These days, ‘wonderings’ can be set straight as soon as curiosity knocks on the door. An answer no longer has time to tease, it can be instantly generated instead. Except what if I don’t want to ‘Just look it up!’: if I ask someone a question, it’s because I want to know what they think about something, to connect with their experience of it. It’s infinitely preferable to tapping on a small screen for the nth time in a day - as is cycling to the library, taking in the pulse of town and lingering to browse. A half-day well spent.

As mother and educator, I’m inevitably exposed both at home and at work with the confluence of advantages and disadvantages of ‘what it means to be human in a digital world’. There is plenty to celebrate: while I’d give anything to revert to the straight-forward candour of library index cards and the hermetic hush of the manuscript Reading Room, I don’t exactly wish to reconstruct a golden age of scholarly inconvenience (maybe just a bit?), or claim that knowledge was superior when it took longer to locate. But I do believe that physical access to material and embodied sources of knowledge, in particular the ‘journey’ to these, is irreplaceable: aside from library trips, there is also the live performance, the artist discussing their work, and skimming the dictionary for the translation of an idiom, only to stumble upon countless (always more fascinating) others - one of my favourite ways into a language.

I call this slow knowledge, which brings me to the difference between information, fact-gathering and actual knowledge: access to information and to someone else’s knowledge is not the same as owning that wisdom, having agency over developing, deploying and sharing it. ‘It’s wanting to know that makes us matter’, Stoppard tells us through Arcadia - that masterpiece of the 1990s which teases out our relationship with knowledge against the tide of time. Yet one of the most significant outcomes of the digital revolution is not simply a loss of curiosity– in many ways, we have become compulsively curious. It is, instead, the disappearance of the interim journey from question to library/museum/teacher/friend – from the ‘wanting to know’ and the thing given to us that looks like an answer. It is in that interim journey that education (‘life’ as much as ‘school’ learning) happens: wonderfully, painstakingly, beautifully. Sometimes, accidentally.

In Reader, Come home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf brings to life the neural activity of reading printed text through a delightfully vivid analogy with incredibly complex Cirque du Soleil acrobatic acts performed at light-speed. In the (idealised?) ‘once upon a time’ of barely two decades ago1, the search for an answer was still often a quest – if not from home to library or knock on a door, then at the very least from one shelf (or page) to another. It involved, to different degrees and much like Wolf’s breath-taking illustration of neural activity while we read, an entire web of connections and experiences, from sensory to emotional, from social to cognitive.

I exaggerate: of course, in many areas of life, we still go on ‘analogue’ searches for answers, from the depths of armchair reading to coffee with a friend. But the new school year is about to begin, and I’m planning a layered curriculum review, for which we’ve been tasked to integrate two unlikely bedfellows: Artificial Intelligence and Human Flourishing in a Digital World. Wolf’s book was exactly the glue I needed for my scattered ideas. She advocates nurturing a biliterate reading brain: one capable of moving discriminately, efficiently and even seamlessly, between digital and print environments without ‘short-circuiting’ the kind of reflection, inference and critical attention developed and sustained by deep reading. A substantial part of her book is dedicated to explicating ‘deep reading’ and how printed text facilitates this.

Wolf is not arguing for the false dichotomy (analogue vs digital) of a luddite perspective. Her concern is that the habits fostered by our secondary mode of reading (the digital) supersede the primary mode. Reading, she tells us, unlike speaking, does not come naturally: it is a complex cognitive capacity developed over time, which has not only altered the human brain but, as engine of culture, has actively elevated our species: ‘The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens’2.

To me, this is the most valuable take-away from Wolf’s argument: that the concern with a decline in reading, and therefore in sustained attention and engagement with deep knowledge, isn’t only about how we bring up our kids. Rather, these are issues fundamental to ‘the nature of human thought’, the ‘cerebral evolution of our species’, and define the society of the future. Since the future is ever closer than we anticipate, that society is the very one into which we are releasing our children. Wolf brings front stage the elephant in the room: our drive to be ‘informed’ (and allegedly empowered) by a daily deluge of byte-sized content can trump our critical capacity to analyse the complex realities we strive to negotiate.

What we read, how we read, and why we read changes how we think […] the quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is also our best-known path to developing new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.

- Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

Resisting binaries, Wolf’s proposed biliteracy is partly about flexibility. She advocates developing different cognitive habits for different media, to prevent allowing the medium to control how we engage with knowledge. The stumbling block is that the digital medium doesn’t only determine how we read, it is also addictively flooding our attention and ‘head spaces’ in ways that crowd out exactly – you guessed it - the complex web of experiential connections (cognitive, emotional, social, sensorial) that we could encounter on an analogue, meandering and slow, search for an answer.

The safe, supportive, intellectual and creative ecology of the classroom is the world in microcosm. Here, we can be more deliberate about different kinds of attention – particularly those useful to acquiring, practising and owning knowledge. But to any kind of attention, reading is central:

A young reader can develop the multiple deep-reading processes embodied in the fully elaborated expert reading brain; alternatively, the novice reading brain can become short-circuited in its development, or it can acquire new networks in different circuits.

- Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

Wolf’s argument is not that one mode of reading produces cleverer people, but that any medium will develop a different cognitive capacity from another. The difficulty arises when a capacity becomes dominant and short-circuits the other. The digital has become our current ‘dominant’: we have become remarkably adept at constantly switching, skimming, scanning. We are perennially seduced by digitally-packaged novelty, interruptions, fragmented/distorted information, in a perpetual state of alertness and vigilance we deem vital. Caught in this exponential feedback loop of craving, stimulation, expectation, fragmented attention, we breathe the illusion of ‘knowledge at our fingertips’.

Because neural reading circuits are made rather than inherited, the modes and contexts in which we function define them. Wolf’s concern is therefore developmental (the child and the society they grow into). The young have an extraordinary capacity to develop networks for inference, empathy, critical analysis, creative output and reflection. Yet these processes are increasingly short-circuited by hijacked attention and sensorial overload3.

This is why I think schools (with human teachers!) are as important today as the advent of literacy itself. Not to police smartphone use, but because the classroom is one of the few remaining places in a young person’s life where attention - precious commodity - is explicitly front-stage. When we teach, our primary effort is directed towards capturing attention. When kids come to lessons, for many of them, the primary effort, conscious or unconscious, is to scan for potential distraction.

Teachers are uniquely positioned to harness, cultivate and celebrate attention. This is the very the foundation of the knowledge, skills and confidence needed for intellectual development, learning to ‘be’ in the world, and with each other. By virtue of their specific subject expertise (particularly in Humanities, the Arts and Primary education), teachers can be adept at nurturing fluent intellectual movement between modes. They can teach pupils to recognise the strengths of new technologies without jeopardising their (surely phenomenal?) painstainkingly acquired cognitive and creative capacity.

Our young people are also required to learn how to work meaningfully alongside artificial intelligence. Unlike previous generations, the fluency expected of them in today’s classroom is multi-modal but also steeped in ethical considerations to an unprecedented but much-needed extent. Moreover, they must remain in control at all times: it is imperative that human agency, not the medium, stays in charge. It’s a lot to ask.

A biliterate classroom is therefore explicit about the different modes and journeys to knowledge – including why. There is a time for ‘research’, and a time for deep reading; a time for skimming through text to capture key points – and a time to be immersed in it, to grapple with the meanderings of a complex argument. A time for evaluative prediction and dialogic interaction, or for silent, focused work. There’s a place for testing oneself in intellectual combat with an AI agent, and one to mix acrylic paint.

It is the teacher’s job to provide the conditions for a child’s journey to knowledge. In my subject (English), we engage with voice, perspective, thought and feeling on a daily basis, from personal response to critical articles and wider context. When I hear of kids elsewhere being asked to use AI to generate their story plot, my heart weeps: let AI be an assistant, an interrogator, a source of feedback. Let it take over chores. But handing over some of the most special gifts we are born with – imagination, empathy, creativity – is counter-intuitive to human flourishing, particularly in a digital landscape.

I will finish with Wonder, and Stoppard’s wisdom again, that ‘wanting to know’ makes us ‘matter’: what if we made a point to cherish – beyond the classroom – a certain liminal state of ‘not knowing’? A kind of curiosity that is robust enough to take the journey towards possible answers, armed with the awareness that there may be more than one solution, depending on perspective and context? A liminal state of curiosity that knows how to be evaluative, empathetic and inclusive.

Daughter of Boredom, Wonder is a state of intellectual fertility. As the ‘adults in the room’, we are Her custodians. We know how to educate young people about contexts or aims suitable for the quick and easy path, and which arduous slow journeys to protect. We can encourage them to set aside devices at certain times and be immersed into the worlds and ideas of printed text, the synergy of real-life conversation - instead of instantly reaching to ‘just look it up’. We can encourage retrieval before ‘search’. We can be explicit about the how and the why of cultivating different kinds of attention for different purposes, in different spaces - why taking the slow road to knowledge, is not a waste of time, but an investment. We don’t do this to protect the book industry (which is in fact thriving), but the ‘wanting to know’ which keeps us connected with our family, friends, neighbours, and ancestors.

The journey between question and answer once took us more frequently on scenic routes past waiting, remembering, asking, catching a bus, getting distracted by the wrong book/page/shelf, arguing with somebody over coffee, changing the question, discovering that the original question was not quite the question after all. What now looks terribly inefficient, was in fact the fertile ground of problem-solving, human interaction and sensorial delight.

But much as I love musty index cards and would wax lyrical about white chalk handwriting on blackboards, come September I’m not going to disconnect the classroom Wi-Fi: a bi-literate lesson isn’t about fencing off new paths to knowledge, but about preserving the wondrous journey to it

PS: The book waiting for the 13 year olds starting secondary education in our school next week:

‘From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In Klara and the Sun Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?’ (Faber & Faber blurb). Film out in October.

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The ongoing discourse - we’ve finally moved past doubtful ‘debate’ - is picking momentum fast. All eyes are on the restriction of toxic influences on childhood: the ban on smartphones in schools; the curfew on social media for under 16s; the exponentially growing concerns about young people’s mental health, social, sexual and physical development, and skewed understanding of privacy; the depleted, if not severed, personal connections, especially within the family space1. This debate, surprisingly welcome by young people themselves, stems largely from Haidt’s seminal arguments in The Anxious Generation, where he uncovered how childhood has become increasingly reorganised around the smartphone. This issue has finally turned from background noise to front-stage argument. It has also confirmed some of our fears that before long we’ll be looking back at how freely we handed over smart devices to kids. A woeful hindsight similar to the realisation that cigarettes or Coca Cola were harmful from the beginning.2

While those in power tackle the means to a necessary end, the time feels ripe for the rest of us to consider more closely what, and above all, how, we can restore childhood to an generation increasingly lost. There are real opportunities for more creative approaches to holiday camps (such as Beaver Tree Camp), increasingly popular initiatives to reconnect with nature (the Education Nature Park, forest schools, the WWF Happy By Nature programme, rewilding opportunities in the Carpathian mountains, to name but a few), while other imaginative analogue alternatives are surely being conjured as I write.

It is interesting how currents of an age, even from different angles of the human experience (perhaps because of it), eventually end up with concomitant goals. The smartphone ban is not ostensibly linked to the climate crisis, nor to the eco-drive to reconnect with indigenous wisdom - and yet the goals are the same: a return to the recognition of our symbiotic existence with Mother Earth, our relationship with it and with each other - but also, delightfully, with our inner worlds. This symbiotically engaged existence has been for too long contaminated by the other human drive, for progress, to the point that it has now reached beyond endangering the Blue Planet, right into our children’s social, emotional, creative and intellectual lives.

For me (and I know I’m far from alone in this), one aspect of childhood I like bringing back to my children alongside reconnecting with Nature, is the experience of the Arts. A significant aspect of giving childhood back entails recovering embodied, relational and imaginative experiences through unstructured time, responsibility, conversation, making and play. Sustained exposure to the arts belongs to this wider philosophy of reconnection. The Arts ask of us to see and hear, move and make, interpret and discover how much more the world sparkles when lit by more than one glow. Crucially, they also lead us to uncover the joy of our own inner resources.

This is the strand I want to follow here - primarily because it shaped my own childhood so profoundly, in circumstances where the Arts were both instrumental to political control and unlikely spaces of imaginative freedom.

This essay builds on a recent talk to my students, weaving stories and themes explored in last summer’s Visible Strings and Freedom Spaces. The theme for the talk was Light in the Darkness. Readers of Visible Strings will recognise the puppet theatre of my childhood, leading here explicitly towards other forms of freedom that artistic expression made possible in the dark and controlled world of a 1970-80s Eastern European totalitarian regime, where pre-digital childhood was materially restricted.

I recounted the story of when, back in Romania for the summer of 2025, my companions found it amusing when I said I’d skip the mountain hike for a marionette show - I was the only adult unaccompanied by a child in the tiny auditorium, where the ten worn out benches of memory had been replaced by plush chairs.

In the communist Romania of my childhood, even in the decades of food rationing, the Arts provision remained generous: from opera to theatre, from art exhibitions to spectacular propaganda displays. It’s easy to take for granted the uncommon power the Arts have on us, even when we are only tangentially exposed to them. Totalitarian systems have always understood how this power reached far beyond entertainment. Such cultural generosity was strategic arts and cultural pursuits are ways of enthralling attention and manufacturing feeling.

Whether communist, fascist or fundamentalist, indoctrination and propaganda are especially effective when they understand spectacle. Picture, on a typical communist May Day3, a sports arena where young people are choreographed into colourful shifting patterns outlining detailed portraits and spelling out slogans, streets lined with pioneers armed with red carnations and little red flags - and marching band music, all in celebration of a fabricated record-breaking crops and industrial production. And of the Supreme President, of course.

Ridiculous though this may sound, we loved the multicoloured noise, the electrifying sense of purpose and belonging. For our parents it meant a day off physical labour, in full sunshine. For us kids, a day off school. We, children, didn’t for a second question the performative theatricality of it. Nor how this spectacle (in standardised outfits of red, yellow, blue – the colours of our country) sat alongside the rationing of food, gas, electricity; homework by candle light; or the winter water saved in bathtubs which freezed so hard that we’d pretend to skate on it.

