Magic at Wittenham

A day spent at the Wittenham Clumps (and Dorchester on Thames). The Clumps stand on a hill above the Thames valley from which the views emanate as gentling spectacle shot through with modernity.

To one side is the very visible Didcot Power Station, though soon to be decommissioned and eventually dismantled, to another, distant power project which is JET - the Joint European Taurus - an experimental nuclear fusion reactor wanting to take off where Didcot's coal steps down. I thought the transiency of both would not outlive the trees, these trees or their successor trees. The natural world is transient but our makings more so.

But even the lumbering Didcot fails to dominate a vision of distant hills, a closer, meandering river and the scattered villages of Oxfordshire, most prominent of which is Dorchester itself.

Dorchester on Thames is a town out of time, bypassed by the main road, it stands in its own stillness. At the beautifully simple Abbey, they were rehearsing for an evening performance of Sir Arthur Sullivan's 'The Golden Legend'. It seemed apt - a Victorian cantata - a piece of serious music from a composer wholly secured in the popular imagination for his collaboration on comic operettas with W.S. Gilbert. A piece of music out of the mainstream in a village similarly displaced!

The Wittenham Clumps were a favourite theme of the neo-Romantic English twentieth century painter, Paul Nash. He painted them throughout his career (as above, towards the end of his life). They were endlessly suggestive (akin to Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire) to exploration and offered themselves both to realistic presentation, formal exploration and imaginative transformation. This latter mode is evident in the painting above - the moon rises on the summer solstice and the magic suggested stretches beyond the natural.

I first visited, many years ago, when I lived near by, cycling to Little Wittenham and the locks on the river and walking up to the Clumps, round to Dorchester and back. I usually went on a weekday, when all was collected and still and you had the trees and their accompanying 'iron age fort' to yourself. They became imprinted as a magical space, and they ever remain as such.

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog