THE TUILERIES, Paris.  COPYRIGHT JOHN HAYNES 2011

I found myself taken into the life-worn and immaculate workshop of a carpenter, in a Liverpool industrial area, who had custom built and fitted wooden doors and windows for new buildings. An exacting and precise craft. Rather that is what he used to do, and although he looked like a pensioner but perhaps he was prematurely worn to the bones with stress, that was what he still wanted and still needed and still could do. I have not been able to put his hang-dog dejection, nor his workshop with its metallic precision of polished and blood warm tools and surgical implements out of sight. If I was Seamus Heaney I might want to write a poem, or if I was David Storey, a novel,  for this man, so skilled and outlawed from trade, seemed to me to  embody all the dying poetry of  artisanal  England.

A pause to reflect on the word artisan, which is how the French still refer to their local rural builders, and which embodies the word ‘art’ which is not reduced to utility.  Manual skill is art, it can be living poetry and this man with his weak eyes stained by permanent tear, where perhaps once a star had spun as he swung his hammer, and who with his complexion now stained raw by blood pressure was still in every cell the artist in his workshop where every tool had its own hand-worn placement of apprenticeship to the wood.

Yes, His act worships itself.

What disturbed  most was that this man, I choose not to use his first name in a wanton intimacy, like other men interviewed in the programme, did not require thousands of pounds to stop his house being re-possessed, his workshop lost, only some hundreds. Why do ‘we’ need a government and the bureaucracy of  urgent and unpopular tax reforms for those of us who have enough, or even too much, or much too much.  ’Oh reason not the need ‘ Lear  declares, to inspire ‘society’ to give up just one habitual luxury to prevent our ‘neighbours’, some might say the working classes from losing their homes and being cast out onto that unchanging heath of homelessness. Homes which the programme told us, within a matter of a year – or in some instances – still more tantalising, months would have become owned but which were now in the steely hands of repossession.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

If the ‘Big Society’ means forming circles of virtue and reciprocity, giving receiving and returning, then I’m all for it but how to start? No, I don’t need anybody to tell me, I can if I choose, get on the phone to Citizens Advice in Liverpool and ask for some advice…

Post Script, April Fool’s Day:

It is not possible to make any contact because the CAB bureaus are so  overwhelmed that they don’t accept emails or phone calls. In Liverpool, rather like our local Waitrose deli, I have discovered that you have to collect a number from a slot in the  wall which tells you where you are in the queue. When there are no more numbers available it means that you must come back the next day and queue again, presumably earlier. Since becoming concerned about ‘repossession’ I have just read Pessoa’s definition of Romantic and I think Blake and Will Shakespeare, at least in some of his moods, might have gone with it:

The fundamental error of Romanticism is to confuse what we need with what we desire. We all need certain basic things for life’s preservation and continuance; we all desire a more perfect life, complete happiness and the fulfilment of our dreams…..

It’s human to want what we need and  it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable. Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering our lack of bread. The Romantic malady is to want the moon as if it could be obtained.

sympathy

1570s, “affinity between certain things,” from M.Fr. sympathie, from L.L. sympathia “community of feeling, sympathy,” from Gk. sympatheia, from sympathes “having a fellow feeling, affected by like feelings,” from syn- “together” + pathos “feeling” (see pathos). In English, almost a magical notion at first; e.g. in reference to medicines that heal wounds when applied to a cloth stained with blood from the wound. Meaning “conformity of feelings” is from 1590s; sense of “fellow feeling” is first attested 1660s. An O.E. loan-translation of sympathy was efensargung.

Copyright 2010 Cornelia Hartman

We didn’t make it to Paris so we are going to be eating salad instead. I adore this image which a client – who comes for professional development gave me permission to display – and has just sent to me as a metaphor for the conversations we have continued to have together for rather a long time. I also love Shakespeare’s metaphor about emotions being like a salad but I am not referring to Cleopatra’s ‘salad days’, I’m sure there was something more subtle about emotional combinations somewhere in A and C. I’ll have to keep on thinking and finding.  If I’m really stuck I can check out with Greg Hicks who has currently opened in the RSC season, which has transferred to the The Round House, in advance of going to New York, where he will be playing in ‘Lear’. His is a great and thoughtful Lear, it may not have the age of  the other current Lear but it does have great complexity and trickery. All traces of the mannerist Greg have been pared away, and who speaks better Shakespeare?  He is also the Soothsayer in Antony, and I had quite forgot, until I saw an excellent review in the papers today, that he has just opened in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ as Leontes. What a fistful, if not a salad bowl of emotions to juggle there. Surely, Leontes’ flayed and phantom immersions into those green eyed monsters of jealousy must have prodded at Proust in his immortal autopsy of what is possibly the most primal, when additionally linked not only with bodies but with territories, animal emotion.