We worshipped our great Communist Father on cue, in confident voices - with flags, slogan placards and impressive human formations spelling out the fabricated glory of his name. We were too young to comprehend the bedazzling machinery of totalitarian power, legitimised by Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain. A power which terrorised our parents into not breaking the spell – for fear of losing their livelihood, if not their lives.

Even warped into propaganda, the Arts still work through the reality of the world as we know it - its physical and emotional dimensions: rhythm, colour, voice, movement. We feel what we see before we understand a message. In those moments when we perform, make or watch something, we get to suspend our disbelief, we open differently to whatever life throws at us, we get to live more fully. In a context of scarcity, creative activities and celebrations, alongside reading and spending time in nature, were, quite literally, all we had. But in any context the creative impulse – the bliss of ‘flow’ - is irresistible, even therapeutic.

We sing, dance, tell stories as a life-affirming way of coming together, but also to express the inexpressible: courageous artists across history found ways to weave dissent into the very fabric of censored or propaganda work. This is famously the case with Palestinian embroidery, Trajan’s column in Rome, Lu Xun’s allegorical satire of authoritarian culture, or Dmitri Shostakovich’s 5^th Symphony, all of which embed irony and tension in scores that satisfy a political power - while unsettling it from within. By disguising radical critique within the symbolic messages it broadcasts, subversive creativity can sow the light of hope.

In a totalitarian context, the power of the Arts is further complicated by its re-construction of reality, thus controlling minds: firstly by inspiring trust, then by twisting trust into fear. For those growing up under dictatorship, this fear is normalised as loyalty to the ‘supreme’ communist figurehead. The President’s portrait featured on the first page of every school book and reigned larger-than-life above the teacher’s desk. Before the first lesson of the day we sang the national anthem - a hymn to His glory, the communist colours, the agricultural fertility and geographic magnificence of one of the most beautiful and (at the time) oppressed, of European countries.

Viktor Shklovsky said that the purpose of art is to defamiliarize, to break the dulling force of habit so that we can see afresh the ordinary things of this world: and precisely this is the strange but also wonderful thing about artistic expression in dark times. While they indeed controlled a hungry and terrorised population through indoctrination - by re-writing everyday life - even censored songs, stories, artwork and poetry were infused with wonder.

In What Good Are the Arts, John Carey argues for the vital role of creativity in ordinary life - more than as luxury or privilege - because of its power to enrich and magnify human experience, to shine the light on possibility. Indeed, under the tactical benevolence of a tormentor’s hand, or maybe with just more luck than in other dictatorships, Romanian culture was not all propaganda: it saved a place for certain ‘safe’ classics, including international ones (any non-Western and pre-20th century Western authors, artists, musicians, film makers…). By accompanying my father, a theatre sound engineer, on tours, after 18 performances of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, I was able to lead my siblings into endless role-play in our apartment living room (which overnight functioned as our bedroom), line by line Shakespeare in translation. This game alternated with tough Arctic explorations, tropical jungle challenges and even excursions into old age, when we imagined what it would be like to become like the rustic old men and women sat in porches by the side of country roads: frail, wise and full of stories.

Although contextually we lived a comfortable life, we owned fewer toys than we could count by the fingers of our hands. Due to the 100% employment policy of the communist system, with both parents working full time, in the summer holidays we were left either unattended for hours on end, or taken to our grandparents’ flat. This made role play, imaginary toys, story-telling and writing, and later, reading, the only forms of entertainment available. Our grandparents took us to parks, the library or swimming pool, or further afield on day trips to dreamy Carpathian castles. And of course, to the puppet theatre in the old town centre of Brasov:

The tiny auditorium of Puppet Theatre Arlechino was founded by the communist government of 1949 for the entertainment of small children. This diminutive venue has always lived in a slim Baroque building, just off the historic square of my town. It’s a crazy thought that, across decades, several generations - from that of my grandparents, to my own kids - have clapped hands of a Sunday morning to the same little stage.

As the usher unhooks the velvet rope and we settle for the opening gong, this womb of stories takes us back in time: firstly, there is the layered cultural history of Robin Hood: from old English ballad to novel, to translation from English into Romanian, then this 45 minute page-to-stage adaptation of its most entertaining essentials. Secondly, there is the magical suspension of disbelief particular to the experience of puppet theatre: the human actors appear first, to rouse interest with sing-song context; we grow familiar with their voices and mannerisms, anticipate with excitement the plush protagonists they’ll bring to life. In green and brown, no make-up, they come physically close to us, their uplifting energy enchants.

In the silence they leave behind, the magic takes hold: there under the first spotlight, emerges the first marionette: a monkish badger in brown hessian, carrying a satchel. Immediately, the moral tone is clear - the ordinary people of this world are the heroes of the show. By the time Robin Hood (a fox) and Little John (a thieving teddy) enter, we are hooked. The bad head of state, Prince John, is a bright orange tiger in red tights and golden shoes, sucking his thumb. The story is funny, exact, and deeply readable.

I’m mesmerised by the choreography of it, the deft manipulation of puppets on strings, each animated by four human hands but only one voice, each injected with consciousness, by the practised expressivity of fingers. We feel its ‘aliveness’.

When we watch or tell a story, the illusion works because we want it to work: we suspend our disbelief and our attention takes the show as truth. Indeed, performance becomes the only truth. Playfully stripped of violence but morally serious, this show bravely asks questions about justice, greed, charity, authority. It conjures the possibility of the weak to grow strong. It restores power to the disenfranchised.

By the time the glitzy, larger than life puppet of the rightful king, Richard Lionheart enters, I am taken aback — why do we need him? Now? To me, the more interesting power has already been claimed by Sherwood Forest and its mischievous everyday heroes. We clap joyfully in the wake of resolved moral conflict.

In reverse to the opening act, each character bows for applause, first as marionette, then as human. I appreciate, once again, the unpainted faces of these wonderful humans whose vocation is to enthral. This hour of time travel has unravelled in the guise of a language I thought slipping from my grasp, retelling a narrative originally from my second language, this, of my adoptive country. Artistry has stitched together rags of torn time into something new, richer and wonderfully luminous.

Back out into the sunny square, I wander into the Arts Centre next door where, up the grand marble staircase, I’m sucked into a crowd of kids the next age up from those watching the puppets. These girls and boys, also in their Sunday best, dash upstairs hyped about an acting workshop, booked first-come-first-served and not by body type or “natural” talent selection, like in my day.

For me, this isn’t just an exciting sight: in the bright voices and rosy cheeks of these kids, I witness one of our most powerful instincts: to make, express and embody a story, and in doing so live freely, but together. And - at least for a moment in time - retreat from the digital glow.

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- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

15 December, 2025: I’m about to embark on a predictable art trail which begins with the Eurostar from London St Pancras to Rotterdam. Normally at this time of year I return to the fold of Rome, catching up with friends over Mediterranean Christmas. Today’s journey is therefore a snap decision to leave behind the comforts of a (lovingly) haunting past.

At the first stage of passport control, I relax into the amorphous softness of ambient chatter as four distinct European languages converge into the polyphony of departure zones: a mother speaking to her son in Flemish, but turning to her friend in Italian. A French couple. I myself pass the time messaging towards three different parts of the world, including across the Atlantic.

The ornate underbelly of St Pancras International has become more than a geographical borderland: it’s a coupe of effervescent identities overspilling like New Year’s champagne, in unintentionally fizzy and unashamedly joyful erasure of liminality. My own sense of self slips out of its paradoxical bind the moment I hand over my British passport again, this time at continental (French?) border control; it assumes a lighter, less performative form than in daily life when I’m often subject to questions about my accent and/or ‘But where are you really from?’. Here I can relax into a sense of self shaped by relational acoustics rather than geographical assignation by country of birth (which assignation will forever label me as ‘other’ even after 70% of British lifetime). Anyone who has lived in more than one country will vouch for how exhausting it is to keep justifying who you ‘really’ are. To explain that ‘home’ isn’t a fixed concept. That all you want, when you look up, is to see the light of the same sky.

The polyphony of St Pancras eventually also floods the Eurostar. Passengers settle quickly into the microcosm that is their travel ‘group’, determined by seat number or social affinity. Small screens above the isle contribute to the party with animated visuals relevant to this journey, minimally captioned in Dutch, Flemish, English and French.

Other than as émigré/expat (depending on context-subtext) in mainland Europe and trips to the Middle East, my experience of travel is limited compared to that of my peers. And yet I only seem to relax in the liminality of journeys. Perhaps by now this is where I belong, in transit - where half-English half-Italian voice notes to friends don’t refract oddly off public walls. Where a Belgian grandmother, feeding grapes to the infant on her lap, smiles at me with understanding when I ask in a language she does not speak, if she’d prefer the window seat.

At Rotterdam Station, following a delay crawling out of Antwerp where ‘people were on the tracks’, everyone alights without saying goodbye to their companions of four hours. At first, I find this a little stinging - haven’t we, after all, just breathed 1/6 of a day in close proximity? But with hindsight I understand it as part of the shared flow: together we poured in and together we pour out of this train. We trusted its pull below the depths of La Manche while our experiences whirred in different tongues inside homely little tribes neatly distributed along carriages. Also with the momentum of flow we finally stood up, tugged our luggage off racks and stepped into the differently dynamic space of our destination. We parted ways.

Rotterdam station glistens with logical order, sleek cleanliness, the gloss of efficiency. Its unhurried demeanour is explainable in part by the automated ticketing service. Within steps from the Eurostar, I tap a slim yellow boulder with my phone to register use of the Dutch transport services; later, in Delft, I tap my way out of the circuit. There is not a queue in sight. But flow and efficiency are not just about automation: these were already characteristics of my experience in 2014 when I first visited the Netherlands and contactless wasn’t a thing. It seems to me that here flow isn’t a state of things as much as an attitude which results in this state of things: the Dutch sense of civic clarity comes across as more ethical than functional.

16 December: This morning I stepped into this view:

It’s not often that I find myself walking into a pop-up postcard at dawn. Perhaps a 5D one, if you count the measured pace of a modernised historical town in sync with the windmill watching over it; the outpouring of city bikes on ample lanes organic to calm roads where electric public transport provides swift, reliable transition; or the scent of an unusually soft December; the drone of a cleaning truck along the canal that skirts a train station sumptuously designed, studded with starry lights.

The spirit of some places really gets to me. This one squeezed tight in my ribcage all the way through the day. It held my hand at Vermeer Centrum where I found myself buying the ticket in English but asking for a tour device set to Italian, which I then switched to French. And something had to hold my hand - not only on the first floor, where I was moved by the science of Vermeer’s palette, the reconstruction of his domestic backgrounds, the pottery items from private archaeological collections so we can see for ourselves, multi-dimensional again, the milkmaid’s jug, or the letter-reader’s Delft blue fruit bowl:

I enjoyed messing around with scenery sets and demonstrations of how The Master of Light captured translucence and luminosity.

But on the second floor the caption on the wall stopped me in my tracks before I even saw its object of reference:

To mark 350 years to the day of Johannes Vermeer’s death, contemporary local artist René Jacobs re-created View of Delft out of 110,851 miniature human figures representing the estimated population of the town on 15 December 2025. Each figure was added by a Delft resident: the first by the oldest, and the last, on 12 December, by a pregnant woman (baby due 15 December). The resulting work, We are Delft, is thus a 21st Century installation - self-reflexive meaning-making in material form across time, but anchored in place. A gesture that erases polarisation1 by embracing both diversity and heritage. Under Jacobs’ watchful eye, past and present reunite, holding hands in a movingly resplendent dialogue that celebrates continuity of creative expression, from a certain resident of Delft named Johannes Vermeer, who set to work on this townscape around 1958, to today’s residents living and breathing the same air. One glance is enough (try it even with the reproductions here) for the sonorous energy of these three dimensional images to vibrate kinetically. This crowd is dancing.

I had not set out from England on 15 December 2025 specifically for Vermeer’s commemoration - I don’t tend to keep up with special calendar days. So the poignancy of my arrival in Delft on this very date was heightened by the finalisation of We Are Delft on 12 December, a day of particular significance to me, which essentially facilitated this journey in the first place. The force of such coincidences is hard to ignore.

Having stocked up on Vermeer stationery with all the restraint I could muster, I set off for the Hooikade, where the great man stood to paint his original, that is to say, subjective, interpretation of View of Delft. I have no words for what it felt like, being right there, at one with his own skyline. What with the shroud of cliché that threatens to demolish most luminous moments when they transition from imagined to experiential, it would be best just to say this: I felt the past and the present (my own, and of this place, its people) converge as a physical sensation that pinned me down. I spent a long time writing and photographing as the light shifted - subtly at first, then more dramatically, and yet without ever reaching the luminosity of Vermeer’s own moment in time. Later I learnt exactly why: this was the wrong season.

As reported in the Smithsonian, in 2020, in yet another momentous encounter between art and science, astronomer Donald Olson ‘studied the 17th-century cityscape’s depiction of light and shadow’ in Vermeer’s View of Delft, ‘to pinpoint the moment that inspired the artist down to the hour’. Taking into account architectural, cultural and ecological context down to minute detail, Olson concluded this masterpiece was most likely completed ‘around 8 a.m. on September 3 or 4, 1659 (or the year prior).’2

Gratitude, quiet awe are just two of the defining emotions triggered by my time in this place. And there’s also the realisation that my ‘luminous’ experience on the Hooikade was the cumulative effect of immersion, of love even, invested in a lifetime of encounters with art and in a variety of cultural contexts. Significantly, all of these encounters had been dialogic, never siloed, experiences. Even as lone observer in museums in countries where I didn’t speak the language, I could never be actually alone, empirically or metaphorically.

Similarly, it is virtually impossible to be working on a creative or innovative goal without being inevitably connected to (directly responding to, or addressing), others. Csikszentmihalyi actually insists that without an evaluative audience, an outcome cannot truly be defined as creative, just as nothing that we make is ever produced separately from everyone else and from the context ultimately shaped by all of us.

We Are Our World. Our world is us.3

While I didn’t come to Delft specifically to look at how Vermeer painted light, when I try to entangle the circumstances which brought me here, the little patch of yellow wall that pulled me in this direction immediately revealed itself. I guess if one could single out a colour in this entire painting that ‘catches the light’, it would have to be the yellow.

