Virginia Rounding's Blog, page 7

David Grossman on consumer society

The values and horizons of our world, the atmosphere that prevails in it and the language that dominates it, are dictated to a great extent by what is known as mass media, or mass communication. The term ‘mass media’ was coined in the 1920s, when sociologists began to refer to ‘mass society’. But are we truly aware of the significance of this term today, and of the process it has gone through? Do we consider the fact not only that, to a large extent, the ‘mass media’ today are media designed for the masses, but that in many ways they also turn their consumers into the masses? They do so with the belligerence and the cynicism that emanate from all their manifestations; with their shallow, vulgar language; with the oversimplification and self-righteousness with which they handle complex political and moral problems; with the kitsch in which they douse everything they touch – the kitsch of war and death, the kitsch of love, the kitsch of intimacy.

 

Fred Vargas, and the importance of coffee

Last night, Charles had felt her face with his fingers. It had been rather nice, she had to admit, those long hands scrupulously exploring all the contours of her face, as if she were printed out in Braille. She had sensed that he might have liked to go further, but she had not given him any encouragement. On the contrary, she had made some coffee. Very good coffee, in fact. That was no substitute for a caress, of course. But in a way a caress is no substitute for a good cup of coffee, either.

 

Michael Novak on the Judaeo-Christian roots of modern progress

From Aquinas and the heretics:

Apart from the guardianship of the Church over many centuries, it is hard to see whence would have derived the resources that later gave rise to modern science, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. The fundamental conceptions of progress, truth, compassion, the dignity of the individual, and the centrality of personal liberty on which modern progress rests are rooted in Jewish and Christian beliefs about human nature and destiny.

Isaac Bashevis Singer on literature that lasts

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Herman, left alone, sat with his head bowed. He had noticed a copy of the Bible on the shelf near his chair and he leaned over and took it out. He leafed through the pages and found Psalms: ‘Be gracious unto me, O Lord, for I am in distress. Mine eye wasteth away with vexation, yea, my soul and my body. For my life is spent in sorrow, and my years in sighing. My strength faileth because of mine iniquity and my bones are wasted away. Because of mine adversaries, I am become a reproach, yea, unto my neighbours exceedingly, and a dread to mine acquaintances.’

Herman read the words. How was it that these sentences fitted all circumstances, all ages, all moods, while secular literature, no matter how well written, in time lost its pertinence.

 

THE BURNING TIME Introduction: Setting the scene

Anne Askew was burnt at the stake along with John Lascelles (a lawyer and Gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber), John Hadlam (a tailor from Essex) and John Hemsley (a former Franciscan friar), on 16 July 1546. A great stage was built at Smithfield for the convenience of Chancellor Wriothesley, other members of the Privy Council and City dignitaries, to watch the burning in comfort. Anne herself, having been broken on the rack, was unable to stand, and was chained to the stake in a sitting position. John Louth, the Archdeacon of Nottingham, who witnessed the execution, described Anne as smiling throughout her torment and looking like an angel, and insisted that, at the moment of her death, there was ‘a pleasant cracking from heaven’. Whether that was the sound of the flames, or summer lightning, or merely a figment of the imagination, cannot now be determined; nor can we know how, or if, the witnesses could actually have identified the precise moment of death.

So what was the terrible crime that Anne was deemed to have committed and that led her to this appalling end? Why was being a ‘Protestant’ or ‘reformer’ considered so heinous, and what was this ‘heresy’ with which she was charged?

A word deriving from the Greek, ‘heresy’ originally meant merely ‘choice’, but by the Middle Ages it had come to mean ‘wrong choice’, especially in matters of religion. In Europe, and particularly Spain, the ‘Inquisition’ had been set up to identify heretics, with the aim of their contaminating heresy being cut out of society, like a cancer. Heretics were given one chance to ‘abjure’ or ‘recant’ – effectively, to make a public confession that they had been wrong, to accept some kind of ‘shaming’ penance (such as standing in front of a church congregation wearing a white sheet or being paraded through the streets on a cart), and to agree to follow ‘orthodox’ belief (‘orthodoxy’ meaning both ‘right doctrine’ and ‘right worship’) from now on. If a heretic, having recanted, fell back into his or her old ways, there was to be no second chance. They were to be handed over by the Church to the civic authorities for punishment – which meant death by burning.

But the nature of what constituted heresy kept changing, particularly in England during the tumultuous years of the mid-sixteenth century. There were several types of possible heretical belief under the respective reigns of the three monarchs which constitute the burning time (the period which saw the greatest number of burnings for heresy) in Tudor England – Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I. Some were based entirely upon interpretations of religious doctrine; some hinged on changes in society and questions of authority and were linked to the increased availability of the printed word; others were dictated by the whim of the individual monarch …

Read more in The Burning Time

1959: Woman Donkey Hours

Outlined against the fields,

inevitable as landscape,

a kerchiefed woman and a donkey

trudge the dusty path, to where

they fight the stubborn earth for food.

Anchoress, she treads her daily silences,

mantras iterating on her children;

she knows no joy in exercise of muscle,

spread of sky or shades of green

on ten-mile tramps each way.

She fills the bag suspended from her shoulder

with twigs for kindling, dandelion and sorrel,

and cuts the donkey’s fodder from the pathside

to stuff the sacks which press against his flanks;

she would not dream of riding him.