The queues outside of St. Pancras Station looked as though they were for the ‘last train’. Undiluted chaos. At first I thought the people were queuing to see an exhibit at the British Library, at least two blocks away from the station, until I noticed that they were all carrying suitcases.

I know this won’t be popular but at the moment I’m finding Dorothea, who hasn’t yet departed for Rome, irritating and my sympathies are with Celia’s intuitive intelligence. I have also been castigated by ‘Prof’ for finding Norpois boring, and not understanding what Proust was doing. But, even though I knew that he was mimicking a salon style of parrot gratuity, and even though I think I knew that to some degree there was a conscious mimesis of Proust’s own syntax, taking place, I failed to ‘laugh out aloud’. Still, on the next reading I promise that I shall try to read more acutely.

I am also struck, watching my grandchildren’s turbulent and exquisitely painful experiences of ‘first love’ along with the liberties of adolescence, by what a terrifying business this encyclopedia of love is. What tremors, what annihilations, what sobbings of self do any other experience, except the challenge of death, throw into the insomnium of night. Or, is it all no more than ‘romance’: ” My lords if you would hear a high tale of  love and death…’?

My daughter tells me that I am naive; that it is because she understood all these scarred, or do I mean sacred, woundings of adolescent love, self-harming, body piercing and possession that she originally determined as a therapist, also to work with adolescence. Yes, love speaks with a warlike language, and all along the way, it twists, if not strangulates from desire to death, with passion. The God of Love is a blind archer, a magician of  projections, who only ever shoots fatal arrows, and his rites de passage seems to agony between one besieging and another.

Now that I cannot people watch in Paris, I don’t have any excuse not to meet the challenge of the contorted thoughts, digressions and arrogance of Denis de Rougement’s,’Love in the Western World’, whenever Dorothea exasperates me, and once I’ve found that Shakespearian metaphor of emotion…I’ve checked with the Concordance and it doesn’t exist. Must be another bard. I do like this:

‘Indeed, sir, she was the sweet marjoram of the salad, or rather, the herb of grace.’ Clown

Dan and Rose June 2010

Grandad, the 80's

‘Grand Dad’ to book for dinner. While I’m happy to stay hotel-home, eat club sandwiches with Portia, and people watch. But she’ll no doubt want to go clubbing with her mum. In fact we’ve all agreed to go clubbing together.

In a way I rather wish I hadn’t started re-reading ‘Middlemarch’ before we are due to go because whenever I am properly committed to reading a novel, which isn’t that often, other than when I’m re-reading Proust’s ‘Recherche’, I become anti-social. I’m finding with ‘Middlemarch’, and I cannot remember when I last read it, that although I do not have any memory of the plot at all, my brain still seems to know what is going to come next, not in advance but only page-by-page. I have no idea what will happen to Causabon, but I rather think he will have to die, and with any luck he wont return from Rome. I don’t know who bores me most: Causabon or those relentless foreign policies of Monsieur Norpois. Only last week I should never have dreamt that Proust’s ‘Recherche’ would drop off my linguist-deaf tongue – or rather my pen in such a languid manner – as I should never dare pronounce it, but since my Proustian partner managed to inveigle me, except he doesn’t inveigle – and would I think detest the word – anybody into doing anything. But, it was through his magic that I ended up, far less reluctantly than I could, to begin with, have imagined, doing a gig on Proust at the Royal Society of Literature, and being privileged to hear Christopher Prendergast and Ian Patterson jousting over whether Proust and Art were, or were not life savers and could, or could not, redeem the Time. And, just for your benefit Christopher, oh heavens I can’t even initial your surname because they both start with ‘P’, so just for your benefit Prof, I don’t believe in Redemption either, well not through Proust, nor Love, not through anything except perhaps Individuation and the Self.

