How everything turns away

Last week's offering made me think about other poems that respond to paintings. I like this one, "Musée des Beaux Arts," by W.H. Auden about Pieter Breughel's “Landscape with the Fall of Icharus.” It's a neat comment on the way those old Dutch paintings exquisitely rendered the ordinary, but it's also a poignant observation of the world's propensity to sail calmly away from the boy falling out of the sky.  The museum of the title is the Musée Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, which is well worth a visit if you're ever strolling up the Rue de Musée in Brussels.

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.
 

Sense and Sensuousness

With the advent of digital books and reading devices, many avid readers lamented the loss of the sensuous pleasures of reading: the bowed boards of old hardcovers; the feel of aging paper between the fingers; their fragrance of ruin. (For a lovely description of these effects, see the first paragraph of AS Byatt’s Possession.) These are indeed lost, or at least replaced with a new pleasure: the sleekness of plastic and the gentle clack of tiny keys. In some ways the loss is grievous and irretrievable, but in others, it is a virtue. If, like me, you’re seduced by the covers of new books – by their design and texture, the éclat they acquire from media exposure – the e-reader imposes some much-needed rigour to the reading diet. I’m not remotely tempted to download new and fashionable books on the strength of their glossy finish. Whereas, unleashed in Borders, I could easily spend a small fortune on books that will forever unfinished adorn my coffee table.

Scribes and Pharisees

Noted atheist Philip Pullman has written a book called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. It’s a fable based on the premise that Mary had twins: Jesus, a respected moral teacher, and Christ, a traitor who invents a spurious religion around the death of his brother. No doubt it will invite a tiresome downpour of righteous wrath, and an equally tiresome uproar of atheist enthusiasm. Amid the clash, I hope the gentle voice of the Archbishop of Canterbury will be heard. His review is careful, thoughtful, and gracious. It pays Pullman the compliment of serious attention, without yielding any of the ground claimed by Christians who take the gospel seriously. Moreover by taking the book seriously as thought-provoking fiction, it avoids the righteous error of being provoked by fiction into serious dispute.

Things as they are

A bit of a departure today.  Here's a very short extract from a longish poem by Wallace Stevens based on a painting by Pablo Picasso.  It's called “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” 

You can read more of the poem here, but I think this excerpt contains an extraordinarily profound and succinct definition of art. 

They said,

“You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.”

      The man replied,

      “Things as they are

      Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

Reading and democracy

At the recent Sydney Writers Festival, NewYork-based Peter Carey told his audience that Australians “are getting dumber everyday…literally [sic] forgetting how to read.” He complained that cookbooks and Dan Brown novels consistently top our bestseller lists, and that we don’t grasp how destructive of democracy is the “cultural junk” we seem to prefer. Carey’s cultural cringe is part of a great tradition, (and one to which Carey’s claim to belong is, I think, dubious). Australian intellectuals, artists and authors, many of them expat, have always been contemptuous of the Aussie predilections for beer and barbecues over boffins and books, and more broadly of Australia’s contempt for intellectuals.

I too lie awake at night fretting about the unhallowed masses who read nothing but junk, and whose nearest approach to high culture is that guy from Masterchef who wears a cravat. And I too treat with a certain misgiving the statistical finding that what with digital books and latte-enhanced book emporiums we are reading more than ever. However, I think Carey’s brand of elitism (which borrows heavily from Patrick White) is unhelpful, and unreflective of literary history.

A bestseller list, or a top 100, or a ‘Borders recommends’, is always going to be an eclectic mix of the good, the great, and the ordinary. That’s because reading matter always has been. Since the invention of printing and the subsequent spread of literacy, reading has been inherently democratic, and democracy, as bestseller lists remind us, inherently involves giving equal weight to the great and the very, very ordinary. Carey wants 14-year-olds to read Shakespeare and Dickens. No doubt 14-year-olds in the 17th century and the 19th were exhorted to read Horace and Sophocles instead of ‘popular’ authors. If Dan Brown is our Dickens it’s a pretty sad indictment on us, but it doesn’t mean that Dickens has vanished from our cultural landscape. He is still there, and anyone who wants to can pick up a cheap edition or download a cheaper file. How democratic is that? A 14-year-old who is lucky enough to discover Shakespeare can pursue her newfound taste to her heart’s content; and no doubt he will lead her to other magicians of the language whose version of human experience is indestructible and irreplaceable. Nothing is stopping her but the serfdom of her peers in the feudal sway of junk.