Hare & hound corbel, Kilpeck Church, Herefordshire (from Commons Wiki)
‘Listen – no, listen. Carefully. What? Yes, of course I know you’ve done this before. Done this, seen that, been there, etcetera, etcetera – everything, in fact, save buying the ‘T’ shirt. Yes, point taken.
Anyway, listen to me – and take it all down. All of it. What? Yes, reading it back to me afterwards is a good idea. A very good idea. What do you want me to say, “you’re brilliant, gosh I’d never have thought of that myself”? That what you think? That I wouldn’t have dreamt up that one on my tod? Moi? C’mon, you know that’s impossible!
So where were we? We hadn’t started? That a fact? Golly. Better crack on. Ready? Right, here goes:
The following are wrong. Yes, wrong. Ab-so-bloody-lute-ly WRONG. W-R-O-N-G.
What now? ‘Repetitive’, is it? Of course it’s repetitive: it’s called ‘emphasis’, clot. It’s called ‘rhythm’ and ‘dramatic tension’, isn’t it? Look, just take my word for it and let me continue.
All of the following are wrong:
- Ripping people off, however you dress it up (e.g. hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, CDOs & similar forms of credit-based larceny) = wrong.
- Torture = wrong.
- Rewarding the pernicious short-termism beloved of power-crazed CEOs (no names; bet you can supply a few) to the detriment of the economy from the micro- to the macro-economic levels = wrong.
- Letting the poor go hungry and unhoused let alone without suitable medical attention or education = wrong.
- Sending complete strangers you or your country are not at war with to Kingdom Come (or whatever you happen to call it, I personally couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the terminology), simply because you can, when – who knows – many of them wouldn’t even wish you ill let alone do same = wrong.
- Slavery = wrong.
- Cutting off the clitorises of little girls and sewing up their labia whether with or without anaesthesia or antiseptic measures = wrong.
- Throwing thousands of literate, numerate and highly experienced workers onto the scrap-heap because they’ve dared to survive beyond the age of 50 then complaining long and loud about the new nadirs of illiteracy, innumeracy and unsteadiness to which the workplace has now sunk = wrong.
- Slaughtering your daughter or sister because she’s smiled at/longed for/kissed/slept with or even married The Wrong Man (in your view) = wrong.
- Trying to turn crucial public services into ‘management-driven, bottom-line led, re-engineered ongoing maximising optimal output solutions going forward’ waking nightmares (for all but senior management) via the cretinous theories extruded from the beam-end of a bunch of MBAs (‘More Bollocks from America’) = wrong.
Got that? Sure? Let’s be having it, then. I’m waiting. Yes, I’m listening … still listening.
Good. Excellent. Well done!
Now comes the difficult part – as you know. What’s that? I don’t surely have to remind you that effective communication of messages from The Management form an essential part of your job description, now do I? Harhar, my dear: my own health & safety officer, as it were – and, yes, I will have my little jokes. What would have become of me without a sense of humour? I hate to think. And don’t look at me like that. You just go and get on with it, Moses, there’s a good lad.’
official IRB rugby ball (illustration from Commons Wiki)
As the end of the year is traditionally the time when we all look back, I thought this might be interesting for rugby fans: the sports journos on British broadsheet The Independent have come up with their list of the world’s Top 50 Rugby Players of the Year.
Brian O’Driscoll au top? Ouais, bien sûr – il est magnifique: “In ‘BOD’ we trust”, comme disent les irlandais – et il me semble inutile de les contredire dans ce cas-là.
Mais les autres … hum, je m’interroge un peu parfois sur l’ordre du classement. Et vous, qu’en pensez-vous/What are your views? Quels seraient vos choix?
This Christmas I should like to report that I shall be eschewing all things glamorous and/or consumerist – virtue, you see, is its own reward (which is probably just as well, considering). Although, frankly, there’s absolutely sod-all rewarding about being boracic, I don’t mind telling you – necessity is definitely not the mother of invention in any of my temporary households these days.
