Writing

Writing is an exercise in controlling fear, especially the fear that you're not a writer.

Thomas Kenneally, Desert Island Discs, 22 July 07

farewell

Up to Kettle's Yard yesterday hoping to get a last look at the de Waals. The gallery was shut; black-clad staff inside were squatting, wrapping things. There were cartons stuffed with bubble wrap and bound with parcel tape, boxes of curious dimensions, some very long and thin, unwieldy. Two men paused amid the ruins of the Wunderkammer, of which nothing remained but the base, some stacked sections of plywood, and cardboard boxes. A high scaffold stood next to where 'All you can see' had cheered the empty wall. The young men and women in their black t-shirts looked like rude mechanicals, and I wanted to watch but that's rude. I'm even now wondering if de W has decreed how the installations should be dismantled.

Oh, come on, I tell myself. This is just taking down an exhibition. These people are used to it.

National treasure

In the National Museum in Cardiff there's a gallery round the foyer, given over to Welsh crafts: glass and pottery, silverware and so on. Some of it's fine, but it doesn't interest me much, or at any rate, not as much as it should. Perhaps it's because I'm not feeling 100%. Slipware, oh please; it's nice and homely, but the decoration, the use to which it's put, hardly merits place in a museum. Most of the stuff would be better off in someone's house, being used. What is there about it to be stared at, wondered at? The skill in making? Yes, but it seems skill without purpose: the purpose is curtailed, we are looking only at a small part of the thing's reality. Our imagination must supply context and use, imagine an owner, or at least the hands of the user: this is what it's like to hold, this is how easily it pours, feel its heft, the sound it makes as you place it on the kitchen table. How the light strikes it among the apples and red peppers. The morning sunlight slanting in through the half door, the light reflected off the river, wobbling and shifting.

Somehow it's much easier with something from the past. Contemporary craft is so self-conscious.

And there is a cabinet of de Waals. (That doesn't merit an apostrophe as it's a standard museum cabinet.) Instantly recognisable: two of his tall swaying cylinders placed, I'd have thought, slightly too far apart, and some shallow nested dishes, wide, with straight sides, very thick. Some are nested with their sides touching, some randomly, but they look untidy and haphazard rather than studiedly random. They look as if they have been put in the case by someone other than the artist, someone who's just collected some examples of his work. I can't explain it. If I knew that de Waal had installed it, I'd pay the arrangement a different quality of attention. Instead, they seem to be tired, denatured, uncontextualised. They're pieces in a museum making as much sense as something dug out of a garden when we don't know where the garden is or what the thing is for. The presence of the pots is only part of their meaning. And how naked they are. We can see them, see into them - all except the tall ones, which have their unknowable interiors. Perhaps under the dishes there are marks or colours we will never see. I'd like to think so. And there are no titles - simply 'Edmund de Waal' and some dates, I forget now. I should have made a note. De Waal's captions, titles, are part of how we read his work. So again, I'm wondering if this is after all an installation, if he's deconstructed the museum exhibit to leave the thing stripped down like this, bare, devoid of meaning and context (the title is literally 'con-text'), the unknowable just creeping in when you think you've drained it of meaning. But I doubt it. It's too obvious: it looks as though the museum staff have been able to do that anyway, all by themselves.

facebook

Why is facebook so successful? There are toys to play with, and people to annoy. You can make gangs, and draw attention to yourself. Some people like to compete in the Number of Friends stakes.

I'm amazed how many poets are on there, how many older people one would expect to know better. We write on each other's wall, we poke each other, throw sheep, share tunes. And all in our own time, in the privacy of our home. No need to get dressed up, no need to worry where we will go to meet, or if no-one talks to us when we get there.

Not that I'd dream of throwing a sheep at anyone, but I have written graffiti on a wall.

The Sweeney

Reading Matthew Sweeney’s A Smell of Fish. Some of it’s funny and some is black, but some I just don’t get.

It took a moment for the penny to drop, but I enjoyed 'The Houseboat', which is his take on de la Mare’s 'The Listeners'. It's probably because I recognised the reference, rather than for the poem itself. Even with the switch to the first person plural (which is inspired), it doesn’t make me care much what they wanted Dick Blackstaff for. Probably informing, drugs or some scam or other; maybe we’re supposed to think it’s Belfast rather than Camden, but there’s no clincher... The de la Mare draws on all that fairy story medievalism for atmosphere – a cheat of course, but memorable for all that. And de la Mare’s language was archaic even when he wrote it. Sweeney’s language is contemporary, no-frills (apart from the “blood-red moon”) and the clichés are situational clichés of urban violence and deprivation: houseboat, police siren, howling dog, gunshot, wrecked tanker, curry smells. I’m convincing myself that part of the point (as well as S demonstrating his skill) is in making the threat of violence mundane and unremarkable, displacing the scenario from the turreted building in the middle of a moonlit forest to a litter-strewn urban estuary. This is how some people actually live. Not a fairy story, not even (despite/because of those clichés) a TV copshow, just filthy life.

