Sunday swim

Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work, and helps
make something of the world.

Heraclitus of Ephesus

Brooks Haxton, translation

Fragments

Penguin, 2001©

Refreshments

A friend of this page, evidently having seen the previous posting and not wishing to embroil himself in the furor of comment it might engender, has passed along the present photograph to replenish one’s supply of apples. At the same time, a kind of atonement held me in its grip, for not having visited a single play of Shakespeare since initiating this blog. (I imagine one may not be alone in this default, whether or not consumed by Red Mug, Blue Linen). To me, then, this portrait was not about apples, but about being circummured, as its hero is.

Now I give away the hand, of course: I was reading Measure for Measure. You’d know this, because you know that Shakespeare invented the word for this comedy, and never used it again. As has been widely reported, and sometimes even blogged, this outrageous fount of philological radiance, this subtlest of all known celebrants of the gusher we know as English, this humanest of voices ever to resound from its stage, has often been invoked by that mountebank lodestar of injurious ignorance, herself, Mrs Palin, in defense of her latest ejaculation of logophobia. There is, as Hawthorne remarked of Zenobia in Blithedale Romance, “no folded petal, no latent dew-drop, in this perfectly developed rose.” She is the fullest flowering of her faction's calculated, chronic contempt for learning since the King and the Duke held forth on the river in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - which, we are given to understand, they've abandoned trying to suppress.

But I stray into tinctures of partisanship, where play is the spirit of this page. It turns out, to one’s further annoyance, that Measure for Measure - which nobody thinks is a very good play - poses the plight of our harridan harlot to a T: how to reign in sexuality, without slaughtering the populace.

It all works out, of course, by that sleight of hand she has been so foully accused of, herself - the substitution of one conjugal heroine for another. Who can doubt the lady’s entitlement to the legacy this play is, for sorting out the peril of Big Government? 

Yet, what a morbid fortress she would forge for us, circummuring all in corporate concupiscence, as she is by her casuistry and cant. The plainness of her lust would do her credit if she'd not draped it in such zealotry. But William Shakespeare saw her coming, and I savour this good apple with much debt for her depiction:


Act II, Scene iv, 183-186


Then, Isabel live chaste, and brother, die:
More than our brother is our chastity,
I'll tell him yet of Angelo's request,
And fit his mind to death, for his soul's rest.

Atoning with Soldati

.. for bold rebellion

Be welcome then, great Sir,

to constant vows of loyalty

never to vary more ..

Henry Purcell
Fly, Bold Rebellion, 1683
James Bowman, counter-tenor
Robert King, King's Consort
Hyperion, 1990©

Particle undetectable

I love photography for being uncollectible, and for other things.

Mathias Lauridsen

Saturday commute vi

Jakob Wiechmann

JCB, Attingham House

Pierre Frey, Paul et Virginie

Anonymous, Stadium Steps

Picnic

In khaki, 
late Autumn.

Billy Budd on Friday

He was enjoying what he was doing.

The look was one of pure rapture.

..

I still remember his look.

Frank Bidart

Adolescence

Desire

FS&G, 1997©

We really have to blame the aviator on Jean Renoir

Well, to be sure: there was Lindbergh, there was Earhart. But when you think of it - as you do, every time - the first thing to cross your mind as the unfathomable, frequently reflective allure of a gaze fastens on you from a pair of these things is, rather, of an impromptu, imponderable height which the wearer occupies in your regard. And why should this be, but for the panache of the aviator in two (can you stand it) two of the greatest motion pictures of all time? 

But, rest easy. Where else is it possible to repair, to any discussion of La Grande Illusion (1937) or La Règle du Jeu (1939), without enduring some recital of the latest critical fetish, replete with the sort of slovenly neologisms Orwell deplored in Politics and the English Language? Not for that did you head for this relais, I hope. 

  

Here, now, sip a flute of Billecart, and we'll hear nothing more of the curious cultural history of cinema. These are movies for people who like movies, in the way people who like flying think of it as sport. A gallant pastime, albeit somewhat less attractive down below.

Ah, sport. That weirdly fungible allusion to anything pleasant involving adrenalin and perspiration. Selection, contact, engagement, contest, release, reflection. Ancient cycle. Still goes on, I'm told. We may all think we are discussing, say, tennis, when various percentiles of us are transposing the narrative into the discus, the javelin, or cat burglary, already anticipating getting together later for a second flute. 

And this, too, was central to both films. They pointedly do not hammer one with an insistence upon What this Thing is About, any more than it would be polite to remark on the Champagne as other than pleasant. They exude, moreover, a serenity that Champagne, itself, is not in peril from the Other Side. 

We get the drift, civilisation assimilates the text in its way - so much of La Règle familiar, already, from a play by Beaumarchais which launched the slide of the Bourbons; and of l'Illusion, from pesky Geneva Conventions which don't apply to the Stars and Stripes, much less to any drug-financed goon squad we outsource our morals to, instead - and we reflect on our elevated appreciation of aviators, in this progressive and discerning age of drones.