I should like to tell you that I shall be frail-y, wispily loitering, lurking ‘dans mon petit coin sombre avec mon noir chagrin’ or something similarly romantic (should that be an upper case ‘r’? Possibly) suggesting depths of Sturm und Drang as yet unplumbed by man (or woman – or Min for that matter). But it would be a lie as cheerfulness would be bound to break in, reliably puncturing such a bubble of self-indulgence.
I’d like even more to tell you that I shall be devoting the entire season to Good Works. But that wouldn’t be true sadly, knowing such activities at this time of year have all the fizz of fun about them, everybody concerned becoming intoxicated with good spirits. No, certain health ishoos mean I can’t offer my services to the Red Cross, the Little Sisters of the Poor or les Restos du Coeur or whatever: buggerit squared.
No, the truth is other. The truth is that I shall be foostering about as always, yelling ‘feck!’ with great frequency as various fragile items fly out of my grasp or kitchen knives turn mysteriously murderous. Yes, I confess it – I am a world class klutz. So it seems best to leave my greetings and best wishes in more dextrous hands – enough of me, bring on the minstrels (that fabulous troupe, Kalenda Maya).
But before they begin, just a quick word to draw your attention to the picture on the clip showing two of my favourite composers, contemporaries from 15th century Burgundy: on the left is Guillaume Dufay, on the right Gilles Binchois. I feel sure that they’d appreciate this gloriously exuberant Spanish carol that sings of happiness and hopefulness. The song dates from a slightly later period, one whose own advancement is built on the achievements of this pair among others – progress does happen. An English translation of the lyrics can be found here. I hope you enjoy it.
Joyeux Noël. Feliz Navidad. Nollaig Shona Duit – and a very merry Christmas to you all.
The grimace is mine - all mine; the hunky punk's from Pilton (as in Glastonbury Festival)
An amazingly unseasonal something going down in Nice on Friday night – snowfall. Most of the population took a dim view of this phenomenon, regarding la poudreuse as a disgraceful interloper welcome only en piste. So they stayed indoors, while a brave few launched into some joyous snowball fights and two young waiting staff from adjoining restos took advantage of a lull in demand to dip into a doorway and enjoy a passionate embrace.
For a brief moment the snow added its magic to the scene. Only briefly, mind – within an hour or so the snow had turned to sleet and thence to rain. Unfortunately, though, where the snow falls, there falls I. So I suppose I got off lightly on Saturday morning when I slid, unsure-footed, across a patch of ice between pavement and road and landed full-length on my side.
No sooner had recognition of the accident dawned on me, than I heard the sound of running feet. I raised my head and peered around, testing my left arm (nothing broken – good), and saw two men racing towards me from different directions. One helped me up, the other asked if he should call the SAMU (emergency medical services). By the time I’d gathered breath and ascertained that, albeit shocked and doubtless badly bruised, I was otherwise unharmed, a passing trio of pompiers had stopped their van and were emerging in sequence to see if I needed their help. Breathlessly but gratefully I declined their offers, explaining I was en route to a friend close by. Eventually, satisfied I was indeed all right, they all departed.
Of course, in France witnesses to an accident are legally-bound to offer such help as they may. All the same in my experience – and what is experience if not essentially personal? – during an acquaintance stretching back decades I have found people in France more helpful than otherwise.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, this incident formed a huge contrast to the last time I fell in the street. The previous occasion was in mid-afternoon at high summer in England a few years ago. I tripped and lost my footing walking down an unevenly-paved hillside, going down on my right side this time. Could Divine Providence (or Kingsley Amis’s ‘Bastard’s HQ’) possibly be targeting portions of me in turn, I wonder? I have to say a growing roster thus far is beginning to point that way – although you may relax, dear reader, as I do not propose to go into detail (yet).
Anway, this former incident happened next to a pub, where a party of male drinkers sat savouring their pints at a bench outside. They watched with interest as I struggled to my feet, blood dripping from my wounded right hand and tears of shock starting from my eyes. They did absolutely nothing – unless sneering and yelling contemptuous insults counts as doing something, that is.
