Some lines of poetry just refuse to give up their juju. However over-quoted they are, however often rid of context and subtlety, however relentlessly pushed upon us in pastel-covered self-help compilations like poetic prescription drugs, they simply will not yield their freshness to ubiquity. John Donne’s roving hands discovering their ‘Newfoundland’; Milton’s Adam and Eve taking their solitary way through Eden ‘hand in hand with wandring steps and slow’; TS Eliot’s world imploding ‘not with a bang, but a whimper’; Seamus Heaney’s squat pen resting ’snug as a gun’ – these are just a few of the familiar images that can still perform instant trepanation on my shivering skull and cover my tongue with a coppery current of recognition.
One of the best is Keats’s ‘wild surmise’. Sure, the lad was a shamelessly theatrical showman, but he knew how to nail a Damscene moment like a pro. Who hasn’t yearned after – and occasionally, gloriously felt – that fugitive, feral flash when the illusory boundaries of the earth fall below and you are left on a silent peak: suddenly seeing, suddenly hoping, suddenly scenting the savage extravagance of possibility?
So I found myself thinking of eagle-eyed Cortez striding out into his America when I watched Being There last night, the 1979 Peter Sellers film that left me writhing in pleasure like Shirley MacLaine’s Eve on the rug.
Young Johnny Keats would have loved it. Chance, striking a path of pure serenity through his own Paradise Lost, is a paragon of Negative Capability; quietly accepting his ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’; walking on water without a qualm.
Life is a state of mind, alright. I’m aiming for wild surmise.
Watching Manuel Guillén play Elgar’s Serenade for Strings in E Minor Op.20 is like watching Danny DeVito paint a Picasso. Jiggling jowled, prodigally paunched and erratically tonsured, this mini Madrilenian leads the silkily black-clad young string players of La Camerata de Madrid like a mischievous Satyr shepherding Manaeds through a celebratory dance. Elegant, energetic, and edged with danger, La Camerata veer from the dissonant intricacies of Zulema de la Cruz’s specially commissioned Concerto Grosso Para Cuerdos to Guillén’s own playful, gutsy remix of Saraste’s swooning Danzas Españolas with deceptive ease.
Guillén fiddles - the only verb for his quicksilver rustic brilliance – with his whole compact body, curling and stretching up on his toes as if to seduce the implacable Spanish heavens with competing human heat. At the concert I caught he was inaugurating Malaga’s newly renovated Sala María Cristina, a camply resplendent fantasy of mirrors and roses and flush-faced gods who looked tempted to jump down and join their unlikely, electrifying Pan. Manuel, usted es swell.
Malaga, like much of southern Spain, is a city of bone. Her soft, striated stone bakes under a gravedigger sun in calciferous creams, pinks and caramels; her corner-lurking churches hide the once-evangelical mandibles of whey-faced saints behind shimmering mosaic tiles; her modestly magnificent cathedral offers faded, skeletal pillars up to the flesh-melting sky. Her mountainous sister Ronda is whiter and quieter, hazy with horse flank and bull dust, snug in self-contained beauty and smug with the great men she has entrapped – angular, nimble-fingered Peinado; audacious, nimble-footed Pedro Romero – with her heady jasmine breeze.
Great violinists, great horses, and more cliche-ridden, history-laden, religion-stinking sensuality than one broad can handle in a frustratingly few snatched hours. Amigos, I’m coming back.
I’m suffering a crisp-related crisis of confidence this week. I suspect that I might be a Pringle, you see. I have begun to believe that I am an overpackaged nugget of pretence; a saltily seductive, easily digested yet inherently unnutritious snack full of superfluous ingredients that leave you feeling empty but craving more. I fear that I hydrogenate our subtle, slippery society into a gelid slice of smarts, processing the Real Cultural McCoy into a pallid pop-tart parody of what it really is. I despair that I am a fast food footnote in the great moveable feast of art, and that my only legacy will be as a brief, unwelcome burp in the minds of the unfortunate few who were bored enough to scoop the odd tube of my cerebral crap from entertainment’s aisles.
