Christopher Potter » Blog

Buckland

Christopher — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:08:59 +0000

I’m reading a mid-nineteenth century book titled Curiosities of History by Francis Buckland, alighted on in some second-hand bookshop. It must have been popular. This a condensed version of the eight volumes, published after the author’s death. Here you can find out how best to secret jewels about the person to avoid highway robbers (bury under the flesh of the left arm and let the skin heal over, apparently: ‘I fear, however, that if his precious depot were suspected, any robbers into whose hands he might fall would fairly mince him to pieces in search of further treasures.’ Or how about the efficacious properties of dugong oil, as good as Cod Liver oil but without the nauseous taste or smell: ‘Messrs. J Bell & Co., 338 Oxford Street, have a large stock of it on hand at the present time.’ Then there’s the moss called Usnea that ‘is found on the heads of men that have been hung in gibbets, or the like. The English druggists generally bring these heads from Ireland…This moss was used in the composition of the “sympathetick ointment” available in the cure of “falling sickness”. Giants, mummies, penny microscopes made from a drop of heated tree gum and a matchbox, Natator the Human Frog, Natator eats a bun under water, the performing Bull, performing fleas, the monster pig, Blondin’s imitation of an ape, fossil butter, fossil pork, and much much more!
I’ve long been a fan of the Bucklands, who as a family dedicated themselves (among other things) to eating their way through the animal kingdom. Father William was Dean of Christchurch Oxford, where he kept crocodiles in the round pond in the quad. Notable visitors have recorded being served such things as mice on toast for breakfast. Francis tells how, on hearing that a nearby zoo had burned to the ground, father and son rushed to the scene in the hopes of tasting rare flesh. Unfortunately they were some days after the event and the cheetah steaks were already rather high. William said the worst thing he’d ever tasted was a mole, though I think he changed his mind when he ate a bluebottle. In Italy they were shown the miraculous patch of stone eternally wet from the blood of some saint. Before he could be stopped William was on his hands and knees licking the ground. Bat’s urine, was his laconic response. He was also a noted geologist. Once when his driver got lost, he stopped the coach, picked up a handful of earth, sniffed it, and declared, ‘Ah, Uxbridge!’

Even the appendices of this book are fascinating. Though why I say that I don’t know. Appendices are often the best parts of a book. Ancient deposits of buried butter occasionally turn up in Irish bogs. (Well they did then, I don’t know if they still do.) Bog butter is very old butter that has turned to adiopocere. Under the right -damp – conditions animal flesh can turn to adiopocere too. Adiopocere is a kind of fossilised fat. Buckland speculates that bog butter may in fact be the product over time of some bog-stranded cow. In the appendix, however, he notes that in fact bogs have the opposite effect on flesh. The acidic conditions tend to preserve it. Bog butter turns out to be indeed just butter. The ancient Irish had a pension for rancid butter. They used to bury it, but sometimes must have forgotten where.

On writing You Are Here

Christopher — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:28:20 +0000

I only knew why I’d been driven to write You Are Here some months after I’d actually completed it. At the time, I was too busy worrying if I could write at all. And if not worrying about that, worrying about how I was ever going to organise the ridiculously free-ranging material I’d collected. Actually, it was the working out of a structure for the book that distracted me from the fear of writing it. Once I knew what I had to say, I just got on with saying it. Seems like an obvious strategy, but it took me by surprise. (In that perennial argument about style versus content I’ve always been a style man. I can’t imagine how a writer who knows how to say something hasn’t also got something to say. Whereas the reverse is certainly not the case. Plenty to say but no style, no thanks.)

I’ve always been interested in science. As an editor at Fourth Estate I worked with many science writers: Simon Singh, Matt Ridley, Peter Singer, V S Ramachandran, Peter Forbes, Marcus Du Sautoy, Henry Gee, Timothy Taylor, James Gleick, Eric Drexler, and Dava Sobel, among them. Some of these writers are also actual scientists. I am not a scientist of course, and it’s over thirty years since I read mathematics, and then history and philosophy of science at university. I never thought I’d end up writing a science book myself. Not in a million years (or even a billion years now that we know what a really long time looks like). Despite my science-based education, I’ve always felt like an outsider from the world of the arts daring to peek in. I haven’t had a mathematical thought since I left university, and even during those years long gone, I spent most of my time reading novels and going to the opera. (Mathematics is the perfect subject for the lazy student.) I like that thing Auden said about scientists, that whenever he found himself in their company he felt like some shabby curate who had stumbled into a drawing-room full of dukes. There’s something about the way scientists think that can be really intimidating. It’s hard to live in a world in which even one’s most casual remarks are liable to be scrutinised for logical inconsistency.

What really interest me, and interests very few scientists, is what it is that they are doing when they do science, and whether it leaves room for anything else. Scientists are just happy to get on with what it is that they do. And very successful they are at it too. But I’m interested in the philosophy of what that is. On the whole, scientists despise philosophers. As the biologist Steve Jones once remarked: ‘philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex.’ He’s not being complimentary.

Science really got going 401 years ago when Galileo first raised a telescope to the Heavens and described what he saw there. What he saw was a reality made out of things that move. Science tells us what the stuff of reality is made out of, and what we mean by motion. It turns out that it is hard to answer these questions. The material of reality takes us on a voyage down to ‘virtual’ particles that exist (if they can be said to exist) in a so-called vacuum of writhing energy. And what we mean by motion takes us in both directions: out into a possibly infinite universe in which all motion is related to the motion of light in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, and back down to a quantum world in which the motion of even a single atom is unpredictable (and where space and time may exist in 11 dimensions). But for all the subtlety of our current scientific theories, the story of creation can be reduced to a single sentence: The universe is a patch of radiation that expanded. Alternatively, we can say that the universe is a patch of radiation that evolved. The expansion and evolution are equivalent terms. Evolve is merely what radiation does in an expanding universe. Various fields, including the famous Higgs field, explain how radiation becomes matter. As the expanding space cools down, these primeval parts of matter coalesce into atoms, and eventually under the force of gravity into large agglomerations that ignite, and which we call stars. Some of the larger stars explode and spew heavier elements into the universe for the first time. Simple compounds like water and carbon dioxide emerge, and other more complicated molecules like hydrocarbons. And if the conditions are just so on small planets that are not too cold, and not too hot, with just the right sort of gravitational stability, and protected from damaging radiation by a strong enough magnetic field, then just possibly these conditions are fair for life to emerge. These so-called goldilocks conditions have existed at least once in the universe, and perhaps exist prolifically across it. The jury is still out on that one. An opinion either way has to be a matter of belief at this point.

Science is about separating and naming, and looking and describing. Science isolates phenomena and names them before it attempts to describe them. The world is a world ‘out there’ of separateness. This is very different from, say, a Buddhist description of nature, which tells us that the separation is an illusion. Curiously, the different stances aren’t as far apart as it seems. What science does is relate separate phenomena together into descriptions, or theories. Science advances by relating more and more things together into a unified whole. The methodology is one thing, and what comes out of the methodology something else altogether. If you like, the methodology is the illusion, and the wholeness the reality. Such a philosophical understanding of what it is that science does, also helps to explain why science can make us feels so isolated from nature. The separation is the starting point, but not where the end point. Ultimately, science has to account for us – we human observers - at the end (as far as we can tell) of a chain of complexity that stretches from the Big Bang to what we call ‘now,’ the present moment. After four hundred years science has only just begun to understand how to address such complexity as we are.

Science has a methodology that it uses to approach the truth. Observation, measurement, theory and technology feed into each other into a positive feedback loop that we call progress. Finer measurement leads to deeper theorising. Theories come and go, each encompassing the one that precedes it, showing where the previous theory holds and why it breaks down. The current theory is always truer than the one that came before because it has greater explanatory power. Science moves from true to truer. It’s great strength is that it never has to use the demon word ‘truth’. There is no such thing in science as ‘the truth’ only theories that are truer than what has gone before.

In his wonderful The God Delusion Dawkins distinguishes between deists, theists and atheists. For atheists there is nothing other than the evolution of stuff. Theists believe that God created and continues to interfere in his creation. And for deists, God created the universe and stepped back from his creation. Dawkins writes of his youthful attraction to deism, before his later adherence to full-blown atheism. In typical Dawkins fashion he is most scornful of those who claim to be agnostic. He tells us that science has no need of a creator only an explanation of the universe’s starting conditions. Well, I don’t see how this gets us very far. The starting conditions merely get more elusive, as indeed does the universe itself, the more we know about those conditions.

God simply has got nothing to do with a scientific description of the universe, the only real question is whether one believes, or not ,that a scientific description is all that there is.

Well, there’s art. Here’s Peter Campbell writing in the London Review of Books about the current exhibition of Henry Moore at Tate Britain:

‘Yet it is the sense one has when faced with ancient or exotic things that there is something beyond what can be grasped by mere inspection, if only some priest or shaman could give the correct interpretations, that makes the obscure impressive. We don’t necessarily need to know what things mean, but we do like to think they mean something: we want to know what Stonehenge was for.