“Serves yer rye, doanit,” yelled a wag among their number. “Should nav gorn out with those poncy farkin sunglasses orn, yer stupid c***!” His mates murmured dark-toned assent: “stupid farkin cah, silly farkin bitch”. Well, no – not really: my sunglasses were in place because it was that rare and lovely thing in Ing-er-lond, a bright sunny day in August. Why would I not be wearing sunglasses? Also, being a driver, I always selected sunspecs for maximum vision.
But those spectators, my dear compatriots, so many of whom appear these days ever prepared – not for action (God forbid they actually do anything) – to exercise a peculiar predilection for spouting spite. Come to think of it, this appears to be the default mode of the nation if so many online commentaries are anything to go by (check this out if you doubt me, a quick glance at the subjects filleted by the skilful contributors should suffice). I hope I’m mistaken. If not, it is far more disturbing than a mere lack of suitable response to a trivial accident: it is also desperately sad, for this serves no useful function or, in the end, truly impresses anyone. All it does is fuel division, dislike – hatred, even. As, very probably, does intensive criticism of same.
Ouch! Ah, me. And oh, what shining wits – as the Rev. Dr. Spooner might have said.
Christine de Pisan & Queen Isabeau (detail; from Commons Wiki)
The old schools of rhetoric teach that the proper approach to an entity is via its opposite. Musing about loss the other day, I resolved to approach the matter more objectively starting with antonyms. But I got as far as some desultory research when loss, grief – call it what you will – struck. It has a way of ambushing you and taking over. If you don’t know about this (and I rather hope not), don’t take my word for it.
Enter Shakespeare’s Duchess of Brittany – a real, historical character whose son, Arthur, has fallen into the hands of the enemy (the English; need you ask?) and The Worst is feared. Arthur’s captor being King John, The Worst predictably happens: Constance of Brittany has correctly anticipated her son’s fate. Correctly if not accurately, for the details are unknown to this day – but Arthur, barely adolescent, had disappeared for good.
Thus the mystery characterising those sinister circumstances continues to eddy and swirl as murkily as the waters of the Seine at Rouen where it’s thought Arthur died. Yet Constance’s feelings are captured with chilling clarity: ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child,’ the distraught duchess laments to her King and his Cardinal, words which resonate hauntingly.
She’s right: hers and commensurate sources of grief grow to take up all available space, marking it out indelibly. And the madly, maddeningly efficient mechanisms of loss are as unpredictable as they are uncontrollable.
How to cope? Meditation helps, but demands silence or at least relative calm. Distracted from my attempts to relax physically if not mentally by neighbours’ booming telly plus roaring ‘motos’ and equally noisily roaring celebraters outside in the street, meditation was not possible. Evening was already well advanced, so it seemed reasonable to go and ask the (? aurally challenged) neighbours to turn their telly down a tad – enough at least so that I didn’t have to hear every single fecking word of the film’s dull dialogue.
Opening the door, I was instantly greeted by a whirling blur of brunette curls, cherry red fleece and bright red and pink pyjama bottoms which hurled itself at me, arms outstretched. Mimie! She’s here on a brief visit from university in another city, before facing exams in the New Year. Her best friend, studying even further afield, had been spending the day with her and was just departing.
“Mee-nee! Wonderful to see you I was just asking Mummy how you were and should we come over to yours tomorrow and here you are and would you like to talk to my sister calling from the US silly question yes of course you would” she seized my hand and hauled me into the family home, still chattering furiously.
There sat Nadia, the girls’ mother, crouched over her laptop, eyes fixed upon Mado’s face framed in a tiny square of the screen, Mado’s voice coming over loud and clear accompanied by her extensive repertoire of grimaces.
Greetings, talk, laughter, confidences … more laughter. We sat in a cosy huddle, using only a tiny part of the comfortable cushion-strewn seating that hugs two sides of their sizeable séjour. The plasma screen offered unreal excitements, mostly ignored as we generated our own, conversations flowing in all directions. Absolute cacophony, yet entirely coherent.
