The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza)

Well Italians (well Romans) seem to have to go clubbing at a much higher age than In Brighton. This film..   Tree of Life meets Human Traffic, but with a 65 year old protagonist, a tremendously expressive and interesting portrayal of writer turned playboy Jep Gambardella by actor Toni Sevillo - he's got such a great face, aged but young, deeply jowled and wrinkled but shapely.  A lot of the women characters are old too - they too have wrinkles and jowls, they're not perfect, but they are still partying and snorting lines of coke off the kitchen table in front of the disapproving, but tolerant eye of Jep' housekeeper. 


 The party scenes are a  continual visual and aural cinematic experience that gets you bouncing in your seat to them dancey rhythms, but a lots and lots of changes of pace, of perfect witty cameos of the characters  and situations that surround him, great satire ) and surreal scenes that suddenly envelop the screen seamlessly and effortlessly. Always interesting - this is a long film, a long winding non-narrative that has to change gear abruptly at times, as we see into 


Wants to have its cake and eat it with the Catholic church - the cardinal and  future pope hopeful is always describing his recipes, the Mother Teresa figure is so old and decrepid, stage managed in all sorts of pictures and events on her trip to Rome, but she also has some of the best lines
"You cannot speak poverty. You have to live it".

Karl Ove Knausgaard - Boyhood Island (My Struggle: 3), New Statesman magazine(pitiful again)

A while ago I picked a copy of the New Statesman in London (thinking about it, it's over a year ago), and except for a brilliant piece by Will Self on Costa coffee it was nauseatingly familiar in its snipey I know better than you tone. I really didn't like it. So when half way though Boyhood Island I stop and look up some of the reviews, and read the New Statesman review it was truly sick making in its superior tone as it said how bored the reviewer was reading the book:

  "To a loud anglophone minority, he constitutes a thrillingly boring alternative to boringly diverting invention"

- what a condescending piece of shit that sentence is.  Of course he has to say that the book is good (which it is, oh yes it is, a searing portrait of child hood I'd say, both because I mean it and because I can't be bothered to think up a less cliched phrase). He does say

 "he also displays a tremendous and irreducible zeal for penetrating what Karl Ove, ...  calls 'the inner core of human existence' ".

But he says it begrudgingly. It's a really bad review (you can read it here if you want to: NS Review) , because it's pretentious, over- intellectual ( being intellectual isn't bad, being a clever little show off is) and really hasn't opened up to the experience of the book (if I can loosely call it that). Because  Boyhood Island is intense raw "ordinary" childhood, written so clearly, so fiercely and so boldly, in simple everyday language that makes it punch you hard, in the head, in the gut, in the soul. Above all he captures the distress and panic of being a child where small things in themselves figure as cataclysmic tragedies , and the highs and joys as well, which arise out of similarly small things. And there is true horror in his terror of his probably alcoholic angry father. It makes you rethink you own childhood, and if you are a parent, your own parenting. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Essays in Love, and certain essential paradoxes

I was thinking in the shower, a hot and wonderful place to think in, where the only regard you have to your well-being is whether to turn slightly this way or that to receive the flow of hot water on each bit of skin in turn.  I'm still reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being  in small chunks, but have just finished reading Alain De Botton's Essays in Love, which I started out liking, began to turn my nose up at half way through, but persisted back into an admiring galloping speed read of the last half of the book, nosing out little truffles in inspiration. Alain de Botton is to philosophy as hot water is to the back. But more than anything it got me thinking about the terrible paradoxes that I accept without a blink.  There are so many of them, but I'm going to pick out a few.

Take Rudolf Steiner.  We sent our children to a Steiner school, and I'm glad we did. I've also read a lot of Steiner, almost equally divided between stuff that made sense with a certain amount of unentanglement, and stuff that was, to any rational mind, absolutely barking. No I take that back, most of it reads as absolutely barking, but it did produce this amazing education, that works with the whole child. So I'm trying to disentangle some of this. here's my lists of disentanglement (but don't worry back to Unbearable Lightness of Being and Essays in Love reasonably soon).

So:
The Steiner Paradox
1. Steiner school based on huge number of estoric writings and lectures from Steiner, ranging from angels to burying cow horns in fields as part of  bio dynamic agriculture, very difficult to make sense of. Child viewed as coming into their physical bodies not yet full incarnated. Child, 3-7 years old,  needs lots of play , rhythm, song, dance, colour, wonder, beauty.  Does not need TV and plastic toys and computer games.

