Elizabeth Harding's Blog, page 5
December 17, 2013
The Exiled Bell - Shadow Zones
'Shadow Zones' (Volume three of 'The Exiled Bell' quartet) - will be on Kindle soon – I hope.
December 16, 2013
Celebration?
Mandela was old when he died and his life was unusual, world-changing, filled with extremes and worthy of being looked back on. His memorial service was a true memorial, indicating a life justly and justifiably celebrated by those who didn’t know him. His family and friends (I refuse to say ‘loved ones’ - a phrase so beloved of undertakers and BBC reporters) will however be the ones to grieve. In Mandela’s case, as in the case of anyone who has come to the end of a full life, the grief will be tempered by the knowledge that there really was no future for him any more.
What angers me is the assumption that the grieving phase can be ignored altogether. It can’t. Neither is a funeral simply a celebration of someone’s life. It isn’t and I hate to see it on funeral invitations. The immediate reaction to a death can’t be skipped or disposed of and it is only prissy squeamishness to confront human grief that seems to make it so.
A friend of mine, F, was duly annoyed by a neighbour, whose reaction to being invited to the funeral of a mutual acquaintance was ‘We should be celebrating his life.’ F. pointed out that grief came first. The man, not at all old, had died horribly in a farm accident and the mood of the family was not one of celebration but one of shock, then of grief.
A funeral is not the place for a celebration. Whatever funeral baked meats are eaten or whatever is quaffed afterwards it is simply a relief from weight of sorrow. ‘Celebrating the life of……..’ comes at the end of the period of grieving, even at the end of the period of apotheosis, when you eventually take stock of that life, when you measure and weigh it up, when you sort it out and retain the quirks, the truly human characteristics and even eccentricities that belonged to that person. And then you file it all away in the archives of family memory to be accessed and given the light of day at genuine family celebrations. ‘Now you won’t believe this but it was your great-aunt Edith who said….’ And although you’ve heard the story time and again, a good tale is worth repeating and her photograph worth seeing…..again. That is true celebration.
What angers me is the assumption that the grieving phase can be ignored altogether. It can’t. Neither is a funeral simply a celebration of someone’s life. It isn’t and I hate to see it on funeral invitations. The immediate reaction to a death can’t be skipped or disposed of and it is only prissy squeamishness to confront human grief that seems to make it so.
A friend of mine, F, was duly annoyed by a neighbour, whose reaction to being invited to the funeral of a mutual acquaintance was ‘We should be celebrating his life.’ F. pointed out that grief came first. The man, not at all old, had died horribly in a farm accident and the mood of the family was not one of celebration but one of shock, then of grief.
A funeral is not the place for a celebration. Whatever funeral baked meats are eaten or whatever is quaffed afterwards it is simply a relief from weight of sorrow. ‘Celebrating the life of……..’ comes at the end of the period of grieving, even at the end of the period of apotheosis, when you eventually take stock of that life, when you measure and weigh it up, when you sort it out and retain the quirks, the truly human characteristics and even eccentricities that belonged to that person. And then you file it all away in the archives of family memory to be accessed and given the light of day at genuine family celebrations. ‘Now you won’t believe this but it was your great-aunt Edith who said….’ And although you’ve heard the story time and again, a good tale is worth repeating and her photograph worth seeing…..again. That is true celebration.
November 29, 2013
29 November 2013 - Rijksmuseum
Yesterday I was walking around the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It had been re-opened in April but in all that time I hadn’t been in, as everyone and his mother seemed attracted to the place, owing to a great deal of publicity. I thought a grim, damp November day would ensure that I could at least have room to see the paintings I wished to see.
Well, in a way it worked, as long as I avoided the usual tourist traps, such as the Nachtwacht, although such an overrated painting is difficult to avoid. It has never moved me, I’m afraid. Clever it is and original in execution, it is dull in subject matter and really rather empty. But it hangs hugely and hypnotically before the many pilgrims who have come especially to see it.
Pilgrims? Well, yes. Hype has made the painting a secular altar piece and the whole museum has become once more the Cathedral that the architect Cuypers intended it to be.
