MORAL STORIES


I’ve just watched several of Éric Rohmer’s films again - The Green Ray, The Aviator’s Wife, Pauline at the Beach - prompted to do so by an article suggesting that his films were appropriate viewing during 'lockdown' because many of his protagonists are emotionally trapped, struggling to change their confined and undramatic lives. Rohmer’s films are low-keyed; his characters, predominantly unremarkable and middle-class, slowly reveal their traits and characters as their stories unfold, and you eventually realise that most of them are interesting, even though they may at first seem irritating or unlikeable. They rarely stop talking and thinking about themselves, their dialogue, often amusing, being a peculiar mix of mindfulness and self-delusion that reveals some of the subconscious feelings and thoughts that underlie and motivate normal behaviour.

Rohmer’s skilful story-telling, which can be gripping, owes much of its effectiveness to his judicious restraint, which is evident, for instance, in a preference for viewing his subjects from a discreet distance and seldom in close-up. He is a  self-effacing film-maker, his work conservative and temperate, so I was startled when, having recommended The Green Ray to a friend with whom I rarely disagree about aesthetic matters, I received a reply saying that she finds Rohmer’s attitudes to young women ‘challenging’. (Later, as it turned out, she told me that she watched the film and had enjoyed it greatly). My friend’s comment, however, struck home and made me consider the question anew. I’ve long thought that most of the women in Rohmer’s films are more interesting than his men, and that he was unusually sensitive to feminine feelings and predicaments, so I began to wonder if I were only sympathetic to his views of women and femininity because they often reflect my own. It also occurred to me that in these ‘woke’ times such attitudes might be regarded at as old-fashioned, paternalistic, and condescending.

I discovered two articles that suggested that my views of Rohmer weren’t completely mistaken. In a piece on Claire’s Knee, the film critic Molly Haskell points to the wide variety of ordinary women who regularly appear in his films, all of whom ‘have problems as deserving of close attention as party girls and divas and more cerebral professionals’, adding that ‘he’s as interested (almost) in mothers as in ingenues’. She draws attention to their mutual bonding - ‘girls exchange secrets and advice, quarrel and make up; (they) stick up for each other, sometimes heroically, in the face of male intimidation’ - and concludes that Rohmer ‘watched femininity with a mixture of dispassion and empathy, often mocking the unconscious strategies by which men use women for their own purposes’. In the second article, published in the feminist film journal Another Gaze, Fiona Handyside notes ‘a nascent feminist sensibility' in Rohmer’s film cycle, Six Moral Tales, going on to say that this tendency became more pronounced in the later Comedies and Proverbs series, which often featured lead female characters. She adds that in The Green Ray Rohmer employed a female crew and cinematographer, as well as co-crediting Marie Rivière, the actor who played the main character, Delphine, with the screenplay.

I find it interesting that although Rohmer’s films are liberal in tone, he was nevertheless traditional in his moral opinions and a lifelong Roman Catholic. Another French film-maker of the time, Robert Bresson, even more widely admired and canonical than Rohmer, also held strong religious views, which are almost always evident in his ascetic and morally astringent films. I was reminded of this while browsing through Another Gaze after reading about Rohmer; by chance I came across a long essay on Bresson that  jarred uncomfortably with my understanding of his work. Focussing on Bresson’s supposed interest in ‘the female automaton’, a topic  apparently previously explored by Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, McNeil Taylor writes about Bresson’s ‘misanthropic vision’ and need for complete control over his actors, arguing that many of his films ‘encouraged and enabled subsequent generations of male filmmakers to capitalise on women’s suffering in the name of mannered artistic profundity’. This is a misunderstanding of Bresson’s style and convictions.  Like Rohmer, but more radically, Bresson was interested in people who felt imprisoned in impossible situations and in how they found strategies to deal with or escape from them. Bresson’s Catholicism led him to believe that suffering often had meaning, if only because it can lead to spiritual transcendence, and whether or not one agrees with his world view, it seems  perverse to take Bresson’s work out of context and to assess it retrospectively in terms of currently fashionable critical theory.

One of this year’s unexpected pleasures was the abundance of new music by Gillian Welch, who is notoriously careful about what she  releases to the public. As The New York Times noted in a long article, the fifty-eight songs amount to seven more than those on all of Welch’s previous five studio records. One of the four new albums comprises covers; the other three are collections of demos she wrote with her partner Dave Rawlings many years ago, most of them hitherto unreleased. 'They are returning to what they know’, said the NYT; ‘songs about the slow, challenging, beautiful heat of living, about people having to make hard decisions on a path to goodness’. Welch, like Bresson, is drawn to the lives and stories of outsiders and outcasts, many of whom are similarly caught up in impossible situations. Some of them appeal for the help of God because they’re searching for personal transformation or redemption. Welch’s telling of these tales is always reduced and tenderly austere, couched in the idioms of folk, bluegrass, and country music, but because she was not born into the social conditions that gave rise to this music, she has occasionally drawn criticism for ‘inauthenticity’. This is to overlook, however, the truth that Welch’s art is fundamentally an act of imagination, of projected identification with the lives and plights of people in different times and places. In one of her more beautiful and poignant new recordings, Rambling Blade, Welch sings about a man who reflects on the ominous prospect of being hanged for his misdeeds; all he asks for is ‘a prayer and a resting place’. Not many traditional folk or blues songs are more compelling and emotionally persuasive.



For further exploration:

 Éric Rohmer

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/438-claire-s-knee-rohmer-s-women 

https://www.anothergaze.com/a-womans-art-sophie-maintigneux-eric-rohmer-and-female-friendship/ 

Robert Bresson

https://www.anothergaze.com/woman-escaped-female-automaton-robert-bressons-mouchette/

Gillian Welch

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/magazine/gillian-welch-david-rawlings.html 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3xeXS2pnnE&list=OLAK5uy_nZws8QUezopBYxnY1Tzt27q489jSLDArU&index=5

 

TIME ON MY HANDS

 

Not long ago I had reason to say to a friend that I had ‘time on my hands’, and the phrase unexpectedly brought to mind a song of that name that I first heard in 1998 on an album called The McGarrigle Hour. A droll tune written and performed by Chaim Tannenbaum,  I’ve always thought of it, perhaps wrongly, as a charming tale of a New York flâneur set in the 1940s or ‘50s. I find it oddly touching.

I listened to the song again, enjoyed it, and found my way to Tannenbaum’s only solo album, which was made in his late sixties and released in 2016, by which time he had spent most of his musical career playing with the extended McGarrigle family, essentially as a sideman, adding touches on banjo or guitar and singing background harmony. This role seems to have suited him well, as he was - and is - an old-fashioned amateur who likes to live his musical life at a leisurely pace. Born to immigrant parents in Montreal, he went to the same high school as Kate McGarrigle, learnt to play several instruments, and then joined an informal band with Kate and Anna, with whom he developed a long friendship and musical camaraderie. He nevertheless continued to pursue his main professional interest, which was teaching philosophy at university.

Although it appears that Tannenbaum never had a strong desire to make his own record, he was eventually persuaded to do so when he retired from teaching and moved to New York with his wife. He said that he’d have a preference for an ‘Italian wedding band’ to work with, but ended up with musicians who usually performed French cabaret songs of the 1930s, as well as with a handful of guests. They were a good match. The resulting album was mainly made up of obscure folk songs and three original compositions, all of which are notable either for their wit or wistful nostalgia. Although not blatantly autobiographical,  his own songs seem to be based on personal experience; for instance, in what is probably the most striking of them, London, Longing for Home, Tannenbaum clearly draws from memories of the time he spent there studying for a PhD. It would be unfair to describe them as bitter, but the lyrics are decidedly gloomy,  amounting to a dour description of the city and its people in terms of an English ‘kitchen sink drama’ of the 1960s. Tannenbaum later explained that his songs were ‘about an irremediable sense of exile, an exile from one’s own past, where the monuments, the landscape, have been destroyed’, and that certainly rings true.

Fictional or not, Tannenbaum’s dejected portrayal of London took me aback, particularly as the track goes on for almost ten minutes, and you can hardly miss the point. It’s common enough to find songs about a longing for home or somewhere you love (the McGarrigle sisters wrote and recorded one such beauty, Mendocino, which Tannenbaum has covered on his album), but it is rare to find lyrics in which the place the singer wishes to leave is described in such disgruntled detail, so I tried to think of another, possibly written by an American in England, that might be compared to Tannenbaum’s plaintive and surprisingly agreeable lament.

I failed to find an equivalent, but I was reminded of Paul Simon’s Homeward Bound, which was recorded in 1965 and included on the British release of Simon and  Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence album. I knew that Simon had written it while feeling despondent at a railway station near Liverpool when he was touring England in the early 1960s, and for a long time I assumed that the song’s lyrics described his longing to get back home to America. I subsequently discovered, however, that he was actually writing about returning to his girlfriend Kathy Chitty in Brentford, Essex, where he had met her after performing at the Railway Hotel. Simon wrote several other beautiful songs about her that are included on his first solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, among them the delicate April Come She Will and the lovely Kathy’s Song, in which, like Chaim Tannenbaum in London, Longing for Home, the drizzle and ‘rain-drenched streets’ are the context for his doubts and loneliness, but also, in this case, for loving thoughts about their relationship.

