fortuna, etc

from Ode 29, Book 3, paraphrased in Pindarique Verse

 

        Fortune, that with malicious joy,

            Does Man her slave oppress,

        Proud of her Office to destroy,

            Is seldome pleased to bless –

        Still various and unconstant still;

    But with an inclination to be ill;

        Promotes, degrades, delights in strife,

        And makes a Lottery of life. 

        I can enjoy her while she's kind;

        But when she dances in the wind,

        And shakes her wings, and will not stay,

        I puff the Prostitute away:

The little or the much she gave, is quietly resigned:

    Content with poverty, my Soul I arm:

    And Vertue, tho' in rags, will keep me warm.

 

                    What is't to me,

        Who never sail in her unfaithful Sea,

            If Storms arise, and Clouds grow black;

            If the Mast split and threaten wreck,

        Then let the greedy Merchant fear

                For his ill gotten gain;

        And pray to Gods that will not hear,

While the debating winds and billows bear

                His Wealth into the Main.

        For me secure from Fortune's blows

        (Secure of what I cannot lose)

        In my small Pinnace I can sail,

            Contemning all the blustring roar;

        With friendly Stars my safety seek

        Within some little winding Creek;

            And see the storm ashore.

– Horace (65-8 BC), translated by John Dryden (1685)

bill sanderson ... and the double helix

back in the 1990s, in the heyday of modern british illustration, just before everyone was about to go electronic and digital ... bill sanderson crafted some fine work using the double-helix as source material ...

 

DNA ... the double helix ... THE HUMAN GENOME ...

When I was at school in the 1950s and 1960s, we'd heard of THE DOUBLE HELIX but it wasn't part of the school biology syllabus, Mendel's work on heredity patterns was taught because it was an important part of the development of better farming crops ... it took me some time to catch up with watson & crick's book ... and a bit of library research in the early 1970s always seemed to raise more questions than answers ... now, late in life, I know that one of life 's unwritten laws is that THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS ... I still haven't grasped all the means by which human physiology, anatomy, even psychology, are transmitted to new generations ... today i went to WIKIPEDIA and looked at their article on the HUMAN GENOME ... IT IS VERY GOOD ...

BUT THE ARTICLE STILL HAS TO RAISE NEW QUESTIONS AND HEARING THE NEW ANSWERS, AND EVEN THE INCOMPLETE ANSWERS, GIVES ME A LOT OF PLEASURE, AND ALWAYS WILL ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome

ten or eleven chance meetings ...

 

TEN OR ELEVEN CHANCE MEETINGS WITH POETIC MINDS AND POETIC POSSIBILITIES

ONE … aged nineteen, finding a volume of Eliot’s FOUR QUARTETS sprawling, although happily  undamaged, on the rubble of a half-demolished college library.  You can’t argue with his first lines, which I read there and then …

 

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

TWO … as a child, having been the very last of my class to learn reading … one lad never did … studying a rhyming epitaph in the churchyard at Malmesbury … Hannah Twynnoy, “In Bloom of Life, She's snatched from hence” in 1703.

THREE … in infancy, hearing over the radio a traditional nursery rhyme set to music … “Boys and Girls, Come out to play, The Moon is shining bright as day” … and instantly being able to visualize the scene in much more detail than the rhyme itself had offered.

FOUR … in the house where the painter TITIAN was born, loitering a short while and listening with enormous surprise to a young RED-HEADED woman talking to her three small RED-HEADED children, in IRISH GAELIC, her own voice clear as a small bell, in phrases that almost always ended on higher notes.

FIVE … Aged fourteen, sitting ten feet from the stage in a school hall & being quite shocked by the melodic fluency of a fourteen year old actress enacting Jessica’s few lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice … and to make things “worse”, she already had a come-and-get-me body, and huge come-and-get-me eyes.

