Livby

War Wounds

2008-04-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

I studied this poem at school, and yet it didn't ruin for me its painful beauty. The literary genius of the alliteration, metaphor, oddly chosen adverbs and adjectives, the clever use of simile, anaphora, the rhyme scheme: all this is eclipsed by the strong images the poem conjures up, the`picture of young men fighting their way through the gas attack in pain and fear and desperation, which hasn't left my mind to this day. Add to this unutterable personal tragedy: Wilfred Owen was killed in battle a week before the end of the war, so that news of his death reached his village the day the end of the war was declared. A masterpiece.

Dulce Et Decorum Est: Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in.
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

A Bit of Art in the Mix

2008-04-16T01:40:00.001-07:00

Musee des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
1940

Wear Sunscreen - Mary Schmich

2008-04-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

A poem or not a poem? Plenty of people would disagree, but to me it is exactly what a poem should be like: carefully put together, with plently of thought to the sound of the words, the scansion of the phrases, epanalepsis etc. And with an interesting message, amusingly written. And if anyone (who has a blog, for instance!), wants to write their own version of this, as I was thinking I might (if it wasn't for the excessive yet necessary revision Im meant to be doing...) then I would be most interested!

Wear Sunscreen - Mary Schmich

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of '97... wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be IT.

The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.

You are NOT as fat as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts, don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.
Don't waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium.

Be kind to your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't, maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't, maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself, either. Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's. Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

Dance. Even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.

Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents, you never know when they'll be gone for good.

Be nice to your siblings; they are your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography in lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.
Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old, and when you do you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse; but you never know when either one might run out.

Don't mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're 40, it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

A Bit of Stargazing

2008-04-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

I recited this to my friends and our tourguides in the desert, when we were standing under the most awesome and incredible sky of stars you have ever seen. So immense you felt overwhelmed. I think if I could give someone all the stars that would be the greatest present in the Universe.

He wishes for the cloths of heaven-William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

Sonnet 130

2008-04-13T07:24:00.000-07:00

Today ladies and gentlemen, some Shakespeare for a change. This is the most beautiful sonnet which combines realism and sarcasm with genuine emotion.

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Aubade, Philip Larkin

2008-04-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

Aubade-Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

A Valediction: Of Weeping

2008-04-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

I promised Ben some Donne on here, and this is my favourite Donne poem of all. Such a mish-mash of imagery and conceits and yet somehow, for me, it works. I like the idea of her face reflected in his tears being a whole world, a globe because it is a sphere and also metaphorically his whole world. Enjoy.

A Valediction: Of Weeping - John Donne

LET me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth.
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee ;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more ;
When a tear falls, that thou fall'st which it bore ;
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.

On a round ball
A workman, that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all.
So doth each tear,
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mix'd with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolvèd so.

O ! more than moon,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere ;
Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea, what it may do too soon ;
Let not the wind
Example find
To do me more harm than it purposeth :
Since thou and I sigh one another's breath,
Whoe'er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other's death.

The Piano

2008-04-09T01:28:00.000-07:00

I set this poem to music for my GCSE, I think it's gorgeous. I have lot of memories like this, of waking up to beautiful piano music, and sometimes a particular piece will just set me off on a path down the years.

PIANO
By D.H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

2008-04-08T04:35:00.001-07:00

Another favourite. Again, a nice segue from the descriptive to the comntemplative. I like it when poems broaden their scope like that, but not in too obvious a way. I always remember the line "When the little I knew was less limited than now" as well. So contradictory but true.

Armada, Brian Patten

Long, long ago
when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now,
I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond
and to the far bank launched a child’s armada.
A broken fortress of twigs,
the paper-tissue sails of galleons,
the waterlogged branches of submarines -
all came to ruin and were on flame
in that dusk-red pond.
And you, mother, stood behind me,
impatient to be going,
old at twenty-three, alone,
thin overcoat flapping.
How closely the past shadows us.
In a hospital a mile or so from that pond
I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes,
reach out across forty years to touch once more
that pond’s cool surface,
and it is your cool skin I’m touching;
for as on a pond a child’s paper boat
was blown out of reach
by the smallest gust of wind,
so too have you been blown out of reach
by the smallest whisper of death,
and a childhood memory is sharpened,
and the heart burns as that armada burnt,
long, long ago.

