Turkey: Cappaddocia – Near Goreme

 

 This spectacular landscape was relatively unknown to UK-based travellers in the early 1980s, when these pictures were taken. At the time, there were very few hotels, with tourism restricted by the extremely limited hospitality infrastructure. I was working with a company which was offering specialist art- and religious tours, attracting people who were interested particularly  in the huge underground cities in this area (esp. Derinkuyu to the south) and the many underground churches, richly decorated from as far back as the  10th  century and earlier.  There is beauty and edginess here in equal measure, as we think of whole populations disappearing underground in the event of threat.

As landscapes go, it is all breath-taking and other-worldly. These days, mass tourism has arrived ( mea minima culpa!) , and I would have to  go back knowing that the moments of wonder I experienced here in those visits is likely to be forever compromised. But I think I would be willing to give it a try.

Photos © David Betterton 1983

Image ©  https://www.goreme.com/goreme-open-air-museum.php 

Image ©  https://www.goreme.com/goreme-open-air-museum.php 

Image ©  https://www.goreme.com/goreme-open-air-museum.php 

The Church at Kilpeck: Random Observations

During a day on the Welsh borders near Hereford, I made a visit to the famous church at Kilpeck. A place I had visited before, the last time perhaps 20 years ago.

The church is dedicated to St Mary and St David – although this St David a local St David and is not the patron saint of Wales. The church at Kilpeck is quite fascinating. To my mind, this church deserves absolutely, the obvious attention it has enjoyed over time. It repays repeat visits. I do not think any similar example exists anywhere in the UK of a church with such an extraordinary mix of Celtic, Saxon and Viking art all vying for a place in the visitor's imagination.

Rooted even further into the past, there is an example of the Manticore, a mythical beast out of Persia, via India, brought to northern latitudes by the Celts over time. It is a beast with the head of a man and the body of a lion, and momentarily I wondered whether W.B.Yeats thought of the Manticore when in his poem "The Second Coming" he writes:

             somewhere in sands of the desert  

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  

Is moving its slow thighs,

The Manticore

Some discussion of this can be found  here .

The South Door with Tympanum

The Marticore sits broodingly on the left-hand pillar of the exquisitely-framed entrance to the church, amidst a plethora of exotic iconography. These carvings derive from the Herefordshire school of sculpture, a 12th Century group of artisans, whose work is visible in several other churches nearby. Despite its overtly religious nature, Herefordshire School work also has a playful, occasionally bawdy approach.

The motifs – no less than 89 corbels - which populate the four sides of the church are a fascinating example of this art, and they have attracted debate, intrigue and deep interest over time. Here are a few samples:

Lovers or Wrestlers?

A Pig with Protruding Tongue?

Hound ( intelligent and loyal) and 
Hare (representing faith in God and not the self)

Much has been written about these images, and the official website of Kilpeck church is a mine of information and detail, with a downloadable guided tour. Full details are here  

Corbel No 28: The Sheela Na Gig

In general terms the presence of the Sheela Na Gig in church architecture attracts, one could argue, more than its fair share of comment. For me, two fragments grabbed my attention, in the set of brochures and other literature laid out for visitors. 

The first one was the reproduction of a letter from a Mary Rose O’Reilly PhD of the University of St Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. I make no further comment, but record only a recognition of a valid interpretation. After all, what do we really know? She writes:

 “a number of scholars and researching comparative iconography in (especially)  Ukrainian and Central American weaving and needlework are inclined to relate the Sheela figure to a recurrent symbol of women giving birth. (Ukrainian girls until recent years embroidered a similar figure on long draperies which were part of their trousseau – drapes which were held onto by a woman during childbirth). The figure represents, then, not fertility in the lascivious aspect, but a patroness of women seeking an open womb, an easy delivery. P.S. I add this for whatever corrective it may be to the male view that the figure has to do with women vis a vis men, whereas more likely its significance was entirely within women’s culture".

The second fragment was this, from an older brochure describing the corbels.

[A female exhibitionist  goddess (Sheela-na-gig) with huge bald head, puny diminutive body and long arms which pass behind the legs to open the grossly beautifully enlarged vulva (Fig 78) . This represents low morals. female creative power ]

Indeed, more power to that person who made these revisions, one might say.

Encounter Near Cefn Coed : A Memory

This picture by Van Gogh, painted in 1890, two months before his death, appeared in the recent (May 2019) Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain. It is called “At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man” and was made in the institution at St. Remy de Provence. 

At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man

At the exhibition, it appeared below a paraphrased quotation by the artist, written in 1880. The paraphrased quotation  was:

“You may not always be able to say what it is that confines you and yet you feel I know not what bars … and then you ask yourself Dear God, is this for long? Is this forever? Is this for eternity?”

The word “bars” triggered in me a memory of a ditty I wrote 45-odd years ago now, where the word “bars” also appears. The ditty follows below.

