Greer Gilman's Blog, page 78

Upwelling

So for now, consider yesterday.  (Leaving aside the glories of Florence, Domitian's astronomical villa, and Rome, and the joys of Buckinghamshire, the North York Moors, Durham, another household in Cambridge, and Hampstead Heath.)

I'm staying in my donnish friends' Wendy House.   Nothing shows from the street but a door with a lion's head between two brick garages.  That opens on a narrow hallway with ladderlike stairs and a ship's kitchen underneath; but the inner door is four feet broad and panelled.  And that opens on a lovely neo-Georgian room with grey-green panelling and huge windows on a little brick-walled secret garden.  In essence, a small Common Room.  There's an OED, of course, and an Art Nouveau cabinet with books and wineglasses, and an impressive portrait of Christopher Ricks's grandfather, abandoned in the English faculty. Upstairs there's a many-gabled attic bedroom.  The Wendy was built in someone's garden as an artist's studio, and then swallowed up in brick.  My friends keep it as a guest house.  

S (who taught me) had to be in London, poor thing, presiding over the Philological Society.

So in the morning I nipped round to St Edward's Passage, where the secondhand bookshops are.  G David has scholarly remainders and an imposingly glass-cased, leatherbound antiquarian section; the Haunted Bookshop has enchanting old children's books, from the sixpenny-now-collectibles to full Rackhams, and diversions:  old Penguin Wodehouses, and what not.  I can't afford (or carry) most of what I wanted.  I could look!

Then I came back for my camera.  (It was durham_rambler 's brilliant discovery that at least some American battery-chargers will charge in English shaver points; only mine keeps tumbling out of this particular one, so I've been sticking it to the wall with bandaids.  Bathroom improv at its best.)

J and I dropped S at the station (a pity on the first fine day in weeks), and wended to Ely.  Now Durham is founded on the rock, and rises like a sempiternal beech wood; Ely floats on the fen, with its spectacularly fractal octagon.  I love them both dearly.  Ely now has a most excellent stained-glass museum, with pieces from 12th-century Cistercian through Cromwellian heraldic, the Gothic revival, Arts and Crafts, and up to now.  I particuarly loved the angel dancing-master, clad in feathers as in Morris rags, and the leaping ladies from Isadora Duncan's bathroom, making high aesthetic whoopee; but the high-Victorian Duke of Clarence as Saint George is utterly hilarious.  I nearly fell off the clerestory.

Before we left, I walked their labyrinth, for pilgrimage and safe returning.

Then we set out on a quest for angel roofs.  Many years ago--twenty?--we'd been on a church-crawl, and had stumbled on one obscure and spectacular fenland church with angels you could walk among.  We thought it might have been Upwell, in Norfolk.  So we drove through the flatlands, by willow-fringed canals with narrow boats, over humpbacked bridges, past familiar names:  the Denver Sluice, the River Wissey.  The Hundred-Foot Drain was flooded, and we couldn't cross, so we just turned into the fens, and looked for roads going north.  A hare ran cross our path, flat out, ears streaming, long and low.  Magnificent!

St. Peter's Upwell, when we found it, was locked.  Emphatically, with spiders' webs across the iron gates of the porch.  However, a note at the side door told us to apply at the Post Office for the key.  (I love it when that happens:  I was once entrusted with the key to Ludlow Castle, as long as my forearm.)

And the angels are glorious.  Angels set between angels, leaning out on the air.  They are slanted so the light will catch their faces, palely gold, with their outstretched wings in shadow.   A passionless ecstasy.  They look, not heavenward, but down upon us shepherds in the stony dark below.  They bear tidings; they bear up the sky.  One tramples down a woman-headed dragon with a scorpion's tail.  You can indeed walk among them:  there are galleries.  You can touch the hammerbeams, hide emeralds there.  (I do wonder if Sayers knew this church.)   In one box pew in the north aisle, I saw a bobby's helmet.  Going over, I found--good lord!--a dismembered mannequin, head, torso, limbs as white as fungus, glowing queerly in the dark.  An eerie thing..