SIX … on a morning when Venice stood still, the whole city shivering in a freezing fog, wandering in to the huge interior of the Basilica of San Giovanni and San Paolo, hoping to be impressed by some tombs … a long way from the door, a priest was singing in a strong but unforced tenor … I wasn’t really listening because I don’t understand Italian or Latin … but gradually the voice accumulated more expressive phrasings until it’s beauty overtook and then mesmerised me and I was compelled to listen to every note … it was a funeral mass echoing amongst the tombs … I hadn’t realized that Latin could be so eloquently musical … afterwards, they carried the coffin to a magnificent launch, all black lacquer and chrome, and it glided away from the Campo beneath a low brick foot bridge, the Ponte Cavallo … the shadow of someone’s life propelled by that warm voice quickly dissolving into the icy gloom.

SEVEN … there is a musical, filmed in France, called LES DEMOISELLES DE ROCHEFORT … lots of singing and dancing, with a dialogue in modern French ( as spoken in the 1960s ) … in the middle of the film, a small group of local people and some handsome strangers sit down to an after-hours dinner party, guests of the owner, in an ultra-modern café … all plate glass and chrome … suddenly, you realize that they are speaking in an archaic style, their dialogue compressed into a seventeenth century rhyming format the French called ALEXANDRINES … but just as your ear grasps that change, so the spell breaks and they revert to spoken dialogue again.

EIGHT … an elderly man with a rucksack used to show up in our local pub when he came in from his village to collect his pension, and then had to wait a while for a bus to get him home again … he was very softly spoken and had an enquiring mind … once, our conversation turned to poetry and we discussed the problem of form, because I was ignorant of all the possible conventional and traditional ways to construct lines and verses, and had given up the struggle to finish a poem of my own … he pointed out that passion was infinitely more valuable than form, and urged me to study the poetry of LORCA, and to read the translations of the ancient Welsh romances, known as the MABINOGION … years later I found an excellent translation of Lorca’s essay on the subject of DUENDE … and decades after that I found MATTHEW FRANCIS’ magical re-writing of THE MABINOGI, which my old friend never lived to enjoy  … I am eternally grateful for his advice, given more than forty years ago.

 

NINE … that poem I struggled to write, which the man in the pub politely dissected, stayed with me, unresolved … fifteen years later, living a hundred miles away, I was scavenging offcuts from a furniture factory and I was pondering how I might use a dozen curved skirting boards for a painting, then suddenly realising I had enough rows to paint my poem … and even though the lettering is clumsy, I still have it thirty years on … it is about six foot high and over four feet wide, and will soon become too heavy for me to lift i wonder who might have to dispose of it ?

TEN … a woman from Ireland charmed me deeply …  she suffered from insomnia … I fetched and read Keats’ sonnet O SOFT EMBALMER for her … and often wonder if she eventually found a man she might sleep deep with.  Her soul was as deep as it was wide.  He would be a lucky man.

 

ELEVEN … Years & years ago, I wandered into a sunlit library on a day when my heart was filled with the customary gloom that follows rejection by yet another fine woman … someone had left the Times Literary Supplement open on a table and at the bottom of the page was THE TENTH MUSE, a short poem by SYLVIA KANTARIS … I laughed out loud, even though I didn’t yet know that the Greek Gods lived in the company of NINE muses … and many years later my interest in the Muses was re-kindled and then, learning a little more about them, was able to make a small painting about their encounter with the nine brash and uncultured and impertinent princesses who deservedly became the PIERIDES.

 

TEN THINGS ABOUT ART ... i started writing this some years back, i've just found it again in the untidy files, i honestly cannot remember if i printed it before ...

Ten things about Art

 

FIRST

 

 

 

ten pictures of stuff that is art, or inspires art, or might as well be called art because it takes you towards the boundaries of thought and logic and human possibility ... number one might as well be bubbles !

because ...

matter, from what we know, likes to aggregate in patterns, some more spectacular than others, some astonishingly ordered such as DNA, some halfway between randomness and logic ...