Snow

2008-04-06T02:23:00.000-07:00

My favourite poem ever, and nicely topical for this whitewashed surprise of a day. By the way, any ideas about why the snow outside my window has completely covered the grass, trees, cars etc. but the road has remained, not only snow-free, but wet and warm-looking, with unfrozen puddles scattered about? Most peculiar. The roads haven't even been gritted.

Louis MacNiece - Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

For Ben - poetry lesson

2008-04-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favourite poems in the world, I think its imagery and the segue between the descriptive and the contemplative is just stunning.

Clouds, Rupert Brooke

Down the blue night the unending columns press
In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,
Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow
Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness.
Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,
And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,
As who would pray good for the world, but know
Their benediction empty as they bless.

They say that the Dead die not, but remain
Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,
In wise majestic melancholy train,
And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,
And men, coming and going on the earth.

Might start updating

2008-03-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

Having been bullied into it by Ben, I might just start updating this blog, maybe even when I'm in Morocco. On the other hand, I might just tell him I'm going to update it and then never write anything, hence forcing him to check for nothing every day. Am I that cruel? We'll have to wait and see...

Secrets of Berlin

2006-01-18T06:22:00.000-08:00

When I first came to Berlin, I was expecting a city full of guilty secrets. The one time capital of the Third Reich, the guilt of the holocaust and the butchery of Hitler’s regime must weigh heavily on Berlin. In addition, the collapse of the Soviet Regime with its omniscient network of Stasi spies feels alarmingly recent. It cannot be banished into the distant past as other shady aspects of Berlin’s history may be since most of the people of working age in Berlin today will remember the regime. They lived for a large portion of their lives under its shadow, and the legacy of these years remains apparent today. How could a city recover from such a dreadful past without trying, albeit subconsciously, to banish all memory of them? Before I came here I kept thinking of the Fawlty Towers sketch with the punch line ‘Don’t mention the war’, (which was, in fact, all anyone said to me when I told them I was moving to Germany.)

When I reached Berlin, it slowly dawned on me that what had happened was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. Rather than trying to suppress memories of the past, Berliners had filled their city full of reminders of the Second World War and the Hitler regime, the Holocaust and the allied occupation of Germany. Right in the centre of Berlin, the newly opened Holocaust Memorial is a vast disorienting forest of concrete pillars. They appear from the surface to be all approximately the same height, but in reality the ground at the base of each tower rises or dips in a disconcertingly unpredictable manner. Before you are really aware of it, the memorial swallows you up and you are gaping at the tiny window of sky at the top of tree sized pillars. In a basement underneath this extraordinary monument is a museum to the holocaust. As if this vast memorial is not enough, dozens of museums dedicated to every aspect of the war and the Third Reich have sprung up all over Berlin, documenting in precise and horrifying detail the crimes of those years. There is no suggestion of hiding the horrors or relegating them to low priority in history museums around Berlin: Berliners face their history squarely and with an almost desperate sense that the horror must be documented to prevent any reprisal of such things. The Jewish Museum, with its eerie artwork dedicated to the holocaust victims and its ‘garden of exile’ dedicated to the Jews exiled from Berlin is billed as one of the main tourist attractions in Berlin: Berliners want their sense of shame about their past to be made known to visitors from all over the world. Even the new Reichstag dome was designed transparent to indicate the transparency of the proceedings inside: a constant reminder of the appalling secret decisions made inside the original building, reinforced by the exhibition inside the dome of photographs of the Third Reich inside the Reichstag.

Museums and memorials to the Berlin wall have similar attitude: the wall must never be forgotten. In addition to the huge museum at Checkpoint Charlie on the border between West and East, stretches of wall around the city act as memorials to those who died crossing them, galleries to express the hope for peace and unity in the future, and starting points for information about the divided Germany. There is even a museum dedicated to the Stasi, revealing in all its sickening detail the extent of their monitoring of the German population. Every German citizen has the right to look at their own records, hence breaking down the walls of secrecy which had been erected around the government during Communist rule.

Everyone in Berlin seems almost desperate to talk about its shameful past. Quite contrary to my expectations, I found myself mentioning the war time and again with my new German friends and hearing their opinions on this subject and any other aspect of German history. The young people of Berlin seem highly educated in their own history and eager to discuss it, not to excuse it but to understand why it happened.