Kathy Chitty can be seen with Simon on the cover of the album, but she soon became uncomfortable with his growing celebrity, and they went separate ways. Nonetheless, she was not forgotten; memories of their intimacy resurfaced soon afterwards in one of Simon and Garfunkel’s most poignant songs, America, on their 1968 Bookends album. Describing a journey on a Greyhound bus, it vividly evokes a young man’s hope and anxiety as he and his companion set out on a quest for adventure and discovery. Its mood of sombre innocence, both emotive and affecting, is reminiscent of the final scene in the 1967 film The Graduate, which featured many Simon and Garfunkel songs on its soundtrack: joy and elation fade away and slowly turn to reflective melancholy.





For further exploration:

Chaim Tannenbaum:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUbBkjCyF14 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0upKZIWT2Q

 Paul Simon/Simon and Garfunkel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylCGvOUL938 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo2ZsAOlvEM 

Final scene in The Graduate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14pdNYXY3Zo

 PIROSMANI, PARAJANOV, AND KOMITAS

Before watching Giorgi Shengelaia’s  slow and poetic film I knew very little about the Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani, but by the time it ended I felt that he was an artist whom I might come to admire and perhaps understand. Later, as I read more about him and familiarised myself with Pirosmani’s work, I realised just how sensitive and restrained Shengelaia had been in his approach to his subject, and I began to develop a deeper appreciation of the film’s beauty and discretion, because it could easily have become sentimental. At its heart is a story about how Pirosmani, devoted to his calling, was determined to live a free life, unencumbered by commitments and the expectations of others. He paid a high price for his independence.  

Although unfamiliar abroad, Pirosmani is beloved in his own land, perhaps because of his obvious sense of belonging, both to his country and to its melancholy people. His main trade was that of an itinerant painter, producing shop signs and pictures that he exchanged for food, lodging, and alcohol. He never settled down. Born about 1866, his life appears to have been unfulfilled and sad; he was an outsider, a loner, and he died, forgotten, at the end of World War I. He worked on the railways for a while and briefly opened a shop, but his heart was set on painting and this is what he chose to do despite little success. Although he received some modest support from artists and the art world it seems to have made little difference to him, probably because of his dreamy nature and incessant drinking.

Pirosmani’s ‘primitivist’ style is disconcerting; at first glance it looks as though he barely knew how to paint at all. His images are simply and boldly outlined, their colouring coarse, and more often than not their background is dark, as he liked to paint on black industrial oilcloth. As sometimes happens, however, it is those very limitations that make his work so perplexingly effective. His figures are stiff and still, as if self-consciously posing, but they are nonetheless iconic; his many animals, which he once described as ‘friends of my heart’, are particularly touching. Infused with feeling, they seem to live in a timeless world, parallel to ours, but radically apart. They often have a certain urgency and a sense of foreboding, as if the artist felt that the world was under threat. A religious man, Pirosmani imbued his paintings with humility and awe.

As I thought about Pirosmani, the work of another Georgian eccentric, Sergei Parajanov, came to mind, and while reading up about him I was intrigued to discover that he had once made a short film called Arabesques on the Pirosmani theme. I was introduced to Parajanov’s films many years ago in the context of a discussion of his friend Tarkovsky, and I learnt to enjoy them very much, perhaps especially the extraordinary The Colour of Pomegranates, a visionary biography of Sayat Nova, the 18th century Armenian poet, singer, and musician. Parajanov, born in Georgia to Armenian parents, became devoted to Georgian and Armenian folklore and history, with the unfortunate consequence that he raised the suspicions of the Soviet authorities and came to be considered a dangerous subversive. He was later jailed on several charges, which many commentators have suggested were false and untrue.

Parajanov developed a luxuriant cinematic style that can seem excessively mannered; his dreamlike films, inspired by icons, traditional dress, folk artefacts, and Persian enamels, appear over-refined and decadent to contemporary taste. His art was akin, in many respects, to the Symbolist paintings of Gustave Moreau and to late 19th century Aestheticism, such as that of the novel À Rebours by J.K.Huysmans. Nevertheless, there is a sense of innocence in his films, which perhaps explains Parajanov’s admiration for Pirosmani; his cinematic portrait of the painter, whose pictures are so plain and earnest in comparison to Parajanov’s fanciful tableaux, is deeply respectful, even to the point of reverence.

With the Caucasus still on my mind, I also searched for the film on Komitas, the Armenian musician and composer, that I’d been hoping to watch for some time, but I failed to find it online. Born in 1869 as Soghomon Soghomonian, Komitas Vardabet is similarly revered in his home country, and it is sometimes said that whenever Armenians gather to honour their past, they sing his songs. Komitas spent his last twenty years in mental institutions, traumatised by the 1915 genocide of two million of his compatriots in Turkey. He wrote comparatively little; important works include some majestic choral pieces, arrangements of the Armenian mass, and a few dances for the piano, but it is as a collector and arranger of folksongs that he is perhaps most loved. Komitas did for Armenia what Bartók did for Hungary, turning simple tunes into more sophisticated compositions, always retaining the soul and spirit of their sources. His music can be exceptionally beautiful; after a concert in Paris, Claude Debussy once said that Komitas deserved to be recognised as a great composer, even on the basis of a single song. Sadly, outside Armnenia, few people even know his name.

For further exploration: 

Pirosmani:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=favP7b57y8E

Parajanov:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfu9KA78jI0 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZwhS_b4Df4 

Komitas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW-zuBMOZNk 

SPIRITS OF ALBION

 

A Canterbury Tale, made in 1943 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a strange film. Centred on an off-beat mystery plot, it is at once a realistic portrayal of British life at the end of World War II and a form of myth-making that was doubtless intended, consciously or otherwise, to encourage social solidarity in the ongoing conflict. After a brief preamble based on the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a dramatic cut from a shot of a falcon in flight to a Spitfire in the sky above modern Kent introduces the story and the three main characters - a young ‘Land girl’, an English soldier, and an American GI. They meet by chance at a blacked-out railway station, one stop away from their destination, and as they walk towards town in the darkness a man dashes out from the shadows, pours glue into the woman’s hair, and disappears. It is later revealed that the ‘glue man’ had already assaulted several other young women in the same way. Some time later, after discovering the culprit, they travel on to Canterbury, where they each experience a blessing.

No one gets killed, hurt, or arrested, and the overall mood is gently melancholic, albeit slightly surreal. Beautifully photographed in Kent, Michael Powell’s home county, the film’s affirmation of traditional ‘Englishness’ - with an emphasis on tolerance and eccentricity - can come across as impossibly quaint and even reactionary, but a recent article nonetheless suggests that it is possibly ‘the most loving and tender film about England ever made’. The description is not as hyperbolic as it may sound. The three ‘pilgrims’ are weary and tired because the world is in upheaval and their future unknown, but when they arrive in Canterbury their lives take a turn for the better. As Xan Brooks puts it in his piece in The Guardian, the film tells us that ‘the only world is the one we're in, bashed about and bent out of shape, and the only heroes the people around us: frail and fearful, sometimes misguided, and coping as best they can. But if we can learn to trust them, and invite them to trust us back, then we may just be OK’. This, he suggests, is the Canterbury blessing.

I watched A Canterbury Tale on an evening just before the summer solstice, and a few days later a friend sent me an image of the Wittenham Clumps, a pair of wooded chalk hills in South Oxfordshire, that had been painted by Paul Nash in the year the film was made. It depicts a solstice, when both the sun and the moon are prominent in the sky. Nash, drawn to the English countryside in its more mythical aspects, was particularly attracted to places such as Silbury Hill, the Avebury stone circle, and to the Wittenham Clumps, which he once described as ‘haunted by old gods, long forgotten’. Reflecting the influence of Romantic artists  such as William Blake and Samuel Palmer, he was fascinated by the mystery and magic of the perpetual cycles of nature. Another war artist, Evelyn Dunbar, who painted everyday scenes of women’s life in England during the 1940s, sometimes saw the world in a similar way, especially after she settled in Kent, where she became deeply attached to its countryside. While her characteristic style of painting was straightforwardly sensitive, it was occasionally infused with visionary intensity. On easels in the studio after her death in 1960 were the masterly Autumn and the Poet, on which she had worked intermittently for over a decade, and the unfinished Jacob’s Dream, which depicts a modern incarnation of the Biblical character lying in a field at night. Above him is the dream - a ladder extending to the heavens, bearing angels, shown in the painting as abstract white shapes. On either side of the ladder are wooded hills, strongly reminiscent of the Kent countryside where she had made her home.

As I think about it now, Evelyn Dunbar’s painting reminds me of the ‘stairway to heaven’ scene in A Matter of Life and Death, another peculiar and memorable film by Powell and Pressburger, in which the story begins with an RAF pilot waking up on a beach on the southern English coast after his aircraft has crashed. In turn, that association brings to mind Crowlink, the last song on Heart’s Ease, the recent album by Shirley Collins, which celebrates her favourite place near the South Downs, where she can ‘sit and gaze at the sea and think about what’s gone and what is to come’. A moody and evocative piece of music, founded on the drone of a hurdy-gurdy and harmonium, and embracing recitation, birdsong and sounds of the sea, it is thought of by Collins as ‘a step out of the past and into the future’, but it has also been described in a review as ‘a pagan epiphany, or an emanation of the spirit of Albion’.



