This is the second in a series of posts relating my visit to Paris in October 2019. See Part One
My first day’s Parisian wanderings led me to the Louvre, which I’d not planned on visiting. Before I even realised that’s where I was, my eye was drawn from a distance to this free outdoor photo exhibition, works by the photographer artist Nicolas Henry.
At first sight it reminded me of a fairground, being a collection of three colourful, slightly higgledy-piggledy, circular structures.
Closer up, the work revealed itself as a collection of photographs of people in what appeared to be staged environments.
Gallery
The buildings are not part of the original photo, but a reflection in the work’s protective glass.
the original
The work was made over a number of years, Henry travelled the world to explore diverse communities, and enlisted the help of his subjects to produce these fabulous, very human and charming images. According to the blurb from the book of the project:
these participatory stagings are composed of large-format sets bordering on theater and installation, produced with the help of part of the village or neighborhood.
The backdrop of the Louvre can be seen advertising its Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition, a sell-out show and one of the largest ever collections of Da Vinci in one place at one time.
You can see more of Nicolas Henry’s work, including selections from this project, on his website.
I spent the afternoon of the 24th October this year listening to two instructive, entertaining and even illuminating editions of two standards of BBC Radio broadcasting.
Desert Island Discs, running continuously on the BBC since 1942, interviews each week a ‘castaway’ entitled to choose eight sound records, a book and a luxury to console them in the event of them following in the footsteps of such archetypal castaways as Robinson Crusoe and Tom Hanks.
My maternal grandmother was a big fan of the show, though it’s the kind of thing I would only listen to if interested in the guest. On this occasion I tuned in on spec, and found myself engaged and intrigued by the castaway and his choices: Michael Sandel, a noted political philosopher. I’ve just re-listened to the edition, including the bit at the start I missed. Well worth a listen, Sandel’s choices include Hamilton, from the musical of the same name, which he mentions listening to more critically recently in light of his own critique of the ideology of meritocracy, Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit and Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, as well as other delights I’ll leave you to discover for yourself.
Radio 4 being primarily a station of the spoken word, a valuable commodity, nevertheless produces a slight weakness in DID‘s format: we only hear the briefest of clips from each choice.
Radio 3’s Private Passions, in which guests are invited to share their favourite recordings usually of classical music or poetry, has the luxury of longer excerpts, but otherwise in form resembles nothing less than a slightly higher-brow version of DID. Indeed the emphasis remains on the conversations. Scheduled after DID, the two together form a good solid hour of enlightening listening both to musical choices, perhaps unexpected or familiar, as well as to the perspectives of some notable and fascinating people. On this occasion, Private Passions interviewed the ever-interesting Rory Stewart, former diplomat, Tory MP, and possibly spy. Stewart talks most interestingly of how little he misses being a politician. He’s particularly good on detailing an insider’s view on exactly how the political system corrupts those involved in it, so that by the time you get to cabinet level and thus power, all your ability to think critically and with nuance and compassion has been eradicated from your political practice. He even goes as far as to suggest if he had succeeded in becoming Prime Minister, which he had a crack at in 2019, he thinks he would have been ‘corrupted’. The interview also gives an insight into Stewart’s experiences in the Middle East, as well as his cultural interests there and in Scotland, including an interesting excerpt from a recording of Scottish folk singing, as well as usual suspects Handel and Bach.
Both episodes remain available on BBC Sounds, and repay a listen:
The writer Philip Martin has died. Probably best known for the 1970s TV play and later series ‘Gangsters’, which was set and filmed in Birmingham, ‘Gangsters’ stands up today partly as social commentary and partly as an exemplar of non-realist TV drama somewhere between Patrick McGoohan and Dennis Potter.