Does this make Berlin a depressing city, wallowing in its own grimy history? Not one bit. Although the crimes of the Nazi and Communist regimes don’t make for easy reading, Berlin is a city looking forward. The great thing about an ending is that it also represents a new beginning, and to Berliners the end of the Communist regime has meant just that: a chance to finally build Berlin into whatever kind of place they want it to be. Unhampered by the restrictions of oppressive regimes, Berlin is finally being given its belated adolescence. And this is very much the feeling which Berlin gives; a teenage city, choosing what it wants to be and a little unsure of itself.

Far from hiding guilty secrets, the secrets which Berlin hides are its private gems, the creative attempts to build up a fascinating cultural centre from the ruins of a divided, broken wasteland. After the fall of the wall, East Berlin revealed itself as still wounded from the war. Museums were still riddled with bullet holes, great tracts of land remained undeveloped and bombed out buildings remained, still standing (just) on many East Berlin roads. After 1989, many businesses found themselves forced to close due to fierce competition from the West.

It didn’t take Berlin long to find its feet. Within months clubs were springing up in these deserted factory buildings, bars in the basement of bombed out buildings. One of the most famous communities of modern artists in Berlin is that which occupies the former brewery Tacheles, which went from being a small hidden community to a large and popular venue for concerts and art exhibitions and contains a warren of studios for private artists. Since I’ve been living in Berlin, I have been to a party where we had to cross an outlet canal on stepping stones to reach a deserted factory where the party was held, I have wandered down a tiny alley behind a posh shopping centre to find an art gallery exhibiting sculptures made out of scrap metal on the third floor of a dusty building covered in shrapnel scars, I have sipped at a beer on a bar on a beach beside the river, sitting on imported sand and watching the plastic chandeliers swing eerily in the trees, and I have eaten at a café in the basement of a building overgrown with greenery but with a pockmarked shrapnel façade. Best of all, I have spent an amazing night in a club housed in a defunct brewery. Entry is through a small kindergarten, complete with clown wallpaper and tiny plastic chairs, after which we crossed a large grassy parking lot and entered the brewery, descended four deep stories and found ourselves in an extraordinary vaulted warehouse, lit in striking blue and red. The techno music, coupled with the vast underground secrecy of the place (the kindergarten could only be accessed up a steep, pathless, wooded hill, devoid of all signposts) gave the whole evening an air of the excitement of being ‘in the know’ about such places. Apparently shortly after the wall came down, such places existed but only illegally and they were forced to constantly change location. Nowadays, the clubs are mostly legal but retain these amazing, hidden venues.

So the secrets of Berlin, I have discovered, are not the painful stories of its dubious past but the hidden signs of the tentative awakenings of a culture which has everything to hope for, which is not afraid to confront its mistakes but can create a new, vibrant society out of the ruins of the past. Rather than the infamous eagle adopted by the Third Reich, the symbol of Berlin should be a phoenix, rising out of the ashes, as Berlin has done. From the secret bars and beaches, art galleries and studios, to the jubilant graffiti reclaiming a city which now belongs fully to her people, Berlin is showing signs of growing up, experimenting with its identity and having a damn good party in the meantime.

Where big boys come to get their buns

2005-12-15T01:21:00.000-08:00

Our favourite inappropriately named bakery - check out the butt shaped logo!!

