Goosebumps

Astonishing radio experience this morning, listening to Radio 3 in the car. Rob Cowan played a movement from Smetana's Ma Vlast (My Fatherland), from a recording made at a concert in Prague, a few weeks after Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis in 1939.


At the end of the piece (which is based on a legend of knights emerging from a mountain to save the fatherland from peril), the applause quietens and the audience sing the Czech national anthem. Spine-tingling.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0159f84



Starts at 1hr 22m, ends at at 1hr 39m.

Autumnal

Autumnal
Raining acorns in the car park today: the clattering fall of them through the branches and onto the tarmac echoed between the trees.

A green woodpecker, its harsh call startling and loud in the yellow sunshine, flew up into the branches of a tree, and a red kite drifted overhead on cranked wings.

The yellowing leaves in the late morning sun.

The glare of light on an adjacent car's metal trim.

Thinking about the seasons changing, the turn of every life towards death.

Missing the dead.

Remembering watching the squirrels in the trees last week as they stripped the acorns from branch after branch, and the sound of the discarded bits hitting hard on the roofs of the parked cars below. The animals' distant unconcern for what was below. The miraculous arcs of evolution finding them here, in their companion trees; and me sitting there, with the capacity to watch, articulate what I see in language, and feel the ache of my understanding so little and making so little of my time. Thinking about the wasted hours. Vowing to myself to change.  The imperative of going back to your desk, in the heart of the building, where natural light does not fall.

Gloom.

Cue Harpsichord...

Plink plink plink plink plink-plink, plink plink plink-plink... "Ah, Mr Ambassador, with this fine writing you are really spoiling us!"

The second really well-written book inside six months. Remarkable.

I'm currently reading Andrew Graham-Dixon's biography of Caravaggio, and am thoroughly enthused about it. It places the artist's life and work in a richly evocative social/historical context, an approach that works really well - partly because the historical learning is worn lightly, such that it never feels like an 'academic' treatment. The writing is fluent, varied and unobtrusive.

The section I read today dealt with a visitation of the plague in Milan when Caravaggio was a child - two years of death, suffering and misery: all Caravaggio's male relatives died, and the city streets were full of corpses and carts carrying the dead. You can't help but see the twisted, pained bodies of some of Caravaggio's paintings in this light...especially the sickly, greenish hues of the dead bodies therein.

Amid the plague, the city's most powerful cleric organised a series of 'spectacles of penance', one aspect of which was to set up miniature shrines throughout the city. Graham-Dixon writes beautifully about how "On a multitude of outdoor altars 'there burned a great quantity of candles and much incense'. Flame and shadow: Milan had become a city of chiaroscuro."

Caravaggio chiaroscuro

Splendid book - I recommend it.

Resonance

Reading a book about German intellectual history this evening, and this passage (citing Herder) resonated with me given the current febrile social climate: "To fail to make use of man's divine and noble gifts, to allow these to rust and thus to give rise to bitterness and frustration, is not only an act of treason against humanity, but also the greatest harm which a state can inflict upon itself."

Quieting

I turned off my machine, which was playing my habitual choice of music.

I turned off my preferred radio station.

I turned off the car ignition, and the air blower stopped huffing.

The leaves of the trees whispering.

The birds in the hedge-shadows calling to each other.

The low rumble of a distant airliner.

A pigeon's rhythmic cooing, dreamy and drowsy in the dappled sunlight.

In the centre of it, me, listening to my mind.

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Hell+Handcart, Part 47

I know that I am somewhat out of touch with the dominant norms in my country's popular consciousness, but when all of the UK's leading news organisations agree that the doings of FIFA are the lead news story...well, I am forced to resort to astonishment.

Resisting Anthropomorphism, Part 735

You walk across the field. The sheep and the lambs look up, startle, skitter away from the path. Then they pause in the golden evening sunlight, feet planted in the emerald-green-after-the-rain grass.

You look at them, and they look at you. You see the cheeky-looking ones, the lively ones, the nervous ones hiding behind their mothers, and the little pale one, shivering in the breeze and looking vulnerable.

You look into their eyes and you have to remind yourself that all of this meaning is mere projection.

Fabulous story.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-13491268

To a Mountain in Tibet

I'm not usually one to go in for gushing reviews, but sometimes something comes along that is so good that I just can't help myself. One such artefact is Colin Thubron's To a Mountain in Tibet.

There are always good reasons to read Thubron's books: the beautifully balanced and poised prose, the colourful imagery, the historical and philosophical depth, and the insights into half-hidden cultures. As ever, this book is full of lovely writing - by turns vivid, fluent and spare, and, in this book at least, pretty austere (like much of the rocky scenery). But the spareness of the writing embodies the richest of philosophical/religious pictures, as befits a book about a journey to a mountain that is sacred to about a fifth of the planet's population, and the intricacies of Buddhist and Hindu belief unfold along the stony trackways and in the gloom of remote monasteries, where candles gutter and monks old and young struggle to find a shared language to make themselves understood amid the shadowed statues and prayer flags. 

If Thubron was a craftsman, he'd be creating Faberge eggs, or delicate friezes of wooden fretwork, or Grinling Gibbons-type carvings; but the style is never just for its own sake - it's there to act as the vehicle for the story/the journey.

As well as the usual fine writing, there's an emotional edge to this journey: the recent death of Thubron's mother and, it becomes apparent, the ghost of his long-dead sister. Their stories intertwine with the narrative of the journey through Nepal and Tibet and on the approach to the holy mountain. As the journey progresses, the spiritual allusions blend with the descriptions of the scenery, and to the dozens of deities and demons that haunt the landscape for believers. 

These different elements all intertwine, and you feel as if you are circling the beliefs just as the pilgrimage path circles Mount Kailas; the spiritual journey echoes the physical trek, sliding in and out of focus as you move closer towards some kind of truth. The  threads are all drawn together skilfully in the concluding pages, and the climax of the journey takes place on the high slopes of the mountain, above 18,000 feet, amid tired, happy pilgrims who have completed their circuit. If you read the final section of this book and remain unmoved, you should probably make an appointment with your cardiologist and get them to check whether your heart has been removed.

Highly recommended.