New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

It is a strange business – how, in one sense, we can ‘know about’ something for many years and yet, in another, not ‘know’ it at all. I have long been aware of ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, ‘The Blue Rider’ movement, and its radical artistic adventures in the early twentieth century. Individually, I have enjoyed many of the works of its main contributors: the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and, with less educated conviction, the artist-composer Arnold Shoenberg. Then, suddenly, I find these prophetic artists seeming to say everything I have ever wanted to say – although I have never known quite how.

Some background might be useful. Undoubtedly the visionary inspiration for ‘The Blue Rider’ came from Wasssily Kandinsky, although from the start it was an essentially collaborative venture, and would never have left the starting gate without the committed involvement of many other artists, mostly painters and musicians. The name was the title chosen by Kandinsky and Marc for the movement’s first and most famous publication, ‘The Blue Rider Almanac’ of 1912. This is a picture of the cover, an original design by Kandinsky for general use as a symbol of the movement:

The Almanac was a bibliographical expression of the rationale underlying a number of exhibitions staged under the same name. The movement was essentially eclectic - hence the unusual juxtaposition of painters and musicians. More than that, however, ‘The Blue Rider’ deliberately avoided identification with any one off-the-shelf artistic style – and this was the first feature forcibly to strike me in its potential to dialogue with more recent movements and ideas.

Kandinsky was clear in his conviction that rigid alignment to any single artistic style seals a death warrant on genuine creativity. He spells this out in considerable detail in his now famous treatise, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ – one of the few major texts out of the western world exclusively dedicated to a dialogue between art and spirituality. In it he suggests that, at any given moment of cultural history, there are rarely more than a few artistic pioneers who actually live on the leading edge, at the top of the artistic pyramid, as it were. These few are those who are able to cut themselves free from the shackles of all previous styles and schools of thought, and are genuinely able to ‘do a new thing’. They put down markers ahead of their time, and effectively create the possibility for new cultural futures. Contrastingly, the majority of artists, working within one or more already established styles might seem to create the new but, in reality, their work is no more than a fresh example of something that has already become dated and lifeless. They seem to put down markers too, but these are already behind the crest of the advancing cultural wave.

This is an fascinating model for understanding the continuing movement of artistic styles, and goes some way towards explaining one of those things which has remained a mystery to me for many years – precisely why it is that new artistic expressions generate such extreme vitriolic responses, not only in the public at large, but also in the more rarefied communities of the art establishment. It has happened over and over again with each new generation of artists; even though it is also well understood that the same works of art, pilloried in one generation, will almost certainly become the priceless and sought after treasures of the next. The pattern has been repeated generation after generation, though rarely with greater force than in the turbulent years around the turn of the twentieth century. I have written elsewhere (‘God and the Art of Seeing’) about the scathing reception given to Edvard Munch’s painting, ‘The Sick Child’, in Norway in the mid-1880s; and the venomous reception given to Monet’s now world famous images of water lilies and haystacks is now well-documented as one of the conundrums of art history.

I had already learned to recognise a familiar sociological motif at work in this phenomenon, the creation and preservation of a closed circle, an establishment – but Kandinsky, I think, offers a more subtle window of understanding. It is not just that the boundaries of the establishment and its club are threatened; more than that, genuine pioneers are doomed to be misunderstood, because they are actually thinking what up until then has remained literally unthinkable. Because what they are thinking has not previously been thought, there do not exist any readily accessible conceptual categories with which to facilitate its reception. (I am reminded here of Kuhn’s analysis of the way in which revolutions take place in models of scientific thinking, paradigm shifts as he calls them.) Cultural critics, exclusively drawing on categories derived from the past, simply do not have the apparatus with which to interpret and therefore appreciate the arrival of the genuinely new.