He subsequently wrote two rather idiosyncratic, very political and satirical Doctor Who stories of the mid-1980s, and in a strong field was probably the best new writer for the series in that decade. Martin, while taking Doctor Who in new and bravely uncomfortable directions, impressed fans at the time as a possible successor to Robert Holmes. Certainly of the 80s writers he was closest to Holmes’ style and approach to the series.Vengeance on Varos, his first Doctor Who story, satirised reality TV years before it was even invented, and features outstanding guest performances from Nabil Shaban and Martin Jarvis. Its sequel a year later seemed to inspire director Ron Jones to create some powerfully surreal, dramatic and moving moments of television, with strong performances from Nicola Bryant, Brian Blessed and Colin Baker. Nicola Bryant tweeted her tribute:
So very sad to hear that the brilliant Philip Martin has passed away. I adored the episodes he wrote for @SawbonesHex and me. We were to have worked together again but then COVID-19 struck. He gave Peri some of her very best moments. #RIPPhilipMartin thank you. pic.twitter.com/qW9BfTTLay
Martin went on to write for the excellent 1987 sf drama series Star Cops with the episode This Case To Be Opened In A Million Years, which gave us some of the best character moments for the protagonist Nathan Spring battling his demons – and the mafia – in Venice and on the Moon.
Philip Martin was a visionary, offbeat writer and deserves to be remembered as a legend for his contribution to British TV drama.
In visiting Paris last year in pursuit of art I had two specific objectives: an exhibition and a gig., But as I outlined in my walking blog, the journey would be nothing without the unexpected. I thought I’d offer a more focussed look at what art I found, beginning with the art of the street, the public arena where commissioned sculpture, modern and historic, competes with graffiti, architecture, and gardens, to create an admixture, a many-voiced public conversation we call ‘the city’.
Elegy & Memorial
Angel Bear
Warning: bad French, and an Anglo-Saxon swear-word
In 2015, in advance of the COP21 climate change conference, France’s state owned national rail commissioned the Angel Bear sculpture from artist Richard Texier, which I encountered in front of the Gard du Nord’s classical facade. According to the Solis Art Conseil:
the 7.5 metres high silhouette seems to disintegrate under the effect of a mysterious evil…the silent cry of the bronze animal captures passers-by to raise awareness of the urgency to act. Air despite its 4.8 tons, the chimera spreads its wings in an attempt to escape, out of the world already
Pasted on a pillar, letter by letter, one Zebodj Mohamed ‘killed by the police’ remembered alongside a graffiti artist’s memorial to 17 Octobre 1961, the Paris massacre; the Fontaine Molière, a memorial in the 1st arrondisment to the playwright with whose name the French language is sometimes associated, is the work of two sculptors directed by an architect; and tucked away in a park lies a small but powerful memorial to the Shoa survivor, writer and activist Elie Wiesel.
Fontaine Molière
Elie Wiesel
Place Harvey Milk
A Nos Morts
Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to public office, and assasinated a year later is memorialised with a Place name, while a street memorial commemorates some of France’s colonial history, the inscription reading ‘A Nos Morts (‘to our dead’) INDOCHINE ALGIERS,
Attraction Touristique
And then there are those big public statements of Paris architecture. My wanderings led me to my first view of the Eiffel Tower, icon of modernity, foreground traffic between us. An outdoor exhibition attracted me from afar, with its colour and shapes, to the Louvre, where I became fascinated by the people, their identities framed against the scene.
Next time…
In Part Two of this travelogue I’ll take a look at the free open-air exhibition Cabanes Imaginaires autour du monde
With an apparently innate antipathy to the internal combustion engine, I’ve always been a keen perambulator. I was born and brought up in Stourbridge, that strange interface between the industrial Black Country and the Worcestershire and Shropshire countryside. My beloved Grandfather was a great walker. In my late teens I journeyed to Birmingham to catch a gig and, not wanting to leave early to catch a last bus or train, and lacking any alternative, walked the twelve miles or so back home. I related this to my Grandfather, and it reminded him of the time he had some unexpected army leave, and had to walk a similar distance back home, only to find his wife saying “What are YOU doing here?”
Living on the edge of the town, we weren’t far from a small mature woodland, Norton Covert, once a working sand pit accessing the ice-age sand deposits in the area. The main access point to the Covert was on the junction of Sandy Road and the Sandy Lane bridleway. All this made for fine walking, and a valuable asset in my early years.
