The robust London sense of humour was on display at Borough market last week, courtesy of the bloke selling Christmas trees.
Also of interest at the market, some fine-looking fungi for sale. I have no idea what puffballs are like to eat—mushroomy, probably—but they look impressive.
These pictures are hosted on my Flickr account. And it seems like an apt moment to plug my photoblog Clouded Drab again, since the photo on the front page at the moment was also taken at Borough Market.
More fascinating stuff from the British Library collection; this poster is from 1892.
Today is William Blake’s 250th birthday. Happy birthday, William.
The Chimney-Sweeper
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying ‘weep, weep’ in notes of woe!
‘Where are thy father and mother? Say!’
‘They are both gone up to the church to pray.‘Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter’s snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.‘And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,
Who made up a heaven of our misery.’
I always think of Blake as one of a triumvirate of great London writers, along with Dickens and Pepys. There are plenty of other poets with impeccable London connections: Chaucer, Donne, Pope, Keats and Browning, just to pick some of the obvious ones. Hell, you could throw in Shakespeare at a pinch.
And you could hardly claim Blake as a typical Londoner. I mean, the revolutionary politics was common enough at the time; as a matter of fact, in his day job as an engraver/printer, Blake did one of the illustrations for a book by another C18th poet and radical I wrote about recently, Erasmus Darwin. And London has had its fair share of esoteric and peculiar religions, so that’s not too unusual. But Blake saw visions; as a child, he saw the head of God outside an upper-storey window in Soho, and a tree full of angels on Peckham Rye.
It is that combination, though, which is the point: Blake walked the filthy, stinking, noisy streets of London, and found the transcendent. He saw it as a place of poverty, tyranny and oppression, of mind-forged manacles, but he also saw it as something more and stranger.
Hampstead, Highgate, Finchley, Hendon, Muswell Hill rage loud
Before Bromion’s iron tongs and glowing poker reddening fierce.
Hertfordshire glows with fierce vegetation; in the forests
The oak frowns terrible; the beech and ash and elm enroot
Among the spiritual fires. Loud the cornfields thunder along
The soldier’s fife, the harlot’s shriek, the virgin’s dismal groan,
The parent’s fear, the brother’s jealousy, the sister’s curse,
Beneath the storms of Theotormon; and the thund’ring bellows
Heaves in the hand of Palamabron, who in London’s darkness
Before the anvil watches the bellowing flames. Thundering
The hammer loud rages in Rintrah’s strong grasp, swinging loud
Round from heaven to earth, down falling with heavy blow
Dead on the anvil, where the red-hot wedge groans in pain.
He quenches it in the black trough of his forge. London’s river
Feeds the dread forge, trembling and shuddering along the valleys.
That passage, and the illustration, are from Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. It’s hard to know what to make of these long prophetic poems. I can only take them in small doses, although they contain some brilliant moments. Is their strangeness best understood as a radical artistic statement, which would make them comparable to, say, Walt Whitman; or do they reflect Blake’s weakening grip on reality? Was he insane? Does it matter?
It is an odd thought that Blake published the first of his prophetic poems, The Book of Thel, in the year of the Regency Crisis, while George III was being confined in a strait-waistcoat and kept away from sharp objects a few miles up the river at Kew. Considering how the King was treated in his illness, Blake did well to keep out of the hands of the doctors.
There is a famous story that one of his friends once arrived at Blake’s house in Lambeth to find him and his wife sitting naked in the garden reading Paradise Lost aloud to each other. The friend was embarrassed, but Blake called out, ‘Come in! It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!’ Perhaps the King would have envied such freedom.
» all the pictures are by Blake and are taken from the extraordinarily comprehensive William Blake Archive.
I thought I’d post the picture I took of what is perhaps the fattest tree in Kew Gardens. Or perhaps just the fattest relative to its height. Its fatness is so impressive that I wonder if there’s some kind of odd mutation or something going on above and beyond the effects of age and pollarding.
I didn’t get a picture that showed the overall shape—you’d probably need to wait for all the leaves to drop—but you can see by the size of the name label and the leaves that this is a big lump of tree.
I went to Kew Gardens to see the Henry Moore sculptures. Which were OK, I guess. It’s not easy to display such a lot of very large sculptures—28 in all—but Kew is big enough that there’s plenty of room for them, so it’s quite a good match. I wandered around desultorily looking at them but they didn’t really grab me; not that I tried that hard to engage with them. I’d be curious to know whether I would have got more out of them if they were in a field; i.e. if there was less other interesting stuff around to distract me.
The particular thing that side-tracked me most was Big Trees; and specifically, some of the oaks and chestnuts. Now there has been a botanical collection at Kew for over 200 years, so there are some decent sized exotic trees. The conifer in the picture above is a pretty imposing example. But the trees I was looking at must surely be older still. There was one particular chestnut which must have been about eight foot in diameter. I didn’t get a picture that did that one justice, but here’s a smaller one:
I love the deeply grooved bark of mature chestnut trees. The sweet chestnut isn’t actually native to Britain; it was introduced in the Middle Ages. The oak, Quercus robur, is a native species. Of course it’s native to the whole of Europe, so the fact that in this country it’s often referred to as the English Oak is a wee bit parochial. Still, it’s a key feature of the English landscape. And this is an impressive example. Not a great picture, but hopefully the people standing in front of it give some sense of scale.
