Usefully Subdued

In the supermarket earlier this evening I was suddenly struck by how subdued the whole Christmas thing seems to be this year. It was when I noticed the attendants working the checkouts were wearing those silly little Santa hats that the lack of overly intrusive Christmas muzak became happily apparent. In fact, I can't think of any shopping centre I've been in recently has done more than pay a sort of discreetly superficial attention to the season.

I'm not sure if this is related in some way to the pandemic, but if it is it's one of the more positive effects. I'm sympathetic, of course, to those all around the world whose sincere celebration of Christmas will be affected by all the necessary restrictions, but it seems to me that our various festive occasions become more meaningful in the light of the tribulations faced by so many. Somehow the sense of them being driven by essentially commercial interests is usefully dissipated. I forgot to mention the other day that one of the highlights of our visit to the Botanic Garden was the delightfully kitschy display of trees decorated for Christmas by various organisations who partner the Garden. How refreshing it was that nothing there was on sale.

I think it's time to give the Dylan Christmas album a spin.

A Question Of Quality

Had to battle to read the poems in the Wolfwatching section of Hughes's Collected Poems in recent days. This surprised me. I got hold of a second hand copy of the book some years back and thought the title poem quite brilliant - up there with the very best of the poet. But I didn't make much of the rest, except for The Black Rhino which seemed a powerful one-off, very effectively fulfilling its purpose of campaigning to save the animal in question from imminent extinction. Generally though I think I assumed that there was something lacking in me as a reader and that I would one day grasp more of what Hughes was doing in the collection, especially regarding the poems that seemed to relate to his family.

That feeling was reinforced by bits and pieces of commentary I read haphazardly over the years which suggested that the autobiographical poems were something of a breakthrough for the poet. So I thought that I would find myself achieving something of a breakthrough myself in my appreciation of the collection, especially having been so deeply soaked in Hughes's work for much of the year. But it wasn't to be.

The poems about his relatives seemed to me difficult to read, even when I had a greater inkling of context than I had when first encountering the collection. I found them a bit clumsy, a bit overly dramatic in a way that wasn't quite real. And the remainder of the poems I thought poor stuff, redeemed here and there by muscular lines, but weighed down by obsessive references to the usual obsessions, now becoming tiresome. Which leads me to ask whether it's reasonable to say there are quite a few downright bad poems in the sequence and a fatal lack of quality control.

I think it's a question worth asking and worth answering firmly in the negative. Part of this writer's strength lies in the pouring out of work of uneven quality. A real encounter with Hughes involves acceptance of the seemingly clumsy, a surrender to the fact that he needed to write, to get the poems out there, even when he had doubts about what he was doing. The amazing thing is that the fully achieved work can be found everywhere, even in the inconsistent sequences. And there may well be some lack in myself that a different reader might compensate for to make the poems live, for them at least.

Walking And Looking

Spent the afternoon doing not much else but walking and looking, and then looking and walking, in a most satisfactory manner since all these activities were undertaken in the Singapore Botanic Garden. It's the sort of place in which everything is worth an extended gaze, so you really can't go wrong.

On The Heights

I set about reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in the wrong way. I made an initial assumption that since the text was so obviously allegorical it needed to be read as such and I didn't take the surface level of realism too seriously. I suppose I failed to invest in the characters, feeling distanced even from Hans Castorp and not feeling any depth of human interest in anyone else at the sanatorium. For example, Castorp's cousin, although featuring heavily in the early chapters, remained just the cousin, a sort of contrast to the protagonist and little more.

It says much for the power of the text that I was still drawn into its world, especially in terms of an imaginative identification with the experience of being a patient and surrendering to the routines of the sanatorium. Indeed, that aspect of the novel seemed almost hyper-real to me, uncomfortably so at times. So I was never less than engaged in my reading, but in a way that seemed dream-like. Until I realised that the extraordinary detail provided by Mann had made me accept the reality this world and I was reading a novel in the realist tradition of Trollope or Dickens - especially Dickens, since Mann worked the same magic of delineating characters who were grotesques yet convincingly real social beings.

