Last night, the prom, the Symphonie fantastique – just caught the last two movements (Maris
Janssons): but here the French-German romantic autumn begins.
Taiwan: meanwhile, Dutilleux cello concerto (‘Tout un monde
lointain’…: to continue the theme announced above).
Except that G-d alone determines the themes.
Der Freischütz –
Heidegger. Schama on Tacitus and the forests.
Libretto for Der
Freischütz. ‘Leise, leise’.
Harmony – diminished 7th.
Heidegger in his hut; night; outside, the forest trees are
swaying uneasily. What enemy is prowling out there?
Lift up your eyes from the screen: the blue and the white
are above.
Faust, Freischütz, Wagner etc.: the occluded
problem of damnation. The woman is the saviour? Theological consequences of
this? – Also, as in Faust, the idea of a contract with the devil that goes
wrong (cf also Merchant of Venice) – goes wrong for the devil but due to
devilish means (‘you didn’t know the devil was a logician’ in Dante).
After Beethoven, noisy triumphant endings become the rule.
Was this ever the case before? Why does music have to become
struggle-and-triumph? The last bars are always working up to the climax of a
‘bravo!’ So much symphonic head-banging. Tension and release. Why not show
something starting out well and gradually turning more and more tragic? This is
surely unusual: much more common is the case of music that starts sadly, makes
a few attempts at escape, and ends badly (Mozart’s 40h, Mahler’s 6th,
etc.).
I sometimes like contemporary music because you can hardly
tell that it has ended (or why).
One jackdaw on this side of the road, another opposite: they
are strutting down the road, pecking their way with a staccato systematicity
along the grass verges. I had not noticed how blue their feathers can be as
they catch the afternoon summer sunlight.
The ‘cornetto’ music from an ice cream van. (In W., I think
the chimes were sometimes classical – a bit of Mozart, or the March of the
Toreadors.)
The delights of the threads (a nice word – textual) in the
online dictionary Leo. As adopted to philosophical texts, maybe? It also has a
good Chinese-German dictionary.
‘Form squares!’ This is good advice for life.
Father’s silence in me.
Perfumes and transferences – my life.
World Wide Walt. Whitman? Disney?
I was glade.
The father (not mine) agonizes over his identity: the mother
gets on with looking after the children.
My headmaster and Isaiah Berlin. - My headmaster lent me a
little illustrated book on Buddha. (And a general study of philosophical
problems, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul.) - The smell of the Board
Room at school, near the Headmaster’s study: an overwhelming mixture of pipe
smoke, mahogany, leather, and polish. The smell of culture. Here we had ‘special’
lessons (sometimes Latin, for some reason; later, Oxbridge ‘general essay’
lessons).
Impressions of ideas. I mean: an impressionism of ideas. (I
don’t mean: ideas as impressions, in
the sense perhaps of certain empiricists.)
Nietzsche’s sense of smell: man riecht die Verwesung.
Cat’s Carnival – a
children’s picture book about Venice. (More Venetian than some learned tomes.)
The palm court of the soul.
Death in Venice –
the most Proustian film. – They are all ghosts on the beach: this civilisation
has outlived itself. – Tadzio’s smile: Angelos Thanatos: the true Hermes. – The
use of the old Lowe-Porter translation (‘the terrible vibrios’) adds to the
ceremoniousness. – Like Buñuel, there is hardly a scene in which he does not
show the labouring classes that serve this elite. (Even in the lovely scene of
Aschenbach, his wife and daughter playing on an Alpine hillside, there is a
gardener tending the plot in the background.) – When I first saw this film,
aet. 17 or 18, I longed to be Aschenbach, just as aet. 9 or 10 I had longed to
be a chorister at King’s. – Recently, I was in Venice in a jacket and tie
despite the midsummer heat: but I was wearing, not a homburg, or a fedora, or
even a straw hat, but my safari hat.
Other deathly ceremonies: Boulez in IRCAM. - Musica(m) templum vult.
Happiness demands a transcription. 1976, MAO EST MORT. (I
remember the funeral music.)
The fat man bathing his belly in the cemetery sun, recently.
A can of beer on the bench beside him, his headphones plugged into his ears. Ni le soleil ni la mort.
The couples dancing in the Piazza San Marco.
“In the days when Indian restaurants served dishes of
various hues of orange in flock wallpaper surroundings, one restaurant stood
out...”
London restaurants RIP: The Bullock Cart
In the days when Indian restaurants seemed to serve dishes
of various hues of orange in a flock wallpaper surroundings there was one
restaurant that provided high quality Indian cuisine in a sophisticated environment.
This was the late, lamented Bullock Cart in Hampstead’s Heath Street. It was
decorated in a tasteful turquoise colour with elegantly aged pictures of
bullock carts and other aspects of Indian life. The service was always charming
from waiters who had been there for some considerable time. I was a regular and
was always treated well, often ending the meal on a complimentary liqueur. My
particular favourite dishes were the lamb rogan josh with tomatoes, a mild,
creamy prawn bhuna and a sag paneer with spinach and lumps of cheese in a
buttery sauce. Delicious! The Bullock Cart was not state-of-the-art cuisine but
did what it did extremely well. It was an unobtrusive star amongst the
overpriced bistros and Pizzalands (remember that?) of late 70s Hampstead
Village. It closed in the late 80s and is now a Thai restaurant. The estate
agent next door used to be The Nag’s Head, another lost Hampstead boozer. Here,
one dark autumn night in 1981, I dined with K., in a trance of garrulous and
nervous jocularity (hers) and slow, edgy desire (mine) that concealed our
growing PASSION. My inner desolation when she decided to go back to I.I. for
the evening. What a steep hill it was thereabouts, with the haze of India and
the burning ghats on the Ganges at Varanasi on the wall of my one-room flat in
South London, torn from some colour supplement (I was learning Sanskrit at the
time, at the Mary Ward Centre for adult literacy.) Some of the above is taken
from this rather wonderful website: http://oldsite2.london-rip.com/27?page=1 (There is a photo, but it is not salvific.)
The unconscious: the idea insofar as it permeates and
suffuses the body.
Delivered onto the doormat this morning: the patch of
sunshine.
Prom: Runnicles, Beethoven’s 5th: autumn is
coming.
Autumn, Atem, Aten.
To have written of a life, his, hers, yours in a cool,
deadbeat style.
Pound – translated from Latin from Greek: do likewise.