At one in the morning I looked at my watch, checking it again in disbelief – could it possibly be that late? It could: I was in the company of nightbirds, one at my side yelling happily at her laptop, the other draped across me punctuating her mother’s encomiums with sisterly insults:
“that’s my scarf you’re wearing, you cow!” bawled Mimie.
“yeah, so?” snarled Mado. She smirked, preening: “suits me better than you.”
My arm around Mimie, I patted her and pointed out: “see, she wouldn’t steal any of those vivid shades of red or pink that you look so lovely in – they don’t suit her one bit.”
Mimie nodded equably, “no, she looks like shit in them!”
On the screen a decorative Mado most indecorously crossed her eyes, stuck out her tongue and gave Mimie the finger.
Near-deafened, crammed in between mother and daughter, lolling among cushions while an energetic hero unleashed havoc upon the plasma screen, I had found tranquility – just as soothing as the kind I’d originally sought.
As for those antonyms for ‘loss’, apparently they include ‘win’, ‘gain’, ‘profit.’ For me, loss had been inadvertently transformed into all of these – for a while at least, although these parallel friendships will endure.
Lucky me, although I couldn’t cope with too many nights that go on until 2 o’clock in the morning!
Olivier Millagou exhibition slide from Galerie de la Marine site
There’s always something happening in Nice, something diverting and rewarding – Nice, elle … bouge! And the entertainment’s often free, too. So ‘Over the Rainbow’ the latest exhibition by Bandol-based artist Olivier Millagou showing at the Galerie de la Marine on the quai des Etats-Unis was easy to integrate into a shopping trip to the Cours today. I’d heard that the exhibition’s a timely one, chiming in with certain topics for discussion in Copenhagen this week, and felt in an otherwise lamentably powerless way that attendance might contribute to my own growing awareness of what faces us.
Oliver Millagou, born in 1974, concentrates a very long, very intense gaze on contemporary life in all its guises – a deeply reflective scrutiny that draws in the viewer, involving him or her to bear their own witness.
In this show Millagou invites us – especially, perhaps, we azuréens – to look at the flipside of what’s around us, what lurks behind or beneath the façade. Experience and commonsense already tell us what that might mean – it’s unlikely to be pleasant at best. As far as I can make out Millagou takes an especial interest in exploring the self-deluding and destructive aspects of escapism and western consumerism concealed by the brightly-coloured surface manufactured by the marketing industry.
But Millagou goes one step further, demonstrating that the ill-effects of these things are hiding in plain sight, no longer obscured but rather proliferating to an extent that ignoring them is becoming increasingly difficult – and increasingly a matter of concern. In Nice’s Galerie de la Marine he has arranged 12 slide-show projecters on automatic setting – six on either side of the high, cool, echoing space – each showing a series of 24 black-and-white slides projected onto a coloured background that echoes in sequence the colours of the rainbow. In prominent position on each of the three sides of exhibition space stands a rusty rectangle of metal about 250 x 150 cm – the kind used as temporary covers for holes in the road, for example. Millagou has embossed each of these with a single word (in English): ‘destiny’, ‘attitude’ … and a great big invisible question mark hangs in the air above each of them. Each slide station has its own theme as well as its own background colour, and each thematic series offers a test of the spectator’s responses. The projection area marked out in a solid block of rainbow colour is kept deliberately small (about 25 cm square), thereby drawing you in, forcing you to look closely at the constantly changing images as the machine inexorably moves on, clicking each one into place.
