Poems to Remember the Past By

Byron

SO, we'll go no more a-roving 

  So late into the night, 

Though the heart be still as loving,

 And the moon be still as bright. 

For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out the breast, 

And the heart must pause to breathe, 

  And love itself have rest. 

Though the night was made for loving, 

  And the day returns too soon,

Yet we'll go no more a-roving 

  By the light of the moon.

Francis Thompson

* For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast, 

* And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost, 

* And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host 

* As the run stealers flicker to and fro, 

* To and fro: 

* O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !

 The story goes that “Not long before his death and long after he had watched Hornby and Barlow bat at Old Trafford, Thompson was invited to watch Lancashire play Middlesex at Lord's. As the day of the match grew closer, Thompson became increasingly nostalgic. At the end, he did not go for the match, but sat at home and wrote At Lord's. The original match in 1878 ended in a draw…”

I was reminded of both of these poems the other day (the second is a fragment of a longer poem) and remembered that I wanted to write about this. About the stark feeling of having done everything worthwhile that you are ever going to do. Good memories are good, but they shouldn't remind you too clearly that they are now only memories. These lines do.

There are many things I will never do again, or never do at all. And there are many things I will do, if I choose to or am lucky enough.  It is these last that are the future, that make the present worth prolonging, that cause optimism, happiness even. And memory is good, even memories of what is gone forever.

But there is a finality about these lines. The simplicity of the metres, the bareness of the images, the lack of any contrast with a worthwhile present, lead to a feeling that what is good is lost. And perhaps was never truly had.

Just poetry, and I like it. It provokes an emotional response, which is one of the things I like in writing. But don’t read them under the influence.

Artistic Suicide Part 2

Following on from yesterday’s thoughts on the Berlin artists claiming to be committing artistic suicide in order to protest against something, I want to consider the concept of artistic suicide per se. To then it seems to mean something like this: they are artists, they distinguish themselves from people who are not, they consider their work to have technical/aesthetic merit and also to be valuable in itself as the product of an act of creative self-expression. Valuable to them and to others, which I think is an important point.

There is, of course, no reasonable comparison between burning a painting and setting yourself on fire in front of the Ministry of Employment, but it does involve a definite sacrifice of something that not only belongs to you, but which you understand to be part of you. If this seems to be straying into pompous cobblers territory again, this time you’re probably right.

Nonetheless, there is some truth in it. Assuming that the works have some artistic merit and that they weren’t produced specially for the occasion, and assuming that they have done this with the real aim of saving these arts centres, and not just to get their picture in the paper, the symbolism of the event means more to these artists than would the mere destruction of their property. There is no reason why anyone should recognise the importance of that symbolism, or take it remotely seriously, but it is their work they have destroyed, something which is more important to them, and, they think, to you, or at least it should be, than mere belongings, even those that were worth much more than the flaming art. If their painting were worth money, they wouldn’t be in this position, so I think it’s safe to assume that the artworks were among the least valuable of their possessions. Yet they have not burnt their iPads and Prada handbags, because the sacrifice, and so the protest, would have been less.

I’m a writer. Not a successful one, it’s true, but an artist of sorts. I can never bring myself to destroy or delete any of the stories I write, even the ones I know aren’t very good or haven’t worked the way I intended. Or which I now recognise will never be finished.* So I know why they think they have made a sacrifice, and that their protest should be understood in that light.

To Paul Erdich, the eccentric mathematician (eccentric is something of an understatement, but there you are) death was a mere inconvenience. To learn that a colleague had shuffled off this mortal coil meant no more to him than that he would have to change his schedule and find someone else to bounce ideas off about that paper they were working on. To learn that a colleague had ceased to do mathematics, however, was a tragedy that could affect him very deeply. A mother will choose to sacrifice her own life before that of her child (or so we are told, and anecdote tends to bear it out). That which we think of as part of ourselves, for whatever reason, whatever we have made emotional investment in, has far more value to us than an observer would guess who didn’t know of that investment.