For further exploration:

 

https://archive.org/details/ACanterburyTale_201605 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/oct/25/favourite-film-canterbury-tale 

https://www.nashclumps.org/index.html

https://evelyn-dunbar.blogspot.com/2013/05/jacobs-dream-1960.html 

https://archive.org/details/AMatterOfLifeAndDeath_257

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shirley-collins-hearts-ease/ 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCWa-lmmnQ0

 

 

 

ALL THE DREAMS YOU SHOW UP IN ARE NOT YOUR OWN

 

 
I’ve been listening to We're New Again,  Makaya McCraven’s reworking - or ‘reimagining’, as he puts it - of the late Gil Scott-Heron’s last album, I’m New Here.  It is the second such record, which indicates something of the significance of the original. McCraven’s arrangements, in many ways closer to Scott-Heron’s musical roots than those of the earlier albums, run from blues to ‘spiritual’ jazz, with the singer's voice given due prominence, and because he was starting with fragmentary material, he had to be much more than a conventional producer. That may have been part of the attraction of the project.

While working on  I'm New Here, Scott-Heron was in bad shape, with serious health problems and addicted to crack; he had recently been in prison on Riker’s Island, which is where he was first visited by Richard Russell, the English producer who was to work with him on the original record. In a New Yorker profile, Scott-Heron later admitted that the finished album was more the producer’s work than his own, and that he had been happy to accede to Russell’s enthusiasm and direction.  'All the dreams you show up in are not your own’,  he said. There was barely a handful of songs on the record, only one of them written by Scott-Heron;  the remaining tracks were spoken or recited with musical accompaniment. I’m New Here had little of the socio-political content that Scott-Heron had been known for in the past, but it was engaging and unexpectedly emotional, touching on themes such as fear, mortality, and isolation, and it is perhaps not coincidental that Scott-Heron died not long after the album was completed. The record begins and ends with a poem entitled On Coming from a Broken Home, a tribute to the grandmother who helped to raise him, and the rest dwells sorrowfully on the consequences of his insecure childhood, revealing how a sense of caring and safety had been replaced by rootlessness and torment. Nonetheless, although I'm New Here is a bleak record, it is not without moments of wry hope and reconciliation, its tone set by the line in the title song, written by Bill Callahan, that ruefully remarks: ‘no matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around’.

I’ve also just finished reading Wilhelm Waiblinger’s brief book, Friedrich Hölderlin, Life, Poetry, and Madness, an account of the poet’s sequestered life in a tower of the house in Tübingen that belonged to the carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, who kindly took him in after he was released from a clinic in 1806, diagnosed as incurably insane. The young Waiblinger, entranced by Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion (subtitled The Hermit  in Greece), visited the older man over a period of four years and wrote the biography shortly before he died in Rome, aged only twenty-five. Describing Hölderlin’s decline into an eccentric who delighted in bowing to his guests, addressing them as ‘Your Royal Majesty’ or ‘Your Holiness’ and conversing in inanities, Waiblinger refuses to give up faith that his friend might yet recover his senses and return to his hitherto elevated state of mind. This was not to happen. Before his mental collapse, Hölderlin, Romantic poet and philosopher, had hymned the eternal values of art, beauty, and truth, inspired by nature and classical Greek culture, but after the breakdown his style, as well as his personality, changed. He continued to write poetry in seclusion, but it was simpler and fragmentary, often with unfinished lines and unconventional sentence structure, and yet, like shards of glass in sunshine, his verses sometimes emitted intense and unexpected rays of illumination.

Reflecting on these melancholy examples of breakdown and isolation, I turned to an alternative perspective sent to me by a friend, an extract from Inducements to Retiredness by the 17th century English metaphysical poet and mystic Thomas Traherne. As my friend observed, Traherne seems to suggest that the more cloistered our physical existence, the more potential there is for extensive vision.

All objects being most excellent which in Retirement we behold, it cometh to pass hereby that Retirement is the Sphere of Treasures, the Point of Concurrence, wherein all the Influences of Heaven meet, the Pupil of Vision out of which all the Rays and Beams of Sight disperse themselves and so, like God, an Invisible Sphere of all his Kingdom.

 

For further exploration:

We're New Again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jfvh07FIDM&list=OLAK5uy_niTp864avMp4Wy3m1_giuaEytm9o1iMdo&index=15

Gil Scott-Heron: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/09/new-york-is-killing-me

Makaya McCraven: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gil-scott-heron-makaya-mccraven-were-new-again-a-reimagining-by-makaya-mccraven/ 

Hölderlin and Waiblinger: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/friedrich-holderlin-poet-life-madness/

 

 

  

 SATCHIDANANDA




The Indian rudra vina is a wonderful and imposing instrument that is said to have had an ancient origin. Although its currency gradually diminished in the 19th century following the development of the surbahar, the bass sitar, there has since been a revival of interest in its sonorous music, and the rudra vina has been significantly modified, most notably by Zia Mohuddin Dagar, who added bigger gourds and thicker strings to enhance its resonant softness and depth. Best suited to slow alaps in the vocal dhrupad style, the introspective sound of the rudra vina is seductively immersive, its typically meditative mood evoking the ‘imaginal world’ or mundus imaginalis that Henri Corbin wrote about with reference to the Sufism of Ibn al’Arabi - the  liminal realm where invisible realities become visible and material things are spiritualized.

John Coltrane might have had some understanding of the idea of the ‘imaginal world’. Sympathetic to all kinds of metaphysical thinking, Coltrane had a spiritual awakening in the 1950s, about a decade before he died, which helped to free him from the narcotic and alcoholic addictions that had been ruining his life. From then on, his consciousness shifted from a focus on the purely musical to the mystical, his flamboyant improvisational technique subjected to what he felt was a higher purpose. His classic A Love Supreme, a work of intense, hymn-like spirituality, recorded in 1964 and released a year later, was a case in point. In the album’s liner notes, Coltrane alluded to the difficulties he had been experiencing and how he was overcoming them: ‘As time and events moved on, I entered into a phase which is contradictory to the pledge and away from the esteemed path. But thankfully now, through the merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been fully re-informed of his omnipotence. It is truly a love supreme’. Widely acclaimed as a jazz masterpiece, the record proved to be hugely popular and influential, Coltrane becoming revered enough for an African Orthodox Church in San Francisco to incorporate his music and lyrics into its liturgy, and to elevate him to sainthood. 

Described as one of the most complicated and misunderstood of all 20th century musicians, ‘a respected yet divisive figure who was scorned by the jazz mainstream for most of her life’,  Alice Coltrane suffered greatly after the death of her husband. After seeking help from two gurus, she immersed herself in Indian culture and philosophy, changed her name to Turiyasangitananda, became a spiritual leader, and in 1982 founded an ashram in southern California. Hitherto a bizarre mix of modal jazz, Indian influences, and string orchestras (with Coltrane herself playing harp, piano, and organ), her music was transformed into something more cosmic and psychedelic, dominated by choral voices, percussion, and synthesizers. Its avowed purpose was devotion and rapture. On Sundays Alice Coltrane would lead the community, many of whom were musicians, in gatherings that were like Gospel services sung in Sanskrit; many of their devotional songs, very similar to Indian bhajan music, were later released on private press cassettes for a limited audience, and some years ago David Byrne included a selection of them on an album for his admirable Luaka Bop label. They are extraordinary pieces of music, trancelike and exultant.

Alice Coltrane may have known that she was a part of a long lineage of bhakti music and poetry that originated in the 7th or 8th century CE in South India. With an emphasis on devotion and surrender to God that brought spiritual experience to many marginalised people, especially women, whose opportunities for religious expression were often very limited, bhakti removed all need for an intermediary between an individual and his or her personal relationship to God, and as such it challenged the conventional Brahmanical hierarchy. Women bhakti saints, many of whom led normal domestic lives, rejected asceticism and wrote about their love of God in songs and poems that used the vernacular language of ordinary people. While Alice Coltrane’s life and ideas were colourfully different, especially in relation to the norms of American culture, they were just as brave and radical; decades after it was recorded, her music still seems joyous, eccentric, and necessary.

For further exploration:

 Rudra vina:  http://www.rudravina.com/

Zia Mohiuddin Dagar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5trNs7M3MU

A Love Supreme: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21158-a-love-supreme-the-complete-masters/

Alice Coltrane:  https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23135-world-spirituality-classics-1-the-ecstatic-music-of-alice-coltrane-turiyasangitananda

 

 

 GURU  MAA

I’ve been spending time with Garden & Cosmos, a catalogue of an exhibition of Indian paintings from the collection of the Maharaja of Jodhpur that took place in 2009.  Much of the work is typically rich and exotic, reflecting the pleasures and luxuries of life at the Jodhpur Royal Court, but the pieces that really engage me are the more religious images, especially those that speculate about the origins and mysteries of the universe, which bring together a Mogul Muslim style of painting and ancient Hindu beliefs. In the early 19th century the Maharaja, a devotee of the Nath gurus and mendicant ascetics, commissioned paintings that mark a dramatic shift from those that went before. Instead of flattering and charming pictures of a courtly world there are surreal representations of metaphysical realms where, for example, Brahma, god of creation, emerges from a golden lotus flower that sprouts from the navel of the deity Narayana. Such images, uncommonly large in reality, are truly magnificent.