They’re starkly shocking, the pictures. The show begins with images of rubbish on a beach, jarring and ugly, their usual gaudy attractions mocked by monochrome rendition. These have nothing to do with the imaginative explorations of the possibilities of beachcombing by the late Nick Darke and his wife or by Irish artist, Dorothy Cross. No, these baldly and darkly preclude any interpretation connected with beauty or even charm – however skilled the execution and artful the composition.These images are deliberately disturbing, whether alone or in context: a derelict ship lists on the shore, neglected into near-oblivion, polluting all around it. Next, CCTV cameras cluster like grapes, robots for the few observing the many, silent reminders of our loss of control. Barbed wire and fencing are shown forbidding entry to brutal buildings few would wish to access, but whose potential is thus reduced. Beautiful, soaring palm trees die slowly from neglect, disease or pollution, blighting the view. A shark opens its jaws and, blithely oblivious, a surfer takes to the air above; an injured limb is then projected onto the vivid rainbow colour of the background, followed by a skateboarder losing control then the image of a skateboard, broken in two. Finally one of the more aspirational ends of earthly human endeavour is shown for what it is: luxurious status-symbol cars ending up as useless wrecks – they may yet turn out to have cost the rest of us the earth.
While the gorgeous spectrum of rainbow colours glows more brightly in contrast with the harsh monochrome scenes imposed upon them, clever, clear-eyed Olivier Millagou invites us to make what we will of the whole display. “Draw your own conclusions,” he seems to be saying. ‘Attitude’ says the clear, elegant script on the rusting panel; ‘destiny’ says another. One has to change, to change the other.
Many of us are now so familiar with organic farming that we’re almost blasé about farmers’ markets and the sight of organic produce shelves in supermarkets (always strikes me as a contradiction-in-terms somehow, that). And whichever stance we adopt on global warming and its consequences, on peak oil, the world’s supply of fresh water and the enormous post-war explosion in population, we’re mostly fairly clued-up on environmental issues as well. But what of other concerns about how we live? It seems to me that a few people have been considering just these matters. And seriously.
Firstly, there’s that intrepid jester, Tom Hodgkinson, waving cap and
- Tom Hodgkinson
bells in the stern face of the Protestant work ethic while actually doing the unthinkable by taking up a slower pace of life with all that entails.
Now that reliably interesting and quietly adventurous author, Tobias Jones, has launched his own project. This involves founding a woodland community, and is covered here. It’s a story that caught my eye, promptly capturing my imagination. Not least because I was already familiar with Tobias Jones’s work, notably in this context Utopian Dreams (2007), a scrupulous scrutiny of various kinds of alternative community (definitely recommended, if you haven’t already read it). Tobias Jones is
- Tobias Jones 2009
actually trying to do something along those lines himself. Already a successful literary journalist and novelist (if the first in what promises to be an intriguing series of crime novels set in Italy is anything to go by), he envisions a complete change. On the face of it the very idea of a crime novelist nurturing a socially-responsible woodland community possesses such inherent absurdity (not to mention potentially rich ground for plots of a fictional variety) that it simply has to work. Although, of course, as you can see from the Guardian piece, Tobias knows what he is doing and approaches the project with flexibility and feasible ideas at the ready.
No sooner than I’d been cast into my own Utopian reverie, one of those serendipitous coincidences cropped up. Those coincidences that I am – if I’m to be strictly rational (which is asking too bloody much, frankly) – supposed to regard as just that. Well, I don’t: coincidence? Bah! But I digress. The next thing I
- Paul Kingsnorth
- Dougald Hine (pic from DH’s blog)
learned was that journalist, poet and environmental activist, Paul Kingsnorth, together with fellow writer/poet/campaigner, Dougald Hine, were aiming to establish a loose coalition of artists to formulate new narratives for a new age. You can find out more about it – and them – at The Dark Mountain Project site.
Both – Tobias Jones’s prospective community, perhaps, more than The Dark Mountain Project – tend to make me think of similar stirrings during the 17th century Civil Wars in Britain. As I don’t know enough about the history of the period, I’ll duck out of detailed parallels. Yet there does seem to be a more responsible practicality abroad than in the predominantly ill-fated hippie movements of the late ’60s-early ’70s. What’s happening now appears to have a more definite sense of the possibility of new kinds of community and practice, combining 17th century attempts to find ways of living both more free and more collaborative with the essential message of peaceful co-existence purveyed by the hippies.