No modern sculpture is embedded in systems of belief of that sort. With Moore you must look to your own responses for explanations of what you see and feel.’

Agnosticism is the acknowledgement that there things – most things I would say – that are beyond what can be understood, and always will be. A certain kind of rationalist will put aside the unknown and be happy to wait for a rational, scientific description later. I say, if we wait too long we might forget what the questions are that we don’t know the answers to. I’m happy to stand up for agnostics.

Today’s Guardian crossword

Christopher — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:53:29 +0000

One of the solutions was upas tree. Chambers defines upas as, ‘A fabulous Javanese tree that poisoned everything for miles around.’ Why are dictionary definitions often so satisfying? An art.

Thinking about the something beyond nothing

Christopher — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:51:27 +0000

Here’s something I read in the current issue of the London Review of Books that took my fancy.

No modern sculpture is embedded in systems of belief of that sort. With Moore you must look to your own responses for explanations of what you see and feel.’

London Review of Books 25 March 2010 Peter Campbell reviewing an exhibition of Henry Moore at Tate Britain.

Reading

Christopher — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:39:51 +0000

Here’s something from my reading of War and peace, actually from the very good introduction by Richard Pevear to the wonderful translation by the same and his wife: the shortest sentence in War and Peace is kápli kápali, which is translated by the Pevears as drops dripped. Richard Peavear uses this example to illustrate the quality of their translation, that it pays close attention to the musicality of the original. Interestingly, none of the other translations translate these two words with such poetry or with the same attention to the rhythm of the original words.

‘Drops dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored.’

Wonderful stuff.

The death of Andrei is of course a highlight. I was shocked to hear him say the words Piti, piti, and boom, boom. I immediately heard the Prokofiev music that accompanies these words in the opera, without having been aware what was going on in the opera. I’d assumed they were Prokofiev’s invention and not Tolstoy’s. Such an odd and miraculous passage both in the novel and in the opera.

I’ve got behind. Perhaps I won’t say anything about reading Pnin. Disappointing. There I’ve said something. Too clever by half. There’s something else.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle was recommended by a friend and all I can say is that I wish I’d written it myself, or that I’d read it as a child. Loved it. Amazing what writers for children can get away with.

I read all 620 pages of American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. Didn’t mean to but couldn’t put it down.

And I read a Canadian novel that my paperback publisher Stephanie Sweeney gave to me, and for the life of me I can’t remember what it’s called, which ist errible of me but not untypical. I left my copy with my mother and can’t check just at the moment. It has a really wonderful opening, and again I devoured all 480 pages of it in a day or two.

I read Tolstoy’s last short story Hadji Murat. It could have been written yesterday the style is so fresh and the content so relevant.

And I never got back about finishing Proust again. My memory wasn’t entirely at fault. Marcel does not go back to venice, but I had forgotten that physical travel is not the only kind of travel available to him. He does go back in memory as he steps on the threshold just before the long amazing last scene called le bal de tetes.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Christopher — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:30:13 +0000

Did I really manage to read the whole of War and Peace without making a single post. Looks like it.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

Christopher — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:27:09 +0000

‘Will they kill thee?’

‘Oah, thatt is nothing. I am good enough Herbert Spencerian, I trust, to meet little thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know. But – but they may beat me.’

p319 in my old Macmillan edition, which has, incidentally wonderful illustrations by Kipling’s father. And yes, I have the spelling correct in that passage.

And then comes this on the next page:

‘It was process of Evolution, I think, from Primal Necessity, but the fact remains in all its cui bono. I am, oh, awfully fearful!’

Interesting, to me at last, to see how strongly Darwin was in the air even in Edwardian times, just before it went out of favour. There’s something like this in The Water Babies but of course that’s much closer to the time. here’s the bit from the Water Babies:

You must not talk about “ain’t” or “can’t” when you speak of this great wonderful world mind you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.

You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows; not even Sir Roger Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr Darwin, or Professor faraday, or Mr Grove, or nay other of the great men whom good boys are taught to respect…’ p53/4

‘…Wise men are afraid to say that there is anything contrary to nature, except what is contrary to mathematical truth; for as two and two cannot make five, and two straight join twice, and a part cannot be as great as a whole, and so on (at least, so it seems at present): but the wiser men are, the less they talk about “cannot’. P54

I have to say both these novels are among the most peculiar I’ve ever read. Mind you I’m also reading Selma Lagerlof’s The Saga of Gosta Berling and that’s pretty odd too.

Here’s another quote from the Water Babies:

p56 ‘Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.’

‘Wise men know that their business is to examine what is, and not to settle what is not.’

And this amused me too:

‘Being quite comfortable is a very good thing; but it does not make people good. Indeed, it sometimes makes them naughty, as it has made the people in America.’ P157

Peter Forbes’ review of What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Masssimo Piatelli-Palmarini

Christopher — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:54:42 +0000

I like this from Steve Jones: ‘philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex’. Quoted in Peter Forbes’ interesting review.

I met Steve Jones at the Dartington Festival last year, and I have to say I was rather terrified that he’d come to my talk. He didn’t. At breakfast he couldn’t have been more delightful company, but still I was terrified. And now I see he would not approve my interest in things philosophical. It’s amazing how vituperative some scientists are about philosophy. There were a number of such comments in Susan Blackmore’s book of interviews with cognitive scientists. I think I’ll start a collection of them. There’s something important here. Richard Dawkins is critical too in his The God Delusion. I like scientists who just get on and do what they do, but there is room to pause and think about what it is that they do. In fact it has become critical that we do. Just as we are now asking whether economics has to be done differently (the answer may be that it can’t) we are also asking whether scientific progress has to happen differently (maybe it can’t). Both methodologies require growth, and we now realise with a start that the earth is a limited resource.

Dawkins distinguishes between deists, theists and atheists. Atheists, there is nothing other than evolution of stuff. Theists, God created and continues to interfere in his creation. Deists, God created the universe and stepped back from his creation. Dawkins talks of the attraction of Deism, and tells us how close he came to such a view himself. He tells us that science has no need of a creator only an explanation of the universe’s starting conditions. Well, I don’t see how this gets us very far. The starting conditions merely get more elusive, as indeed does the universe itself, the more we know about those conditions. God simply has nothing to do with a scientific description of the universe, the only question is whether one believes or not that a scientific description is all that there is. I never hear such materialists ever come out and actually declare that they don’t believe in anything other than the scientific method but this must be their belief. What I sometimes hear is an argument that science isn’t about belief, but then that begins to sound suspiciously philosophical.

By the way, I feel I don’t have to have a view either way. I feel that makes me truly agnostic, and also makes me a creature on whom Dawkins pours the greatest scorn. Not that that matters, I like what he’s doing and as far as Biblical literalism goes, it is blown out of the water. Their own side ought to have been able to deal with it though. Ironic the job should have been left to a scientist. If I was part of some organised religion I would be open-jawed at anyone who claimed it was possible to take the Bible literally. Christ spoke in parables for God’s sake.

Flannery O’Connor/Good Country People

Christopher — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:14:45 +0000

‘as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other.’

‘Mrs Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.’

The use of that ‘but’ is genius.

‘Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face…’

And how about this for comic timing:

Mrs Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. her name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.’

Joy, we discover, has a PhD in philosophy. Her mother ‘picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing – how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.” These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quietly and went out of the room as if she were having a chill.’

Finishing Proust, and reading The Violent Bear It Away

Christopher — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:28:44 +0000

I recently finished reading Proust (again). Wagner recommended a three-day diet of Bach canatas coming down from his Ring Cycle. I’m reading Flannery O’Connor to come down from Proust. Certainly O’Connor shares with Bach a vision of the world that has at its foundations Christianity at its most astringent; and that astringency is in marked contrast to Proust’s divagations. More about the last volume of Proust another time.

Wagner failed, however, to tell us what we might then take to come down from the Bach, and today I’m stumbling out of O’Connor’s landscape, disoriented and as if trying to remember how to see in colour.

All the way to the last page I had no idea how she was going to pull off an ending. I imagined myself as the novelist, having no idea what to do. She tells us on the first page that Tarwater’s great uncle has been buried, and did not perish in a fire as Tarwater believed. We know that Tarwater will find the burial mound. We know that something else must happen but we cannot imagine what. That O’Connor does manage to pull off what she does (I won’t spoil it by saying how the novel ends, anyway it is much wrought in the language, and would seem banal said straight out) is a measure of her genius. There’s a life just out which I might take a look at. She died aged only 39 I see.

The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor

Christopher — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:19:13 +0000

Hard to know what to read after Proust. The harsh, rock-hewn sentences of Flannery O’Connor have turned out to be an ideal contrast. Amazingly, The Violent Bear It Away doesn’t seem to be in print in a UK edition. I had to buy an American edition at £11.50, though if I could have borne to wait a day or two I could have had it for less on Amazon, but I couldn’t and didn’t.