The paintings in Garden & Cosmos are usually to be found in a museum in the great and forbidding Jodhpur fort of Mehrangahr, where the album Junun and its accompanying  documentary were recorded and shot in 2015. Junun is the fruit of another cultural fusion, this time between the music of Shye Ben-Tzur, an Israeli who lives in Rajasthan and composes versions of Sufi Qawwali songs, and local drummers, a six-piece  Hindu brass band, two women singers, and musicians from the Muslim Manganiar community who play bowed-string instruments. Jonny Greenwood, the composer and guitarist from Radiohead, produced the record and brought in his friend and collaborator, Paul Thomas Anderson, to make the film. Its highlight, perhaps, is the wonderfully ecstatic Allah/Elohim, named after the Muslim and Jewish words for God, but the overall exuberance of the project, happily captured in the informal and rough-cut film, is just as joyful and uplifting.

Indian court patronage and the intersection between Muslim and Hindu culture are also at the heart of a quite different musical story, one that makes for a sombre contrast to the more confident and extrovert narratives of Garden & Cosmos and Junun. The celebrated sarod player and teacher Allauddin Khan, at one time employed at the court of the Maharaja of Maihar, was the father of Annapurna Devi, widely considered to have been one of the finest classical Indian musicians of the 20th century. Born a Muslim, Roshanara Khan was later renamed by the Maharaja, an incident that was in many ways typical, for as one obituary put it,  if outsiders knew of her at all, it was probably only as an accessory to the men in her life. It is said that her father had pledged not to teach her music, but when he heard Annapurna, at the age of ten, correcting her brother’s practice, he could no longer ignore her talent. She began learning the sitar, but Allaudin Khan soon encouraged her to take up the bass surbahar, telling her that while it would never be as popular as the sitar, the instrument’s refinement and musical depth would suit her well. 

At the age of thirteen Annapurna met Ravi Shankar, one of her father’s students, and they married two years later, Annapurna converting to Hinduism on the day of their wedding. A conventionally arranged marriage, it began to fall apart not long after the birth of a son. The worldly Shankar blamed his sheltered wife’s tantrums, but he also admitted that she was aware of his persistent affairs with other women. Annapurna, however, suggested that the the cause of the breakdown was her husband’s jealousy of her talent. ‘Whenever I performed’, she said, ‘people appreciated my playing, and I sensed that Panditji (Ravi Shankar) wasn’t too happy about their response. I wasn’t that fond of performing anyway’. Shankar didn’t agree. ’She maybe doesn’t like to face the public or she is nervous or whatever’, he told an interviewer. ‘This is very sad, because she is a fantastic musician’. Annapurna subsequently called Shankar’s accounts of the collapse of their marriage and the premature death of their son ‘false and fabricated stories’. ‘I think Panditji is losing his sense of propriety or his mental balance’, she said; ‘or he has turned into a pathological liar’.

Annapurna Devi withdrew from public life in the 1950s, choosing never to play in public again, and because the only extant recordings of her playing are of poor quality, her reputation is based on memory and hearsay. Many serious students were nonetheless drawn to her, among them the distinguished sitar player Nikhil Bannerjee, the flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, and her nephew, the fine sarod player Aashish Khan. It is rumoured that the only outsider to hear her play was George Harrison, whom she allowed to sit in on a daily practice session, a privilege granted only after persuasion from India’s then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. Becoming known as ‘Guru Maa’, she refused to be photographed, was rarely interviewed, and seldom left her apartment. Some years before she passed away in 2018, she said that she was happy in seclusion and was at peace when teaching, practicing, and feeding pigeons on her balcony.

A sign on the front door of Annapurna Devi's Mumbai apartment read:

A Request

Please Ring The Bell Only Three Times
If Nobody Answers, Please Leave Your Card/Letter
Thank You for Being Considerate
Smt Annapurna Devi

Some references:

Review of Garden & Cosmos:   https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/31/exhibition-art

Junun:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTK7S97EQU

Article on Annapurna Devi:  https://www.mansworldindia.com/people/annapurna-devi-the-tragedy-and-triumph-of-ravi-shankars-first-wife/

Obituary of Annapurna Devi:  https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659786993/annapurna-devi-poised-star-surbahar-spent-60-years-her-apartment

DO IT WITH LAUGHTER,  AND DO IT WITH TEARS

You got what they call the immortal spirit

You can feel it all night, you can feel it in the morn'
It creeps in your body the day you were born
One strike of lightning is all that I need
And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed
Shimmy your ribs, I'll stick in the knife
Gonna jump-start my creation to life
I want to bring someone to life, turn back the years
Do it with laughter, and do it with tears…

My Own Version of You - Bob Dylan



‘The Seer’, a short book by Lars Muhl about his spiritual teacher, a Danish clairvoyant and healer who took the name ‘Calle de Montségur’ and spent most of his later life in southwestern France, abounds in visionary and symbolic experiences, initiations, and musings about the Cathars and the Holy Grail. Reminiscent in some respects of the writings of Gurdjieff and Hermann Hesse, it is engaging and interesting, although the credibility of its details may be moot. Muhl became the Seer’s apprentice after being cured by Calle of a longstanding mysterious illness, and he spent a few years being taught by him. He also developed a deep interest in the healing practices of the Essenes, ancient religious communities in Israel about whom much is speculated but little is definitively known. According to Muhl the Essenes were healers, prophets, astronomers, astrologers, and vegetarians, their beliefs informed by Zoroastrianism, Chaldean religion, Egyptian mystery schools, and possibly by Buddhism. There seems to have been a close connection with teachings that are now known as Gnosticism. Muhl is of the opinion that the scrolls which were found in the 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea are Essene and, more debatably, that those from Nag Hammadi come from the same source. He suggests that Jesus, whom he refers to as Yeshua, the Aramaic form of the name, was initiated in the Essene tradition, from which his teachings were derived.

After reading ‘The Seer’ I turned to ‘The Nag Hammadi Library in English’, which contains translations of Coptic Gnostic texts.  According to James Robinson’s introduction, the focus that brought the collection together ‘is an estrangement from the mass of humanity, an affinity to an ideal order that completely transcends life as we know it, and a life-style radically other than common practice. This life-style involved giving up all the goods that people usually desire and longing for an ultimate liberation’.  The texts in the library, he writes, have much in common ‘with primitive Christianity, with eastern religion, and with ‘holy men’ (and women) of all times, as well as with the more secular equivalents of today, such as the counter-culture movements coming from the 1960s’.

Gnosticism, a loose grouping of ancient religious ideas and system that originated in the first century CE among Jewish and early Christian groups and sects, proposes that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world that was made by an imperfect god or deity. Considering the material world as flawed and evil, Gnostics held that the task of humanity, based on the example of Jesus, was to turn away from darkness and to return to light, usually through mystical or esoteric insight. Close to Gnosticism’s dualistic cosmology is Manichaeism, a religion founded in the third century CE in Persia by the prophet Mani, which spread rapidly through the middle east and further afield; in Catharism,  the movement’s final form, it survived in southern France until the Middle Ages, when it was eventually subdued by crusaders. The ruins of the castle at Montségur, the town where Lars Muhl spent several years with the Seer, are the remains of a Cathar stronghold.

Many writers and thinkers have been influenced by Gnostic ideas; among  the more recent are the Theosophist Mme. Blavatsky, the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung, the poets W.B.Yeats and Allen Ginsberg, and the novelists Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Durrell. Perhaps the most important was the poet and artist William Blake, whose dualistic cosmology was central to almost everything he did. Blake considered ‘salvation’ to be the full expression of his visionary spirit; a few months before he died he told a friend that he was ‘very near the gates of death’ but ‘not in spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination, which liveth for ever. In that I am stronger and stronger, as this foolish body decays’.

It may not be coincidental that during the isolation of ‘lockdown’ I’ve spent some time with William Blake’s work, and especially with his illuminated books, whose astonishing intensity can be a distraction in these difficult times. I understand little of his symbolism, but it barely matters, as the depth and richness of his inner world is nourishing enough. I’ve also been listening to Bob Dylan’s new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, and I began to suspect that there might be something Gnostic about his lyrics too,  because the subject was on my mind and I was aware that he has been influenced by Blake, whom he mentions in the first song on the record. Some internet research swiftly revealed that there are at least two books written on the subject - there is little about Bob Dylan that has not already been thought or said - but it is still worth remarking that Rough and Rowdy Ways,  a collection of songs about death, temporality, and battles between good and evil, might plausibly be described as Manichaean.