The latest sample is tiny, of course, and it’s far too early to predict how things may go but these dreamers seem blessed with a pragmatism that may – with luck and a following wind – save some of their dreams from dissolution or dismissal. Rarity value or the resurgence of old values or even the emergence of something new – the question hardly seems to matter: what does is whether or not they flourish and nourish. Just like any healthy, growing thing.
Coluche (Michel Colucci, Paris 1944 - Opio 1986)
I can’t quite believe it, but it’s 25 years since the organisation les restos du coeur was founded by Coluche – that absurdist gadfly of a comedian. Coluche – Michel Colucci – was born in Paris in 1944. Although he died in 1986, he remains a vivid presence imprinted on the national psyche and last year’s excellent biopic directed by Antoine de Caunes was a huge success. As for the restos these are not restaurants in the true sense, more centres where those in need can go every week between December and March each year to obtain a weeks’ worth of basic foodstuffs. Registration is straightforward and brief, clients have merely to show basic evidence of income/outgoings. Much emphasis is placed on treating all comers with respect and kindness, and the atmosphere is relaxed and friendly.
From relatively modest beginnings les restos du coeur grew rapidly, and there are now 2,000 centres throughout France. This year the organisation expects to hand out 100 million free meals between December and 19 March. Last year 800,000 people were helped in this way - an increase of 14 percent on the previous year, with even more expected to present themselves at the organisation’s centres this year.
Despite its réputation bling-bling (sic) the départment where I live (the Alpes-Maritimes) is especially hard hit by poverty – and especially this year, with unemployment at around 14 percent according to some estimates. Stratospheric rents ensure that homelessness is a growing problem. However, government and EU funding for les restos du coeur has been reduced and next year a drop of about 15 percent is anticipated. A series of fundraising concerts are being held in Nice at the end of January to attempt to redress the balance.
What a pity Coluche himself couldn’t be there: it would be just the kind of event – and battle – that most feisty of clowns would have relished. He died 23 years ago in a banal motorcycle accident in the hills not far from here – but what a legacy he left behind him. And how much comedic savagery he would have derived from what would surely have been an uneasy emotional combo of pride in the organisation he founded and disgust at the extent of its growth. I have a fanciful suspicion that Coluche can’t possibly be resting in peace …
Exhibition poster
The older I get, the more I know I don’t know due to a sense of time running out combined with wry recognition of my limitations. So when I hear about something
Mongolian bronze (late 17th-early 18th century)
unfamiliar that is mind-expanding, expressed with breathtaking beauty and accessible to me, I’m avid to explore it. For some strange reason the exhibition of Mongolian Buddhist art at Nice’s Musée de l’Art Asiatique kept slipping my mind. Perhaps because the venue’s a long-ish walk away through some insalubrious territory and I’m still resentfully nursing a post-’flu. cough. But no matter, as the show was about to end I had to get going. So I did.
The Museum is an uncompromisingly contemporary structure of spare, economical design softened by the gentle curves of its circular form. It stands
Musee de l'Art Asiatique de Nice
surrounded by water in an enclave parsimoniously carved out of the botanical gardens. Apparently spacious and light but nonetheless relatively compact, the building provides an ideal setting for moving around an exhibition with ease, enjoying the silence imposed by its sturdy walls. A basement space serves for displaying more fragile, light-sensitive objects, such as parchments, prints and books. Inside, the permanent collection is predominantly Buddhist and – to a lesser extent – Hindu in theme. Outside the water laps at the decking around the ground floor. Wildfowl are plentiful and varied – including, famously, a pair of pelicans.