Moreover, even under the muted grey and beige of this mild December in 2025, it is light that keeps stopping me in my tracks. Not only as natural phenomenon or as captured by a masterly paintbrush - but also as function of cultural permeability. Dislocated from the many places I’d call home, I feel free. Free from labels imposed upon me based on appearances, and from labels I myself seek - to neutralise those appearances. The light I breathe here doesn’t so much dissolve boundaries (physical, experiential, disciplinary) as liquefy them into a state of osmotic flow. I realise that on such currents, through exposure, attention, and the willingness to be moved - by that and by those around us - by positioning ourselves in a receptive state, we can finally drift into presence; we can be altered into being - as opposed to doing, yearning, seeking.

In ‘Art as Therapy’, Alain de Botton evaluates the potential of art - of our encounters with works of art - as prism for self-knowledge and for re-sensitising ourselves to the beauty of the ordinary; a means towards counteracting the perpetually dissatisfied hunger for the unattainable. Meanwhile, on the other side of the creative process, there is discovery and meaning-making - not only through art but through any expression of human ingenuity. So, from whichever point we view it, the outcome of creative endeavour becomes the nexus for the permeability needed to feel ‘more fully alive than in the rest of our lives’.4 And therefore truly free.

If we take Csikszentmihalyi’s proposal that a creative outcome ‘arises from a synergy of many sources, not only the mind of a single person,’ then my Delft encounter was the pinnacle of convergent streams, all of them contextual. By engaging in cultural experiences - in conversation, writing, even just thinking - we are already contributing our own modest ‘human figure’ to the choreography of cultural heritage at large. Csikszentmihalyi’s proposition that nothing we create is ever really new, isn’t because influence is unavoidable but because, he argues, the best innovations of humankind have to be re-learnt - studied, expressed, re-expressed, applied, then seen again through new (usually updated) lenses. ‘The spark is necessary,’ he writes, ‘but without air or tinder there is no flame.’ Writing can be tinder. Looking, standing face-to-face with someone else’s creativity- or even better, contributing to its revival, like the people of Delft- is tinder. Or, in the words of Tom Stoppard, our recently departed giant of intellectual prowess and creativity, ‘we shed as we pick up’: knowledge, discoveries, innovation, artistry.

17 December: I’m here to take in my view of Delft for the last time. In this version, the sky is overcast, the canal glassy with the indubitable stillness and flawless reflectiveness of mirrors. No ripples, no gilded shimmer. People rushing past (mostly students on their way home), don’t stop for homage to pale winter light. This vantage spot being more than familiar, they might have understandably become de-sensitised from what I, as outsider, regard with wonder. The shifting perspective, the fluid, luminous view of their town. It will probably take a trip away from home, somewhere into a differently-cadenced space of light, for them to be awe-struck at the polyphonic potential of place, of time, of being.

It seems that, although it takes displacement to restore us ‘home’ to ourselves, even if we do all we can to release the past, our lived context - in its entirety - will insist on highlighting our perception of the world down to its tiniest detail. Without palimpsest of context, there’d be no grounding in self, home or community - no ‘yellow wall’ to catch the light of heritage.

18 December: At the Mauritshuis in The Hague this morning I saw many wonderful things about which I will write another time. Just one last thing before I sign off: standing in the very spot where Proust’s Bergotte collapsed before the sight of Vermeer’s View of Delft, in real life proximity to its palette, I can confidently contribute to the yellow wall debate that the only true patch of ‘yellow wall’ in this painting is this:

My point is backed up by the wholesome, yolk-yellow 21st century risposte to the debate, visible today from the Hooikade and resplendent with enlightened wit. Dedicated to Vermeer, Proust, Bergotte, Jacobs, the people of Delft and its visitors - the creativity chain shines on.

Language is the big adventure of my life.

Deborah Levy, interview for Prospect magazine

In the beginning there was, and always will be, the Word: written and unwritten, from the innermost language of the self to the gasps of awe at the first sighting of Earthrise (which reverberate into our times)1, via complex printed volumes of human endeavour.

Our most intimate understanding of the world is conjured into being by language. For the most silent and the most confidently outspoken of us alike, the tune of that language is our voice.

This is the story of how I found out that, in order to be truly free, we have to use that voice, in the languages given to us - which are always more than one - to share our stories. We don’t only tell stories ‘in order to live’ (Joan Didion), ‘to survive’ (Umberto Eco), to remember ‘who we are, and why we are here’ (Sue Monk Kidd). Storytelling is capable of so much more: it can empower the master, the novice, the disenfranchised; it can restore, and it can destroy, dignity; it is the breath of life, and it can take lives away.

As cultural practice, storytelling is as old as the human ability to form meaningful utterances. Our brains are literally wired for narrative - there is a story arc in our recounts of mundane events, in jokes, in the flow of news items. We feed on narratives in all areas of life. Some yield a didactic outcome, but the most powerful will provoke questions without spelling out answers. As result of the narrator’s skill and of our capacity for empathy, storytelling can inspire the birth of even more complex (though not always better) worlds.

When I was about 11, the headmistress of General School No. 7, whom we knew and addressed as Comrade Director, started sending for me whenever there was an unexpected need for a cover lesson. I’d turn up to her office, which opened directly onto the school lobby, and stand straight to attention, silent and shy before her desk, knowing exactly what was coming. She would ask, always kindly, if I wouldn’t mind telling a story to the pupils whose teacher wasn’t available. She knew I could come up with something fresh at a moment’s notice and that even older kids would then stay out of trouble for the hour.

I don’t remember much about these stories, but if they were anything like the content of my home notebooks, the protagonists were habitually reared in the natural world: injured creatures I may or may not have rescued from allotments behind our apartment block, or more fantastical ones I dreamt of taming - including mountain deer or a certain jet-black mustang called Prince, appropriated straight from the plains of a Western.

Many of my protagonists, especially the non-human, had escapist, anglophone names. But what’s in a name?

Some stories were the underground adventures of a clever, rust-brown spaniel I hoped to conjure one day into real life (7 years ago, I actually did - proof below!), and whose burrowing under the earth generated an entire universe. This spaniel was always called Annabelle, until one day our headmistress asked if I wouldn’t mind changing her name to something less … capitalist.

‘Like what, Comrade Director?’ I piped up big-eyed in anticipation of a more exciting suggestion.

‘Maybe… ‘Leaf’?’

‘…!?...’

To 11 year old me, ‘Leaf’ sounded daft and devoid of personality, more like debris hanging from my spaniel’s ear; but personal preference was not an option. Least of all for Comrade Director, who was held responsible for any transgressions against the nationalist integrity of the Socialist Republic of Romania, and of our Supreme Father, Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu, the President of the Republic and of the Communist Party. As is the case in all classrooms set up under dictatorship, Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu’s larger-than-life portrait watched over us from above the blackboard as we sang the national anthem before the first lesson of the day, and peered up our uniform sleeves from the frontispiece of each and every textbook.

I nodded in wordless agreement and found solace, albeit of a different kind, in a translated spaniel: Annabelle became a creature patriotically local to our fertile, communist, owned-by-the-state native soil, appropriately named after an oak leaf I made sure would be speckled by the reds and golds of a Carpathian autumn. I still own a carbon copy of the first three pages of the original, handwritten Annabelle story. The script is painstakingly pretty and rather neat (skills from which I’d soon be distracted), set out in sophisticated diction and SPAG (spelling, punctuation and grammar), on plain unlined paper. These frayed, yellowing pages actually introduce vivid, loquacious human characters, about whom I had completely forgotten. The animal world only really opens up at the bottom of page 3. Somehow, from reams of handwritten stories, I only actively remember animal characters. What is it about animals and the natural world that lends them to storytelling and memory with so much ease?

I look at these sheets now as if they were written by someone else; in many ways, they were. I am no longer that 11 year old girl, not even any ‘girl, woman, or other’^⁠2 who can speak and write Romanian, a complex Romance language, as beautifully as on this carbon script. Sadly, I no longer own my Romanian voice like a mother tongue and my version of the thing we call identity is in shreds. The Western, capitalist, anglophone escapism of those storytelling days has long since become the reality in which I live, breathe, play and… teach.

When visiting the same class on successive occasions, I’d continue the tale previously started. The reputation of these make-believe cover lessons (where did I, a timid child under any other circumstances, muster the confidence to stand in front of 40 teacher-less kids?) was flattering, but also a great burden. While I relished the opportunity - the ‘freedom’ - of stepping out of school-time into story-time^⁠3, this freedom came with the inchoate sense of expectation to stand to attention, always ready, always responsible. And if possible, to excel: there is more to be said about the cost of this privilege, but I’ll save it for another time.

Our freedom spaces, whether underground realms of earthy fantasy and childish folklore, or those of the playground, were no more than the imaginary worlds of any childhood: except ours stretched well into our 14^th year. This was not so much symptomatic of 1980s socialist zeigeist as of suppressed access to any zeigeist, and to modernity itself. The cultural, artistic, social, technological advances which would typically nurture and excite a younger generation, lift them off the playground^⁠, were the forbidden territory of allegedly corrupt, capitalist systems, which apparently loomed as constant, unspecified threat from beyond the barbed wire of our borders. They also darkened our communist skies with the rumble of aeroplanes that frightened the playground: I’m still not over the realisation, too many years later, that those were simply tourist or cargo planes bisecting our sky. Many of us remained naive well into adult years, with significant impact, for better and for worse on life-choices and relationships (sometimes with inter-generational, and others with tragic, consequences).

Like the fount of creativity hidden inside propaganda arts (addressed in my previous post, Visible Strings) storytelling and make-believe in general were an escape from our scripted, ‘uniformed’ lives - and those of our parents. Little did we know that the very world we inhabited was itself the most masterfully cruel make-believe of them all. Our stories were in fact an escape from its bleak reality show of rationed nourishment and the terror of our homes being tapped or our parents being reported (by otherwise kindly neighbours) and ‘disappeared’ for betraying the communist state through word, thought^⁠ or aesthetic preference. This didn’t stop our surreptitious enjoyment of things like blue jeans, music or VCR tapes smuggled in from the West by rare relatives of the lucky few who had such illustrious opportunities. Music and movies already out of date on the ‘other side’ became our counter-culture. As long as we stayed clear of Radio Free Europe (and its mystery news stories played exclusively by adults, on extremely low volume, behind closed doors), we’d be safe. The privilege of setting our imagination loose, and in my case the joy of having my peers hop on the flight - was as close to magic as reality could get.

Fast-forward to June 1997: my first job interview, with lesson observation, at an independent boys’ school on the outskirts of London. I’m trying this out as ‘postgrad teacher’ with no training, tentatively intending to pay back my student loan before catching the Eurostar to Paris for a dreamy M.A. in Comparative Literature.

My PowerPoint projects an image of a painting I know well, the handout shows two different ekphrastic poems in response to it. There’s no glossary, no guiding questions, just the raw sources. The Year 9 lesson is the first time I stand before a class on this side of the Iron Curtain. But I’m not here to entertain a bunch of 13 year olds restless in their lesson before lunch. I’m here to prove my teaching potential by delivering a one-off lesson from which these hungry boys will hopefully take something away. I have not been told anything about their programme of study so far. It’s a ‘do what you want’ kind of lesson (read: do what you can, we’re throwing you at the deep end - but if we like you, we’ll have you qualify on the job): the kind of interview lesson offered in the independent sector to the youngest of unqualified teachers, fresh out of their Bachelor degree Finals, with no expectation of school syllabus or pedagogical knowledge. It’s about professional potential and low-cost filling of vacancies in otherwise solid, experienced departments. So here I am being interviewed at this ‘competitive independent day school located in the green belt of London’, my first time in front of a class.

Except it isn’t: the only novelty lies in the positioning, ‘on the other side’: of the classroom, as potential educator, as the adult in the room; the other side of the now bulldozed Wall4 that used to divide my childhood from that of kids like these settling at their desks before me. The other novelty is that, this time, I’m not telling a story. I’m inviting young people I’ve never met before to read and unpack meaning, their own ‘story’, from the image and poems I confront them with.

I don’t expect the intent look on their faces - the hands shooting up, the joy that runs through me at their eagerness to respond. I’m swept by the energy in the room and before we know it, the discussion - detailed, dynamic - reaches a state of flow which tells me: this is what I want to do, for the rest of my life.

I never caught that train to Paris. And I only learnt this summer, coming across my miraculously preserved childhood diary, how predictably a vocation can grow from the pages of a childhood. In addition, the fact that writing was the (naive, idealistic) raison-d’être of my child self is clear from the statement of intent for a first ‘novel’, announced in the second paragraph of her very first diary entry:

Sunday, 14 July, 1985

Nico doesn’t want to be friends anymore and has send Ana and Monica to ‘teach’ me hide-and- seek. I’m getting really fed up and I noticed that Ana only actually speaks to me when Nico isn’t around.

Today I copied up two of my stories and thought of a new novel: ‘The Stallion from Grandpa’s Herd’. I’ll start writing it tomorrow. Also today I went to play outside without asking mother for permission.

An entry three days later mentions devising a secret alphabet for communicating with another girl and a boy from our street, and the stalling of the horsey novel, because yours truly was stuck for a foal name.

In this diary, weaving in and out of friendship, schoolgirl crushes and animal rescue sagas, one motif stands out as clear as day: from the first pages in school-blue ink to the pencilled ‘farewell to childhood’ of the final entry (July 1990, when I emigrated), this writer was obsessed with education.

This article is an excerpt from a longer piece - thank you for dropping by!

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They found it amusing when I said I'd skip the mountain hike for a marionette show.

I’m the only adult unaccompanied by a child. When the cashier shows me Seat 4 on Row 3, one of the last available on the map of a diminutive auditorium, I tell her it’s perfect. ‘But … close to the front!’ she warns, taking payment. I couldn’t be happier.

I remember this auditorium as rows of perhaps ten wooden benches. When the doors open the attendant pulls across a velvet cord, at once delineating and dissolving the boundary between the real world (bright sunshine, cobbled sounds of street life) and the hush of magical sanctuary (the stillness of the stage). While too early to enter, it’s the right time for the mental shift. The dimmed lights, carpeted floor and plush beige chairs replace the benches of memory, telling me this womb of stories has enjoyed an upgrade. And then my breath catches - not so much for cut-out memories of crude miniature worlds of plywood or polystyrene, as for a specific festive occasion.