Oh God. It all started with AA Gill (as so much does) complaining in The Sunday Times with his customary acuity that TV comedy has lost its sense of belly-laugh humour in favour of ‘one-line salty cleverness: the Pringle’. Then two days later I came across Benjamin Kunkel’s brilliant essay on reading and writing online, which compares the addictive way in which we consume digital content to the sinister pull of Procter & Gamble’s famed potato chip.
And now I’ve finally got round to starting the frigteningly masterful Possession. This tale of academic obsessives has reminded me not only that most of us are mere leeches, living off the lifeblood of the great and clinging onto our puny revelations like lemmings on a cultural cliff, but that so few writers achieve what AS Byatt does: genuine alchemy, which forges cohesive originality from the fragments of the past.
The thing is, as a commentator cum reviewer cum rambler online, I know that I’m a Pringle, and it doesn’t bother me. I accept that my output is exaggeratedly engineered for the medium: shiny, snappy and synaptic; a smooth mashing of memes and mores into an overflavoured energy hit. But what about my embryonic attempt at long-form fiction, which is creeping so slowly and insecurely into the light? Will it wither in the unforgiving beam of Truth like a slug doused in Pringly salt? In short, now that I’ve so compulsively popped, will I be able to stop?
We shall see. In the meantime, I shall resign myself to a literary career as a Sour Cream and Chives: a little bit tart; a whole lot of odd; goes surprisingly well with gin.
What is it about Paris? Having spent half of last year schlepping back and forth from St Pancras to visit my errant swain, I found the mundane daily reality of La Ville-Lumière to be mostly composed of small-minded bourgeoisie, griege cashmere cardigans and casual racism; not to mention the bored, cold-eyed, disenfranchised youth who were so beautifully exposed in The Paris Intifada, Andrew Hussey’s piece for Granta on the banlieue. But still; but still. Centuries of re-making the Paris myth makes it all glaze over with a patina of moody glamour even as you experience it. And sadly makes the sort of kissing-on-bridges-in-striped-jumpers kind of malarky I would usually sneer at, irresistible.
My rosy tint has become even worse thanks to the BFI’s recent Nouvelle Vague season. Spending hours sunk in the coarse-grained, high-cheekboned, sweaty-sheeted, Galoise-stained oeuvre of Godard, Truffaut and co has led me to reinvent my memories to an extraordinary degree. Now all I can recall of that often dour and pursed city is epiphanic, light-flooded trips to the Musées D’Orsay and Rodin; le perfect brunch in le chi-chi Marais; and a woozy Sunday afternoon in L’Anvers du Décor, a tiny café on the rue D’Orsel near Montmartre, sipping Diabolo Menthe while brooding boys in turtlenecks played rough and ready jazz.
I was already familiar with many of the BFI season’s films – I sported a poor imitation of Seberg’s gamine crop from Á Bout De Souffle for years – but somehow Les 400 Coups had slipped past, and I was quietly blown away. It’s a moving masterpiece with central performances – both by Jean-Pierre Léaud and the city herself – of peerless sophistication, style and wit. The typewriter! The stuffed horse! The cats! The absorbed, practical, unquestioning love that is friendship between prepubescent boys!
Damn, she’s a fine actress, that artistic illusionist, that chiaroscuric queen, Paname.
Great literary characters are as complex as you and I. Subtle and surprising souls who shimmer in the mutable, multicoloured motley of humanity, the Edward Rochesters and Iagos and Anne Elliots of the fictional world transcend cliché and categorisation. Despite the slings and arrows of schoolroom seminars, Sparks Notes and shoddy sequels, they remain proudly irreducible to specious, snappy soundbites and biased pseudo-psychological profiles.
Artemis has always been my classical goddess of choice. Haughty huntress and evasive hauntress of the cypress groves, her feral forest spirit surpasses her Mediterranean origins to chime with our earthy native lore of Arthurian chivalry, forest sorcery and celtic myth. Her enigmatic chastity puts both Athena’s stiff, urban erudition and Aphrodite’s pink-tipped, pearlescent petulance in the shade; queen of metamorphosis, she continually shape shifts to avoid becoming the static, statuesque subject of men’s ravening gaze. Not for her some glistening, clitoral self-presentation in a shell: the moon maiden is the most untameable and unattainable of the squabbling dieties.
