Biology of the Worst Kind

Like Flies

Like flies, dammit.  Bergman, Antonioni.  Hang in there, Resnais.  Keep your head down, Godard.

As it happens I've been having a private Antonioni festival this week. L'Aventura and La Notte and tonight L'Eclisse was planned.  I haven't seen any of them since I was 16 or 17 and went to the movies to discover what was what, how things were, the way of the world.   I used to leave the cinema (the Academy, an essential component of watching those movies) excited, filled in and filled up with the complexity of being human that they showed me.

I rather feared that seeing them again at 60 would reveal their and my pretention and waffle.  But they're stunning (so, as like as not, I'm as pretentious and waffly now as I was then).  The photography holds you riveted to the screen; every shot thought about and beautiful.  The pace is extraordinary.  The movements of each character carrying the film along.  And the way of the world seems pretty much the way the world is.

I was often depressed at that time (the clinical, suicidal variety) but coming out of those sometimes grim movies always gave me a sense of excitement about what usually sent me into the dark.  All those difficulties, problems between human beings, their foolishness, the pointlessness, the making do, and the filmmakers refusal to provide easy resolutions, seemed to me moving and often funny, instead of intolerable.  And, to my relief, I watched the first two Antonioni movies this week with the same result, drawn back into how interesting people are.  I forget sometimes.

Princess Diana - Again

Tunnel Vision

Jenny Diski   

The Diana Chronicles  by Tina Brown · Century, 481 pp, £18.99

Diana  by Sarah Bradford · Penguin, 443 pp, £7.99

I had supper with a friend on 31 August 1997. He arrived looking wonderstruck. ‘Are we just going to have dinner?’ he said.

‘Why, you think we should sit shiva?’

‘But if she can die then anyone can.’

I don’t think anyone else ever got around to articulating that quite so precisely.

One friend spent the day of the funeral in his study, locked away from the world, reading Civilisation and Its Discontents. Others I knew wandered around the flower carpet outside Kensington Palace, spying and sniffing the air to gauge whether sentimentality and hysteria actually might achieve what neo-Marxian analysis had failed to do in the 1960s and 1970s. Not being a great one for crowds, I stayed at home with the TV on, just watching and wondering at the events of that week, which really were strange on a scale beyond anything I’d encountered. Some months later, I saw a documentary made on the day of the funeral, in which a bag lady was asked for her opinion on the death of the Princess of Wales: ‘Oh, she’s died has she? I wondered why there were so many people about.’...

The rest of this article on the latest Princess Diana books is available online at the LRB site.  Subscribers only, I'm afraid.

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

Reading The Wedding Group by excellent Elizabeth Taylor, and came across this chapter opener, below.  I'm not the only one who worries about birds :

"'I can't think why birds don't get duodenal ulcers,' Midge said to Mrs Brindle. She was standing at one of the drawing-room windows, watching them, her birds, swooping into and away from the ham-bone on the lawn. 'It's terrible the way they have to eat their food, so full of anxiety all the time.'

'Perhaps they do get them, ulcers,' Mrs Brindle said, flicking her duster along bookshelves. 'We're hardly to know.'"

The Poet's Project (Outcome)

All is revealed. The Poet's project worked, it turned out, but not until he'd examined over a thousand novels to find what he was looking for, while I padded (part of the time) behind him yelling 'What the fuck are you doing?'.  It also turned out that it was a poem for my birthday.  Ooops.  It was related to the present he gave me (as if a poem wasn't enough): an etching of a rectangle divided into four on white paper in a white frame, by Linda Karshan.  So beautiful and exactly what I want to look at.  Also somewhat like a window on a window.  The poem is below.  His byzantine method of making the poem is explained in a note at the end.

Also, the cake was alarmingly delicious.

 
 

60 WINDOWS FOR JENNY   BY IAN PATTERSON

 

Tiny room whose window was never opened

Curtain for the window

On the cane chair under the window

   *

  Pale green even in the window

  Emptying the basin out of the window

  Halts by the window and gazes

   *

  Lay on the ground under the window

  Kneeling up to the window

  An octagonal vaulted chamber with a balconied window

   *

   Her bed had its back to the window

  Through the curtainless window day stole in

  She went to the other window

  *

  Sitting at the table near the window, working

  Opened windows into the wrong world

  A gale, exploding against the window

  *

  Awnings lowered outside the windows

  A reproduction of a stained-glass-window angel

  Whistling up at vague windows

  *

  Got up and went to the window. It was raining again.