I wonder if it is because some novels are great – in fact why we claim them as great; not just greater but somehow transcendent of the rest – that we read in them whatever it is that currently interests or exercises us. A hundred pages in and it is beginning to creep into my awareness that this is a novel about among many things freewill, which is what I’ve been reading about elsewhere these last few months. Will Tarwater act freely? Can he, or anyone? Will he fulfill the prophecy of his Great Uncle or will he choose the world as represented by the schoolteacher, his uncle? It’s more complicated than that. There are layers of choosing and not choosing. Is to follow his great uncle also to follow God, or must he wait to hear God’s words himself? Can he follow both uncles, and if he did could he said to be any freer than merely following the one over the other? What would an independently made choice look like?

On page 104 Tarwater has just found his way to his schoolmaster uncle who is deaf and is hung about with machinery to aid his hearing. Tarwater, who is 14, says of his uncle’s device: ‘Do you think in the box…or do you think in your head?’ The whole problem of consciousness summed up in the passing remark of a peculiar boy!

Faulty memory

Christopher — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:48:48 +0000

Can memory ever be truly faulty given that it can never anyway be faultless? Rather as we have learned to live with the realisation (discovery?) that there is no absolute space and time, we have also learned to live with the discovery (knowledge?) that there is no true path back to the past. And so as I begin to re-read the final volume of Proust’s novel I am already surprised, and appropriately so given that this is Proust after all, how faulty my memory is of past readings. And not straightforwardly faulty. After my first reading, many years ago, I go it into my head/memory that at the last, Proust’s final revivification of his past comes about when in Venice he steps on a broken paving stone as he crosses St Mark’s Square. What’s more I ‘remember’ this scene as a highlight of the entire novel, and despite the fact that I have since read the novel again, and had the chance to correct that memory. Indeed I remember how much I enjoyed that scene the second time round. And yet though I must surely have corrected the memory on the second reading, the first incorrect memory persists. Proust doesn’t, in this volume, return to Venice as I had remembered. Well I haven’t got to the relevant section yet so who knows what I will discover this third time around. I haven’t actually embarked on this final leg of the journey, but I am ready to. I’ve read the introduction, and out of that reading was forced to adjust my memories. I can’t even begin to imagine what I will find when I get to the actual scene.

Jane tells me that I would not have had to investigate far to find Proust’s first reference to the Arabian Nights. It comes in the first pages of the first volume. And yet though I have just now looked I cannot find the reference, so perhaps Jane’s memory has played tricks too. (I doubt it, and wait for page numbers.)

Reading the Arabian Nights I see like a penny dropping that Proust’s diversions and digressions are licences given to him out of his love for these stories. Delayed gratification is a strong force, and apparently a strong early indicator in children of later adult mental health. (Those who learn to delay are better off. Often literally so.)

Night at the opera last night: finally got to see Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, an opera I have loved on CD. Very disappointed when Covent Garden cancelled its production during its years of crisis. Particularly pleasing then to experience a world class performance at an opera house which has been going through its own years of crisis. Perhaps ENO is coming out the other side.

Ligeti says he meant in this opera to abolish time; to turn time into space. The clocks stop. Does everything resonate? Again this seems a propos as I begin to read In Search of Lost Time, a novel which ultimately finds the artist, after thousands of pages of digression, ready to begin writing the very novel that the reader has just completed. No time passes. Things vibrate sympathetically. My dinner partner and I agree that we regret the modern use of the word empathy, when sympathy must be what is meant. Empathy is not possible, it’s the tragedy of being human. Sympathy is our best consolation.

At dinner afterwards we wondered if there is such a force as unconditional love. In somewhat Socratic fashion we started from the premiss that there is not, but quickly came – I think it shocked us both – to the opposite conclusion. The conditions we beset around such love are invariably conjured in an attempt to mitigate the despairing realisation that when we do love unconditionally, we really do.

Iain Burnside trailed his next week’s program (the one I’m on) twice today. I learned for the first time that he is calling it ‘Little and Large’. It turned my blood cold hearing my name. I suppose there are people in world who just love to be on the radio live.

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights

Christopher — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:46:48 +0000

I’ve tried reading the Arabian Nights before, from a couple of selections that are around. Though the one selection started off promisingly (erotic and violent as we have been led to believe), I was soon bored, and the other volume was not well translated and the choice even less enticing. Actually, only now can I say that the choice was unenticing. Then, as I far as I might have known, all the stories could have been dull. But now I’ve started the complete new Penguin edition, published in 3 gorgeous hard back volumes (almost 3,000 pages together) and I’m completely hooked. I read them at night before I go to sleep and this is far from ideal. The book is so heavy it’s hard to manipulate from a prone position, and each story ends on such a cliff hanger it’s difficult to put the volume down. So, hard to keep the volume up AND hard to put it down.

It gives you a much better idea of the work as a whole to read from the beginning than to jump around in some selection. A major part of the delight of these stories is how one story is embedded into another, and that into another and so on. I’ve just read the three individual stories of how three one-eyed men all arrived on the same night at the home of three beautiful and bizarre young women, but this is already a story so embedded in other stories that I can no longer remember where the story began or what loose ends are left dangling (if any). There was a moment in the last of these three stories when the protagonist met ten one-eyed men, and I wondered if we might then hear each of their stories. I had thought this boxed set was perhaps going to remain as beautiful wallpaper in my study, but now I think there’s a good chance that in the next couple of years I may read the lot. No chance of taking it on a plane alas. It was reading Proust that first got me (and my friend and Proust-reading partner Jane) interested in the Arabian Nights. They pop up in his great long novel from time to time, though having said that I can’t remember where, and now I wonder if mostly they make an appearance in the last volume, the volume we are about to re-read. Jane and I are making our second go through Proust (and my third). I think we both know now that Proust is for life (well our lives anyway), even given the shocking discovery that the second part of volume five is a drastic falling off. Volume five is made out of the loosely connected parts The Prisoner and The Fugitive. The Prisoner is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the whole cycle, just as The Fugitive is undoubtedly its low point. It really isn’t possible to read a novel this long and get an idea of even its architecture the first time round. Each time I’m enjoying the novel as a whole more, and feeling more confident that I can say where its strengths and weaknesses lie: this does not lessen the pleasure so much as focus it. Now the great passages arrive like jewels hung in ghastly night, or like arias in some great opera (and all operas, even the greatest have their longeurs). Of course, I am not infallible. I was convinced the last time round that there were many more longeurs in the novel than in fact there are. Sometimes a longeur turns out to be this reader’s lack of concentration. I’m pretty confident this isn’t the reason I have it in for The Fugitive. The author doesn’t seem to be in control of his material at this point. I’m sure he would have revised it heavily if he had lived or had the energy. The Fugitive was published posthumously. The chapters here don’t hang together. In fact I’m suspicious that thee are chapters when there have been no such shortish chapters in previous volumes. Despite many references to his long held desire to be in Venice, and the obstacles that get in the way of fulfilling that desire, suddenly in The Fugitive we finish one chapter only to find ourselves in the next in Venice without a by or leave. I do hope form returns with the last volume. My memory is that it is one of the finest volumes of all. I’m eager to test my memory, and create new memories to be further tested in the future. (Why is that Proust trails pretentiousness. To say that I am reading Proust for the third time sounds utterly pretentious. But Proust is hugely entertaining, wise, profound. And long. He has to be read over and again. Apparently Virginia Woolf oncee wrote that Remembrance of Things Past was the greatest novel ever written. Recent scholarship suggests that she cold not have read more than the first couple of volumes. This has been used against her. But really! That’s still over a thousand pages. Surely enough for the pronouncement to hold.)

Quote for today

Christopher — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:30:24 +0000

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us – and if we do not agree, seems to puts hands in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. – How beautiful are the retired flowers! how they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out ‘admire me I am a violet! dote on me I am a primrose!’

Keats in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 21 December 1817

Woolf and Joyce (and Dolly Parton)

Christopher — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:06:51 +0000

Virginia Woolf’s New Year resolutions for 1931 as noted in her diary:

Friday 2 January 1931:
Here are my resolutions for the next three months…
First to have none. Not to be tied. Second to be free and kindly with myself, not goading it to parties: to sit rather privately reading in the studio…
To care nothing for making money. As for Nelly, to stop irritation by the assurance that nothing is worth irritation: if it comes back, she must go. Then not to slip this time into the emptiness of letting her stay.
[Nelly was the Woolfs' cook and the bane of Virginia Woolf''s existence. It was as if the power relationship had been reversed. Woolf felt herself terrorised by Nelly.]

Despairingly on 17th February 1931 Woolf writes in her diary:
Nelly comfortable installed for life.

Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (as I was last year) I began to make a list of words unfamiliar to me.

Resile, to return to a former position
Dundrearies, long flowing sideburns
Catamenic, monthly

Then followed:

Baisemoin
Agendath
Inwit
Kalipedia

but I quickly ran out of patience. I can’t be opening the dictionary every two lines: so these words remain as mysteries.

