicians and soloists. The weather on the evening of the performance was suitably Biblical: a full-dark Saturday evening in March rendered dramatic by heavy rain blowing white and horizontal through the headlights on a strong, gusty wind. White headlights showed here and there in the dark landscape as we went up and down the hills and dips, the wipers swept runnels of rain across the screen, and I hoped that there'd be no cars coming up behind me to dazzle my vision as I drove rather nervously through the twisty lanes with their potholes and ill-defined edges to the roadway.

After a fraught negotiation of the narrow high street, over-parked with too many cars and too little light, I parked at the far end of the village and we walked back through the heavy rain, then up the slippery path to the church door, taking care to avoid the missing stones in the path (the empty apertures for which were full of slick, shiny mud).

The church at Everdon was big, and full of people waiting to take their places in the pews or in the additional seating (stacking-type plastic seats) at the rear of the nave. The demographic was typical of classical concerts - mainly people in late middle age or older (such that I felt like a real youngster) - and dressed either in smart 'going out' gear or the beige and grey uniform of the casual elderly. The space in front of the rood screen was set up with music stands and seating, and a wood, wire and gaffer tape framework (which looked distinctly rickety) supported a series of very white, very bright lights. The front-most audience seats were about three feet from the performers' chairs, and the overall effect was of a very cramped, packed hall before an amateur theatrical performance.

A very attractive woman in a posh frock came in. One of the soloists: it was a bit chilly for that kind of do. Through the gap in the curtains behind the rood screen I could see the members of the chorus moving about. The orchestra members started to arrive, coming in through the big door to my left, trailing the smell of the wet night outside, and then gradually the splendid sound of an orchestra tuning up began to assemble in the space under the hammer beam roof.

The acoustic in the church wasn't brilliant, such that when the orchestra (brass, strings, woodwind, continuo, kettle drum(s)) and the choir (50+) were at full tilt the sound blurred and merged, like music over-amplified through inadequate speakers. For the most part, though, the playing was spot-on, the soloists good (the bass was the strongest, in my view) - despite the conductor's baton swooping dangerously close to their eye sockets as he conducted the orchestra over their heads, and the words and 'story' (out of the Bible and Milton) fully intelligible (despite some rather awkward translations/constructions in the libretto...): I particularly liked some of the onomatopoeic elements, especially the bit about the 'sinuous worm' that slithered along at the bottom of the bass's range).

Other entertaining elements included: the rain drumming on the roof, audible in the quiet passages where the libretto dealt with the inundation of the earth; the bat that swooped across the nave; and the big butterfly, perhaps brought out of hibernation by the unaccustomed heat from the bodies, lights and heaters, which drifted across the spaces above and behind the orchestra, moving perilously close to the white hot-looking lights.

The music lasted for the best part of two hours, and at the end my shoulder blades ached from the two curtain calls to which we clapped the singers/orchestra/chorus. I was left feeling privileged to have been able to enjoy such excellent music making so close to home, and to be able to hear all the different instruments and singers joining together in this complex music. A concrete reminder of the beauty and intricacy of music.

Corn

My subconscious popped up a punchline this morning for a terrible, corny, shaggy-dog-story kind of a joke, which would probably involve a clumsy journalist interviewing Lionel Richie over breakfast at Lionel's hotel; the set-up would feature the accidental flicking of toast-related preserves onto Lionel's clothing, between two and four times. Clearly the punchline would involve the words "But Lionel, you're once, twice, three times marmaladey".

Ouch.

Bombs

I'm coming towards the end of Keith Lowe's Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943. This is an interesting book, which tells 'both sides' of the story of the RAF/USAAF bombing of the German city; there are some slightly strange (to my mind) tonal elements that sit a little awkwardly with the generally measured, objective and sombre tone of the book (as if he's trying too hard to create a sense of tension/drama or anticipation, or (unnecessarily) synthesise traditional human interest angles), but for the most part it is vividly and fluently written.