I have been struggling, wading or fumbling into the pages of Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougement. His thoughts are dense and intense and it’s easy to give up the effort to think these sentences through. But twice now he’s thrilled me and most recently it was with his elucidation, via Plato, of the original meaning of the word, ‘enthusiasm‘. It seems that to be enthusiastic is to be possessed by the Gods, I love that thought and get it because at the same time it fires another unthought thought in my head, and my sensory memory confirms it. When I am enthused about something I’m inhabiting my environment, I’m being fed by the universe and the mortal world is enough. I sparkle and my enthusiasm might even be contagious. The other thought is that when one stops being enthusiastic, one is, if not sad, depressed and I have been trying to figure out for a long time what might be the opposite of depression, which I often elucidate to my clients as losing desire for the world, and that explains to me why enthusiasm is so irrepressible and when something is irrepressible, whether it’s my dogs enthusiasm for her walk, or my irrational devotion to my dog’s feelings, it means that repression is absent. And, repression, whether it is anger, or denial, or love, yes we so often repress our love in the fear that it will not be returned is a broad walk to depression.

My enthusiastic dog, Lucy the Viszla in Regents Park, 2009. Copyright John Haynes

Finishing Finding Time Again on Friday was traumatic and I’ve only just recovered from vertiginous sensations of inspiration and despair at my own mortality. I think that the first time around I read the masked ball sequence I couldn’t have been ready to embody – and that is what Proust asks his reader to do, to embody and not observe or applaude art – the physical impact on my own descending mortality of Time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour. How can one read Proust’s dissection of mortality without Shakespeare’s monument to time chiming into consciousness?

Proust makes it clear that there can be no escape from the masked ball of time and organic decay and it’s my guess that he would see our present day obsessions with Botox, liposuction and cosmetic lasers as futile cul de sacs of vanity. Although, that’s not to say he might not have recourse to them himself. As he describes, the longer anyone remains looking ‘Good for their age’, the worse is that final descent into their failure of helplessness, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything. Yes, everything, except perhaps time, wears out.

Oh, Heavens, I could write for hours on my experiences of reading Proust but I wanted to write about other things, like falling in love, even in its non refulgent state, with the young maple sapling my landscape gardening friend, Special Branch bought me last Wednesday. Its full name is Acer Palmatum Westonbirt Red. When Special Branch left Westonbirt Aboretum he told me that the sapling was still in an open-leaved crimson glory. He had a shock when he opened his van for by the time they had made the short journey to London its maple sensibility had been compromised and its leaved tendrils were contracted into what might be described as an arthritic screetch of bruised agony. 

Its demise provided me with an example of what Proust is always writing about: ‘because at that moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law, which means that one can only imagine what object is absent’. Now, I could not perceive, but only imagine, what my sapling had looked like before it went into shock and I shall have to wait for another year to pass before it finds its time again.

I don’t think there’s going to be much time today to write about finding the experience of things, but I have almost caught up with my Proust reading partner who has embarked on William James, The Variety of Religious Experience without waiting for me to finish Proust, (and it’s possible that he only finished first because my handbag was stolen and I didn’t have any reading glasses for a week and my brain anyhow felt like punctured seaweed).There are two thoughts that have come to me from James’ first lecture. First of all I should declare that even though I am an experienced psychotherapist I am also still a neurotic, but in Proust and James’ company that’s no bad thing to be. And, there is a caveat: I am a conscious neurotic and it’s in unconsciousness that the cliff falls of much of our un-deciphered neuroticism and depressive sufferings reside.

I adored James’ image of religion as a perversion of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression: ‘Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid from thee, my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot with the roaring all night long; as the heart panteth after the water brooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my God.’  And, as James goes on to say, the foundation in many non-Christian countries of all religious discipline consists in the regulation of inspiration and expiration. It might also be true to say that these two involuntary and mainly unconscious acts are, when brought into mindfulness, also at the foundations of psychological health.

We can never escape our breathing, after all it’s the first and last thing that any of us ever do, our greatest commonality, and yet too many people expend their lives forgetting that they breathe. Not only is its perversion the loadstone of James’ metaphor, its health is also the foundation of any meditation. In the search to understand beyond the mechanics of consciousness more and more neurobiologists and psychologists are being drawn towards the study of meditative practices and the conscious orientation of our bodily dimensions. Children need to be taught how to orientate themselves in space, to use their body compasses of cognition. 

