Keel up

    

     Topicality, George Smiley remarks
     to Control, is always suspect. If
     anything bears him out, it may be
     the adventitious rabidness with
     which our Tea Party-bitten Repub-
     licans leap at the throat of the
     President, for every breath that
     passes through it. Or it may just
     be the arrival of a revival of a
     fine book on art one day, and the
     demise of an artist by miscalcula-
     tion the next. A newspaper is no
     way to plot a web log, minor craft 
     that it is. Its keel is deflected
     in the shallows.

     One can't renounce the currents,
     but there are charts to keep open,
     temperate channels of fair depth.

     Through it all.

ii   Valéry Lorenzo©

No, I do not wish to abolish Friday

      There may be times 
      when I might think 
      of accelerating it,

      and there may

      be times when

      I might think

      I could do it.

      










ii  the architect at home

Learning "were" is as good as "have been"

  For Barry Leach

But I had never seen the Solway.

And then, resting on a rocky

ledge above Crag Lough, I sudden-

ly realized, what I had long con-

cealed from myself, that I was ill

.. and so home, and spent a week

in bed, and read Guy Mannering again.

But after I had been up two days

(for I was determined to go), I was

taken to Blindburn in the Cheviots,

north-west of Alwinton, and after

lunch I walked, over the old Roman

Dere Street, down the Cottonhope

Burn to Byrness, over the fells by

the Blackhope Nick to Kielder ..

on again next morning up the Lewis-

burn valley, and over to Becastle

Fells, a killing struggle, over peat-

hags and bogs and clefts, making ev-

ery mile as two; and at last, from

Sighty Crag, I saw it, a sheet of

twinkling water and a long reach of

desolate sand, the Solway Firth;

  

and at the same time I heard the

bubbling of a spring nearby among

the moss, and slaked my thirst

with its cool dark water; for my

throat was parched with the long

weary climb. After which I felt 

as I daresay the Israelites felt

when, from a hilltop, they viewed

the Promised Land, that it wasn't

very different from anywhere else;

still, it was something to be out 

of the wilderness.

                  .. and dropping lightly down the

                  fells I met a shepherd, the first 

                  human face I had seen for eighteen 

                  miles, and so to Bewcastle, where 

                  I found, against all probability

                  (for it is a lonely steading) an-

                  other man, in the middle of a field,

                  delivering lime from a lorry. So I

                  asked him for a lift, and he took 

                  me to Brampton, whence I gradually

                  found my way home. He drove a lime-

                  lorry now, he said, but he had once

                  lived far away in Northumberland,

                  and had spent his childhood in the

                  village of Powburn, where his uncle

                  was the policeman. So I told him

                  that I had been born in the parish

                  of Powburn, in Glanton, and from

                  that time we were intimate friends.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Lord Dacre of Glanton

The Solway Firth

  [fragment]

June, 1945

The Wartime Journals

Richard Davenport-Hines

  editor

op. cit.

Thermidor

     You are so beautiful and trusting

     lying there on the sky

                             ..

               you seem to be breathing softly

     you look slightly nude, as if the clouds had parted

     ..

     when the wind comes

                   you speak of an itch or a tickle

     you are very gentle

                I want to kiss you and I do

     and look slightly shaggy and perfectly carved.

Frank O'Hara

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

Donald Allen, editor

Weather Near St Bridget's Steeples

1961

op. cit.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria

               And from then

               on, you know,

               well ..

An intentionally unempirical celebration

The colour fields in this canvas

are subordinated to its whole territory. Thus, what they lack in rank by iconographic virtue of hue, density or placement, they acquire by means of their con-centration in detachment from the frame. They create a possibility of a vortex or other mystery, possibly menacing in depth, a setting where investigation may become exploit and exploration, heroic. 

The painting has a title, Blue, Green, and Brown, dated 1951. If it were from The Aeneid, ca 19 BC, it might be Heavens, Earth, Underworld; but it isn't, and we resist unwarranted projection.

One doesn't walk right into a Rothko, any more than one strolls into the underworld in Virgil, unless escorted or at least equipped with a golden bough. Powerfully seductive as it is, the painting declares that something like courage will be exercised in addressing these fields, which are indeed enthralling independently as well as patently engaged with each other. If there were a narrative for braving their distinctions without being locked within one field, why could it not be that of the trials of the young man in establishing his place on an indeterminate shore? I find nothing in this painting to compromise its participation in that struggle, in its own brilliant, virile terms.

On the contrary. The tour d'horison of this paint-ing is not that of an afternoon's browse through Sotheby's list-ings of available villas. It is a saga. In Book 6 of The Aeneid, the wandering Aeneas implores the Sibyl to lead him into the underworld, for the most powerful of motives - and she warns, so famously that a reader cited her in "comment" to our Sunday posting, one might get in readily enough, but getting out is another matter.