Anyone who’s engaged in country walks may have their own primal, formative experience of this. For me, walking brings up memories of those sandy lanes next to mature woodland, long straight roads leading to a topographically diverse Covert with great views of itself; an opportunity to observe nature. My first close encounter with a fox was in Norton Covert: a timeless moment between us where the fox, which had been rummaging in a pile of leaves, and I locked eyes for a moment before the fox remembered itself and scarpered. I remember some of my primary animistic experiences there, as well as observing how wildlife uses the canopy as a transport network, and observing the signs of human impact on the woods.
A walk, to me, is to embark on a journey of unpredictable possibilities. The word walk traces its history back to the Indo-European *walg- (“to twist, turn, move”), via the Old English wealcian (“to curl, roll up”), to the Middle English walken (“to move, roll, turn, revolve, toss”). I like this element of unpredictability in the word. As has been noted by such luminaries as Will Self, walking is political; the twisty-turny connotations of the verb ‘to walk’ leave the route to the destination – or even the idea of a destination at all – unwritten. The word is intimately bound up with political tensions around land, access rights, and liberty. Wikipedia contributors assert that:
freedom to roam takes the form of general public rights which are sometimes codified in law. The access is ancient in parts of Northern Europe and has been regarded as sufficiently basic that it was not formalised in law until modern times.
I’m curious as to the truth of this assertion. These islands historically are known for pioneering the practice of enclosure, erasing common land. This practice proved controversial in law and in letters, being criticised from Sir Thomas More to George Orwell. Tudor politicians were concerned about the effects of land enclosure on the well-being of the people and on the economy, and the people themselves also made their views known in a series of revolts, riots and rebellions.
Kinder Scout to Right to Roam
In 1932, an organised mass trespass of Kinder Scout in the Peak District took place, leading to violence as local landowners and gamekeepers tried to force the ramblers away:
several of the ramblers were arrested and imprisoned… over the following days and weeks much larger trespasses were held and public opinion started to sway in the trespassers’ favour
Today, we can see this as the beginning of a journey, taking in the establishment of National Parks, footpaths and trails, and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, codifying the right of free access to certain types of land in England and Wales.
Meanwhile
Luminaries of the Enlightenment wrote on the value of walking. Thomas Jefferson, the essential American politician (intimate with revolution, nation-building, war, and slavery) wrote to his nephew advising a course of study, including two hours a day of physical exercise. Jefferson advised “the gun…it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind”. Jefferson continues:
Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you. The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk. But divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far. The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man. But I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much the degeneracy of the human body. An Indian goes on foot nearly as far in a day, for a long journey, as an enfeebled white does on his horse, and he will tire the best horses. There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Volume I, pp298
In a similar vein, but more English mode, the English essayist William Hazlitt, celebrated in his time but little-read today, wrote:
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but…I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticizing hedge-rows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this purpose go to watering-places and carry the metropolis with them. I like more elbow-room and fewer incumbrances. I like solitude…
Hazlitt touches on the therapeutic value of walking
There is hardly anything that shows the short-sightedness or capriciousness of the imagination more than travelling does. With change of place we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feelings.
We’ve explored the country walk as a journey without a destination, where in slowing down, and spontaneously exploring the sights and sounds, the mind can relax. Why not bring such an attitude to city walks too? The flâneur, from the French for “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, or “loafer”, emerged as a privileged and critical position in the project we call modernity, not unlike Auden’s Airman, emblematic of the changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The flâneur stands, or rather strolls, to this day, “casual wanderer, observer and reporter of street-life in the modern city”.