Virginia Woolf in a letter to Roger Fry, on reading Proust and then Joyce:

‘One has to put the book down with a gasp. The pleasure becomes physical – like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses: to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished – My martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for 4 pounds 10 shillings.’

Quite.

I downloaded all 26 CDs of the uncut spoken books edition of Ulysses. What could I have been thinking? Will I ever listen to it? Actually did listen to a couple of minutes the other day and wonder if this might be the only way to approach this monster (monstrosity?)

A few things I enjoyed in Ulysses (and yes, yes there are many wonderful scenes, but the totality…It’s like higher Irish blarney. A lot of drunk Irish men going on and on. Incomprehensibly. Oh, if only there had been more of the Blooms):

Joyce invents the World’s worst twelve books including: Let’s all chortle (hilaric) and Who’s who in space (astric)

‘It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.’

‘Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.’

‘Ineluctable modality of the visible.’ [Sounds great but what does it mean?]

‘Beaglebaying’

The American country singer Dolly Parton (b1946) may be historically unique for having lent both parts of her name to science. A parton is what Richard Feyman named a mysterious particle out of which protons and neutrons are made. Murray-Gellmann named the same particle the quark, the name that stuck, a word found in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake that describes the sound a seagull makes. The first cloned mammal was a sheep named Dolly (because cloned out of a breast cell). She was born on July 5th 1996 and died February 14th 2003. Sheep can live 20 years. The average life expectancy is 10 to 12 years.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle: a short synopsis

Christopher — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:22:44 +0000

DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN

A music drama performed over three days and a preliminary evening

Running time 14-16 hours (depending on the conductor: Keilbert ultra fast, Goodall ultra slow.

Synopsis

Wotan and Fricka are about to move into their lovely new home, but first they must pay the contractors, the giant builders Fasolt and Fafner (bros.), who are, even now, at the door. Why Wotan thought it would be a good idea to offer payment in the form of Fricka’s sister Freia is unclear. But a contract is a contract and the builders leave with their payment.
You only ever get what you pay for. It might have seemed like a bargain at the time, but the true cost of this contract is becoming apparent. For reason Wotan had forgotten that Freia is the keeper of the magic golden apples, without which the Gods will age and die. With Freia gone the Gods begin to lose their life-force.
Re-negotiating a contract is always tricky, particularly after the fact, but the giants agree to return Freia in exchange for the famed golden hoard of the Nibelungens (a tribe of royal dwarfs who live over Nidelheim way).
The Nibelungens are represented in the Ring by two tiresome brothers, named Alberich and Mime. At the beginning of the cycle we find Alberich in the process of stealing the eponymous ring from the three Rhinemaidens – Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde – an act that confers on him all the world’s power.
Alberich’s techie brother Mime has made a magic helmet called the Tarnhelm that allows anyone wearing it to change form, or even to become invisible. Wotan teases Alberich, saying that he does not believe the helmet has the powers professed of it. Oh yes it does, says Alberich. Oh no it doesn’t, says Wotan. Oh yes it does, says Alberich, turning himself into a mouse. Too late! Wotan seals the mouse-shaped Alberich into a little box and heads off back to Valhalla with ring, golden hoard and mouse-shaped dwarf. So much for being in possession of all the power of the world. Now Wotan has it.
Alberich does, at least, manage to curse the ring as it is taken from him. It is this curse, rather than the power of the ring itself, that ultimately brings about the downfall of gods, and hence of everything.
Wotan has it in mind that he will hand over the hoard yet hold on to the cursed ring. The giants aren’t so easily fooled, and insist that the ring is part of the Nibelungen hoard and theirs by rights. It’s less than two hours into the cycle and the giants have become the fourth owners of the ring.
The cursed ring spells TROUBLE. It’s not long before the brothers are fighting. One of them kills the other, always hard to remember which. The surviving brother moves into a cave, and turns himself into a dragon. The ring remains here, in the dragon’s protection, until the third opera: Siegfried.

The Ring was written over a period of 26 years from 1848 to 1874. For the first five years Wagner devoted himself to writing the libretto, beginning at the end of the story, then called the Death of Siegfried. He worked his way backwards to Das Rheingold, at which point he began to write the music. (Wagner did not call his operas operas but music dramas.) In 1857 Wagner got to the end of the second act of Siegfried, at which point he put the score to one side while he wrote Tristan and Isolde (the work that set classical music on its modern course) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg his only comic opera. (Aside: In James Joyces’s Ulysses the author invents the world’s worst twelve books, among them: ‘Let’s all chortle (hilaric) and Who’s who in space (astric)’. Might I suggest, Wagner the comedian (farcical).)
When Wagner returned to the Ring twelve years later, his sound world had changed. The third act of Siegfried is generally taken to be a highlight of the cycle, the first two acts are the least successful parts of the cycle. Though Ring productions invariably sell out, sometimes years in advance, it is always possible to get tickets to Siegfried, except perhaps at Bayreuth where tickets are offered on a lottery basis.

Bayreuth: the wooden opera house that Wagner built as a place of pilgrimage. Situated in the town of Bayreuth, where there is nothing to distract the Wagnerite, or any one else for that matter, which is why Wagner chose it. Only the works of Wagner are performed here. The seats are wooden benches. The audience is locked in (yes, actually locked in) for the duration of each act. Das Rheingold plays for 2 and a half hours without a break. The first act of Gotterdammerung is about 2 hours long. Wagner acknowledged that his music is addictive. He constructed a three-day cold turkey cure consisting entirely of Bach cantatas.

Wagner had initially intended the Ring to end with the redemption of the Gods, but after the twelve-year interregnum/writer’s block he decided to end instead with their annihilation. Optimism is replaced by pessimism. The Death of Siegfried was re-titled Gotterdammerung, somewhat tweely translated into English as the Twilight of the Gods.
Erda’s early gloomy prophecy comes true. The Gods are indeed doomed.
Erda is the goddess of the earth. The nine unruly Valkyrie sisters – breast-plated, horn-helmeted, spear-carrying Brunnhilde, Waltraute, Helmwige, Gerhilde, Siegrune, Schwertleite, Ortlinde, Grimgerde, Rossweisse – are her children by the promiscuous Wotan. Erda is also mother – though not by Wotan – to the Norns, the three sisters who weave the fabric of reality that Erda predicts will soon unravel.
The Ring opens with a famous 136-bar chord of E flat major that sounds for almost 4 minutes, and represents the creation of the universe. Wagner pushed harmony to the limits of lushness but here prefigures minimalism. The last opera of the cycle heralds the demise of the universe by sounding out the chord of E flat minor.
It is generally agreed that the masterpiece of the cycle – along with Act III of Siegfried already mentioned – is the second opera, Die Walkure, the story of twins Siegmund and Sieglinde. Their father is, unknown to them, Wotan, who else? Mother is some mortal or other.
It is a dark and stormy night. Siegmund seeks shelter. Sieglinde takes him in. She is married to Hunding, who as luck would have it is just the person Siegmund is fleeing. Hunding returns and vows to kill Siegmund in the morning, but rules of etiquette dictate that until then he is a guest in the house. (Etymological aside: host and hostile have the same root.) The twins tell their stories, which turn out to be the same story. They recognise themselves, by which time they have fallen in love. By morning Sieglinde is pregnant.
Meanwhile, back at Valhalla, Fricka – one of her goddess duties is protector of the marriage bed – has tuned in to Hunding’s prayer for vengeance. She is disgusted by the incestuousness of the twins.
Wotan is lord of all the Gods but he is also a hen-pecked husband. And yet though the marriage is sexless, Wotan loves Fricka.
The plot of the ring doesn’t hold together, as is clear after even the most cursory reading. The story is ridiculous and riddled with inconsistencies but the marriage of music and words – as music drama – is so powerful on the symbolic level that it quickly sank deep into the dark creative consciousness of the 20th century.
Wotan had hatched some complicated scheme, begun in the mists of time, to thwart Alberich’s curse, but now his plans have been thwarted by his wife.
Brunnhilde is mortified that her beloved father should be so distressed. She vows to stand in as Siegmund’s defender and as Wotan’s will. Wotan shakes his spear at her. He tells her that his will is that Siegmund must die. She quakes. She agrees to toe the line, even though she knows that Wotan has forfeited his will to Fricka’s.
When it comes to it, Brunnhilde is so moved by the mortal love Siegmund expresses for Sieglinde that she defies Wotan. Siegmund refuses to accompany Brunnhilde to the halls of dead heroes if that means he can never again be with Sieglinde. Brunnhilde is amazed that anyone might forgo deathlessness for oblivion. She begins to understand that love is more powerful even than death. Wotan intervenes and kills Siegmund (and Hunding). Brunnhilde flees. By the end of the second opera Brunnhilde has been put into a deep sleep as punishment, though she does manage to strike a bargain: a hero who is willing to cross the threshold of fire will be permitted to wake her and win her heart. Wotan and Brunnhilde declare their deep love for each other, and he sings his famous farewell to her: Lebe wohl.
That hero is, of course, going to be Siegfried, the child swelling in Sieglinde’s belly.

