Divine Inspiration - A Travelog Part 2

Hereford 

When I think of Hereford I think of the poet Thomas Traherne    

A detail from the Tom Denny window in Hereford Cathedral inspired by the life and writings of Thomas Traherne. 

This could be a self-portrait.

Thomas Traherne - a remarkable seventeenth century poet, scholar, clergyman and religious writer believed that Hereford was a blessed city.  I am inclined to agree with him.

As I strayed quite far from poetry in the last blog post I am going to jump straight in and share this Traherne poem with you:

Consider the Extent of Love

Thomas Traherne

(1636 or 1637, Hereford, England -  1674) 

  

You are as prone to love as the sun is to shine;

it being the most delightful and natural employment

of the soul of man; without which you are dark and miserable.

Consider therefore the extent of love, its vigour and excellency.

For certainly he that delights not in love makes vain the universe,

and is of necessity to himself the greatest burden.

The whole world ministers to you as the theatre of your love.

It sustains you and all objects that you may continue to love them.

Without which it were better to have no being.

Life without objects is sensible emptiness,

and that is a greater misery than death or nothing.

Objects without love are the delusion of life;

the objects of love are its greatest treasures:

and without love it is impossible there should be treasures.

Hereford Cathedral is a treasure.

No one demands money with menaces as you go inside; no implication that it might fall down on your head if you don't cough up a fiver, It is a welcoming and busy place full of life and colour. It is a beautiful building that is being constantly renewed and revived for the twenty-first century. It feeds both body (good cafe and little sheltered garden) and soul and lifts the spirits. You don't have to be religious to value such a special place. For me it is an object of love and it was wonderful to visit it again and watch the Magna Carta exhibition going up.


  
If you'd like to know more about Thomas Traherne your very best guide is Denise Inge - another inspirational scholar and religious writer who died far too young.  I recommend Happiness and Holiness on Thomas Traherne published in 2008 by Canterbury Press.

I also visited Ledbury (home to an annual Poetry Festival) http://www.poetry-festival.co.uk/

And of course, birthplace of the 19th century poet John Masefield. I will spare you the ubiquitous Sea Fever and offer this instead: 

JOHN MASEFIELD

An Epilogue

I have seen flowers come in stony places,

And kind things done by men with ugly faces,

And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,

So I trust, too.

Much of his writing seems dated to me now and often gloomy, but this frivolous little poem cheers me.

                                                    1936 Gold Cup winner Golden Miller ridden by Evan Williams

Of course the Gold Cup he refers to is the famous Race Meeting at Cheltenham and this is a good way of taking us across the border to Gloucestershire and the village of Dymock.

The Dymock Poets  

The 'Dymock Poets' are generally held to have comprised Robert Frost, Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, and John Drinkwater, some of whom lived near the village in the period between 1911 and 1914. Eleanor Farjeon, who was involved with Edward Thomas, also visited. They published their own quarterly, entitled 'New Numbers', containing poems such as Brooke's "The Soldier".

Which ones to choose?

Edward Thomas is probably the most local poet and maybe we'll take one from Eleanor Farjeon so a woman poet gets an outing. Thomas famously volunteered to fight in the First World War in 1915 and was killed in 1917 - this led to the break-up of the group.#123 on

The Glory

by Edward Thomas

The glory of the beauty of the morning, -
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy
Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart: -
The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning
All I can ever do, all I can be,
Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue,
The happiness I fancy fit to dwell
In beauty's presence. Shall I now this day
Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,
Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start
And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,
In hope to find whatever it is I seek,
Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things
That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?
Or must I be content with discontent
As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?
And shall I ask at the day's end once more
What beauty is, and what I can have meant
By happiness? And shall I let all go,
Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know
That I was happy oft and oft before,
Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,
How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,
Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core. 

His strange, discontented personality shows through this poem and perhaps helps to explain his decision to enlist.

The poem below - very different from Eleanor Farjeon's well-known children's poems and her theme tune Morning Has Broken, may be a reaction to the death of Edward Thomas.

Peace

Eleanor Farjeon

I am as awful as my brother War,

I am the sudden silence after clamour.

I am the face that shows the seamy scar

When blood and frenzy has lost its glamour.

