Tuesday, December 27, 2005

The Holy Family













by Poussin. The tree on the left is an orange tree, which blossoms and fruits at the same time, a symbol of fertility and blossoming purity, represented ideally in the Virgin Mary.
Employment

He that is weary, let him sit.
My soul would stir
And trade in courtesies and wit,
Quitting the fur
To cold complexions needing it.

Man is no star, but a quick coal
Of mortal fire:
Who blows it not, nor doth control
A faint desire,
Lets his own ashes choke his soul.

When th' elements did for place contest
With him, whose will
Ordain'd the highest to be best;
The earth sat still,
And by the others is opressed.

Life is a business, not good cheer;
Ever in wars.
The sun still shineth there or here,
Whereas the stars
Watch an advantage to appear.

O that I were an Orange-tree,
That busy plant!
Then should I ever laden be,
And never want
Some fruit for him that dressed me.

But we are still too young or old;
The man is gone,
Before we do our wares unfold:
So we freeze on,
Until the grave increase our cold.

George Herbert, 1633

Herbert's weariest poem. The brash confidence of the opening verse is trodden down as the poem progresses till it stops dead in the frozen earth. Life is a business, or "Life is Business", as our modern ears naturally hear it, although the use of "business" to mean specifically commercial transactions does not predate the 18th century, according to the OED, and that makes obvious historical sense. It was used in Herbert's time to refer to a person's occupation or daily activity, and that might include buying and selling. However prior to the 17th century, "business" seems also to have meant "anxiety" or "source of anxiety and concern", and this sense has perhaps survived in expressions like "it's a bad business..." or "what a terrible business!" (Expressions reminiscent of an Edwardian period drama - a murder-mystery probably - but perhaps people still use them.) That sense of "business" is the earliest cited in the OED, from 950, translated in the source as the Latin solicitudinem, but by the 17th century it seems to have to have been used in a more neutral sense: serious occupation or public affairs, as opposed to having a good time, or "cheer".

Whereas the stars/Watch an advantage to appear... again, one thinks of business in the modern sense, and in fact a sense of "advantage" as commercial advantage, or "pecuniary profit" was active in the 17th century. "Another fleet... had fallen upon the Molucca islands, bringing away great advantage" (Grotius's Low-Countrey Warrs, 1665, cited in the OED)

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Festive erotic screenshots















from Mario Banana 1












from Emanuelle in America












from Throw Away Your Books, Let's Go Into the Streets

Art and Engagement

I heard Harold Pinter on the radio this evening describing the necessary antagonism that theatre creates between artist and audience. Part of him despises the audience - and the audience more than reciprocate with their sadistic shuffling and coughing. But Pinter pointed out that the duty of the performers is to rise to that challenge, to meet the audience in combat and overmaster them. Certainly, it is not good to flatter them, to offer to "entertain" them. Part of the viewer is resentful of art, and jealous of its self-containment; a part of the artist wishes to twist the viewer's hand right back until it hurts. What fun! The concept of the fight, or the engagement, kicks through the "entertainment" lie and allows people to verbalise their anger when confronted by genuine art. That's good for the artist too, who should never be flattered. It's dispiriting for flatterers to hear that an artist is irritated and made uncomfortable by praise; what artists long for is a passionately-felt attack on their work, a proof that their play or their film has wounded the heart of a sensitive critic.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

And my thought all gone & the vanish of the sun

I think one can only capture The Dream Songs' lurches in tone if one reads them while half-drunk. Berryman does extraordinary violence to the language, dismembers his sentences with a theatrical wave of the knife. And in their stumbling and their turning bewildered back on themselves, his poems are already remorseful, conveying a distinctive self-conscious pathos.

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I'd asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.
I saw the point of Loeb
at last, to give oneself over to crime wholly,
baffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound
attend while he is cooked

until with trembling hands hoist I my true
& legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains -
it's the texture & the thought -
but I will like them now, spooning at you,
my guardian, slowly, until at length the rains
lose heart and the sun flames out.

Dream Song 95, by John Berryman

Richard Loeb, along with his accomplice Nathan Leopold, became famous in the 1920s after murdering a 14 year-old boy with a chisel in an attempt to do something "Nietzschean". He was himself only 18 at the time, and the product of a respectable middle-class family. He was later killed in gaol by another inmate. The two friends were the inspiration for
Rope.