From here on in the Ring cycle begins to fail as drama. Wagner has painted himself into a corner. How could Wagner create a greater hero in Siegfried than Siegmund? He can’t, he couldn’t and he didn’t. Siegfried is meant to be a child of nature – a kind a holy innocent, better characterised as Parsifal in Wagner’s final opera – but here he more often comes across as an ingrate. We even begin to feel sympathy for Mime, who has brought him up. Mime’s motives may not be honorable, but Siegfried doesn’t know that – at least not at first.
Mime is in possession of the fragments of Siegmund’s sword, which he continually tries and fails to re-forge.
The third opera of the cycle plods through the life of the hero. The sword is re-forged by Siegfried from instructions delivered to him by a woodbird. Siegfried kills the dragon, takes the ring. Mime is killed by his brother. Wotan wanders in and out disguised as Der Wanderer. In the third act Brunnhilde is awoken. Siegfried and Brunnhilde declare their love for each other.

In the last opera the plot thickens and darkens. Hagen is introduced: the progeny of Alberich and a mortal woman. He is the dark counterpoint to Siegfried. The Tarnhelm comes to the fore once again. (I hate that Tarnhelm, my companion said to me the last time I saw the cycle. I agreed.)
A love potion is brought into play to trick Siegfried into a love match with Hagen’s half sister Gutrune: a device recapitulated from Tristan and Isolde. Oh it all gets too tedious. Siegfried is killed. He has a weak spot it turns out. Funny no one mentioned it before. It is his back. He is not protected there because, as a hero, he would never flee an enemy. Brunnhilde tortured by his apparent love for Gutrune reveals this secret.
The body of the hero is carried down the Rhine in a famous sequence of music. Brunnhilde takes back the ring that her former lover had once placed on her finger. In a final gesture, she immolates herself, riding onto the pyre astride Siegfried’s horse, Grane. In the last sequence of sung music she makes her farewells to the world and to her horse, declaring her love for Siegfried. She was once a deathless god, but now she, too, willingly embraces oblivion. And all for love.
The banks of the Rhine burst. Valhalla is destroyed, and all the world with it. Hagen reaches out for the ring with a last cry, but the Rhinemaidens rise up to reclaim it. The opera finishes as it began, as a portrait of nothingness.

Life and art

Christopher — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:21:36 +0000

In the Guardian the other day I read about Anthony Matthews aged 20 a trooper in the Light Dragoons who survived a grenade hit. He was quoted as saying that the experience had been ‘like a scene from Saving Private Ryan‘. I suppose this is a more heightened illustration taken from a more extremely lived life of what for any of the rest of us we might mean when we say that a sunset is just like a painting by Turner. It is such artifices that make the shoreline from which we judge what we take to be the motions of the real world.

More at Dartington

Christopher — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:15:15 +0000

Salley told me afterwards about her friend Brian and what happened as he was sitting down to take his place in the audience. The man next to him lent over and said: ‘I don’t hold with all this Big Bang stuff do you?’

And while I remember, my friend Tim tells me that the use of the word ‘quiver’ by Virginia Woolf in The Waves and Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm may mean less than I think. He told me that one of his chief memories of Constance Garnett’s translation of Anna Karenina is of her use of the word quiver, and how Anna was forever to be found in this condition. I suppose that translation must be of the same period. I’ll check on the date. Clever Stella Gibbons must just have been up on the word’s then trendiness. (I just tried to find a date for a Garnett’s translation. It seems to have been published in 1901, thirty years before The Waves, so perhaps I’m right after all.)

Arriving Provincetown

Christopher — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:25:57 +0000

I wish I could say that I when I travel I am perfectly happy cocooned in a cashmere shawl (no one should travel without one the smarter magazines tell us), absorbed in the penseés of some French philosopher or other, or in one of the more obscure novels of George Eliot. But I don’t own a cashmere shawl (and as often as not the cabin is overheated as it is underheated) and I have learnt by experience that I can only get through the experience of relocating myself across the globe thtough continuous low-level diversion, which is why I fly Virgin: for the on-board entertainment system. For the almost seven hours it took us to get to Boston, I watched one thing after another, except for the odd hour or two inbetween during which I struggled to complete the Saturday Guardian crossword, always more of a challenge in the air (less oxygen?, less concentration?). So yesterday it was Coraline followed by Christian the Lion, then a BBC Horizon documentary on why some thin people can’t get fat, and I forget what else. Proust and Richard Dawkins, who made it into my hand luggage, went unread. And no matter how much I mean not to, yes I eat everything on offer, the chocolate pudding and the chcocolate brownie and the ice cream. I draw the line at alcohol, but mainly because I’ve been trying to drawn the line even when on the ground. In the past I have taken a more austere approach, but it seems to make no difference – I still arrive feeling grubby - so I’ve decided to go with it and exult in the grubbiness. Conclusion: I’m not sure it’s working. I just feel even grubbier.

The flight from Boston to Provincetown is how travel ought to be all the time, and presumably is for a fortunate few. There was only me and the pilot (Molly). Admittedly the plane only seats a maximum of nine passengers, but still, it was an unforgettable experience. Even I, a nervous flier, could enjoy a flight made under these ideal conditions. The sky was so clear, and the light so pure, we appeared to be merely skimming the water. The sun was beginning to set, the waves sparkled, the air was as still as could be. The grubbiness of the translatlantic flight was quickly cast off and I could feel the energy of approaching Provincetown feeding me as if intravenously: and who is it say that it wasn’t feeding me even more directly: at that molecular interface where our neurons jiggle and dance with the molecules of the rest of the universe.

The tide is going out, the sky is the palest blue, streaked at the horizon with bands of colourless clouds, the canvas of the sky seemingly left unpainted there, and the slightest breeze blows as if perfectly judged for optimum human comfort. In otherwords: it is a perfect day, and I intend to do nothing other than be in it, which is not going to be difficult. Now, yesterday, four hours into the flight across the Atlantic, that’s when it is most apparent how difficult it is to live in the moment. Buddhists tell us that they learn how to suffer extremes of cold and heat not because they wish to suffer but because they mean to be comfortable in all conditions. Me, I’ll just try and avoid the extremes.

To blog or not to blog

Christopher — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:44:51 +0000

One of the reasons I had to give up ashtanga yoga was I getting too competitive, which is hardly the point; looking around to see how deep my neighbour’s down dog. My friend Jane has taken to blogging like the proverbial duck to water, while I’m left sounding out blogs in my head but then not getting around to writing them up, and what would be the point of that? Except of course that there is an aspect of blogging that is akin to talking to oneself. Perhaps Stephen Fry feels differently, but for me it is a little like talking to the void, or perhaps talking aloud outdoors, where it is vaguely posible that someone might be listening. I did get a response from someone I actually don’t know telling me that she was enjoying my blogs, and what a boost that was; though of course part of me wonders whether it might have a spam e-mail. I had meant to tell you (whoever you are) about my trip back from Provincetown to London, though what exactly I have now entirely forgotten. I meant to tell you about the talk with Salley Vickers about the book, which took place in Dartington last Sunday, but that is already beginning to move off into the mists. Well here’s a snippet two before it entirely disappears from view. It went well I think, though I was concentrating so hard I couldn’t really tell. The audience were deathly quiet. Was it because they were concentrating – they didn’t laugh at any of my jokes, surely a bad sign – or was it was seething anger? For all I knew they might have been about to rise up as a single body and bludgeon me to death. The best indication that all was well came at question time 15 minutes before the hour was up. I’ve been to enough of these things to know that it can be tricky getting the first question out of an audience, and that once there has been one question it’s generally easier to draw out another and then another. But when Salley asked for questions about 20 hands shot into the air and in the end I didn’t have time to address more than half of them. Good questions too. Do we have freewill? Why should I buy your book when I’ve read Bill Bryson’s? Is dark matter an indication that the Big Bang theory isn’t working? When you’re sitting there wondering what on earth (what in the universe) the question is going to be it certainly gets the adrenalin going. My first thought a number of times was ‘I can’t answer this question, I don’t know where to begin?’ But then somewhere inside me a voice was also saying, ‘you have to say something, just think’. Of course I loved the fact that various people came up afterwards to tell me in person how much they had enjoyed the talk, but my favourite moment came as I was leaving the hall: I heard one very English older woman say to another: ‘Did you enjoy that?’ to which she received the one word reply, which even in its monsyllable could be said to stentorian: ‘Bits’. Quite.

