Touched by the printed word

I learned to read at my grandmother’s knee, before the age of five. We used a Victorian primer, Reading without Tears: it proved itself worthy of the name and I worked through it in a few days, mostly on my own. I remember being frustrated with the word “parlour” near the book’s end: a word I’d never heard spoken, but which I could have recited anyway, if only it had been spelt “parlor” in the American fashion. I was to reading as a duck is to water.

Thereafter I read everything that came my way. I’d arrived from Australia to an England of bomb sites and frugality, the War being only just over. In my grandmother’s house toilet paper was not supplied, only sheets of appropriate size torn from old copies of the Radio Times. I would never use a sheet without first reading its contents both sides. The text was ideal for this purpose, mainly consisting of brief listings of the three wireless channels: The Home Service, The Light Programme, The Third Programme; corresponding respectively to talk; light music and entertainment; classical music, high-brow talk and literature. By today’s standards, all three were high-brow, for the BBC believed passionately in public service, support for the arts and the role of the educated classes in edifying the masses. You could say I was touched by the highest culture at a tender age, and for that matter in a tender place.

But if you were to ask me what, during my childhood, were my favourite books, I don’t know how I could respond. You might as well ask a sponge to name its favourite liquid. What is a favourite book? Perhaps it’s (1) the one I am reading now; (b) the one that I will be sorry to finish; (c) the one I would turn to in troubled times like a trusty friend; (d) the book I would like to quote from the most extensively.

Blogger, that department of Google which allows us free of charge to each have our own private/public Blogspot (invented by some genius but absorbed by Google a few years ago), has a feature allowing us to enter a profile which includes a list of favourite books or films. When you have written your list and saved it, you can click on each item to find out how many other bloggers have made the same choice, and even see them listed so you can click on each one to visit their blogs.

Till now, I have kept my profile minimal, wishing to be characterized only by the posts themselves and the comments they spawn. But lately I’ve started to put in some entries into the favourite books and films sections.

When you do this, you can discover how many other Blogger bloggers have made the same choice. I’m the only one to have nominated The Anatolian Smile, directed by Elia Kazan in 1963; but it was released in certain countries as America, America, so when I put that title in, I discover that 148 other members of Blogger (they don’t all have blogs) have chosen the same film, almost all Indian or Greek. Perhaps it was they who empathized most with the hero's (Kazan's uncle's) yearning to emigrate to a land of infinite promise. Then I entered one of my current reading-books, The Mirror of the Sea, by Joseph Conrad. No one else in the Bloggersphere has selected it. My copy was given as a prize for Geography to Dorothy Vera May in July 1930 by the Governors of Orme Girls’ School, Newcastle, Staffordshire. She’d be about 96 now, and may have treasured the book (whether or not she actually read it) till the day she died and her relatives cleared out her personal possessions to dispose of them in the charity shop where I found the book. It’s still in print though, or you can read it online via Project Gutenberg, to whom, and especially to the transcriber David Price, I am grateful for being able to copy and paste this extract:

The unholy fascination of dread dwells in the thought of the last moments of a ship reported as “missing” in the columns of the Shipping Gazette. Nothing of her ever comes to light--no grating, no lifebuoy, no piece of boat or branded oar--to give a hint of the place and date of her sudden end. The Shipping Gazette does not
even call her “lost with all hands.” She remains simply “missing”; she has disappeared enigmatically into a mystery of fate as big as the world, where your imagination of a brother-sailor, of a fellow-servant and lover of ships, may range unchecked.

And yet sometimes one gets a hint of what the last scene may be like in the life of a ship and her crew, which resembles a drama in its struggle against a great force bearing it up, formless, ungraspable, chaotic and mysterious, as fate.

It was on a gray afternoon in the lull of a three days’ gale that had left the Southern Ocean tumbling heavily upon our ship, under a sky hung with rags of clouds that seemed to have been cut and hacked by the keen edge of a sou’-west gale.

Our craft, a Clyde-built barque of 1,000 tons, rolled so heavily that something aloft had carried away. No matter what the damage was, but it was serious enough to induce me to go aloft myself with a couple of hands and the carpenter to see the temporary repairs properly done.

Sometimes we had to drop everything and cling with both hands to the swaying spars, holding our breath in fear of a terribly heavy roll. . . .