My Kind of Church - the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

2005-12-08T00:41:00.000-08:00

The Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. A gleaming wonder of white walls. Wide, open plan rooms. A string quartet softly playing in one wing, a flute concet in another and at some point, the lilting strains of a soprano. There is something utterly calm and peaceful about an art gallery; people taking time out of their busy lives just to sit and look at the paintings. The paintings in the Gemäldegalerie stretch from the Medieval era through to the 18th Century, leaving the 19th Century and beyond for the Neue Nationalgalerie next door. The Medieval paintings, from the dark ages of the last millenia, mostly depict grim religious scenes or two dimensional faces leafed in gold, but the real gems in the collection appear after the Middle Ages, and especially in the Dutch paintings at the back of the gallery. The collection includes a plethora of famous artists: works by Dürer, Titian, Vermeer, Velasquez, Canaletto, Gainsborough and Rembrandt gaze at us from the walls, so recognisable and yet such a shock in reality. I always feel moved when I see great art, and especially famous art. The the faces which have felt so familiar, and the compositions which are lodged somewhere deep in our consciousnesses greet us like old friends, at the same time as they shock us afresh with their mastery. The paintings really speak to me. The eyes of Dürer's old man look questioningly, suspiciously towards me; Susanna (below) is embarrassed to be caught getting out of the bath, but also flirtatiously proud of her gleaming, naked body, and the couple in Vermeer's masterpiece (above left) carry on their modest courting blissfully oblivious to the myriad eyes boring down on them from the gallery floor. It is strangely moving to recognise the inescapable humanity of these characters. The artists did not just paint from models or puppets, but from life. We see the emotion of the characters and recognise it as the same we possess. As I wander around the gallery, I recognise more and more that people have been the same since time began. Although we are separated by hundreds of years, I am being given the privilege of staring into the emotional lives of the subjects of these paintings.
The gallery also brought home to the the genius of the artists we now consider to be "great" The paintings of Rembrandt glow with an inner light, his characters resonate with emotion and thought. We picked his paintings out of all those on the gallery walls, without knowing the artist. Vermeer's clean lines and the telling body language of his characters surpass all his imitators: when coupled with his unerring colour sense and his use of rich textiles his painting actually made me gasp when I saw it hanging. The Gemäldegalerie is perhaps the closest I will ever come to knowing what philosphers mean by the sublime: I felt inspired, awed by the acheivements of men, and moved by the realisation that man is unchanging throughout the centuries, strong and weak in equal measure. I also realised that for me, the art gallery is my church. I have no belief in God or the soul, I don't think my body will carry on after I die and I disagree strongly with the ethics of organised religion. Nevertheless, churches have always given me a feeling of peace. This may be becuase a church is a place where people come to be still and quiet, to reflect and to pause, just as an art gallery is. It may be becuase a church is usually a huge building, full of beautiful art and objects, just as an art gallery is. I also love the sense of history, of the years stretching back until we can see into the past, which I feel in art galleries just as much as churches. The gallery is open late on Thursday nights, and I think next Thursday I will relish wandering through the whitewashed rooms, alive with faces from history watching me out of the corners of their eyes.

Judging the Quick (and the Dead)

2005-12-07T02:39:00.000-08:00

"Never judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins" Native American Proverb

I have been thinking a lot lately about whether it is possible to make any kind of moral judgement about anyone. This is partly because Hen has been filling me in on the delights of genetics, which suggests that our characters are in part formed through our genes. It is also partly because I have been reading Rabbi Marc Gellman's column in Newsweek. This has led me to think a bit about God, heaven and hell, and the way in which God purportedly comes to judge the living and the dead and section us off into good and bad, lucky sheep and unfortunate goats. This has always seemed to me an unfortunate analogy: goats cannot help being goats, and in the same way, sheep are not really responsible for their innate sheepish nature. Goats are wild and free becuase they are made that way, and sheep follow a shepherd (or one another) because it is in their nature to do so.

It seems to me, that people are not really so different from these sheep and goats. Each person is a product of his genetic make-up, which he cannot change, a product of his upbringing and history (i.e. nurture), which he also cannot change, and a product of his circumstances, which are again usually beyond his control. These factors combine in many different ratios to produce a finished person with a certain character - a propensity for anger, a compassionate nature, or a tendency to give up easily, for example. In order to suggest that a person has any "free will" or ability to combat these influential factors, we need to posit a self-determined force, an individual spirit independent of nature, nurture and circumstance.

This is getting quite philosophical, so let me give an example. Take, for instance, a jobless man. His lack of a job may be put down to laziness. There are obviously many other reasons why he might be unemployed, but let's keep it simple for now. Why might he be lazy? Firstly, he might have laziness inbuilt in his genes- his father and grandfather were lazy, he has inherited their laziness. Is this his fault? Could he overcome it? Perhaps, if he was sufficiently taught by, for instance, his mother, how to overcome his laziness. If he didn't have a helpful mother, however, is this his fault? He could not change his upbringing but perhaps he could find a mentor elsewhere, in the form of a teacher or friend? This is down to chance or circumstance, and is again, not his fault.