In most cities beyond the Iron Curtain, even when basics such as food or electricity were scarce, places of cultural provision and physical exercise thrived on rigorously active programmes in designated venues, alongside communist party headquarters, the Pioneers’ Palace (youth organisation for hobbies and activities), sports stadiums and training centres. Like other large Romanian cities, Brasov had the full suite of what is still known as ‘intellectual and artistic’ entertainment: the Opera, the Philarmonic Orchestra, the Drama Theatre - and for the youngest audience, the Puppet Theatre.

Smaller towns would boast a minimum of two such institutions. If a designated space was lacking, a Cultural Centre hosted touring companies from the city. The pervasive presence of these dogmatic but wonderful institutions was part of the Soviet script - the USSR imposed a regime of culture and sport to its vassal countries, fundamental to the propaganda machine. It then stipulated what culture and sport should look like.

Arlechino has always operated from a small building in the historic centre, adjacent to the main piazza. Communist workplaces of the 1980s, from factories to institutions, organised Christmas gift-giving for the employees’ children. Following a stint as factory engineer, my father worked as sound technician at the Drama Theatre of Brasov. In a city of colourfully historical architecture this theatre presides over a busy main road with its discordantly functional character. For the children’s gifts, the quaint puppet theatre stage was somehow more appropriate. It’s important to note that this was no Christmas party: there were no games, no festive mingling, no music. The children, lined up with their parents on little wooden benches would be called up to the stage one at a time by an ersatz Father Christmas to answer ‘yes’ to questions such as ‘Have you been a good boy/girl for your parents this year?’ and ‘Are you working hard at school?’ Looking back, I see us all as little automatons marching shyly towards the little (but oh so big!) stage, overwhelmed by the occasion (and perhaps also by these public declarations, true or untrue, of our worth).

Pre-communist Santa was known as Moș Crăciun, literally ‘Old Man Christmas’. But back in ‘those’ days, Father Christmas went by his Cold War name, Moș Gerilă, loosely translatable as Old Man Frost - or, as I’d prefer to translate it for the more accurate, duplicitous connotations, Old Janus. The Roman god Janus (father of ‘January’), was associated with beginnings, transitions, endings. Our own Janus’ double face looked both towards the New Year and away from it, unashamedly vigilant and intrusive. During the Cold War, the dextrous Soviet upper hand scripted a secularised version of Christmas for all countries east of that heaviest of curtains. This meant that gift-giving and celebrations were re-cast as atheist end of year festivities.

Yet despite state intentions, in their own homes Romanians carried on celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve. Until the overthrow of the dictatorship on 23 December 1989, for most families Christmas was hardly a feast, stripped of both spiritual and material dimensions: the former was forbidden, the latter unattainable. An anachronistically pagan feel was preserved instead, of value fully focused on nuclear family togetherness: decorating, baking, cooking, eating - a sort of rationed bountifulness, especially in the latter years of austerity. The more fortunate kids enjoyed the gift of an orange or a bunch of unripe bananas. There was no extended family and no church time, no St Stephen’s Feast/Boxing Day to indulge in some more afterwards. Nor were there carols, although a series of gorgeous, viscerally pagan folkloric rituals (pre-dating the Roman invasion of Dacia), took place in every community on New Year’s Eve and Day. All this to say that those gift-giving events for children of employees were therefore pretty exciting.

Culture, the lush fruit of creativity systems, besides providing opportunities for existential contemplation and life-affirming joy (and tears!), has a steely potential to control and dominate. Communist propaganda is particularly effective because of the centrality and accessibility of its carefully orchestrated events of immensely entertaining, didactic and motivational power. In Ceaușescu’s Romania1 these didn’t only take place on designated stages but also on streets and stadiums.

But in the worship of a Father State, didacticism marches hand-in-hand with censorship. In the case of children’s theatre and literature, the artistic ignorance of over-stretched state censors2 ironically facilitated dangerously delightful subversive messaging: ‘approved’ innocent imagery could easily be exploited for and by adults. All the more so on stage, where the very art of manipulating a puppet is a symbol of control, and the experience of the medium safely ephemeral. Other notably daring under-cover messaging for adults featured in the work of Ana Blandiana, one of the greatest Romanian writers and activists. Her most risqué tale in verse, ostensibly about a tomcat named Asparagus, implicitly critiqued the autocratic personality cult. Blandiana was eventually banned but post-Revolution her courageous activism and artistry returned to flourish and inspire her now grown up audience: she founded and lead the Civic Academy while at the helm of several other institutions fundamental to the re-birth of democratic culture in liberated Romania. Her oeuvre includes numerous volumes of poetry, essays and fiction. As a child I was blissfully ignorant of the politics at the heart of my copy of Tales from My Garden, but many years later I had the honour of meeting Blandiana at an Irish-Romanian poetry event in Belfast (1996) where she collaborated with the great Seamus Heaney.

Meanwhile, propaganda succeeded marvellously as inspiration for some of us children. I confess with blushing horror that I enjoyed pioneers’ marches and stadium choreography (the fun of waving red carnations or miniature patriotic flags…!) in celebration of socialist festivities such as The International Day of the Worker (1 May); Liberation [from fascism!] Day (23 August), or visits by the president to our town. These were opportunities for togetherness, band music, colourful dressing up (albeit hundreds of us in identical costumes to spell out patriotic slogans in giant white, red, yellow and blue arrangements on a stadium), even the occasional street seller of yo-yos (cloth balls stuffed with saw-dust, which we treasured from one year to the next) and cockerel-shaped lollies of burnt sugar. With everyone off work and school, these felt like the special occasions they were intended to be. As kids we never questioned the effusively militant celebration of bountiful crops, factories, and so-called ‘international’ success, clearly incongruous with our empty fridges or the glow of oil lamp on homework ink. Our parents were too scared for their livelihood to break the spell of this particularly magnificent show.

I’m shocked and amused remembering the fun we had on the communist stage; at how much closer to fascism it was even as it fancied itself the polar opposite; at how we performed its scripted games - unquestioning kids, frightened adults. How we worshipping the Father of our state on cue, in loud, confident voices, with flags, slogan placards, and human formations in pretty patterns.

Wonder is, unavoidably, undercut by the kind of access to material (but perhaps also to social and spiritual) comfort we take for granted when we live in a privileged world: there is nothing awe-inducing in choosing a bunch of bananas or a bag of sugar at the supermarket, or in stopping by a convenience store to grab some chocolate on the way back from work. By contrast, frugality and deprivation are engines for wonder: when something good turns up, the human capacity for joy and gratitude reaches levels otherwise reserved for epiphany and miracle. It is a cruel blessing, the miracle of access to basic livelihood.

With the unexpected tactical benevolence of a tormentor’s hand, or maybe just more luck than other communist countries, Romanian culture was not all propaganda: it saved a place for ‘safe’ classics, including international. I enjoyed countless theatre shows especially by accompanying my father on tours. The long, exhausting, uncomfortable coach trips in rusty vehicles that stunk of diesel and made me travel sick were worth it: I’d get to see that play one extra time. These were also rare opportunities to see other parts of the country, albeit within the parameters of coach/car-park/venue.

Occasionally the Brasov troupe would perform in towns so small they’d barely qualify as villages today, in dingy halls lit by a single fluorescent strip. There was never a raised stage or curtains, and the auditorium consisted of rusty, fold-away plastic chairs. These sparse settings were in fact the very reason my tween self watched in awe how the stage crew deftly set out a minimal scenery grown out of the mobile features of permanent sets I knew by heart. It didn’t matter that the backdrop of a beloved performance was reduced to its backbone: that it still worked and was applauded all over again, made it a thing of wonder. After all, the more effort we put into filling in gaps, the closer and richer our experience of a work of art.

These tours could be why I particularly enjoy teaching The Seagull, a play of deeply human, distinctively Chekhovian, pre-Soviet, concerns. The Seagull opens with two minor characters building a makeshift stage for the play-within-the-play that sparks off the main plot. This experimental mini-play becomes a symbol for the risk-taking creativity vs power dynamics conflict of the main play, pitching modern and traditional values against each other against a wrenchingly beautiful décor of social change.

By contrast, I never deliberately choose to teach As You Like It for fear of turning rewarding memories of Shakespeare in performance into assessment topics. I saw As You Like It over 18 (counted) times, and knew it word for word, in Romanian. Ironically, Shakespeare is much more accessible to foreign audiences because translated in their own, contemporary, language. By contrast, my English pupils depend on my assistance with textual paraphrase (or No Fear Shakespeare!) However, since decoding Shakespearean semantics and syntax is not only fun but proven to have cognitive benefits,3 as teachers we focus on enabling pupil resilience and curiosity in decoding Shakespeare. Ideally, they should reach the stage of ‘reading’ rather than ‘translating’ - a challenge in the classroom since the meaning of a play relies on non-verbal cues.

For years I could recite entire scenes from As You Like It and, with a little help, the full play. This was very useful when short of games to play in a toy-less home. Like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I readily jumped to adopt more than one role on the living room carpet, our stage. I still cherish vivid memories of the actors playing Rosalind (‘Rosalind’ was also Nina in The Seagull), Orlando and Celia; of their costumes, especially run-away Rosalind’s ‘safety disguise’ as sylvan male youth as she chases Orlando unchaperoned in the Forest of Arden.

As I peer inside the diminutive auditorium of the Puppet Theatre today, the usher unhooks the velvet rope, offering a look at the dormant stage. There is nothing uncommon about my nostalgic curiosity: the city, especially in summer, swarms with expats hungered by an emotive quest as we return to our native land to savour so much more than cuisine. With a few more minutes to spare, instead of joining the parents and grandparents waiting with their little ones on the lobby bench, I pass the time taking photographs.

The preserved puppets seem younger than those of my day. They are also very different from the puppets which take the stage after the opening gong.4

Yes: a gong! I cannot remember the last time I heard a gong signalling the start of a show. Much like Tibetan bells or singing bowls, it didn’t so much call for a hush as mark a moment of transition from earthy to spiritual realm. Imagination is as close as one comes to transcendence in a totalitarian state, and I’m living this visit as if back in time. When the tall elegant woman next to me gives up her seat to allow a little girl to settle beside her sibling, I realise that many families are split across the auditorium. When the gong sounds once more, there is further shuffling as confused small children and kindly adults re-arrange themselves in more appropriate seats. The little girl leaves her newly acquired chair to squeeze into her sister’s chair, beside her; next to them, two other girls are also sharing a seat. They too are small enough to fit in more than comfortably.

This liminal moment - the second gong that settles the seat swapping - brings me an awareness of the cultural and historical richness of the narrative about to unfold: firstly, the earliest versions, A Gest of Robyn Hode (ballad, 1400s, cca 13,900 words) and the novel adaptation by Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883, cca 80,000 words). Then the translation from English into Romanian and finally distilled ‘from page to stage’ into a 45 minute experience of its most meaningful and entertaining essentials.

There are also the modulations specific to the experiential and ephemeral nature of the genre. Puppet shows often make a point of grounding the event into its human dimension before drawing us into suspension of disbelief. Here, firstly the human actors leap on, one character at a time, to divulge a contextual morsel. Their respective mannerisms warm us up for the puppet protagonists whose embodied experiences they will conjure. The audience is transported into the enchanted world beyond the Fourth Wall5 by the joyous musical energy of these larger than life humans clad in unsophisticated, even generic sylvan (again!) green and brown doublet and hose. They remind me of Rosalind and Orlando’s costumes in the Forest of Arden decades ago. Young and old, already excited, we connect to the unique timbre of their voices, agile body language, expressive eyes and mischievous smiles. I notice that these adult woodland thieves wear no make-up, how this renders them humanly close. There is no obtrusive artificiality - colourful outlines are reserved for the puppets (not that they will need help securing our focus!)

We clap energetically to the beat of the actors’ bouncy prelude but the truly exciting moment, born out of the silence they leave behind on the stage, is the entrance of the first puppet: a plump, monkish badger, modest in brown hessian, carrying a cross-body satchel. His presence instantly sets a tone that anticipates the moral of the tale: the ordinary people of this world are the protagonists of the show. By the time Robin Hood – a brightly anthropomorphised fox – and little John - a kindly teddy bear thief - enter, we are hooked.

The language they use, especially the sympathetic references to the poor they help with their infamous thievery is archaic, but I'm certain the kids in the audience understand it, whether by working it out or from bedtime stories barely stylised in contemporary re-tellings of classics. I'm really enjoying myself by this point as I sink into the comfortable familiarity of a language which has been eluding me (or me, it) for years. The phoney king /wannabe usurper /bad, bad dictator, regent prince John, is a bright orange tiger with skinny anthropomorphic legs clad in red tights. He wears adorable golden shoes and sucks his thumb – a didactic plot addition to help parents fighting a losing battle against this ancient self-soothing habit.

I’m mesmerised by the deft manipulation – actually, choreography – of the stuffed toy marionettes6. Each is animated by two sets of human hands and one voice, that of its ‘master’. The practised expressivity of a puppet’s body language depends entirely upon the dexterity and inventiveness of human fingers, a skill likened to playing the piano7. The actors must also feel and enact the puppet’s inner life while simultaneously suppressing their own impulses. This is why, despite immobile toy faces of strong, fixed features, there is no detail of body language and emotion, great or small, a puppet cannot express. It is this convincing illusion that draws our attention to it: the utterly unreconcilable paradox of watching ‘conscious’ behaviour in an inanimate object. Through neural mirroring, the puppet’s thoughts and feelings are also directly sparked in the audience. Try focusing on the human behind a puppet, and you’ll feel the instant cognitive pull back to the ‘conscious’ thing! It is a very intense experience.

Stripped of violence and frightening conflict but sophisticated enough to pitch good against evil through acts of justice and charity against greed, the entertaining show is enough to inspire moral questions relatively complex for a small child, such as stealing from the rich to help the poor. I finally see how this play, a classic on the children’s stage, spoke bare-faced and direct against the veneer of Ceaușescu’s tyranny.

There is a playful touch of medieval romance in the Golden Arrow Contest and in Maid Marian’s role which enhances the moral through her choice of winner and therefore husband. Just as with Rosalind, Orlando and other couples in comedies Shakespearean and beyond, the status quo is decidedly re-affirmed by the marriage at the end. Here, with it, the ordinary people are restored to power. So when the glitzy giant puppet of the rightful king, Richard Lionheart, enters the stage near the end of the show, I’m rather taken aback: why do we need him, here? Now?