By commending freedom from commitment to any single artistic style (the Almanac brings together and affirms examples of works of art from many different eras and many different locations) Kandinsky is encouraging an attitude which is, at least, more likely to be able to embrace the genuinely new and to experiment freely beyond the boundaries of local fashion. Examples, peppering the Almanac, are described by Kandinsky as ‘the best’ from the leading edge in earlier specific times and places; his message is that their value deserves to be honoured, but that it would be foolishness to extol them as ‘the best’ for our own unique time and place. They did their pioneering work in their own time and place, but most of their creative potential is now exhausted. This is a very strong statement concerning the contextual nature of aesthetic values.

All of which fascinates me enormously when I begin to think about movements within religions, and the passionate commitments people make to religious and/or spiritual styles – past and present. I am reminded, for example, of the derisory anger which my own enthusiasm for the early charismatic movement in the 1970s generated amongst more traditional Baptists; and I am also reminded of my repeated discovery of ‘sects within sects’, dedicated groups of followers of this or that, still passionately committed to forms of believing which belong to moments in the Christian era now long dead. It makes me want to do a Kandinsky. I want to create a ‘spiritual almanac’ which affirms and commends a wide variety of spiritual resources from a great range of times and places. I want, for example, to commend and to enjoy the icons of early Christian centuries, to be moved by the wild and sometimes terrifying writings of so-called ‘desert fathers’, to benefit from the quiet reflectivity of contemplative mystics, men and women, throughout the centuries; I would even like to discover how to participate in the exuberance of contemporary pentecostal praise - and so on, and so on. The freedom to affirm and commend all these might then, in turn, free me to be able to recognise that as yet un-named somewhat, the special gift for this particular time and place, which I am in the gravest danger of overlooking whilst I remain too embroiled in a single style from the past. I might miss what Kandinsky described as the ‘spiritual in art’, and which today some Christian prophets might choose to describe as ‘what God’s Spirit is doing in our time’. All of which feels remarkably at home in the period we tend to label postmodern – as if we had really significantly moved on from early twentieth century. I am not so sure that we have.

In this ‘breaking with styles’, emphasised by the creators of the Almanac, something quite extraordinary was taking place. The overall direction of ‘The Blue Rider’ movement was clearly orientated towards an affirmation of ‘the abstract’ - something which had not consciously found favour in the cultural history of the west for more than a millennium. In this context, ‘the abstract’ must not to be heard in negative terms, a bid for all that is obscure and inaccessible to interpretation; rather, it should be heard as a massively positive bid to undermine the dominant post-Enlightenment paradigm with its sterile, and too often exclusive, commitment to analytical reason.

It is easiest to illustrate this from the work of Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg first met Kandinsky back in 1911 and each, it seems, immediately recognised in the other something which could draw them together in a single movement. Schoenberg was not entirely unknown as a painter, mainly of portraits, many of himself - though painting was never his strongest mode of artistic expression. He is best known for his experiments with ‘free’ or so-called atonal music – that is, with music which has freedom from the formal conventions in western harmonic traditions. In one of the Almanac’s short essays, by Kulbin, entitled ‘Free Music’, it is argued that, by breaking with the particularity of one harmonic tradition, music is merely re-claiming what has remained unscathed in ‘nature’ despite the development of human cultural history. “The music of nature is free in its choice of notes – light, thunder, the whistling of the wind, the rippling of water, the singing of birds. The nightingale sings not only the notes of contemporary music, but the notes of all the music it likes.” The remarkable thing is that a culture constrained by a very particular harmonic tradition should continue to extol the song of the nightingale as something of peculiar beauty. In commending atonal music, Kulbin enumerates many of the delights in store for the open-eared listener, singling out the distinctively new experiences generated by what he calls “… the close connection of tones and the processes of close connection.” I think it was these ‘close connections’ which, at first, I found most difficulty in appreciating; but with the passage of time, I now can find these quite extraordinarily moving.

