Ludwig van who?

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In our apotheosis of the greatest artists we strip them of the very humanity that lies at the root of that greatness.  Too often we elide the life, thinking of the works, not the men and women who made them.  We may know in a purely abstract way that they were born on such a date, studied here, married there, produced this masterpiece under those conditions, but these remain disembodied statements: they have no person at their centre.

Because of our awe, we tend to think of Beethoven, say, as a kind of Platonic essence, the common divine factor to all his music.  We forget that he was ultimately a deaf, smelly old man who died in great loneliness.  More importantly, we forget that he was born at a time when the classical idiom in music was reaching its maturity; as a result, he happened to arrive on the scene when there was a perfect framework for the kind of compositional iconoclasm that forms the core of his achievement.  In a word, as far as timing was concerned, he was lucky.

This may seem an outrageous thing to say about one of the supreme musical masters; but it does not detract from that mastery: the music he wrote still required an incomparable genius to write it.  But the fact remains that just as his time needed someone with exactly his skills to produce the works he did, so Beethoven himself needed precisely that time.

Take the same man - the same physical and psychological make-up, though obviously with an upbringing changed in details - born now in the fourteenth century.  Music was fundamentally different in its sound, its structure, its scale, and in its performance.  A fourteenth century Beethoven might well have produced masterpieces within those conventions, but they would never have had the impact of works which could draw on the rich and complex possibilities of the classical language at its peak.

The same is true of all the greatest artists.  Shakespeare needed the English language to be poised exactly as he found it - a fresh and subtle blend of powerful Anglo-Saxon roots with infinitely variable Latinate extensions.  Born a hundred years later and his works for the stage would have been incomprehensible doggerel.  Rembrandt too absolutely required the Renaissance's anthropocentric assumptions, and his milieu's painterly techniques, to make the final searing self-portraits possible.  Picture him during the impressionist era, an eccentric and obsessive academician.

If the key creators are great partly because of their eras, it follows that there may well be hidden among us Beethovens and Rembrandts or equivalent figures, whose particular cast of genius is at odds with today's artistic currents; they are like powerful orators forced to use a bad phrase book to communicate awkwardly in a language not their own.

But we should not mourn these losses too much; after all, there are for certain greater tragedies.  For example, the millions of gifted children who will never realise or even discover their vocation, through being born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in a desperate poverty which makes art a superfluity.  There are Beethovens out there, for sure; but we will never know their names.

(1989)

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The knife's deity

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The story of weaponry has been the saga of actions at increasing  distance.  The mutual danger of hand-to-hand grappling gave way first to the impersonal stones and clubs, and then to slings and arrows which removed the attacker from the immediate arena of the attack.  Following them were guns whose thousand yard reach was then lengthened into miles with the development of artillery.  Today the ultimate weapon will be launched with the press of a button by people buried deep in the earth against unseen and unknown populations half the world away.  Target and effects will be little more than figures on a monitor, the final de-personalisation of the business of murder.

Amidst this abstract death by technology, the knife remains the most intimate of weapons, and still provokes an elemental fear in us.  The very act of stabbing is like a violation of the tissues it penetrates.  To be cut with a knife is to feel an invasion of the body: it is as if the blade were probing for the soul within.

The knife is not gross like a blow from a club; it is not sudden and brutal like a bullet.  There is something haughty and horribly clinical about a knife; it is no coincidence that the sharpest and most efficacious knife of all is that wielded by the disinfected, omnipotent surgeon.  Such antiseptic sterility suggests the inhuman; and what is inhuman is by implication inexorable.

Hence the propensity of crazed murderers to choose some old fashioned blade for their worst and most depraved acts.  Often those acts tend towards the ritualistic, and the knife has always been a pre-requisite for sacrifice: picture the spiritual squalor of a ceremony in which the victim - animal or human - were shot or clubbed to death.  The knife sanctifies that which it destroys, as if it were the mysterious touch of something that blesses.

We acknowledge frankly this ever-present god of the knife.  Given a honed and glinting blade, we hold it gingerly, and handle it reverently.  We know that there is a powerful spirit within, whom we treat without due respect at our peril.  Vengeance is swift and terrible.