One of the most intriguing chapters in The Old, Weird America,  Greil Marcus’ rambling and speculative book on Bob Dylan’s seminal  The Basement Tapes,  reflects on Harry Smith’s classic Anthology of American Folk Music, which was first released in 1952 and became immensely important to Dylan and many of his contemporaries in the early 1960s. Marcus describes Smith as ‘a polymath and an autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic, a legendary experimental filmmaker and a more legendary sponger'.  A notorious fabulist and story-teller, he was a friend of Allen Ginsberg and  became closely  involved with the 1960s counterculture. Smith had been familiar with esoteric religion since childhood; his parents were Theosophists, and his great-grandfather seems to have been involved in the ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’, a Neo-Gnostic sect (once connected with the occultist Aleister Crowley) that combined elements of different religions with Masonic and magic symbolism. Although the anthology was composed of unfamiliar hillbilly songs and primitive blues, which accounted for its extraordinary influence, it is not insignificant that Smith chose to present it in a way that reflected his interest in alchemy, and particularly in the physician, astrologer, and cosmologist Robert Fludd. Each of the original three two-record sets had the same cover art, an etching of an instrument that Smith, following the thinking of Fludd, called a ‘Celestial Monochord’, and their colour backgrounds corresponded to three classical alchemical elements of water, fire, and air. A fourth volume, released many years later, had a yellow cover that represented earth. Smith was consecrated a bishop in the ‘Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica’, which includes William Blake among its ‘saints’, and after his death a branch of ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’, of which he had long been a member, performed a Gnostic mass for him at St.Mark’s Church in New York’s East Village.

Some references:

Lars Muhl: 'Gateways and Passwords to Heaven'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT2fojq9EOo

Jesus and the Essenes: An Esoteric History

https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/jesus-and-essenes-esoteric-history

Bob Dylan: 'My Own Version of You'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CERo3DpxCrA&list=OLAK5uy_kqAopNs8YTdcVv-aTY0fBZqiEWI4jmtgI&index=3

Harry Smith Anthology

https://harrysmitharchives.com/media/anthology/

'THE HOPKINS MANUSCRIPT', TRICKSTERISM,  AND BRAZILIAN FOOTBALL

One of the more enjoyable and apocalyptic books I read during ‘lockdown’ was The Hopkins Manuscript, written by R.C.Sheriff in 1939, which tells the story of Edgar Hopkins, a retired and solitary schoolteacher who lives in Hampshire and breeds prize poultry, and how he deals with the prospect of the moon’s imminent collision with the earth. The first chapters, which are very funny, describe Hopkins’ small-minded snobbery and self-importance as he prepares for the end of the world, but the second part of the book is more sober. To his surprise, Hopkins survives what he calls the ‘cataclysm’ and begins to put together a strategy for a new way of life. Gradually he develops empathy and affection for his fellow human beings, and by the end of the book the reader has developed an unexpected  degree of sympathy for a man who was ‘almost tempted to tell John Briggs, the carpenter, that his first name was Edgar’.

I also watched an online interview with Bayo Akomolafe, an unconventional academic, lecturer, and speaker who was born in Nigeria and now lives in India with his wife and child. Especially concerned with ideas about social, cultural, and environmental crises, Akomolafe trained as a clinical psychologist and subsequently spent time with traditional Yoruba healers in West Africa, after which his life changed focus and direction. Choosing to devote himself to the exploration of a ‘magical’ world that doesn’t fit normal Western cultural paradigms, he leads an organisation called ‘The Emergence Network’, described on its website as a ‘trickster activist artist collective’.

Struck by one of his favourite phrases, ‘the times are urgent, let us slow down’ (apparently derived from a Yoruba saying) I read some of Akomolafe’s essays, in which he enjoys inverting the obvious, making unexpected associations, and challenging linear thinking. ‘In order to find our way we must become lost’, he writes, going on to suggest that it may be misguided to search for rational solutions when faced with radical social and environmental crises. He proposes instead a willingness to live in a liminal or ‘in-between’ state of mind in order that new solutions might come into consciousness. Some of his ideas are more focussed;  reflecting on the growing number of tourists travelling to countries like Peru, Colombia, and India in order to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies or meditation retreats, he remarks that this kind of escapism wrongly assumes that indigenous peoples are more connected to ‘authentic’ ways of living. Rather, he says, we should develop our own authenticity and inner nature by committing ourselves to finding the spiritual in the everyday. Real spirituality, he adds, can be found in unexpected ways and places: in failure, brokenness, and in ‘sanctuaries of the otherwise’, which are spaces for falling apart, shapeshifting, resting, and embodying new forms.

Akomolafe’s essays, frequently articulated in the language of clinical psychology and critical theory, also borrow from his experience of Yoruba culture and make much of the idea of the ‘trickster’, the archetypal transgressor and rule-breaker. ‘Tricksterism’ is a term that is widely and often loosely used, and as Lewis Hyde reminds us in Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, a comprehensive account of the subject, ‘most of the travellers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century’ are not tricksters. ‘Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level’, he writes. ‘Trickster isn’t a run-of-the-mill liar and thief. When he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds’.

Vestiges of true ‘tricksterism’ were nonetheless evident in the Brazil of my childhood, where popular culture was infused with influences from West Africa that had been brought over by slaves. The most obvious manifestations of Brazilian ‘tricksterism’ were the ‘jeitinho’ and ‘malandragem’, cunning ways of gaining personal advantage in challenging situations. The ‘jeitinho’ was seldom overtly transgressive, although it always involved subtlety and manipulation, but ‘malandragem’ often used illicit or illegal means and strategies, frequently justified by the belief that work and honesty were incapable of getting the ‘malandro’, who was usually poor and underprivileged, what he wanted and deserved. Despite his blatant selfishness there was seldom any intent to cause obvious harm to anyone else.

The skills and imagination of the ‘malandro’ were greatly admired, perhaps especially in football. Garrincha, for instance, the bow-legged ‘bad boy’ of ‘futebol’ and one of the most beloved of Brazilian players, used to take pleasure in dribbling around defenders and then backtracking so he could do it again. His womanising, drinking, and lack of self-discipline were legendary, but these qualities took nothing away from his popularity. On the contrary, he became known as the ‘alegria do povo’ (’the joy of the people’) and ‘anjo de pernas tortas’ (‘angel with crooked legs’). Some of Garrincha’s talents and characteristics are still evident in contemporary Brazilian players, but  even at home they are now less than wholeheartedly admired, and in Europe, where the most successful ply their trade, the more flamboyant Brazilian footballers are often considered something of a liability. Many of their tricks are seen as ‘showboating’ or humiliation of the opponent, and any lack of professionalism is barely tolerated.

Nonetheless, the period of Brazilian football that is thought of as its ‘Golden Age’(1958-1970) was infused with the spirit of ‘malandragem’. The Brazilian footballer’s style, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre once explained, was typically opposed to European Apollonian order,  full of ‘irrational surprises and Dionysian variations’  and a reflection of ‘mulatismo’, the mix of black and white races. In the 1930s, Brazilian football and ‘samba’ became hugely popular in the cities of Rio and São Paulo, where industrialisation attracted workers from the ‘interior’, many of them descended from former slaves. Football, at first the preserve of well-to-do white people, gradually assimilated black players, who often used steps and moves influenced by ‘samba’ dancing and the martial art of ‘capoeira’, both rooted in African culture, as part of their technique. Feints, tricks, and bending of the rules became part of their game. It is said that referees would often overlook fouls by white players on blacks, but never the other way round, so black players had to develop the skills of avoiding obvious contact with white opponents and of not being caught if they did. ‘Malandragem’ in football was a combination of survivalism, skill, and gamesmanship.



Some references:

http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/content/persephoneforum/persephone-book-no-57-the-hopkins-manuscript-by-r-c-sherriff/

https://forthewild.world/listen/bayo-akomolafe-on-slowing-down-in-urgent-times-155

http://bayoakomolafe.net/

https://www.footballparadise.com/garrincha-brazil-the-cachaca-supernova-in-defense-of-footballs-prophet-of-absurdism-mane-garrincha/

 

BRIGHT STAR

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.


A friend sent me this quotation from William Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ without comment, and it came at a time when I was watching the early episodes of Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’ on television. The tone of Wordsworth’s stanza, full of yearning for the innocent vision of youth, was a welcome contrast to the more acrid tenor of the highly praised book about an addictive relationship between two young Irish people. I didn’t dislike its style or content, but ‘Normal People’ failed to engage me, and I had been wondering if this might be because my cultural and social values might now be radically out of step with most mainstream thinking. The Wordsworth poem confirmed that this was probably so. As I thought about it, an observation from an Irish journalist had come to mind; in response to a remark by a male colleague in another context, she said ‘perhaps this is the first Irish generation who have purposely opted out of tormenting themselves by searching for some unattainable greater meaning, and who have chosen instead just to live’.

If Rooney were to dispute the suggestion that the main characters in her book are not concerned with ‘meaning’ in their relationship it would probably be because Marianne and Connell are  committed to finding an appropriate place for themselves in society; actions  and attitudes are described in terms of consumerism, class difference, and their generation’s sense of helplessness in the face of current problems of social mobility. When ‘The New Yorker’ commented, in its profile of the author, that she is 'writing novels of manners about an era in which the expectations of caring for others no longer obtains, in which it is easier to wreck a home than to own one’,  the barb may have been intentional, as the writer also adds that ‘one of the unusual pleasures of Rooney’s novels is watching young women engage in casual intellectual hooliganism, demolishing every mediocrity that crosses their paths, just for the fun of it’. Rooney comes across in the article as clever, quick-witted, impatient, and opinionated, and these qualities pervade ‘Normal People’. Some reviews have mentioned its sense of resignation, emotional wariness, and existential emptiness, and it is true that although Marianne and Connell develop intermittent understanding and dependence on one other, real affection seems out-of-reach, if not absent. The dialogue in the book is sharp, chilly, and reductive, utterly different from the underlying warmth and idealism in J.D.Salinger’s writing, to which it is often compared.

