Golgonooza

A further reminder from LiveJournal of what I posted a while back - an appreciation of the artist, Lorna Graves. I remember that first meeting vividly. We were in the White Hart Bar at the conference day's end; and, somehow the poet, David Gascoyne, Lorna, and myself created an ''introverts'' corner (maximum three). We primarily listened to David talk of poetry, existentialism, and his current reading of the Russian religious philosopher, Lev Shestov, making pertinent comments, asking gentle questions, and enjoying each other's presence. Lorna died too young in 2006:  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/lorna-graves-413087.html "I met Lorna at Dartington Hall at the first Temenos Conference on 'art and the renewal of the sacred'. It was an appropriate location: Dartington had acted as shelter and support for her artistic mentor: Cecil Collins and it was his work that had furnished the cover image for the journal Temenos' first edition....

Having just re-read it, LiveJournal (that is reminding me of past posts from my time when I used it living in Moscow), today offered up Patrick White's 'Riders in the Chariot'. "After contemplating the books not read, thoughts naturally turn to those read and enjoyed of which one always stands out: Patrick White’s ‘Riders in the Chariot’. A contemporary reviewer for ‘The Times’ called it, by comparison to other current novels, a ‘cathedral surrounded by booths’ and the analogy with religious architecture is apt. Like all great art it is a novel that takes risks: it has as a central character a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who rejects his intellectual past and an offered Zionist future and settles in Australia to become an ordinary worker at the ‘Brighta Bicycle Lamp’ factory. Here on one Good Friday he is subjected, as an outsider and as a Jew, to a mock drunken crucifixion by his fellow workers. Into the vortex of his life come three, equally eccentric, characters...

LiveJournal, the Russian-hosted blog site, that I used to use when I lived in Moscow has been reminding me of what I have posted in the past. Today, it cast this into my email inbox: my best friend, mentor, and who I continue to miss deeply.  "Ann, pictured here on her last holiday in Barbados, and difficult to imagine that she had only six months to live. She was the founder, and I the first employee, of the Prison Phoenix Trust: twenty-one this year. She was, for the five years I knew her, my closest friend and the person whose confidence in me drew me out and restored me to life, after a difficult transition into my twenties. She was an extraordinary person who had originally wanted to be a dancer, and she carried herself as one throughout life. Born in India to a father in the Indian Civil Service during the Raj, she had become the only permanent European student of Uday Shankar, the great Indian choreographer, by dint of persuasion and charm. It was an exploration cut short b...