Perhaps, we need to return to Leonardo. Of all of Leonardo’s known discoveries, his discovery of the cause of heart disease through a build up of cholesterol could have saved millions of lives. This would have happened if his discoveries were ever taken seriously at the time and published by his peers. Leonardo had worked out that a substance carried though the blood and produced by what we eat imbeds itself in the arteries and blocks natural blood flow.

Like Proust we need to remember to look forward and backwards. 

Ligeti  has drawn me, or rather my Proustian partner who inducted me, has inadvertently drawn me to the surreal dramatist Michel Ghelderode.  I have been trying to memorize his name by imagining that I am riding a geldered stallion, along with Keats’ Bright Star, and hope that I have got the spelling right  and then galloping off  to Amazon Prime for the catalogue of James Ensor who was as fascinated by Carnival and Masks and Love and Death and Anxiety as I am, except Ensor painted them and I try to get behind them….many of his works remind me, and are I think, indebted to Goya’s black paintings. (Retrospectively, I also feel that Paula Rego must feel indebted to his visceral imaginings and teasing.) I wish I knew where those black Goya paintings are hidden as so few of them are displayed in Madrid, unless they are stored away in unnamed archives.

Even before these artists, discovered  by courtesy of my  Ligeti-trail, came  as a gift into my vision I was intending to blog about Carnival and the Death of  Tragedy, and Rio de Janeiro, and my Capoeira thrusting Berimbar drumming friend Greg Hicks whose life embodies Carnival and who next year will be playing King Lear at the RSC, and then another unexpected pleasure, to revel in the fact that Rio and not Chicago won the Olympic bid, which is what made me think of Greg because he has a flat in Rio at the foot of  the statue of Christ the Redeemer …  but for now I still need to absorb and metabolize rather than write.  And then last night – at my grandson, Dan’s direction – I watched the documentary Gonzo and discovered the death driven genius, the carnival energies, the insight and death-sight. of  Hunter S. Thompson, the beauty of Johnny Depp, and  today I am still more undone and I don’t,  after watching the inspiring and fittingly minimalist staging while listening to the frantic and god-like desires, demons and visions and woundings, or should I write wounds,  of  Tristan and Isolde – with my Wagnerian loving/ Proust reading partner – where nothing remains black or white, but returns to shadow, have much to spare.  

James Ensor: Pierrot and skeletons.

The mobility, the anxiety and the waivering of his nature explain at once the feverish searches,the steps forwards, the steps backwards, the brusque advances and the sudden retreats, in a word all the unevenness of his art. Emile Verhaearen, 1908

The Intrigue.

And Self Portrait at top of the page.

Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are -changin’.

Bob Dylan

(I  much prefer Dylan’s version to Larkin’s poem.)

 South Bank, John Haynes copyright 2009

Statue of Mahatma Gandhi: Tavistock Square, London. (Copyright John Haynes 2007)

Quote of the week:  ”I don’ think life has a meaning beyond what we put into it. It’s like vision. I mean one only projects colours onto objects – they’re not, of course, themselves coloured -one also projects meaning onto things. If you look at a painting, the viewer is projecting his own meaning into the paint, whatever the artist wants. And ditto with an oak tree; whatever God or Darwin decreed for it, you project meaning into it.”  Richard Gregory


The lineaments of Gratified Desire
.

What is it women do in men require
?

The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

William Blake

Until I started writing this blog I thought I had memorized this quotation years ago and that Blake was right, although he was a gnomic who never quite meant what you think. But, I’ve just found out, after many years to my shame that firstly I didn’t know what lineaments were – I thought they were linty and comforting bandages – worst still that I had substituted a ‘most’ for the ‘do’: What is that men and women most require…which has dented my blogging because I was going to argue that what ‘we’ most of all require are healthy levels of self esteem, and the courage to be ourselves. I’ll come back to that after my desire diversion.

 Despite these reported lapses, I have worked out a paradox of desire, or perhaps that’s not true, I’ve worked it out in conjunction with an absent friend who’s still watching seals on that distant seashore and pondering the meanings of the universe, which is that the essence of desire’s compulsive energy to connect is met, no not met but fulfilled in the obstacle to its connection. Gratified desire is doomed – sooner or later to become dead desire, or domestic desire. It is the obstacle rather than the object that fertilises desire.

