Shedding Light

A big highlight of yesterday was my visit to what I think is called Gallery Night. This is the first night of the annual exhibition of selected pieces of their work by our students doing Visual Art, when the artists themselves are around to provide a commentary on what they've got on display for the various folk popping in to enjoy it. Actually I popped in twice, either side of a meeting I had to attend. This meant my viewing of the work was irritatingly touch and go, but at least I got a chance to hear what the various practitioners had to say, well, the seven of them I managed to chat to that is.

And it was after my rather rushed second visit that I realised just how much all the talk had illuminated the work for me. A few years ago I would have considered this a kind of breach of decorum of what art was all about, somewhat puritanically considering that any work of art, whether a painting, poem, song, symphony, whatever, should somehow stand on its own. I'm not saying I would have consciously articulated this notion upon demand, as it were, but I think it was there - as a sort of spin-off of the New Criticism I suppose. Now I'm more than happy for one work to leak into another, for the commentary on the work to become part of its meaning, for boundaries to blur so completely as to be little more than those crumbling walls between fields that remind you of the continuities that lie below.

The unguarded, unpretentious enthusiasm of the artists last night also served to remind me of important it is for individuals within our culture to be encouraged to shed light through their art, whatever form that might take, for our collective health. I've spent much of today happily thinking of some of the most striking images I took away with me. I can't imagine anyone who was around to look at the works on display not feeling a sense of their own world expanding and becoming a brighter place.

Contrasts

A ridiculously busy day today, but fortunately, at points at least, happily so. One of those points was a peaceful forty-five minutes or so at the mesjid for Friday Prayers, although for a moment or two events in the world outside threatened to intrude upon that peace. Well, not so much events as the weather which decided to show its rainy aspect midway through the sermon making me wonder if I was going to get wet-through making my way back to work. Fortunately the squall was over within ten minutes and the only part of me that got at all damp were my feet since the slippers I'd left outside were well and truly soaking by the time I put them on again. Mind you, I preferred that to last week when the sun had been blazing down upon them whilst I was inside resulting in me nearly blistering the soles of my feet when I had to very tentatively slip them back on.

But all this is by the by. Other than that brief panic my sojourn in the mesjid proved typically restful and I particularly enjoyed the slightly atypical sermon. The focus of today's khutbah was on health, and the need for maintaining it. Spinning off from a very interesting hadith with which I wasn't really familiar, the message was that you had a duty to eat sensibly and exercise to maintain health. Normally I can find all sorts of parallels in the sermons I listen to these days with those I was exposed to as a child in the Catholic church, but it struck me that this wasn't the sort of thing you were too likely to hear in a church.

It connects with something deeply characteristic of Islam - the sense of the religion as a 'deen', best translated I suppose as a way of life. In this respect there is nothing 'secular' within the deen as any and every activity relates back to ultimate purposes. Many years ago I suppose I would have thought of this, from the outside, as deeply constricting. Now I find it deeply liberating.

Good Cheer

In the ordinary run of events I would have been mildly interested in watching the short documentary broadcast on local tv this evening about Singapore's army's involvement in Afghanistan over the last six years. But since it featured Fuad's brother Fahmi, who did his tour of duty out there last year, it became a must-see, and very interesting it was. Lots of the troops who'd been out there were featured and their pride in the good they'd tried to do, and what they'd achieved, was palpable. And when Fahmi was featured receiving an award for his work we were cheering.

Happily no casualties from the SAF were featured, and I say happily because I don't think there were any. But I couldn't help reflect on the casualties there have been amongst the troops from my country, and other countries including, of course, Afghanistan itself. I hope, as do we all, that the courage and dedication of the troops out there turns out to have really been worthwhile in the long run. Sadly, I have my doubts.

Though these doubts don't extend to the value of the clean water, the dental care, the hospitals, the bridges that the SAF sought to provide. In some things there is an absolute good, things really worth cheering for.

As Others See

Snippet of conversation today involving myself and an anonymous interlocutor. Me, commenting on something that needs to be done some time soon: So it looks like I'll need to practise being nasty. Interlocutor: You don't need to practise.

Ouch, eh? To see ourselves as others see, as they say.

A Bit Of A Performance

Watching something on the goggle box tonight, a locally produced drama relating to the making of a drama series for tv, set me thinking about the noble art of pretending to be someone else. It's odd how often good acting here is equated to doing a lot of emoting, the kind of look at me I'm really acting approach. This has often been my experience in schools, sometimes in rather amusing ways.

I suppose the best example I can give is one that comes from a long time ago, more than two decades, but it has stayed with me. The school I was then in had just done a show which had gone down very well, featuring a number of genuinely talented performers. It's always invidious to talk about the 'best' actor or actress in anything, but one young lady struck me at the time as having an effortless ability to lose herself in a character. As so often with this kind of performer she was incredibly easy to direct, it simply being a matter of seeing what she would do next and letting her know if anything didn't quite work. It always did.

Some time after the whole thing was over a colleague, who by this time knew the piece extremely well, was commenting on some of those involved in glowing terms. The particular individual I had in mind seemed not to have taken her fancy, so I tentatively mentioned her expecting a bit more rapture. Instead I got a blank look, and then the puzzled comment, But she doesn't really act.

