SPARTACUS, AGAIN…

Watched bits of Bolshoi Spartacus on TV Friday night, because I remembered being moved by final scene nearly 50 years ago. I saw the same company do it, in a very similar production in Cairo. I was teaching in a government school, on a year out from Oxford, at a time when the Soviet Union was courting Nasser’s Egypt. Most people in Cairo were not that keen on Russian ballet, and nor was I. But I’d heard of Ulanova and now Plissetskaya, and tickets were cheap enough for me to risk it.

Seeing it again, I’d forgotten how formulaic it was, this Spartacus, with its alternating solos and choruses, virile slaves and camp legionaries, sincere young lovers and cynical coquetry. But the Cuban lead dancer believed in what he was doing, and at the end – after missing most of the battle scenes for Have I got News for You – I was moved again by the final set piece.

Spartacus dead, mourned by his lover and the remnants of his army. Earlier his body has been hoisted aloft, like a dead animal, on the points of Roman spears. Now he is lifted gently by his followers, raised slowly on a human pyre of upstretched arms. The light picks up the whiteness of the arms and fingers that almost hide the body they support. From behind, there rises the body of the bereft woman, vertical, eyes and arms raised in supplication, then folding forward over the body, head down, dark hair like a waterfall onto the bearers’ hands and arms…

Except that this production was not quite as I remembered it. The curtains closed while the woman was still reaching up with a halo of round shield behind her. I prefer to remember it as it was... Isn't memory always as it was?

Now I realise that this is one of several related images I bear in mind and recall from time to time. A couple come from other people’s art, a couple from my own life and this is the first time I’ve made the link between them all.

In the first London production of West Side Story there was a dance sequence marking the death of the young lovers, and what might have been their meeting again. The two bodies rise, as if flying in a dream, lifted, one from each side out of the dark wings. Their paths, orbits, cross, through a pool of light high above the middle of the stage and sink back into darkness. A rainbow drained of its colour and promise, no sweet sorrow, bottomless despair.

Antonioni, in Red Desert, I think, has a young woman driving through the desert inb an old car, hearing the radio report of her lover’s death as the police close in on a plane he’s hijacked then returned to base. Act gratuit… She stops the car by the road, switches the engine off and stands, back to camera, in silence at the side of the road. Beyond her is a scrubby bush, its tangled branches in contrast to the long, smooth hair that hangs down her back. She stands for what seems a long time, then her hair, and the wiry bush begin to move, stirred by a sudden breath of wind.

Only now it occurs to me that these images have engraved themselves on my mind in tribute to an actual memory. I remember, or have reinvented, the sight and sound of my mother as she heard the news of Tony’s, her younger brother’s, death not long before the end of the war. He, I learned later, was killed by a booby trap as the Germans retreated from the Ardennes. We were back in London, in the basement of our house, when she got the news on the phone, from her mother perhaps. All I remember is the wail or groan my mother made, unlike any sound I’d heard from her, and the way she slumped against the wall. It must have been a wall-mounted phone. If I’m not imagining it, she crumpled, slid down into the angle of wall and floor.

My mother had thick, dark hair and her name was Mary. Now I wonder if religious pictures – all those images of Virgin Mary and her crucified son – helped link that early experience of mine, and hers, to later images of stage and film. Images fresh images beget, or hook up like trucks on a train. We seem to need those images, to know what it is we might be feeling or have felt. The images can be received, or made up in our own heads, by mistake, as it were, in dreams or on purpose in words or paint or dance. And music? I’m never sure how that works, carrying so much feeling with no image to speak of…

I was going to say we may need some image between ourselves and a reality we cannot quite face head-on, and some mirror to catch and hold it in. Perseus was given a bright shield, looking into that he could see enough of the head with the snaky locks, to cut it off before it turned him to stone. Perhaps it’s not just monsters we need to contain in images, but things, people, we may have loved.

Not just mothers, or lovers snatched by death. I loved Beatrice, but we parted alive and in good health. She died very young, but it was nearly 20 years after we split up that I heard about that. I had written to her c/o her mother, in the hope we might meet. Not to pick up where we left off, but lay the ghosts of eternal youth, each other all those years ago. Malheureusement, Beatrice est decedee. Her mother's letter shocked me, although she wrote affectionately and enclosed pictures of her daughter's two teenage children. I was shocked not only that Beatrice was dead, but that she'd been dead for four years with me imagining her alive, since just before Will was born. Besides, grief was new to me. I remember walking out of our house in Swindon, going nowhere in particular, and seeing a woman with a child in a pushchair coming towards me. They looked nice, and I was half ashamed to find myself noticing that. Half a minute later, when they were ten yards away from me that I realised that the woman was Ada and the boy in the pushchair Will.