The majority of words addressed by Maid Marian to Robin take place during the proposal and regard the alarmingly high number of children she desires from their union. Her giddy maternal ambitions are comically worrisome for Robin and for the adults in the audience, but deeply affirming for the children, who giggle delightedly, feeling wanted, valued. In the wake of resolved moral conflict, we clap joyously as the show ends.

In reverse to the opening, each character enters to bow their leave as puppet first, then as human. I appreciate once more the unpainted faces of these wonderful people whose vocation is to enthral the youngest generation not yet fallen prey to Screen Time and (surely totalitarian?) AI. Since we have come a long way from the days of magically growing cardboard flowers from behind a tiny stage set, from tape-recorded voiceovers to cover staff shortages, I want to know more: I want to ask the actors about their own memories of theatre, the places they tour, the shows in their repertoire, and do they visit hospitals and orphanages?

But it’s almost midday and they are due their Sunday rest. I step out into the bright city sunlight feeling more settled than I’ve been for months. This hour of time travel has unravelled in the guise of a language I thought slipping from my grasp, through the re-telling of a narrative originally from my second tongue, this one, of my adoptive country. Art has yet again stitched the rags of torn time into something rich and strange.

I wander into the Cultural Centre next door looking for the room where I once auditioned for rhythmic gymnastics (the selection of kids for any physical activity including non-competitive was rigorous). Up the grand marble staircase, I’m absorbed into a crowd of parents setting loose children dressed smart-casual, slightly older than those who watched the puppets. Puppy-fat cheeks, confidently smiling, these boys and girls dash up the stairs hyped about a Sunday acting workshop: their ‘selection’ was by first-come-first-served online booking, rather than body type or ‘natural’ talent. For me, this isn’t just an exciting sight: it’s a wonder-ful one.

The Pink Panther - jazz composition by Henry Mancini (theme for the 1963 film). Click to play while reading, if circumstances allow.

There’s a bottomless well of sources to dip into for the history of any colour, so I won’t waste our time with a fact-file of pink nuggets you can access readily digested, elsewhere. What I’m offering instead is a rosary1 of mini narratives pulled out of a single moment in time: this one. I’ll share what escapes from between the leaves of plants and books, and folds of sari cloth.

A book is a kind of plant, but so is any writing. This one in particular will grow from the (limited) time I’m dedicating it. It will follow tendrils of thought, perhaps a sniff of sentiment, some buds of coincidence. It won’t follow: the conventions of a specific form. This is not to say it will be formless.

To begin with, this is not a history of the colour pink. It is the story of instances picked out as I write on a sunny day in June 2025, in the ‘library’ room overlooking the garden in ‘a corner of a foreign field/ Which is, forever, England.’2 Neither of these - room, garden, country - are truly mine, but the books, and this moment, are.

If this were a history of pink, I’d linger on symbolism, practical and artistic uses shaped by social trends across time - mostly related to fashion, but since the 20th century, also to gender dynamics and power statements. I’d be listing iconic events, images, objects that popularised it, from Elvis’ pink Cadillac (oh but for a chance to drive it!), to Monroe’s hot pink dress in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, via a medley of other artistic and commercial highlights. I’d tell you, perhaps immediately, that technically speaking, pink isn’t even a colour. Experts will explain it away as a hue of red diluted by white. This is, in a sense, true. It also explains why we allegedly don’t see pink in a rainbow when light refracts into its true components - although I believe that if you look hard enough, it’s right there.

But what of the possibility of things not being slaves to human perception? What if pink does actually exist as an entity in itself, not necessarily subject to the cones in human retina, the colour-wheels of artists and decorators, the spectrophotometers of neuroscientists? Is it truly appropriate, or even kind, to say that pink flowers are ‘diluted’ versions of red flowers, or blemished versions of white ones? Let’s suspend pragmatic disbelief for a moment and allow things (in this case, the colour pink), just to be, in and of themselves; there are ways of mapping the universe other than by formula.

Just as I was about to dive into the pink of peonies, a poem came to mind:

Here, now, one 
should say nothing 
of three flowers, 
only enter with them
in silence, fear, and hope,
into the next nervous one hundred human years.

- the ending of 'Furious Versions' - From Blossoms: Selected Poems by Li-Young Lee

Searching for a referencing link, I was erroneously taken (perhaps algorithmically, but I prefer to assume by happy coincidence) to a different poem by the same author, which happens to be about peonies and which closes the anthology ‘From Blossoms’:

Out of Hiding

Someone said my name in the garden,

while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of the peonies,

grew larger by my absence to another,
grew older among the ants, ancient

under the opening heads of the flowers,
new to myself, and stranger.

When I heard my name again, it sounded far,
like the name of the child next door,
or a favorite cousin visiting for the summer,

while the quiet seemed my true name,
a near and inaudible singing
born of hidden ground.

Quiet to quiet, I called back.
And the birds declared my whereabouts all morning.

Some of Li-Young Lee’s poems are also available here: Poetry Chaikhana

Here Li-Young dwells on memory as temporal metric of who we are, on details we might normally miss. This is what poetry does: it captures a moment in time and it explodes it. Sometimes like water or smoke, others like multicoloured Holi powder. Poetry entices an instance of reflection, if not contemplation, and can haunt long after we have moved on with our day. For as long as we allow it to stay with us, we come closer to understanding who we are.

The paragraphs that follow are not remotely intended as poetry. They are snapshots of pink things within my reach, and of what lies beyond them. But when considered closely, we see that these things are, in themselves, a kind of poetry.

1. PEONIES

Transient harbingers of early summer, these Central Asian flowers are the opening act to roses in many English gardens. The sensuous mousse of nude pink ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ blooms in the middle image was grown by previous tenants, while I planted ‘Pink Dawn’ (first image) with petals touched by silenced white. This teasing pink contrasts sharply with the yellows of bees.

The other day, one of the larger flower heads was buzzing rather operatically in bumblebee tenor, its petals vibrating like vocal cords. Once I realised that an intoxicated bumblebee was trapped so deeply inside the silky folds that the only way out was by intervention, I gingerly unfolded some petals. There it was, struggling in a golden bed of pollen, tangled stamens and frantic legs: a buzzing voice, much more precise than the muffled resonance of the previously animated peony. This voice belonged to an enormous Bombus ruderatus. Once it broke free, it circled around me too many times for comfort. I want to write ‘furiously’ or ‘aggressively’, but ‘defensively’ is a fairer adverb. Although, subject to our suspension of disbelief, perhaps it was a dance of gratitude.

There are other peonies in flowerbeds away from my house (third image): spun-candy pink, fully open like hand-mirrors for the sun, generously lush creamy stamens rising from the middle. Close up, the stamens look like a chorus of internal petals; from afar, like whipped meringue, or seaside rock candy sucked to softness. Their saccharine contrast to the sky renders the sky a bubble-gum blue. You don’t so much want to smell as to eat these flowers, hence perhaps their commercial name, ‘Bowl of Beauty’.

As the bumblebee will also tell you, peonies are softer to touch than silk, and their timid but efflorescent fragrance, as heady as that of roses.

2. INDIAN SARI

…from one of my other lives: a cool, deep fuchsia, almost violet, trimmed with gold braiding and a border of emerald green weave. The warp and weft of its story sits silently between sheer cotton folds, tucked minutely under the tinies of stitches, in a language I don’t fully understand but which I know I love. This object is a poem you can only see from the outside.

3. TIN BUCKET CANDLE HOLDER

In chalky warm pink, it holds a citronella candle, pair to an identical orange one, bought in Spain, where we used them against evening mosquitoes on the terrace overlooking the swimming pool, a nature reserve, the luminous sea.

4. BEACH TOWEL

With wide, neon pink and orange stripes, purchased without any beach plans for this summer, just because. Perhaps the colour combination echoed the candles and other things from a Mediterranean past, some of it serene, some less so, some finely tuned around a pregnancy: boy, and again boy, then girl. But can a towel be… a poem?

5. ROSES

David Austin roses, ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ variety - immense, damasked heads of a deep matte pink warmed by a blush of subdued orange flame. I have three of these from someone else’s garden, in a wide-necked glass bottle. The bottle originally held John Lewis ‘dog cookie mix’ - a present from one of my daughter’s friends (for the dog!). It seems I’d rather write about this bottle than about the owner of the rose garden and why I brought this bunch of Princess Alexandra specimens from there. (No, not for romantic reasons…)

6. Finally, BOOKS

• Raymond Carver: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (short stories, Vintage, 2009)

• Tom Stoppard: Indian Ink (Faber & Faber Plays, 1995)

• The English Association Journal for Teachers of English: The Use of English (volume from Summer 2016)

I open each, at random:

A. Carver, page 75 -

‘I’ll tell you what did my father in. The third thing was Dummy, that Dummy died. The first thing was Pearl Harbour. And the second thing was moving to my grandfather’s farm near Wenatchee. That’s where my father finished out his days, except they were probably finished before that.’

a) This is the opening of Carver’s short story ‘The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off’, in which he interrogates masculinity and the impact of personal and historical events on memory. Wenatchee is described by Wikipedia3 as ‘the county seat and most populous city of Chelan County, Washington, United States’. Google images show an immense, beautiful lake, wine-dark as Homer’s sea.

b) Pearl Harbour: historical event of which I was fully ignorant until I came across it in my 20s, in novels and films. I blame my ignorance entirely upon the fabricated content of history textbooks and resulting limitations of a Cold War childhood. A childhood rich in countless other ways, and in which historical detail, perspective and accuracy were as irrelevant as material comfort. Although I see now that in fact historical accuracy was hugely important, in how propaganda censorship made a point of re-writing it, not so much for the victor, as for the dictator.

Pearl Harbour is described by Wikipedia as ‘a surprise military attack by the Empire of Japan on the United States Pacific Fleet at its naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. The attack, lasting about two hours, resulted in the deaths of over 2,400 American servicemen and civilians, and led to the United States' entry into World War II.’

B. Stoppard, page 19 -

FLORA: While having tiffin on the verandah of my bungalow I spilled kedgeree on my dungarees and had to go to the gymkhana in my pyjamas looking like a coolie.

DAS: I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug escaped from the choky and killed a box-wallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny.

a) this is a snippet of not-yet-flirtatious dialogue, quipping on the ‘colonial embrace’ of English and Indian vernaculars. Involving a hybrid discourse of Hindi, Tamil4 and English, Das and Flora’s game is called "Hobson-Jobson". Most of these words became commonplace in British English.

b) Flora is an English modernist poet visiting fictional Jummapur in 1930, weeks before she dies of tuberculosis in her final destination, real-life Jaipur. Her story, like the fabric of my fuchsia-pink sari, weaves colonialism and artistic legacy, complicated by gender dynamics.

c) Nirad Das is a widowed artist, educated in a British college in India; he is sensitive, respectful, highly skilled. He paints Flora’s portrait and cares for her during a fever. This facilitates an ambiguous degree of intimacy lead by Flora’s liberal attitude in a moment of physical crisis. Das will, not long after this scene, be arrested - ostensibly for his involvement in the Independence Movement although implicitly also for his involvement with Flora.

d) in the parallel, 20th century plot of this play, Flora’s surviving sister, Eleanor, describes the 1857 Indian uprising as ‘mutiny’, noting that, by contrast, Indian history called it a ‘rebellion’ - an observation not far removed from her own view of the Independence Movement of the 1930s. Eleanor’s observation is one of many examples of how Stoppard challenges even the most subtle aspects of colonial discourse.

e) the play was originally written for radio as In the Native State (there’s an excellent production on Audible, although it evolved for the stage version). Stoppard’s fictional Jummapur represents the intersection of British colonial rule with Indian culture and identity. Meanwhile, Jaipur, Flora’s final destination, features in Wikipedia as capital of the northeastern state of Rajasthan, and - with unbelievable serendipity for my purposes here, is ‘known as the "Pink City" due to its distinct pink-colored buildings’.

C. The English Association Journal for Teachers of English5, page 67 -

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guiltie of Dust and Sinner.

        - George Herbert’, ‘Love (III)’

‘George Herbert was an English poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists”’. (Wikipedia)

Having opened this pink (verging on violent violet) volume on this page, I turned to the beginning of the chapter to contextualise the purpose of the quotation. By further coincidence, the essay, on the joys and tribulations of teaching devotional poetry to 6th Form boys in their final weeks of school (therefore as removed from pink as anything) is authored by the person who interviewed on the same day as me for my current position, at my current school, on this day, exactly 10 years ago (also 10 years to the day I started, 6 January, my life as I knew it came to a kind of halt). This person’s name was, already, centuries ago, the name of a fairly well-known English poet and activist. I didn’t think I’d stand a chance - although I still don’t know if I was offered the job based on merit or because the other finalist picked a different school at the end of the day.

And since we’ve somehow returned to school: sometimes I start lessons asking pupils to ‘help me’ unpack the ‘DNA’ of a set text, based on a random quotation. Similarly, on this pink journey today, I have in a way exposed the genetic coding of three writers’ ‘agenda’, something of their vision of the world. Alongside, we have also stopped by personal histories encoded in a handful of objects.

Before signing off, I’ll let you into a secret: this essay is the fruit of procrastination. I should be preparing a talk at a local library next month, advertised as Stories of Blue. For the sake of my audience, the talk will follow a more traditional thread than this form-defying warm-up number. But it will also be similarly constructed on personal vision and encounters with a colour: from nature to literature via memories of paintings stored in the heart.

Anyone can look up the history of a colour. But its story, the ways in which it accompanies us in life, belongs to us alone. Any aesthetic or sensorial indulgence shouldn’t so much be about beauty, but about what lies beyond it. Following this wool-gathering anti-essay on pink, I will take my stories of blue to an audience who have lived through much, much more than me: my gift to them will be about expansiveness, mental clarity, and fiery sparks of colour captured in precious pigment, on the wings of kingfishers and jays, in lines of poetry.

5

The mission of The English Association Journal is to impart life-long love of reading and learning in the English classroom. Its contributors are mainly teachers and academics.