In his own celebrated essay in the Almanac, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Schoenberg himself goes on to argue that music must also resist every compulsion to be programmatic, to replicate, as it were, patterns already laid down in the other arts. So in setting words to music, Schoenberg deliberately refuses to conform to stereotypical assumptions. Traditionally musicians had often felt obliged to match words expressing urgency with rapid tempos, and words expressing restfulness with slow and sombre tones; rather, Schoenberg argues that music must be free to create its own forms of expression, breaking its slavish congruence with other media, and opening up fresh potential to complement and enlarge the possibilities for inspiration.

The reception of ‘free music’, of course, had all the hallmarks that I have already associated with the work of painters, and Schoenberg’s music was rubbished by most of his contemporary critics. The Almanac argues, not entirely surprisingly, that the professional cultural critic, already tied in allegiance to particular styles, is precisely the person who is least likely to be able to ‘hear’ the prophetic inspiration (Kandinsky’s ‘inner sound’) in new forms, be they visual or musical. The ear of the critic has been so ‘tuned’ to the styles of previous times, that there is now no way for ‘the new’ to be heard. As Kandinsky also put it, the critic is a theoretician, and the theoretician is a person capable of little more than discovering ‘mistakes’ in the genuinely ‘new’, however inspired this ‘new’ might be. The theoretician is structurally bound by the ‘rules’ of the past, and is disabled for doing other than negating that which is emerging in the present with genuine significance for the future.

I have no difficulty in relating all this to my own slow and sometimes reluctant journey towards an appreciation of ‘modern’ music. Today I value a measure of freedom to hear the previously unhearable, to be free to test everything for what it is, good or bad, riding as loose as possible to inherited conventions.

Everything Schoenberg affirms about music, Kandinsky parallels in his own crucial essay within the Almanac, ‘On the Question of Form’. Kandinsky is effectively declaring his own right to paint atonally, abstractly, playing the palette of colours and shapes with fresh freedom, expressing real moments of the human spirit which cannot be contained in any previous conventions of concerning form. Kandinsky claims this as the only way to release what he calls the ‘inner sound’.

Breaking the ‘rules’ of form is what, of course, the critics cannot bear. Franz Marc’s horses are the ‘wrong colours’; Schoenberg’s musical phraseology, in his ‘Herzgewächse’ (‘Heart’s Foliage’) for example, does not sufficiently correlate with verbal tones in the libretto. But that is the very point; in a fresh, although internally coherent way, the music provides the possibility of a new, equally valid, depth of insight as yet unheard in the history of music.

One fascinating conviction expressed in the Almanac, and shared by artist and musician alike, is that, in their new-found freedom, they are re-discovering things already known by the majority of children in their infancy, but strangled out of their artistic vocabulary by the processes of formal education – usually by the age of six! Kandinsky is ruthless on this point. He writes, “For every fire there is a cooling off. For every early bud – the threatening frost. For every young talent – an academy. These are not tragic words but a melancholy fact. The academy is the surest way of destroying the power of the child. Even the greatest, strongest talent is more or less retarded in this respect by the academy. Lesser talents perish by the hundreds. An academically trained person of average talent excels in learning practical meanings and losing the ability to hear his inner sound. He produces a ‘correct’ drawing that is dead.” Am I hearing a description of theological education trapped in that cul-de-sac generated at the pinnacle western liberalism? Even Kandinsky is not reluctant invoke the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament for support, pointing out Jesus’s specific allusion to the openness of children to God’s coming kingdom – the starting point for a very stimulating conversation concerning the relationship between artistic and religious forms.

From a religious perspective, I am fascinated by two powerful implications of the Almanac’s analysis of western culture. The first is simply this insight into the freedom of the child to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ the truth, the prophetic word of God’s Spirit. This is something I have also found amongst people labelled as ‘learning disabled’ – and I find myself musing, as does Jean Vanier on the basis of massive experience by comparison with my own, just who it is in our culture that is disabled in their learning – by a lack or a surfeit of it.