   The Gates of Hell are open Night and Day;

   Smooth the Descent, and easie is the Way;

   But, to return, and view the chearful Skies,

   In this the Task, and mighty Labour lies.

Aeneas is demanding an audience with his father, who has finally succumbed under the ordeal of the flight from Troy. Alone among the translators, it seems to me, John Dryden has it right: he wishes for his father to be allowed to see him. I rediscovered this distinc-tion only because BL of Blue Remembered Hills had been thought-ful enough to cite the scene in "Comment" in the prior entry; and I found this illustration of what Aeneas might be facing in this story, only because Thea Beasley had thought to post it. All catalysts are welcome. We are all navigators.

Conduct me thro' the Regions void of Light,

And lead me longing to my Father's sight.

But for the sudden visitor, the persistent allure of this canvas lies in its luminously brilliant upper tier, almost blinding to study, as the eye nevertheless compulsively does for signs of prior passage of human life. What, yes, is the meaning of that outcry from this man? This magnificent painting, part of the incomparable Rothko collection of Mrs Paul Mellon, has been bequeathed to the people of the United States in what I take to be, first of all, a gesture of public service. I look to my would-be leaders to be cognizant of what they are dealing with, to engage honourably the distinctions between the world, their beliefs and their duties, and to be mindful of how they leave the place when they go. I am able to assert these demands of the Sibyl because people before me have shown me the way. One of them, happily, has been Mrs Mellon, whose birthday it will be, this Thursday.

Just sayin'. 







Virgil
Aeneid
op. post.
ca 19 BC
John Dryden, translation
1697
Frederick M. Keener, editor
Penguin Classics, 1997©

Mark Rothko
Blue, Green and Brown
1951
National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC

iv  James Marsden

I know better than to ask much more of life than a hunt in a tub

Oh, but how it does pour

when it rains at The Blue

Remembered Hills™. 

Widely understood to be

the basic news of the

world for many in the

incurable adventurer set,

its travel entries take 

us through one comfy hotel

suite for strategic napping 

after another, from Rome to 

the Riviera to London to 

Vancouver. I, for one, fol-

low our roving romantics in 

only the keenest interest in how they take their eggs at Claridge's and Manhattans in Canada, with the squirmiest 

sense that Scott and the

Murphys are in awe of their revenge. But it is below the bar, in the Comments section, where the mayhem they inspire results in the swappage of tales too delicious for premeditation.

I put it to you, that only the other day, a reader wrote in to boast of doing away with a fox in his bath. Now this quality of élan in the getting through of one's day is so gallopingly disappearing, that we were all put on notice, to get on with the revels in our own tub at once.

They are, you know, everywhere, these bathers of high invention. It remains only to exchange profiles and preferences in poaching. I know better than to ask much more of life, than a seasonable hunt in a city of high rainfall and plush linens; and when I heard that our travelers were off to the wettest resort in the continent, I knew the thread count would be sublime.

And should it not be? Growing up, you know, they teach us that it is bellhops, who have all the fun. Well, who knew, that it is their wit for hotel habitation, not some occupational quirk which makes this so. I credit BRH™ with drawing this distinction (and so many fine ones like it). Moreover, I can't believe it goes too far to cite the multilinguality of bellhops as among the more natural of their advantages in hotel habitation, where it isn't a veritable cascade of tongues which counts so much, as the right one for any given traveler. Connoisseurs of the narrative of the bathtub hunt have much to be thankful for, that English is so well assimilated at BRH™, and that our fellows enjoy setting foot out of town with such free fancy.

And yet, you ask, can it fairly represent our most cultivated of connoisseurs and faultlessly companionable of duos, to portray their nappings as the rallying point of their readership? But surely this is a query for which no host can be answerable, in this era of sometimes detached retinas. We do remember their hotels, because they document their amenities with the tellingest discernment. Possibly a good natured speculation flows from fine fellowship and, as in any serviceable arterial bypass, invokes a vein of convenience to channel happy data to the healthy heart.


















i  Clément Chabernaud

Is taste a human right?

This posting was originally issued
May 25th and was taken down for
revision. A friend was asking for it
lately, and allowed that it was OK
as it was. It should still be developed,
and in time I hope to do so.




Another excellent exchange
on taste was lately joined
at Blue Remembered Hills.

     A thousand postings in the same vessel at the same time,
and still we haven't identified the right to what is so often decried of this page, taste. It's a matter of important work, 
and then we can play.