Men in my pause shall know the cost at last

That is not to be paid in triumphs or tears,

Men will begin to judge the thing that's past

As men will judge it in a hundred years.

Nations! whose ravenous engines must be fed

Endlessly with the father and the son,

My naked light upon your darkness, dread! -

By which ye shall behold what ye have done:

Whereon, more like a vulture than a dove,

Ye set my seal in hatred, not in love.

II.

Let no man call me good. I am not blest.

My single virtue is the end of crimes,

I only am the period of unrest,

The ceasing of horrors of the times;

My good is but the negative of ill,

Such ill as bends the spirit with despair,

Such ill as makes the nations' soul stand still

And freeze to stone beneath a Gorgon glare.

Be blunt, and say that peace is but a state

Wherein the active soul is free to move,

And nations only show as mean or great

According to the spirit then they prove. -

O which of ye whose battle-cry is Hate

Will first in peace dare shout the name of Love? 

The famous wild daffodils in Dymock Woods 

We saw the famous lent lilies - wild daffodils on our way to May Hill in Gloucestershire.

Red May Hill - Valerie Maclean 

May Hill is known for its crown of trees (supposed to number 99 but this is a poetic truth only) and this makes it very easy to identify. 

John Masefield describes May Hill in his poem "The Everlasting Mercy" eulogised "May Hill that Gloucester dwellers 'gainst every sunset see".   But I'll spare you that one as it is beyond bad.

Suffice it to say that a walk over May Hill on a spring morning is poetry in motion. 

A final word for Ross on Wye - where I lived for almost 30 years.

Ross is famous for its beauty and its connection with hedgehogs. This seems to relate back 1500 years when the Celts invaded Ross on Wye and called the area "Ergyng" which meant "Land of the Hedgehog"  My daughters' school badge was made special by the hedgehog peering over the top.

There is even an annual Hedgehog Festival and Ode to the Hedgehog poetry competition.  Can you think of any good rhymes for hedgehog ?

I leave you with a Scottish poem about a hedgehog as I bring myself back home.

Hedgehog, Hamnavoe

Jen Hadfield

Flinching in my hands

this soiled and studded but good heart, 

which stippling my cupped palms, breathes –

a kidney flinching on a hot griddle, 

or very small Hell's Angel, peeled from the verge 

of a sweet, slurred morning.

Drunk, I coddle it like a crystal ball, 

hellbent the realistic mysteries 

should amount to more than guesswork

                        and fleas. 

This began as an inspirational blog post so rather than leaving you with the idea of fleas I offer another aspect of the hedgehog.

You can knit your own - guaranteed no fleas!  

Next Post - Scottish sea poems.

Deprivation and Inspiration - A Travelog

This blog post is a travelog of a recent trip to England.  

There are as many references to poetry and to Scotland as I can find to uphold the spirit of ScotPot but sometimes I digress. I am in good company, as many much better writers than me are famous for their digressions. 

Fashion on the Ration at the Imperial War Museum in London

was my first culture stop. It runs until September.

http://www.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/iwm-london/fashion-on-the-ration

Although the exhibition put a positive spin on the austerity years with much discussion of creativity being born of restriction - I was left with a greater awareness of the endless dreary shortages and the real hardship for ordinary people during those long war years. 

It was still a fun exhibition in many ways and here are a few of the memorable images:

Here is one of my favourite quotations from this time:

The Women's Group of Public Welfare stated, "....decline in clothing standards may be accompanied by a decline in self-respect and a consequent slackness of the mind."

The government took this idea very seriously (who wants a slack mind?) and women were allowed to have some lipstick (or beetroot juice if one ran out) and there was a Utility Corset available. A very high value seems to have been placed on firmness of all kinds.

There were one or two Scottish connections.  This is from the Scottish War Savings Committee and I couldn't agree more.

Next culture stop was: RIBA http://www.architecture.com/WhatsOn/Feb2015/MackintoshArchitecture.aspx

At the Royal Institute of British Architects for an exhibition of work by the famous Scotsman Charles Rennie Mackintosh

The main focus was on CRM the architect (naturally) and there were many architectural drawings and models as well as a fascinating Timeline linking his work to the bigger event of the time.