The second runs a little further with this powerful affirmation of ‘the abstract’, peaking in the early twentieth century, and energised by a forceful rejection of the exclusive dominance of the analytical method – which, since the Enlightenment, had posed as the key to all significant truth claims. What ‘The Blue Rider’ group do with such skill is to expose this intellectual blind alley for the dead end it had always been. Whether we look at the playful coloured shapes of Kandinsky, or listen to the ear-stretching tonal games of Schoenberg, the common claim is that these artefacts are able to touch ‘depths’ in the human spirit, which have largely remained untouched by the dominant western cultural inheritance for many years. Tapping back into ‘natural’ forms and ‘primitive’ styles, largely untouched and certainly undervalued for many centuries, these artists speak into their own time and their own place with unique power.

One thing, of course, which they would not want us to do is to idolise their own heavily contextualised achievements in such a way that these too should become dampers on our own contemporary creativity. The invitation from ‘The Blue Rider’ is to ‘ride again’, and again, and again …

All of which, it seems to me, speaks volumes to any who are seeking to explore the potential of contemplative prayer – to which I so frequently return. As I have written in earlier blogs, a clear pre-requisite for such an exploration is liberation from the exclusivity of western obsession with ‘conceptual’ patterns of thought. Until it is possible to think again as a child, and to discover the role of the pre-conceptual and even the non-conceptual, in a fuller vocabulary of human knowing, God will not merely remain a mystery, God will remain a nonsense.

Once again I am reminded of a repeated caution in the writings of Thomas Merton. Merton reminds his readers over and over again not to become reliant on any one ‘mechanism’ of prayer or any one spiritual discipline. It is not that these disciplines are irrelevant - far from it they are essential equipment for the exploration; it is rather that they do not of themselves a guaranteed pathway to enlightenment or deeper insight. Insight only comes as a gift of God’s Spirit and, as such, will only come unsolicited, free from the constraints of any pre-determined conceptualisation (as free as the blowing of the wind, says Jesus in the Fourth Gospel). What we need, then, if we are to discover prayer that has contemplative depth, is a freedom akin to that affirmed in the birth of modern abstract art, which learned again old lessons about ways that deep truth is disclosed, revealed even. Rarely does fresh revelation depend exclusively on old forms, be they geometrical patterns, musical scales, or liturgical prayers. New wineskins will be in constant demand, as old ones will never be able to contain the ferment of the new wine.

I like all that – and could preach a pretty respectable Christian sermon on it too!

Just a little bibliography:
‘The Blue Rider Almanac’, first published 1912 (Tate Publishing 2006)
Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, first published 1911 (Dover Publications 1977)
‘Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider’, Scala Publishers, 2003

I want to explore in much more detail some of the implications for Christian spirituality of taking the ‘pre-conceptual’, even the ‘non-conceptual’ option – as I began to introduce it in my last blog. At a theoretical level this might look like a pretty heavy enterprise - but there is good news; this can be broken down into some very accessible exploratory excursions, which will lead us into a variety of fascinating theological adventures.

The basic question is this: what are we going to do when the words run out? Or, to put it another way: what are the options once we decide that the deepest levels of truth – the kind which will be needed if we are to talk about God – are simply not amenable to exhaustive explication in words as we typically know them?

Well, the blanket term for those who have travelled this way ahead of us, and have made this decision against ‘words alone’ is the ‘apophatic tradition’, and some Christians have been interested in this tradition from the earliest days.