After our journeying, we got quite a good straightforward dinner at a Cambridge chophouse, and came out just in time to see the Chronophage strike eight.  A day of winged creatures.

Off now to Little Gidding.

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Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011)

A hearthfire that’s a falling star.

A city of ghosts and butter-pies.

A coat that is a world rewoven.

Bristol whirling up in scraps of litter, as a daemon clothed in trash.

A luckless world wiped bare to make a game board for tourists.

A rotten borough as a reprobate, mucky Old Sarum.

A garden—many gardens—with a living spring.

Caprona of the angel.

The Place Between and all the branching worlds.

Ah, we know these.  We have heard the mermaids lisping, each to each.

We have been fortunate beyond all measure to have known Diana’s worlds:  to journey in the moving castle of her great imagination.

What a dizzy joy it was to open a new book of hers; or re-read an old one, new again. Her books are always changing, living labyrinths.

Her multiplicity is never jumbled.  No, her games with time and space are as strange, as orderly as quantum physics:  there are laws.  “Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm.”

Diana took delight in the strangeness of commonplace.  She took note of the non-Euclidean geometry of con hotels.  She loved to turn now here and nowhere—glovelike—inward out.  So in Christopher Chant, she writes of a goddess child's passion for a bright enchanted world of jolly hockey sticks and dormitory feasts.  Beyond the black knob in Ingary is unimaginable Wales, where the wizard Howl is a layabout post-graduate and where a silvery spell—we slowly realize—is photocopied homework.

Diana had the power to transmute the world around her, realign its very atoms.

For her—and for her sisters—gates in Cumbria were guarded by a witch swathed in sacking—Beatrix, protectress of sheep—and the mad denizens of Thaxted pranced their bells and gibbered.

Her travel jinx—ah well.  Trains ran backward for her.

But she spoke with wood and hill and water.  I remember going with her to the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, to the welling up of magic at the heart of things.

If you were fortunate enough, she’d draw you in.

At her tall house on the Polygon—how perfect that manysided name is! every way of it a portal—she and John made an earthly paradise, clouded only by England’s sempiternal doom at cricket.  What a joy it was to wake amid their treetops in a charm of birds—like waking in the middle ages.  I knew that Diana would be sitting with her coffee in a cloud of smoke, and there would be the wittiest and warmest conversations that I’ve ever had.

It was there she received a carful of sober-suited emissaries from Studio Ghibli.  They interviewed her gravely; then requested:  “You will now please show us Wales.”

I imagine they went elsewhere.

You can get there by car, you know, but only if Diana sends you:  to Wales of the falling stars,  England of the Chrestomanci, Scotland of the Pleiades, and otherworlds beyond.

She will draw you in.

There’s an image of hers that I love, of an artist at work, immersed in it:  of Daniel Hyde the weather worker, calling up the Isles of Blest within a frame of golden wire and walking into it to sculpt the clouds and breathe the wind.  He is of it, even as he shapes it:  "up to his waist in moving, misty map,” wading in Blest.

Her element is otherness.  Rejoice in it.  Wade in.

Nine

Diane Wynne Jones (1934-2011)

A hearthfire that’s a falling star.

A city of ghosts and butter-pies.

A coat that is a world rewoven.

Bristol whirling up in scraps of litter, as a daemon clothed in trash.

A luckless world wiped bare to make a game board for tourists.

A rotten borough as a reprobate, mucky Old Sarum.

A garden—many gardens—with a living spring.

Caprona of the angel.

The Place Between and all the branching worlds.

Ah, we know these.  We have heard the mermaids lisping, each to each.

We have been fortunate beyond all measure to have known Diana’s worlds:  to journey in the moving castle of her great imagination.

What a dizzy joy it was to open a new book of hers; or re-read an old one, new again. Her books are always changing, living labyrinths.

Her multiplicity is never jumbled.  No, her games with time and space are as strange, as orderly as quantum physics:  there are laws.  “Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm.”

Diana took delight in the strangeness of commonplace.  She took note of the non-Euclidean geometry of con hotels.  She loved to turn now here and nowhere—glovelike—inward out.  So in Christopher Chant, she writes of a goddess child's passion for a bright enchanted world of jolly hockey sticks and dormitory feasts.  Beyond the black knob in Ingary is unimaginable Wales, where the wizard Howl is a layabout post-graduate and where a silvery spell—we slowly realize—is photocopied homework.

