Age, Art and Withering

The Coming of Wisdom with Time

(Published 1916)

Though leaves are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;

Now I may wither into the truth

  - W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

We learn today that David Bowie has released a new record after 10 years. I was never a fan in his earlier incarnations, though was aware of the effect he was having on the new wave of youth which I was already leaving behind at the time. And because his music is woven now into the fabric of the past 45 years, it is impossible to deny his brilliance, and the huge paradox of his revolutionary, esoteric art combined with his appeal to a huge mass audience.

I really like this song “Where are we now”, which is an honest exploration of how it is to start feeling older. The video with it is extraordinary. No vanity, much depth. I particularly like the images of Berlin in the late 1970s, where Bowie lived for 3 years.  I feel lucky to have had several trips there in the same era.  Didn’t see him though!

The announcement of Bowie’s  record was on BBC news in the morning. In the same programme they had Andrew Motion on to talk about a Poetry competition for teenagers. At the end of the interview, and weaving in an earlier comment about age and Bowie, he chose a Hardy poem, which I found I half-remembered as I had learnt it verbatim for my college exams.

I Look Into My Glass
(Published 1898)

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, "Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!"

For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
 - Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

No withering into the truth there, then.

Oddly enough, as part of the focus of past couple of days, on themes of growing older, I was looking at some poems of Yeats, including the short 4-liner above. This one seemed highly appropriate

An Acre Of Grass
(Published 1939)

Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

My temptation is quiet.
Here at life's end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.

Grant me an old man's frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;

A mind Michael Angelo knew

That can pierce the clouds, 

Or inspired by frenzy

Shake the dead in their shrouds;

Forgotten else by mankind, 

An old man's eagle mind.
   - W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

This was part of his “Last Poems”  written in 1939, the year of Yeats’ death, and 20 years after “The Coming of Wisdom with Time” (1919) . Here, rather than withering, he is calling out in his old age, to become like these raging figures of old, who “beat upon the wall” to get truth to show itself, so that he can express it, externalise it (in poetry).  for fear that his “eagle mind” is forgotten to posterity.

Random thoughts.

T. S. Eliot and Football Supporters

Dublin October 2012

A trip via North Wales to Dublin with friends from Swansea University days, included an extended visit to Ireland's National Gallery.  This gallery is intuitively laid out to take the visitor though the various eras of art history, all helpful.

Back this enjoyable weekend we were travelling on a train back from Bangor to Euston. At Milton Keynes, the carriages were suddenly invaded by crowds of football supporters heading for some London-based fixture. They were a boisterous, good-humoured lot, but the contrast between the peace of the earlier part of the trip, and the chaos we were now subjected to, was palpable.

Here is the set of words (somewhat more judgmental)  from TSEliot about the “Inner Voice”  They are from an Essay called “The Function of Criticism” and actually addresses the relative merits of an understanding of “Classical”  and “Romantic” in art and literature.  In this section, he focuses on the importance of “Tradition” to advance a civilisation via its literature  – the Classical mode,  as preferable to the Romantic mode which relies on reference to the self, the “inner voice”.

North Wales October 2012

“My belief is that those who possess this inner voice are ready enough to hearken to it, and will hear no other. The inner voice, in fact, sounds remarkably like an old principle which has been formalised by an elder critic in the now familiar phrase of “doing as one likes”. The possessors of the inner voice ride ten to a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear and lust.”

Thus the themes of our trip were joined, fragmentally, with Swansea and football hooligans!

Geological Time and Cigarette Papers

 Yesterday (one of those sunny September afternoons in clear light on shimmering flat sea and no breeze), Clare and I went  on a  Geology tour at West Runton beach  (Norfolk, twixt Sheringham and Cromer). It was led by a former curator of Cromer Museum, who was part of the group which discovered the Steppe Mammonth on this beach in the early 1990s.

He was excellent at explaining  the classification of Geological time since the Big Bang. He used the location to do so

We were standing on the concrete mooring platform at West Runton. From this mooring, our guide pointed to  Cromer Pier in the distance, some 2.5  miles away. His illustration went like this:

Cromer Pier from West Runton Beach

Imagine, he said, a timeline where the start is Cromer Pier representing the Big Bang, the start of our Universe. Then he pointed to a half centimetre crack at the edge of the concrete mooring upon which we were standing. At  some point in this crack, he said, would have occurred the latter stages of Pleistocene Epoch in the Cenozoic Era,  2.5 million – 12,000 years ago. The Holocene, our current Epoch in the Cenozoic Era, and the end of the timeline, would have been a fag-paper’s width within this crack....

Twelve thousand years and a fag-paper's width. A momentary perspective on our sense of what's important, our place in the scheme of things

Flag Fen

Britain’s ancient settlements, burial mounds and sites of ancient ritual are always attractive, enticing and enjoyable in their mysterious associations. The sense of mind activity in the ether (one way of putting it) is always a great driver for walks and visits to such sites. There are few such ancient sites where it is impossible not to feel some fallout from the buzz of a way of thinking and living which long preceded the scientific age.

Flag Fen, Towards Reconstructed Village

Recently, we came back from a visit to Flag Fen on the way back from Stratford-on-Avon. This is the site of Bronze age ( c 2500 BC and after) activity – a settlement of early farmers, who eventually (due to climate change, flooding etc)  built a 1 km causeway across a flooded plain, so as to continue inhabiting and managing the landscape.

Flag Fen - Old and New Crossings

This causeway eventually disappeared over time: so much so that the Romans built their own road about 100 yards parallel to it, not knowing the existence of a road already buried there from 1000 years previously. In recent times it has been rediscovered, after modern fenland draining.

Flag Fen - Original Timbers Preserved

Archaeology has unearthed many artefacts in the region, but especially large quantities of tools and personal items, deliberately broken and pegged down into the mud all along the causeway. These clearly were not “lost”, but deliberately offered up as a gift or sacrifice.

Real-world reflection - or a world beyond?

It is surmised that the rituals involved here, were emblematic of offerings to a world beyond the water. One can imagine the non-scientific mind and the  way it might interpret the rules of image reflection / refraction  in water. On the smooth surface appears a world in replica, populated by figures which move in time with the viewer. What world is this which lies beyond? What does it ask of me? Over time the answers are lost in mystery, but the gifts of precious objects are a witness to a very real conversation these minds were having.