It’s a favourite by all the criteria I listed above, (a) to (d). English wasn’t Conrad’s native language but his mastery of it shows all the more strongly in this piece of non-fiction: reflections on his seafaring days, the characters, the incidents, the passionate nostalgia that makes even the bad times seem good:

One seems to have known gales as enemies, and even as enemies one embraces them in that affectionate regret which clings to the past.

Then he goes on to express the different character of each gale. Here is one:

It was off the Horn. For a true expression of dishevelled wildness there is nothing like a gale in the bright moonlight of a high latitude.
. . .
Above our heads the explosive booming gusts of wind passed continuously, justifying the sailor’s saying “It blows great guns.” And just from that need of human companionship, being very close to the man, I said, or rather shouted:

“Blows very hard, boatswain.”

His answer was:

“Ay, and if it blows only a little harder things will begin to go. I don’t mind as long as everything holds, but when things begin to go it’s bad.”

This is the kind of writing I aspire to. It’s not that he romanticizes the last days of commercial sail, or converts his nostalgia into heroics and sentimentalism. On the contrary, his every observation is sensitive to the humdrum, the inadequacies of men, the symbolism of birth, life and death implicit in every voyage, from departure to landfall.

To me, what it’s really about is the sacredness of human endeavour when etched in stark outline against the wild elements.

I know I can be just as moved by the events in my own life, today and yesterday. This reminds me of another favourite book, (I’m surprised to discover it’s been put back in print last year, perhaps encouraged by a review I wrote a few years ago): John Cowper Powys’ first novel Wood and Stone. His chapter entitled “The Pariahs” starts with describing an eccentric recluse:

Mr Quincunx was digging in his garden. . . . Every now and then Mr Quincunx would leave his work: and retiring into his kitchen, proceed with elaborate nicety to stir a small pot of broth which simmered over the fire. . . . The lighting of his fire in the morning, the crackling of the burning sticks, and their fragrant smell, gave Mr Quincunx probably as much pleasure as anything else in the world.

Memoirs (continued): At Mrs Jenkins'

Last night I watched My Left Foot, in which Daniel Day-Lewis plays the real-life Christy Brown, born to a family of thirteen in a Dublin slum with severe cerebral palsy. To his parents, it’s out of the question that he should be abandoned in an institution, but they cannot afford the home care and treatment that would help him. He can neither walk nor talk so is treated as a mental defective, till it dawns on them that he’s intelligent, and with his left foot can draw and write on the floor. Eventually he gets professional assistance, has a stormy adolescence and matures into a celebrated painter and writer.

Do you ever find that you don’t get round to reading a book, or watching a film, till the time is right for you? I was somehow frightened to watch this one till now. And here I am before five in the morning, finally inspired enough to continue my own memoir from where it left off a year ago. The various episodes comprising my birth to age fourteen are all in the archives of this blog, neither contiguous nor chronological, but never mind that for now. Each is written so as to be self-contained.

*******

It was only today, more precisely at four in the morning, waking up in the silence of this cosy house, that I realized for the first time the significance of what happened when I was fifteen. I’d lived in a real family home for only a year, for till I was fourteen I lived with my mother in rooms in big rented houses, with or without a stepfather; or at boarding-school. Then at last the second stepfather got us a little house all to ourselves, from which I could walk each day to school, and I looked forward to being settled. As I say, it lasted a year, for at fifteen I left home, never to return.

I was sent to lodge in the country cottage of Mr & Mrs Jenkins. My mother knew Mrs J from the Spiritualist Church. Mr J had been an invalid since the first World War, when his lungs were half-wrecked by poison gas. His breathing was always laboured, and every so often he’d have to clear his throat with a cough that rattled eerily inside him; but he was a genial man, patient with his disability. Mrs J was capable and kind, but weighed down with work. She had to go out most days to earn their keep, and be housekeeper when she returned home.