The figure emerged through the writings of Charles Baudelaire, whose flâneur “wandered the streets and arcades of nineteenth-century Paris looking at and listening to the kaleidoscopic manifestations of the life of a modern city. The flâneur’s method and the meaning of his activities were bound together, one with the other,” according to Bobby Seal of the Psycho-Geographic Review. As Seal explains
In the twentieth-century Walter Benjamin returned to the concept of the flâneur in his seminal work, The Arcades Project. This weighty, but uncompleted, study used Baudelaire’s flâneur as a starting point for an exploration of the impact of modern city life upon the human psyche…
Benjamin puts forward two complementary concepts to explain our human response to modern city life. Erlebnis can be characterised as the shock-induced anaesthesia brought about by the overwhelming sensory bombardment of life in a modern city, somewhat akin to the alienated subjectivity experienced by a worker bound to his regime of labour. Erfahrung is a more positive response and refers to the mobility, wandering or cruising of the flâneur; the unmediated experience of the wealth of sights, sounds and smells the city has to offer. Benjamin was interested in the dialectic between these two concepts and cited Baudelaure’s poetry as a successful medium for turning erlebnis into erfahrung
In working with vulnerable clients, we may find they lack access to green spaces within and outside the city. Services I work with have noted clients who have never, or rarely, been outside the city, and who are unaware or unable to access green spaces near them. Some clients have spoken of the benefits of breaks outside the city, and the benefits of walking in the green.
Liaison and Diversion Services in Birmingham work with clients with multiple health and social challenges referred from the criminal justice system. L&D Birmingham initiated a series of walks in green spaces in the city. Participants included staff and service users. The notion of peer support taking place in outside environments, on a walk, was thought might be beneficial, talking and healing while doing an activity – multi-tasking, in other words.
Walking, in the sense of free roaming in open green spaces, has a lot to offer in terms of improving the physical health and well being of clients on low incomes with multiple social challenges: turning erlebnis into erfahrung.
Walking as a post-trauma therapy has plenty of anecdotal evidence beghind it. Here for example is Jennifer Tennant’s essay “Walking Myself Home”, in which she writes
For me, walking makes space for reflection, much like church or meditation does for others.
Tennant argues walking may have physiological effects similar to eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, and thus effective for symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress.
The evidence seems conclusive. The conditions for well-being include the need for walking, for exploring both the twists and turns of our environment, the world we live in, and the possibilities of our souls.
Thanks to three individuals for their invaluable contributions to this post: Emma for initially linking walking with EMDR, Matt B for information under greener horizons, and James E for putting me onto the Hazlitt essay.
In late 2015, after physically healing an injury I’d sustained in midsummer, I was looking for some psychological healing experiences. Laughter, of course, is often called ‘the best medicine’ and there seems to be some truth in this. I discovered laughter yoga, which I found an excellent tonic.
What’s the medical evidence for this? Somewhat inconclusive it seems. We know laughter produces endorphins, and seems to involve the limbic system, specifically the hippocampus and the amygdala. In other words, it’s ancient, something laid down early in our primate evolution, and indeed laughter has been observed in other primates.
On the other hand, there’s some evidence the cortex is involved: there’s a cognitive component. This makes intuitive sense. I’ve been told I have a very sophisticated sense of humour. I will laugh or smile along with the rest of humanity at funny cat videos, but I also laugh when others do not. For example, I recall watching the 1995 Judge Dredd movie, in my view an underrated film, and finding it hugely funny in the way it uses American cliches and mythologies to satirical effect. You can’t find that funny without a certain level of cognitive sophistication. My co-watchers were confused as to what I found so funny, while I found the film a fresh look at America. Christopher Hitchens was inclined to consider irony one of the consolations for the losing battle we are all fighting, and something he couldn’t live without; I’d agree irony and wit are precious jewels, producing such satisfying smiles.
Laughter seems to have evolved as a survival strategy for both individual and social health. There’s evidence it relieves stress, boosts the immune system, helps keep a healthy heart and blood flow, and even reduce allergic reactions. It may extend life. It also has social benefits, improving relationships amongst humans. It can also be used to reinforce social isolation of particular humans while improving bonding amongst those who join in the laughter, thus reinforcing shared social norms. The object of the laughter thus plays an important role in those relationships.
In these times, anything that can help our health, particularly the immune system, as well as improve social relationships, has a value that perhaps should not be understated. So I thought I’d share with you three videos that have made me laugh a lot recently.