2. Only the last two sentences are in anyway believable as a basis for an education BUT they do make sense, and that is why Steiner schools are wonderful places for the younger child, and certainly benefited all of ours.

Alright as far as it goes, can live with the esoteric stuff in the background, can see the results in the children - especially now we know many Steiner kids who grown up in their twenties and thirties.

Then there:
The What Am I paradox
1. I grew up in a miasma of half-baked beliefs, kind of twirled round in Christianity, certainly with hopes of an immortal soul, certainly with the sense of religion as a past it relic of ignorant ages, but most certainly of all without a clue as to how to live.

2. Seems likely we are just the sum total of the neuroscience of the brain (and other bits), but like the universe we are essentially emergent, I am the rather wonderful total of the atoms that make me up, albeit with the freedom to move think and express myself in different ways.

But I still search for meaning, the right questions, the right behaviours if not the right answers. I exist in a tepid pool of half baked agnosticism which is little better than hopeful atheism.

Then there is
 The Love Paradox

1. Tomas, answers, when being pressured to sign a statement reinforcing the letter that got him sacked from his job as a surgeon in Czechoslovakia (the Russians have already tried and failed to make him sign a retraction).

“It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground," he said, "than to send petitions to a president.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Whatever it means, I feel the same, even though I will happily shoot crows, rabbits etc to eat them - that's something completely different. It is the impulse of love that is important.

2. And soooo, back to Essays in Love where  where? fuck me! Looking for the quote I wanted in Google, to save typing it  all out, I searched for "categories of mature and immature love quotes" and found this from OSHo, the Bagwan, the Orange guy with all the Rolls Royces, you remember him in the seventies! 
It says about the same as De Botton, with a little more panache actually.  But bits of De Botton are worth quoting, particularly since he does express it rather well too: 

"The philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful and reciprocated [and perhaps explain why most people who have known desire would refuse its painlessness the title of love]. Immature love on the other hand [though it has little to do with age] is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy & beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature [because absolute] love comes into death, symbolic or real: the climax of mature love comes in marriage..."
Essays in Love p 202

I've left out a last rather stupid clever clogs clause tacked onto the end, about calling marriage "the attempt to avouch death via routine [the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote controlled appliances]"   I don't think it is that - but then I'm lucky in that respect. And there is also a sense, and call me a romantic if you will, because that would be correct, that mature marriage in love doesn't stop a lot of immature behaviour on my part certainly, but it does flow through into a sense of absolute bliss, plenty of romance left  in there which appears in bright, light moments, and in quietness as well.  

still rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being...

... as I am still rereading Shikasta, in bits when I feel like it, until suddenly  I get a momentum so that I keep going. What struck me today in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as I read in the late morning having come in from the town and a bitter wind, enough to get me up again and in front of the screen to start writing, was this:

"Here he was doing things he didn't give a damn about, and enjoying it"

This is by comparison to his previous profession as a surgeon ( the post 1968 Soviet backed authorities have forced him to resign because he will not sign a retraction of a letter critical of the Soviets) when:

"Whenever anything went wrong on the operating table, he would be despondent and unable to sleep"

Tomas is just doing stuff (window-cleaning) , without weighty responsibility, but with a nice weighty hangover of respect from his previous occupation, and from his refusal to retract.  It reminds me of having a migraine when I was working, not in the times when I grimly hung on and worked through it, but when I was able to go home and climb into bed between cool sheets and lie down with nothing but thudding pain to occupy my mind, as the nausea used to fade as soon as I was able to lie down.  I would be able to perch just on the edge of sleep with the pain carefully balanced, as it felt, at the edge of my forehead, pushed out from consciousness although still a presence. That effort meant that I couldn't think about anything else - or the pain would trample its way back in - and in its own way it was a delightful precipice to lie on, it felt white, soft and above all, safe.