Having read many books about the bomber war in Europe in 1939-45, I was particularly impressed at how convincingly, powerfully and comprehensively he had portrayed the horror and suffering of those who lived and died under the bombs; Lowe's account of the firestorm that resulted from the second RAF raid of 27 July 1943 is detailed, relentless and harrowing, as are his descriptions of the aftermath of the firestorm, the subsequent raids, and the 'clean-up' operations that followed. These chapters speak compellingly of the fear, horror, exhaustion and suffering of the German civilians and service people. This is the most moving and insistent treatment I have read on this subject.

Something else that struck me as I read this book was how closely I identified with the bomber crews (particularly the RAF crews, whose cultural background I feel I know so much more about). This identification partly stems from my reading of Len Deighton's Bomber. I'm not sure exactly what age I was when I fist read my brother's thick, tatty, black-covered, bold red capital-lettered Pan Books copy of this novel, but it was probably around 1974 or 1975, when I would have been 12 or 13. I remember reacting powerfully to this book, and re-reading it often in the following years; in fact, I think it became something of an obsession - I thought it was such a fantastic book. (At this time I had a mental list of books that were the 'best' in different genres: Bomber was the best book about night bombing; Colin Forbes' Tramp in Armour was the best book about the war in France in 1940, Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was the best science fiction book - and so on.) And Bomber keyed into another of my pre-adolescent/adolescent obsessions: war and war machines. Even at junior school I had been fascinated by war (particularly the Second World War) and I had been building model warplanes, warships and armoured fighting vehicles since I was six or seven; this book gave me a coherent narrative structure and set of imagined visual images around which I could shape my model-building and play, as well as a set of imagined characters whose voices and perspectives I could adopt as part of my creative world.

In retrospect, I think that one of the reasons I found Bomber so affecting and powerful was that it somehow legitimised this play-world of pilots, warplanes conflict and death that I had innocently been engaged in for years; the cool, objective writing of the book created a quasi-scientific narrative that delineated the use and effects of the weapons - bombers, bombs, night fighters, cannon-shells - in such a way (vivid but distant) that let me maintain a distance from the reality of those effects and avoid a deeper moral or emotional engagement with the issues. In retrospect, it is rather strange to think that most of the people in the book were mere adjuncts to the stunningly-written sections about air combat or the effects of explosions: the bits of the book that I approached with the greatest sense of pleasurable anticipation were the ones where German night-fighters and British bombers encountered each other in the dark night sky, 20mm cannon shells were fired, and holes were blasted through the stressed metal skins of Lancaster bombers. This was something like a pornography of violence: thrilling, abstract, rewarding. This, despite what I later came to understand as the novel's distinct anti-war thrust - there are no 'good' and 'bad' people, just the living and the dead.

It strikes me now that this unemotional focus on machines and imaginative abstractions helped to cement my crude sense of the morality of the Second World War, derived from comics and popular culture: a clash of Good (the Allies) against Evil (the Axis). Thus the bomber crews were fighting a just campaign against the people on the ground (who were largely faceless and unreal to me); this picture was nuanced by the sense that the German night-fighter crews were noble 'Knights of the air', unsullied by any unpleasant ideological taint from Nazism (in fact, this was implicitly reinforced by the portrayal of some of the airmen's disgust on finding evidence of the medical experiments that were being carried out 'for their benefit').

This 'good German/bad Nazi' element of the book did not make as big an impact on me as it might later have done. My early readings of Bomber were completed in a naive state, before my awareness of the Holocaust began and developed. In a way, my awareness of the Holocaust made it even easier to duck any moral questions about mass bombing and the explicit targeting of civilians, since it fostered a (largely unconscious) sense that 'they' (the bombed) had (all) 'deserved it', (a) because the Nazis had launched a war of aggressive conquest, and (b) because since the regime's genocidal policies were clearly morally repugnant, any qualms about adopting the measures of 'total war' could be easily dismissed (even if I had framed them in that way).

