One. After four or five days of prevarication, I
find a suitable sentence to end a letter, using a freshly discovered story about real people who are long gone. A story that still has no proper ending but will leave my
readers’ eyebrows shooting up with a mixed note of suspense, incredulity, and
scandalized laughter.
Two. More than twenty years ago, some friends took
me up on to the roof of Painswick House on a moonlit night. You could make out distant hills and woods whilst
the polished sky was so bright. We had
explored the lovely library of the house and I had re-discovered there that slightly
scandalous poem by Edna St Vincent Millay which begins “ I being born a woman, and
distressed …” and so I showed it there
and then to a third party whose willing person I was developing a passion for
at that time, a passion that growed and growed, but has long since been set
aside.
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, -- let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
A lovely moment that I had since forgotten. But, anyways,
The Loved One hath brungen home a precious and scholarly booke, Sir Roy
Strong’s The Artist and The Garden, and she placed it on the lectern by the
window after I’d hurriedly read the first two chapters. So, this morning, sleepless again, after about a week of intermittent and
aimless page-turning, I was looking at one of the less spectacular brown pictures,
printed small, and was admiring it’s decorative painted border.
It was painted by Thomas Robins in 1748 and
is a poorly drawn representation of the “folly” named “Pan’s Lodge”, in the grounds of that same Painswick
House, but is an imaginatively and splendidly preposterous
invention on the part of the Artist. As
Strong puts it, “Robins turns the grounds of Painswick House in to a rococo
reverie of frolicking satyrs”. However,
Robins’ value as an artist was in his talent for lively incident and he had
produced a border full of birds, and even a bird’s nest, so that the border
distracts the viewer from the picture's subject.
It
was about five in the morning when I discovered this picture and a bright
crescent moon had just appeared outside my window, next to a brilliant
star. In that moment, which only lasted
a few seconds, whilst my swivelling eye began to take in the details for the
first time, and as I compared Robins' delineation of the two owls, so there came
from the dark trees only a few feet away, the real hoot of a real owl.
Three. Later still, whilst re-reading between the lines of a
very good book that I’m “editing” about those dead persons, making some new intuitions,
joyfully, though too late in life to be of great use, about what is sensibly
called “Women’s Intuition.” A subject which should be part of the National Curriculum.