The Waves (1931) and Cold Comfort Farm (1932)

Christopher — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:39:36 +0000

THE WAVES (1931) and COLD COMFORT FARM (1932)

‘…that pleasure [of reading] is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it. When the day of judgment comes therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick – the reason why we have made better shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this – we have loved reading.’
Virginia Woolf from Essays Volume 5: 1929 to 1932

I mean to spend more time with Virginia Woolf’s non-fiction. Who could not love someone who writes in her diary:

Tuesday 17 February 1931:
‘And I feel us, compared with Aldous and Maria [Huxley], unsuccessful. They’re off today to do mines, factories…black country; did the docks when they were here; must see England. They are going to the Sex Congress at Moscow, have been in India, will go to America, speak French, visit celebrities – while I live here like a weevil in a biscuit.’

And who does not think that Mrs Dalloway is a masterpiece?
But I have been reading The Waves (published in 1931, around the time she was writing that diary entry, and that essay). It is written in a sort of high incantatory style, and by time I reached the words ‘the end’ I wanted to throw the book across the room.
I was eager to read the novel because rather to my surprise I was thrilled by Katie Mitchell’s production for The National, and which I saw when it was touring in New York. I’d heard such mixed reactions to her work that I was pretty much convinced I was going to be a naysayer; which ought to be a warning against what has become almost irresistible: having an opinion about everything. So much of ordinary everyday exchange is made up out of opinions dubiously grounded. But what is the alternative: to remain silent?
My friend Cy left at the interval, having been made so incandescent with rage she won’t talk about the experience even now months later. I had gone under duress but was quickly mesmerised by Katie Mitchell’s theatrical magic. Woolf herself called the novel a ‘playpoem’ and it has found its best expression in Katie Mitchell’s adaptation. The theme of the novel is of the underlying oneness of Nature, not just of the one-ness of the consciousness of its six main characters, and of Percival, the 7th and absent character (absent in that we never enter his interior monologue as we do the other six in turn and turn again), and who in his absence affects deeply the lives of the other six. (He dies about half way through the novel.) I feel Woolf must have been influenced by the ferment of the ideas from the 20s around how to interpret quantum physics: that a unified reality seems to underpin Nature, out of which the illusion of separate things mysteriously emerges. In the novel, the sea is a metaphor for that underlying connectedness:

‘”Yet these roaring waters,” said Neville, “upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out those false sayings, ‘I am this; I am that!’ Speech is false…”‘

‘But we who live in the body see with the body’s imagination things in outline…’

For me it is not enough to declare that the characters are all meant to sound the same. That is of little comfort to the reader, with readerly expectations. And even then perhaps all would have been well if I were at all drawn to that ‘one’ voice. For me the interior monologues are self-absorbed maunderings.
Katie Mitchell brought the novel alive by concentrating on this philosophical aspect of the novel – its oneness – and uses it to fire her theatrical imagination. We were made to see in what way the material world might be an illusion. The fabric of reality dissolved around us. In the centre of the stage was a screen on which a film was being shown. The film, however, was being constructed in front of our very eyes by a group of actors and a studio filled with props. At one point in the film we ’saw’ a woman standing on a cliff top, leaning forward over the precipice looking out at a blue sky, the wind blowing through her hair. Away from the screen, however, we could also see how the illusion was being constructed, how the fabric of reality is woven out of parts. We see one actor playing the woman, but since on screen we only see her head and upper body it hardly matters what else she is wearing. Another actor (now prop assistant) holds up a painted blue board to represent the sky, while another prop assistant (and actor) wafts a piece of stiff card in order to create enough of a disturbance of the air to blow the performing actor’s hair back.
I loved every minute of the show. It was continually inventive, often moving, though I seem to remember, as the novel is, never funny. On the whole I don’t like negative criticism, but I feel Woolf is great enough that her failures might at least be pointed up. As my friend S pointed out, ‘the trouble with The Waves is that it isn’t nourishing.’

Of course it has its moments:
‘I am immeasureable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales – huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering; I detect, I perceive.’

‘Yet like children we tell each other stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language, such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.’

but a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. I also liked: ‘But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough.’ Except that the million millions spoils the effect. Given that she talks of the six, she must mean human beings and there have been nothing like even a single million million humans even through the whole of history. Arguably she could be referring to all life-forms and that might put her in the right ball-park. But perhaps I’m becoming pedantic out of irritation.

Woolf seems to be quite aware of the difficulties she has to overcome. I can’t help but feel that when she has a character say: ‘I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all the phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?’ she knows that her own novel suffers for lack of narrative impulse. And we can only nod in weary agreement when she writes: ‘Yet like children we tell each other stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language, such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.’

There are many passages of true bathos:

‘My being only glitters when all its facets are exposed to many people. Let them fail and I am full of holes, dwindling like burnt paper. Oh, Mrs Moffat, Mrs Moffat, I say, come and sweep it all up.’
[Did she really have to call the servant Mrs Moffat? If this were a comic novel, I’d say how brilliantly done.]

‘Now that lovely veil has fallen. I do not want possessions now. (Note: an Italian washerwoman stands on the same rung of physical refinement as the daughter of a English duke.)’
[Is that so? I wonder if the Italian washerwoman would agree?]

‘I open a little book. I read one poem . One poem is enough.
O western wind…
O western wind, you are at enmity with my mahogany table and spats, and also, alas, with vulgarity of my mistress…’

and

‘”Life, how I have dreaded you,” said Rhoda, “oh, human beings, how I have hated you! How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube!…”‘
[Yes, I want to cry, what marvellous comedy choices: 'spats', 'Oxford Street'!]

[A few days earlier]
I’m in Provincetown on the tip of the Cape, north of Boston. The most easterly point in America. Travel directly east and it’s Ireland where next you pitch up. It’s one of those cold and gloomy days that makes being inside a guilt-free pleasure. The perfect reading day. Putting aside The Waves I search around for something better suited to my mood. When I look at my reading pile and see that coming up next are The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Violent Bear it Away, I begin to see a pattern that needs to be broken. So I get on my bike and cycle to the Provincetown Book store where I know there are copies of Cold Comfort Farm and Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, passed over on previous visits because I then felt my own pressure to read what I haven’t read before. Today I’ve given in to the desire to re-read what I know I love, and what will deliver some lightening of the spirits. On the non-fiction front I’m reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which, as stimulating and entertaining as both are, nevertheless require rather more of a certain kind of attention than I’m ready to give them today. Perhaps the left hemisphere of my brain needs a day off, or at least a rest.

I plump for Cold Comfort Farm next, which by coincidence was published the year after The Waves came out; in my higher mind I’d remembered it as a later novel.

I’ve read Cold Comfort Farm (1932) umpteen times. I probably first read it when I was at university in the late 70s, though perhaps even then I was re-reading it. Sometimes it’s hard to say why it is so entirely satisfying, and quite so funny: ‘She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.’ Now why is that perfect, and what about it makes me laugh out loud?

Flora Poste, a young woman of 19, finds herself living with distant cousins at Cold Comfort farm, Howling, Sussex. Her love of order meets head-on the chaos of life on the farm. Apollo confronted by Dionysus. Civilization forced to address Nature; but Nature that has been perverted: ‘The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated. It seemed chaotic, but it was more methodically arranged than you might think.’

