Epiblog for St Olaf's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Our plans to get the camper van ready to go off to Scotland have been forced to take a step backwards rather than forwards this week, as the relatively simple task of getting the boiler changed over and working again has so far confounded the plumbers on two separate days. It’s rapidly developing into the sort of saga Esther Rantzen used to feature on “That’s Life” for those of you old enough to remember it.

Don’t worry, though, this is not going to develop into one of those “and so we rang the gas board” consumer rants. I’ve already been there and done that, with my web page “Norwich Union stole my ceiling” several years ago now when those East Anglian insurance swindling oxygen thieves refused to pay up for the fallen plaster. One of the unfortunate legacies of owning your own house is that you are responsible for every disaster, for every bit that crumbles and falls off, and all of the battles you have to engage in to get it fixed again.

We’re back to TS Eliot and the fight to restore that which has been lost, for two weeks running, which I guess sort of proves his point. Anyway, the plumber is coming back tomorrow to finish off the very last of the work, and maybe we can salvage enough time out of the delay to get away for a fortnight or so in the general direction of Scotland, provided I can organise Kitty also going on her holidays to the Cattery at Honley for the same time. That’s another job for next week to add to my “to do” list, which currently has 27 urgent things on it today ranging from “empty bin” to “set up accounts in TurboCash”.

Speaking of Kitty, she hates all of the disruption and chaos caused by workmen in the house, with the hammering and drilling, and went missing for long periods of Tuesday and Wednesday. Actually, I am not overly fond of it myself. She was probably only out in the garden somewhere (or possibly upstairs in the old office, except she seems to have ceded that particular part of her territory to Spidey from next door, who can frequently be found curled up asleep on one of the old cat beds up there) but even so I was concerned that she wasn’t going to come back any time soon. However, by teatime on each of the two days in question, hunger and the desire to sit next to the stove, even though it wasn’t always lit, had overcome her natural reticence, and she was back in her accustomed place, either on the settee or on Zak’s chair in the conservatory.

She’s been enjoying the unaccustomed warm weather, and has, according to Debbie, developed a liking for drinking out of the pond for some reason, despite her having a nice bowl of clean water to sip from at any time she chooses, day or night. She seems to draw the line at stalking her own prey, however – various birds and squirrels come and go as they please, helping themselves to the bread and peanuts, and she never even lifts an eyebrow. Cat treats are so much easier to catch – you just go and sit by your bowl, looking hungry.

But she doesn’t like domestic DIY disasters, and neither do I. Actually, one surprising consequence of my writing last week about the doorknob coming off in my hand was that someone, a very kind dear person who reads this blog, actually sent me a doorknob in the post. It was a different kind of knob, and I am interpreting it as a charitable gesture and not an ironic comment on my own knobness, but either way, I quite like the principle of people reading what I have suffered and then rushing to rectify it, so, if you’re all paying attention, by way of experiment this week I’d like to write about my Ferrari with the nude model in the passenger seat being broken, and all of the money vanishing from my bank account. Cheers. I’ll be waiting behind the door for the postman.

Anyway, as I write this, as a result of Debbie’s general penchant for home demolishment, several kitchen units are in bits in the garage, and the fridge is in the front room. It’ll all get resolved in the end, either that, or we’ll end up on the next episode of “Half-Built House”.

In the midst of all the chaos and destruction, I’ve been trying to edit books with one leg, write some new stuff, do some publicity, and set up the new accounts. We have finally decided to ditch Sage on the grounds that it’s too expensive to upgrade to a version which will work on Windows 7, and still won’t give me the royalties reports I need because it treats payments as a lump sum and doesn’t split them down by line items. Still smarting from the loss of Adobe Pagemaker, I’d only contemplate paying for a Sage upgrade if they’d actually fixed the royalties thing, and even then only if someone shot me with a tranquilising dart to dull the pain of writing the cheque, but it doesn’t do it anyway, so I won’t.

