The Garden Gallery, Rachel Bebb's celebrated sculpture garden in Broughton, put on a special exhibition at The Grange, Northington, on 2nd June 2017. The old Baring home is in the process of being restored and this provided magnificent brickwork and stunning lighting effects for the artworks, many being paintings used as stage sets.
A selection of writings, speeches, photographs and events as well as some of my favourite literary passages.
Friday 2 June 2017
The Garden Gallery Exhibition at The Grange
The Garden Gallery, Rachel Bebb's celebrated sculpture garden in Broughton, put on a special exhibition at The Grange, Northington, on 2nd June 2017. The old Baring home is in the process of being restored and this provided magnificent brickwork and stunning lighting effects for the artworks, many being paintings used as stage sets.
Location: London
Northington, Alresford SO24, UK
Thursday 18 May 2017
Bertrand Russell's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech - The Four Desires Driving All Human Behaviour
All
human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory
advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist
desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious,
not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold
on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do,
you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but
rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
Man
differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he
has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully
gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa
constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake
until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like
this.
Russell points to four
such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power — and examines them in order:
Acquisitiveness
— the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods — is
a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the
desire for necessaries. I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who
had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my
family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure
visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded.
Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult
life in a similar manner.
However
much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream
which will always elude you.
In 1938, Henry Miller
also articulated this fundamental driver in his brilliant meditation on how money became a human fixation. Decades later, modern
psychologists would term this notion “the hedonic treadmill.” But for Russell, this elemental
driver is eclipsed by an even stronger one — our propensity for rivalry:
The
world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always
stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face
impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence
the present level of taxation.
Rivalry,
he argues, is in turn upstaged by human narcissism. In a sentiment doubly
poignant in the context of today’s social media, he observes:
Vanity
is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows
how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” “Look
at me” is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take
innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.
It
is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity throughout the range
of human life, from the child of three to the potentate at whose frown the
world trembles.
But
the most potent of the four impulses, Russell argues, is the love of power:
Love
of power is closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing.
What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory
without power… Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole these people
have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to
glory… Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could
satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the
causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It
is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.
Love
of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to
petty power as well as to that of potentates.
Anyone who has ever
agonized in the hands of a petty bureaucrat — something Hannah Arendt
unforgettably censured as a special kind of violence — can attest to the veracity
of this sentiment. Russell adds:
In
any autocratic regime, the holders of power become increasingly tyrannical with
experience of the delights that power can afford. Since power over human beings
is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is
actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure.
But
Russell, a thinker of exceptional sensitivity to nuance and to the dualities of
which life is woven, cautions against dismissing the love of power as a wholesale
negative driver — from the impulse to dominate the unknown, he points out,
spring such desirables as the pursuit of knowledge and all scientific progress.
He considers its fruitful manifestations:
It
would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether as a motive.
Whether you will be led by this motive to actions which are useful, or to
actions which are pernicious, depends upon the social system, and upon your
capacities. If your capacities are theoretical or technical, you will contribute
to knowledge or technique, and, as a rule, your activity will be useful. If you
are a politician you may be actuated by love of power, but as a rule this
motive will join itself on to the desire to see some state of affairs realized
which, for some reason, you prefer to the status quo.
Russell then turns to
a set of secondary motives. Echoing his enduring ideas on the interplay of boredom and excitement in human life, he
begins with the notion of love of excitement:
Human
beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom,
though I have sometimes thought, in examining the apes at the zoo, that they,
perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be,
experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires
of almost all human beings.
He argues that this
intoxicating love of excitement is only amplified by the sedentary nature of
modern life, which has fractured the natural bond between body and mind. A
century after Thoreau made his exquisite case against the sedentary lifestyle, Russell
writes:
Our
mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor. I used, when
I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a
day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from
boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be
conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is
sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When
crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that
the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they
had all walked twenty-five miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is,
however, impracticable, and if the human race is to survive — a thing which is,
perhaps, undesirable — other means must be found for securing an innocent
outlet for the unused physical energy that produces love of excitement… I have
never heard of a war that proceeded from dance halls.
Civilized
life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide
harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in
hunting… I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that
people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing
pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war
should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters. More
seriously, pains should be taken to provide constructive outlets for the love
of excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden
discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such
moments than is sometimes thought.