Are we, then, never to be blamed for our actions? Is there not a spark of individuality in each of us which can be held responsible for everything which we choose to do? Can an angry man teach himself to be calmer, or a lazy man force himself to struggle out of his inertia? Perhaps, but if his ability to do this is not inbuilt into his genes or taught him at some stage in his life then where does it come from? From that inner voice which urges us to do better, the conscience which pushes us away from bad deeds and towards good ones? And is this not taught us at some point in life, through our parents or our teachers or the media? Is our access to these influences not also governed by luck?

I find these questions very difficult to answer, and the answer I always come to is the same: we are all products of chance, and our luck is assigned to us by fate, leaving us almost powerless to change it. This doesn't mean I will stop trying to be a better person, or that I will encourage people not to try to better themselves. It does mean, however, that at the end of the day, we are stuck with our genetically created, impressionable, bodies and our free will is limited, if not non existent.

I do not believe in a soul, but perhaps if I did, this would answer the problem - God's gift to us of free will allows us to create our own destiny. Even if this was my belief, however, I think i would find it a bit difficult to accept that I had total free will - when I couldn't help bursting into tears, for example, or saw a kid who lacked the self-control to be quiet in class because he had never been taught to listen. If God really sorts the sheep from the goats on the last day, I think this is grossly unfair. Since God knew exactly how each human being would turn out, he deliberately created some sheep and some goats; some bad and some good humans; and condemned the goats to hell before he even put them on earth.

I think the North American proverb is very apt - we can never judge another person until we have actually inhabited their mental space. If I had the same genetic makeup, upbringing and life as Hitler, who is to say I wouldn't do exactly the same as he did. And as God's own son told us,

first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye

One cake too many??

2005-12-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

Me: I've got fat, haven't I?

Hen: What particular part of your chubbiness are you referring to?

Way to make me feel better hunny.....

March of the Affectionate (but not spiritually aware) Penguins

2005-12-06T01:28:00.000-08:00

Zrenneh on his post 'The March of the Penguins' discussed Rabbi Marc Gellman's article,'The March of the Loving Penguins'. In his article, Gellman debated the ability of penguins to love, and came to the conclusion that although penguins were able to exhibit animal lust and self-sacrifice, they could not actually fall in love. This post is an extension to Zrenneh's counter argument.

Rabbi Gellman's argument has one major flaw. In arguing that penguins cannot experience love, he fails to define the word 'love', hence making his claim impossible to support.

Love is clearly a very difficult concept to pin down to a single definition, but in order for language to be meaningful, a broad agreement on the meaning of the individual words needs to be reached. The Merriam Webster online dictionary gives many ,meanings for the word, but the primary definition of the verb 'to love' is:

1 a (1) : strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties (maternal love for a child)
(2) : attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers
(3) : affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests

In 'The March of the Penguins', the penguins demonstrate all three of these forms of love:
(1) Strong affection based on close personal ties: the mother for the child (evidenced by her selfless nurturing of it), the penguinfor its partner (evidenced by the penguins' cooperation and the personal depravation endured for one another's benefit).
(2) Attraction based on sexual desire: although we may argue that this is only instinctive animal lust, such instinctive animal lust accounts for a great many human sexual encounters and is a large part of the human, as well as the animal, genetic make-up.
(3) Affection based on common interests, i.e. that of looking after their child. The cooperation exhibited by the penguins could teach many modern parents the benefits of working towards a common goal in harmony rather than in conflict.

Rabbi Gellman's only attempt at justifying his rejection of the concept of penguin love is the following:

"Penguins don't plight their troth to one another for fish or no fish, for colder or really colder, for seas full of krill or seas full of leopard seals."

What he appears to be suggesting here, is that love is not really love unless it is everlasting and able to surmount all obstacles. This is manifestly not the case, not only for penguins but also for humans. Literature has taught us that the greatest loves may only be temporary: Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Rhett Butler are proofs that it is just as easy to fall out of love as it is to fall in love. In addition, rising divorce rates in the Western world indicate just how many people declare their love to be everlasting, only to discover that it is not. Very few people suggest that this calls into question the validity of the emotion in the first place.