Precisely.

A Bit Odd

Now up to Sonnet 46 in the great-sonnet-read-through and not feeling inclined to start rushing. It's all a bit too intense linguistically to try and go at any pace other than super slow - though, I must admit, you lose any sense of the overall design of the sequence. Maybe I should consider a brisk read-through of the first 50 once I get to the one-third mark (roughly) just to see how things cohere. The other kind of intensity involves the sheer oddness of what's going on in terms of the emotions being expressed. Is WS really serious, or is this some kind of literary exercise, or is it a bit of both? Paterson's position is that he really means it - most of the time. Kerrigan doesn't seem to care, which makes a kind of sense given the fact we'll never know.

Incongruities

The contrast couldn't have been more stark. In the late afternoon yesterday I was watching a very disturbing item on Sky News about a poor little lad allowed to starve to death by his mother, his body lying in a cot unburied. And this following another dreadful story about a mother killing her two-year-old son through repeated violent abuse. It seems one of the jurors in her trial for murder had to be excused having broken down when the evidence of his injuries was given.

And then I spent part of the evening watching a show, a musical, about a little girl suffering from cancer and surviving. The little girl in question, who appeared in the final scenes, is the daughter of one of my colleagues and it was his wife (oddly I taught her as a teenager!) who had produced Brave Maeve as an exercise in fund-raising and raising awareness of children stricken with cancer - and, I suppose, celebrating a lovely story of love and survival. Some of the early scenes when Maeve is first taken ill were pretty harrowing, making no attempt to sugar-coat the traumas involved. I liked that. And really the show didn't sugar-coat anything. The love shown for the child by the community around her, and the sheer effort put in by all involved in the musical itself to make something even more positive out of all this, were straightforwardly real - and a reminder of ultimate realities.

I still can't quite put my day together. Glimpses of hell and heaven. I suppose this is something of what Blake felt composing his songs of innocence and experience.

Even More

The truth is that there always more than this, this being the immediate, local, limited version of reality you think is real. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't just give you a new perspective. It gives you a whole new universe.

A Bit Much

Over the last couple of days I've become more aware than ever of the vast riches, in a scope almost impossible to comprehend, of what's available via the Internet. This was all quite by accident, and didn't reveal anything conceptually that was new to me, yet at one point each day I felt delightfully overwhelmed.

The first came when I was following a link from a sort of educational site I occasionally visit and arrived at a classic movie of the 1930s available for viewing in its entirety. Immediately following which I discovered an opera, again available for viewing in its entirety, which I last saw on telly in the 1980s (in a different production) and assumed I would never get the chance to watch again.

And then on the following day I almost negligently linked to a couple of obviously fascinating blogs, extensive in their nature, centred around the kind of poetry and art that I suspect nobody much cares for except me, the bloggers and their very limited (I'm guessing) audience. In this case I grabbed them under Favourites, but suspect I won't be visiting them too often, if at all. And, by the way, I won't be watching the film I mentioned, nor the opera, not in the near future anyway.

I don't have time. And I don't really mind that - I'm not writing this in any spirit of complaint. Even if I had did have time to do the business with the above I wouldn't have time, nobody would, for all their wonderful companions waiting in the wings. I also need to add that I'm not overwhelmed by choice, though I could imagine someone feeling that way. In fact, I'm finding it quite easy not to watch, not to listen, not to read, because I'm enjoying plenty of other things in my spare time.

I suppose I'm writing this in a spirit of celebration, happy at my ease of access to these treasures, and happier still that I can find from somewhere the wisdom not to abuse that access. I'm lucky this stuff wasn't around when I was a youngster. I don't think I could have summoned the wherewithal as a teenager to resist temptation. As I've said before, I'm fairly sure I would have been addicted to computer gaming if it had been around way back when.

Intensity, Plenty Of

I've been spending quite a bit of time lately in the company of Gerard Manley Hopkins, as mediated through his poetry, and I'm rather glad it's time to move on having just read every extant line of it. Every moment of the experience has been in some sense rewarding, but often overwhelmingly so. His verse is just so packed, so dense; at times each line is like its own small explosion. And my goodness is he obsessional, wonderfully so, but you can only take so much of it.

When I said 'quite a bit of time' I really should qualify that: three poems a day was just about the maximum, and when you come to something like Tom's Garland really you'd need a week to wrest any kind of coherent meaning out of it. Fortunately my edition gives Hopkins's own gloss on it (I think done to help Dixon or Bridges or one of those coves) and I settled for a couple of read-throughs of the poem followed by a couple of readings of the gloss and then a final reading aloud of the poem, at which point things were starting to make sense. (Although, curiously, I think I had a pretty good idea of what was on Hopkins's mind even on a first reading. But I didn't get the animus against levellers and their like as expressed in the prose.) 

Anyway now I'm moving on into the Prose selection and since I've not read much Hopkins at all in this vein I'm looking forward to it. The conventionally Catholic devotional bits I suspect will be eerily familiar. It's nice to visit home once in a while.