Thank you for reading xx

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It begins with this: a poem:

Storyteller
                     - after R K Narayan’s Under the Banyan Tree

Graced with a rare gift, there once lived a storyteller who could weave yarns like no one else. In Narayan’s tale, he earns his living by exchanging stories for food and necessaries provided by his community, until one day he loses his gift. In the background of this poem, the storyteller firstly loses his ability to utter certain words. Gradually silenced, he remains under the banyan tree where he continues to light his lamp, signal that a story is about to begin. Villagers continue to arrive, drawn by his light - excited, then expectant, until in dwindling numbers, simply patient - and finally, resigned: Nambi's gift does not return. In Narayan’s story, a goddess may or may not be in control of Nambi's storytelling gift. In my poem, where tree reigns over man, nature itself may be the goddess, and she may or may not be in control. As Nambi loses his gift, the banyan tree blossoms ever more abundantly around him, flower and fruit for every lost word.

Her branches embrace your meditation, 
her leaves shade your soul;
like copper, like silver, like gold, 
they tinkle forests of enchanting stories, 
and they resist your sleep - 

So you spend another day 
cross-legged, face hidden in cold hands.

Instead of dreams (and maybe because of spring)
swathes of bone-white blossom, waxy fragrance, fall
and weigh on and over you, in handfuls,
while rain follows on, hydrating your silence.

When fruit drops swollen round your rooted shrine
you mostly leave it, juicy incense for scorched earth -
but some you touch, and savour: bounty. Talisman.

Zest trickles down your chin.

Unmovable, a goddess guards you at her feet,
kisses the sweat of your temples, sieves 
dreams through your toes, seeps into your soul

while ordinary mortals clothed in dark skin 
stand waiting, with patience of cold coal, 
loving you, loving you to dust.

Translation isn’t always a linguistic exercise: as bridge between experience and expression, it deftly assumes other guises too.

Meanwhile ekphrasis, as we understand it today, is the translation of a work of art into a text, as factual description or as personal interpretation in a different mode. I refer to ‘reverse-ekphrasis’ when I respond with a painting to a poem (examples in my 'Echoes of Sappho'), while ‘acoustic ekphrasis’ or ‘ekphrasis of music’ are terms used for ‘musical pieces’ or ‘performances captured by language in a literary text’.1

Originally, however, in ancient rhetoric, ekphrasis was the art of conjuring a vivid image of an event, experience or feeling, in the mind of the audience, unrelated but akin to an imagined work of art: sensorial, vivid, as anecdote, analogy, extended metaphor. Its purpose was to provoke an empathetic response. Assigned to the artistic domain, today ekphrasis is almost entirely removed from communication for civic or political purpose, and often unconcerned with empathy. To an extent however, by bringing audience and subject into intimate proximity, it still beckons with ‘being in the moment’. The Journal of Northern Renaissance clearly elucidates the original meaning and purpose of ekphrasis as a multi-sensorial ‘showing’, ‘just as people, events, times, and places are multidimensional and multisensory. If the aim is to evoke them as completely as possible one cannot only call upon the mind’s eye, but has to involve the mind’s ear as well.’

Similarly, translation also ‘carries across’2 a feeling or a moment in time, except firmly, unavoidably (rather than incidentally) imbued with the cultural contexts of production and reception. When we engage in ‘translation’ we handle much more than lexis and syntax. This is particularly true of literary translation, with poetic form and meaning as most difficult to convey in a different language, to a different culture. It’s not mere words and grammatical choices that preoccupy us - although fascinating in themselves, these are but vessels for the intangible, the infinitely rich and complex, the mutable, the personal. What adds weight and meaning, what animates those marks on paper is a composite of feeling, emotion, voice and personal associations - all of which include historical, aesthetic and unavoidably political resonance with the reader and their own context. A good translator requires dexterity in all of these aspects of their own time and culture, and those of the author.

Whether used ekphrastically or not, words, grammar, rules and etymology are beautiful, adaptable, flexible. They elucidate, embellish, sing and even dance - on the page, as sounds, in the mind or in the heart. Individually or braided into sentences, words pose questions, solve problems. When misused or misunderstood, they spark conflict. When abused, they can kill3.

We use language and its mechanics neutrally, with ornamental or semantic craft, or with scientific precision. Aside from complex structural choices, the simplest of phrases or arrangements can also fascinate on a page: patterns (rhyme, anaphora, chiastic constructions, etc) or palindromic words.4

But most of all, language, words, the images they conjure, take us places. Physical places which we might never otherwise come to know, and places of the mind, too - including, rather wonderfully, the minds of those with whom we engage in social interaction, from simple dialogue to relational subtlety, from instruction to inspiration.

And here’s the exciting thing: to take us places, to carry meaning (unless an instruction manual for flat-packed Billy bookshelves - but even then!), words primarily touch our hearts. They evoke a feeling: a subtle flutter in the chest, a vague sensation on the tip of the tongue, the fire of overwhelm. No less miraculously, as it happens to me with words from languages I only partially understand, tangential connotations evoked by phonic similarities can also result in an emotive response.

But what is to be done when we read a letter, a story, a news item that touches us so profoundly that sharing it with others, lending the book or talking about it, isn’t enough to satisfy the restlessness it stirred in our hearts? This is when ekphrastic writing can be enjoyable and cathartic. I do it in student workshops and sometimes when I visit museums5. I like the challenge of ‘carrying across’ that feeling, that emotion, that ungraspable composite that assails the heart when reading the story of an object on display, the contextual label of a painting, the letter penned in sepia and protected by velvet covering and glass cabinet: translating one form of expression into another, filtering someone else’s voice or experience, into my own (especially across otherwise unfathomable boundaries), is an intimacy of most peculiar kind. Most of my ekphrastic writing germinated in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and at Galleria Borghese in Rome.

But - to bring in the old and the new meanings of ‘ekphrasis’ and ‘translation’ - nowhere is this kind of play more rewarding than in the act of storytelling, for its power to transcend personal, cultural and temporal boundaries.

My ‘Storyteller’ poem was an exercise in ‘carrying across’ R.K. Narayan’s protagonist from ‘Under the Banyan Tree’. The plot of this story is simple, beautiful, bordering on the mystical - as is the Indian village setting which cradles the central concept of a beloved storyteller so influential that his community ceased to notice their own poverty ‘because they lived in a kind of perpetual enchantment’. Also central to the narrative is how the community sustains Nambi the storyteller - ‘for he was without possessions’ - in exchange for the privilege of being transported by his words towards vividly better worlds and multi-sensory experiences that made them richer than any earthly condition could: when Nambi ‘was hungry, he walked into any house that caught his fancy and joined the family at dinner. When he needed new clothes they were brought to him by the villagers’. And he ‘hardly ever had to go out in search of company; for the banyan shade served as a clubhouse for the village folk’.

This poem was born of the emotive experience shared with a class of 14 year old boys of predominantly Indian and Pakistani heritage where I taught this story for the first time. The emotional, social, spiritual and narrative bond between Nambi and his community touched us in a very different way from all the other (also wonderful but exclusively white-British) syllabus texts. Here was the figure of the storyteller as teacher - speaking for, and to, his society by enchanting them with fantasies rich with morals and elusively ambiguous spirituality (Narayan teases us with the role of the temple goddess in Nambi’s demise).

Secondary school education too often, perhaps pragmatically, relies on Big Themes with Big Plots and Larger than Life Characters. War, suffering, marriage, great love and loss. The Hero’s Journey. The clever heroine who defies social expectations and either succeeds or is sacrificed. All of these matter, of course. It’s the stuff of life, it poses big questions about the human condition, it inspires young minds to ponder social and existential vicissitudes across temporal and cultural borders.

But how often do we use the classroom space to evaluate the wonder of storytelling itself - by which I don’t mean reading or telling stories, but talking about this practice. For storytelling is the glue that binds society, connecting us across time and space, pervasive across modes of communication and fields of information, entertainment, education.

Storytelling is the golden thread that pulls us closer to understanding what it means to be human. Its super-power is backed by neuroscience too: emotive and experiential ‘translation’ isn’t just literary, it is also biological. Since we are but cells in a larger organism, its benefits are deeply social. In a biological sense, psychological and cognitive aspects of live storytelling and shared reading include mirrored neural firing in the brain of speaker and listener: literal sparks of empathy. This neural coupling accompanies the already empathetic response to the characters and narrative arc of a story, elicited by internalising its language and being transported into its situation. This makes stories and the practice of storytelling indispensable to cultivating a sense of belonging and, by extension, the desire to keep this, our shared world, safe. Indispensable to personal enrichment, to dissolving experiential borders, to welcoming difference. You can find out more about the neuroscience of storytelling, how it changes our brain chemistry, and the role of a narrative arc in inciting empathy here.

In Narayan’s story, this super-power is assigned to a single protagonist who is, significantly, the simplest and least materially attached of all characters in an archetypal - but under-served - community. My poem is a personal ekphrastic translation of the emotive experience of sharing the story with my students. It brings this experience across and the protagonist out from the pages of Narayan’s book, out of my classroom, into a space where it can carry on existing. Its new identity contains the most pronounced original traits (cultural context, character, situation), but also some of my experiential ‘DNA’. This includes what the story meant to me then and echoes other context: the imagery in the 3rd and 4th lines stems from my native folklore, where forests of copper, silver and gold -in this order- with their own distinctive tinkle of challenge and enchantment, typical of the rite of passage, are often encountered by the Hero on ‘his’ journey.

While this version of the poem, originally from many years ago, is edited for structural flow, I haven’t updated the imagery: in a serendipitously ekphrastic way, it already captured the empathetic charge of experiencing the story in a particular context re-imagined and recounted for sharing. Perhaps I’m also currently particularly attuned to the feeling of coherence slipping from one’s essential narrative. Except whereas I still stand a chance of writing myself into a new story, for Nambi the storyteller, this was the end.

Under the Banyan Tree, by R K Narayan

The village Somal, nestling away in the forest tracts of Mempi, had a population of less than three hundred. It was in every way a village to make the heart of a rural reformer sink. Its tank, a small expanse of water, right in the middle of the village, served for drinking, bathing, and washing the cattle, and it bred malaria, typhoid, and heaven knew what else. The cottages sprawled anyhow and the lanes twisted and wriggled up and down and strangled each other. The population used the highway as the refuse ground and in the backyard of every house drain water stagnated in green puddles.

Such was the village. It is likely that the people of the village were insensitive: but it is more than likely that they never noticed their surroundings because they lived in a kind of perpetual enchantment. The enchanter was Nambi the story-teller. He was a man of about sixty or seventy. Or was he eighty or one hundred and eighty? Who could say? In a place so much cut off as Somal (the nearest bus-stop was ten miles away), reckoning could hardly be in the familiar measures of time. If anyone asked Nambi what his age was he referred to an ancient famine or an invasion or the building of a bridge and indicated how high he had stood from the ground at the time.

He was illiterate, in the sense that the written word was a mystery to him; but he could make up a story, in his head, at the rate of one a month; each story took nearly ten days to narrate.

His home was the little temple which was at the very end of the village. No one could say how he had come to regard himself as the owner of the temple. The temple was a very small structure with red-striped walls, with a stone image of the Goddess Shakti in the sanctum. The front portion of the temple was Nambi’s home. For aught it mattered any place might be his home; for he was without possessions. All that he possessed was a broom with which he swept the temple, and he had also a couple of dhoties and upper cloth. He spent most of the day in the shade of the banyan which spread out its branches in front of the temple. When he felt hungry he walked into any house that caught his fancy and joined the family at dinner. When he needed new clothes they were brought to him by the villagers. He hardly ever had to go out in search of company, for the banyan shade served as a clubhouse for the village folk. All through the day people came seeking Nambi’s company and squatted under the tree. If he was in a mood for it he listened to their talk and entertained them with his own observations and anecdotes. When he was in no mood he looked at the visitors sourly and asked, “What do you think I am? Don’t blame me if you get no story at the next moon. Unless I meditate how can the Goddess give me a story? Do you think stories float in the air?” And he moved out to the edge of the forest and squatted there, contemplating the trees.

On Friday evenings the village turned up at the temple for worship, when Nambi lit a score of mud lamps and arranged them around the threshold of the sanctuary. He decorated the image with flowers, which grew wildly in the backyard of the temple. He acted as the priest and offered to the Goddess fruits and flowers brought in by the villagers.

On the nights he had a story to tell he lit a small lamp and placed it in a niche in the trunk of the banyan tree. Villagers as they returned home in the evening saw this, went home, and said to their wives. “Now, now, hurry up with the dinner, the story-teller is calling us.” As the moon crept up behind the hillock, men, woman and children gathered under the banyan tree. The story-teller would not appear yet. He would be sitting in the sanctum, before the Goddess, with his eyes shut, in deep meditation. He sat thus as long as he liked and when he came out, with his forehead ablaze with ash and vermilion, he took his seat on a stone platform in front of the temple. He opened the story with a question. Jerking his finger towards a vague, far-away destination, he asked, “A thousand years ago, a stone’s throw in that direction, what do you think there was? It was not the weed-covered waste it is now, for donkeys to roll in. It was not the ash-pit it is now. It was the capital of the king…” The king would be Dasaratha, Vikramaditya, Asoka, or anyone that came into the old man’s head; the capital was called Kapila, Kridapura, or anything. Opening thus, the old man went on without a pause for three hours. By then brick by brick the palace of the king was raised. The old man described the dazzling durbar hall where sat a hundred vassal kings, ministers, and subjects; in another part of the palace all the musicians in the world assembled and sang; and most of the songs were sung over again by Nambi to his audience; and he described in detail the pictures and trophies that hung on the walls of the palace…

It was story-building on an epic scale. The first day barely conveyed the setting of the tale, and Nambi’s audience as yet had no idea who were coming into the story. As the moon slipped behind the trees of Mempi Forest Nambi said, “Now friends, Mother says this will do for the day.” He abruptly rose, went in, lay down, and fell asleep long before the babble of the crowd ceased.

The light in the niche would again be seen two or three days later, and again and again throughout the bright half of the month. Kings and heroes, villains and fairy-like women, gods in human form, saints and assassins, jostled each other in that world which was created under the banyan tree. Nambi’s voice rose and fell in an exquisite rhythm, and the moonlight and the hour completed the magic. The villagers laughed with Nambi, they wept with him, they adored the heroes, cursed the villains, groaned when the conspirator had his initial success, and they sent up to the gods a heartfelt prayer for a happy ending…

On the day when the story ended, the whole gathering went into the sanctum and prostrated before the Goddess…

By the time the next moon peeped over the hillock Nambi was ready with another story. He never repeated the same kind of story or brought in the same set of persons, and the village folk considered Nambi a sort of miracle, quoted his words of wisdom, and lived on the whole in an exalted plane of their own, though their life in all other respects was hard and drab.

