Peaceable Land 3 - Oh siddown oh siddown

More life, more cathedrals!

It is a sad fact of our time that the cathedral-loving Hinge browser will so often find himself asked ‘Are you a wanker?’ Still it is a fact, and love is on Hinge, so he had better evolve a decent answer. My own is this:

Oof, that’s a touch stiff. I’m sensitive to beauty is all, and die when from its warmth. That’s why I loved Durham. Like Athens or Paris the whole city is oriented around a beautiful centrepiece. The Parthenon has its hill, no building can be so tall as the Eiffel Tower. Durham Cathedral is the best-sited – that’s s-i-t-e-d – not just in the UK, but in all of Europe, the critics say so, which I dare say means all the world. It is perched atop a steep escarpment and visible from everywhere else. I have several favourite viewing spots.

It makes an interesting contrast to London. Here there are twelve protected ‘viewing corridors’ of St Paul’s. Nothing can be built in them that would obscure the view. Once you know that you occasionally spot a V-shaped contortion in buildings and realise why. But, if you go to one of the view points, such as the one at the Heath’s Kenwood entrance, you will hardly locate St Paul’s. Eventually you will say, aha, there it is, at the foot of the Shard. That tiny stub there.

St. Paul’s cathedral is far larger than Durham, but it feels much smaller. It is nearly twice as tall (111m vs 66m) but inspires not half the awe. That’s because it’s a matter of context.

Jean Racine is the playwright you might call France’s Shakespeare. His play Phèdre contains an intriguing device. The main character’s overmastering, total soul-devastation is shown by having her… sit down on a chair. 

That sounds insignificant until you learn the context. In the neo-classical tradition, in which Phèdre participates, no one sits down. No character in Phèdre, until that moment, will have had any bearing except the rigid upright. Here is the critic George Steiner: 

It is a momentous gesture of submission... This minute concession spells out her greater yielding to unreason. It is precisely the nakedness of the neo-classic stage, the abstraction of technical form, which allows a dramatist to derive implications so rich and violent from the mere presence of a chair. The stricter a style, the more communicative is any departure from its severity. 

Come on folks that’s bloody good. “The stricter a style, the more communicative is any departure form its severity.” You will see the link to the cathedrals, and you will know where in life this idea manifests. 

The spectrum of electromagnetic radiation runs from gamma rays to radio waves. We see the rainbow, the range from wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometres. Butterflies see from 300 to 400. We see from violet to red and they see colours we can’t imagine. It will never be ours to know the ultraviolet beauty that draws them to flowers, for those colours are out of our range. 

On the strong recommendation of a colleague I recently read Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. My opinion brought spluttering protests of ‘What, so you’re complaining that it’s too relentlessly sublime, that’s your complaint?’ In a way, that was my complaint. Every moment was robed in lavish descriptions. The descriptions of a loved one dying of aids were treated no more lavishly than arsey side characters from earlier parties – because no lavisher treatment was left. 

In wrestling’s better days no more than one match per show was allowed a given ‘spot’ – blood, weapons, leaps out the ring, etc – and if someone ‘stole’ yours you were expected to beat them up in the locker room. Modern wrestling has endless super-triple-backflips-off-ladders-through-tables, and for these ‘spotfests’ the crowd goes mild.

This concerns art, and it also concerns life. TikTok and films seem too almost far apart on the frequency spectrum to be contained in one human range. It seems hard to enjoy both porn and women. A foraging YouTuber promises that after a few days without sugar blueberries are gorgeously sweet. Everyone from a not-distant past would be amazed by the heat of showers we would now call tepid. 

We are plastic, so we can slide our range along these spectra. But we don’t really seem able to enlarge them. It is another impractical melancholy, as was last week’s conclusion, in the line of that even if we can be anything, we still cannot be everything, and so still have cause for mourning. 

Or perhaps not. A friend endeavoured to wear white shirts every day for the last two years of school then shock us with a blue one on the very last day. By our account it should have been the most ravishing blue we’d ever seen. Instead no one noticed, and when he lamely pointed it out himself at the end of the day, everyone laughed at him, and then someone debagged him. 

Thus is the charge of ‘wanker’ dismissed. 

GM

Afterbirth

Happy 125th birthday to Ernest Hemingway. I would have liked to write on him but have not for a variety of reasons. The most exciting of them is that all my spare time this week is going into preparing to interview another hero of mine, and one who is living, and therefore a touch more urgent, tomorrow! I will show you that.

I one night thought I heard James’ Sit Down from my room, and on opening my window realised I could listen in to them playing on the heath. One of my luckiest moments.

Racine is also the foiler of my A-Level French. 

Line of Beauty was my three-hundredth book of the twenty-twenties. I think that’s good? It could be faster.

I saw it joked that those who can watch a full movie now seem like intellectuals.