     On almost every page of this blog, a right is asserted on behalf of the young, of which they were endowed by their creator but only haphazardly by society, if at all. The right to have Horace at one's back, Haydn in one's hospital, Heraclitus in one's curriculum is nothing more than the right to be formed in the legacy of one's birthright - and nothing less. Thousands of seagulls will crash into the Seagram Building before any ten pedestrians in a walking radius will know to preserve it. Yet, it was built for every man on the street for coherency's sake, for proportion's sake, for longevity's sake, and then for eloquence and elegance and inspiration's sake. And why is this, if not because no civilisation can stand without them?

     Is it possible to torture in good taste? Is it possible to tease others with oppression in good taste? Is it possible to exalt grandiosity in good taste? Is it possible to refuse the gifts of science in good taste? Is it possible to plan for New Orleans to drown in good taste? Is it possible for a fiduciary insider-trader to "bet" against his client in good taste?

     Could Mr Madison have fashioned the separation of powers without taste? Could Mozart have reconciled his finales without taste? Could a child's quadratic equation in algebra stand without taste? If we were conscious of the rôle of taste, in short, what would be obscure? 

     We are unalterably adamant, even in this nation, on the universal right of learning. We are at times tiresomely persistent at this page, on the universal obligation to commit the same act, at least on behalf of the young. Is it not probable, given grounding in Vitruvius and Palladio, Titian and Watteau, Haydn and Schubert, Virgil and Virginia Woolf, that some software program can be written, to infuse our domestic design with sympathy -- even if, as we read from time to time, nobody knows anything anymore?

     Coherency. Proportion. Longevity. Add whatever aioli we may want, this is our sandwich of taste. Of course it can be learned; it has only been learned, as regards comprehension if not execution. Let taste shape my herbaceous borders all it wants, it will incrementally shape my civilisation. Why, may an outsider ask, do we ever entertain the slightest doubt, that Syrie Maugham lives up to the Persian Letters of Montesquieu, and that David Adler should be taught in middle schools, along with Mr Emerson?

     The teaching of taste, the sharing of taste, the conserving of taste for the bequeathing of taste have been the subjects of this blog, just as the novelty of its projection of those purposes has struck some as paradoxical. The answer is, that the constituency for those purposes claims precedence here over examples of its achieve-ment, to lend resolution to a task which should feel like play. Something mad over something good, in a word, from the BRH exchange. We want there to be healing voices, we wish there to be a literature of power without force, but not merely because they are in good taste. The wanting of them gives the good sensation of their being, if one has the taste to dream of them. And this obliges us, once in a thousand blog entries, to declare their necessity. We want such things because there are people we love, to be looked after, and taste is their right, their ultimate protection.

I dedicate this posting

with thanks, to the

sharers of taste who

have been with Laurent.

At one of those blogs the other day, which grant a safe haven

At one of those blogs, the other day, which grant a safe haven for gastro-nomic discourse in public, I found myself stumbling in as the discussion was centering on just how far to go with hopes for a decent poached egg at Claridge's. Oh, you can't know how this conundrum lifted me from that post-operative haze under which I still labour, sometimes all but knotted in my sheets in torments for a slice of seaside sourdough, dappled in Normandy butter and plums. The hiatus was almost as salutary as if I had gone ahead with Mrs David's recommendation, of coddling my eggs in caramelised carrots and béchamel; before reluctantly rotating to another page in sitù, to read of Rick Santorum.

Little, indeed, had I been able to perceive the prosody in the Spring our politics have been enjoying, as one of alimentary escalation in lusciousness with every passing day, one rival's taunt of another's palate deficiencies resulting in ripostes of ever loftier Lucullan lunacy for the next news cycle. Surely we can all remember the day, before this campaign commenced, when the panicked piling on of super-fluous ingredients had not yet so robed the shimmering yolk of satisfaction in surfeits of amour propre? But there we are: a spot of debauchery infallibly tracks with our higher reachings of rectitude, at the hedonistic breakfast table of our politics.

Now that the season has exploited the South for all its enthusiasms for these tendencies, it's natural to wonder how genuinely crazier our candidates can get, even at a convention which promises to be a cockfight. It's enough to restore us by two's to our sheets, to rusticate in the fresh and local underlying ingredients of everyday nourishment, just to weather the culinary heights of a politics of battling foams. Who knew, for example, that the campaign for compulsory childbirth would escalate into one against adoption, only thence to condemn intercourse? How can we fall between so many stools, with a single vile body? 

Possibly it does not beg too much forbearance of our reader, to propose that all of this fanciful flight to lusciousness is really a way of our leadership's distract-ing our attention from the china, as the acuity of whose bluity calls out for nourishing clarity, and truer expositions of the ingredients of our day. But this is china inherited, not shopped for, and it seems that as much as they want it, they do not care for it. Feasts of thrills proliferate, for paper plates of entertainment, the china in the sideboard empty in a bacchanale of vanity. 


















Elizabeth David
Provincial French Cooking
1960
Penguin Twentieth Century Classics
Penguin, 1999©