The melancholia in Wordsworth’s verse and the compulsive relationship in ‘Normal People’ brought me, through a process of loose association, to the recollection of Jane Campion’s lovely film ‘Bright Star’, which is about the intense friendship between the poet John Keats and his neighbour Fanny Brawne. ‘The Guardian’ pointed out in a review that the film is ‘defiantly, unfashionably, about the vocation of romantic love’, and in its unabashed beauty and sadness ‘Bright Star’ is far from typical of Campion’s work, which is usually more severe. The film is undeniably affecting, and although it skirts the boundary of sentimentality, Campion manages to judge its tone with great delicacy and restraint. There is only one scene that involves close physical intimacy between Keats and Fanny Brawne, and even then it is muted and reticent; as in another moment in the picture, when they communicate with each other by knocking on the wall between them, a barrier keeps them apart, but this veil of difference simply serves to emphasise their closeness.

I was reminded, when I watched the film again, of ‘Keats and Embarrassment’, a book I bought in 1974, at a time when I was becoming involved in my first intense and overwrought relationship. Its author, Christopher Ricks, suggests that the poet was especially sensitive to embarrassment, which he defines as ‘a constrained feeling or manner arising from bashfulness and timidity’, and Keats certainly suffered acute awkwardness when it came to his involvement with Fanny. This had its causes in social and cultural inhibitions, and perhaps in anxiety about his own emotional vulnerability, but Keats’ ‘embarrassment’ seems not to have been the source of particular unhappiness. His troubles, about which he rarely complained, were of a different kind.

Some academic critics have proposed that Keats used his poetry as a way of escaping from the demands and banalities of everyday life; others have suggested that his fluid and unbounded sense of self, as well as his commitment to ‘negative capability’, uncertainty, and doubt all indicate a particularly ‘feminine’ sense of male identity. These observations are plausible, but I’m inclined to believe that Keats’ feelings and temperament are far from unusual. On a visit to London some months after first watching ‘Bright Star’, I went to Keats’ house in Hampstead and strolled around the Heath; as I did so I remembered the late photographs of Nick Drake that were taken nearby. Today’s cultural norms would have it that both Keats and Drake (probably the most classically Romantic of singer-songwriters) were too thin-skinned for their own good, and that some hard-headed pragmatism would have helped them to avoid their sadness and - possibly - the tragic endings to their short lives. True as this may be, and although it must be admitted that they paid a high price for their fine feelings, much beauty and loveliness would have been lost.


Some references:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/sally-rooney-gets-in-your-head
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/nov/05/bright-star-review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRzZpqg_Rq0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ9JBwuO128

THE WREN

Not long ago I discovered a wren’s nest in a rose bush; from time to time I watched the bird building it beautifully, surreptitiously assembling small tufts of moss and tiny twigs. A few days later it seemed to be abandoned and began to disintegrate, perhaps because the wren’s mate had no interest in settling there, as the male typically builds several possible nests and the female chooses one of them, which she then lines with feathers. Just after I found it, I was led to a tender song by Paul McCartney, ‘Jenny Wren’, which tells the story of a young girl who abandons her love of singing because of a broken heart and the unkindness in the world (‘wounded warriors took her song away’), to which she is unusually sensitive. I was not aware of it before, but as it was mentioned by the singer-songwriter Laura Marling in an interview about her new album, ‘Song For Our Daughter’, I followed it up out of curiosity. Its gentle melody is delightful - worthy of a place on a Beatles album - and McCartney’s lyrics suggest that the young woman’s lost innocence becomes, through experience, her salvation, and that the world would do well to learn from her compassionate vision and example. 

Laura Marling’s last record ended with the sound of someone walking out of the studio into a garden full of birdsong; like Nora in Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’, she seemed to be abandoning her past in order to discover herself anew. ‘Song For Our Daughter’, recorded a few years later, hints at how her life has developed since then. Marling has explained that the loose theme of the album (which is addressed to a fictional daughter) is loss of innocence, and how our culture rarely provides plausible ways for women to look after themselves. The record is deft and attractive, and it has been favourably reviewed. The writer for NME describes Marling’s voice as ‘comforting and crystalline’, going on to say that she comes across as ‘gentle and intelligent, humble and wholly kind-hearted’. The album as a whole ‘feels cohesive and like a safe haven’, and Laura Marling is a ‘lifeline and a source of stability’. ‘We’re lucky to have her’, she says.

Marling is often compared to Joni Mitchell, and ‘Song For Our Daughter’ further accentuates the comparison, especially in relation to ‘Blue’, the celebrated Mitchell album that was recorded fifty years ago. There are substantial differences between the two, but their tone and mood are close. In 1971 ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine commented that Joni Mitchell’s earlier records had been ‘instantly traditional’, combining realism, romance, and vulnerability, but ‘Blue’ was more explicitly autobiographical, a chronicle of the singer’s search for permanent love, and that ‘in portraying herself so starkly she has risked the ridiculous to achieve the sublime’. Decades later, ‘Blue’ has generally been accepted as iconic and is even considered to be a ‘perfect’ record; its themes - leaving, journeying, independence, honesty and memory - are clearer in retrospect, and the album’s confessional quality, much emphasised by ‘Rolling Stone’, is now less obvious, probably because that kind of intimacy quickly became commonplace among singer-songwriters of the 1970s. Mitchell, however, has never belittled the autobiographical element of the record, latterly explaining that ‘Blue’ was written and composed at a turning-point in her life, after her innocence had been lost, and when she found that we have responsibility for our own lives and the discovery of our core values.

Despite its efforts to be forthcoming,  Marling’s record is more emotionally reticent than ‘Blue’, and this may partly be due to her cultural background, the secure and constrained self-assurance of the English middle classes. In that respect Marling brings to mind the films of Joanna Hogg, which I’ve been watching enthusiastically in the past few weeks. Much admired by some and dismissed as boring and pretentious by others, they are about the psychological problems of well-off English people, whom Hogg depicts with merciless accuracy and quiet empathy.  Hogg’s recent and semi-autobiographical ‘The Souvenir’ is perhaps the most relevant film in this context. Set in the 1980s, it focuses on the relationship between Julie, a sweet-natured film student, and her older boyfriend, Anthony, who may or may not work in the Foreign Office, and whose cultured and arrogant persona disguises deep unease and a dark secret. Julie lives in her parents’ pied-à-terre in London’s Knightsbridge, but she is trying, not altogether convincingly, to shed the trappings of privilege to which she is accustomed. Anthony, however, whose origins are a rung or two down the social ladder, gives the impression that civilised luxury is his natural milieu. Julie is attracted by his louche charm and accepts his occasional casual cruelty, so he cleverly establishes himself as a dominant influence on her life. For much of the film Julie is in Anthony’s thrall, her innocence a dramatic contrast to Anthony’s decline towards self-destruction, but she gradually develops a sense of awakened independence. Hogg’s visual sense is immaculate, and ‘The Souvenir’, like Laura Marling’s record, is remarkable for its good taste, composure and grace.

Another film that elegantly portrays the influence of an older man on a younger woman is Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘The Phantom Thread’. The story also takes place in London, some thirty years earlier, and it describes the relationship between Reynolds Woodcock, a successful fashion designer, and Alma Elson, a shy foreign waitress whom he meets in a small country hotel and takes home to model for him. Woodcock, beautifully dressed, fastidious, and arrogant (although perhaps not quite the gentleman he considers himself to be) is in the habit of having affairs with young women and discarding them when he becomes bored or otherwise distracted. Woodcock is impossibly controlling and dismissive of Alma, and his sister, who lives with them, makes it clear to her that she will not long remain a favoured muse and companion.  Alma, nonetheless, is not intimidated, and she pursues unconventional ways of balancing her relationship with Woodcock. Her innocence is lost, but her power is in the ascendant.

Fiona Apple (coincidentally, once the partner of Paul Thomas Anderson) has received much press attention of late, perhaps most significantly in a long ‘New Yorker’ profile entitled ‘Fiona Apple’s Art of Radical Sensitivity’, which reveals some of the complex layers of pain and emotional instability that lie behind her music. She has also released a new album, ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’, which has been even more ardently reviewed than Laura Marling’s ‘Song for Our Daughter’. While they both address many similar ideas and themes, Apple approaches them with real anarchy and eccentricity - in a ‘glorious eruption’, as ‘The Guardian’ describes it.  According to the self-consciously hip ‘Pitchfork’, Apple’s early music was about ‘grand betrayals by inadequate men and the patriarchal world’, but this album is ‘unbound’, ‘a wild symphony of the everyday’, and ‘liberationist’. ‘It’s not pretty’, the writer concludes; ‘it’s free’. More succinctly, to paraphrase the reviewer in ‘The Guardian’, the record is a refusal to be silenced. 