I've read number of books in recent years that approach the question of mass bombing in a more morally-charged way (previously, most of the books cantered over any questions of morality). These kind of books (e.g. A.C Grayling's Among the Dead Cities or Frederick Taylor's Dresden reflect a recent trend whereby questions about Bomber Command's campaign have shifted from 'objective' discussions about the bombing's cost-benefit-based validity to starker questions about whether the bombing can be seen as morally defensible (these questions are also entangled with questions about the responsibility of the individual in a set of social contexts and about whether to admit that something is immoral necessarily taints the individual who was carrying out their duty in good faith); it's easy to see how you might have a similar discussion about moral/individual responsibility over the role of - say - a German soldier who had grown up from childhood under the Nazis regime and knew no other moral/social universe other than the one that they had lived their life within.

I realise that I have no established position on these questions: this does not strike me as necessarily a bad thing - it seems better to me to have a morally complex, difficult position than one which is simplified and polarised. Neither do I have the language or structured arguments of a moral philosopher with which I can express myself properly (at least, not without making a proper 'essay plan' instead of just putting finger to keys as I have done here. So the questions are still open in my mind - something to work on some more.

Skyscape Number 76

So. Driving home late this afternoon. The inside of my car is full of bright sunlight from the low-ish sun; in the middle distance, the still-wintry landscape of brown fields, bare trees, the odd streak of green or tan; in the far distance, a great curtain of grey-black cloud, with a scouring of paler grey in front - rain or snow falling - and a seam of paler sky showing between the base of the cloud and the horizon, with the precipitation smudging the bluish sky into grey.

Eventually, I nose the car in under the grey cloud, and the rain and sleet spatter the windscreen for a while, and then it stops, and I'm emerging into blue sky territory again, with a great swirl of dark cloud looping overhead.

Nearing home, I can see that the snow is scattered over the fields, and when the lowering sun breaks through at the top of Eydon Hill, I'm inspired enough by the scene to stop the car, jog back through the chilly air and take a few pictures.

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I was listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter's "Between Here and Gone" album on the way home, and there was something refreshing and reinvigorating about the light and the cold air that lifted my mood, chiming with the sense of everyday mystery and reawakening possibilities (in the midst of the damnably confounding human condition) that's embodied in a lot of the tracks on this disc.

So that was my drive home. :-)

The Return

Putting.
Some.
Words.
In.
A.
Line.

So simple and so pleasurable.

All of my life can be seen as a word-based reflection/commentary/stream of thoughts; without the words there is no life, there is no consciousness. There is nothing to leave behind. Words and language are everything - and yet we waste them.

Coming up with a phrase or a well-balanced sentence is so pleasurable: there was something at work today, in an email I wrote, about how something was 'homophonically Freudian' - something that I had never expected that I would ever say; and yet it was very appropriate, and pithy and funny. But just a set of words in a line, in a dynamic, unforeseen context, and now vanished forever, except, perhaps, in the minds of the sender and the recipient. A reflection/extension of my consciousness and sensibility, projected out into space and now...lost.

Possible Disservice

I may be making a horrible misjudgement. But...it seems to me that you can tell very quickly whether a work of art is 'true' or not: whether its heart is beating with the beat of a real life, or whether it feels like something cconcocted. Something that has been created within a framework that has constrained its mode of expression and rendered it...what? Bogus? Unbelievable? At the very least, you are aware of this thing straining to be art; you are conscious of its artifice and of what it is trying to make you think or feel. With film, I feel that this is possible almost from the first frame.

Thus "Flags of Our Fathers". A worthy subject. But as soon as the voiceover starts, with its carefully modulated commentary on the images we're seeing, you're aware that a script is being read: there's no sense that this is a real person voicing real thoughts - it's an actor reading a script. Artistically, this is death for me. Bogus and manipulative. Much as I wanted to watch this film, I had to stop, because - from that early moment - I didn't believe it.