 

 

 

SECOND

UNCERTAINTY. Doubts and uncertainty beget stress, which we all know is injurious to health. Years ago, I thought that certainty and agreement could be within the grasp of every rational mind.  Hah ! If I’ve ever learned anything, then I’ve always been the last to know … even though Bertrand Russell had spelled it out in one curt sentence … “Be certain of nothing, for nothing is certain.” …

Everything we know is only what we like to think we know, everything we see is only the mind’s best guess as we wade through oceans of sensory chaos. Looking at art teaches you something about uncertainty, if only by default. Artists get away with approximations that would annoy the hell out of engineers. Very often, an artist has to leave stuff incomplete.

I’ve often sat in front of this drawing and searched it for content. 

You can guess what the women and their babies might be saying but you can’t know, or else Leonardo would have had to invent the speech-bubble. 

Two thoughts only dawned on me very slowly, years after I’d first looked at the picture. 

I’d been looking at the faces and hands too much, but what are they sitting on ? I wonder, but don’t know if they are sitting on a rock, for Leonardo’s church supposed itself a rock ? 

And it took me ages to realize he’d never got to grips with the technicality of placing their bare feet in a living stream. Leonardo kept this unfinished work with him.

Is it the stream of time ? I don’t know, and that really doesn’t matter now.

 

 

THIRD

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Physical grace. Occasionally the World Stands Still. For me, when someone is entering the scene who is perfectly poised, agile and purposeful in their movements, and whose every movement seem to flow.

Once, in a shabby club in Bristol, a big girl in an ugly sweater walked to the centre of the floor and spun a triple pirouette, and then walked off again. 

On Brighton beach, I saw a tiny sinewy man stand on his hands and “walk” on them down the steep shingle into the sea. 

A new drinking partner in a beer garden, when light-heartedly challenged by me, turned six or seven cartwheels until she came to a halt standing in a bed of roses.

Sometimes such moments coincide with the camera shutter … I think, for instance, this picture by Thollier might be one …

 

 

FOURTH

 

Memory of place … Canaletto, the stonemason’s yard, painted late 1720s

it can be assumed that the human mind is as great as the universe … if only because its boundaries are undefined

can I make another assumption ... that everyone I know has their own private memory bank of places and spaces ?

and then add that I think there might be another memory bank we keep which holds on to fleeting impressions of atmosphere and space and light ?

maybe it isn’t a bank, more of a cloud, or perhaps a labyrinth without walls ?

anyway, whenever I visit this painting, I can hear and feel the empty undefined sunlit spaces of childhood, a time before the fabric of memory was woven, dyed, stained, embroidered, frayed at the edges …

 

FIFTH

 

 

GUILT ... I journeyed to a hospice where a dearly loved one was fading away. We talked about the general topic of guilt, honour, shame, etc, and I confessed that, when depression clouded my days, then I would sometimes become so burdened with shame at all the daft and dishonest and selfish things I’d said and done ( or left undone ) that I would mutter, “I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself …”

She, with a chesty laugh through her tracheotomy plug, recognized that condition and said it had afflicted her often … And of course, guilt is a very common affliction which no one likes to talk about, and rightly …

In Brighton, I had a great job delivering rental cars with a bunch of youngsters thirty years younger than myself and we also had a brief discussion of guilt which led me to state that I thought I might easily fill a thick book, maybe even a couple of volumes, if I started to write down all the horrid things I was ashamed of. A girl in the back seat said, “I wouldn’t go there, Tris … that way lies madness”

Sometimes when I’m looking at Rubens’z fabulous frivverless fripperies in the National Gallery, the gleaming frames remind me that “Guilt is a luxury you can’t afford”.