Perhaps Rabbi Gellman's real problem with the concept of penguins falling in love arises, not out of their lack of eternal committment to one another, but from their inability to love an abstract being, that is, God. As a Jew, Gellman focuses throughout his article on the unique ability of humankind to love. Perhaps it is this abstract, spiritual love which is lacking in penguins and leads Gellman to abandon altogether the notion of penguin love. Whatever Gellman's reasoning, it is clear that, although there are possibly several types of love which penguins probably do not experience, there are also many types (illustrated by the Merriam Webster definitions) which penguins do demonstrate. To say that 'The March of the Penguins' is a story about love is a fair summary. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning so neatly pointed out, there are many different ways to exhibit love, and the penguins on the icy wastelands of Antarctica certainly seem adept at exhibiting many of these.

Chef extraordinaire: honey mustard chicken with creme fraiche mashed potatoes

2005-11-30T00:44:00.000-08:00

I have always loved food, and often dreamt about being a chef when I was younger - I still think it is something I would love to do. I have always dreamt about staring a catering business from home, creating beautiful gourmet meals for dinner parties and cocktail parties - canapés are such a delight to cook but so time consuming that they can only be made very infrequently, for a very special occasion.

During my time at University, I worked for a staffing organisation, waitressing at high profile events and experiencing the catering styles of many different catering companies. My favourite was Rhubarb Food Design , who inspired me in my catering ambitions with their stunning creations, exquisitely presented as works of art (hence the "design" in the title). Rhubarb's food wasn't overly pretentious, unnecessarily pretentious or ridiculously miniscule. On the contrary, the portions they served were large, the food wholesome and delicious, and often some of the dishes they served were just old favourites, presented in an unusual way. One of their specialities which I was particularly fond of sneakily sampling was "bowl food": this came into play at a canapé party held on a weekday evening, when tiny canapes would not satisfy the hunger of the overworked executives attending. It involved reasonably sized bowls filled with a meal in miniature; shepherd's pie, bangers and mash, fish and chips, cauliflower cheese; exquisitely presented and cooked and a big hit with all the guests.

This gave Henry and I the idea of starting a "real food restaurant", a place which cooked traditional or original simple, tasty, hearty snacks, in reassuringly large portions, and cooked to absolute perfection. We had a few ideas for the menu:

Corned beef hash
Shepherd's pie
Tuna pasta bake
Steak and chips
Risotto (of the day?)
Irish stew

Any more ideas, anyone? Although this kind of thing can be found in most good British pubs, we wanted a gourmet restaurant to cook them beautifully, with as much care as they would take over any more pretensious dish.

To spur on our creativity, each week, it is either my turn or Henry's to come up with an original surprise meal. Henry's meal was grilled aubergine with feta cheese and grated carrot last week, which was superb, really delicious. I had problems being totally original with mine this week, but it was very tasty: here is the recipe! For two, you'll need:

2/3 carrots
1 courgette
2 chicken breasts
Olive oil
Two large teaspoons of wholegrain mustard
A large dollop of clear honey (about as much honey as mustard)
6/7 potatoes (depending on how hungry you are!)
1 small pot creme fraiche

Peel the potatoes, cut them into thin slices and set them to boil.
Julienne the courgettes and carrots
Heat up a generous amount of olive oil in a pan and chuck in the vegetables
Fry these lightly
Meanwhile, slice the chicken into strips
Mix together the honey and mustard in a bowl and dunk the chicken in it; roll the chicken around in the mixture until thoroughly coated
Heat up a little oil in a new pan and fry the chicken and all remaining sauce until fully cooked
Drain and mash the potatoes with the créme fraiche and a little honey.
Serve the mashed potato in a ring around the edge of the plate, with the chicken resting on the vegetables in the middle. Enjoy!

Snow

2005-11-29T02:44:00.000-08:00

Berlin is covered with a thin sprinkling of snow, scattered over the compacted, frozen ground and crunchy, icy grass. I love the way the snow squeaks as you tread on it, I love the way it traces the outline of the trees, giving them a second silhouette, the purer negative of the dark branches, and I love the way it dissolves almost as soon as it is touched, like a butterfly caught in your hand. We have already witnessed many different types of snowfall - the flat, feathery flakes floating though the air, thick with the promise of settling and laced with an intricate network of ice; the tiny, powdery shiver of snow which looks like icing sugar pouring down through a sieve; the small flakes bashing against the window, propelled through the air by the wind so they look like a swarm of midges attacking; and the driving rain of snow which leaves you bitterly cold and drenched to the skin.