In the romances of archetypal lovers like Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis and Achilles and Patroclus, desire is challenged by separation, suspended and then immortalised by death. I find Venus and Adonis the most tragic scenario because of its lack of symmetry between the lovers and because Adonis is adolescent he feels himself to be invincible to danger and as immortal as Venus. It’s still true that it’s the most original, beautiful, brave and intelligent adolescents who wont listen to their elders. (Which brings my grand children Dan and Portia instantly to mind.)

This paradox of desire is true of Amaldova’s  latest and perhaps greatest – although I have heard as many say his least successful – erotic testament, ‘Los Abrazos Rotos’, or ‘Broken Embraces’, where the collision of obessional desire(S) are suspended and then ruptured by violent acts of  sex, death and blindness. Here, there is no light; except with Almodovar there always is more light, but I don’t want to write a review of Broken Embraces although I am still thinking of little else, except that Penelope Cruz’s symphonic Spanish beauty stops me thinking at all. (Her Hollywood performances don’t work so well outside of her mother tongue, which enhances her sense of timing and wit.)

A link between Coriolanus and Almodovar’s film is that they both reveal the suffering of men whose parents have refused to recognise them, let alone love them for who they are. Isn’t that what we all desire most of all, to feel that we have been unconditionally loved.  Or is that just another unrealisable myth that keeps us in a state of longing. There is so much unconscious narcissism in love.

In my ‘Mother’ blog I talked about the elusive elixir of self-esteem, which I would identify as the lubricant of becoming oneself, and which is almost impossible to manufacture artificially. Some few do manage it but if you miss out on feeling unconditionally loved in childhood then it’s a lifetime’s work and hard going all along the way.

I’m drawn to the observations of ethologists, who were inspired by the ideas of Conrad Lorenz when he uncovered the concept of an ‘innate releasing pattern’ to explain our instinctive behaviours which are often only accomplished at specific life stages and afterwards become notoriously hard to recapitulate.

It’s one of the great wonders of life that self- esteem is so vital to human wellbeing and yet it is so often absent even where you would expect to find it. Success is rarely related to self esteem, but often grows out of its absence and an inflated desire to get the zeitgeist to prick up its ears in compensation for the absence of a more private gleam of admiration in the parental eye.  

In ‘Broken Embraces’ what I understood to be personal clues from Almodovar’s life are barely concealed within his maze of imagery;  an underplayed moment of personal pathos and revelation was costumed in the geeky  and sexually ruined son of the tycoon Ernesto Martel, whose life is fuelled by revenge for  humiliation at the hands of his father for being unworthy of his loving embrace. That’s why unconditional love matters: it is the antidote to stunted emotions. And then, I thought of Almodovar’s compatriot Lorca and his torment at disappointing his father and then, how astonishing it must feel to grow up knowing that you are unconditionally loved, and then how terrible it is to know that so often, but not always, because nothing is for always, that broken embraces are so easy to contaminate one dysfunctional generation with another.

And that is why learning how to live and love matters more than anything.

Quote of the week:  He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.  For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars. William Blake, ‘Jerusalem’ 111, 55: 60-8.

Coriolanus’ fall from hero to exile is caused by a revengeful narcissism, which makes him seem arrogant rather than vulnerable when – victorious in battle – he refuses to expose his wounds to the marketplace as custom demands. (You can find descriptions of his wounds in Plutarch’s Lives but not an account of his relationship with his suffocating mother.) Shakespeare was not keen on mothers: often they are most present by their absence. He doesn’t manage ‘a good enough one’, let alone a loving mother, anywhere. I’ve just thought of Queen Constance in King John, but she must be the exception. And, there’s Hermione but she’s too vulnerable. When I think about Coriolanus’ inability to expose his wounds it provokes other thoughts in me, which cluster around differences between concrete acts of self-harm and psychic equivalents. It’s common for some adolescents who self harm to bear their cuttings like jewelry, at least when among their peers. I’ve just been reading some Chaucer  with Dan and in the commentary I was much intrigued to read that in the early Medieval period it was commonly regarded that body cutting was a means of enhancing spiritual energy.

If one is positioned to talk to adolescents about their self harm they will often explain that seeing their blood run free gives them a sense of being alive, (often in contrast to feeling emotionally dead) and that allows them to feel empowered. My daughter Tanya is a psychotherapist with extensive experience in working with self harmers. I was once listening to her give a public lecture and at the end one of the mums asked her what was her most frequent piece of advice. Quickly, she replied, ‘Don’t interfere, don’t over-react and make sure you have lashings of lint, antiseptic and plaster visible  in an accessible drawer.’ I’ve had little professional experience of physical acts of self-harm although it is not a phenomenon limited to adolescents and more often it’s the boys who carry it on into manhood.