And yet it had gone on for years and years. One moon he lit the lamp in the tree. The audience came. The old man took his seat and began the story. “…When King Vikramaditya lived, his minister was…” He paused. He could not get beyond it. He made a fresh beginning. “There was the king…” he said, repeated it, and then his words trailed off into a vague mumbling. “What has come over me?” he asked pathetically. “Oh, Mother, great Mother, why do I stumble and falter? I know the story. I had the whole of it a moment ago. What was it about? I can’t understand what has happened.” He faltered and looked so miserable that his audience said. “Take your own time. You are perhaps tired.”

“Shut up!” he cried. “Am I tired? Wait a moment; I will tell you the story presently.” Following this there was utter silence. Eager faces looked up at him. “Don’t look at me!” he flared up. Somebody gave him a tumbler of milk. The audience waited patiently. This was a new experience. Some persons expressed their sympathy aloud. Some persons began to talk among themselves. Those who sat in the outer edge of the crowd silently slipped away. Gradually, as it neared midnight, others followed this example. Nambi sat staring at the ground, his head bowed in thought. For the first time he realized that he was old. He felt he would never more be able to control his thoughts or express them cogently. He looked up. Everyone had gone except his friend Mari the blacksmith. “Mari, why aren’t you also gone?”

Mari apologized for the rest: “They didn’t want to tire you; so they have gone away.”

Nambi got up. “You are right. Tomorrow I will make it up. Age, age. What is my age? It has come on suddenly.” He pointed at his head and said. “This says, ‘Old fool, don’t think I shall be your servant any more. You will be my servant hereafter.’ It is disobedient and treacherous.”

He lit the lamp in the niche next day. The crowd assembled under the banyan faithfully. Nambi had spent the whole day in meditation. He had been fervently praying to the Goddess not to desert him. He began the story. He went on for an hour without a stop. He felt greatly relieved, so much so that he interrupted his narration to remark, “Oh, friends. The Mother is always kind. I was seized with a foolish fear…” and continued the story. In a few minutes he felt dried up. He struggled hard: “And then… and then… what happened?” He stammered. There followed a pause lasting an hour. The audience rose without a word and went home. The old man sat on the stone brooding till the cock crew. “I can’t blame them for it,” he muttered to himself. “Can they sit down here and mope all night?” Two days later he gave another instalment of the story, and that, too, lasted only a few minutes. The gathering dwindled. Fewer persons began to take notice of the lamp in the niche. Even these came only out of a sense of duty. Nambi realized that there was no use in prolonging the struggle. He brought the story to a speedy and premature end.

He knew what was happening. He was harrowed by the thoughts of his failure. I should have been happier if I had dropped dead years ago, he said to himself. Mother, why have you struck me dumb…? He shut himself up in the sanctum, hardly ate any food, and spent the greater part of the day sitting motionless in meditation.

The next moon peeped over the hillock, Nambi lit the lamp in the niche. The villagers as they returned home saw the lamp, but only a handful turned up at night. “Where are the others?” the old man asked. “Let us wait.” He waited. The moon came up. His handful of audience waited patiently. And then the old man said. “I won’t tell the story today, nor tomorrow unless the whole village comes here. I insist upon it. It is a mighty story. Everyone must hear it.” Next day he went up and down the village street shouting. “I have a most wonderful tale to tell tonight. Come one and all; don’t miss it…” This personal appeal had a great effect. At night a large crowd gathered under the banyan. They were happy that the story-teller had regained his powers. Nambi came out of the temple when anyone had settled and said: “It is the Mother who gives the gifts; and it is she who takes away the gifts. Nambi is a dotard. He speaks when the Mother has anything to say. He is struck dumb when she has nothing to say. But what is the use of the jasmine when it has lost its scent? What is the lamp for when all the oil is gone? Goddess be thanked… These are my last words on this earth; and this is my greatest story.” He rose and went into the sanctum. His audience hardly understood what he meant. They sat there till they became weary. And then some of them got up and stepped into the sanctum. There the story-teller sat with eyes shut. “Aren’t you going to tell us a story?” they asked. He opened his eyes, looked at them, and shook his head. He indicated by gesture that he had spoken his last words.

When he felt hungry he walked into any cottage and silently sat down for food, and walked away the moment he had eaten. Beyond this he had hardly anything to demand of his fellow beings. The rest of his life (he lived for a few more years) was one great consummate silence.

© 2008-2025 xpressenglish.com

Footnotes:

Eric Satie, Gymnopedie - if you can play this while reading, it would make Proust (and yours truly) very happy.

For weeks, a stubborn writer’s block stood between me and 20 Substack ‘drafts’ (for reasons evident in my other publication, Drawn from Life). Then something changed. Before I tell you my new story, here is a Substack-style list - I wish I were saying this tongue-in-cheek! - of how I turned overwhelm to creative focus:

1. I seized the opportunity to revive the ‘creative spark’ by joining a couple of writing circles: ’s SoulCircle (see her site, ‘Do What You Love’ for virtual workshops, many self-paced) and Julie Bebis’ Writers’ Hour, an opportunity to connect and … just write!

2. I filled the ‘empty’ weeks with Note bursts to stay connected (and discovered that that while notes keep the creativity fire alive, they don’t necessarily lead anywhere).

3. I begun inspecting my Substack from ground zero, to give it a polish. This, by the way, came with a brick wall of its own, as I dreaded what I might find there. It will take a while, but at least I’ve started.

4. All of the above lead to the wild idea of a series of ‘Meta-Stacks’ to keep up writing momentum until I’m back in the right zone for those festering drafts. This is the first one:

Much to my delight, re-reading my first ever Substack, I spotted an object quietly nested inside it, waiting to star in a story of its own:

The Scraps that Make Us reflects on ‘narratives of self’ we can construct by assembling memory triggers. Its argument was precipitated by a bunch of junk I’d saved from recent travels. Amongst venue entry tickets, postcards and shards of coloured glass, there was a tiny sliver of pale yellow wall - the epitome of my surely absurd hoarding. Re-reading that post with the objectivity of hindsight instantly reminded me of a reference to an iconic (but wait to see why) piece of yellow wall from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I followed the reference (itself spotted in Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap1, a book I recently recommended in Notes), back to its Proustian origin:

The character Bergotte, an ailing writer approaching the end of his life, reads the review of a Dutch art exhibition in Paris. The reviewer mentions a certain detail in a painting Bergotte ‘adored’, and ‘thought he knew perfectly’: Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’, deemed by Proust himself as the most beautiful painting in the world. The detail celebrated is ‘a little patch of yellow wall’ (a detail Bergotte cannot in fact recall), so skilfully painted that: ‘it was, if one looked at it in isolation, like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty’.2

For Bergotte this becomes a seminal moment - the final of his earthly life. Fuelled by enthusiasm, he pulls himself together to visit the exhibition. Standing before Vermeer’s painting, dizzy and unwell, Bergotte:

‘fixed his gaze, as a child does upon a yellow butterfly he wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. "That is how I ought to have written," he said to himself. "My last books are too dry, I should have applied several layers of colour, made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall."'

With the predictable, but forgivable, bathos of poetic irony, he breathes his last and collapses in front of ‘View of Delft’.

I simplify here, but Bergotte’s epiphany - somewhat tragically prophetic of Proust’s own final dialogue with art- leads to narratorial weighing of the drive for success vs a life well lived, across time. Ever the philosopher and master of writerly nuance, Proust doesn't offer a straightforward argument and stops just short of judgement. Having dwelled on the point of living this one and only life to the full instead of sacrificing it on the altar of professional success, Proust then satirises Bergotte’s legacy:

‘…the idea that Bergotte was not dead forever is not at all implausible.

They buried him, but all the night before his funeral, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, set out in threes, kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection’.

There’s an awful lot happening here - from the narrator’s ambiguous tone, at once touching and humorous as it damns the futility of it all, to the implicit reminder that a life dedicated to one’s legacy, even aside from public success (in this case of a creative kind), is actually a life well-lived.

Before writing this post, I was ignorant of the extent to which critics have been fascinated by Proust’s ‘petit pan de mur jaune’, vying to identify exactly which little bit of yellow wall he is exploiting. If you look at Vermeer’s painting closely, as the authors of this site have tried, the quest appears akin to a wild goose chase, in which Proust has the last laugh (very different from his precise, iconic use of a madeleine as memory trigger capable of reversing the decay of time3).

Proust was fascinated by contemporary studies of emotional, or ‘involuntary’ memory - the beating heart of his masterpiece: memory as life-affirming force that counteracts the inexorable movement of the universe, which includes our inner world, towards its own extinction.

To me, Proust’s playful biographical reference to the ‘petit pan du mur jaune’ is akin to Tom Stoppard’s maddening use of Fermat’s Last Theorem4 in Arcadia, a masterpiece of British theatre, where 13 year old Thomasina Coverley, 18th century maths prodigy (and Stoppard’s cheeky namesake), remarks to her tutor that ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem was a ‘joke to drive you all mad’. Like Proust with his yellow bit of wall (therefore art), Stoppard empowers the theorem (therefore mathematics) with a dramatic and symbolic power that links characters, life and art, across time. The spectacle of Thomasina's emboldened mathematical exploration becomes riveting for the audience (yes, Stoppard makes maths exciting!), especially as it leads to her discovery of a ‘new geometry based on iteration’. Through Thomasina’s genius, Stoppard pays homage to Ada Lovelace (‘mother of algorithm’ - take that, AI nerds!), Sophie Germain and other female mathematicians buried ‘in lost time’. Thomasina discovers a way to model nature through maths, a ‘new geometry’ that uses iteration to analyse irregular patterns. Ahead of her time, she astutely observes that ‘If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell.’

Like all pre-19th century mathematicians, Thomasina’s genius was stunted by the limitations of pencil and paper. She had the vision, but without the necessary material context, she couldn’t reach the proof of what we now know as fractals, chaos theory and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This technical limitation was a problem of humanity eventually resolved by Ada Lovelace through her real-life breakthrough in algorithm and computation. Sometimes when I teach this play I invite in a Maths teacher so my students can witness the complex graphs that result from inputting equations like Thomasina’s into a calculator.

Without spoiling the extraordinary plot of Arcadia (an engrossing and entertaining read if you can’t locate a production): by the end of this play in which past and present waltz in vertiginous quest for the meaning of human endeavour through time, pencil and paper re-enter the stage: this time, with the perfectly pitched bathos of life turned art (and mathematics).

Like Proust, Stoppard is also a master of nuance, ingenuity, wit and surprise, except he makes us laugh out a bit louder, even as we cry at the behaviour and demise of his characters. And also at existential futility, at the magnificent, often foolhardy, human capacity for discovery; at the precious - but not necessarily irreplaceable - legacy of curious, creative thinking: ‘it is wanting to know that makes us matter’, Thomasina’s tutor tells her. Consolatory, Stoppard proposes that it’s not tragic if genial breakthroughs (like Thomasina’s) are lost to time, because someone else, somewhere else, will be certain to rediscover the same thing again: ‘we shed as we pick up… and what we let fall, will be picked up by those behind.’ (And if Stoppard’s wisdom and wit aren’t enough, what do you make of this cosmic coincidence: Arcadia premiered a year before Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem?)

Other than in mathematical quests, pencil and paper have never limited humans of any age, epoch or inclination. We marvel at draughtsmanship on display in museums, at quick pet portraits and everything in-between:

Look at us splashing out (or is it investing?) in bath crayons for toddlers or the apparently ‘best pencil in the world’, the Blackwing, used by writers and cartoonists from Steinbeck to Sondheim and Chuck Jones. (Oh yes, I have a couple too, in the more affordable revival by Stilo & Stile in Rome, the Blackwing Palomino, which offers a sensorial writing experience of the kind Proust would have adored, coming as close to the feel of fountain pen as a pencil might).

…And look at us still reading, writing and generally feeding off Proust’s words! For a comprehensive, elegant and thought-provoking exploration of the length to which his legacy can still nourish and entertain us, even without reading his oeuvre, read Alain de Botton, 'How Proust Can Change Your Life':

All this is to say I’m grateful for my own tiny piece of yellow wall:

• for its intrinsic value - back to human endeavour, the labour that conjured it into being; the physical and sensorial dimensions of memory it signifies, especially fascinating when complicated by the passing of time

• for its personal value - the journey on which it has taken me (and you, my reader) to this ‘here, now’, from the place where I found it on some ‘island of the day before’5, to which presumably I expected never to return.

In ‘The Art of Travel’, Alain de Botton momentarily dwells on the psychological enrichment that results from factual knowledge (which I extend to memories), garnered particularly through travel. He draws inspiration from Nietzsche’s 1873 essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, which proposes that the real challenge of collecting facts is ‘to enhance life’, by contrast to academic or scientific fact-collecting for ‘sterile’ knowledge (although I am yet to hear of an expert not passionate about their field of inquiry and thus lacking a personalised stream of psychological enrichment! Also, is knowledge ever sterile?)

Surprise and wonder are vital to the experience of a life well lived. As two of Stoppard’s young male characters unknowingly concur across their temporal divide, ‘when we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.’ This is why the legacy of writers, artists, actors, scientists, other creatives and academics, will always be of value. All the more so when at the cost of their own experience of, or chance at, a life well lived.

On the night before he died, in a moment of meta-inspiration that harked back to fictional Bergotte’s own demise, Proust allegedly6 dictated his final sentence, to his secretary, carer and housekeeper, Céleste Albaret:

“There is a Chinese patience in Vermeer’s craft.”

A patience that persists, too, in Proust’s own craft: bedridden for the final years of his life, he must have found life-enhancing solace in crafting his meticulous, often very witty, if painfully drawn (and drawn out) five volume novel which we struggle to read cover to cover, but which continues to inform, comfort and inspire our understanding of the vicissitudes and complex beauty of human life.

It’s unlikely that Proust had in mind the astonishing Chinese art of painting and carving into rice grain when he referred to Vermeer’s patient, meticulous craft. But that’s what comes to mind when I think of his own wielding of the writerly brush as he conjures for us an instance of his inner universe: the sheer expanse of it, estimated at 1,267,069 words, every single one of them in ‘search of lost time’.