Shikasta revisited 2

There was a time in my life - and I think it started in my childhood and just carried on, when I used to experience what I can only describe as a deep well of sadness. It used to come and go, sometimes just a background thing, sometimes overwhelming in its intensity. I still have it to a certain extent - it's why I weep in films or certain passages of books (Shikasta is one) with alarming frequency.  I kind of shook it off as a defining part of me about fifteen  years ago, with  a newer more outwardly successful period of my life, but it still returns to possess me at times.  It's strangely not unpleasant, not like  a cut or a blow or  a terrible event, or feeling cold or angry or frightened, but it is quite debilitating and all-consuming when it happens. It's like I get absolutely overwhelmed with empathy - it might be a film, a book, or, often, having children, it was seeing some small or large  hurt or disappointment that I could not remedy, and the distress would soak through my consciousness as if I were plunged into a pool of sadness and it had permeated every part of me. At home, out in the street I would have to exert enormous power not to openly weep, I wouldn't be able to speak without choking over the words.

The defining pull or feel of the "zone" though which the protaganist, Johor, approaches Shikasta, is described as nostalgia:

"Zone Six can present to the unprepared every sort of check, delay, and exhaustion. This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion – ‘nostalgia’ is their word for it – which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined. Chimeras, ghosts, phantoms, the half-created and the unfulfilled throng here,..."
Lessing, Doris (2012-05-31). Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1) (Kindle Locations 115-117). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

In Zone 6 lost souls congregate in what was a lush and green place, but now is dust and desert, waiting for the chance to reincarnate and "try again".   The narrative then describes Johor's meeting with some of the people that he had known, and  the distress, the grief, the pull that he feels for them - he sums it up like this:

" Already depleted by grief, that emotion which of all others is the most useless..."
Lessing, Doris (2012-05-31). Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1) (Kindle Location 204). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

And it does feel, of all the emotions the most useless in terms of getting anything done - and yet, and yet, without the sensitivity and empathy that so debilitates me at times I would not be who I am, I would not have achieved the things I have done.

Doris Lessing was a pretty direct and no nonsense sort of person - the few times I met her we had short conversations about writing, the coffee, nothing of great significance, but she always had this questioning, inquisitive mindset.  "What do you write about?" I remember her saying when we were sitting together before a seminar in London, and she was genuinely interested. But she catches this sense of the strength of emotions, the importance of them and the destructive nature of their not being kept in check, not being recognised for what they are, across all her books I suspect her sense of empathy was just as strong as anybody's. 
There's a story she tells of walking though post war bombed out London, with a small child, cold foggy, and she is walking with tears streaming down her cheeks. A man stopped her and said "What is the matter?" She answered him, and then he just said "Oh well something will turn up", and walked off. As I recall the interviewer said something along the lines of "oh, that's terrible", and I think she said, "No, it was the best thing he could have said, because, of course, something did turn up."

So lastly, a talk that Doris Lessing gave, one of a series on Sufism in that inordinately posh voice of hers - don't let it put you off.
Doris Lessing talks about- well quite a lot actually

I've started reading Shikasta again, partly as a homage, partly because it is one of those books that underpins and supports me, and partly because it is one of Doris Lessing's best and greatest books, often misunderstood and often disliked by readers for one of two reasons:

1.  It's science fiction, and I don't read science fiction (subtext "I'm not a boy, I'm a feminist")
2. It's not science fiction, because it's not Heinlen, Arthur C Clarke etc. (subtext "I'm not a feminist, I'm a boy")

This how readers create their own worlds in spite of the words - the kind of readers I hate - they resist what's in front of them and twist it to their own world view, won't try anything new, won't think anything new. Dead from the neck up. It reminds me of a Nasrudin* story: 

Nasrudin met two men by the side of the road who boast about their tastes:
"I only eat the finest halva, studded with pistachios and almonds, wrapped in palm leaves."
"Well I only eat the finest saffron rice with chicken and goji berries  and acai berries from the deepest reaches of the Amazon forest."
Nasrudin pauses to think.
"Well I only eat wheat, ground up and carefully mixed with water, yeast, and salt, and then baked at the proper temperature for the proper time."

Doris Lessing was good on reading - said pick up all sorts of books - if you don't like them, if you get bored after the first few pages read somethings else.  Sometimes it's not the right time for you to read a book  - but you may come back to it years later and find that now is the right time.  This happened to me with Henrich Bohl's Group Portrait with Lady - borrowed from Candice in about 1977 maybe, got fifty pages in then couldn't get any further.  Picked it up may be twenty years or so later and read it avidly all the way through, what a great book I thought. Although I can't remember a thing about it now.  But Shikasta still haunts me in the sense of sitting in my consciousness as a kaleidoscopic introduction to a lyrical but stern sense of possibility.