Diana had the power to transmute the world around her, realign its very atoms.

For her—and for her sisters—gates in Cumbria were guarded by a witch swathed in sacking—Beatrix, protectress of sheep—and the mad denizens of Thaxted pranced their bells and gibbered.

Her travel jinx—ah well.  Trains ran backward for her.

But she spoke with wood and hill and water.  I remember going with her to the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, to the welling up of magic at the heart of things.

If you were fortunate enough, she’d draw you in.

At her tall house on the Polygon—how perfect that manysided name is! every way of it a portal—she and John made an earthly paradise, clouded only by England’s sempiternal doom at cricket.  What a joy it was to wake amid their treetops in a charm of birds—like waking in the middle ages.  I knew that Diana would be sitting with her coffee in a cloud of smoke, and there would be the wittiest and warmest conversations that I’ve ever had.

It was there she received a carful of sober-suited emissaries from Studio Ghibli.  They interviewed her gravely; then requested:  “You will now please show us Wales.”

I imagine they went elsewhere.

You can get there by car, you know, but only if Diana sends you:  to Wales of the falling stars,  England of the Chrestomanci, Scotland of the Pleiades, and otherworlds beyond.

She will draw you in.

There’s an image of hers that I love, of an artist at work, immersed in it:  of Daniel Hyde the weather worker, calling up the Isles of Blest within a frame of golden wire and walking into it to sculpt the clouds and breathe the wind.  He is of it, even as he shapes it:  "up to his waist in moving, misty map,” wading in Blest.

Her element is otherness.  Rejoice in it.  Wade in.

Nine

Voyage

Sitting in the tiny Rijksmuseum at Schippol Airport: fifteen paintings--flowers and fruit and portraits and a mischievous alehouse scene--with a magnificent blue-and-white tile picture of a Dutch man o' war guarding the herring fleet. There is classical piano music and a lovely long soft bench. The Dutch know how to travel.

Behind me, Firenze, which is utterly sublime.

More later.

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Felicity

Rolling through Tuscany, eating prosciutto and strawberries.

Thrud and papersky and zorinth and A. and I are on our way to Rome to see the Pope's astronomer.

I owe you all a dozen posts.

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Totentanz

The day's frivolities embraced a visit to the hill of Sir Francis Dashwood's Hellfire Club.  It is surmounted by a spire and golden bauble which we took to be a Gothick fane, but which turned out be St. Lawrence's Church, and by a folly which is fact the Dashwood mausoleum.  An extraordinary edifice:  a septagonal hollow crown, its Roman brow confronting from its steep a new-made Roman road which Sir Francis laid down to lead up to it, bedded on the chalk dug out from the caves in which--'tis whispered--he enacted nameless rites.  Just what the Devil would do, if he had the money.

After lunch, Phoxinus and I popped over to Beaconsfield for a non-wooden spoon and a jam-and-jelly skimmer.  (She bottles hedgerow fruit.). Quite the upmarket town, home in various quarters at disparate times to Disraeli and Pratchett, Enid Blyton and Edmund Burke, Wendy Hiller, G.K. Chesterton, and Alison Uttley.  (Which pleased me:  I had just remarked how the countryside looked Fuzzypeggish).  There's a splendidly melancholy obelisk in the churchyard, with carven fire leaping up from four stone torches, and a carven pall down-drooping on four yards of Latin, and--most glorious of all--a tetrarchy of winged skulls guarding it, as if Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John had been relieved by the graveyard shift.  When we went to puzzle out the Latin, the late lamented turned out to be Edmund Waller ("Go, lovely Rose...")

But the stunning thing, most wonderful because ephemeral, was earlier.  On our way from the morning's outing, we were stormed by a Walpurgisnacht of red kites.  All silent, black against a cloudcurled, eye-of-lapis sky, but hematite if sunstruck, wheeling.  They are rare; there were forty of them in a vortex, like November in Averno, Sibyl's leaves spelt out.