Cuypers was a Roman Catholic and it shows. He was slipping churches into secular buildings at a time when faith was rapidly being whittled away by scientific enquiry. And this made me think, ironically enough about France just after the Revolution.
When the First French Republic came into being in 1792 the cathedrals of Notre Dame and Chartres became temples dedicated to the Goddess of Reason. It was a clever move as it saved the buildings from being destroyed.
Yet somehow, in the 19th century, a reversal in thought, taste and faith occurred and many secular buildings all over Europe, such as museums and railway stations had within the design overtones of the religious.
In England, it was Pugin’s Catholicism that provided the impetus to the creation of Neo-Gothic architecture while in the Netherlands it was Cuypers who was the architect of a nostalgic mediaevalism that brought into being the Rijksmuseum and the Central Station in Amsterdam.
These two buildings alone re-invented in a nineteenth century way the mediaeval restlessness that resulted in pilgrimage and the pilgrim’s destination. Cuypers was influenced by Viollet-le-Duc, responsible for the Disneylandish Old City of Carcassonne. Cuypers’s work however, was frowned on by the more Puritan and businesslike Amsterdammers. Too Catholic. Far too much popish frummery. And many of the interior decorations in the Rijksmuseum, including the frescoes, were all plastered over, as though the building was some church, post-Reformation.
Now it’s all been brought back, frescoes and all, and some places, hitherto closed off, now see the light of day. I won’t go into the paintings that I like best, the ones I could see without being pushed, as that can be tedious to read about.
All I can say is that as I walked through the space where the shop used to be, looking at the pastel frescoes and stained glass windows, I saw the world not as a neo-Catholic reality but as some kind of mediaeval pre-Raphaelite fantasy, a clean, tidy, ordered and orderly world (we are in the Netherlands after all).
Cuypers would have recognised it, being the creator; Viollet-le-Duc would have approved; Pugin would have given thoughtful approval; William Morris would have nodded his head vigorously.
As for me, I then went downstairs to where the remnants of the real mediaeval world were kept in semi-darkness, as though they were post-reformation rejects in the dusty corner of a church sacristry.
Well, in a way it worked, as long as I avoided the usual tourist traps, such as the Nachtwacht, although such an overrated painting is difficult to avoid. It has never moved me, I’m afraid. Clever it is and original in execution, it is dull in subject matter and really rather empty. But it hangs hugely and hypnotically before the many pilgrims who have come especially to see it.
Pilgrims? Well, yes. Hype has made the painting a secular altar piece and the whole museum has become once more the Cathedral that the architect Cuypers intended it to be.
Cuypers was a Roman Catholic and it shows. He was slipping churches into secular buildings at a time when faith was rapidly being whittled away by scientific enquiry. And this made me think, ironically enough about France just after the Revolution.
When the First French Republic came into being in 1792 the cathedrals of Notre Dame and Chartres became temples dedicated to the Goddess of Reason. It was a clever move as it saved the buildings from being destroyed.
Yet somehow, in the 19th century, a reversal in thought, taste and faith occurred and many secular buildings all over Europe, such as museums and railway stations had within the design overtones of the religious.
In England, it was Pugin’s Catholicism that provided the impetus to the creation of Neo-Gothic architecture while in the Netherlands it was Cuypers who was the architect of a nostalgic mediaevalism that brought into being the Rijksmuseum and the Central Station in Amsterdam.
These two buildings alone re-invented in a nineteenth century way the mediaeval restlessness that resulted in pilgrimage and the pilgrim’s destination. Cuypers was influenced by Viollet-le-Duc, responsible for the Disneylandish Old City of Carcassonne. Cuypers’s work however, was frowned on by the more Puritan and businesslike Amsterdammers. Too Catholic. Far too much popish frummery. And many of the interior decorations in the Rijksmuseum, including the frescoes, were all plastered over, as though the building was some church, post-Reformation.
Now it’s all been brought back, frescoes and all, and some places, hitherto closed off, now see the light of day. I won’t go into the paintings that I like best, the ones I could see without being pushed, as that can be tedious to read about.