 

 

SIXTH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Derveni Krater … The People of The Past were smarter than you can possibly imagine … well, some of them … 

At a glance, you might take this for a bit of late eighteenth century neo-classicism … and you’d be wrong by two thousand years, and some more … this is Greek bronze from 330BC, maybe a bit earlier … a cunning assembly of wrought and beaten and cast metal, in which the figures are modelled with a grace and subtlety rarely seen in any great art … 

The narrative complexity of the party-scene has taken up a few chapters of scholarly dispute … and we have few clues as to who made it … this was a party piece for posh drinkers, but it really is a kind of party in itself … 

One photo cannot do it justice, so clicketty-click on the links, the youtube video shows it to better advantage than any of the best books …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LYNl3JezPA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derveni_Krater

 

 

 

SEVENTH

 

 

 

The Sky … is a painting with the clearest palette … is an open book without a discouraging cover … is a poem without a beginning or an end … light and life come through the sky … when our world ends, everything that we once were will radiate away from or through the sky and will dissolve back into the eternal cycle of order and chaos …

 

 

EIGHTH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

DREAMS … I was talking to one of the modern world’s many professional counsellors who are sometimes called psycho-therapists.  She said she won’t discuss people’s dreams during their paid sessions because they divert her clients’ focus from the urgent central issue of their personal weaknesses and their failures of understanding. 

Well, yes, I can see her point … but only up to a point.  

Dreams are still part of the lived experience of many people, and for some of those people they offer a key to what might be the only securely locked room in their personal and ricketty palace of inverted priorities and unresolved issues, wherein may lay hidden all of those cobwebbed and dusty questions that are too hard to ask, let alone answer. 

In Art, however, and particularly in painting, dreams seem to take on another significance … the artist might offer us a view into a world that has little rhyme or reason, but it still acts a kind of yardstick by which we measure our own understandings, and our uncertainties.

I think that looking at other people’s imagined worlds can be a kind of prism for thought, where many of the tangled knots of existence can be teased out and split off into nearly  recognizable smudges and blotches of shades and colours, even if their shapes and functions remain vague. 

Time spent contemplating other worlds, whether real ones or improbable fictions, time spent trying to accommodate one’s own narrow thinking to another’s equally limited point of view, will often lead us towards fresh intuitions about our own situations, tastes, beliefs, anxieties, confusions. 

That said, most paintings can’t and won’t offer copious rewards ... but look twice anyway, just in case.

 

NINTH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LAUGHTER … I haven’t got a “proper” sense of humour … you’d be lucky to hear me tell a joke because I can only remember one joke, maybe two, after all these years of laughing at other people’s … yet I’m addicted to laughter, and I’m addicted to the company of those who live to laugh lightly … am I like a crack-head without a lab ? …

it doesn’t matter … and I can’t figure out a point of view about Art and Humour … in Umberto Eco’s splendid detective novel, The Name Of The Rose, ( much better than the fillum ), the fulcrum of the plot turns out to be the Church’s suppression of Aristotle’s Treatise On Humour, ( which never existed outside the novel ) and the novelist implies that tyrants hate humour because they fear ridicule … laughter bonds people as powerfully as love

visual art can be “good-humoured”, especially in books designed for children, or in those lovely old compendium’s of Giles cartoons … yet I can’t think of any gallery or museum I’ve been where people might have lingered to laugh … maybe the nearest I get to laughter in the arts is when Steve Bell draws a cartoon and borrows from a famous composition of some great painter … this mischievous travesty of Grant Wood's American Gothic is already old but still seems topical …

TENTH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LOVE … the comforts and the excitements and discoveries of shared affection are something we all crave … although artists tend to be more interested in the erotic possibilities of true intimacy than in the mundanities of domestic contentment … but either way the viewer wins … the best art comes from the souls of those who have loved and from those who have endured all the illusions and delusions that come with the full package … no point in making a list of them for we’d have to write an encyclopaedia … the best are all sweetness and light, the things we need most … and we need them to be unencumbered by futile notions of obligation and ownership because only unconditional love can endure