Friday 28 April 2017
The Winchester Portrait Exhibition
Nadine Collison and Michael Butters |
St Francis of Assisi |
Jamie Balfour |
Jean Ritchie |
Nadine Collison |
Nadine Collison |
The Charles and Diana gates |
Monday 24 April 2017
Favourite Poetry - This Scepter'd Isle - Richard II
Methinks I am a prophet new inspired
And thus expiring do foretell of her:
Her rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
She tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.
This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!
Shakespeare - Richard II
And thus expiring do foretell of her:
Her rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
She tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.
This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!
Shakespeare - Richard II
Thursday 23 March 2017
Sunday 8 January 2017
What is Poetry?
Your poetry arises of its own accord; when you and the object have become one; when you have delved deep enough into the object to apprehend within it some hidden glimmering
Basho
What is a lovely phrase?
One that has mopped up as much truth as it can hold
Virgina Woolf
It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Mary Oliver
"All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. ... Very often there is not any adjective, sometimes not any qualification at all: often only one subject with its predicate and its statement and its object. There is never any detail of description, but the scene rises, more vivid in colour, more exact in outline, more wonderful in influence, than anything we can see with our eyes, except perhaps those things we see in the few moments of intense emotion which come to us, we know not whence ..." (Belloc.)
Listen to WB Yeats reading his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Listen to WB Yeats reading his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Saturday 31 December 2016
Said a Blade of Grass
Old Swan House Garden in Autumn |
Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again — and she was a blade of grass.
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”
Kahil Gibran
Thursday 22 December 2016
Wednesday 14 December 2016
Christmas at Blenheim 2016
Blenheim Palace |
Blenheim is the most astonishing castle in the country; absolutely magnificent, and of course set in a perfect Capability Brown landscape.
The lake at Blenheim taken from the West gate at sunset. The view of the palace from the West gate is often described as the finest view in England. |
The Temple of Diana where Winston Churchill proposed to Clementine |
Friday 9 December 2016
Monday 5 December 2016
Wellbeing of Women Christmas Fair 2016
Drapers' Hall fi;;ed with stalls for the Fair |
The Drapers' City Fair held annually and free in the Hall by Wellbeing of Women since 2009, was the best attended yet and raised a record amount for the charity. Over 50 stalls sold high-quality gifts and food and drink including my favourite Christmas cake (which so heavy with fruit that feels like a black hole).
Friday 2 December 2016
Stockbridge Christmas Evening 2016
St Peter's Church and the Christmas tree after lighting |
Alex Lewis, Sam and Sally Taylor switching on the light |
Prior to this, a horse-drawn coach carried the local MP, the Lord of the Manor and the mayor of Test Valley from Old St Peter's to new St Peter's, proceeded by the Town Crier.
Stockbridge Town Hall. The horse-drawn carriage can be seen approaching |
Middle Wallop Military Wives Choir |
Wednesday 28 September 2016
Garden Design - Vaux Le Vicomte
One of the most brilliant aspects of Le Nôtre’s concept was the use of an optical illusion known as ‘anamorphosis abscondita’, resulting in decelerated or accelerated perspective according to whether the gardens were viewed away from, or towards the château. This was achieved by means of visual devices that rendered ovular pools as circular, and changed the apparent level of the grottoes at the far end of the park, by means of an optical effect based on the tenth theorem of Euclid’s optics - Andrew Lyndon Skeggs
Le Nôtre employed an optical illusion called anamorphosis abscondita (which might be roughly translated as 'hidden distortion') in his garden design in order to establish decelerated perspective. The most apparent change in this manner is of the reflecting pools. They are narrower at the closest point to the viewer (standing at the rear of the château) than at their farthest point; this makes them appear closer to the viewer. From a certain designed viewing point, the distortion designed into the landscape elements produces a particular forced perspective and the eye perceives the elements to be closer than they actually are. That point, for Vaux-le-Vicomte, is at the top of the stairs at the rear of the château. Standing atop the grand staircase, one begins to experience the garden with a magnificent perspectival view. The anamorphosis abscondita creates visual effects, which are not encountered in nature, making the spectacle of gardens designed in this way extremely unusual to the viewer (who experiences a tension between the natural perspective cues in his peripheral vision and the forced perspective of the formal garden). The perspective effects are not readily apparent in photographs, either, making viewing the gardens in person the only way of truly experiencing them.
