Tuesday. Quite a fun meeting on xxxx - certainly a lot more relaxing than the previous morning in xxxx when I struggled single-handedly to defend our lines against the advancing Austrian hordes ! By clambering over the bodies of their own dead piled in heaps on the parapet, some adjectival phrases succeeded in breaking into our trench and were only subdued after desperate hand-to-hand fighting involving much close-quarter use of the bayonet.
As the meeting drifted quietly on, life in the booth was a veritable hive of creative activity. Andy Upton had brought with him his drawing pad and 2B pencils and was busy drawing his own hand. I hadn't realized what he was doing and wondered why his hand was posed in such a peculiar way - the consequence of a lifetime devoted to self-handling possibly? Andy is actually very good, approaching his task with the focused attention and conscientious application which is typical of everything he does. Talking about it, he explained how he was seeking to attain a sufficient level of technique to be able to capture the inner life underneath the surface appearance. Well, I don't suppose you can ever have too much technique, but I can't help thinking that ultimately what is really required is a certain sensibility on the part of the artist which is more than just technique. It's probably one of those left-brain, right-brain things. I remember years ago an art teacher on TV recommending drawing with both hands simultaneously for that very reason. Dufy, although right-handed for everything else, painted exclusively with his left hand.
When he wasn't drawing or (when pushed to it) interpreting, Andy devoted himself to reading some whopping great novel in Finnish. A "Great Work of Modern Finnish Literature" - about a thousand pages of recherché descriptive prose, recommended, of course, by Jari! Jari rang me up from Finland to tell me that he could order a translation into Swedish if I wanted. I told him I'd get back to him once I'd got through the the lengthening list of other "books I must read", so I'm safe for a month or two!
Anyway, while all this was going on, I was enthusiastically recommending passages from the sermons of Meister Eckhart to Karl Telfer. I'd been dipping into one of those little yellow Reclam editions I'd picked up while on mission in Austria (see earlier posting). He, however, affected to be utterly absorbed in the sports pages of the Independent!
During some lull in the proceedings, our conversation drifted, quite naturally I thought, onto the subject of Ibsen. My innocent reference to the Father of Modern Drama was, however, greeted with hoots of anti-intellectual derision. One does, on occasion, have the impression of casting pearls before the proverbial swine! What this illustrates, it seems to me, is the relativity of culture. In a Scandinavian context there is nothing remotely abstruse about a reference to Ibsen. In fact he enjoyed a huge Europe-wide reputation. Joyce learned Norwegian specifically in order to be able to read him in the original. His plays are still regularly staged. Just last autumn, in fact, we saw Hedda Gabler in London. I've got a biography somewhere. I must dig it out. Another one to add to the list!

Saturday afternoon. Went on a mini-trip to Antwerp to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art, the MuHKA. I'd heard about this temple of the avant-garde when studying "kunstkritiek" at the KUL in Leuven. I'd signed up for the course imagining it to be a likely forum for "heated debate" and the chance to meet people and talk about the role of art in smokey cafés after lectures. That was clearly the intention of the lecturer who worked really hard to get things going, but it was always an uphill struggle against the stolid passivity and endemic shyness of the students. She made much of the "Crisis van de Kunst in Vlaanderen". I couldn't help feeling rather smugly that it was all a bit of a storm in a tea-cup. It seems to me that we have a crisis of art tout court. Cut off from its natural hinterland of spiritual inspiration and didactic purpose, deprived, for fear of Kitsch, even of simple joy in beauty, many "artists" today seem to be little more than purveyors of vapid trendiness to vapid trendies - flogging an overworn Marcel Duchamp joke to death.
This was certainly the impression one got from the permanent exhibition. Anna was quite ruthless: "Pretentious crap!". The most striking exhibit was an installation by Jan Fabre. His name had cropped up a lot on the course. It would appear that he is very successful (rich) and an accomplished showman who demands (and gets) a reaction from his audience. He'd set up a plastic tent in a bare empty room. As you approached, it looked like camouflage material, but on closer inspection it revealed itself to be made up of strips of raw ham distributed over a transparent membrane. It smelt awful. Around the room were hanging repulsive, what looked like sides of pork reconstituted out of strips of ham like papier maché. At one end there was a series of what appeared to be dogs' doings moulded into some primitive form each on its sheet of newspaper. It could be some profound nihilistic comment about identity and the death of the flesh, but, then again, it could be a nasty little boy showing off.
Downstairs was a temporary exhibit of video art by the Turk, Kutlug Ataman. His work consists essentially of a lot of video footage of ordinary, but weird people telling their stories on camera.
There is an implicit comment on the duplicitous nature of the TV medium itself as the purveyor of dreams and fantasies. The suggestion is that the speakers somehow invent their identity as they speak, but that, in fact, identity is far less certain than we or the interviewees believe.
The most interesting exhibit for me was one consisting of some quite ordinary people speaking quite prosaically of their experience of reincarnation following violent and sudden death. While the artist obviously sees this as another example of the precarious nature of identity, I was much more focussed on the basic issue of metempsychosis. Their testimonies were so unaffected and convincing that one couldn't question their sincerity. Do we come back? Do we all come back? Is there a soul? If so, what is it? Do we all have a soul? One thing which came across from the interviews was the idea that a specific task was to be achieved in each lifetime. What would that task be? What would my task be? Am I fulfilling it just by being alive, or is some specific initiative required of me? Quite a lot of questions really.
Leaving the building, I was struck by the notion that the whole museum was, in a sense, an unwitting exhibit. A blank, modern, empty-feeling, soulless construction housing an incoherent collection of random "works" by artists with their own private, but definitely self-important iconography, each seeking to communicate the impossibility of communication in the modern world. A bit like real life!