Last year's fire at the Glasgow School of Art stunned Scotland and it was fascinating to see a film made about the School a few years ago.

                                                     The library - Glasgow School of Art

I also learned a little about Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and intend to find out more - he rated her very highly(see above) but she's not nearly as well known.  Perhaps she will feature on a later post about special Scotswomen.

Leighton House Museum was next for "A Victorian Obsession" an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.  http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/subsites/museums/leightonhousemuseum1.aspx 

Leighton House is the former home of painter and collector Frederick Lord Leighton (1830-96)

The house is well worth a visit even without this special addition of the Perez Simon collection adoring the walls. It is famous for the Arab Hall

     Some of my favourite pictures were Classical Beauty by John William Godward

Queen Esther by Edwin Long

and a very strange painting inspired by George Meredith's fantasy tale that glories in the title of
The Shaving of Shagpat! You may not be familiar with it - neither was I - but it really impressed George Eliot and others at the time.

The Enchanted Sea by Henry Arthur Payne.

Please note that the princess is making her escape in a magical cockleshell.

As far as I know none of these painters were Scottish but I just had to show you them.

Another strange painting was saved until last and the huge canvas displayed on the top floor.
As we left the studio and ascended the stairs there was a hugely powerful smell of roses and perfumier Jo Malone had created a special fragrance to enhance the heady experience of
The Roses of  Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema,

The seemingly romantic title and presentation makes it all the more shocking: it depicts a grisly story of a depraved young emperor who suffocated his dinner guests with a torrent of rose petals!

Still in London (the Herefordshire stage of the trip on the next post) I was lucky enough to get in to the National Portrait Gallery's special exhibition of the work of John Singer Sargent.

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/sargent/home.php

One of his most favourite portraits is a pin-up for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery:

                                                         Lady Agnew  John Singer Sargent SNPG

This exhibition brought together nearly 70 pictures from various collections. It was quite a marathon to go round it all but well worth the "museum fatigue".  JSS seems to have been in the fortunate position of having enough money to live comfortably and to choose his subjects.  Far from starving in a garret, he spent his time pleasantly. He went travelling and painted his friends and famous people of the time; he was well connected and seems to have been admitted everywhere.  He particularly liked the theatre and classical music and many of these paintings have a theatrical impact.

But poor JSS got more drama than he wanted when in 1884 the Paris Salon showed this "scandalous" portrait of Madame X  (later revealed as Mme Gautreau).  In the original version of the portrait the strap of her gown had fallen off her right shoulder and this provoked the outrage. The Salon refused to let the painter alter the painting at the time  (no doubt it boosted the footfall) but he later re-painted the strap of her dress to placate the family.  He was mesmerised by the lady himself and didn't want to distress her.

A less controversial picture is the innocent  Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

This was inspired by a sight seen by Sargent on a boating trip on the Thames - two little girls lighting paper lanterns at dusk in a garden planted with roses.

To end with - a Scotsman and Poet.  Robert Louis Stevenson 

                               Robert Louis Stevenson    John Singer Sargent 1887

This was painted at Stevenson's home in Bournemouth, Dorset.  RLS looks calmer than usual and there is another more typical one with his wife in the background showing her dramatic side.