In what laughingly counts as my spare time (usually the 20 minutes per day between getting into bed and falling asleep) this week I’ve been reading Painted Shadow, the extremely exhaustive and very well-written biography of Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, by Carole Seymour-Jones. The author’s contention is that Vivienne Eliot was much maligned and misunderstood, both in her lifetime, during the period she was actually married to him (1915-1947) for the last nine years of which she was committed to a private asylum in North London, and afterwards, by various biographers and writers on Eliot who have gone along with the generally received interpretation that Vivienne was neurotic, depressive and possibly mentally ill. Seymour-Jones argues that in fact she was as “sane” as the next person, or would certainly have been viewed as such today (indeed, Vivienne’s own brother said as much on visiting her) but that it suited Eliot, who had already fled the marital home some years before, and the Haigh-Wood family, to have her shut up.

This is another example, I suppose, of that process I wrote about last week (inspired by St Mary Magdalene) about the distortion of people by history, and the semi-mythical status which is attained by people who did actually (potentially) once exist, the different versions of them, depending who’s doing the asking, who’s setting the questions, and who’s writing down the answers. It seems to be a fairly universal process, it applies to commoners and Kings – there is a widespread movement to re-assess King Richard III as a good bloke really, and King Olaf of Norway, who became St Olaf of Norway, was a Viking pirate during his lifetime, known as Olaf the Fat, died in battle at Stiklestad in 1030, and was only canonised in the 1100’s after various miracles were attributed to him, the chapel of his shrine eventually becoming Trondheim Cathedral.

History, especially mythologised versions of ancient history, for which there are few if any records, is at the mercy of the interpreters. Ironically enough, for someone who was at least complicit, if not active, in the “authorised version” of his wife’s “illness”, Eliot actually wrote about this process, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” – about how our impression, our ideas of one poet or writer are inevitably viewed through the prism of everything that has happened since, and that they must have appeared in a very different light to their contemporaries:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

It goes beyond individuals, of course: it also applies to entire countries, peoples and nations, and their collective mythos. Thus, almost everyone famous in legend who has ever died is not actually dead, they are only sleeping, and will come back to help us in England’s hour of need – King Arthur under Glastonbury Tor, Francis Drake in his hammock down below, listening for drumbeats, Elvis in his chip shop in Kilmarnock.

Sometimes, we even embrace these myths ourselves without appreciating their full significance. Everyone has heard of King Alfred burning the cakes, Canute trying to turn back the tide, Robert the Bruce and his spider, or Lady Godiva riding naked through the streets of Coventry, but very few people know the back story. In Lady Godiva’s case, she apparently did it to protest against the punitive taxes levied on the people of the town by her husband Leofric, and he, jesting, said he’d reconsider, but only if she rode naked through the streets first.

I mention Lady Godiva specifically because – as part of the so-called “cultural Olympiad” which runs alongside the official Olympic Games – a six foot high puppet of “Lady Godiva” has set out on a journey from Coventry to London, powered by a team of cyclists, and dressed in an embroidered coat created by a team of glass and textile artists from across the West Midlands.

A mythologised, Merrie-England, pick and mix version of the past also featured very strongly this week, in the form of the Olympic opening ceremony. I am afraid I come at this from the standpoint of someone who doesn’t believe in the Olympic ideal, at least not as it is currently manifested, and who is very wary of patriotism being made compulsory, especially as the idea of “patriotism” espoused by The Blight and their myrmidons is much different to mine. But even assuming that you accept the questionable premise that the Olympics “needs” an opening ceremony in some way, this was not the one I would have come up with, given a blank sheet of paper and a seven year run-up. I’ve written extensively on the Olympics elsewhere in my other blog, and why I think it’s a bad idea and an excuse to impinge on civil liberties, so there’s not a lot of point in re-hashing it here.

I was, however, truly amazed to hear the opening ceremony described as “left-wing” by the MP for Cannock Chase, Aiden Burley. Obviously Mr Burley is the sort of person by whom the term “left-wing” is automatically used as a term of abuse, but even so, left-wing?

A truly left-wing "Opening Ceremony" would have had Isambard Kingdom Branagh shoving the Great Ormond Street volunteers up his chimneys after the child catcher Andrew Lansley had sold off Great Ormond street to the local Workhouse. But I guess they are hanging on to that idea for the next Tory manifesto.