  Early light, coming through the uncurtained window

  With its tiny windows looking on to the street

  *

Pat wandered from the window and took up the George Moore novel

  He came out through the French windows

  She got up and stood at the window

  *

  There was moonlight in the window

  There's a sharp rapping at the window

  I am in the window, smoking

  *

  They had seen it happen from a window

  Then went to the window that looked on the street below

  Watching you from the apartment window

  *

  In my memory, at the window

  The rain was still thudding against the window-pane

  I think that I might open the window

  *

  A camera is being held to the window

  Silver things in the window

  From the street the windows were in darkness

  *

  His reflection could be seen in the front window

  High up, from one of the small barred windows

  His right arm through the open window

   *

  I put all the lamps on and opened all the windows

  A huge wall broken by gaping windows loomed above

  Sordid glare of shop windows, made beautiful by distance

   *

  A board nailed across a broken window

  They opened all the windows

  Sat and sewed by the window in the clear autumn afternoon

   *

  The room was almost in darkness, the windows quite covered

  The night I stared at from my window

  A castle whose windows were glittering orange squares

   *

  The windows, between lengths of white embossed satin

  Our windows, on the second floor, overlooked the street

  The butcher pulled down black window shades

   *

  She had been sitting in her own window

  The inner courtyard on to which my window looked out

  The middle one of the three windows was half way open

   *

  The sun filtered through the windows with remarkable subtlety

  Rushed to the window, not to sail out of it

  No lights behind its white painted windows

   *

  Has to look out of the window at the elements, at nature

  Draw down the upper frame of the window

  The windows were shuttered. But there was a crack.

 

 

 
A note

60 WINDOWS FOR JENNY is composed entirely of phrases taken from page sixty of sixty novels, for Jenny on her sixtieth birthday, 8 July 2007

 

 

 

 

 

The Poet Has A Project

The Poet has a project and it's secret.  That's the thing about poets, they can have projects and spend several days wandering around the house, gazing at shelves, opening and closing books, going 'Hmmm', 'Yes, that's good', 'No, that won't do', 'Well, possibly' and when politely asked what the fuck he is doing, tell you 'It's a project.  I don't know if it's going to work yet so I can't tell you about it.  I'll know by next week.  I'll tell you then.'  It's remarkably aggravating and full of mystery, hard thinking and purpose, all three of which are so lacking in my own prosaic doings.

When I'm thinking about writing something, I have the decency to keep him up all night talking about it, demanding his full attention at three in the morning, teasing out the maybes and possibles and then losing interest entirely.  That way, he's always included in my thinking.  None of this poetic withholding.  He has such an aura of deep brooding about his sodding Project, whereas I plod on, page after page ('Thank God, that's 60,000 words, not so many more to go'), month after month, wailing and moaning about not being able to write, getting it wrong, taking too long, wondering what on earth I'm doing.  Monday, The Poet will know what he's doing and if it's going to work; Friday, it'll be finished.  And what's more it'll be a poem, which is so much more serious a thing than a novel.

And on top of that, as if being a poet and having a secret project wasn't cool and superior enough, he's downstairs baking a coffee and walnut cake for my birthday.  It's insupportable.

Correction

The Poet says he certainly does know the difference between swallows, house-martins and swifts.  He just didn't have his glasses on when I asked.  Oh, me of little faith.

Winging It

France. Late afternoon.  Lying in a recliner chair, looking up at the sky.  Every day a free-falling, tumbling, wind-dancing performance by dozens of birds catching insects on the wing - though it's very hard to avoid the thought that they are not doing anything practical like subsisting, but just showing off to each other, and to me (obviously to me, I'm the human), as they dart and dive, swerve inches from the corner of the wall, barely skim the roof, miss colliding with each other by less than an intake of breath.  The walls are high so looking up there is a small arena where they perform over my head, shrieking and squealing like playtime.

The first problem is what are they?  Swallows?  They've got what can only be called swallow-tails.  No, says the Poet, who was brought up in the Country and knows these things.  Too big.  And swifts have bifurcated tails too.  House martins or swifts.  Or a mixture of all three, with the occasional something-or-other eagle circling meditatively high above them, and a couple of pigeons playing chase between the swirling little birds.  The Poet proves his point with a web page full of pictures of swifts/house-martins/swallows for the bewildered.  Somehow it makes it no easier to decide what they are when I look up again. Does it matter?  Well, yes.  I wish it didn't, but I urgently need to know the names of things, in spite of, or because of, the things neither knowing, nor probably caring what they are called.  It's a sad human foible, but it has its uses for description, finding out more and taking a position.

For example, if they are swifts then I have to look at them quite differently from house martins.  What I think I know about swifts though I don't know why I know, and what The Poet definitely knows from his Country Lore, is that they are always on the wing.  The Romans or some such believed that they had no legs.  In fact, why do they have legs?  Did they once land like other birds but decided that constant eating gave them the edge over the swallows and house-martins?  They fly all their lives, never stopping, snatching a quick nap while they glide.  So why don't they bump into things?  Why don't they fall down from exhaustion?  The more I watch and think about the never-stopping swifts, the more ridiculous it seems.  What about nesting?  Albatrosses are always out of sight of land, but they bob about on the water to sleep and even they have an island where they land to mate and produce young.  How can swifts give birth on the wing?  Flying eggs?  I worry a lot now about the problem.

I offer The Poet the opportunity to modify his certainty.  'For God's sake, consider...'  But he is adamant.  As you would want to be once you've taken up the cause of the skybound, prisoner of the air, swift.  Now I'm back home in my solitarium at the top of the house, and it's all collared doves and blackbirds, but I still wake up in the night, or put off getting a sentence to make sense with the worry about the swifts that never stop flying. Oddly, neither I or The Poet have clicked on Wikipedia or the endless bird watching sites to find out the truth of the matter.  It seems, we both want the idea left in the air.