Some references: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wubCa3JZdEk

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/laura-marling-review-song-for-our-daughter-tracklist-a9455451.html

https://www.nme.com/reviews/album/laura-marling-song-for-our-daughter-review-a-lifeline-for-turbulent-times-2644043

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFNV2EDSnsc&list=RDaNTd9BYAZd8&index=11

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/29/the-souvenir-review-joanna-hogg

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/02/how-phantom-thread-undresses-our-ideas-about-toxic-masculinity

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/fiona-apples-art-of-radical-sensitivity

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fiona-apple-fetch-the-bolt-cutters/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N541HLPeG6Y

DISAPPEARANCE

I remember the first time I saw the well-known photograph of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow, flat on his back, with two onlookers in the distance behind him. An artist friend had sent me a photocopy - it was before the internet made such things instantly available - and I was taken aback by its impact and rawness. Then, on reflection, I began to think that it wasn’t such a bad way to move into the next world: suddenly, unexpectedly, on a Christmas Day walk. It was a kind of radical disappearance.

I regularly return to Robert Walser’s short stories. They employ all manner of ruses to ensure that nothing ever comes to a firm conclusion, and as a consequence there is something ambivalent and open-ended about them, which is part of their appeal. I also enjoy Walser’s quietly ironic Romanticism, often expressed in his descriptions of nature, as well as his obsession with walks, which seemed to be not only an opportunity to observe the world but a form of surrender and effacement, a way of reducing self-consciousness, just as his apparently childlike wonder at the glory of life may have been an escape from the torment of self-awareness. Walser’s writing is oddly humble, his humour, perhaps driven by despair, serving to undercut its earnestness. The characters in his stories are often out of step with society’s conventional values and pace, yet he can be sharp in his observations about those he considers pompous and foolish.

Walser had few possessions and was generally distant from other people; once described as ‘the most unattached of solitary poets’, he appears to have suffered from anxiety. After his early years he led a precarious existence ‘with emptiness blowing through every part of it’, as someone else once remarked. A tendency towards self-erasure is reflected in his so-called ‘microscripts’, the multitude of texts realised in tiny and nearly unintelligible handwriting, but as W.G. Sebald observed, Walser’s writing also seem to dissolve as one reads it, just as every footstep on a walk is immediately forgotten and replaced by the next. His ideal, it has been said, was to overcome the forces of gravity.

Walser’s gentle writing has attracted much commentary, some of it surprisingly forceful. Walter Benjamin, for instance, once commented that his characters ‘come from insanity and nowhere else’ and that they ‘have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality’. Susan Sontag proposed that Walser’s writing assumes depression and terror in order to accept and lighten them, just as he ironizes pretence and insincerity but leaves us with something sincere and unpretentious. In recent years he has become widely read and admired, and it is worth reflecting on why this should be so. It may be partly because Walser’s liminal world, somewhere between the real and the fictitious, the laughable and the solemn, is especially resonant in postmodern times, but his appeal is surely more timeless than that. Something analogous might be found in the poignant 18th century French painting by Watteau, known as ‘Gilles’. The pierrot stands alone, apart from his companions, and  although uneasy he has no self-pity. On the contrary, he has inner stillness.

I recently thought of Robert Walser while reading 5th century Chinese ‘rivers and mountains poetry’, which is remarkable for its profound sense of emptiness and silence. The practice of living as a recluse in the hills was the physical equivalent of the ‘empty’ awareness so prized by Taoism, as David Hinton explains in his introduction to Mountain Homes: the Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. In our culture, when we look out at the world, we assume that that we do so from the ‘I’, a centre within ourselves; in Taoism, however, the ‘I’ exists only a an opening of consciousness. There is a story about Wu Tao-Tzu (or Wu Daozi) an 8th century painter of the Tang Dynasty, that nicely illustrates the point. One day, it is said, he stood looking at a mural he had just completed. Suddenly he clapped his hands and the temple gates in the picture opened, whereupon he walked into the painting, disappeared, and the gates closed behind him. He was never seen again. In The Myth of Wu Tao-Tzu the Swedish writer Sven Lindquist uses the tale to illustrate his conviction that art should not be a form of escapism in which we can lose ourselves and disappear. He goes on to explain that when he first encountered poverty and suffering on his travels in China and India he fell into a state of despair, wondering if beauty and harmony, in which he hitherto had such faith, had any purpose at all. He decided, perhaps a little reluctantly, that they didn’t, and most of the book describes how his interests and sensibility became more politically engaged. There is a certain irony in the fact that I recall the early pages, in which he writes about the myth, as by far the most enjoyable and enlightening in the book.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/robert-walsers-disappearing-acts
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/pierrot-formerly-known-gilles
https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/hinton.html
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-art-of-escape-on-sven-lindqvists-the-myth-of-wu-tao-tzu/

MIDWINTER


To my surprise, as I was looking at a copy of the Chinese Tao Te Ching in the school bookshop, the headmaster, who taught French and collected ceramics, came up and told me that it was a wonderful book.  I knew little about it then, but my interest in Eastern philosophy and spirituality was already beginning to take shape. A year or two later I recognised some of its verses in George Harrison’s The Inner Light, which was released in 1968 as the B-side of The Beatles' single, Lady Madonna. In the 1970s I gave my brother the book, and he has since told me, more than once, how important it is to him. Last Christmas he returned the gesture and sent me a new translation as a present, and I enjoyed reacquainting myself with this ancient, beautiful, and mysterious text, which is full of poetic and resonant thoughts. This, for instance, is a rendering of the verses that inspired Harrison’s song:

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out of the window 
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes
The less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,
Identifies without having to see,
Accomplishes without having to act. 

The basic idea of the Tao is not difficult to grasp, although the Tao Te Ching declares that it is ‘nameless’ and can never adequately be described or intellectually understood. The word is usually translated as ‘Way’, and while it does not have definite characteristics, the Tao is commonly characterised as strong, gentle, and fluid. Historically, Taoists were often hermits and recluses; they kept their light hidden and didn’t identify themselves.

In the recent past, perhaps because of its apparent simplicity and exotic appeal, Taoism has spread widely and thinly, to the point where it has lost something of its original depth and savour. An example of this popularisation was the 1982 publication of Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, in which the characters from A.A.Milne’s Winnie the Pooh are used to explain the fundamentals of Taoist philosophy, and although it is overly cute, the book does have charm and interest. Pooh is the Taoist, uncomplicated and flexible, never worrying about how life will turn out; he embodies ‘wu wei’, which is often translated as ‘non-action’ or, in vernacular terms, ‘going with the flow’. His friends and companions, in contrast, tend to over-think and create bother, for themselves and other people. As Piglet says, ‘Pooh hasn’t much Brain, but he never comes to any harm’.

Hoff’s approach to Taoism reflects the manifestations of 1960s counterculture that valued childlike qualities of innocence, fantasy, and imagination. This whimsical attitude to life now seems willfully naive, but at the time, and in relation to a society that emphasised materialistic progress above all else, it made some sense. William Blake, who was also much admired by the counterculture, saw both sides of the issue. In Songs of Innocence and Experience he suggested that childhood, while pure and protected, is not immune to the fallen world, whose frailties and corruptions sometimes impose themselves. This is ‘experience’, which is usually suffused by fear and inhibition. The Songs of Experience reveal ways in which adult life destroys much of what is good in innocence, but they also articulate some of the weaknesses of a predominantly childlike way of living.

At Christmas I also took the opportunity to read Tove Jansson’s letters, which have just been published in a handsome and substantial volume. I’ve become fond of her writing, and The Summer Book, which I discovered some years ago, is now a firm favourite. It tells the story of an old woman and her grandchild who spend the summer in the Finnish archipelago. Nothing much happens, but they wander around the small island looking at life with wonder, holding vividly candid conversations. The Summer Book combines innocence and experience, and Jansson’s simple narrative, which seems to have no purpose other than the graceful illumination of everyday life and its unremarkable problems, has something of a Taoist spirit. Given the season, however, I turned instead to Moominland Midwinter, one of her children’s books, after browsing through the letters.

I have been slow in catching up with Jansson’s Moomins, those strange and  benevolent creatures whose meditative nonchalance and adaptable tolerance are also lessons in the Taoist way of life, but I’m gradually working my way through the series. Living in an archetypal Scandinavian setting of mountains, forests, seas, and valleys, the Moomins can be both joyful and melancholy, and their extended family is agreeable, inclusive, and composed of motley outsiders, both tranquil and anarchic. Their stories relate how the Moomins overcome dramas and upheavals through genial and affectionate compliance, and Moominland Midwinter is no exception. It is a tale about what happens when Moomintroll, who wakes up early during hibernation and can’t get back to sleep, decides to stay awake through the rest of the harsh winter. Normally placid, he is angered by the absence of the sun and the fierce blizzards, soon becoming resentful of those of his companions who are able to enjoy the snow and ice. Moomintroll is convinced that winter is playing an unkind trick on him. One day, however, he stops fighting the storm and notices that the wind isn't cold and that it makes him feel light, almost as though he is flying. ‘I’m nothing but air and wind, I’m part of the blizzard’, Moomintroll says to himself, and he begins to let go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swT6YTPYwgM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swT6YTPYwgM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAsGD9YLT50

 COUNTLESS BRANCHES

Seymour, the eldest of the precocious Glass family children who are the subject of most of J.D.Salinger’s short novels and stories, is clever, strange, and benign. According to one of his brothers, he was a ‘mukta’, a God-knower, an enlightened man. Seymour’s sensibility, like those of the siblings he so deeply influenced, was much influenced by his study of spiritual texts, and there are constant references throughout the Glass stories to Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, classical Taoism, and Christianity. Nevertheless, Seymour was a troubled soul. After a brief period of marriage to a much younger wife, he took his own life.