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
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April indwelling

The lovely thing about flying into Bristol is that two minutes later you're in the countryside, with green pouring upward to mingle with the falling rain.  There is blackthorn in flower in the hedgerows, and a pub called the Fox & Geese, absurdly pretty lambs, and April, indwelling, uprising, transcendent, and perverse. 

English trees have the endearing habit of standing by themselves in fields, unfolded absolutely:  root to crown and to their fingers' ends.  And fearfully lichenous and hairy.  

I am staying with friends in the Chilterns, in their pocket Gormenghast.  It's a genuine folly:  one man's lifelong transformation of a demure 1930s houselet on a Just William street into a congeries of mad ideas:  annex on annex, with lofts, caves, non-Euclidean cupboards, a complete mahogany bar from a demolished pub, a cinema screen, a Polynesian gazebo, and a pavilion with a hot tub.  It came already fan-formed.

Phoxinus and I walked round a sublime bluebell wood at Christmas Common.  From the fringes you could see the blue remembered hills; then turning inward, heaven in a haze about the trees.  Then we drove, in and out of storm and sunlight and astonishing clouds,  down a deepsunk lane to an uncommonly pretty village called Turville.  (Much favored by the BBC for villagey exteriors, as we found out.)  We saw cowslips, and a pretty piebald trotter, and a befuddled pheasant in a splendid waistcoat.  And red kites, indolently wheeling:  they slosh across the sky.   I caught some spectacular cloudscapes; but alas, could not capture one astounding burst of light, like an angel coming down the stairs for Blake.

Then it hailed.

A nice pub lunch, some necessary shopping, and a most excellent shepherd's pie for dinner. Much conversation.

Bliss.

Nine

A room with a view

Leaving for England and (O glory!) Florence.  Gods willing, I'll be speaking on Sunday at Diana Wynne Jones's memorial, along with sdn and others, both beloved and illustrious.  steepholm is kindly hosting me.  Before and after, I'll be seeing friends ( much_of_a , shewhomust and durham_rambler , and others unLJ'd) that I haven't seen since the winter solstice of 2006, all round England.  With an interlude in blessed Florence--which I last saw in 1971--with papersky and zorinth , thanks to the refulgent hospitality of Thrud.

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Birthwort

Aristolochia—birthwort—was praised by the ancients for its power of easing childbirth.  Its womb-shaped flowers seemed to promise great sympathetic magic.  For thousands of years, plants of its genus have been used in the healing traditions of cultures round the world, for all sorts of maladies:  for gout, for asthma, for snakebite, as a diuretic.   It would appear to be a gift of Nature, and its lore time-hallowed wisdom:  motherwit.

If so, it is one scary mother:  the Medea of herbal medicine.

Growing as a weed amid Balkan wheat, and ground with it to make bread, it has caused endemic kidney failure in whole villages.  Women at a spa in Belgium who took it as a weight-loss supplement have faced dialysis, transplant, and death.  Its use in traditional Chinese medicine is strongly linked to urinary tract cancer:  in Taiwan, the incidence is about four times higher than in the West.  And one poor woman from Chelmsford, who got it from a Chinese herbalist for her complexion, has both terminally ravaged kidneys and cancer.

The Poison Garden—excellent website—says "Quite possibly, in terms of accidental poisoning, the most harmful plant of all those featured on this website."

I wonder if it has ever featured in a murder mystery?  Cyanide is ghastly but swift:  "...but the 'orrors of slow poisoning, that's the work of a fiend."

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And she feeds you tea and oranges...

Isn't this a lovely watercolor?  Cherries, clementines, and blue and white china.  And such elegantly understated whites, such bursts of luscious color.    It's by Stephanie Anderson; I found her looking for nice still lifes for my iPad jigsaw.

Anderson reminds me of the Italian Baroque watercolorist, Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670).  She painted odd, brilliant still lifes, all eccentric compositions, mostly of greengrocery, often with a pecking bird, or butterfly, or beetle.




Clearly she loved creatures, slithery and spiky:  there are grasshoppers, snails, and lizards.  Of course I adore her hedgehog, all in feuillemort.


Nine