The topic is so wide-ranging, however, that we could run with it in many different directions. We might, for example, simply go visual – in which case we shall need to explore something of the controversies around icons, and we shall want to look at the potential spiritual significance of other kinds of painting and general ‘objets d’art’, such as the work of recent artists like Mark Rothko and James Turrell. We might, however, go thoroughly philosophical - and begin to trace patterns of ideas which certainly go back into Neo-Platonism, at and around the time that Christianity was born; and we might drop in on any one of a number of Christian writers who have found their way into Christianity through more mystical styles of believing; or we might even listen to some of the early twentieth century existentialist philosophers who, in their own distinctive way, encouraged something of a revival in these modes of thinking. We might also, however, go poetic. There are a number of religious-minded poets who have forcibly recognised the power of the apophatic tradition, the ‘via negativa’, as it is also called. I particularly have in mind the poems of R S Thomas as also, indeed, Thomas Merton, a prolific poet as well as committed exponent of contemplative spiritual disciplines.

So the irony cannot have gone unnoticed! It is not at all difficult to pile up a vast quantity of words, all seemingly in the cause of this non-verbal tradition!

My own first reaction to this irony is to enjoy a quiet chuckle – but then, on further reflection, I want to put down a marker which recognises that the apophatic tradition is not at its best when delivered as a stand-alone feature. It really does need its opposite number, the ‘kataphatic tradition’, in order credibly to make its way. Between the two of them, however, they can energise a dialectical movement which is immensely potent for revelatory disclosures and otherwise hidden depths from the world of human experience.

Our difficulty in the west is that, having sold out so strongly to the kataphatic over so many years – what with our preaching, our teaching, our written liturgies and our hymnody – that the only way we are likely to head somewhere new is with a massive shot of the apophatic antidote to set, as it were, the theological pendulum swinging another way. And that is what I am about to do - though we can take it in small doses and begin each unit with a thoroughly grounded artefact, like a story or a picture.

In this particular blog, I start in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, who I myself found surprisingly lucid on these matters. In the early pages of his classic text ‘Being and Nothingness’ Sartre is exploring why, in his own experience, something which is not conceptually accessible, a kind of ‘nothing’, can actually have as much if not more significance on his life than something which is in-your-face all-present-and-correct. But being a novelist as well as a philosopher, fortunately he gets us there with a cracking good yarn!

I am returning here to a paper I wrote about a year ago – but I feel I can now re-tell it with greatly increased conviction. Sartre invites his readers to accompany him on a visit to his local café in Paris – where I can easily imagine him engaged in amazingly intellectual conversation with his friends. On arrival he finds that one particular friend, one whom he fully expects to be there, is nowhere to be seen. So Sartre then proceeds to explore just how deeply significant the ‘absence’ of his friend really is –indeed how his absence, in its own strange way, actually makes his friend thoroughly present, maybe even more strongly than had he actually been there! The absence of his friend influences his feelings, his activities; in fact, it influences his whole life very deeply indeed.

Analysing this experience can help us to understand why some spiritual experiences of absence, as with God’s absence for example, seeming an experience of nothing, might become the most significant way that we are aware of a presence.

Clearly there has to be something about the absence of Sartre’s particular friend which makes the experience more significant than the experience of many other absences which, in theory, could also be credited to this café at that moment (for example, the absence of all those people, unknown to him, who live in England and have never even thought of visiting Paris). Can we identify, then, some structural conditions which make this particular absence so special?

Sartre identifies four factors, some of which are more obvious than others. First, he shows how the dimension of expectation is clearly significant – he arrived at the café with an expectation of meeting his friend, something which he brought to the experience as prior knowledge and prior relationship. Second, he identifies the importance of wonder - wonder in the sense of questioning, that is, rather than the sense of awe. Third, he names the experience of fear - why is my friend not here; has something gone wrong between us? Fourthly and finally, he points to the role of imagination – Sartre can imagine the alternative possibility – namely that his friend is actually present.

All four of which immediately begin to help me with my analysis of why a perceived absence of God might be highly significant for my counter-experience of God’s presence. First, as above, an expectation of God’s presence, whether I am a believer or not, has already fed deeply into my culture, through the inheritance of a faith community and its stories. I come with real expectations, however limited these might be. Second, I certainly come with questions; these have actually been heightened in recent centuries in company with the ascendancy of critical reason. Third, I come with fears: at root my fear of my own finite limitations, in time and in space, both of which repeatedly threaten me with the overwhelming possibility of meaninglessness. And lastly, I also come with a certain capacity for imagination, an intuition of the possibility of holy presence, even if it is too often eclipsed by my counter-culture of doubt.