It’s no suprise that country house art gallery Compton Verney chose her most famous legend as the hook for its Diana and Actaeon exhibition about ‘the forbidden gaze’. Historically, interpretations of the tale of the Theban prince, who oggled the goddess’s ablutions only to be turned into a deer and mauled by his own hounds, have veered from brilliant explorations of voyerism and sexaulity by the likes of Titian and Brueghel, to softcore daubings of bum-baring, breast-soaping, bestiality-fearing beauties that upstanding Renaissance citizens could slap without shame on their dining room wall.
Contemporary interpretations of the myth prove to be equally diverse thanks to Compton Verney’s typically creative curation, which includes a gamut of thematically linked works from Robert Mapplethorpe’s powerful Statue Series to Picasso’s slyly funny 347 Series etchings. Photography proves a particularly effective medium to explore the conept of menacing, mesmerising muse; in The Stag’s Room (Diane), Karen Knorr thrillingly contrasts the frank female gaze with woman’s naked vulnerability in a masculine wood-panelled world, and Gregory Crewdson’s cinematic, gothic set-pieces provide a powerfully pertinent exploration of wilderness, sex, meaningful looking and meaningful looks. Least inspiring are Thomas Ruff’s manipulated internet nudes in the final room, which look flat and thin and lacking in the contexts and contrasts which are so strong in the other works on display.
There is a deer park abutting my mother’s house (’abutting’ gives the satisfyingly ambiguous suggestion that it could be hers. It’s not). God, but they’re strange creatures, with voices like whales and the hedonistic, hirsute violence of over-hormonal Glaswegain teens. If there’s still a sense of awe to be found in our overdiscovered world, they’re a pretty good start. And they taste darkly divine; while you’re in Warwickshire for the exhibition (it finishes this week), be sure hit up nearby(ish) Deddington Market for a slice of ancient, gamey, blood-rich sweet Actaeon pie.
A long haul flight is the closest we get to reliving our nursery days. We’re primed by the initial, airless airport wait which provokes the same interminable, skin-crawling frustration that five minutes of delayed gratification brew in a four year old. Once on, strapped in, rule-bound and prostrate, our pre-takeoff resolutions to eat nothing, drink bottled mineral, sprtiz regularly and sleep dissolve into a catatonic willingness to consume everything offered, from antiseptic towlettes to neon chicken curry, cotton wool bread rolls to complimentary boiled sweets. Our palate is palliated into prepubescence with soft textures and bland tastes. Our belly swells into baby roundness. We spill and splatter and slurp.
The repeated application and removal of scratchy bits of clothing – blanket, eye mask, socks – leaves us swaddled and twitching like a mittened toddler. The sudden lurches remind us that we are not in control of this world but suspended over an abyss, continually subject to vicissitudes determined by some greater, older power. Our bodies are perpetually surprising once more: expanding hourly, they become both woozily disconnected and minutely observed. Rarely since the playground have we been on such intimate terms with our hangnails and hangups, excretions and ingestions. Gazing in the cold corpse light of the wet-floored loo, our every eyebrow hair takes on Brobdingnagian size.
Like a squalling brat pacified with Bob the Builder, ridiculous films somehow leave us rapt. Bride Wars becomes as moving as Brief Encounter. Romancing the Stone suddenly does seem Classic Cinema after all. Paul Blart: Mall Cop is positively Pythonesque. All attempts at sleep subside as Simpsons repeats scroll before our eyes. We emerge staggering on infant legs, with the hallucinogenic weariness of those post-tantrum comedowns we remember so well. Home, a hot bath, and bed by nine. We wake early, and cry.
I’m avoiding saying anything about Baros, the turquoise-waved, cream-beached Maldivian isle which was the small glittering gem set at the heart of my return flight noose, because I’m pretending my seven day stay never happened. When you find yourself, 12 hours after landing, on a stinking train to Weybridge staring glassy-eyed at peeling upholstery, two Surrey teenagers playing electro Bhangra on their phones, and the measly beaded ejaculation of rain on the rattling window, the only defence against potentially fatal shock and depression is furious repression.
Who wouldn’t idolise a sister who spends her weekends measuring the forearms of Soprano Pipistrelles?