I will never forget Princess Diana disclosing – if not revealing – her self harmed thighs on Panorama. In fact she was probably doing it for her mother who left Diana comforting her small brother when she disappeared from their lives without warning. Diana probably went on invisibly crying inside for her mother all her life. Diana’s mother filed for the custody of her children but then her own mother, Lady Fermoy testified against her and in favour of her husband and an enforced reign of terror began. Diana was crying because she was abandoned and didn’t know why and Coriolanus was crying because he was impinged on and both were traumatized forever.

One of the saddest things I’ve read was when I was editing a book on Diana’s death, and I read her will online in which her last will and testament reinvests her mother’s authority: ‘Should any child of mine be under age at the date of the death of the survivor of myself and my husband, I appoint my mother and my brother Earl Spencer to be the guardians of that child and I express the wish that should I predecease my husband he will consult my mother with regard to the upbringing …of our children’.

 Flesh wounds can heal in a way that psychic wounds although invisible, often do not. They have the capacity to eat their way into the brain, through people’s lives and erode their self-esteem. It’s true that some words are immortal and it’s usually the insulting ones. There should be a recipe book for cooking, bottling and pickling the elusive essences of self-esteem. Absent mothers, wronged mothers, impinging mothers, blind mothers, vain mothers all suffocate their young. It’s a more sophisticated form of what other animals sometimes do. But, who doesn’t long for the mother of  their dreams, and maybe a few even have them. After all even Peter Pan never stopped wanting one.

Harold Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett

Copyright John Haynes 2006

All his life, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrestled with numerology, and he held an intense fear of the number 13. (For example, he named his unfinished opera Moses und Aron , instead of Moses und Aaron so that the title would have 12 rather than 13 letters.) A certain discomfort stemming from his birth date, September 13, haunted him, and indeed intensified during his later years. Perhaps he foresaw that he would die at age 76 (7 + 6 = 13, a fact not lost on Schoenberg) on Friday 13 July, 1951.

Quote of the week: William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 1:

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows

Like harmony in music; there is a dark

Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles

Discordant elements, making them cling together

In one society. How strange that all 

The terrors, pains and early miseries,

Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused

Within my mind, should e’er have born a part,

And that a needful part, in making up

The calm existence that is mine when I 

Am worthy of myself.

It happened  this morning when I treated myself to a forbidden cappachino and it was lukewarm: a cappachino can only  disappoint unless the heated milk is  just right and like so many things that require a small, if particular skill, it rarely is. I cannot think of anything more disappointing than a cappachino in which  the milk beneath its froth is either too hot or too cold, except  a hotel bedroom without access to a thermostat. I don’t think that life is often just right but I’m still not much good at compromise. I think that’s why flies were delivered into the universe, to remind us of our Fall. Even idyllic places are flawed by a bluebottle, a midnight mosquito, let alone a hornet, or a scorpion’s arcane shadow on the wall.  That’s why I love Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died’; maybe her lines were inspired by Keat’s ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ where he counterpoints the anticipated perfection of ‘ the coming musk rose’ with his ‘murmurous haunt of flies, (not bees) on summer eves’. 

This summer our daughter spent her holiday in France in the unsolicited company of  a hornet-swarm. She couldn’t locate their nest, so nobody could advise her what to do with her anxiety except to remain vigilant and to keep all the shutters closed at all times despite the heat-wave for hornets, she was warned, like Goldilocks, are partial to cool, clean sheets. And their sting can kill. Every night, as she turned on her bedroom light, the hornets slammed against her shutters with scifi sound effects, longing for her bedroom-cool. Nothing felt just right: all she could do was either to evacuate, or to adapt herself to their nightly vigil. On the final hour of departure when she threw open the shutters for the first time and there – suspended between the shutters and veranda glass – was the largest hornet’s nest that the gardener later reported ever having seen. My daughter gasped at its pale beauty and linty trails of  weave. As she looked back towards the house she was taken by  surprise at how sad she was feeling at the thought that her companions, once so close to her in their proximity now, with her absence, faced extinction.

This is a conversation between Hilary Mantel and Jane Haynes on: Mind, Memory, Mood and Sleep. July 2009.

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