Artistic heist, Walter Benjamin steals from Paul Klee, wireless grabs at Ravel - shock horror

On a rainy day in Manchester, last week, (August 2010) my partner showed me a copy of Angelus Novus, a picture by the artist Paul Klee. She had just read me an account of it by the German Philosopher, Walter Benjamin, in which he describes it as being of a figure rushing backwards into the future while witnessing the inevitable trail of utter devastation left behind - like being dragged through a hedge backward, I thought, and seeing a trail of broken twigs and torn leaves, but on a cosmic scale. It seems that Benjamin felt so convinced by his own reading of the picture that he felt he had the right to re-name it as The Angel of History. W.G Sebald refers to Benjamin’s account at the end of his second Zurich lecture in the volume On the Natural History of Destruction.

Although I knew something of Klee’s fragile work, I expected nonetheless to see a work of art as powerful as Benjamin’s description. Even so, I was surprised by Klee’s delicate, formalised image. Decked out in dots, dashes and all washed over in tired Champagne it remained firmly within the artist’s deceptively childlike, and gossamer creations. In taking his tremulous lines for little walks over the paper, he has given me a nimble depiction of a slightly tipsy flapper. She wears a lion’s mask and is decked out in a costume of a fabulous bird stepping out on the tiles doing the Charleston. What looks to be the mane, a masculine attribute, reminds me how, before the introduction of spongy rubber rollers, women used twisted pieces of paper to give shape to their hair while they slept. Her left eye looks straight out of the picture at me, but the right slews off centre further to the right, and tells of her having consumed too much of that Champagne.

Certainly it is possible to see it as being a symbol of a need to escape the memories of the carnage of World War I. But then I can see everything from that period as a messenger from that era. And this for me is a good thing, because it helps to diminish Benjamin’s take over of this single febrile image.

In general terms, my thoughts on this began with my first memory of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro For Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet. This was when I was in my teens. As an accompaniment to a dramatic adaptation for radio of A. V. Morton’s retelling of the story of Jesus, In the Steps of the Master, it could hardly have been bettered. But for a long time after the music was spoilt for me by it having been reduced to a mere trigger to the memory of the radio play, which though good, was definitely the lesser of the two art forms. Today, by describing how I see Klee’s picture, I am trying to claim it back on behalf of the rest of us who want to look at it afresh and not as Benjamin would have us believe it to be. As with any picture it can be seen in as many ways as there are viewers to view it.

hamlet, gertrude and my book

Re: the BBC News this morning: a question in a school exam has raised some dust. My anwer to it would be that of course Prince Hamlet is more concerned for his mother than himself. Anyone with an ounce of history in their blood can understand that.  There's a hint at why this should be in my novella, William Shakespeare - Dark Phoenix. I apologise for not yet having it up on line.  I am still mulling over various quesions, such as, should I put it up for a fee, or for free, or for a donation, and should I give it a web page to itself? I hope, like Hamlet, to have made up my mind very soon.  I have retreated from finding an agent or a publisher.  It is too dispiriting waiting for replies that never arrive.  Besides, in this these hard time I can understand that there's too much risk investing in a story that could never be a blockbuster.  When all is said, it is too short, being only 52000 words long, and is about a bunch of fusty old actors getting their hose into a twist over the death of an eleven year old boy.

But I can say with confidence that is better written than anything I have yet put into this blog because my partner, a one time copy editor, has ensured that it is so. 

Once on tour, I had to whisper to my wife, Marianne, (1930-84) on stage, not to look up because the curtain above us was smouldering having come into contact with a bare electric wire - it is essential not to frighten the audience into panic  - hence my silly cartoon

Judge, The New Prometheus - find in pages to the left of my blog

My monologue ‘Judge’ (originally entitled ‘The New Prometheus’) was commissioned as a contribution to the Conference ‘Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Child Abuse’ at the City University of New York, Brooklyn, USA. It had its premiere on Friday, 24 April 1987.

The second performance was given before an invited audience of psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors at The Friends Meeting House, Cambridge, UK on Saturday 26 September 1987.

It was given its third performance before an invited audience at the former Supreme Army Headquarters in the Stauffenbergstrasse, West Berlin on Sunday 3 January 1988.  It took place in the building in which the Hitler bomb plot executions of 1944 had been carried out, which now houses the Museum to the German Resistance.