And how uneasily those de la Marian echoes and anapaests sit:
“But we heard no sound from the cabin,/ no whisper or muffled step” ...
“And these words rang over the water”...
as if he can’t resist them, though he deflates them quickly with a rhythmical challenge. He couldn't leave them long - they would carry you away.

You can imagine him knocking at a houseboat and listening to the quality of the silence and thinking of 'The Listeners', as anyone would who's ever collected door-to-door for Red Cross. And then wanting to do a contemporary version of what is an edgy encounter, or non-encounter. But the curry and police siren etc have a Z-Cars-ish feeling about them, ie. would have been great in the 60s, but feel shopworn now. Is he doing a double send-up? I don't think so; I discovered later he's a huge admirer of de la Mare and has edited the new Faber Selected.

Sweeney likes to operate in what he calls the weird zone: where reality’s skewed but things still have a crazy logic about them. In 'The Zookeeper's Dilemma', Riesfeldt’s constipated elephant is a weird concept, and the ending is OTT, but it’s not irrational.

Mauve

TLS arrived today, and I eagerly turned to see who'd won the poetry competition. I don't know why I was eager, as I'd been lukewarm about the shortlist. It's eagerness about competition tout court, rather than the quality of the contestants. Something unpleasantly atavistic then.

'The Mauve Tam-O'-Shanter' is a depressing poem. Not just because it is about a bereavement. I don't know whether the poet writes from personal experience, but that shouldn't make a difference. (Oh, it seems to in the case of war poetry, and Tim Kendall has written eloquently about that.) Grief shouldn't disarm criticism. What I object to in the poem is cliché, sentimentality, and outright nonsense. And that seems to be what readers of the TLS like - or at least the voters in this competition. As I neither entered nor voted in the competition, I think I can allow myself a little grumble.

'The Examiners' came second. Of its type, it's highly competent, but there is nothing about it that couldn't have been written half a century ago. Why should this matter? I don't think poetry should be that damn' comfortable, even if it's about uncomfortable subjects. The edge of humour here stops the uncomfortable being anything more than a mild unease... And if, as John Hartley Williams claims - nor is he the first to do so - all poetry should be an experiment, it's not clear what this is trying to do, except be clever. Entertain, I suppose.

Freedom

Alan Johnston is free!

Tenebrae

On the spur of the moment, we went to the performance of Gesualdo's Tenebrae in Trinity Hall Chapel, where de Waal's installation Tenebrae sat in a row on the floor down the aisle, up at the holy end. It consisted of a number of large, shallow pots somewhat larger than dinner plates, about 3 or 4 inches deep, and in each sat what looked like an inverted cylinder, almost filling the interior. Down the insides, like the gap between a boat and the dock, you could just glimpse the fact that the bottom of the larger piece was coloured, but not what the colour was, beyond its darkness. The pieces difffered slightly in size and proportion, and in glaze, but they had more in common than not. I didn't know what to make of them, really - they were mute, and from where I was sitting during the performance I couldn't see them. But I could imagine them, with the sound of the voices falling into them, and the shadows darkening, while they harboured their own secrets in their interior.

I hadn't been in TH chapel before. It's small and rather lovely in an 18thC way. A huge sub-Poussinesque altarpiece, lots of natural light, lots of oak, and a pretty gallery. There were, J told me, 26 candles, and these supplied the majority of light as day began to fade.

And having done no homework about the music, and having been kept away from churches in my childhood, I didn't know about the religious service, though something of its nature became clear through the music itself, and the odd snatches of Latin I was able to recognise. So my experience of the installation and the performance was not well-informed, and I was reacting on a fairly visceral level.

It was perhaps a strange time of year to be singing Tenebrae or celebrating the Passion. The music wasn't a piece I knew, and I had misgivings about its discordances - it wasn't clear if they were Gesualdo's or something incidental. Yet no-one else seemed disconcerted. It was rather long, too, though this only bothered me when I thought someone was off-key. It became clear that the piece was deliberately timed to start in daylight and end in total darkness. It was certainly an experience watching the candles come into their own. Afterwards, everyone milled around and looked at the pots in - it has to be said - a somewhat cursory fashion, as there were about 60 of us - and then afterwards to the Master's Lodge for a glass of wine and a chance to meet the great man himself.