I love these big trees; there’s something so satisfying about the sheer bulk of them. It makes you wonder what England looked like when it was a genuinely wild landscape; for many hundreds of years, the normal fate of a mature oak was to be cut down and used to make a timber-framed building or a ship. But once upon a time there must have been thousands of ancient trees all over the place. That landscape, of untouched primary forest, isn’t even a folk memory now; it was long gone by the time of Stonehenge. British woodland is artificial, a managed resource. Or now that wood is less in demand, an unmanaged resource; but I don’t think much of it is likely to be left alone for the few hundred years necessary to revert to wildwood.
Here’s another chestnut. I think the shape of it, with a fat trunk splitting into lots of branches a short way up, may be a sign that it was once pollarded. But I’m not sure.
Just think, that was probably already a mature tree when George III was confined to Kew Palace, strapped to his bed by the doctors and being bled, cupped, blistered and given emetics in a desperate and ignorant attempt to cure his madness.
» All pictures are hosted on my Flickr account, and you can see bigger versions there, if you want.
I finally visited the Globe theatre for the first time this week. That’s not because I’ve been avoiding it—every time I walked past on the way to Tate Modern, I thought ‘I really must go to the Globe some time’— but I never got round to it.
Since the whole point is that it’s a reconstruction of an Elizabethan theatre, it might have made more sense to see a play from the period, but in fact I saw We The People by Eric Schlosser.
N.B. Picture may not be representative of actual play.
Dealing with the play first: it was a dramatic reconstruction of the process of writing the U.S. constitution, based on primary sources. Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness, is primarily a journalist/non-fiction writer, and this is a very straight presentation of history on the stage. He does his best to bring out the personalities of the men involved and find human interest and humour to leaven the mix a bit, but to be honest, a committee of lawyers and politicians discussing constitutional law doesn’t make for dynamic theatre. It was interesting and somewhat entertaining, but it all felt a lot like being in school.
I heard Schlosser on the radio talking about the play and saying that one of the things that interested him was that Americans tend to treat the constitution as a semi-sacred document (my paraphrase) and that he wanted to bring out its history as a document written by human beings, a product of compromise and a particular historical moment. Which is a worthwhile project, and I think he was successful, although for me the constitution never had those associations particularly.
With the subject of nation-building in the air at the moment, it’s worth being reminded that the process in our own countries’ histories was slow and erratic. A lot has changed in the meantime which might provide a framework and some help, but still, we can’t be surprised if countries like Iraq, Bosnia and even Russia take many years to even achieve stability, let alone all the features of a mature democracy. There’s no guarantee that they will ever achieve those things.
One touch worth noting: at various breaks in the action, a couple of musicians, dressed, like the rest of the cast, in C18th clothing, and played and sang West African music. One was playing a many-stringed instrument that I think was probably a kora, and the other some kind of stringed instrument played with a bow. Schlosser explains:
It’s a reminder of those who were not invited to the room. Slavery was crucial to the economy of the United States, but slaves had no voice whatsoever in society. In the play the music offers them a means to be heard. And it’s wonderful music.
I like the idea, although I’m not sure how well it worked theatrically. I’m not sure how many of the audience made the connection. And in a rather literal play, it seemed a bit out of place. Considering they were supposed to represent the voiceless, it’s an unfortunate irony that the musicians’ names aren’t listed on the website. They were named in the programme, but I don’t have it with me; one was Senegalese and the other was Gambian.
As for the theatre: it’s a striking building and has a plausibly authentic feel, although I believe it’s reconstructed on the basis of fairly thin evidence. I think probably the most interesting difference from a conventional theatre isn’t that it’s in the round—I’ve been to quite a few productions staged like that over the years anyway—it’s the natural lighting. Stage lighting provides a natural focus on the actors and away from the audience, and it helps the audience concentrate. In daylight, the actors don’t have that advantage. I don’t think this particular play made especially good use of the theatre, in fact; the actors moved among the audience standing in the pit sometimes, but most of the play consisted of men talking to each other and was naturally static; it could as easily have been staged in a proscenium arch theatre. Frankly it could almost have been a radio play. I’d be interested to see something more dramatic there sometime. Shakespeare, perhaps.
Oh, and if you visit and you have a seat, get a cushion. They rent them in the theatre. The seats are wooden benches, and it’s tough on the buttocks. They also rent out seat backs for some lumbar support, which is what I had, but I didn’t think it was very comfortable.
» The picture of Benjamin Franklin and an air stewardess is a section of a photo by Matt Wright and is used under—and therefore available under—a by-nc-sa Creative Commons licence.