So with all these caveats, and mutatis mutandes, I recognise and accept the concept of artistic suicide.

On The Origin of Polar Bears

Polar bears are cuddly, for some value of cuddly. You wouldn’t actually want to cuddle one, because they stink of fish oil and would tear you limb from limb before you even had time to pinch your nose and say ‘eeeuuugh’, but they are undoubtedly popular, somewhere between puppies and hamsters, I think. They are majestic, beautiful, elegant and brutal. If they could drive sports cars you would have to forbid your daughter to marry one, and she would do it anyway.

They are also endangered, for some value of endangered, and thus they punch even more buttons. They have been used to sell both insurance and refreshing mints, which few people can claim, and can eat baby dolphins with impunity, in which they are surely unique.

But little was known about their origin until very recently, and even that turns out to be wrong. Morphology was all we had until the last couple of decades, and morphology suggested that they were closely related to the brown bear of North America, Asia and Europe. Morphology turned out to be right, as it usually is when closely observed, and analysis of mitochondrial DNA put the separation at only 150,000 ya. This turned out, a posterior, to explain a lot of things.

So it was rather unfortunate when a recent analysis of nuclearDNA showed that the separation was more like 600,000 ya. And it probably was a complete and sudden separation, a small population isolated on floating ice or some such thing. This will also turn out to explain a lot of things, and the explanations may well have started already.

The fact that values for time and (genetic) distance of separation of populations provided by mtDNA and nDNA or aDNA can differ widely is becoming more and more important. Something similar happened with the Neanderthal sequences, and doubtless with sequences of other animals, too. At a time when knowledge of human history is being rapidly expanded by genetic analysis, it is necessary to recognise that no one advance is likely to be definitive, and it will take years of looking at many such data in the context of each other and more broadly, before the kind of detailed understanding we aspire to can be achieved.

On the Loose in San Vicente

I like Cantabria. In fact I like the whole of the North coast, from Hondarribia to Finisterre, and I like the mountains behind the coast, with their slopes and fields and villages and plants and animals. And I like the dozens of small fishing villages with all their sparkling colours, and the green, everything and everywhere you see green.

La Mancha, down here in the south, is not a bad place to live at all, but it’s very, very dry, and as summer approaches the physical sense of suffocation increases unbearably. Everything dries up and burns, everything turns yellow and brown and the air is stifling.

So in summer we always head north, this year, mot for the first time, to San Vicente de la Barquera, a lovely place, once a fishing village, but now mostly a place for the sort of tourist who appreciates beauty and seafood and doesn’t mind getting wet occasionally. Even so there are plenty of boats of all sizes in the bay, and they aren’t all pleasure boats.

I call it lovely, and it is. In fact we went there the first time because I had seen it several times from the old road, on which you approach on a descent and you suddenly see the mediaeval bridge which you have to cross, the colours of the many and varied boats, and in the middle distance the columns of the main square and the castle and the church up on the hill. This view had always stuck in my memory and so we started going there in summer.

Walking around the port, up to the castle and the mediaeval town, taking in the views from the walls of the whole series of channels and flats which make up the estuary, dining in the Boga Boga (the freshest and finest fish and seafood, and cheaper than it used to be), these are obvious things which anyone who goes there will do. As is going to the beach, a wide ribbon over two miles long, reached by crossing the bridge. There people play racquet and bat games, volleyball, football, they swim, take the sun, surf, run, eat and do whatever takes their fancy.

But as well as its beauty, part of its charm is its position. It’s near Llanes, Comillas, Santillana, a number of small estuaries leading to rocky coves hiding small beaches where you can be completely alone, and which are much more attractive than the typical Mediterranean beaches. A little further away are Santander, Covadonga, Cangas de Onis, Ribadesella, and the mountains of the Picos de Europa.

