Golgonooza

As a year of political upheaval and uncertain prospect comes to its close, I find myself remembering the one and only time I have been involved in a demonstration. This was in no way heroic of me, as it was by accident. I was in Albania and an election was being held. The then miss-named Democratic Party, then in government (as now), was nakedly cheating. A friend, an election observer, then working for the US-based Democratic Institute, came to a rural polling station just outside Tirana, explained who she was, and was heartily greeted with, 'You Democratic Party, We Democratic Party' whilst the hospitable officials carried on stuffing the ballot box! The Democratic Party celebrated their victory (one they could probably have won without cheating, Mr Putin take note) in the main square the following day whilst the O.S.C.E. observer mission thought it politic to withdraw to Vienna before releasing its damning report. The day after victory, the Socialist Party announce...

"The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art" by Roger Lipsey is a magnificent book that has done much to shift my understanding of, and appreciation for, 'abstraction' and has illuminated the spiritual exploration that, he admirably argues, underpinned the discoveries of many key twentieth century artists. Beginning with Kandinsky's own manifesto, 'On the Spiritual in Art', Lipsey shows us time and again that artists have been seeking new languages for expressing the human in a landscape where traditional forms have been, and seen to be, worn thin. They have not only confronted the painter, David Jones' question: what is the language for our effective signs? A question grounded in Jones' commitment to a given tradition of sign making - Roman Catholicism.  They being, predominantly, spiritually alive but of no fixed address, with no tradition of sign-making to renew, have been asking a two-fold question: what is an authentic spirituality and if this ...

I thought I would behave like a newspaper and round up books of the year that I have read. I would have to begin with Paul Scott's 'Raj Quartet'. The first time I read it was through a winter in Nizhny Novgorod, waiting upon Spring, and it struck me then as one of the great reading experiences. A novel series of great complexity both in its unfolding historical and personal events and in its psychological depth. Re-reading it, I was struck by the extraordinary portrait of evil that is Ronald Merrick and a portrait painted from 'outside'. We are never given his life and insights, except through the mirror of others: a study in character and its deformation. I had forgotten, also, how much God there is in the text - important to the lives of certain characters, and pondered on more generally. A second re-read, after a gap of many years, was Patrick White's 'The Vivisector', his fictional biography of an artist, that beautifully delineates in poetic, i...

There is a tradition for Christmas Eve that this is a time for ghost stories, like All Saints being proceeded by Halloween, and Lent by Carnival, the arrival of the light and restoration, must be proceeded by the dark and dissolution. Yesterday I was in London, waiting for my new passport to be processed, and so the obvious thing to do on a late, damp Friday afternoon was to go to the cinema. A quick tramp around Leicester Square revealed nothing that was available, starting at the right time, but at an Odeon, in a side street, there was 'The Awakening' just about to begin. Having no idea what this was (there was not even a poster), I bought a ticket and went into Screen 3, where there was precisely no one else! For the first time in my life, I found myself sitting in a cinema on my own! 'Ah well', I thought, 'it is warm...and I have paid'! 'The Awakening' was indeed a ghost story, bent around a story of trauma and loss: individual and colle...

One of my favourite books of the year was Christopher Rowland's 'Blake and the Bible'. It is a wonderful exploration of how this most eccentric of geniuses interpreted the Bible and in so doing was inspired in the matter of his art. One of his central convictions was that we are all participators in God's image and that this participation extends to all things for 'everything that lives is holy'. If I had one sentence to encapsulate my own credo that would be it! In the course of the book, Rowland explores Blake's strange painting of the Nativity (attached here). William Blake imagined that the Holy Family were both Mary & Joseph and Elizabeth & Zacharias and their off-spring: Jesus and his cousin, John. In this, Blake's unique depiction of the Nativity, the sceptical Zacharias is absent, but all the others are present. Zacharias is probably outside, smoking a fag, and wondering what all the fuss is supposed to be about (or wo...

Having read one novel, burnt into consciousness by being read young and loved, I thought I would read a second whose central protagonist is an artist. This one is even closer to my heart, having being read first when seventeen, when reading was all innocent absorption and assent (or rejection). It is Hermann Hesse's 'Narziss and Goldmund' (and unlike White's 'The Vivisector', I have read it several times, at intervals). The best way to approach Hesse, I now believe, is as fable. Extended and sophisticated as his novels are, they depend on a simplicity of symbolic form that gives them great resonance that removes them from realism. They are, like fairy tales, a genre in which he, also, excelled, archetypal, the characters carry fable before they flesh out in their histories, and it is the fable for which they are charged and memorable. This is especially so of their female characters, always seen through masculine eyes. They come as ciphers of transfor...

When I first visited Russia, I was taken one afternoon to one of the new markets that had sprung up in Moscow, full of traders, selling everything from cheap Turkish knickers to slabs of dark red-brown meat that slid from plastic bags, that had been stored in battered suitcases, onto makeshift tables. These were the people who were 'making it' hustling through disturbed times with grit and determination and guile. On the edge of the market was a woman in a well-kept fur coat holding a single crystal glass, hoping to sell it, needing to sell it, to supplement the shrunken pension that might not even come. She had been a public, municipal official, we discovered, and her comfortable, pre-fall life, had disintegrated and she was now surviving on meagre help from her equally pressed, public servant children, and selling items accumulated in the 'good times' (of late Brezhnev to which Mr Putin recently referred in nostalgic terms). You can imagine that if your life was ...