Spent the best part of last Saturday round at Yosound studio recording with John Makin. Yosound is owned and run by our co-conspirator "Yoyo" Yovanofski who will be familiar to the cognoscenti for his excellent work on Zen Blues. Creeping into his cosy converted remise and closing the heavy soundproof door on the demands and distractions of the outside world is a reassuring back-to-the-womb experience. By playing "live", with no overdubs, we managed to get down eight tracks in five hours, which is pretty good going by any standards. Despite the odd little glitsch, we're very pleased with what will be a first-rate demo for our Country Blues act - John on guitar and vocals and myself on harmonica and harmonies.
Titles include:
"Jesus on the Main Line " (Traditional, arranged John Makin)
"Corn Bread, Peas, Black Molasses" ( Sonny Terry and Brownie Magee)
"Come on in my Kitchen" ( Robert Johnson)
John's got a gig lined up for us in May, so watch this space!

Finished reading "The Climate of Treason" by Andrew Boyle. Subtitled "Five who Spied for Russia", it's a thing I picked up in a second-hand bookshop in York last month, when I was going through my Philby craze. What is the rather obsessive fascination with all this spy stuff? Obviously the class aspect is irresistible in that slightly prurient English way, but I think the whole issue of deception is a very important factor too. Our lives are full of deceptions, both of ourselves and of others. While seeking to present a more or less homogeneous image to the outside world, we are aware, consciously or even unconsciously, of all sorts of inner contradictions and ambivalent motives within ourselves. In other words, the persona we seek to project on the outside world is a sort of convenient fake and we cannot help but be impressed by those who are able to "fake it" to such an extravagant degree.
Boyle is particularly good on the Zeitgeist of the thirties which caused ordinarily left-leaning Cambridge undergraduates to go "all the way" and become fully paid-up Stalinists. The senseless and appalling slaughter of the "War to end all Wars" and the utter incapacity of the capitalist system to offer any sort of valid response to the Great Depression suggested to some that there was a need to sweep away the whole of the old rotten structure and start again afresh.
More personal, psychological motives are also revealed. Burgess seems to have had a pathological need to nurture a posy sense of one-upmanship. Maclean was in search of a secular pseudo-religion to replace the abandoned Calvinism of his boyhood. Philby wished to emulate his swashbuckling Lawrence of Arabia figure of a father in deeds of anti-establishment derring-do.
Why did they keep at it so long? Fear of the consequences of being revealed? But the fourth man (Blunt as we now know) was able to cut a deal with the authorities. Boyle astutely suggests a case of a sort of arrested development, whereby they were never able to shake off the mind-set of their youth. I find that argument rather convincing. I still carry within me attitudes and assumptions which retain a strong flavour of those critical formative years of sixth-form and University (1967-1974), which probably influence my interpretation of the world about me far more than I realise myself. Funnily enough, I recently stumbled across a quotation from Ibsen, who makes the very same point, but in a still more categorical way: "There are truths which have attained such an age that they have really outlived themselves. and when a truth becomes as old as this it is on the best way to become a lie..."

I am still recovering from a nightmare vision of what awaits interpreting-kind in another world - an eternity of xxxx in the xxxx! Not that it was particularly hard, rather that it plumbed new depths of agonizingly elaborate pointlessness. The star attraction was the chairman, who, rather like some demonic Rumpelstinskin in reverse, contrived to spin endless bales of straw out of gold. Well, on reflection, use of the word "gold" in this context is way too generous, more the "bleeding obvious". Those who had the ill-fortune to be there will never forget the rampant vegetative growth which resulted from his desperate attempt to explain how a one-and-a-half-hour lunch-break works. Indelibly imprinted on the mind are the prolix arabesques generated by his exegesis on the language regime. Working with N. and G., we succumbed to a full-on "fou rire", and, hysterically trying to hold it together, I had to send Guy out of the room! The lenteur of the proceedings was at times physically painful. It reminded me of a passage in Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London", where he describes the unalleviated dullness of life as a tramp: "Boredom congealed in the veins like cold mutton fat." At one stage I almost fell asleep while I was interpreting, like falling asleep at the wheel. The whole proceedings evoked an atmosphere of artful contrivance devoid of real content- a pretendy meeting pretending to discuss the preparation of future pretendy meetings!
Bring on the week-end!