I fitted in well to their routines. I was fed, my clothes washed, but I don’t remember details like that. My parents had done the business arrangements and I didn’t have to bother with rent. I must have had money for bus fare to school and so forth but don’t remember that either. I had a small downstairs room which I may even have kept tidy, for I had only my clothes and schoolbooks. In the evening I had homework to do, but I couldn’t do it in my room when winter came unless I used the portable paraffin (kerosene) stove which tainted the air and steamed up the windows. Essentially, the house had a single heat source: the kitchen range. Glowing logs formed the centre-piece on which a blackened kettle or cooking pots could be laid or hung; and there were oven compartments either side, more or less as in my illustration. Washing would be hung to dry around it, and we would find places to sit which balanced the chill draught from the door and the radiant heat from the range. The armchairs were well-worn, covered with hand-knitted patchwork and provided with extra cushions to fill the sagging parts. In the evening I would find a corner where I could write essays or read Shakespeare and Molière, or Professor Previté-Orton’s Shorter Cambridge Medieval History; or work out problems in differential and integral calculus. In the same room, Mr and Mrs Jenkins would receive their visitors who came round to play cribbage, a card game scored with a peg-board – they used match-sticks, and punctuated their play with expressions peculiar to the game like “and one for his nob”. The air was probably thick with tobacco, because I recall Mrs J having a yellow-stained moustache from her habit of leaving the lit cigarette between her lips. And every evening at 7 they would listen to The Archers on the radio, an agricultural soap opera that continues to this day as an “everyday story of country folk”.

The reason I had to leave home was that the home left us; and that was because my stepfather’s job had left him. He was made redundant and found no suitable jobs on the Isle of Wight so he got one near London, at a much lower salary, but then my mother got a job there too, so they were no worse off than before. I had recently taken my public examinations (GCE ‘O’ Level) a year early, with outstanding results. It wasn’t a good time to change schools, so my parents arranged for me to stay on the Island as I have described. In the holidays I had little alternative but to stay with them in their bungalow in Staines; but it was never home to me.

*******

One day I was summoned to the Headmaster’s study. What had he found out? I was nervous that he might have found some of my writings and drawings lampooning him. He wasn’t a man for caning boys. He could quell them singly or en masse, with his sharp weapons of wit, scorn or silence. It was precisely because he awed us so instantly in face-to-face encounters that we had to make fun of him behind his back. In retrospect I’m sure that he wouldn’t have been offended by the lampooning: would have revelled in it, more likely. On this occasion he was in a genial mood. When we got to the main agenda, he looked me keenly in the eye and asked “What do you think of life?”

I was baffled, caught in his gaze with nothing to say, unaware of what he was getting at. He just kept repeating the question, till I got more and more uncomfortable. Was he asking my philosophy of life? As it happened, I had recently become interested in certain books, quite unconscious of any theme they might have had in common: The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Analects of Confucius, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and some commentary on St John’s Gospel. But I wouldn’t have known how to use any of that to answer his question, even if it had occurred to me. In the end I stammered something naïve like “I think one has to be as good as one can, and ...” letting the words trail off into silence.

At last he was satisfied with my response: he who was a bard for Christ, always quoting some noble verse of Chaucer, Milton or Wordsworth, extolling the twin ideals of a disciple of Jesus and an English Gentleman-Warrior, a kind of St George perpetually slaying dragons.

So then we really got down to business. He mentioned discussions he’d been having with my parents, which had reached a satisfactory conclusion, namely, that he would award me a unique scholarship, to last until the end of my schooldays: offering me free tuition, my parents contributing for my board only. The deal was that I should go to the new junior boarding school at Swainston House, to assist the housemaster with looking after the boys there, specifically their games, outings, daily routines, detentions, Scouts, music and so on: anything outside the teaching curriculum. Each day I would be transported to the main School where I would continue to attend the Sixth Form as before. Was I prepared to take it on?

I was.

Muse and Martyrs

The last two days I’ve been stuck indoors with a heavy cold and a raised temperature. Not even tasting the fresh air outside, and my head thickly congested, I’m unable to activate that part of the brain that’s a spokesman for the soul, but I thought I might just start anyhow, and see if in half an hour the Muse might be sufficiently invoked to lend a hand in publishing something. (It actually took an hour—Ed.)

O muse, o alto ingegno, or m’aiutate;
o mente che scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi,
qui si parrà la tua nobilitate.

O Muses, O high genius, now assist me!
O memory, that didst write down what I saw,
Here thy nobility shall be manifest!

[Dante, Inferno, Canto II]

Reading and writing are important, especially writing because it is the window to our own soul—when not stuffed up with a cold of course. Wikipedia gives examples of poets invoking the Muse: Homer, Virgil, Catullus, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer. How many of them actually believed that their inspiration actually came from a feminine being named Clio, Melpomene or Calliope? Enough, we can leave out the names of the other six.

I’m not sure how to answer my own rhetorical question, for inspiration comes from somewhere that can only be referred to indirectly, with metaphor. It is brought up from a deep well, or it is forged from the heat in a furnace; or it is a Muse providing assistance.