Mongolian bodhisattva
The trip was definitely worth it. Not least for the relative reduction of my woeful ignorance. Buddhism, I learned, arrived in Mongolia in 1247, when Köden, brother of
Zanabazar (1635-1723), artist & Mongolia's 1st lama
Güyük Khan, the military commander of Kokonur (now Qinghai), became a patron of the Tibetan Lama Sakya Pandita (head of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism). Adoption was rapid – at least among the highest echelons, for in 1260 Khubla Khan invited the head Lama of the Sakya sect, Pagspa, to the capital conferring upon him the title ‘Imperial Preceptor’. Throughout the Yuan dynasty the Sakya school enjoyed the patronage of the Mongol court. This level of investment explains how Buddhist art could flourish, enabling craftsmen to travel or be imported thereby allowing the sophisticated syncretic aesthetic of Indian Buddhism to serve as an important source of inspiration throughout the regions under the Yuan.
Jetsun Dampa palace (19th cent. painting on cloth)
In the late 16th century the visit to Mongolia of the Third Dalai Lama resulted in the widespread diffusion of Buddhism in Mongolia, and Khökh Khot became the first Buddhist centre on Mongolian soil.
Erdene zuu monastery
The first Sakya-Pa Tibetan Buddhist monastery in what is now the Mongolian Republic was constructed on the site of Ghengis Khan’s former capital of Karakorum. Known by the name of Erdene zuu, it was built in 1585-86 by Abatai Setsen Khan of the Khalkha tribe. Later the complex was greatly extended and enclosed by massive walls. Today Erdene zuu is a World Heritage Site.
walls at Erdene zuu monastery
Although Mongolian Buddhism tried to replace existing shamanistic practices, these continued among the nomads. And do to this day, largely because shamanism’s lack of hierarchy made it less vulnerable to persecution in the communist era. Perhaps fancifully, I’d also like to think that shamanism’s closeness to nature in all its forms combined with the fundamental equality of the sexes among practitioners also helped the ancient beliefs to prevail. For Mongolian nomad society is collaborative, and females must possess skills and strength for a tribe to survive.
One image image among the contemporary photographs at the entrance to the exhibition struck me in particular. It shows a shaman in the Altai Mountains, a hunting eagle perched on his arm: man and beast in cautious harmony – a balance of powers.
As I sat outside after my extended tour, musing on what I’d seen and read and blissfully watching the peaceful, stately
pelicans patrolling their demesne, I wished I could go to Erdene zuu. But a little of Erdene zuu came with me when I left, filling my mind’s eye with rich patterns picked out in every shade of red, bright green, vivid vermillion, glowing sapphire blue; bronzes of extraordinary workmanship; wooden carvings of an undreamed-of intricacy and – everywhere – the gleam of gold. Such treasures! At least I got a chance to see some of them before they returned to where they belong.
And I’d enjoyed the pelicans’ stately circuits of the pool outside, interrupted only by occasional brief flurries of activity as they simultaneously dive for food, reemerging to resume their serene progress. A bit like being a Buddhist monk, it occurred to me frivolously, as I doggedly made my way back to the city centre. Those pelicans – très zen, as we say in these parts. And who knows: maybe they were Mongolian Buddhist monks in a previous incarnation. How very fitting that would be for these silent patrollers of an edifice so much of which is dedicated to the art of their ancestors.
… the Armistice ending the ‘Great War’ (WW1) was signed. The poet Wilfred Owen was among the British Imperial Forces dead, estimated at 1,225,914 (GB + Ireland total: 994,138, of a pre-war population of just over 46 million. French losses constituted about 4.3 percent of the country’s population. And always the wounded and maimed were more numerous). It is perhaps significant that some of Owen’s finest poems, whose savage/poignant counterpoint is used with such power to lament the ‘war to end all wars’, were added to the Mass in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962). Britten’s towering and heartrending requiem was commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral, finally rebuilt – to plans by architect Basil Spence – after its destruction by enemy bombs in the Second World War.
Wilfred Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the Battle of the Sambre. His mother was told of his death on 11 November 1918, while church bells were pealing out all over the land in celebratory clangour.
It is always too late for some. All the more reason for us to remember them, with respect and compassion as well as gratitude.
Futility
by Wilfred Owen
Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
Wilfred Owen 18 March 1893 - 4 November 1918
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it awoke him, even in France,
Until this morning, and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now,
The kindly old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