Thinking about the first example, I guess this is a case of laughing at someone else’s expense, in this case Liam Gallagher’s. And who better? Here’s Sacha Baron-Cohen, on an American chat show, with a very funny story about him:
Chat shows, in amongst the tedium, can provide some spectacular moments of wit and humour. I’ve always been an admirer of Graham Norton. His early forays into the chat show format on Channel Four I thought constituted a quiet revolution in the chat show format. The way he re-focused the format away from the guests and onto the audience, facilitating their participation in the conversation, was very clever. Using early internet humour to widen the tired chat show format into something that could comment on our wider culture, stands as a genuine advance in the form, and he’s partly responsible I think for bringing internet culture to the mainstream.
Here are two examples of humour, again at someone else’s expense. Peter Capaldi and Tom Hanks seize a golden opportunity to make fun of David Walliams, who runs with it beautifully.
My final example is an example of self-deprecating humour, but also perfect timing. Lee Mack tells a very funny story of how he got sacked from Pontins, so perfectly told it even has John Cleese doubled up. Mack apparently regarded this as one of the proudest moments of his career:
Laugh every day, even if you don’t want to. One thing I learned from my laughter yoga experiences is that simulated laughter brings many of the same health benefits as the ‘real thing’, and can easily lead to ‘real’ laughter in ourselves and others.
Laughter, in fact, has been called one of the most contagious things known to humanity, and usefully is transmittable over a distance of more than two metres. Along with orgasm it’s also one of the most effective natural analgesic mechanisms available to us. Perhaps in addition to collectively clapping for those on the front line, we could engage in collective laughter at those responsible for the current crisis, as a way of excluding them from society, and improving social bonds amongst the rest of us?
We have nothing to lose but our pains.
This post’s featured image is copyright Amauta Fotografia, used under license.
On becoming an undergraduate, I soon looked up Karl Marx’s well-known, and often quoted remark on religion: the opium of the people.
Nuance and subtlety drift over time. We may assume Marx dismisses religion as a soothing crutch, or more pejoratively as a harmful addiction. But we can assume nothing from one out of context quotation. For Marx and his world in 1844, opium’s connotations would have been so different from ours, it seemed to my new undergraduate brain trite and naive to assume anything at all about Marx’s remark. Besides, Karl’s pipe was tobacco-laden. It’s just a metaphor. I wanted to look at the whole text of the remark, and to understand, without prejudice, the whole argument.
The remark comes from Marx’s Introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), which begins:
For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.
Since I mentioned my University days on Tuesday, I thought a relic of that time, on Seamus Heaney, who would have turned 80 last week,worth airing. I couldn’t bear to let this go, however, with all the undergraduate prose intact, so I’ve improved the grammar and tone. The essay attempts to see how Heaney brings ‘modern Irish problems into relationship with images from the past’ in the poem Bog Oak, which I reproduce below:
Bog Oak
A carter's trophy
Split for rafters,
a cobwebbed, black,
long-seasoned rib
under the first thatch.
I might tarry
with the moustached
dead, the creel-fillers,
or eavesdrop on
their hopeless wisdom
as a blow-down of smoke
struggles over the half-door
and mizzling rain
blurs the far end
of the cart track.
The softening ruts
lead back to no
'oak groves', no
cutters of mistletoe
in the green clearings.
Perhaps I just make out
Edmund Spenser,
dreaming sunlight,
encroached upon by
geniuses who creep
'out of every corner
of the woodes and glenne'
towards watercress and carrion.
Seamus Heaney’s Bog Oak came into the world at a crucial point in Heaney’s career and in Irish history. An early poem from Wintering Out, Heaney’s first collection since the beginning of the Troubles, and also Heaney’s first since moving away from Ulster. It looks back to the past for images for a new poetry and also I think back to Ulster in an attempt, as Ronald Tamplin (1989) suggests, to glimpse a new reality of Irish identity, a reading supported by Heaney’s oft-quoted view of poetry as “divination…as restoration of culture to itself”(1974) .