It’s that word “belief” that causes the trouble; as if each one of us is prepared to enter the witness-box at any time, take the book in our right hand, and swear by Almighty God that the evidence we shall give is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth: “so help me God”. For God helps us tell truth, as the Muse helps us with poetic inspiration, at any rate will help Marc now that he’s announced to the whole world: “I have started it.” (See the comments on my last for what this is about.) For there is something sacred about this creative endeavour, and I wonder how many of the millions of born-again scribblers and bloggers and emailers and published authors give thanks to the parts of their brain which connect them to their Muse, and more especially to the Muse herself. And if they don’t glimpse their soul through writing, then give thanks to the guardian angel who fixes chance encounters.

I wrote in a recent post Beginnings about eavesdropping the conversation of two boys on a bus. The other day I arrived at the same bus stop for the same ride back into town and found there a young woman anxiously examining the timetable. I won’t bore you with the full details of our conversation—the selective exchange of life-stories that seem to happen when I bump into strangers—so suffice to say she was a committed Christian on her way to a retreat. So at some point I admitted to having been brought up in the Church of England, attending services twice on Sundays and yet never believing that Christ died for me, or that he was Lord. Despite this, I said, I find myself somewhat drawn to the C of E in my declining years, for it rounds off my life somehow, and since I don’t even care about belief any more, I can just go along for the ride, enjoying the hymns, the Book of Common Prayer, the ancient buildings, the fellowship (though I’ll always be a Steppenwolf, at the edge of the congregation, slinking out hoping to remain unnoticed). I was banking on the traditional notion that the C of E is a "broad church": anyone can join!

My diatribe provoked an arousal of the poor girl’s evangelistic instincts, as if I were a lost sheep who had just happened to stray within her orbit; and she started to go about her Father’s business, invoking the Bible in admonishment to my waywardness. I told her I didn’t believe anything in the Bible and moreover, whilst solemnly respectful of the rituals and holy objects of religions, especially the Bible which I hold in superstitious regard as a magical object, I feel that beliefs are divisive and keep us in chains. She demurred at that of course, until I mentioned the Martyrs’ Memorial six miles away, where the names of seven Protestants are inscribed, who were burnt at the stake (by other Christians) for wanting to worship their way and interpret Holy Writ for themselves. As soon as I’d delivered this coup de grâce I repented, for it was too much force to use in a pleasant conversation between strangers on a bus. I need not have worried. It affected her like water on a duck’s back; and didn’t dissuade her from inviting me to her church one Sunday. We had reached town by this, and parted on good terms.

So I feel like making up a new slogan, a new motto hybridized from old ones:

Abandon belief, all ye who enter here!
You have nothing to lose but your chains.

In the footsteps of Basho

If a blog can merit its own patron saint, then I choose Basho, that wayfarer and Zen monk whom I commemorate above with a quotation. In his travel writings—prose interspersed with haiku—he tours Japan on the pretext of pilgrimages. (See typical extract below, in my first comment.)

I went a little further afield yesterday, drawn by two attractions in the same vicinity. One was marked on the map as a huge sewage works. (Previous posts testify to my choice of sewage works as a pilgrim destination. At any rate they remind us we are not all spirit.) The other attraction was, to my mind, unquestionably a place of world-wide interest and literary pilgrimage, immortalized in the introduction to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in these terms:

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going on all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. … Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever.

This is not her story.
…

I decided to start near the sewage works and walk to Rickmansworth in search of that café. The journey, as it turned out, was better than either of the destinations I had chosen: for my walk took me along the towpath of the old Grand Union Canal, whose narrowboats have become permanent or holiday homes. Woodsmoke came from the chimneys of some of them. In the old days the canal revolutionised transport, towing goods between London and Birmingham as a much more efficient use of horse power than wheels on roads.

Suppose I am given the rest of my life to do nothing significant, just to go a-wayfaring? To contemplate existence in places as peaceful as this. Extraordinary! The rest of my life! However long that is, it’s time enough to discover something, even when I have no idea what I’m looking for. And if this notion of discovering something worth writing about is just to lend spurious meaning to the idleness of a man in retirement, so what? The destination is merely a pretext, as with mine yesterday, as with Basho’s.

