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.

Raphael: Massacre of the Innocents

 Coincidentally, the day before the 100th anniversary of Paschedale, we visited the exhibition of drawings by Raphael at the Ashmolean Museum. These cartoons were well-described by experts who now know in great depth, how they emerged from various iterations on the paper by use of electronic screening and scanning processes.

Raphael: Massacre of the Innocents

Most affecting for me in terms of subject matter was No 70: a line drawing of "Massacre of the Innocents", the subject being the attempt by Herod to destroy all the male children in Bethlehem in an attempt to destroy the infant Jesus. The image had sharply defined short lines building up to the shapes of limbs, hands, arms and a composition of dramatic action which defied easy analysis. Simply speaking, a stark build-up of an emotional drama, made more vivid by the sense of an event encapsulated in a scratched-out moment of incompleteness, snatched out from a moment in time.

From the exhibition description: A woman is running towards us, mouth open in a scream, a baby cradled in her arms. The violence around her seems to part and give passage through the slaughter. What the open pathway through the heart of the horror really gives however, is a heartbreaking visual connection between our eyes and her pain. To look into that terrified face is to feel the full pity of her plight. It is impossible not to be gripped by an overwhelming compassion.

Paschendale Remembered: July 29th 2017

New every morning is the Love.
Paschendale remembered in the News:
It has been a hundred years since, but
There is the danger of the flaccid mind
As if those horrors were left behind.
Tell this to the people of Mosul,
Tell this to the people of Yemen.
Let us not be fed with too-comfortable methodologies
To tickle the sentimental core.
                                                                  - DB July 2017