The reference to Edmund Spenser appears to set the poem in sixteenth century Munster, but that the poem concerns Ulster 1969 is clear: the final word ‘carrion’ guides such a reading. The description of the oak in the first stanza then becomes somewhat loaded: for instance, ‘split’ takes on obvious connotations. ‘Carrion’ is excellent, evoking not just death but horror, waste and decay. Heaney gazes homeward in loss and separation, mourning and sorrow.
A subtle manipulation of time through precise language seems to occur. The oak, ‘toughened survivor from Ireland’s past‘ carries the longevity of trees; so as Heaney traces the oak, ‘long seasoned’, backwards through time and space, he turns to the past to try and discover poetry suitable – ‘adequate’ as he put it- to the present Troubles. The images he finds there are mostly inadequate- the wisdom of the dead seems ‘hopeless’ and these old fashioned representations of Ireland, rural carters and creel fillers, seem irrelevant.
In the third stanza Heaney is outdoors now (‘a blow down of smoke/ struggles over the half door’) and he looks back along the cart track, attempting to trace the oak all the way back to its roots. But, ‘mizzling rain’ obscures his view just as time itself obscures our view of the past. Time meaning a changing culture which always constructs the past. The final three stanzas are full of these romanticised images of the past:
lead back to no ‘oak groves’, no cutters of mistletoe in the green clearings.
To make the point Heaney specifies that these images are not there. It is precisely these kinds of representations that are false and perhaps dangerous, an argument redolent of Brian Friel’s Making History. Heaney does discern a classic Romantic image – the sensitive male poet, ‘dreaming sunlight’, the phrase accurately and concisely invoking the false image of the poet constructed in the popular imagination unwittingly by the likes of Spenser, Wordsworth, (perhaps) Oscar Wilde, and the mass media.
Interestingly, at this point Heaney’s time-travelling stops in suspension then reverses into a forward direction by way of ‘encroached’,’creep’ and ‘towards’ (lines 24,25 and 28); now Heaney is looking forward to the future of Ireland. But why Edmund Spenser? Well, the reality of Spenser is very different from the image Heaney presents. Spenser’s non-literary career was as an agent of the Crown in Ireland as Lord Deputy. He also wrote a ‘View of the Present State of Ireland’, which, according to Garry Waller
argues for a vigorous programme of final conquest and subjugation of Ireland and the Irish, [and attacks] the ‘Old’ English preference for a degree of accommodation with the Irish chieftans, [describes the Irish as] barabarians, licentious, and while there were certain admirable or charming aspects of ancient Irish life (Spenser’s interest in Irish poetry and song is often mentioned by defenders of the View in this context), nothing short of force and thorough rooting out of Irish identity would allow the rule of English law to be permanently established
The above seems pertinent. Spenser the poet’s interest in ancient Ireland and Spenser the public servant’s advocacy of genocide is just the kind of conflict which interests Heaney. So you see how the romantic image in the poem (‘dreaming sunlight – kissing carrion’) arrests the reader who knows Spenser’s position.
To return to the image of the bog oak, Irish identity has survived the threat posed by Spenser but not escaped unscathed or unaltered by history; the ‘rape’ of Ireland and conversion to Protestantism evoked in Heaney’s later ‘Act of Union’ are what has led to the divided situation in the Ulster counties and its horrific consequences. In the poem, Spenser is ‘encroached upon by geniuses’, the days of the English are numbered as the forces of nationalism rise. Nationalism however, because of the complexity and unpredictability of historywill play its part in the creation of the Troubles, creeping ‘towards watercress and carrion’. Heaney is aware, like Dennis Potter, of the subtlety of the problem of evil, that ‘a good act can lead to evil consequences’.
In conclusion, this clever poem follows lyrical conventions and subverts them, The final line creates an emotionally charged transcendent moment but, perversely and aptly it is one of death, sadness, and loss. The mood at the end of the poem I judge to be pessimistic in seeing Irish identity set back. The bleak, terse ‘Watercress and carrion’ suggest language cannot yet cope with the situation. But the insertion of ‘watercress’ is hopeful, yet at the same time suggests fragility. As if these two constituents of Irish identity in the context of the Troubles exist side by side, the first constantly threatened by the second. A poem of national mourning then (Heaney from Munster showing grief for the events in another part of his country), how far has Heaney come in these twenty-eight lines in his search for poetry suitable for the times?