On Saturday we wandered through the Tiergarten, listening to the silence which comes when a blanket of snow muffles the earth. We threw snowballs at the frozen lake (and each other); we stomped around making big footprints and we watched the sun sink lower and lower in the sky and glow peacefully through the snowy trees. I was reminded of Gustav Fjaestad's calm, snowbound paintings, and also of my favourite poem ever: Snow by Louis MacNeice:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's
hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

I think this is a most incredible poem - it conveys so much in such a short space. The silence and menacing beauty of a world covered in snow comes across in the first stanza, especially the way snow is always such a shock when you look out of the window. The colours of the pink roses and the white snow, followed in the second verse by the bright gold of the tangerine paints a vibrant picture, composed almost like an impressionist painting by someone like Cailbotte: bay window with snow and pink roses, tangerine, and then in the last verse, the roaring red gold of the fire.

I love the idea of the 'drunkenness of things being various' - we are constantly bombarded by our senses until we are brimful of powerful impressions, and this is exactly what MacNiece intends to convey. He gives us the silence of the snow and the bubbling of the fire, the sight of the snow and the roses, the taste and smell of the tangerine and the toasty warmth of the fire. He draws these together in a list at the end of the poem, drawing our attention to the richness of our senses. In addition, with the word 'spiteful', he sets us slightly on edge - is the snow beautiful or malicious as well? The bubbling fire sounds like an alchemist, intent at his evil work, but it is not only spiteful but also gay. Is this another occasion of the intoxicating variety of the world, like the threatening beauty of the snow or the sinister yet comforting warmth of the fire? I have never fully understood the last line (any ideas?) but I will say that the final image of snow and huge roses, separated from the viewer by glass, finally frames the central image of the poem like a picture and allows us to watch the snow (and the "huge" roses) from the inside. We are sheltered from the snow, but we are not protected from the spiteful, gay fire.

Gissing - a neglected genius

2005-11-25T10:20:00.001-08:00

George Gissing: A man I had never heard of until I started my English degree. And now a man whose genius I will be announcing to anyone who will listen. Everyone has heard of Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, but Gissing remains well known only to the elect few. In my opinion his novels are far more fascinating than those written by the "greats" of Victorian literature. Unlike many of the others, Gissing's novels have the ring of truth, and seem like voyeuristic glimpses into the painful, private lives of their characters.

Gissing had a fascinating life, and he clearly drew a lot of inspiration from reality. Born in 1857, his family were never rich but he received a good education, promptly interrupted when he was caught stealing money to give to a prostitute, Nell Harrison, with whom he had become totally infatuated. After a month's imprisonment, Gissing was exiled to America, and returned several years later, desperately poor and friendless. He married Nell Harrison, but it was not a happy union - Nell was a drunkard and often returned to prostitution. Gissing eventually paid her to live apart from him.

His first novel was a complete flop, although it was largely biographical, telling of his marital strife and discussing the lives of the most desperate levels of poverty in London's slums. Nell eventually died of poverty and venereal disease in 1888, and he married his second wife, Edith Underwood, not long after. This was even more disastrous than his first marriage - Edith became mentally unstable and violent, and had to be committed to an asylum (I always wonder, when biographies say something of this sort, whether the woman was really mad or just miserable, stunted and lonely, but time has erased these truths). Eventually he formed a union with Gabrielle Fleury, a young French translator, and he went to live with her and her mother in Paris, leaving his wife under the supervision of relatives. He eventually died of emphysema in 1903, aged only 46, having spent a vast part of his life in poverty and misery at home.