Robert Louis Stevenson. 1850–1894

Sadly RLS was constantly on the move in search of better health and died in his adoptive country of Western Samoa.  A path was cleared by nearly sixty Samoan men to the summit of Mount Vaea, where Stevenson was buried.  There are many tributes to RLS in Scotland and he is still much read and enjoyed throughout the world. Here's his own requiem poem - UNDER the wide and starry sky   Dig the grave and let me lie: Glad did I live and gladly die,   And I laid me down with a will.    This be the verse you 'grave for me:          5   Here he lies where he long'd to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea,   And the hunter home from the hill. So we need an upbeat finish and I'll give you a cheerful Scottish poem (no that's not an oxymoron). The Jeely Piece Song Adam McNaughton I'm a sky scraper wean, I live on the ninteenth floor But I'm no goin' oot tae play any more. 'Cause since we moved to oor new house I'm wastin' away For I'm getting one meal less every day. Chorus: Oh ye canna fling pieces oot a twenty story flat Seven hundred hungry weans will testify to that If it's butter, cheese or jeely, if the bread is plain or pan The odds against it reaching us is ninety-nine to one On the first day my Maw flung oot a daud o' hovis broon It came skitin' oot the windae and went up instead o' doon Noo ev'ry twenty seven hours it comes back into sight Cause my piece went intae orbit and became a satellite On the next day my Maw flung me oot a piece again It went up and hit a pilot in a fast, low flying plane He scrapped it off his goggles, shouting through the intercom The Clydeside Reds have got me wi' a breid 'n jelly bomb On the third day my Maw tho't she would try another throw The Salvation Army band was standin' doon below 'Onward Christian Soldiers' was the tune they should've played But the Oompah man was playing piece 'n marmalade We've wrote awa' to Oxfam to try an' get some aid We all joined together and have formed the Piece Brigade We're gonna march to London tae demand our civil rights Like nae more hooses over piece flinging height Glossary breid: bread doon: down hoose: house jeely piece: bread and jelly sandwich oor: our oot: out piece: sandwich wean: child  This is a song by Scottish folk singer Alan McNaughton.  You can listen to it here in a version sung by Matt McGinn via Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A7SAPmcwXA So now you know I'm all about High Culture - including high rise buildings. Next Post - Herefordshire - "Land of Enchanting Beauty"

Consciousness - or is there anybody there?

    

This is Dave Chalmers  (much better without the barnet I think but would hate to trivialise this serious debate).

How do we explain consciousness?

Here is a link to a lively TED lecture that was the catalyst that brought this blog post together: 

How do you explain consciousness?

It's all about Consciousness in poetry, prose and philosophy.

First some poetry - this intricate little poem by American poet Joanie Mackowski gives an artist's view of human consciousness.

Consciousness

JOANIE MACKOWSKI

How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wander

the halls of the skull with the fluorescents

softly flickering. It rests on the head

like a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinsel

and awkward as soon as one stops to look.

That pile of fallen leaves drifting from

the brain to the fingertip burned on the stove,

to the grooves in that man’s voice

as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves

of books with moonlit opossums

and Chevrolets easing down the roads

of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single

tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet

itself is a swarm, a pulse with no

indigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo.

Our compacted galaxy, its constellations

trembling like flies caught in a spider web,

until we die, and then the flies

buzz away—while another accidental

coherence counts to three to pass the time

or notes the berries on the bittersweet vine

strewn in the spruces, red pebbles dropped

in the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself

like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds

a fraying map from the pocket of the day.

Source: Poetry (February 2012).

That's just how my brain seems some days - like a crazy birdsnest in my head, full of all sorts of bits and pieces, that sometimes manages to cradle my creativity.

And of course there was Wordsworth - 

Here's a short extract from his famous ode on immortality:

Ode On Intimations of Immortality

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;–
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

.............................

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

For many of us a couple of centuries later, immortality is not a belief that we can accept. 

Consciousness is still a great mystery of course but I have to concede that it probably relies on the brain in order to exist. I don't think that it can outlive death - but it's a fascinating idea to pursue.

I'd like to offer some quotations from recent books. The first by Denise Inge  is called "A Tour of Bones - Facing Fear and Looking for Life.  

" Contemplating mortality is not about being prepared to die, it is about being prepared to live."

The second from neurosurgeon Henry Marsh whose book "Do No Harm" has become a best-seller:

"I think most people realise that thought and consciousness are somehow produces by the brain, and that therefore they are in some way physical processes. This is completely at odds with our experience of our own consciousness which feels completely non-physical and quite different from the outside world. It is an extraordinary thought.

All human beings have a deep capacity for wonder, an awareness of how large the universe is and how small we are.  Religions are full of this sense of wonder and science is as well, even if it is constrained by the need to collect and analyse data scientifically as well as to dream and invent. I think many people share my amazement that our own brain, our own consciousness, is as wonderful and mysterious as the sky at night."

So back to the beginning and the inspirational Dave Chalmers

He says that we haven't really begun to explain consciousness or why we have it. Is it a fundamental building block ? Is it universal or "panpsychic"? I look forward to hearing some of the answers to these challenging questions.