In practice, I might even be tempted to condense Sartre’s four into a more famous ‘Corinthian three’ – I come to my experience of God’s absence already shaped by ‘faith, hope and love’ – and these profoundly transform the possibilities for my apparent experience of emptiness. I could even argue that they open the possibility of an unprecedented fullness. Actually, elsewhere in the same text, Sartre has the line ‘Fullness is emptiness given direction’. I might be confronted with what looks at first sight to be a devastating absence but, if I am simultaneously fed by a rich tradition which offers direction, perhaps this can be the very place where fullness will make itself known in greatest measure. That is, I think, what many mystics and the exponents of contemplative prayer are trying to tell us.

Not bad, eh! It was philosophy alright, but we snuck in through a thoroughly recognisable story, and it soon began to open up a whole new platform on which to build our further reflections. Watch this space, at this moment deceptively empty, and find out where it will take us next.

Several times in my journal over the last three months I have written something like this: “I would never have thought it possible – thirty seven years after first experiencing the overwhelming impact of Christian conversion on my life, that God should pass this way again, and with such intensity.”

But that must only be the start of it – if some further ‘being converted’ is to be of any real significance it must bear fruit in active discipleship, discipleship which makes a difference for others and not just for myself. And I need to find words with which to describe it – both to myself and to others - for one clear component of my Baptist identity is a strong sense of calling to testify to the hope that is in me – I am called to be a witness to whatever it is I have seen and touched and heard.

So, I keep searching for the words with which to tell it. And one of the best attempts so far to make an inroad into the process of telling has entailed the exploration of three metaphors. Let me try them again here.

The first originates with a phrase from Thomas Merton’s ‘Seeds of Contemplation’ – Merton has been and continues to be a major source of inspiration for me at this time. The phrase is this, “… the metaphorical apex of existence”. Merton compares it to a tiny hole, hidden deep in the heart of our humanity, a tiny tiny point of entry through which we must pass if we are to find our true selves, and God. The metaphor grabs me because I think I have had a little peek through the hole, and maybe even a short excursion into the region beyond – and I like what I find; it certainly fuels my desire for God. It is, as Merton expounds at great length and in many different ways, one possible fruit of contemplative prayer, and it is probably the only really significant path to fulfilment in human life.

The second metaphor originates in the book which takes the same phrase for its title, the second in the Phillip Pulman trilogy, ‘The Subtle Knife’. I have recently completed all three volumes. At times I found them frustrating, occasionally a little irritating – I suppose when I felt he was being critical of something I love, especially when I also felt that he had not really understood – but most often I found them very illuminating. The ‘subtle knife’, which is used by the boy, and the ‘alethiometer’, which is used by the girl, have something in common, which I find spiritually extraordinarily perceptive. To use either of them effectively, the knife to open windows (the tiny hole?) onto other worlds and the alethiometer to gain a hold on truths otherwise beyond the user’s reach, requires a very particular kind of skill – which I also recognise from my tenuous excursions into contemplative prayer. Using the knife as the primary illustration – when the boy, crucially one who is ‘called’ to be the knife-bearer, first receives instruction from its previous holder, he is instructed to focus his mind right down to its very tip, to the fine point at the end, where the work of opening will be done. But, at first, this proves in no way to be effective. So then he is told to relax, to try less hard, to ride as it were the very fine line between doing and not doing, between active achieving and passive receiving. Yes, it is his mind, focused to a sharpness which will open to windows, but also (simultaneously?) not his mind at all, for ultimately it can only be the work of the one who has called the bearer in the first place. Aha, you say, the fine balance between effort and grace – as in prayer, on the one hand a disciplined activity, on the other a work of God’s Spirit within us. Yes, I bring my mind to it, but my mind alone remains a blunt instrument; only caught up by grace does it become potent for the moving of mountains.