From the first page:

"This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes."

Shikasta,  Doris Lessing p3

There are four other books, all radically different in content and perspective, that give you this thoughtful and feeling distance from the obsessions and givens of our age.

*Nasrudin has a Facebook page now. Of fucking course. Lots of the stories are there with irritatingly little explanations of their meaning underneath. Ignore these as they will limit the way the stories can sit in your consciousness for decades and suddenly pop out.  In the Sufi tradition whenever one Nasrudin story is told, then six more should be told in immediate succession, so that, to paraphrase a lot of explanation and guff, maybe, just, maybe something from one of the stories will stick, usefully.

Here's an apple for the storyteller, and apple for the audience, and an apple for the one person who really listened

Oral saying I heard somewhere- I think I got this from Pat. 

I remember trotting it out at the end of a peformance at a festival, smallish audience of about twenty in a yurt.  Joss came up to me afterwards and said she didn't like that last saying - look at your audience, she said, they all really listened. 

Going for Blake and Boethius

I was reading Northrop Fry's 1957 essay, Blake after two centuries on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which is good in itself, especially in that he lets the poems speak for themselves, although always with that maddening dissatisfying absence of any explanation.

 "Such a poem.. as The Sick Rose", he says, "Has the power of speaking with the unanswerable authority of poetry itself". 

 I can imagine one of the more self-satisfied Sussex literature tutors I had leaning back with a great deal of self generated self satisfaction and quoting that sentence. (Actually to be fair there are just two tutors that I imagine doing that, there were some great tutors as well.)

The Sick Rose

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

He's right of course, not to pander to the English undergraduate that I was, plundering any book for some kind of unequivocal sense of meaning so that I could write the next essay.  It's worth quoting him (good ol' Northrop) in full:

"One may always meet a poem with a set of questions designed to avoid its impact: what does it mean; why is it considered a good poem; is it morally beneficial; does it say profound things about life, and so forth"

Love that " set of questions designed to avoid its impact".  Of course in meandering though this book a bit more this morning I do of course find a detailed exposition of what The Sick Rose means that is hilarious in both  its plausibility - it is one reading I suppose, and in its wrong headed limiting of the poem. I'll have to quote the fucker  to show you what I mean. One bit will have to suffice as it's too long to tap in all of it.

"The "Sick Rose" poem is the concrete expression of Blake's experience of the corruptive effects of 'social' love upon creative sexuality"

So says Wolf Mankowitz in his essay "The Songs of Experience", in the Casebook series book "William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience", edited by Margaret Bottrall. He also says, and I quote and paraphrase, that it is "immediately apparent" that the rose is mortal, that the worm is evil and the "bed of crimson joy" is obviously the rose's sexuality etc etc. 

But I could equally make the case that The Sick Rose is, amongst other things obvs. an allegory of anal sex - i.e. rose as - well use your imagination,  "dark secret love" and so on. 

But all this is a digression from the main thing I found in another essay in this book, which must be left over from my Sussex undergraduate days in the seventies, - Kathleen Raine's rather dry essay "Blake's debt to antiquity" where she traces Blake's debt to Alchemy through such writers as Boehme and Paracelsus.  There's a wonderful bit of academic speak where she says, speaking of one of Blake's verse letters where he name checks the writers above, 

"From these passages we may gather [I just love this phrase haha ]that what fired Blake's imagination in the  Alchemical philosophy was the teaching of the famous Smaragdine Table of Hermes Trismegistus" 

But that isn't my main thing here: reading this I realised that William Blake was the missing link in two shows that I wanted to write and perform - one being The Celestial Tavern, - God's pub, me being St Peter being security on the door, an idea cooked up with Foz years ago, the other being a show based on Boethius' " Consolation of Philosophy".  I'm not sure how they will fit together in the final version, The Tyger will figure strongly - and one passage from the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which is one of the most evocative and beautiful titles for a poem I know of, as Roger McGough realised as well.

Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath? 

But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee. 

Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering churchyard,

And a palace of eternity on the jaws of the hungry grave?

Over his porch these words are written: ‘Take thy bliss O Man!

And sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew!

There's something here worth telling, worth playing with , worth putting together. Worms, eagles, tygers and a gentle mention for the horses of instruction.