Encounter Near Cefyn Coed

Cefn Coed Hospital is a mental health facility in the Sketty area of Swansea, Wales. It is currently managed by the Swansea Bay University Health Board.

A man was a joker and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger, alone
He asked, in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
For a hint of the secrets he’d known

He should have been wiser, but nevertheless
His mind was the kind that would roam
The reason was hard, it was everyone’s guess
He’d not come from a broken up home

“Won’t you tell me, my friend” he said as he stopped
“What you’re doing out here in the night?
And can you explain why your hair is all cropped
And your coat isn’t buttoned up right?”

“It’s not easy for me,” the other replied
“To show you the place I have been
All my life I have tried, to finish the ride
On an endless and circular dream

I was born in a pain, as I think, I don’t know
I cannot remember so well.
These strange things you see I had hoped would not show
They belong to another, you can tell?

Now I amble alone all over the earth
Though my wisdom would reach for the stars;
And all because of a difficult birth
Which has put my whole world behind bars.”

A man was a joker, and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger alone
He learned in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
How secrets are a burden, once known

Swansea: May 1973

The Rhapsody of Time Passing

Today I thought about time measured objectively by a watch or clock, and the uncertainty behind the act of observing the device. , I always marvelled at that strange experience of looking at a wrist watch, and how the second hand briefly appears to go into reverse when we check  for the time. A common experience I think, but with much to educate us on how our physiology is not always giving us the right - or rather, any consistent - conduits to reality.

An approach to the problem is to consider this: if the arrow of time moves from past to future in units of days, hours, seconds, nanoseconds and so on, is there any smallest unit beyond which time can be divided no further? And if there is such a smallest unit, does the essence of time consist in the flicking by of such units like the beads on some vast cosmic abacus? (This image, and this idea is entirely lifted from the remarks of a good friend with whom I discussed the subject).

And if time proceeds thus – as my friend pointed out - then two big questions arise: What happens within the units? and what happens between the units?   That moment between the decision to observe the time, and to consciously identify its measure, is a place where it is possible to believe in a dimension which is outside of both time itself, and is indecipherable by the time-bound mind of the individual.

Some of these thoughts have been prompted through a recent reading of a new critique of T.S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night”. This poem is the one which describes an arc of time in which a flâneur is wandering the streets with an ostensible purpose: to get to his numbered apartment at the end of his wandering. 

On the way, we are given time checks.  But we are also given a stream of unconscious memories filtering and surfacing in his mind. The poem sets up a juxtaposition on the one hand between objective moments - " 12 o'clock ", "half-past one", etc: and on the other hand a subjective flow of memories which by definition are elastic, qualitative, time-indeterminate, coming from, as it were, "nowhere". And so also a juxtaposition of "habit" and "dreams" where time has two (at least) separate qualities. 

I learnt from reading Jewel Spears Brooker's 2018 critique on Eliot, that Eliot wrote the poem after becoming disillusioned with the teachings of Bergson, whom he briefly championed, and whose lectures he attended in 1910/11 in Paris. The tension between pure consciousness and the challenges of a time-bound, time-dictated existence is palpable in these lines at the end of the poem.

      The bed is open; the toothbrush hangs on the wall,
      Put your shoes by the door, sleep, prepare for life.

      The last twist of the knife.

Bergson’s lectures in Paris in 1910–11 featured a concept of ‘pure duration’, contrasting it with the rigid demarcations of the clock. In ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, written in 1911, the clock time is announced at regular intervals and again, there is a tension and a discrepancy between those objective markers of time and the speaker’s experience of pure duration in these lines:

     Twelve o’clock.
     Along the reaches of the street
     Held in a lunar synthesis,
     Whispering lunar incantations
     Dissolve the floors of memory
     And all its clear relations
     Its divisions and precisions,
     Every streetlamp that I pass
     Beats like a fatalistic drum  

The progress of time through the deep of night drives Eliot’s speaker forward like a ‘fatalistic drum’, through ‘Half-past one’, ‘Half-past two’, ‘Half-past three’ and finally ‘Four o’clock’.

By contrast, the speaker’s consciousness points backwards, as every new thing he encounters takes him back though linked associations, to painful, difficult or banal memories. 


For Eliot, in this poem, the ‘divisions and precisions’ of the clock, its ‘clear relations’, conflict with a human consciousness which can only exist from retrospective constructs, insulated against fresh experiences by a time-bound crust of memory. No “pure duration” here. 

Bergson’s optimism that this artificial construct of clock-time, or time as an arrow, could be cauterised and dissolved in the experience of pure duration, is refuted in Eliot’s rhapsody. There is a much more pessimistic reality here, with the speaker’s thoughts ushering him robotically and despairingly forward, with no sense of a dimension where a creative peace might exist.