As Lynne Truss points out in her Introduction, the ‘as well they might be’ is comic genius.
Flora is partly guided by the works of the fictitious French philosopher the Abbé Fausse-Maigre, author of a book of Penseés, and ‘The Higher Common Sense’. This latter work ‘had been written as philosophic treatise; it was an attempt, not to explain the Universe, but to reconcile Man to it inexplicability’: a sentence that came as a shock to me because it read like some sort of summary of intent of my book, and perhaps even more aptly of the book I may write next; though as I read Cold Comfort Farm I long to write a comic novel.
Not for nothing does Flora reference Persuasion and Mansfield Park. Flora possesses the capability of Anne Eliot and effects a transformation at Cold Comfort Farm every bit as powerful as that which Fanny Price brings about at Mansfield Park. But Flora has none of their meekness (even though their meekness turns out to be a disguise hiding a resolute moral core). Flora is more like a young Mary Poppins. She is, as Lynne Truss puts it, the superego organising the id. The creative powers of the id have been suppressed by the shadow-matriarchal toad-like presence of Aunt Ada Doom who by disallowing change has brought a kind of Biblical barrenness to be visited on the farm. Legs and horns fall off the cows (brilliantly named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless) and no one notices. Strange plants grow with strange names and monstrous flowers. Characters jump down wells, or give joyless annual birth to children they care nothing for. In a casually symbolic gesture Flora lets the bull out of the shed in which he has been enclosed for as long as anyone can remember, and so begins a process in which she gradually brings some kind of order to bear where there has only been chaos.
But even she can only go so far towards normality. Seth, representative of all things virile, and at whom all the local young women throw themselves, proves to be more interested in the ‘talkies’ than he is in sex. Flora engineers his discovery by a Hollywood producer, and off he goes towards some transformed life: ‘She watched the car drive away. It was going to Cloud Cuckoo Land; it was going to the Kingdom of Cockaigne; it was going to Hollywood. Seth would never have a chance, now, of becoming a nice, normal young man. He would become a world-famous, swollen mask.
When next she saw him, it was a year later and the mask smiled down at her in the drowsy darkness, from a great silver screen: ‘Seth Starkadder in”Small-Town Sheik”.’ Already, as the car receded, he was as unreal as Achilles.’
Cold Comfort Farm is famously a parody of the novels of Mary Webb (Gone to Earth, Precious Bane) with their overblown descriptions of nature, and in which nature has almost a sexual hold on the characters. (I have actually read both these novels, and loved them.) But Gibbons is also satirising the pantheism of D H Lawrence and his acolytes. Mr Mybug (really Meyerberg but Flora can only think as him as being called Mybug) represent a type of then modern intellectual, and about which Gibbons has some pointed things to say: ‘This was his idea of romance, Flora could see. She knew from experience that intellectuals thought the proper – nay, the only – way to fall in love with somebody was to do it in the very instant you saw them. You met somebody, and thought they were ‘A charming person. So gay and simple.’ Then you walked home from a party with them (preferably across Hampstead Heath, about three in the morning) discussing whether you should sleep together or not. Sometimes you asked them to go to Italy (preferably to Portofino) with them. You held hands, and laughed, and kissed them and called them your ‘true love’. You loved them for eight months, and then you met somebody else and began being gay and simple all over again, with small hours’ walk across Hampstead, Portofino invitation, and all.
It was very simple, gay and natural, somehow.’
Gibbons has a philosophy of ordinariness which is never quite spelt out but is implicit in the very tone of the novel and perhaps comes closest to being made explicit at the end: ‘They were all there. Enjoying themselves. Having a nice time. And having it in an ordinary human manner. Not having it because they were raping somebody, or beating somebody, or having religious mania or being doomed to silence by a gloomy, earthy pride, or loving the soil with the fierce desire of a lecher, or anything of that sort. No, they were just enjoying an ordinary human event, like any of the other millions of ordinary people in the world.’
CCF is a plea for clarity. I wonder what novelists she has in mind when she writes: ‘The farmhouse itself no longer looked like a beast about to spring. (Not that it ever had, to her, for she was not in the habit of thinking things looked exactly like other things which were as different from them in appearance as it was possible to be.) But it had looked dirty, and miserable and depressing, and when Mr Mybug had once remarked that it looked like a beast about to spring, Flora had simply not had the heart to contradict him.’
Could she be thinking of Virginia Woolf? I was struck by how similar certain passages are in both novels, except as I say that The Waves is a humour-free zone (even though Woolf can be hilariously spiteful in her diaries and journals). Woolf makes the same point about the limitations of simile: “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’ but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of thing?” but cannot help falling into Gibbons’s trap. What is the content of a sentence like: ‘The sky is dark as polished whale-bone.’ Eh, come again?

‘These then are the flowers that grow among the rough grasses of the field which the cows trample, wind-bitten, almost deformed, without fruit or blossom.’

That’s from The Waves but it could just as well have come from Cold Comfort Farm.
CCF was her first novel and Gibbons went on to write over 20 more. It has youthful vitality and goes deep, like poetry can, and as vital things do. I adore her idiosyncratic style and inconsistencies; her made up words, and her strange chronology. (We are told that Adam learnt a song at the wedding of George I. But what George could this be? Not the English king, who died in the 18th century. But if George I of Greece, then why him?)
Another thing that made me wonder if Gibbons had read The Waves is the frequent appearance of the words quiver and quivering in both novels. Coincidence? Doesn’t seem very likely.
Hurrah for the French that they awarded Gibbons the femina via heureuse prize for 1933, and much to the astonishment of Virginia Woolf, who writes to Elizabeth Bowen on May 16th 1934: ‘I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons; still now you and Rosamond [Lehmann] can join in blaming her. Who is she? What is the book? And so you can’t buy your carpet.’ Yes, the novel was indeed Cold Comfort Farm and if Virginia Woolf had read it she might have been even more enraged.

Wikipedia entry of the day

Christopher — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:09:59 +0000

Temenos (τέμενος,[1] from the Greek verb τέμνω “to cut”; plural: temene) is a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to kings and chiefs, or a piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god, a sanctuary, holy grove or holy precinct: The Pythian race-course is called a temenos, the sacred valley of the Nile is the Νείλοιο πῖον τέμενος Κρονίδα, the Acropolis is the ἱερὸν τέ The concept of temenos arose in classical Mediterranean cultures as an area reserved for worship of the gods. Some authors have used the term to apply to a sacred grove of trees,[2] isolated from everyday living spaces, while other usage points to areas within ancient urban development that are parts of temples.[3]

A large example of a Bronze Age Minoan temenos is at the Juktas Sanctuary of the palace of Knossos on ancient Crete in present day Greece, the temple having a massive northern temenos.[4] Another example is at Olympia, the temenos of Zeus. There were many temene of Apollo, as he was the patron god of settlers.

In religious discourse in English, Temenos has also come to refer to a territory, plane, receptacle or field of deity or divinity.

‘Ida’ 20 May 2009

Christopher — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:11:12 +0000

Today the world’s press is dominated by news of Ida, who if nothing else, is an astonishingly well-preserved fossil. Of course she is claimed to be more than that: what the popular media still wants to name THE missing link, as if there could ever be such an exalted piece of the puzzle. As Henry Gee has made admirably clear in his books, and in the media today, the phrase is virtually meaningless. In the deep time of evolution there are so many strands of descent – nearly all the evidence of which is missing – that the best we can hope for is to discover ever closer cousinship. Even if we did find some fossil of a direct human ancestor, it’s not at all clear how we could know that that was what we were looking at. Ida arrives with the most amazing modern story – like a script for a film - already attached to her. Modern fossil hunting seems like a throw back to the days when aristocrats and sharpsters (often both embodied in the same person) simply appropriated foreign treasures. That this fossil was dug up over ten years ago is one of the many intriguing aspects of this news story. Fossils, it seems, belong to those who first find them. Amazing, too, that there are collectors who keep these fossils secret. It made me think of those rich closeted owners of the world’s lost or stolen art treaures, who presumably get a kick out of the power of keeping their possessions unseen. There’s something cabalistic about this, as if art might be reduced for being always looked at. Or like the cliche that there are aboriginals who believe that photographs steal away ones essence. And something does change. The Vermeers, say, that we know of, pale against that Vermeer lost for centuries, found at some future unspecified time in mankind’s history, hidden for centuries perhaps, passed down through generations of some family made purposive for owning such a masterpiece, and now finding it’s way again into a world quite different from the indifferent world from which it was kidnapped.

The release of the story of Ida has obviously been a brilliant piece of PR. And it is certainly a great story, but there do seem to be some huge question marks hanging over it. No wonder there is carping from the sidelines. Scientists can be as bitchy of each other as literary writers are.

Easter Monday 13th April 2009

Christopher — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:10:39 +0000

I was intrigued by a brief editorial comment in this week’s New Scientist. Apparently ‘There is now a CCTV camera that monitors people who are employed to watch CCTV footage… This, though, raises the question of who is monitoring this extra footage…Clearly what we need is CCTV that watches the CCTV that watches the CCTV…’ This being the New Scientist, the obvious comparison is not made here to the predicament of being human that Zen Buddhists have long understood; that it is possible to take a similar position in relation to our own ego: the pilot who observes the pilot, the pilot who observes the pilot who observes the pilot, and so on. Indeed, it is through the contemplation of this infinite progression, Zen scholars suggest, that the shock of enlightenment can be attained. Rather than get too closely involved with the actions of our ego, a more compassionate and quietened condition is gained at a distance, and by whatever it is that we are if we are not our ego.

The editorial doesn’t say where such CCTV cameras are to be found, which makes me wonder if it is rather the idea of such cameras that provoked the article than their actual existence. I don’t mean this as a criticism, I am merely making an observation. Sometimes we think a fact substantiates an idea, when in fact the idea alone is just as interesting. (And this makes me think of the condition of much conceptual art, which is less interesting seen in actuality than it is in its verbal description.)

Easter Sunday 12 April 2009 (ii)

Christopher — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:57:48 +0000

I like curious words, and/or curious definitions. It was my friend Hazel who first alerted me to the word ‘mallemaroking’ as defined in Chambers dictionary. It is a curious word and has a curious definition. Mallemaroking: the carousing of seamen in icebound ships.

The first words of mine I ever saw in print came in a letter I wrote to The Listener (younger readers will need to Google here). I can’t remember now what kicked it off but over a period of a few weeks various correspondents wrote in with examples of words that it would be difficult to imagine ever find much currency. My favourite was a Spanish word (I think this came in response to my own contribution of mallemaroking) which means to kill a cockerel by throwing oranges at it. I wish now I had kept a memo of that word.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day doing the Guardian Easter Crossword (by the master, Araucaria; I completed it, I’m pleased to brag, around 1am) – I would say, yesterday I spent most of the day idling away doing the Guardian Easter Crossword, but to me it felt like important work. Anyway, while flipping through the dictionary (eventually I found the word I needed – etourdi, meaning frivolous) I happened upon dromophobia, a fear of crossing the road, and teichopsia, temporary partial blindness with optical illusions, accompanying migraine. Araucaria also got me to canthus (or as he required, the plural canthi) the corner of the eyelid.