Third, I have long been fascinated by the metaphor of the dream. And I find myself recalling a sermon I once preached at Sion Baptist Church in Burnley – occasionally people still quote it back at me, so I guess it must have been one of the better ones. In the sermon I begin to tell a story, an attention-grabbing story, seemingly drawn from my own experience. Only after a while does it suddenly become apparent that the story is actually the record of a dream! In the reflection that follows, my point is that though the form and content of the narrative are now exposed to be dream – still the dream remains real, I really dreamt it, and the fact of dreaming it can never be taken away. Sometimes over the last weeks I have been unable to avoid the thought that I might be ‘dreaming up’ this fresh encounter with Christ, that I have in some way ‘made it all up’, and that I shall wake up to my old self and find that nothing whatsoever has changed. Well, I increasingly feel that this is much more than a dream, but this metaphor brings me comfort, for even if my experience turns out to have dream-like qualities, no one can take away from the reality that I dreamt it.

So, three metaphors, all I think pointing in a single direction. I am not claiming that they have the power of explanation, they simply provide a first inroad into giving account of the hope that is in me.

No doubt it gets stronger with increasing age, but I have long felt that the concept of memory is enormously important within the whole construct of human life, and a crucial category within any credible process of theological reflection. Long ago now, this whole theme of memory opened up for me in the writings of those who take the label 'process theologians' - especially Norman Pittenger in his 'After Death: Life in God', but also almost anywhere that the formative ideas of A N Whitehead are explored and developed.

It has also been for me a very special attraction in the poetry of Craig Raine, beginning with one of his early collections entitled 'The Onion, Memory' (1978). The opening line of the poem with that title reads: 'Divorced, but friends again at last, we walk old ground together in bright blue uncomplicated weather' - yes, that is what I know in part and still continue to seek.

If I could have reserved a title for a book I can imagine writing it would be 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu' (In Search of Lost Time) - but Marcel Proust got there long ago, and who am I to compete. I have long been aware that the Proust was a book I wanted to read - I still vividly remember the enthusiasm of a gay friend, explaining how he had read it many times over. Being a slow reader, I looked on in amazement - it extends to six volumes!

But as part of the sabbatical I have started Volume 1, 'The Way by Swann's' in the Penguin translation - and I do not think I am about to be disappointed. In a flowing stream of prose the author begins to explore in minute detail seminal moments from early childhood, which still remain as powerful as ever to shape and transform the present. I think I know that experience. My guess is I shall be commenting on this book in more detail through the coming weeks as I make my way further in the novel(s).

My own first attempt to say something about memory took shape quite a few years ago (1996). I would not say it quite like this if I were writing today, but it was fun digging it out to look again. I titled it 'The Ulitmate Amnesia' and it turned out like this:

THE ULTIMATE AMNESIA

It is no small things for us
to remember;
not merely
the reget of
promise broken,
opportunity missed,
the pain of
grief revisited -
real though these are.

Much more,
each time a memory is re-collected
it is changed
forever, and in measure lost;
fused with fresh connections,
new interpretations,
which, when re-stored,
fade into that
eternal blur
which will become our final Now.

And God is the chief exemplification!
_____

No, that is not what I want to say today, either in style or content. I think I would find a more hopeful note than 'eternal blur', but it still says much that is important to me. (I am also a bit embarrassed by the rather unsubtle influence of Whitehead on the last line!) Most recently I have found myself reading my own fresh experience through lenses formed over more than half a century, and coming to identify just what the lenses are with much greater clarity than when first I looked through them. And it is very moving, so that I can gladly say, again with Craig Raine, 'It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry.'

At this early stage of learning to blog, I am still laying trails which I shall no doubt be re-visiting many time in days to come.