When they reach their hard half-barren patch

she pulls the weeds out from the wheat,

clears a space around the beans, then sits;

other headscarves dot the panorama –

one with her, yet utterly unknown.

When sun is hot it scorches them,

when rain is pouring they get wet;

every day the same but Sunday

when she prays for strength from Him

Who made this grand design and drew her in it.

Responsive to the brushstroke of the air,

she feels the varnish drying on the day:

they set off on the backward trail,

his hooves clicking, her boots scraping –

rhythms marking off the hours.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1996

Merry-go-round

After Mark Gertler’s painting of 1916

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Here we go round the merry-go-round, the merry-go-round, the merry-go-round,

here we go round the merry-go-round

in saecula saeculorum:

on Hampstead Heath by threes we turn,

no way forward – we never learn –

fixed for ever, still and moving –

our nannies nod their heads approving;

trapped, we look in the next direction –

dress and deportment turned to perfection –

no one knows if we’re laughing or screaming –

sleepriding blindly, awake but dreaming;

if we come unstuck we’ll surely die –

do what all the rest do, don’t ask why –

keep on circling to postpone our fate –

circulate, circulate, circulate;

swapping clichés, repeating them afresh –

tongue exercises for the sagging flesh –

I’ll say something, you agree –

then you can do the same for me;

traipsing vacant-faced through exhibition halls,

staring at dead people on the walls –

why don’t the living vanish when I close my eyes? –

I need free hands and feet, no human ties;

through angular spaces carpeted with jazz,

lifting our noses above the razzmatazz,

we find our way by a thin yellow line –

dictatorial, one-dimensional, serpentine;

squeezing through the many, never meeting eyes –

how can these others live whom I despise? –

looking only in order to look away and scorn,

heading for the solitary chair on the empty lawn;

get up, go to work, the weekly routine –

the same at sixty-four as at sixteen –

the only escape routes TV and sleep –

other distractions never come cheap;

along the City streets the unremitting bustle –

swept to my next appointment, apostle

of the mobile phone – I hurry therefore am alive –

running round the treadmill eventually I’ll arrive;

commuters crushed on tubes and buses –

the boy barges past, the old woman fusses –

accusations, shoving in the queue –

excuse me, I was here before you;

fashions repeating – hems up hems down –

last year pink and blue, this year cream and brown –

songs of thirty years ago are sung again –

up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen;

chew gum and turn your music high –

if you have to speak make sure you tell a lie –

play computer games, take drugs, don’t think –

blot out your dissatisfaction with a drink;

dole out gossip with like-minded guests,

dream of making citizen’s arrests –

there are no new ideas left under the sun

and we have done those things we ought not to have done;

don’t dare get off, don’t try to live –

remember there’s no alternative –

sweet dreams as long as you hold tight

spinning down dark spirals of endless night;

keep on spinning happy till you die,

spun on your way to pie-land in the sky –

then your relatives will act surprised –

they thought death long since exorcised;

some are dying, others being born –

spare parts to replace the overworn –

the dead are recycled in the living –

the mother views her infant with misgiving;

more and more degeneration, nothing moving on –

too late to turn back now – we’ve crossed the Rubicon –

spinning so fast we’re almost standing still,

helpless to make a change for good or ill;

trapped, we look in the next direction –

smart sophisticates in our subjection –

no one knows if we’re grinning or screaming –

our mouths in rictus of fear or inanely beaming;

on Hampstead Heath by threes we turn,

no way forward – we never learn –

progress ended before we’ve begun –

no reason for living under the sun:

here we go round the merry-go-round

in saecula saeculorum.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1995

Too much dreaming

I heard that life is no rehearsal,

But performance of the play;

Yet I have spent so long in learning lines

I missed my time and lost the way.

So I become a critic in the wings,

Mocking observer of what others do and say,

And dream of being the deus ex machine

In the final act, when I have my day.

But will I still be waiting here

When the curtain falls for the ending of the play,

And the last of the watchers has wandered off

To the empty street and the dying day?

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1988

First published in Apostrophe 12, Autumn 1996

Blackbird

A blackbird alone in the dying sun’s footlights

sings to a backdrop of indigo blue;

for the sound of its voice, for the sake of the singing,

it plays out the longest day of the year.

Perched on the rooftop, stop-out blackbird,

late home, carousing, careless of time,

emptying its throat till its heart is empty,

scattering the tune like stars in the street;

unnoticed by drivers cocooned in their vehicles,

by comfortable viewers with volume turned up:

only the walkers of dark hear this singing –

the carolling bird in summer’s midnight.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1993

First published in Poetry Nottingham International, Autumn 1995

A Baptism

Brompton Oratory, a hot lunch-time in July,

a baby being received into the Catholic Church

and Catholic upper-crust society:

dressed-up, a group stands round the font.

Otherwise the building’s almost empty, save a

scattering of oddballs dotted round the nave,

the occasional stray tourist fleeing from the sun.

A little girl in blue-and-white-striped dress

escapes the cluster of family and friends.

She patters down the aisle towards the wardrobe-like

confessionals – archaic Wendy-houses –

which lure her to explore their dark insides;

drunk with happiness, she crawls along a pew;

ecstatic – the Oratory one unimagined playground.

Behind her plods the solemn uncle.

Determined not to make a sideshow of himself,

he doesn’t chase – but holds himself on guard

till the moment she stands still. She totters,

absorbing wonder, dizzies herself with space …

He scoops her up, bears her back towards propriety –

the serious expectations of family and Church.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1995