In my consciousness today - February 19th

is the awareness that it is the Chinese New Year of the sheep.

February 19th also happens to be the date that my parents were married way back in 1944, 

The date that I moved from Warwickshire to Herefordshire in 1985

AND the date that I moved from England to Scotland in 2013 - so this is my second anniversary in beautiful Gamrie.

This seemingly significant date (for me) is probably just random chance - but my consciousness can't help but see patterns and attach meanings to such things.  Without consciousness there would be no sense of self; no capacity for creativity. It can make life seem wonderful if we stay awake to it.

The last word from Stephen Hawking:

"What puts the fire into the equations?"

Brains and Beauty

A trip to Auld Reekie or "The Athens of the North", depending on your point of view, brightened January.  

The city was looking a bit shabby I must confess - much digging up of the old and building up of the new.  But looking past that there were all sorts of compensations for being there in this dark month: no crowds, cheaper hotels and -

Turner in January at the NPG.  

There's a lovely story about the fanatical art collector Henry Vaughan who bequeathed his Turner watercolours to the nation with the stipulation that they only be displayed in January to protect them.   Edinburgh has a tradition of having an annual show of the Vaughan Turners each January.

It seems to me a piece of serendipity that the watercolours need the gloom and we need the light so everyone's happy. 
(Trivia - Vaughan also bequeathed Constable's The Hay Wain to the nation but that should probably  be displayed only in June as it's rather gloomy.) 

At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery  was an exhibition called Beauty by Design which examined fashions in beauty and provoked debate about body image and self-esteem. Fashions in beauty change as in everything else.   Currently in our culture it's extreme slenderness and youth (the 15-year-old female supermodel) and there are associated problems of anorexia and other disorders. The media sets very high and unrealistic standards of "beauty".   Meanwhile around the globe, millions of people have too little food; millions over-eat; and millions make themselves ill -and often much poorer - trying to look different.  

These ladies were thought to be the epitome of beauty (well not the respectable kind - they were probably courtesans) in 16th century Italy.  They wouldn't make the front cover of Vogue today.....

This headpiece was also part of the exhibition and like the black lace jackets was intricate and strangely beautiful in a timeless way. Pattern is as much about absence and space as it is about motif.
If these ideas interest you see more here:
Beauty by design SNPG

Keep young and beautiful ....
I will not be having a face-lift but I want to be able to lift my feet for as long as possible.  As we grow older it seems that the body becomes more demanding - so I intend to look after the bod as best I can and develop the brain on the "use it or lose it" principle. 

The jewel in the toad

I'm not saying that ageing is all about adversity but it can require extra fortitude! 


I've been thinking a lot about brains and skulls and trying to put a positive spin on ageing. The hardware and the software are so utterly different and completely complementary:

                                          For the Love of God - diamond encrusted skull by Damien Hirst 

Braincase

The skull I carry isn't jewelled

(a bit heavy-handed with the symbolism there Damien)

I know there’re no pockets in shrouds

And I can’t take it with me

I want less of it nowadays anyway

Diamante is good enough for me

A bit of everyday sparkle

Where was I?

Yes – that skull I carry

It’s just an imaginary one

But I drink from it from time to time

Remind myself to seize the day

Drink to absent friends

And turn back to the party

The Party

And it’s quite a party –

We’ve paid off the mortgage

The kids have left home

We retire with our pensions

Still able-bodied (well sort-of)

Free of the toad work

We build the meaning

For *T.S.E.  it was the church

But each to her own

And mine is being alive now

Life before death

Not just hanging on in there

Finding openings within

Expanding inside while the casing

Is getting flakier by the day

Using the brain for fear

Of losing it and reaching out

In all sorts of ways
  

*T.S.Eliot - "Choruses from The Rock"

Love

Do you know enough about love?

I am still learning about love

This is one meaning

Trying to love better

To accept better

To connect better

When one offers you a gift

Can you receive it?

Giving is the easy part

©sallygivertz2015

This picture was a gift to me from a loved one and I am giving it to you.  Who can fail to love a baby penguin?

January is nearly over and sunrise is getting earlier - something to celebrate.

 

Next blog will be more about brains I suspect and the Hard Question of consciousness.