To go up through the Hermida Pass is to see the beauty of the mountains in a new and different way. On a very narrow road, carved out of the rocks that flank the stream, with the water beside you and roofed over with greenery. And from Potes, another lovely town, you can reach, on foot, Santa María de Piara, Santo Toribio and its satellite shrines, the whole of the Liébana and the mountains, for climbing, walking, taking photographs or whatever you want.

This has been a quick run through what San Vicente has to offer. (The Telegraph had a supplement on the north coast around the 10th of June on the cover of which was a photo of San Vicente. You can probably still dig it up on their site.) Anyway, wherever you go and whatever you choose to do, have a good summer holiday.

Quote of the Day- from George Steiner

“Bullshit, Profesore. The old Party-line blood-libel on human nature and on America. About which… you and I know very little. To me it sounds like the society which says to every man and woman: ‘Be what you want to be. Be yourself. The world was not made only for geniuses and neurotics, for the obsessed and the inspired. It was made for you and you and you. If you choose to try and be an artist or a thinker or a scholar, that’s fine. We will neither inhibit you nor put you on a pedestal. If you prefer to be a couch-potato, an auto-mechanic, a break-dancer, mile-runner, a broker, if you prefer to be a truck-driver or even a drifter, that’s fine too. Perhaps even better. Because it so happens that ideological passions and ascetic illumination, that dogma and sacrifice, have not brought only light and aid to this approximate world of ours. [America] is not saying, ‘Do not better yourself.’ It is saying: ‘Go after… what fires your soul… Move up the ladder, if you can… because the desire to live decently, to give your family a comfortable home, to send your children to schools better than those you attended yourself… is not some capitalist vice, but a universal desire.’ …America is just about the first nation and society to encourage common, fallible, frightened humanity to feel at home in its skin.”

I had never read George Steiner, because I had always assumed him to be one of those idiot lefties, like Shaw or Saramago, for whom the writing of fiction is not an attempt to create something worth reading, some new character or motive or image that has not existed before, an object of some aesthetic value that might give pleasure or intellectual stimulus to others, and satisfaction to the creator, but an exercise is repeating beneath a ham-fisted veil the things they think that, if we hear them often enough, we might start to believe.

It turns out I was wrong. Maybe I had him mixed up with someone else. In any case he is actually a genuine writer, in that he writes because he has something to say, and he knows how to say it. I read ‘Proof and Three Parables’, an admittedly pretentious title for a small collection of short stories, each of which takes an idea, in itself worth expressing, and writes a story around it. This matters, because ideas, clever images, are not themselves stories, and more people know how to come up with a clever image than know how to use it in a story, or any other medium.

Steiner does, and I am delighted to prove myself wrong. I’ll be digging up some more of his stuff.

At Lords

We don't get to watch a lot of cricket in this part of the world. I'm quite prepared to pay for it but even so Sky tell me that for contractual reasons they can't stream me the Ashes. And the BBC can't stream the commentary, for the same obscure motive. I am left with this, which for various reasons, is not the same.

Which means that when Eurosport chooses to show the T20 World Cup, something that I would normally find it hard to take seriously, I order the finest popcorn and buff up the edge of my seat. Today we have beaten Australia, an unusually uninspired Australia, in fact. The main reason they beat us so often is that we prepare for a cricket match, while they prepare for the conquest of Persia. They just seem to care that bit more. Today we got to them early and often, and the fight went out of them.

To the true cricket fan, cricket is life. And to the cricket fan with a bit of art in him, art is an attempt to hold a mirror up to cricket. Francis Thompson has done this, producing the most evocative, if slightly obscure, lines ever written about the game, and the most beautiful image of all is in the second part of the stanza. It doesn't explain how it feels to win the Ashes, it is even greater than that; it expresses what it is to watch cricket.

"For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro: -
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!"

Francis Thompson was completely nuts, and the rest of the poem, particularly the WG Grace section, is unambiguously execrable. But he achieved a moment of genius. Forget Newbolt. "At Lords" is what the love of cricket does to people.