Golgonooza

  Mrs. Wilkins sitting in her women's club during a dismal, rain-sodden English winter, espies an advert in The Times for renting a castle in Italy in April promising wisteria and sunshine. She is intrigued and notices that Mrs. Arbuthnot, a distantly recognized acquaintance from Church, is similarly engaged.  "Why not enquire?" she suggests. Using her nest egg, patiently acquired from her solicitor husband's allowance and Mrs. Arbuthnot's savings from a generous, if distant, husband, it may be possible. The inquiry must overcome several challenges - the expected disapproval of Mrs. Wilkins' husband and  Mrs. Arbuthnot's conscience as to the source of her income, a conscience that rails against self-indulgence and prefers expenditure on 'the poor'. This sits uneasily with her husband who writes best-selling biographies of famous mistresses! However, progress is made, and to further share the burden of the castle's expenses, two further women ar...

  When a Yanomami shaman was asked how they had got from highly poisonous plant to medicinal treatment when trial and error would have been repeatedly deadly, the shaman simply replied: "The plant told me." But within our materialist 'western' perspective listening to plants is at best a metaphoric exercise in projection, rather than a simple, if challenging, craft of imagination, perseverance and of the plant's grace. This was not always so, nor is this an indigenous practice for which you need to travel far, except perhaps in one's willingness to slow down, slip down and listen carefully.  In Kassabova's new book, she travels back once more to her native Bulgaria and to one particular valley, that of the Mesta river, and its surrounding mountains to pick up the traces of the traditions of herbal medicine and weaves them into a haunting picture of lives lived enfolded within community, an encompassing nature and souls' journeys after illumination. His...

David Jones, 'Nativity with Shepherds and Beasts Rejoicing' 1929-1930 All four hooves, Welsh as a pony on hill are inches off the frosted ground. They skip for a fish tight saviour who is swathed in stillness between apple breast and pillow of hair. Come to look at it, all are off the ground: cow and ladle, shepherdess and lute, bits of floating Latin, but all stock still, as if playing statues. I am waiting for the cockerel to spill its redness on the page to Botticelli up the colour and set the world in motion, from out of winter into summer. Then the snow will melt and who knows what the sun might loose them into. A David Jones Nativity (Gentilis animetur) by David Scott When the wonderful Irish artist, Patrick Pye, and his equally, if not more wonderful wife, Noirin, visited me in Macedonia we went on a Church crawl, punctured by leisurely lunches and dinners, in search of the striking frescoes that populate many of its churches, especially at St. Panteleimon outside Skopje...

  'What a Human Being Is' 1910 Hilma af Klint Hilma af Klint, posthumously, has become the artistic equivalent of a 'rock star' and one who appears to be permanently on tour. Wherever she goes, she can break box office records, as she did at the Guggenheim in New York in 2018-19. You can even buy Hilma af Klint scarves and socks - the height of art gallery shop acclaim!  When she died in 1944 in relative obscurity, she had bequeathed her artwork to her nephew with instruction not to show it for at least twenty years, imagining that a future audience would be more receptive, which has turned out to be deeply prescient; and, since she appeared at 'The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985' show in Los Angeles in 1988 her reputation has gathered pace. This has primarily rested on the fact that her pioneering of abstraction pre-dates that of Kandinsky and that, being a woman, the reality of her pioneering was obscured from view. Would her paintings' rece...

  Claude Houghton was an English novelist, playwright, and poet whose work, whilst being praised by his contemporary authors - J.B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole, Graham Greene, and, most notably, Henry Miller, never ignited sufficient momentum with the public to survive the passage of time (though the excellent Valancourt Books  https://www.valancourtbooks.com/  have brought five of his works back into print). Reading his novel 'All Change, Humanity!', published in 1942, I began to see why.  In the earlier novels, the ones republished by Valancourt, his deepest interests are there but offered obliquely. You see his philosophical playfulness, his interest in questions of identity and of the unity and, more often, fragmentation of the self, the ways in which our perception of any person is molded by our needs so differently and culminating at hinting at a prospective transformation of a person that yields a whole new perspective, a renewing Eden. In this, later novel, writt...

  Alongside not bathing (a stereotype that happens not to be true) and mouths of rotting teeth (equally false), one other aspect of the Middle Ages we can do without apparently is the Medieval model of the cosmos. Superseded by science, it might remain of antiquarian interest but no more than that. In no way can it be be believed in or operate as a model whose contemplation may have something to offer us in the course of our lives. We have, happily or not, superseded the medieval mind. C.S. Lewis, however, thought differently and not only was he an engaged, and engaging, scholar of that very mind but sought to imaginatively transpose it in forms that put it to use in helping shape minds anew whether through Christian apologetics, science fiction or children's fantasy. Jason M. Baxter's 'The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind' lucidly explores how he did so, and more importantly why we might ourselves think it important. We might think it im...

  The story one tells oneself, and projects toward others, at a particular time, might be wholly necessary for your well-being, even your survival but, as time passes, if not relinquished or refashioned, it may become destructive of your, and others' lives. It was one of the most helpful lessons of my own analysis - the story was necessary then, but now? How might it be surrendered and reshaped? Hugh Brody's mother was a Jewish refugee from Vienna, fleeing to Sheffield in 1938, falling in love, marrying, and hiding into the safety of English 'normality' by silencing her past, sheltering her children from the knowledge of where she had come from, why, and how many of her extended family were perishing in the Holocaust. But silences like this, though very real, are rarely watertight. Her mother, Brody's grandmother, whispers, and intimates other narratives; and, his mother is distorted by a passionate anger that rips through his family life, unexplained. Brody was ini...