19 January

Today is the anniversary of the premiere perfomances of Goethe's Faust Erster Teil (1829), Verdi's Il Trovatore (1853), and Ibsen's The Master Builder (1893). It is the birthday of Aelia Pulcheria, empress and saint; of Edgar Allen Poe; of Paul Cézanne; and of Hans Hotter.

Haydn: ganz toll!

Haydn is possibly the craziest of all the great composers. I am surprised, perhaps a little alarmed, that this is so little recognized. Beneath the palm court demureness of those quartets, what abysses of madness - in the most cheerful sense, of course. He is the musical equivalent of Lewis Carroll.

Cinefool (3)

Cinefool says: 'Your own life is as fragmentary and mysterious as the film you are watching - even to you.'

(In this case, the film was L'Intrus, by Claire Denis: but this is merely anecdotal.)

Cinefool (2)

The eye is naturally lured to certain points on the screen, just as the ear naturally focuses on the melodic line. This is to forget the 'peripheral' - if harmony can be called 'peripheral'.

Cinefool (1)

Dogtooth: yes, no doubt it is ‘about’ an abusive family, but I am so alienated that I thrilled to its utopian aspects. Putting on a tie; brushing shoes; having sex – these are all ordinary rituals. But licking, calling the salt telephone, and awarding stickers to your children for satisfactory behaviour: these are much more alluring.

Nafforisms (1)

1. Hide and seek (but nobody comes to look: eventually I pine away: vere ego sum absconditus).

2. Nomads have no windows, just mirrors.

3. Life on hold: hold me.

4. Being is so passé.

5. He was disconcerted by the music of John Cage.

6. Meaning – not a group of words, but a gesture, a rhythm, a tone, a colour.

7. The game played on the death bed is the gamest of all.

 

New Year's resolutions

Yesterday, N. told me that his New Year's resolution was to make a New Year's resolution.

Today, S. told me of a radio programme in which the speaker - a cleric sceptical of the value of New Year's resolutions - said that his New Year's resolution was not to make a New Year's resolution.

These more-or-less paradoxes are a nicely teasing way to begin the year: they both suggest that a certain self-conscious mirroring, an apparent emptying or differing of content, or an internal formal quasi-contradiction can drift towards something vaguely but insistently affirmative.

Burying the dead

On 30 October 2011 I went to a workshop in Yiddish song. Apart from one young man in a yarmulke (his pregnant wife was also there, and their young child), I was the only man. The teacher was Hilda Bronstein: we were upstairs in the usual Sunday-morning-dingy pub. We sang: ‘A Malekh Veynt’, ‘Lomir Ale Zingen’, ‘Shoyn Avek der Nekhtn’, ‘Dona Dona’, and ‘Zol Shoyn Kumen Di Geule’: this song is about longing for ‘geule’, or redemption, and even to sing it will hasten the coming of Meshiakh. Afterwards, cycling home, I felt that something had been done. Later that day I heard Mahler’s Seventh, cond. Bernstein: my favourite among his symphonies. I saw Trick ’R Treat (2007): the horror – or rather, the moral frisson – comes from the switching between innocence and guilt, and between the uncertainty as to whether the action is a play (the Halloween festivities, in which everyone dresses up) or a reality. The hoax played against the nerdy girl Rhonda backfires when the children from the ‘school bus massacre’ turn out to be still ‘alive’. (The theme here is: playing dead.) Someone can be attacked and her blood-spattered body left propped against a wall in full public view because everyone is in similar gruesome disguises, there are other (drunk and drowsy) bodies propped up against the same wall, and so on.

On Monday 31 October: The Evil Dead (1981). Roots grasp: bodies erupt from below. Most vulnerable are legs and feet: you are essentially dragged down. The horror itself is a little corny: you jump in all the right places, but the spine does not tingle. However, the beginning and end of the film – something (the camera) moving with deadly intent, very fast, along the ground, darting hither and there, seeking its prey – is very effective: you are the horror, or are being swept along with it.

On the previous night, a little apathetic about All Saints, I had watched The House on Haunted Hill (1959). The exterior shots of the house are in fact of Ennis House in L.A., designed by Frank Lloyd Wright: textile blocks, with relief ornamentation, in the Mayan Revival style, based on similar features on the temple at Uxmal, in the Yucatán. (The house has also been used in other films, for example Blade Runner, as well as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

Although human sacrifice was less common among the Maya than among the Incas, it was nonetheless practised - for example at the inauguration of a temple. Ennis House is already sinister: it looks like a place in which strange rituals are performed. The fact that its architectural style is an anachronistic transposition is less relevant than the way it revives an ancient civilization associated with human sacrifice.

The horror of the film is based on the interplay between the pool of acid on the one hand, which dissolves all flesh but still leaves the skeleton, and the angularity of doors, windows, and corridors, which are often muffled or covered by soft drapes. The uncanny is figured by floating – figures float across the scene, or hover outside a window, or (in the case of Annabelle, who has apparently committed suicide) are left hanging.

I also went to see V.T. in the House of Healing: frail but bright. Her daughter D. was there: we chatted about the Lea Valley, my radiotherapy, 'Just A Minute'. In the library at Respublica Regalis I read some of Yeats's 'The Tower' poems. Curious: I read all his poetry when I was 18: it has been a long hiatus. I especially read - a yearly ritual - 'All Souls' Night', understanding it more than usual, in the quiet, overheated library with its thick shabby carpets, its odd busts (Napoleon), its air of cramped desuetude. Then, in Maria Minore, for the requiem: there was a black cloth behind the altar (itself draped in purple), and the small choir sang, uncertainly, from the Victoria 'Missa pro defunctis'. But the priest, coming from London, was late, and we sat in silence, waiting. (I was probably the youngest person in the sparse congregation.) When he arrived he hurried up the aisle clutching a briefcase, like a businessman hurrying for a train. He eventually emerged in fine robes of black and gold: but his address was banal and half-hearted, warmed-up platitudes delivered with an apologetic smile. I left shortly after the Peace, thinking it was better to leave the dead to bury the dead.

For Christmas...

For Christmas, B. gave me a calendar of photos by Mario Giacomelli. The January image is one of seminarians dancing in a ring, in the snow: black on white. Here we see the pilgrims at Lourdes:

(taken from http://www.mariogiacomelli.it/53_lourdes10.html, accessed 01.01.12).

So many of his subjects seem to have been shot against snow (and this one is fleetingly reminiscent of the scene from Ivan the Terrible). 

In my dream (1)

In my dream, I was involved in a complex game of cat-and-mouse, being chased through the grey streets of South London which were also the black-and-redbrick backstreets of W. At one stage I thought I could shake off my pursuers by taking refuge in a small Catholic church, and I reflected on the mysterious Hitchcockian allure of these places in countries where Catholicism has sometimes been proscribed. A little later, one of the inspectors on the case pointed to a gay man, who was giving a quick peck on the cheek to his 'lover boy', as the inspector growlingly called him. I felt responsible for the film, aware that this kind of typecasting might seem offensive - and yet I also wanted these sometimes flamboyant characters to be kept in. They were true to life, after all: I had known people like them, and could with advantage draw on my experience to make the film more realistic.

Simon Armitage's translation of Gawain and the Green Knight includes the world 'allack' (the Green Knight says: 'It's not my nature / to idle or allack about this evening', lines 256-7).