Fourteen pots, I counted.

The Master's Lodge! Oh, I could live like that! And there was a de Waal on a window ledge: two huge cylinders like those tube-worms that live near underwater volcanic vents... tall and thin, and swaying slightly in unison. They were almost identical, but one had a very shiny glaze and the other silkier. From across the room, you could tell instantly they were de Waal's.

There was a lull when de W was standing by himself, so I told him how much we'd enjoyed the exhibition in the gallery, the subtleties, the wit, and the way he withheld things - how we'd nearly missed 'All You Can See' (the red shelf piece) and he was amused and touched, I think. (It was more of a conversation than I'm making it sound.) And he said how he'd always longed to do an installation in the chapel. I should have asked him about the spiritual dimension, and his asceticism. I wanted to ask him about Morandi too, but more people came up then to talk to him.

J was edgy throughout (his seat was uncomfortable, and it's not his sort of art or music anyway) but even so we came away, as we usually do from such events, with a sense that we are enormously privileged.

Still thinking about it later. I cannot know how differently I'd have experienced the evening if I'd known something about it at the outset, if I'd bothered to do the slightest research rather than just looking at my watch and saying: it starts in half an hour - we can catch it if we leave right now! without a sense of what 'it' really was. A concert, we thought. I doubt I'd have persuaded J to come with me otherwise.

Fourteen pots. Fourteen Stations of the Cross. I should have realised. Yet it's a curiously flattened interpretation of the Passion, even allowing for what's concealed. Then again, it fits with the stripping down of the altar that traditionally accompanies the service. We couldn't have counted them from where we were sitting, so it can only affect the experience retrospectively. And retrospectively, I wonder if I'd have felt the pots, lovely and mysterious as they are, equal to their metaphorical burden, if I'd been thinking clearly about the religious meaning. It was a very secular audience - the couple next to me were the only ones who didn't applaud. I'm bothered, really, by treating something like that as a purely aesthetic experience, even though I can't partake of the spiritual side of it. It's cultural tourism, isn't it? I wish I'd got my mind engaged before I went - we left in a rush, and didn't think about it as more than listening to some music. Is it simplistic to hope that music, art, will create its own conditions for attending to it?

Oh, and apparently Gesualdo was a murderer.

tobacco free day

The Queen's Head up the road held a wake last night, and auctioned off their ashtrays. There was something terribly poignant about the chalkboard announcing this - wish I had a photograph - on a par with all the excitement preceding one of England's disastrous football matches.

I'm in two minds about this. It's about 30 years since I gave up, but in my heart I'm still a smoker. I dislike the smell and taste of smoke more than I ever did before I started. So there is a selfish gain for me. Yet I would far rather be free to choose to go to a pub like The Free Press, which has been smoke-free for years, and leave smokers free to go to theirs. I'm not persuaded that staff are obliged to work in smoky atmospheres if they don't want to. There is no shortage of bartending jobs.

As for other workplaces, the more enlightened have been smoke-free for years. But the idea that two builders sharing a van about their daily work can't enjoy a cigarette while driving between jobs, or parked up in a tea break, is laughable. Even more so the long distance lorry driver, on his tod.

The health arguments are strong, but don't persuade me that change should be brought about by legislation. There is something horribly self-righteous about all this hectoring. Forcing smokers back into their own homes and the bosom of their families, where they will smoke and booze to their heart's content - or discontent - isn't going to improve anything, least of all the health of the alleged victims, or their children.* What has happened to the right of consenting adults to damage each other? Don't even get me started on the bureaucracy (pdf file) of enforcing the new law, the utter waste of time.

Oh, and what would the Chancellor do for an income stream if the tobacco revenue dried up? Allegedly, smoking isn't cost-efficient. ASH claims that the Government earned a mere £8,103 million in taxes in the financial year 2004-5 (excluding VAT)**, citing 'Tobacco Factsheet November 2005. HM Revenue & Customs', which I haven't found or read. ASH suggests that there is a net cost to British society when you factor in the cost of treating tobacco-related illness, whereas Philip Morris argue (wrt Czech Republic, but surely extrapolatable) that premature deaths actually save money. Yes, of course, killing people off early will save money, so long as they don't die a horrible lingering death - or sue you. ASH fisking of Philip Morris here. BMA article arguing an economic basis for the ban here.

In my dreams I'm still a smoker. And I still write smoking poems.

*It's only a journalist's interpretation, so caveat lector.
**Why exclude VAT from the calculation of revenue? That's another 17.5% of the pack price the Government spends.


Recommended: Jane Holland's Elegy for the Ashtray.