This became clear to me in reading the second part of the novel, after the Walpugis-Night episode involving the beguiling Frau Chauchat, a wonderful femme fatale, yet much more than that. I suppose it was when I realised just how moved I was by the death of Joachim, the cousin whom I had so foolishly disregarded, that the human depth of the text became obvious. And at that point I became aware of just how extraordinary Mann's achievement was: like Joyce (yet in a completely different manner) exploiting all the strengths of literary realism yet balancing these against - or, rather, manifesting through them - a formidable symbolic poetry.

In his essay on The Making of The Magic Mountain the writer invites the reader to read his novel twice to get a deeper enjoyment from the second reading. He ruefully terms this a very arrogant request, but it doesn't seem at all that way to me, especially since Mann places enjoyment front and centre. And it occurs to me that on concluding the novel that's what I was chiefly aware of - the sheer enjoyment of reading something so fascinating, a work that is never in any way predictable, that seems to follow no obvious form, yet in retrospect seems beautifully constructed. A novel that makes its own rules.

The Body In Question

Still struggling in an asymmetric manner. The muscles in my left leg/side feel suspiciously vulnerable, especially in the early morning, whilst those in my upper right arm continue to remind me forcefully of their presence in a most unfriendly fashion. I'm more bothered by the pain in my arm though, since this has got steadily worse over the last couple of months whilst my leg and back continue to improve. I need to go to the doc across the road for the annual medical required by my employers soon and I just might mention the arm to see what they make of it. They might offer pain-killers and I wouldn't mind giving them a go simply to make sleeping easier. As it is I tend to wake frequently, aware of the nasty ache provoked by lying on my arm.

I took myself off to the gym earlier, having suffered no ill effects from my recent foray. Still taking it very easy indeed, though. It's funny to be so deeply conscious of this old body at an age when you'd think I'd be more interested in the matters of the spirit, but I'm afraid it's all I've got.

Parklife

Spent the morning at Labrador Park. Good to see lots of the common people there, with whom Noi and myself blended in highly successfully, being more than a little common ourselves.

Taking Time

Progress on reading is very slow, and this despite me having quite a bit of time on my hands. I worked out some years back that I was inclined to the false belief that it was being busy at work that prevented me doing all the stuff I really wanted to do. The fact that I can so easily do so very little when I genuinely have the time points in other darker directions.

However, I have made some progress in The Magic Mountain. Today I found myself gripped by Hans Castorp's brush with mortality in the Snow chapter, which I found myself reading whilst we were out shopping. It's potent stuff, especially the weird dream sequence he surrenders to when taking shelter by the side of the hut in the snow storm. Must say, I found the Apollonian-Dionysiac symbolism pretty obvious, but that kind of added to the potency. It felt happily incongruous to be reading something this extreme in the crowd.

I'm wondering though whether the momentum I picked up on my reading today will be dissipated on the morrow. More than once I've found myself not really up to continuing the novel and putting it to one side for a day. Similarly I realised today that I haven't read any of the Hughes Collected for around a week. It's as if the intensity of these texts is such that I need to take a breather now and again, to escape them for a while. On the positive side, in some way it seems to keep them fresh because as soon as I resume I wonder what was keeping me away from the enjoyment of reading them.

Back Exercising

Finally the gym has been opened again for our use. I celebrated by going there this evening for a very gentle forty minutes on the elliptical trainer. Some trepidation as to whether I might cause further damage to the fragile muscles in my left side, but past experience suggests that getting the muscles moving does more good than harm. Hoping for the best.

It felt oddly natural, strangely right, to be back in action. Possibly a good sign. That's the best I can hope for as things stand.

A Bit Special

We've been intending to do some walking around the many parks on this island in my vacation, but the crankiness of my back has interfered with the grand plan so far. However, today being Noi's birthday we felt it had to be marked by a special outing and set our sights on West Coast Park as the destination of choice. Even then it looked like we might just abandon the attempt when the rain came down mid-morning, but we decided to make our move once the squall had ceased and it turned out to be a very good idea indeed. Evidence above.

Happy To Cooperate

Went to pick up another set of masks provided buckshee by the authorities this evening. Easy to do: just needed to walk across the road to the vending machines and key in our identification numbers. Now contemplating the pleasures of living in a place where things work and people understand the need to cooperate.