All I can say is that as I walked through the space where the shop used to be, looking at the pastel frescoes and stained glass windows, I saw the world not as a neo-Catholic reality but as some kind of mediaeval pre-Raphaelite fantasy, a clean, tidy, ordered and orderly world (we are in the Netherlands after all).
Cuypers would have recognised it, being the creator; Viollet-le-Duc would have approved; Pugin would have given thoughtful approval; William Morris would have nodded his head vigorously.
As for me, I then went downstairs to where the remnants of the real mediaeval world were kept in semi-darkness, as though they were post-reformation rejects in the dusty corner of a church sacristry.
November 24, 2013
November
In my poem ‘St Martin’s Eve’ (see eponymous collection) I have attempted to draw together aspects of the somewhat bloody yet joyful mediaeval festival that used to take place before the Reformation; bloody because it involved a wholesale slaughter of cattle in preparation for winter and joyful because of the knowledge that there would be enough food to last the lean and barren months. Of course the ironic thing is that the 11th of November is now commemorated as the day in 1918 when a great bloodletting ceased.
According to William Hone, November was the month of quite a number of festivals in pre-Reformation days. Now Hone was an interesting character. Born in 1780 he was what we would now call an investigative journalist, delving into injustice levelled on ordinary people, exposing government corruption, fighting against censorship and being in general a pain in the arse to those in power. A political satirist, he was tried for sedition but acquitted, sued for libel at times and was in effect the Ian Hislop of his day.
Yet in spite of his hard political nous he was also deeply interested in folkore, mythology, historical anecdotes and gossip ancient and modern. All this can be found in three books, The Everyday Book (1826), The Table Book (1827) and The Year Book (1830). Each was a miscellany of observations of nature, legends, poems, drawings and tittle-tattle of all kinds. I picked up all three books - original editions- in a second hand bookshop in Amsterdam some twenty years ago, also on a grey November day. Even now they are just the thing for browsing in when I look out of the window and see the red sky sinking into darkness, the trees silent and motionless.
In Hone’s books can be found the general mood that fits in well, on the one hand, with chill air, mists and a silent damp trudge towards winter and on the other hand with Walkyrie winds and fleets of scurrying cumulo- nimbus such as we had at the beginning of this month.
November has an eeriness about it, a crepuscular Gothic …or perhaps I’m just allowing too much free rein to my imagination. But, to return to Hone, he does give a fair amount of detail about the great November feasts and celebrations before the penitential sombreness of Advent.
This might be an odd thing to consider – November a month of parties and jollification. Yet the Americans have Thanksgiving and although there was quite a lot of retrospective 19th century political tweaking as regards the origin of this celebration, it was nevertheless done within a sound knowledge of exactly what the English November celebrations were. This not surprising. Washington Irving for example was well-acquainted with English legends and folk customs. Both he and his contemporary Hone were worried that the old holidays were becoming moribund.
But let’s have a look at some of those November festivals. For one thing, there was Bonfire Night, which really belongs to Samhain, one of the two Celtic New Years, the other being Beltain in May. But within a post-Reformation and indeed Restoration context it was politically appropriated to cover the yearly commemoration of the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1604. When I was a child my friends and I would earn our firework money by standing outside the pub with our stuffed effigy of a man in a wheelbarrow and asking for a ‘penny for the guy.’ Yet Guy Fawkes et al were not burned at the stake of course but were hanged.
Then we have the aforementioned St Martin’s Eve, which even now is celebrated here in the Netherlands in the form of children with lanterns going round the village singing St Martin’s songs and being rewarded with sweets or fruit.
Hone mentions the curious custom of bull-running on the 14th, which even as he was writing was being frowned on. A chosen bull, having survived the St Martin’s slaughter was released and followed wherever it went by crowds of villagers, with goads and prods. It became angry and began to run, the villagers trying to keep up. Eventually the bull was killed and the meat given to the poor of the parish.
Then we have St Cecilia’s day on the 23th of the month and I’m really not sure whether this is a neo-Classical imposition on an already existing day. But I doubt if villagers needed a special day to celebrate music.