To me the genius of Gissing's writing is his ability to see inside the hearts of all his characters, high or low, rich or poor, he appears to have that incredible ability to empathise with everyone and anyone which is so rare for an author. The plot of his most widely read novel today, "New Grub Street", is in parts very similar to that of George Eliot's "Middlemarch" : poor husband, rich wife, wife inconsiderate and whinging, marriage fails. But the story of Amy and Reardon is far more beautifully rendered in "New Grub Street" than that of Rosamund and Lydgate in "Middlemarch", because Gissing understands the character of Amy to the extent where we understand her behaviour, and see the fragility of good intentions in a world of adversity. In short, Gissing's empathy enables us to sympathise with all his characters, and consequently makes us believe in his story to the point where it is hard to believe it is any longer a story. We have a sneaking suspicion that we may not have acted so very differently if the situation had been ours.

To give you a taste of this, I have copied a part of Chapter XXIV, Part IV of "New Grub Street", the most convincing part of the book in my opinion:

Both had come to this meeting prepared for a renewal of amity, but in these first few moments each was so disagreeably impressed by the look and language of the other that a revulsion of feeling undid all the more hopeful effects of their long severance. On entering, Amy had meant to offer her hand, but the unexpected meanness of Reardon's aspect shocked and restrained her. All but every woman would have experienced that shrinking from the livery of poverty. Amy had but to reflect, and she understood that her husband could in no wise help this shabbiness; when he parted from her his wardrobe was already in a long-suffering condition, and how was he to have purchased new garments since then? None the less such attire degraded him in her eyes; it symbolised the melancholy decline which he had suffered intellectually. On Reardon his wife's elegance had the same repellent effect, though this would not have been the case but for the expression of her countenance. Had it been possible for them to remain together during the first five minutes without exchange of words, sympathies might have prevailed on both sides; the first speech uttered would most likely have harmonised with their gentler thoughts. But the mischief was done so speedily. New Grub Street, Chapter XXIV, Part IV

Gissing's book the Odd Women, is also well worth a read - a strange but wonderful story about women's rights during the Victorian era, discussing the "Odd Women", that is, those who remained single and hence were not part of a pair.

Gissing is an inspiring, moving author and I'm not sure quite why he has been so neglected as an author in the past, Now, I believe, he is enjoying something of a revival, and his works are beginning to be reprinted. So check him out! You will be surprised.

Gustav Fjaestad - a surprising discovery

2005-11-24T08:39:00.000-08:00

I came across Gustav Fjaestad in the Brohan Museum, Berlin, a museum of art deco and art nouveau. In one room, all the walls had works by him, including an immense and spectacular tapestry which seemed so real I could feel the ice on my fingertips. I was totally stunned by his work, which seemed so beautiful and real and yet somehow magical, as if it inhabited a world untouched by human hands. I stood and stared for a long time, and went back to those paintings after I'd seen everything else. As usual, there were no postcards of the best pictures....

When I got home, I googled Mr Fjaestad, to find this passage about him on the Art Fund website:

Gustav Fjaestad (1868-1948), made the frost- covered fields and snow-laden branches of the Swedish winter his hallmark. He too adopted country life, migrating to the densely forested province of Varmland in western Sweden, where he and his wife became the centre of a group of artists and craftsmen. But he was less interested in depicting country activities or wildlife than in exploiting the abstract pictorial qualities of the landscape. In his hands, the countryside in its winter guise became a vehicle for decorative surface patterns of dots and swirling Art Nouveau inspired arabesques. Yet they are never blandly pretty, and occasionally contain a hint of menace. The cold, unknown depths of the mysterious stretch of water contained within snowy river banks in Winter Evening by a River carry a sense of foreboding. Art Fund Magazine (author not credited)

To me there was no menace about the pictures - this was one of their key delights, that they felt entirely calm. (Perhaps this is one of the most interesting things about art, or the arts in general: the much room left for individual interpretation, the diversity of response and the unknown intentions of the creator.) To me the pictures spoke of perfect, untouched beauty. They reminded me of a visit to Esthwaite Water in the English Lake District, at twilight, when there was a light breeze rippling the lake like silk and the silver birches hung their heads ponderously over the water. The whole atmosphere was scented with the calm of evening, and I lay down on the quay to watch the fishing boats bob on the water and felt completely at peace. Probably if I did this on a day like the ones in Fjaestad's paintings, I'd freeze to the dock and would have to be cut out, planks still frozen to my back, but then nothing is quite how it looks in the picture...

Pictures from: www.mundofree.com, www.teosofiskakompaniet.net