This I found to my cost once.  Handling a Swiss army knife with a positively baroque multiplicity of tools, I began carelessly exploring its secrets.  After opening the main blade I found its lesser brothers and sisters.  Then there were corkscrews, bottle-openers, and a pair of scissors, first cousins to the knife.  All of these were released awkwardly, but the scissors proved particularly difficult.

In frustration, I tugged hard on them.  Finally they emerged in their miniature Swiss neatness.  All this while I had neglected the splay of razor-sharp knives already arrayed.  As I sprang out the scissors suddenly, my thumb drove deep onto one of the waiting blades.  For a second or two I gazed abstractly at the clean parting of the flesh; then a huge bright red blossoming welled up.  I realised I had sinned against the knife's deity, and that this was my punishment and reparation.

(1987)

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Wallpaper

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Powerscourt is a great country house just outside Dublin.  It stands on a magnificent site with formal terraced Italian gardens running down a steep hillside towards a lake and a fountain framed by tall, dark trees.  The Wicklow mountains form the backdrop.  Tragically the house itself was gutted by fire in 1974; all that remains is the shell.  Peering through the windows at what were once the grand saloons, you see massive bushes and greenery pressed up against the glass, eerily filling the whole space.  In one of the wings the rooms remain bare and empty.  There you see no foliage, just ancient, faded wallpaper.

There is something particularly sad about old wallpaper exhibited in this unwonted, even unseemly, manner.  It is as if wallpaper were the undergarments of a house.  Unlike the bluff, confident facades presented to the outside world, wallpaper is meant to remain private and hidden.  In the harsh light of day it looks wan and vulnerable.

This sense of vulnerability stems from all the emotions we invest in our wallpapers.  New wallpaper is put up with such hope; it is an act of faith in a domicile.  And few things in our home make such a strong statement about our self-image, our chosen environment, our aspirations.

For this reason wallpaper does not travel well between different domestic contexts: often the first task after moving into a new house is to strip the old owner's wall coverings.  The act is partly symbolic: the old internal skin is sloughed off, and a new one grafted on.  Mostly it is simply that you find their choice appalling and incomprehensible.

The incomprehensibility of other people's wallpaper is literal: you cannot understand the patterns and the accretion of other marks.  The latter are born of years of living, and can only be read by their authors.  That was where we spilt the soup; that was when the dog went wild; that was the height of little Freddy when he was two.  Wallpapers absorb our lives' tiny details: they are a domestic palimpsest.

More importantly, you cannot read the patterns.  Living with a wallpaper means imbibing its pattern, humming along to its visual mantra.  Each day that pattern is reinforced until your eyes become so conversant with it that it is part of the very fabric of the visible world.  Encountering a new wallpaper is like hearing a harsh and discordant eye-music.

The importance and impact of wallpaper patterns is perhaps greatest for children.  They spend much of their early lives in bed, either ill or else failing to go to sleep.  What is there to do, but look at the wallpaper?  Again and again and again, until they feel hypnotised by its insidious and relentless rhythms.  The shapes and images begin to vibrate and hover in space; they seem to be filling the entire world; for the bed-ridden child, it is the world.  Which is why we are still shocked and saddened to see a house or block of flats being pulled down.  The intimate wallpapers are exposed, their secrets revealed, the personal histories betrayed.  When we see wallpaper abused in this way we see the past torn and fading, and we are suddenly aware of the paper-like fragility of our own world.

(1989)

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Chiral asymmetries

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The word 'sinister' says it all: it means, originally, left, and its unabashed negativity stands in stark contrast to the positive connotations of 'dexterity', which derives similarly from the Latin word for 'right'.  But it is no wonder: Nature itself discriminates.  If it were literally even-handed, there would be as many people born with hearts on their right as those with them on the left; in fact this reversal of all the body's organs is extremely rare.

Chirality - that is, handedness - is altogether a mysterious business.  Consider the mirror:  facing it, your right side becomes your left, and your left, your right; and yet top does not swap places with bottom.  Actually, nothing swaps over; it is simply that chirality is intimately bound up with the 'sense' of space - a sense which the mirror reverses.  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for such a profound concept, chirality crops up frequently in the world of sub-nuclear physics.  Handedness goes to the heart not just of life, but of reality too.