Years after I first read them as a young adult, the Glass stories remain important to me because they were entertaining, helpful and instructive at a particular time in my life, and I recall them with affection. But as Seymour points out in ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’, ‘we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it’, and I concede that my feelings towards the Salinger stories may be too sympathetic, coloured by fond nostalgia. It is not coincidental that Salinger’s writing has itself been accused of sentimentality; although sharp and funny, particularly in their dialogue, his stories are unusually soft-hearted and benevolent. His style and way of thinking, which had detractors when the stories were published, are perhaps even less liked today. Salinger’s books are often considered earnest, self-conscious, and pretentious; like Hermann Hesse’s, they're dismissed as the kind of novels that mainly appeal to over-sensitive young people. 

Seymour’s definition of sentimentality, which I have often found useful to remember, came to mind as I listened to Bill Fay’s new record, ‘Countless Branches’. Fay is an intriguing musician and something of an outsider. In the early 1970s he made two albums for Deram, Decca’s label for its more experimental releases; the first, ‘Bill Fay’, was personal, fragile, and lavishly orchestrated, while the second, ‘Time of the Last Persecution’, was troubled and stark. Neither was successful, and he was soon dropped by the record company. Relatively unambitious as well as temperamentally inclined towards privacy (his absence from the music world coincidentally caused him to be called ‘Britain’s musical Salinger’), Fay took up other jobs but continued to write and record music on his own. He felt deeply out of place in the contemporary world, coming to believe that spiritual values, prominent in the counterculture of the 1960s and subsequently forgotten or ignored, were all that mattered. He also found meaning and solace in nature, which remains a deep source of inspiration.

Bill Fay’s music has been intermittently championed in the intervening years - by David Tibet, Jim O’Rourke, Jeff Tweedy, and Nick Cave, among others - but it was about a decade ago that his career unexpectedly flourished. The music producer Joshua Henry, whose late father had ‘Time of the Last Persecution’ in his collection, sought him out, attracted by the record’s mix of apocalyptic despondency and resolute hopefulness. The outcome of their eventual collaboration was a new album, ‘Life is People’, which was released in 2012 and followed three years later by another, ‘Who is the Sender’. Both sold well enough to justify the third and current release.    

Although musically unexceptional and blatantly out of step with fashionable taste, ‘Countless Branches’ has been surprisingly well received. Fay’s simple lyrics are heartfelt and most of his melodies are memorable; together they resonate with emotional authenticity, and this appears to be at the core of the record’s warm reception. One reviewer said that the songs seem to be the fruit of a lifetime overcoming despair; another remarked that the record is infused by melancholy, but ‘the knowing sadness of a long life, not youthful depression’, while a third  described it as ‘tender, forgiving, and wonderstruck’. ‘Countless Branches’ is  a moving record, in some respects reminiscent of the lived-in profundity of Johnny Cash’s last work and the vulnerability of Gil Scott-Heron’s final albums, but lacking their darkness and gloom.  Fay’s music is close to being sentimental, at least in Salinger’s sense of the word. Unashamedly, its aim is to gladden and uplift.

I recently described and praised ‘Countless Branches’ to a musician friend who is somewhat younger than me, and after a moment’s thought he wondered if it might be a record that especially appeals to an older generation. This may be so, just as it is probably true of Leonard Cohen’s last albums. Fay’s feelings are those of a person who, like Seymour Glass, has found living in materialistic contemporary culture unusually difficult and disenchanting. More profoundly, it is clear that he has also been touched by suffering and pain, both his own and that of the world around him. Nonetheless, he seems to have risen above it. Fay's music suggests that life may not be an inevitable descent into gloom or despair but an ongoing process of creation and rebirth in which our capacity for love can grow and strengthen. In that respect - and sometimes musically, as in the band version of 'How Long, How Long' - it recalls George Harrison's solo work.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFvKnwrVSQE
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-fay-countless-branches/
https://www.allmusic.com/album/countless-branches-mw0003335569
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV_astp3BjM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWnUItw1ElU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GckXmRkPQqw&list=OLAK5uy_mCLUlJks2QLwyWZnmXU17_p9tojvoqg5c&index=4

 TANTRA AND AUTHENTICITY

I was eighteen when I went up to university to read for a degree in Philosophy and Psychology, and in the preceding months I had made my way through a preparatory reading list. Insensitive to the strengths of logical positivism and behaviourism, I found the suggested books disappointingly dry and pragmatic in the light of my interest in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Freud, and Jung, and the first lectures confirmed my disillusion. I lasted perhaps two weeks at what was then known as ‘PPP’ (I had paid no attention at all to the prospect of the third ‘P’, which was physiology) before I requested a transfer to Oriental Studies. After a brief chat with my college ‘Moral Tutor’, who advised me cheerfully not to ‘go native’, I went to the Oriental Institute for another short interview. Academic life was relatively informal and relaxed in those days, and I was admitted without difficulty to the degree course in Sanskrit and Pali. As I recall, only two other students had enrolled that year, so I imagine that the authorities were happy enough to swell their number, if only by one. In retrospect, this was somewhat surprising. Other than a keen interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, I was poorly equipped to deal with the rigours of a degree that focussed on the intricacies of classical languages that were unknown to me.

It was not long before a brown paper package arrived from John Sandoe’s bookshop in Chelsea, which enclosed a postcard from a family friend, a very cosmopolitan Italian. He had heard, he said, that I was now reading Oriental Studies, and he was sending two books that he thought I might enjoy. The first was a Chinese esoteric text, ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’, with a long introduction by Carl Jung; the other was ‘Tantra Art’ by Ajit Mookerjee. It was one of those oddly memorable presents that is never forgotten, and both publications were to become significant, perhaps especially the book on Tantra, which is substantial and full of compelling illustrations. I have been fascinated by Tantric art ever since. I liked the cosmic and metaphysical diagrams, the pictures of chakras, and the colourful gods; in short, I was drawn to a deeply seductive and unfamiliar form of spirituality.

Just before Christmas last year another unexpected gift arrived in the post. It was a beautifully produced catalogue of an exhibition of Indian Tantric and Jain art at Joost van den Bergh’s gallery in London, and it gave me occasion to reflect on why my interest in the subject has lasted for half a century, and how it led to the acquisition of a number of Tantric and other sketches, drawings, manuscripts, and bronzes, some of them quite similar to those in Joost van den Bergh’s show. Mine are not all of high quality, which raised another question. Although I would probably buy fine examples if I had the means to do so, I find myself content with what I have - so why isn’t the difference more important?

It has much to do with their blend of exoticism and authenticity. I like the artefacts if they’re worn or repaired, even if they’re fragments, and I’m not especially concerned if I don’t know exactly what their symbolism means. In other words, my interest is neither that of a scholar nor of a connoisseur. I appreciate their original usefulness and enjoy knowing that they served specific purposes that were related to strange metaphysical views of life. In that light, modern copies - and particularly fakes - have little appeal. Before I learnt where to acquire older work inexpensively, I occasionally bought more recent pieces, but something about them bothered me, and I eventually concluded that this was because I suspected that the maker’s motives, if not his or her techniques, had almost certainly changed. In time, after I had already accumulated some experience and a number of interesting old Tantric and ritual drawings, I was caught out when I purchased one or two fake Tantric diagrams, which had been drawn and painted on old paper. It was then that I realised quite clearly that what was most important to me was authenticity of belief.

Romanticism and much of Modernism bestowed great significance on what was considered to be authentic and pure, but today, when doubt and scepticism are culturally dominant, the ‘authentic’ has become a hybrid that often embodies clashing or contradictory qualities. This is not unwelcome, if only because old-fashioned 'authenticity’ was usually coloured with essentialism, nostalgia, idealism, or exotic ‘otherness’, but in these ‘post-truth’ days lies and fakes are often cynically flaunted, which is even less tolerable. One constant remains, however. With regard to matters of financial value, the question of authenticity or genuineness is predictably fundamental. Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’, art’s approximation to a magical or supernatural force, may have diminished in the ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, but the market has ensured that it hasn’t disappeared.    

I was probably drawn to Indian culture - and to Romantic notions of authenticity -  predominantly because of the countercultural spirit of the 1960s, which is when I first began to learn about them. I found it inspiring that there seemed to be an abundance of unorthodox ideas, structures, and strategies that offered liberation or fulfilment; Tantra and many other such paths were among them. Today, in my maturity and in a world of increasing anxiety and homogeneity, that promise has gone. The loss makes it even more alluring, but it has to be admitted that Tantra’s exoticism, as evocative in its associations as good joss-sticks or incense, undoubtedly accounts for much of its charm. I now wonder, with unwelcome doubt, if I would feel the same way about Tantric and other ritual artefacts if they were the fruits of my own inherited culture, or if a taste for such things suddenly became widespread and mainstream. Perhaps only formal quality and excellence would keep my interest alive, and I'd turn into a serious collector or true aesthete.


https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/tantra-enlightenment-revolution
https://www.joostvandenbergh.com/perfect-presence