From the top of the grand staircase, this gives the impression that the entire garden is revealed in one single glance. Initially, the view consists of symmetrical rows of shrubbery, avenues, fountains, statues, flowers and other pieces developed to imitate nature: the elements exemplify the Baroque desire to mold nature to fit its wishes, thus using nature to imitate nature. The centrepiece is a large reflecting pool flanked by grottos holding statues in their many niches. The grand sloping lawn is not visible until one begins to explore the garden, when the viewer is made aware of the optical elements involved and discovers that the garden is much larger than it looks. Next, a circular pool, previously seen as ovular due to foreshortening, is passed and a canal that bisects the site is revealed, as well as a lower level path. As the viewer continues on, the second pool shows itself to be square and the grottos and their niched statues become clearer. However, when one walks towards the grottos, the relationship between the pool and the grottos appears awry. The grottos are actually on a much lower level than the rest of the garden and separated by a wide canal that is over half a mile (almost a kilometre) long. According to Allen Weiss, in Mirrors of Infinity, this optical effect is a result of the use of the tenth theorem of Euclid's Optics, which asserts that "the most distant parts of planes situated below the eye appear to be the most elevated".
In Fouquet’s time, interested parties could cross the canal in a boat, but walking around the canal provides a view of the woods that mark what is no longer the garden and shows the distortion of the grottos previously seen as sculptural. Once the canal and grottos have been passed, the large sloping lawn is reached and the garden is viewed from the initial viewpoint’s vanishing point, thus completing the circuit as intended by Le Nôtre. From this point, the distortions create the illusion that the gardens are much longer than they actually are. The many discoveries made as one travels through the dynamic garden contrast the static view of the garden from the château. - Wikipedia
Sunday 18 September 2016
The River Test
Chalk streams are regarded by their admirers with an affection which is unreasoning as true love ever should be, and of all such streams, the Test commands their deepest devotion. To appreciate its full individuality you have to go to the middle or lower reaches. The higher stretches are delicately beautiful, but you must get down about to Wherwell before the special qualities of the Test are apparent. There are its broad valley, the half cliffs, the swing and rush and depth of the river, and its strong clear volume. Most people think that Hampshire streams consist either of thin shallows, spread wide between flat meadows, or else still almost steamless depths, and it is a surprise to find the Test is strong, quick and deep. And, in spite of all the damage man has done and is is doing, it still keeps its character. Perhaps, to those who can look back so many years as I can, it has deteriorated. On the whole the hatch of fly is less plentiful, for you do not so often see those great volumes which were common thirty years ago. But I am satisfied that small fly is increasing and mayfly is quite as thick as any angler could want. In the upper reaches, too, trout are less abundant. Lastly, I am convinced, though the conviction rests on fallible personal observation, that the water is not as clear as it was. In order to appreciate the change, you have only to look at one of its pure tributaries, such as the Bourne, and you can then realise what the old Test was like. It was not so much that the water was stainless,: many streams are that, such, for instance, as the Dartmoor brooks: but it was as if it possessed a crystalline quality of its own, different from all other water. The colour of weeds and stones and gravel, seen through its medium, was not only not dimmed but acquired an added brilliancy and radiancy. This you do not see now, and in fact, even the upper Test is slightly tinged with colour. But still, in spite of the wear and tear of time, in spite of man and his many iniquities, the essential Test remain to us. She is still the greatest trout river in the world,: and it is to be hoped that this present generation will hand her on unspoilt to their successors.
'A Summer On The Test' - John Waller Hills, 1946
The Test at Wherwell |
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Sunday 11 September 2016
De Profundis - Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde |
De Profundis is a wonderfully wise, profound and moving letter written by Oscar Wilde from Reading Jail, and is here read in the same jail by Stephen Rae for the BBC.
An excerpt:
'Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow, - He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.'
They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her later life. I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn.
I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me; and during the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension.
I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and art.
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.
More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.
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Thursday 8 September 2016
Old Swan House Garden in September
The garden in early autumn |
The grasses and euphorbia seen through verbena |
The brighter colours of autumn |
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