Mysterious it all may be as a philosophical abstraction, but the many practical consequences of Nature's unfair habits are not in doubt.  Since there can be no compromise between right and left, the sinister part of the world loses out in a vote decided by a crude show of hands.

We dextrists may take corkscrews for granted; imagine, though, if the turn went the other way.  Handles in general presuppose that your right arm is the stronger; if it is not, you are faced by a difficult choice: a weak, but natural action, or a strong, unnatural one.

Things are improving.  As the world population has increased, so has the viability of catering for the minority group of the left-handed.  Consequently, many everyday objects that imply or have acquired a handedness can be obtained in a mirror-image form.  Leaving aside the joke left-handed teacups, there are now scissors for the left-handed, as well as flutes, violins and guitars.  At least the widespread availability of the left-handed pen nib, along with writing tools that assume no one chirality, has brought equality to a crucial area; after all, Arabic script is produced right to left with the right hand - an equivalent situation to that of the sinistrist scribe in a dextrist writing system.

But there remains one domain that is stubbornly handist, with little hope of any remedy: that of traditional Western art.  Representational paintings expect to be read from left to right.  Typically an optimistic image will rise across the canvas, a gloomy and despondent one fall.  Thus, like chirality, the mood of a picture also is reversed in its mirror-image.  That this was explicitly understood is proved by the habit of composing subjects with the emphases switched in the other direction when painting cartoons for tapestries, for example in Raphael's great series.  Transferring the cartoon image to the tapestry reversed the sense, and so restored the traditional chirality and created the intended effect.  As a consequence, for those with a leftish take on the world most of the greatest masterpieces of Western art must seem subtly but irredeemably flawed; no sinister plot, for a change, but a dextrist one.

(1989)

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The weekly essay

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When I was a schoolboy, I used to dread Monday afternoons.  It was the day we wrote our English essay.  The classes you hate are often those taken by some mentally defective bully whose only pathetic pleasure is to terrorise hapless children.  In this case it must have been from some deep antipathy to the form, or else a sense of personal inadequacy with words; it certainly had nothing to do with Mr Thurlow.

Normally grown-ups tower over you at school; Sammy Thurlow appeared small even to us in our short trousers.  He looked like a tiny Amazonian Indian dressed in a characterless grey demob suit.  And there would be no need to shrink his head: it was already brown and shrivelled, as if chain-smoking had cured him from the inside out.

On the Friday before the essay, Mr Thurlow would turn to us, his rheumy  eyes avoiding our gazes as ever, and between near-fatal coughing fits give us our theme for the following Monday.  We wondered where he got them from: 'it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive'; 'ambition'; 'the pen is mightier than the sword.'  They could have been framed in Sammy's native Amazonian dialect for all the relevance they had to this twelve-year old.

I did not understand essays then.  Drawn more naturally to mathematics, I could only approach essays as problems in search of a solution.  But answers were hard to come by: was the pen mightier than the sword, or not?  The best I could hope for were a series of alternatives, each paragraph nullifying the next with its "on the one hand" or "on the other."  I was deeply envious of fellow schoolmates who were able to take the title as the starting point for some huge fantasia, a pell-mell rush of ideas and images which never seemed to bother themselves with a final destination.  I was also convinced that in some sense they were cheating.

I could have lived with the rigours of my dialectical approach had it been easy to apply.  But it was not.  Every Monday I was faced with the same blank piece of paper, as if all my previous essays had been in vain.  I was oppressed by the sense of distance to be covered, as if the sheet of paper were all uphill.  The essay's form seemed to be a Procrustean bed which stretched my limited ideas and poor creativity to breaking point.

I realise now that it was meant to.  An essay that was easy to write would have been a waste of time.  As I vaguely but correctly sensed, writing is a journey, and often through harsh terrain.  Its destination is not an answer, but a coming together and accommodation of your current ideas.  Which was why I found essay-writing so hard: I had no ideas.

Nor did writing really help me to discover any.  Ideas come only from experience, be it your own or other people's.  As the first ideas begin to germinate within you, the essay becomes not so much simpler as richer.  The act of writing is a crystallisation of ideas; like a crystal, it is formed by creating links, and by establishing a larger order.  That order, however, is only one of many.  As its name suggests, an essay is an attempt, an instance of ambition and of travelling hopefully.

(1987)

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