My springtime resounds with the purr of traffic dampened by lukewarm London drizzle and the ectoplasmic swirl of a pavement martini; with the lazy, haunting robotica of some old-school Air; with the shriek of rubbish trucks as the sun wakes me early through broken blinds; with the huffs and haws and high-pitched howls of the Shoreditch poserati returning from disco all-nighters through the rain; with the sticky tap tap tap of an old EeePC which has had coffee spilt on it one too many times.
Hers resounds with the hidden poetry of woods: Yellow Archangel and Sweet Woodruff; Dog Violet and Columbine; Bluebell and Bugle and Greater Stitchwort; Shakespearean fools and faeries flourishing in the dirt. But above all her springtime sings with bat. Their inaudible screams silently echolocate through the English air while we saunter, smiling at the birds and the butterflies, biosonically blind to the caramel-hued, mask-faced, hand-winged chiroptera vanishing at the corners of our eyes like prehistoric memories.
I stroked a Soprano Pip cradled in her gloved palm; watched two defiant Leislers weighed in a bag; saw the death sentence dangle of a Noctule’s third finger bone marring the perfect span of his membranous wings. The privilege was shocking; our daily oblivion, more so. There are Pips all over London, and the squeak of brakes outside my office keeps making me turn my head.
I continue to be fascinated by the rise of the super. No, I don’t mean the predictable phenomenon of Claudia, Cindy, Linda and co ironing their faces and dusting off their youthful selves’ workout DVDs in order to squirrel away a last few paychecks in their recession-hit pension pots; I’m talking about the sort of linguistic larceny that I once used as a smug stick with which to beat our transatlantic cousins but which seems to have infected the mouths, pages and posts of our own shores like a pandemic of syntactical swine flu that makes you projectile vomit hyperbolic prefixes.
Weary of very, exhausted by extremely, and definitely work shy of specificity, we are left with super. Observing the unlovely nativity of the superlativity of our language, I am equally repulsed and intrigued. Could it be that our bee-denuded, porn-polluted shambles of a world has become so risible to us that delight and delightfulness can only be found above and beyond, in some extraterrestrial Platonic realm untainted by our substandard reality? I keep dropping it into my conversation – ‘but the sign was superambiguous, officer‘; ‘good lord, that’s superlong‘ – in the hope that someone will give me a slap, but super seems to have become so subsumed into our society that no-one bats a supervolumised eyelash.
When everything is super, everything is average. It’s a sleazy game of oneupmanship that turns conversation into a monologue of absolutes, refusing to admit that anything could be equal to the experience, let alone suprasuper, leaving no room for compassionate equivalence or questioning uncertainty.
“When you realize how perfect everything is” said Buddha (not directly to me, although we did once have a face to face on the subject of bees, but that’s a story to be saved for a time when we’re delirious with gin, salt beef bagels and pavement fumes on some London midsummer midnight), “you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky”.
Too true, Guatama my podgy lad, too true – tho’ to the inward-locked perfectionist, frustration, ingratitude and dissatisfaction feel pretty perfect too: their heady hormonal cocktail slips down a treat even though you know the moreish milky mouthfeel will curdle into an ashy aftertaste, and leave you howling at the moon rather than basking in old father sun. Perfectionists crave self-flagellation; we savour the pus-filled soul striation that comes from absolutely agreeing that everything is perfect, Siddartha mon frère, but you’d look so much better if you lost ten pounds, added a fuschia sash to those tangerine robes, tilted your head a little more coyly to the left and laughed at the sky (which looks like it might rain, actually) comme ça.
Anyway, the shootin’, ski-in’, vanity-publishin’ dandies at Finch’s Quarterly Review have surprisingly deigned to patronise a gal who patronises them and have created The Perfectionist, a shiny new section for my collection of esoteric, overblown articles about Perfect Things, which are probably much less ironic than my soul would like to believe.
Too true, Guatama my podgy lad, too true – tho’ to the inward-locked perfectionist, frustration, ingratitude and dissatisfaction feel pretty perfect too: their heady hormonal cocktail slips down a treat even though you know the moreish milky mouthfeel will curdle into an ashy aftertaste, and leave you howling at the moon rather than basking in old father sun. Perfectionists crave self-flagellation; we savour the pus-filled soul striation that comes from absolutely agreeing that everything is perfect, Siddartha mon frère, but you’d look so much better if you lost ten pounds, 
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