Despite its evocative and complex nature I don’t find the poem a total success; the identity of the ‘geniuses’ is as uncertain as the relevance of ‘watercress’ until analysed. This uncertainty is to some extent the whole point but but the poem seems to come to an awkward stop. Anyway, if Heaney has not yet found the right poetic images and words to represent the times, he has certainly in his rejection of Romanticism demonstrated intelligently what is not appropriate or propitiate. Spenser’s presence achieves this especially well, ensuring the poem goes beyond Ireland. We may argue Heaney cannot assume an audience who would be aware of Spenser’s advocacy of the art of persuasion, but Tamplin resolves this for us: ‘a poet creates and leads a readership…it is not unreasonable that [Heaney] should hope that an audience might acquaint themselves [with the history] either from wanting to be in touch, or because they want to extend the knowledge they themselves can bring to their reading. The knowledge is good in itself…some have it before they first read the poem and others catch up…some of the audience is assumed and some acquired’. In this case, the Spenser effect is simply and starkly to show that a particular popular image is false and misleading. At the same time he has powerfully evoked the mood of a troubled place and people. Given recent events in Ulster we look forward to Heaney’s future work with excitement. If Heaney can catch this wave, as the Beach Boys might put it, he’d be sitting on top of the world.
The work of E.E Evans-Pritchard, the now somewhat old-fashioned, but utterly meticulous and detailed anthropologist, and I, have crossed but once. As an undergraduate I studied the first of his books from his fieldwork with the Nuer, a people of the Nile Valley
Phenomenology ‘back to the things themselves’ seeks to explore ‘human consciousness’ believing that through this we can study universal aspects of ‘phenomena’. Phenomena only exist as parts of consciousness, but phenomenology attempts to study their universal essence. Borne of the post WW1 crisis it attempts to revive the human mind as the ‘centre and origin of all meaning’ (Seldon 1985).
Eagleton claims this is not far from the contemporary attempts of Leavis to return to the concrete.
Phenomenological lit crit influenced the Geneva school Poulet, Starokinski, Rousset). The text is a ‘pure embodiemnt of the author’s consciousness’, has deep structures found in recurrent themes etc. and these reveal how the writer “‘lived’ his world”.
Criticism: non-evaluative, complete objectivity. The point is to ‘enter’ the world of the literary work and this to experience the author’s consciousness. For phenomenologists, language is an expression of the text’s inner meanings. Meaning is centred on a ‘transcendental subject’ – the author.
Martin Heidegger breaks with Husserl, reflects on the ‘irreducible Dasein (givenness) of human existence’.
consciousness is constituted by ‘being-in-the-world’ as much as consciousness contitutes the world.
Language pre-exists the individual subject (cf. Structualism)
Central to Heidegger then is not any individual subject but Being. Man is subservient to Being.
Thinking is always situated in an historical. However, for Heidegger history is not social, external, but inward and personal.
Heidegger – ‘hermeneutic of Being’. His philosophy is referred to as ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’, concentrating on an historical interpretation.
Hans-Georg Gadamer applied this to lit crit. Meaning depends on the historical situation of the interpreter. Interpretation of a literary work is a dialogue between past and present.
Understanding is productive. The present is only understandable through the past. linking together in a continuum called ‘tradition’ (cf Eliot)
Understanding is a ‘fusion of past and present’. We make a journey into the past, but only understand it by taking the present with us.
Interestingly, at this point Heaney’s time-travelling stops in suspension then reverses into a forward direction by way of ‘encroached’,’creep’ and ‘towards’ (lines 24,25 and 28); now Heaney is looking forward to the future of Ireland. But why Edmund Spenser? Well, the reality of Spenser is very different from the image Heaney presents. Spenser’s non-literary career was as an agent of the Crown in Ireland as Lord Deputy. He also wrote a ‘View of the Present State of Ireland’, which, according to Garry Waller