The Cosmic Problem, how I solved it (almost).

Waking early this morning, bright in mind but lazy in body, I thought to while away the time before I got up by solving a problem that is foxing the cosmologists of today.  Nothing can match the nest of a comfortable bed to the fostering of a straightforward answer to a large question.  I got it in five minutes.

I asked, why do the outermost bits of the cosmos speed up instead of slow down as I would expect.  When a bullet is sent on its way by an explosion, its speed and the distance it travels becomes immediately effected by gravity drawing it down towards the earth, and by the material through which it travels, such as air, metal, clothing, flesh and bone. Even if there is nothing it its way I would not expect it to move faster and faster - but the outer reaches of the cosmos do just that.

My understanding of the Big Bang is that it was not unlike the showy bit of a firework when it bursts onto the night sky in an expanding sphere of coloured sparks. As the initial thrust of the explosion loses its power the bits and pieces of burnt paper and cardboard begin to fall back toward the earth. Slowly at first, then quicker and quicker as gravity takes hold.

Burrowing back into the pillow -, I said to myself, it is plain common sense to infer that there’s something outside our cosmos that is pulling the outermost nebulae and stars away from us at ever increasing speeds.

Since cosmologists factor in Dark Matter because they can’t make their sums work without it, even though they are not sure what it is, what it looks like, or smells and tastes of, then they should also factor in a constant for HHG-Matter*, this being the attraction force outwith our cosmos.  Although I use the phrase ‘Big Bang’, the actual event might have been quite a small big bang when seen from the greater perspective.  It’s not difficult to imagine lots of little big bangs going off like fireworks all over the place each pulling and jostling the others, like they might be at a party of adolescents…at which point, as our planet bowled along in a bewildering number of directions, consequent distortians, all at a frightening velocity through space,  I slipped into a secure and happy sleep...

*: HHG= Huge Humongous Gravity

Tony Blair: "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise, That last infirmity of noble mind"… John Milton

I use an old stage director’s trick to help make up my mind about people who somehow raise a question mark. To get it to work, I imagine the person in question within the proscenium, picture frame, of an old fashioned theatre - often as not their true character begins to emerge. Everything about them sharpens into significance and becomes as clear as if they were appearing in a play. We have all strutted and fretted our hour upon the stage.  Even in the first hour of our lives we are what I like to think of as a professional baby.  Even when asleep, we give perfect performances of ourselves.

A politician who raised a question mark for me was Tony Blair when urging us to vote for him on his way to becoming leader of New Labour.  Mystified by his popularity, I subjected him to ‘test by theatre’. Within the confines of my imagined proscenium arch he came over the footlights as a matinee idol, complete with flashing teeth, a daringly sincere eye and with the two sides to his face both ‘best’ and ever ready to be photographed.  We can all call upon what acting ability we may be blessed with to make a point - I have in mind, teachers and politicians.  I think it must be a rare treat to find someone using politics to forward an acting career.

A well-known rule of thumb tells us that we tend to marry those in whom appear traits and characteristics of our parents, or carers.  At the time of which I speak, it was no secret that Cherie Booth’s dad had been a successful professional actor. Tony Blair was Cherrie Booth’s choice of husband. At the time, I was living and working in Scotland, and must have askit masel, maybe, just a wee bitty, was mistress Booth’s choice influenced by that sma bit something in Tony Blair’s perrson that reminded her of her auld daddy? Och aye, mebbe! I’ll hae a wee dram on that forbye.

I was appalled, though not surprised, when Tony Blair joined President George W. Bush in pouring scorn on the view held by the United Nations' former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix, that Saddam could be disarmed without a war.  It was then that my harmless necessary theatre of fun was overshadowed by the shock and awe of the theatre of war.

Tony Blair appears to me to hug dramatic moments unto himself.  Even to marrying into the family whose antecedent, William Booth shot President Lincoln during a theatrical performance in 1865.  Keep the spotlights on me, seems to be Tony Blair’s slogan

I wonder if the danger to us, let alone his own soul, lies in his not recognising this aspect to his character - he just doesn’t know what a damn good actor he is.  His current performance is that of being our Middle East peace envoy. Give that man an Oscar.