Wednesday 15th March

The spring arrived this morning. I felt it when I woke up. Of course, my untrusting cerebral mind required visual evidence, but a glance out the window only confirmed what the body already knew. The body is extraordinarily intelligent in its own way. Just take the incredible workings of the internal organs, which (thankfully) do not require the slightest intervention by our conscious minds. My eldest daughter (the doctor) says that, the more you learn about the workings of the human body, the greater the sense of amazement and wonder. But the body lives a lonely life, largely ignored or even abused by the so-called "higher functions".
I took the bike to work, ostensibly to avoid the trafic inevitably associated with a nine o'clock start, but really in order to participate fully in the magic of the new season. Although the air was still cold, the sun was already quite high in the sky and the birds were all singing away for all they were worth. At times like this, one gets the beginnings of a sense of what is meant by "the miracle of life". The body active and alive, the heart buoyed up by a spirit of optimism, the mind relaxed but alert.

Inspired by this enhanced state of awareness, a little poem popped out of the woodwork, influenced to a degree by the Danish poet , "Piet Hein" and his celebrated "Grooks".

If I say

I was lost in thought

I got carried away

I disappeared into a book

Where should I have been?

A poem is a machine

To return us to ourselves

Here

Now

I am

Beside myself with joy

Sunday 12th March

Got back from Salzburg late last night. Andy and I had hoped to stay on for the Sunday after the Gymnich meeting and try a bit of snow-shoeing in the Tennenberg mountains (near Werfen and its castle, where they shot "Where Eagles Dare"), but the forecast was pretty atrocious, so we cut our losses and got out Saturday night.
Before that, however, found a bit of time to look around Salzburg, which is spectacular. Took what I hope is a great picture from the Mirabell Garten, near the conference centre, across the Altstadt with its Baroque towers to the Hohensalzburg Schloss. I remember last being there on a camping van trip in 1977 with Carol and an eight month old Victoria! Where will we be in another 29 years' time? Remind myself of the need to prioritize and avoid dispersing my energies by pursuing 1001 different projects simultaneously. However, contrary to my own advice, I find myself with Andy in a bookshop (the oldest in Austria apparently), snapping up Reclam editions of such light classics as Rilke's Duino Elegies, the sermons of Meister Eckhart and, in Andy's case, "Also Sprach Zarathustra"! Any honest academic would probably expect to spend about a lifetime on each! Actually, it was poor old Richard Applebee who first put me on to Rilke. He'd been introduced to him by his tutor at Oxford and fancied himself as a bit of a guru on the strength, presumably, of having written some undergraduate essay on the subject. However, Rilke is generally recognized a one of the giants of 20th century literature, so he deserves at least a wee look. As far as I can gather, his major area of interest is man's uncomfortable intermediary position between the material and the immaterial, between the visible and the invisible. Strange how this idea of reconciling two different dimensions of reality is very much on the same wavelength as Maurice Nicoll (author of "LivingTime"), with his different dimensions of time. The thing about Rilke is that he seems to have been a bit of a cad in real life. Abandoning his wife and child, he spent his life snobbishly sucking up to and cadging off the aristocracy. Even allowing for the fact that nobody is perfect, this sort of information on a writer is always disappointing. One somehow expects more of people of great insight.

Meanwhile, back home, the good news is that JT wants us to do a gig! So turns out he's a believer after all! He wants us for April 1st (no kidding), but Barry can't make it. Still, we'll try and find a replacement, as it's too good a chance to turn down.

This afternoon, went to see the Théo Van Rysselberghe exhibition at the Beaux-Arts. Fairly sizable collection of his work. He gives a powerful overall impression of "métier", as he finds his way to colour and his own interpretation of "neo-impresionism". The sheer quantity of his production is amazing - almost like a sort of workaholism, where he feels most alive in front of his easel. I remember an old fifties black-and-white documentary on Matisse, where the Master is asked what it takes to be a great painter. He answers: "Il faut travailler. Il faut travailler beaucoup!" So there you are!

Also took in the Wiener Werkstätte. Active in the 20's, it was a movement which grew out of the Arts & Crafts movement, Charles Rennie MacIntosh, Art Nouveau/Jugendstil etc., which aimed at producing craft products in a modern idiom. One of their central notions was the need to bridge what they saw as the artificial separation between art and life. Their basic problem was money, of course, as, despite their democratic ambitions, the only people who could afford the stuff were rich folks! The Brussels link is with the Palais Soclet on the Avenue de Tervuren, which is recognised as one of the "chefs d'oeuvres" of the movement. It's a building we're very familiar with, as, when I first started work in Brussels, we lived in a fancy appartment only a few doors down. Can't say I've ever really liked it. Although obviously distinctive, there's something oddly cold about it, with more than a hint of megalomania, a feeling borne out by the interior views shown in the exhibition.