It wasn't long before I remember the story of the other Mary, Magdalen, walking desolate in the garden and mistaking the risen Jesus for a gardener. Religious images, romantic images, have a lot to answer for. What would we do without them?

‘Wots left?’ Beginning with Love...

LEFT = Love, Equality, Freedom, Truth and Love comes first. So what might it mean?

A feeling for somebody or something. Need or desire for others, pleasure in their company. Seeking what’s best in and for them. Kinship and communion in a world we share. Love thy neighbour as thyself, do as you would be done by etc/

BUT what if we DON’T love ourselves, or cant count on others responding as we would?

Virtuous and vicious circles: given love, we learn to love; unloved, we don’t… Kinship, familiarity, goes with closeness, mutual understanding and sharing – looking after each other as we look after ourselves. Abused, we're inclined to abuse, but sometimes, mercifully, dont (a restorative mutation?)

Love’s not just a feeling, but a fact of life, a capacity built in. We are born dependent, survive only when cared for. Caring is at once physical and emotional. What we get becomes us, the feeling and responses along with the weight we gain from our mother’s milk.

From mothers and sons to sons and lovers, dependency mutualised. And daughters? More complicated perhaps... As sons become fathers and daughters mothers, we become each other as we become ourselves.*

We’re shaped by what's done to us and what we do. We understand each other – and the world - through our interactions. We’re formed, transformed, imprinted as we engage, reach out, take hold and register. Our hand takes the shape of what it can grasp and bears it to mind.

What we perceive, the image we recall, is not neutral or coincidental: we see what we’re looking for, what strikes or is shown to us. Five senses, plus one equals six. Seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching plus the stirrings inside ourselves - 'heart' or 'gut' feelings, an amorphous sixth sense, no less physical than the rest.

Infants depend on mothers and fathers, adults on a wider material world. As we grow up, we can no longer be rely on food and warmth being brought to us. But with our growing abilities, and a bit of luck, we can find more or less what we need. The world as we know it, need it and love it, is at once physical and human, economic and social and…

And what? Good? Beautiful? Loveable? I can neither dismiss those words, or know what to make of them, unless it’s a tautology – circular, with one leading to the other and back.

We don’t just see the world for ourselves, or as it is, but through the images and language of others. Some images are held up, over our heads as it were, for special reverence. Meanwhile we learn from each other and get to know each other as we make our living together. Our world-view, skills and circumstances, like our languages and landscapes, towns and villages, are common property.

Now we begin to realise that our world, like our parents, is not immortal. As we grow stronger, and our world in some ways weakaer, it too depends on us.... What am I saying? My parents are already dead, I am the endangered one! Which doesn't matter if people and places I love live on. My now, their then, if not quite interchangeable.

By nature and nurture, we have more in common than we have to set us apart. BUT that doesn’t make us identical. In our genes and upbringing, history and circumstances we are also, inevitably, different. Often we are encouraged to hide or ignore this difference – sometimes to exaggerate its importance, in ourselves or others. If familiarity breeds contempt, this is usually because we take each other, or the world, for granted, fail to register difference and change.

CONTRADICTION: I am me and you are you, a tree is a tree and a forest a forest. Although in fact none is the same, from one to another, or moment to moment, life is not long enough to mark the differences. We’re bound to label, class, prejudge, assume. We take what is to be as what has been, for granted...'til Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane.’ The unmoveable moves, or the worm turns, whatever that may mean, and we’re taken by surprise. For better or worse.

True love, like survival, treads a narrow and uncertain line between known and unknown, an act of faith or tentative presumption, between what we most fear and desire. Like driving at night, when what looks like a road ahead, a familiar pattern of light, could be almost anything.

Idolatry, Romantic love, and Hate. In romantic love, we idealise, imagine an other from afar. We may prefer a ready image to what we cannot, or will not face or handle in the flesh. Sometimes we carve up the world itself between imaginary Heaven and Hell, a higher Spirit and a load of material mechanics. Then, somewhere between these higher and lower orders, the baby is lost with the bathwater. As God is Good, Eveil - the devil as lived - becomes possesses some hapless neighbour. We tar and feather a class or race as Monsters, Beasts – anything to disguise the likeness to ourselves.

And sex? How could I have got so far without it? Sex is central to love, where two become one, then three: as single cells meet, combine and multiply to become someone else. But sex may also be at odds with love in its other forms. Sex tends to be exclusive, while Love - as in Christian love - is open to all. That's a contradiction I've tried and failed to solve at least once in my life.