It may well have been less traditional than some people (including me, actually, given that you accept the rather questionable premise that the Olympics needs an "opening ceremony" at all) would have hoped. It may well have been dismally populist with an undue prevalence given to the likes of Dizz E Rascal, whoever he might be. It may well have been a partial, and extremely loopy, selective prism of (largely English) history, with token contributions from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales - and why oh why did they choose "Jehovah" over "Calon Lan" - confusingly intercut with CGI episodes including some feeble attempts at humour, and featuring the compulsory modern dance troupes and drumming which have to be part of any "cultural experience" in the UK today, by law.

But left wing? I don't think so. A truly left wing gesture would have been to cancel the opening ceremony and use the money to keep the libraries schools and hospitals safe from The Blight and the likes of Aiden Burley. Or give the 7 million to Water Aid or something. But nobody in the UK in any position of power would have the guts to do that.

And while we are speaking of the mythology of “our” collective history and culture, I wonder how many of the 29million people who watched the choir sing Blake’s “Jerusalem” with a misty eye (the viewers, not the choir) realised that it was written by a supporter of the French Revolution, a supporter of free love and unbridled sexuality, and a man who considered the established churches and their oppression as “dark, Satanic mills,” an author who wrote elsewhere that:

Oothoon describes a utopian future time of free love, where she can catch girls for Theotormon and lie “on a bank & view their wanton play/ In lovely copulation bliss on bliss.” This is a vision of a future time when “Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love!” can be “Free as the mountain wind”

As Professor Christopher Rowland, a Professor of Theology at Oxford University, has argued the quotation from the Bible which Blake used to underscore the original text of what became “Jerusalem” in the preface to “Milton” (Numbers ch. 11, v. 29: "Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets.") includes

everyone in the task of speaking out about what they saw. Prophecy for Blake, however, was not a prediction of the end of the world, but telling the truth as best a person can about what he or she sees, fortified by insight and an "honest persuasion" that with personal struggle, things could be improved. A human being observes, is indignant and speaks out: it's a basic political maxim which is necessary for any age. Blake wanted to stir people from their intellectual slumbers, and the daily grind of their toil, to see that they were captivated in the grip of a culture which kept them thinking in ways which served the interests of the powerful.

Plus ca change. Still, I expect the organisers didn’t read further than the line about “Chariots of Fire”. The legend on which the rhetorical questions in Blake’s lines are is that Jesus actually visited the West Country and specifically Glastonbury, with Joseph of Arimathea. There is a saying in Somerset – “as sure as our Lord was at Priddy”. Also at Priddy, an otherwise unremarkable spot in the Mendips, a carol sung by the children of Priddy begins: "Joseph was a tin merchant, a tin merchant, a tin merchant”, and goes on to describe him arriving from the sea in a boat.

I see that Jesus has somehow sidled unnoticed into this Epliblog, yet again. Apart from being St Olaf’s day, today is apparently, according to the Lectionary, the eighth Sunday after Trinity, so we seem to be well into what the Church of England loves to call “Common Time” – or, as the rest of us know it, 4/4.

As it turns out, the Old Testament text for today is apparently the Song of Solomon, which is another instance of something completely random having been included in the canonical version of the Bible, although William Blake would undoubtedly have liked it, and probably did. It’s supposed to be an allegorical representation of the love between God and the Church, apparently.

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.
The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.
My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.
My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

Great stuff. I haven’t a Scooby what any of it means, and by the time Solomon (or the author, if indeed they are not one and the same) starts burbling on about “take away the foxes, the little foxes”, I am not sure he has, either. I just hope there were enough mushrooms to go round, so everyone else could see the foxes as well. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding its complete gagadom, in a strange way it is very compelling, a bit like Open University programmes used to be when you came in from the pub, late at night. It all seemed to make sense at the time, in its own terms. I like the sound of The Rose of Sharon very much, and I hope to see it one day. Even if I have to shew myself through the lattice. Later verses (5:3) include “I have taken off my dress, why should I put it on again?” Why indeed? Let me introduce you to Mr Blake.

Anyway, summer has come to these magical mythical isles, and to the Holme Valley. Next week brings yet more banging, sawing and hammering, and maybe, just maybe, the possibility of getting ready to go on holiday, who knows. In the meantime, tomorrow, I will be waiting for the plumber. In the conservatory, with the lead piping.