I took some photos. The sewage works was mighty, but shrouded in trees from where I walked. There was a magnificent scene involving two tiny tugs and a team of men lifting an old barge with a crane. Then there was a derelict factory, reduced to a skeleton, with what looked from a distance like two naked dwarves winched up on a hoist swinging gently, silhouetted against the sky. When I got close enough I saw it was some kind of cartoon animal, almost lifesize. I didn’t take pictures of the bargemenders or the stuffed toy. I told myself to but my fingers didn’t obey, for they didn’t want to tangle with the day’s ephemera. However, the posters warning against Fish Theft fascinated me for their interesting choice of languages.

I kept on walking.

PS Rickmansworth has a selection of cafés: one is dedicated to coffee, another to Thai food, another to health food and so on. Any of them could have provided Douglas Adams with his inspiration; but none was preserved in a décor that might have existed in 1978 and none carried a commemorative plaque.

Metaphors

By kindly grace of destiny, I have a whole house to roam in, so there should be no need to go wayfaring outside, where it’s cold, especially as my leg hurts and I’m waiting for the postman, who’s due to deliver a package that won’t fit through the slot in the door. I can roam around indoors: so convenient for writing, and I can do tidying in the meantime, for I can’t seem to get any inspiration gazing at a screen.

I don’t think we can exactly choose our mood, despite what some say, any more than we can blow into the sails to make our boat go forward. What we can do is be sensitive to the breeze and trim our sails to take advantage of every zephyr that could possibly take us where we need to go: need, not want.

Being a savage, and not a whit ashamed of it, I’m neurologically wired to a sense of place. The whole visible, smellable universe is redolent with associations; thus something happened in this spot, or reminds me of something that happened somewhere else; the scent of the resin from pine, laurel or holly evokes this or that. I cannot pass a certain telegraph pole in the street without its weatherworn tarred surface reminding me of Australia, a land I left sixty-two years ago. Many things remind me of the ocean journey that brought me to England, with its smell of fresh paint, diesel oil, sewage and salt spray. Memory provides its own kind of presence, one sense invoking the other, so now I feel the constant shuddering of the ship’s decks and bulkheads, the warm exhalations from the ventilator cowls, the daily adventure of getting lost and feeling quite safe, for on board everyone knew me, almost all were women, war brides predominantly. I suppose I used to feel on that ship as a rock star must feel when he dives into the audience and they combine to hold him aloft. Leaving Australia was an exile and loss, but the shipboard journey was a consoling interregnum. I was only four at the time, but all the same I could feel, as I feel now. It astonishes me when I hear a person confess to nothing but vague memories before the age of eight, when up till that age mine are at their most clear and poignant.

This house, too, reminds me of a ship, an imaginary one, not the one in which I sailed from Fremantle to Tilbury. It’s cosy and narrow: a 12-foot-wide slice in a row of similar houses all joined together. But from front to back—I just ran a steel tape measure between the two—is 38 foot. The rooms are furnished simply, and though they are rather dark, the furniture and doors are of real wood, whose glow is derived from the sun’s fecundating rays. Where I sit now, which we call the middle room, for it leads to a smaller room at the back, has an arrangement of five washing lines strung across the room, where in winter drying sheets hang slackly like the sails of a becalmed schooner.

My savage’s sense of place is illogical. I do all my writing up here in the middle room with its view of a south-facing hillside, but since I also have the use of a laptop, I sometimes check my emails downstairs at the oval elm table. Logically and in cyberspace, upstairs or downstairs will give the same result; but my savage mind—to whom ritual, place and raw sense-input mean so much—can never quite accept that. Whether revering the sacred or fleeing a life-threat, my savage-mind responds to associations as tree-fronds fluttering in the breeze: sensitively. Another example: both of the times I visited India, in ’90 and ’92, I got sick; and what I judged to be after-effects persisted for years. So when a cyber-friend proposes we meet physically in Bengal, in a future incarnation, I’m forced to decline. He thinks I’m a fool, for other reasons, I should add, but it’s hard for a Westerner to avoid that fate. It’s easier to be wise in India, where the air is clear enough to refract thought and imagination in ways that would never occur to us within these foggy shores; ways which, here, we might consider foolishness.

* * * * * * *

BBC Radio 4 had a programme on Metaphor, a word which in modern Greek means Transportation. So how could you explain to a Greek trucker that in English we only use the word metaphorically? He earns his whole living being metaphorical, i.e. travelling from A to B: what’s poetical about that? Someone on the programme spoke of metaphors buried so deep we don’t notice them, like using space as a metaphor for time. We treat “long ago” like “far away”.