*QUESTION ARISING:

Women can bear and feed babies, men cannot. Where does that leave our aspirations to freedom and equality? For all the gender overlaps and cross-overs, men and women are different. And the same may go for races!) The point is not to deny the statistical evidence, the norms of male and female body and mind, but to see that those norms dont confine or subordinate un-necessarily. Contrary to the scripture, we are not created free and equal. Some are bigger, stronger, cleverer than others, just as some are gentler, more patient or imaginative (it's not either/or, the combinations and permutations are infinite!) The point is to recognise that no statistical generalisation need apply to any individual: the fact that most men are more like this, most women more like that, must not be allowed to prevent any man or woman from breaking free, diverging, combining and crossing imaginary lines. Nor must a generalised difference be translated into assumptions of superiority and inferiority: we may say, in the most general terms, that one sex or other may be better at this or that, in this or that setting; but not that one set of abilities or qualities outranks another over all. With the future uncertain, we cant know which of all those abilities and qualities we will most need. We may need all our options to survive, recognised, understood and freely available between us.

It may not even be a question of yours or mine: the dividing lines may run across us, not between us. The bit of my mind that registers arm or leg, or fear or pleasure may register and assimilate a movement observed before it registers it as yours or mine. Empathy doesnt begin with the heady business of Me imagining I'm You. It's a reflex rooted in the nature of perception and physiology. If I see a footballer kicked in the balls, my body reacts before I know it. Even men have phantom pregnancies.

We're not created free and equal, but the freer and more equal the better - recognising and drawing on all we've got.

From waft to waft
Images that yet fresh images beget, if only smells. This time the leap is from gorse, coconut, to orange, from South Wales to Western Algeria. It's 1962, soon after the Algerian independence war, and I'm driving through the night from Tlemcen, near the Moroccan border, to Algiers. We've been told to get someone there by tomorrow. It's a long drive, after work, and I'm on a threadbare high, between coffee and exhaustion. There's nothing else on the road, economy flat and people still afraid, the line blurred between the freedom fight and banditry, the struggle to survive. I dont feel afraid, unless it's the fear of a rabbit, mesmerised by the beam of my own headlights and compelled along the long straight road ahead.
A bit of open window helps me keep awake, and suddenly I feel myself relax.
Orange blossom, the scent from unseen orange groves is everywhere. I can feel the trees nearby in the darkness and the same sweet air running through them, the car, my lungs and heart, whatever that may mean. On the wings of a smell, all's well.
In a few months the oranges will be ripe, then overripe, in piles beside the road. The colons have gone, and with them the markets that would have taken them, turned them into money, solid food not Midas oranges.

HINDSIGHT

You should be reading this from the bottom up, because the poem below follows from the shooting reference in my last piece. It also links to a poetry-reading we went to in Swansea the other night, with a former US soldier Brian Turner reading from his book Here Bullet. One of his poems (In the Leupold scope) sees life in Iraq through the site of a gun and reminds me of mine from Bethlehem. It's addressed to an Israeli conscript. I call it Just Looking, but its power, if any, lies in the possibility of not just looking. In a village near Nablus two years earlier I was introduced to a little girl with a bandage round her head. Her scalp had been grazed by a bullet from an Israeli settlement high on the hill above. The bullet could not have come her way by chance. Not a ricochet, or crossfire: there had been no battle going on. I photographed the girl where she had been standing, in the back yard of her family home. Now it seemed like a game, but behind her I could also see the outline of settlement buildings atop the ridge. Someone up there must have found her in his sight, and pulled the trigger. As a child with an air rifle, I was shocked when I hit a robin perched high on a tree. I must have been about 15, old enough to know better, but the robin had seemed so small and far away, the odds against hitting it so high.

JUST LOOKING

My flat in Bethlehem looked down on a curious religious site called Rachel's Tomb. A small domed building overlooking a Muslim cemetery has been squared up and fortified as a Jewish pilgrimage venue. From my balcony I can watch the changing of the guard and soldiers taking up positions as coaches full of pilgrims pull up in the dust. One soldier covers the main road, another the smaller road that leads down past the cemetery to the Aida refugee camp. Sometime boys throw stones and the soldiers shoot teargas and soundgrenades to drive them off. On this occasion, a boy's head appears above the cemetery wall and a soldier raises his gun.


Just looking, you say,
And I,
In hindsight
Reply:

A cat
May look at
A queen
But not down the scope
Of an M16...

Soldier, reflect
As you watch
The boy
Behind the graveyard wall
Watch you.

Your gunsight sees
What he cannot.
His features,
Shaving mirror sharp,
So much
Like yours.

Eye for eye?

If looks could kill...
Your other self
He knows
A bullet
From a stone.