And so we come to St Clement’s Day on the 23rd. It is a day of honouring blacksmiths and although I don’t believe it is celebrated anymore, it was, according to Hone recognised by the smith packing gunpowder into a hole in his anvil and striking it with a hammer so that sparks flew. After this apprentice smiths would dress up in disguise do the rounds of the houses and taverns claiming something to drink for ‘old Clem’.
On the whole the month of November is certainly redolent with a primeval desire to see out the winter well-fed and snug – if possible. So to all Americans out there, bear in mind that all your troughing and quaffing is done within a particularly British, if not European, tradition.
According to William Hone, November was the month of quite a number of festivals in pre-Reformation days. Now Hone was an interesting character. Born in 1780 he was what we would now call an investigative journalist, delving into injustice levelled on ordinary people, exposing government corruption, fighting against censorship and being in general a pain in the arse to those in power. A political satirist, he was tried for sedition but acquitted, sued for libel at times and was in effect the Ian Hislop of his day.
Yet in spite of his hard political nous he was also deeply interested in folkore, mythology, historical anecdotes and gossip ancient and modern. All this can be found in three books, The Everyday Book (1826), The Table Book (1827) and The Year Book (1830). Each was a miscellany of observations of nature, legends, poems, drawings and tittle-tattle of all kinds. I picked up all three books - original editions- in a second hand bookshop in Amsterdam some twenty years ago, also on a grey November day. Even now they are just the thing for browsing in when I look out of the window and see the red sky sinking into darkness, the trees silent and motionless.
In Hone’s books can be found the general mood that fits in well, on the one hand, with chill air, mists and a silent damp trudge towards winter and on the other hand with Walkyrie winds and fleets of scurrying cumulo- nimbus such as we had at the beginning of this month.
November has an eeriness about it, a crepuscular Gothic …or perhaps I’m just allowing too much free rein to my imagination. But, to return to Hone, he does give a fair amount of detail about the great November feasts and celebrations before the penitential sombreness of Advent.
This might be an odd thing to consider – November a month of parties and jollification. Yet the Americans have Thanksgiving and although there was quite a lot of retrospective 19th century political tweaking as regards the origin of this celebration, it was nevertheless done within a sound knowledge of exactly what the English November celebrations were. This not surprising. Washington Irving for example was well-acquainted with English legends and folk customs. Both he and his contemporary Hone were worried that the old holidays were becoming moribund.
But let’s have a look at some of those November festivals. For one thing, there was Bonfire Night, which really belongs to Samhain, one of the two Celtic New Years, the other being Beltain in May. But within a post-Reformation and indeed Restoration context it was politically appropriated to cover the yearly commemoration of the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1604. When I was a child my friends and I would earn our firework money by standing outside the pub with our stuffed effigy of a man in a wheelbarrow and asking for a ‘penny for the guy.’ Yet Guy Fawkes et al were not burned at the stake of course but were hanged.
Then we have the aforementioned St Martin’s Eve, which even now is celebrated here in the Netherlands in the form of children with lanterns going round the village singing St Martin’s songs and being rewarded with sweets or fruit.
Hone mentions the curious custom of bull-running on the 14th, which even as he was writing was being frowned on. A chosen bull, having survived the St Martin’s slaughter was released and followed wherever it went by crowds of villagers, with goads and prods. It became angry and began to run, the villagers trying to keep up. Eventually the bull was killed and the meat given to the poor of the parish.
Then we have St Cecilia’s day on the 23th of the month and I’m really not sure whether this is a neo-Classical imposition on an already existing day. But I doubt if villagers needed a special day to celebrate music.
And so we come to St Clement’s Day on the 23rd. It is a day of honouring blacksmiths and although I don’t believe it is celebrated anymore, it was, according to Hone recognised by the smith packing gunpowder into a hole in his anvil and striking it with a hammer so that sparks flew. After this apprentice smiths would dress up in disguise do the rounds of the houses and taverns claiming something to drink for ‘old Clem’.
On the whole the month of November is certainly redolent with a primeval desire to see out the winter well-fed and snug – if possible. So to all Americans out there, bear in mind that all your troughing and quaffing is done within a particularly British, if not European, tradition.