Spong mincer
S Crubellier on flickr

“The past is another country: they do things differently there.” (So begins L P Hartley's novel, The Go-between.) But why shouldn’t I accept time as it actually appears to me? Here upstairs in the middle room, I may try to visualise the kitchen below, but my imagination can summon my grandmother’s kitchen ten times more vividly, in spite of or perhaps because of the fact it has gone; furthermore, she died in 1963. The big house in which she had a kitchen installed on the middle floor in 1948 has long been demolished, replaced by a block of flats, with the large garden converted to a residents’ car park. But I can revisit her kitchen, smell it, know where everything is, help her by putting leftover cold meat through the mincer. Oh, This is not to say that time is an illusion, but merely to rescue it from the unintended consequences of stale metaphors which insist that the past is distant, when I know it is right here with me.

Apply the same process to the metaphor known as God, and see where we get then, Ashok!

* * * * * * * *

It’s not dawn yet, but I’ve turned on the heating and lit a candle. Through this study window that keeps a secret eye on the wider world, I see in the street's yellow lamplight the snowflakes falling. I’ve just finished the last few pages of Crime and Punishment, illuminated at the very last by redemption and love, a longed-for future. It encourages me to discover that this great and complex novel was written swiftly, its author being spurred on by crippling debts as a result of losing everything at the casino. Not because he is like me in that—quite the opposite. Nor, superficially, do I resemble Raskolnikov, for I have murdered no old pawnbroker, neither for money nor as an existential act. Still, I see enough of myself in him, and my own penance has been longer than eight years’ penal servitude in Siberia, without washing the guilt off my hands. Yet by taking Dostoyevsky’s harrowing tale personally, living his character’s feverish dreams and his daily reality in the streets and tenements of St Petersburg, I too get my shot at redemption. And whilst his tale had immediate meaning in the Russia of 1865, it’s open-ended, many-faceted. I have been and am still that young man who thinks he knows better, can make his own rules. Like him I yearn eventually to be received into the common blessing. There’s a world here, for Crime and Punishment “represents the first act in a gigantic Shakespearian tragedy, the other three acts of which are The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov” (says its translator, David McDuff). Will I complete that literary journey? I don’t know, but have discovered that my favourite Christian, the only one who would bring me back to the Church of my childhood, Archbishop Rowan Williams, has recently written a book on Dostoyevsky.

I wonder if he and I will agree on why Raskolnikov's deed is a sin as well as a crime? Not because “Thou shalt not kill” is one of the Ten Commandments, say I. No, it is one of the Ten Commandments because, as Dostoyevsky shows, the deed causes such enduring distress to its perpetrator and those he meets. It’s that distress which separates him from redemption. This is a Christian lesson we don’t get in the Bible.

The book is not about murder, then, but the very concept and origin of sin, in terms so much more relevant than the eating of the forbidden fruit, or the slaying of Abel, or the merciless punishment of the Flood. Come on Rowan Williams, come out from the library through which I have summoned your phantasm (your book, I mean)! Let us duel.

* * * * * * * * *

Straight after Raskolnikov, I’ve been letting my soul go for a ride with another reprehensible protagonist: the unnamed photographer of Antonioni's Blow-up, played by David Hemmings as a bored playboy, who in one scene reminds me of a remark by Marc, commenting on my last: “Every time I ever pointed to a passing girl or woman and, in a commanding voice, said ‘You! Come over here,’ they did so”—as indeed in the scene where Hemmings commands Vanessa Redgrave to sit on the sofa. (NB, it’s Varuschka, not Redgrave, in the photo.) She surprises herself by meekly obeying, but then she’s come to get possession of the incriminating negatives and will stop at nothing. Other dolly-birds of the Swinging Sixties throw themselves at him, anything to be photographed, and they romp and strip in a roll of violet backdrop paper. But this was just the cappucino froth on the director’s intent: according to the audio commentary, “we impose a narrative on our life, forcing the inchoate reality to carry a meaning”. And then the commentator says, “All meaning is interpersonal,” explaining how Hemmings needs someone else to also see the corpse in the park, to validate that he didn’t just imagine it. The corpse is gone. So he joins in a game of tennis without a ball: the others believe in it, so he can too.

A becalmed schooner; Raskolnikov; the playboy photographer of Blow-up; Dostoyevsky; the current Archbishop of Canterbury; the late mincer in my late grandmother’s late kitchen. What do these have in common? Only this, that as in life, as in a Dostoyevsky novel or an Antonioni film, they may suggest different perspectives.