This turbulent priest

I’m sad to hear that Rowan Williams is resigning. He’s not been everyone’s cup of tea as Archbishop, but he’s my kind of prelate. Thoughtful, humane, sonorous, and kindly. He could talk about biblical texts as though they had something to say about human experience, and about Dickens or Dostoevsky as though what they say about human experience has deep moral resonance. His contributions to public debates, unlike those of many other religious leaders, have been subtle and ruminative but nonetheless morally resolute. Moreover he has intervened reluctantly on questions of private morality, and unhesitatingly on questions of public morality. He has had far more to say about war, injustice, poverty, and oppression than about sex. Unfortunately, members of his flock have decided that sex is the defining moral issue of our time. So after ten years in a tough job, he’s going to the greener pastures of a Cambridge College. Many will say he’s better off back in his academic box, but I think he’s a great loss to public discourse and to a much wider communion than his own. They’ll say the Anglican communion is more deeply divided now than it was a decade ago, but who do they suppose could unite it? In a time when there seems less room for complexity, less oxygen for nuance and balance, his loss feels like a victory for the one-dimensioned over the many. As the darkness deepens, his going feels like one more light going out. 

Romance and the city

Thank God Corbusier wasn’t allowed to do this:

The larger point Elizabeth Farrelly made (last night at the Albert Hall) was that modernism has meant cities as objects rather than ‘containers for humans’. Modernist cities planned on Corbusian lines plant imposing objects and leave the spaces to fend for themselves, whereas the ideal city - ideal because green, creative, lovely, enchanting - uses the objects to shape the common spaces. The buildings are simply the wallpaper of streets and squares as inviting rooms for people to live in, not look at. I like this notion, but don’t see that it has to be quite as gendered as Farrelly makes it: towering as masculine, textured as feminine. Whatever might be argued about modernism and masculinity, you don’t have to see modernism’s remedies as feminine to think they’d make better cities. More interesting to me was the tension between planned spaces as livable and organic spaces as lovable. Planned space might tick all the boxes, but the plan’s no good if people don’t flow wantonly and naturally in and out of the space. The answer seems to be about the play of both in history: what Farrelly called a ‘dance’ of evolution and intervention across time. Maybe that’s why Canberra feels overplanned and undercooked. The dance is only just getting started. Maybe in two or three or five hundred years, Canberra will be closer to the enchanting ideal.  

You have been mine before

My sister and brother-in-law have their anniversary today. This poem, DG Rossetti's 'Sudden Light' was, I think, printed on their invitations, or perhaps their orders of service; I can't remember now, but I do remember liking it immensely. Besides a beguiling play of rhythm and rhyme, it has that Victorian yen for love beyond death, and light in a dark place.  Happy anniversary, Alex and Beth.

I have been here before,     
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door, 
The sweet keen smell, 
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,
How long ago I may not know: 
But just when at that swallow's soar 
Your neck turned so, 
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before? 
And shall not thus time's eddying flight 
Still with our lives our love restore 
In death's despite, 
And day and night yield one delight once more?

On Dickens (Part 1): Art and Life

Considerably before there was dada, surrealism, magic realism, or animation, there was Dickens, who foreshadowed them all. He was born two hundred years ago last month into a world that he would later give his nameDickens' study at Gad's Hill to. His childhood was what can only be described as Dickensian - financially precarious, socially liminal, involving stints in a blacking factory. He grew up, somewhat embittered, to skewer a succession of fat, juicy Victorianisms on the spit of his genius, and roast them to a delicious crispness. He’s praised and censured for how much larger his imaginary world is than life, but it’s this largeness, more than anything else, that makes him great. 

What first grabbed me about Dickens was his sheer energy. His narratives rush at and past you. His prose feels like some winged creature swooping and wheeling, circling upwards then suddenly diving, pecking savagely at the nasty characters, tenderly enfolding the sweet ones in soft feathers. His language is elastic, inventive, rhythmic, even onomatapoeic; jazz is latent in it. There are jokes, or at least barbs, embedded in the very syntax. Perhaps my favourite sentence in all of Dickens (it’s the one Miriam Margulyes ends her show with) is the names of the birds that, in Bleak House, Miss Flite keeps caged: “Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.” This sentence runs the reeling gamut of Dickens’ portraiture. Here, and everywhere, he seems to skitter along the edge of the fantastic, the unbelievable. But this, after all, is his most consistent comment: life is unbelievable. 

In his speech at the official wreath-laying in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, the Archbishop used words like ‘exuberance’ and ‘excess’ to describe the essence of Dickens.   What appeals is the exaggeration and caricature, but more because they reach for something truthful than because they go beyond it: “The truth is extreme, the truth is excessive. The truth about human beings is more grotesque and bizarre than we can imagine. And Dickens' generous embrace of human beings does not arise out of a chilly sense of what is due to them, but out of a celebratory feeling that there is always more to be discovered.”  

This is a thought GK Chesterton took up in his marvellous biography of Dickens, published in 1906. He answers the critics who found Dickens’ works unlike life.  “Dickens is ‘like life’ in the truer sense, in the sense that he is akin to the living principle in us and in the universe; he is like life, at least in this detail, that he is alive. His art is like life, because, like life, it cares for nothing outside itself, and goes on its way rejoicing. Both produce monsters with a kind of carelessness... Art indeed copies life in not copying life, for life copies nothing. Dickens's art is like life because, like life, it is irresponsible, because, like life, it is incredible.”

The book of lost tales

I'm utterly enchanted by the story that a book of lost fairy tales has been found. A contemporary of Grimm, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth collected five hundred tales by asking folk about their lore, but neglected to publish them. I find this magical, not because an unknown nineteenth-century book has come to light (exciting as that is), but because it might contain unguessed tales many centuries older. Stories from the long, long ago that have lain untold. Stories that walked among our ancestors, once upon a time.