Anyway, here are a few other curious words I’ve collected over the years. Anyone care to add to them?

A
is for

Accipitrine: pertaining to hawks

Accloy: to lame with a horseshoe nail

Acronychally: under cover of darkness

Agelast: one who does not laugh

Agrise: to terrify

Angekkok: defined in Chambers Dictionary as an Eskimo conjuror; today we might say Inuit shaman.

Anthelion: a phantom sun appearing at the same height as and opposite to the sun

Apocatastasis: the final restitution of all things at the appearance of the Messiah – the final conversion and salvation of all created beings, the devil and his angels not excepted

Aporia: a professed doubt of what to choose

Aposita: an aversion to food, from Greek apo, away; and sitos, bread

Augury: the flight of an eagle, particularly as a prediction of future events

C
is for

Caliology: the science of birds’ nests

Callipygous: possessing beautiful buttocks

Carking: causing anxiety

Cerumen: earwax

Consider: to look at attentively, from con sidere, with the stars, perhaps originally a term of augury

Crithomancy: divination through consideration of the dough of cakes

D
is for

Decussate: to cross in the form of an X

Despumate: removal of froth

Desquamation: removal of scales

Dolichocephallic: long-faced

E
is for
Enatiodromia: the changing of something into its opposite. In Jung, the process by which the superabundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite; the equivalent of the principle of equilibrium in the natural world

F
is for

Familist: member of old sect which holds that religion consists in love not faith

G
is for

Gumple-foisted: sulky (Scots)

H
is for

Hidrotic: apt to perspire

I
is for

Ideopraxist: one who is impelled to carry out an idea

Inoperculate: without a lid

Interdigitation: the locking of fingers together

K
is for

Kairos: going through time and finding yourself in eternity

L
is for

Lambent: moving about as if lightly touched

Latrate: to bark like a dog

Leer: the land known to sheep. [In the UK during the last bout of foot and mouth disease, when whole populations of sheep were destroyed, it was feared that many leers would never be recovered. The knowledge, it seems, is passed on culturally among sheep rather than genetically.]

Longanimity: forebearance

M
is for

Mallemaroking: the carousing of seamen in icebound ships

Mawther: a great awkward girl

Mohock: one of a band of aristocratic ruffians of early 19th-century London

Myomancy: divination through consideration of the movement of mice

N
is for

Nemo: nobody

Notonectal: swimming on the back

Nullipara: a woman who has never given birth

O
is for

Ostracise. In Greek the word is ostraikos meaning oyster shells. [The last librarian at the great library at Alexandria was named Theon. His daughter Hypatia, a Platonist, mathematician, astronomer and high priestess of Isis was murdered, flayed with oyster shells, by a gang of Christian monks in AD 415. She was 45 years old.] The Greeks also used the word as a name for roofing tiles, because of their resemblance to oyster shells. They had a system by which citizens might be expelled by the casting of votes. The votes were made by marking such a tile, hence to ostracise.

P
is for

Pantology: universal knowledge

Pantophobia: morbid fear of everything

Polliwog: a sailor who has not crossed the equator

Q
is for

Quadrivium, literally where four roads meet, a crossroads. In medieval times the four subjects music, astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry.

R
is for

Ridgel, ridgil: a male animal with only one testicle in position or remaining

S
is for

Sardonic: sardonion, a plant of Sardinia which was said to screw up the face of the eater

Serendipity: the faculty of making happy chance finds [Serendip, a former name of Sri Lanka. Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in 1754 from the title of his fairy-tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’ whose heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.’

Shellback: a sailor who has crossed the equator

Sim(p)kin: Urdu corruption of champagne

Syssitia: the ancient Spartan custom of eating the chief meal together in public

Syzygy: the period of new or full moon

Spatilomancy: divination by investigation of animal excrement

T
is for

Thelemite: a monk of Rabelais’s imaginary abbey of Théleme, an order whose rule was ‘Do as you like’

Thenar: the area around the base of the thumb

Thistadeckophobia: fear of the number 13

Tityre-tu: a member of a 17th-century fraternity of aristocratic hooligans. [Opening words of Virgil’s first eclogue, Tityre-tu, ‘Tityrus, thou (lying under the spreading beech)’, conjectured to indicate the class that had beech trees and the leisure to lie under them.]

Toliban: Persian word for turban, and from which we derive the word tulip

Trivium, literally ‘where three roads meet.’ [It is at a place where three roads meet that Oedipus unknowingly kills his father.] In medieval times the three subjects grammar, rhetoric and logic were collectively named the trivium. From trivium comes the word trivial.
Together the trivium and quadrivium make up the seven liberal arts.

U
is for

Uberous: yielding abundance of milk

Uberly: full of bounteous kindness; the milk of human kindness. From the Latin uber, udder, fruitfulness

Easter Sunday 12 April 2009 (i)

Christopher — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:38:00 +0000

Thanks (I think) to quickiebooks for the blog review

http://quickiebooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-are-here.html

I’m not quite sure what to make of the statue of Christ posed next to my book, but I like the photographic composition.

It’s obviously a day for surreal blogs, or is that the general state of the blog world? Take a look at attentionvsaffection

http://attentionvsaffection.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-are-here.html

who has made a poem out of page 30 of my book. Why page 30, I’m not entirely sure, but I like the effect.

And bluemoose is another writer with a distinctive voice:

http://bluemoosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/square-root-of-easter-eggs.html

Presidential Address

Christopher — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:13:21 +0000

In his inaugural address, President Obama told us that his administration ‘will restore science to its rightful place’. If we can agree that former-President Bush’s administration sowed confusion about the nature of science, and confounded its free pursuit, we might still wonder what such a rightful place looks like.

Science has created the world we live in. All our technological inventions – steam engines, fertilisers, particle-accelerators and i-Phones – convince us that the world is real, and becomes somehow more real the more sophisticated the technological world becomes. Technology is the outward and visible sign that science is getting somewhere. And by somewhere we mean the ability to create simulacra of reality that we call the material world. It’s what we mean by progress.

If we, the public, see clearly what science does, we understand only poorly what science is.

Science has a methodology, a way of approaching what is out there. It sets out from the position that the world is made out of things that move. Science ultimately tries to find out what those things are made of, and what we mean by motion. It turns out that it is really hard to answer these questions.

Science begins by separating out phenomena as things with names, but progresses by uniting phenomena into ever more inclusive descriptions. Four hundred years of the application of the scientific method points to a possible unification of the laws of nature. Our universe is a patch of pure radiation that expanded and evolved over billions of years into all the structures of matter we find in the universe today, including (incidentally and probably not ultimately) ourselves who tell the story.

But materialism has become so bizarre – possibly requiring the existence of an infinite number of parallel worlds, or the non-existence of hundreds of elementary particles – that it is moot what now separates mystery from mysticism.

Mysticism could be said to approach reality from the opposite direction. Mystics (who might include artists, philosophers and theologians) try to apprehend the unity of nature all in one go. The approaches may be different but they end up in the same place – a universe of unified phenomena – and they are both about looking and seeing.

Science is more intimately connected to religion than is generally supposed. If as a population we knew more about the history and philosophy of science, we might understand that a popular debate that has religion on the one side and science on the other is at best naïve, and at worst propagandist. The scientific revolution wouldn’t have happened but for monotheism (and didn’t happen in those parts of the world where there were other kinds of belief systems; China, notably). The three great monotheistic religions believe that there is something eternal and unchanging at the heart of the universe. So does science. Science is atheistic only in so far as it means to explain nature without recourse to the supernatural. Scientists, however, need not be atheistic, nor must agnosticism necessarily rule out spirituality.

Monotheistic religion and science both aim, one more explicitly than the other, to people the universe. Science attempts and succeeds in making life more comfortable for some, but science also facilitates an increasing population, only partially provides the means to support it, and at ever greater cost to the planet. In time, science expects to people other planets across the universe. Indeed it can have no other hope. Science and religion relieve suffering but also increase suffering. If religion often provides the reason for war, it is science that provides increasingly sophisticated means of killing people.

Scientific progress is also inextricably linked to economics. All business models depend on ever-increasing output and ever-increasing profitability, and the engine is technological progress. The scientific method, like capitalism, is always in search of new markets to exploit. These days there is plenty of evidence that the way we do science and the way we do business are unsustainable. Starkly, there may not be much time left for the earth, at least not as a place willing to host us. How much unrestrained optimism in unrestrained progress can we bear? This is not an unreasonable question to ask even by the most ardent supporters of science or of capitalism. We cannot unravel the material world, and who would want to? Materialism is the greatest story ever told. But we can try to understand what it is and what we are in relationship to it.