While during his lifetime Proust was seen by many as a hypochondriac, modern medicine established from his symptoms that ‘he was not only genuinely ill but far sicker than even he believed, most likely suffering from the vascular subtype of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome’. A kind of diagnostic error ‘clinicians still routinely make today, shedding light on the plight of patients with rare illnesses.’ (National Library of Medicine)

I think of other men and women, known or unknown to us7, who, under duress of illness in bedrooms anchored by earthly time, also experienced their ‘doors of perception cleansed’, also allowed in visions of ‘the world in a grain of sand’, of ‘eternity in an hour’8 . I think of life-enhancing dreams, the private, quiet ones, and those painted out loud in words or numbers, images or musical notes, for our delight.

'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite'     
        (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
------
To see a World in a Grain of Sand, 
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, 
And Eternity in an hour.  
        (from Auguries of Innocence)'

Mistake now rectified, here is the text of my belated welcome to you all, whether already here with me or just popping in for a look:

Yann Tiersenn, Naval (please click to play as part of your reading experience, if circumstances allow)

Dear Reader,

Since you have landed on my deck, hello!

Perhaps you are already established in your navigation path, captain with one or more expert perspectives, skilful sky-and-sea reading tools, a robust crew of followers.

Or perhaps you are just setting out your compass. Maybe, like me, you are discovering a voice that resonates more confidently in writing, or when ‘hyphenated’, unconstrained by tone, genre, theme.

Here, ‘Drawn from Life’ and searching ‘Beyond Beauty’, my words and images will braid some of the unexpected connections I encounter in instances of life, the arts and literature. Some may resonate with you, others may surprise. Many will slip quietly off-stage under the backwash of a quick scroll. Life.

Like sea-polished glass on a sandy shore, these serendipitous moments happen unexpectedly, translucent or opaque, colourful or monochrome (although, alas! most often green). But never the same.

So I promise neither an expert, nor a regular newsletter routine. My reflections, photographs and, when I dare post them, poems or paintings, will land subject to earthly elements and the music of the spheres. But always in the palm of your hand.

Thank you for joining my search for that fertile ground between our unique perspectives and varied modes of expression: I look forward to glimpses of your own story across the ‘Great Divide’ of these experiential, temporal, geographic and algorithmic boundaries between us. Let’s dissolve them all.

Estella

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‘Naval’ by Yann Tiersen (click to play as part of the reading experience)

In November 2020 when the doors of the world were briefly ajar between lockdowns, I came across a magnificent review of a British Museum exhibition. Laura Cumming’s ‘Arctic: Culture and Climate - visions of a vanishing world’ opens like this:

‘There is a vision, in this magnificent show, of the strange hinterland where Arctic ice melts into the snow-covered ocean. There is no obvious distinction, indeed the water’s edge is all but invisible.’

Evocatively, this ‘vision’ gradually reveals itself as a meta-moment, accurately conjuring the very experience of entering the exhibition:

‘What you see is a series of dark boats drawn on sledges across a white plane dotted with walruses and long-legged birds.’

And then you read that:

‘All the images are inky black, exquisitely carved into the tusk of one such walrus, caught on exactly this kind of boat. Its ivory is beautifully used to stand in for the all-encompassing Arctic whiteout’.

And suddenly you realise that the 3D visual narrative you’ve entered, firstly by reading the review, and then by stepping into the exhibition space, has in fact been - symbolically, unknowingly - immortalised by the hand of ‘Happy Jack’, sometime in the early 20th century; one of numerous Arctic artists of ivory, of ice, of snow, of white sea salt and cubed pink flesh of whale, of seal skin scraped to translucent silver, for manufacture into practical gear. Artists unknown outside of their ‘circle’.

There are fragments of ancient bone jewellery, discovered in newly thawed ice; sculpted figures of reindeer and caribou so sinuously streamlined as to be almost abstract. There are needles made of walrus bone and monuments of balanced stones, a kind of ancestral land art that abides for centuries, marking memories or indicating reindeer paths through the wilds.

You can take the British Museum 360' virtual exhibition tour, with interesting rationale and curation details. You can watch, animated, the shrinking of the polar ice cap since the 1970s, just as it was projected underfoot at the entrance to the exhibition, making it feel as if, by stepping in, you personally triggered the ice to melt. You can explore a gallery of mini-documentaries delving into the climate change, sustainability and cultural anthropology themes of the event. You will come across over 40 indigenous cultures crowning the Arctic, and the linguistic diversity of even more dialects. And you will learn of the resourcefulness, resilience and creativity of threatened peoples and their ways of being, ranging from survival traditions such as hunting, to festivals and exquisite fine art:

The art has a characteristic combination of delicacy and strength that seems to reflect the whole society. It runs all the way from 17th-century engravings of fur-clad drivers merrily bowling across the snow in reindeer-drawn sleds to the terrific photographs of the Alaskan artist Brian Adams, large as life and presented on lightboxes.

This event, poignantly described by its curators as being ‘about the future’ was engrossing, humbling and mesmerising; in the eerily empty carriage of a London train, I was to bring home a more concrete awareness of our planet’s predicament, the frisson of a slowly disintegrating world - a world engraved with the brazen narrative of consumerism and our environmental impact, under the heightened pathos of the pandemic context. It was an experience that cried out to be shared: I would use it as starting point for a creative writing project. In search for examples of art as climate activism, I encountered artists whose work deserves celebration beyond their domain:

From recent iterations of the Venice Biennale, there was this heart-stopping sculpture by Lorenzo Quinn, conceived ‘to support this wonder of city that is threatened by climate change’ as Quinn explains on Instagram:

‘I hope my art brings a new focus of attention to a global calamity that we are faced with.’ “I have three children, and I’m thinking about their generation and what world we’re going to pass on to them. I’m worried, I’m very worried.”

Quinn’s work is the embodiment of the sheer communicative and political potential of art: in the case of ‘Support’, to rouse solidarity for the sinking foundations of a city which, having floated and even thrived on cultural, commercial and civic whirls for centuries, is now prey to the global warming tide.

I decided to structure my project around stimuli from these sources - the British Museum (including a stylistic evaluation of Cumming’s review), and Lorenzo Quinn’s work, which students could research further. I would encourage them to make connections with their own values and experiences; to identify their personal vision for the climate emergency and, through creative expression, add their voice to the conversation. I linked the project to the English Language syllabus and to their knowledge of ancient mythology (which features in much environmental art and its messaging about our origin and responsibility); and I hoped to facilitate the same awe, wonder and sobering sense of urgency that I felt.

With the pandemic threatening to rage some more, there was no opportunity to take my students to the British Museum. But some joined me for a serendipitously timed talk by artist and explorer Georgia Rose Murray, hosted by our Art Department: Murray lives her work before committing paint to paper: her ethereal landscapes, capturing rare Arctic solar events, are initially worked into expanding concertina notebooks which belie the practical savoir-faire, physical resilience and commitment required to conjure them into being at temperatures as low as -40’C. Back in her Scottish studio, she works on big pieces of wooden board (heavy surfaces which wouldn’t be possible to carry in the Arctic landscape). She uses oil and gloss paint - unsuitable in the Arctic because of their high toxicity - to respond to all of the sketchbook drawing and painting completed ‘en plein air’.

On 1 March this year, Murray’s friend from The British Antarctic Survey - Iain Rudkin took her concertina paintings back up to Ny-Ålesund with him and photographed them in the landscape which inspired them (exactly five years after they were painted in situ). Murray recalls her previous stint there, which had been the subject of her talk:

On the 28th of February 2020, the sun rose over the mountain tops for 3 minutes, before setting again for almost 24 hours. I was incredibly lucky to be making a painting at that exact moment […] The sun wasn’t forecast to rise in Ny-Ålesund for another couple of days, so experiencing the golden sunbeams on that day was a beautiful and unexpected surprise.

Georgia Rose Murray used her research time to explore ‘the magical landscape and comprehend the delicate atmospheric changes the environment undergoes as the Arctic transitions from Polar Night to Midnight Sun’. She ‘mixed 96% Ethanol with pigments and paint instead of water to prevent the mediums freezing so quickly - despite this time-aid, icicles would freeze almost instantly on paper, brushes and on [her] skin.’ (PAINTING 2025)

We were spellbound by her tales of solitary work waiting for the once in 6 months sunrise event, of working with freezing paintbrushes - the ‘deep pull to fully connect’ and to translate ‘Arctic reality with colours and brushes.’

Murray’s sketchbooks stretch open to capture and follow the horizon:

See this gallery of her work for more detail about her expeditions and of her search to ‘gauge the magnitude of human existence within the universe’ through conscious and subconscious symbiosis with the extreme Arctic environment.

Some of the best written outcomes of my project were by the students who attended Murray’s talk. The characters in these stories, their personality and language, were born straight out of the adventures she had recounted. In particular, for a dyslexic pupil, this marked a turning point in engagement and long-term performance in English - the most joyous reward a teacher can hope for.

As final stimulus, I wanted an example of creativity directly targeting climate activism: I found just that in the complexity and depth of the latter-day wonder that are the underwater sculpture museums of Jason deCaires Taylor:

I learnt that for two decades Taylor, award-winning sculptor, environmentalist and underwater photographer, has been creating and submerging underwater museums and sculpture parks of dramatic scope, scale, aesthetic and emotive load. To date, he has submerged ‘over 1,200 living artworks throughout the world’s oceans and seas’: you can visit these sites from the dry comfort of your home: Mexico, Grenada, UK, Bahamas, Maldives, Spain, Indonesia, Norway, France, Cyprus, Australia. I urge you to watch Taylor’s TED talk and browse his moving image galleries: they will change the way you think of the relationship between art, context and responsibility.

'As soon as we sink them, they belong to the sea.’

The themes of Taylor’s monumental installations relate to a range of contemporary issues and to how each leads back to climate emergency. Here is the link to the full, spectacular gallery , where you can read about the scientific, ethical and social impact of Taylor’s work, and the fascinating practical and cultural aspects of his colossal creativity process.

In the video gallery of individual projects you can witness the role of underwater light and movement in the artistic, scientific and environmental messaging of each piece. You can enjoy liquid chiaroscuro, nuances of underwater light and shadow, of myriad marine life - nature engaging in creative dialogue with the man-made. You will see the wonder of the biological events that these submerged sculpture parks become; you will understand Taylor’s call for recognition of the sanctity of oceans as more than infinitely awe-inspiring expanses of luminous blue.

Highlights from Taylor’s monumental catalogue:

1. The Silent Evolution – one of Taylor’s most iconic works; hundreds of life-size figures (casts of local community). Isla Mujeres, Mexico

2. Vicissitudes – circle of children holding hands, symbolising unity and the passage of time; The Lost Correspondent - figure of journalist at typewriter desk - commentary on media and communication in the modern world. Both at Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park, Grenada

3. Man on Fire – evocative human figure engulfed in flames - humanity’s destructive relationship with nature. Lanzarote, Spain

4. Ocean Atlas – 28ft tall, 60 tons heavy sculpture depicting young girl carrying the weight of the ocean on her shoulders, symbolising the environmental responsibility placed on younger generations. Bahamas

Beside the awe-inspiring scale, thematic and political symbolism, and aesthetic appeal of his work, Taylor’s most remarkable achievement is his direct harnessing of the regenerative power of the ocean: each sculpture, of pH-neutral material, structurally attracts and hosts life, in every way reversing the toxic tide. In doing so - and just by existing - the sculptures also attract human attention away from reefs and other fragile environments, by enticing snorkelers, divers and photographers in their direction instead.

Thriving in aesthetically fascinating organic layers off the surface of man-made art, newly-formed marine colonies embody the answer to the perennial nature vs nurture debate. But also the emergency of destructive human impact side by side with our capacity to create, heal, regenerate. Moreover, by exposing our own transience, they become a kind of sculpture in reverse: we, who are destroying marine life, are being sacrificed to it. As coral and fish - including endangered and rare species such as the Elkhorn coral, declared functionally extinct - emerge to populate Taylor’s sculpture parks, we are reminded that our relationship with nature, the marine environment specifically (on which our existence depends), is one of mutual consequences.

Far from leaving the Romanticism and aesthetics of art behind,

The subsequent natural changes are intended to explore the aesthetics of decay, rebirth and metamorphosis. [His] projects are not only examples of successful marine conservation, but works of art that seek to encourage environmental awareness and lead us to appreciate the breathtaking natural beauty of the underwater world. (from Taylor’s website).

I personally find them strikingly beautiful in themselves, including for the stories they tell.

Finally, if the Romantic Sublime is the aesthetic and emotive response of awe and terror in the face of natural phenomena immensely more beautiful and powerful than anything we can conceive; if it is the definition of a space for contemplation and critical engagement with the human condition, of our place in a larger universe, alongside - rather than above - the natural world, then the work of artists celebrated here surely also represent the Sublime:

• the Sublime as human resilience

• the Sublime as creative drive

• the Sublime as impact - impact for change

As our natural ecosystems face ever greater challenges these creative approaches to raise awareness are critical to help inspire people to implement the changes need to support the health of our planet. (from Taylor’s website).

Art can have an immensely powerful voice: it reaches minds and souls across language, cultural, temporal or spatial boundaries. Here I only dwell on a subjective selection of climate activism through creativity but, as argued in my first post in this ‘Art and Intent’ series, all art is inevitably political, a product of its times, even when reacting against them:

Cultural and anthropological exhibitions facilitate concrete understanding of significant contemporary issues. In this case, of the Arctic as more than awe-inspiring polar icecap, but rather as threatened home to over 40 ethnic groups, endangered ways of life, endangered flora and fauna. By awakening interest, awe and respect, the British Museum exhibition also revealed our impact on the survival and creative expression of peoples whose way of life continues focused on sustainability, unlike in our consumerist society.

The work of artists like Georgia Rose Murray, Lorenzo Quinn, Jason deCaires Taylor, hold us spellbound with their creative and ethical vision, their aesthetic weight and delight. In the case of Murray, the additionally dimension of adventure and resilience, at the core of her creative endeavour and in her courageous choice to work in extreme conditions. She herself describes her paintings as ‘initiated by sublime experiences’ and essential in encouraging ‘heightened states of awareness’.

Meanwhile, Taylor’s underwater museums and sculpture parks, even while ostensibly resisting an aesthetic drive, are the 21st century riposte to the Romantic Sublime - of scale and magnificence unsurpassable by any other form of creative expression.

While the Romantics contemplated the boundlessness, awe-inspiring qualities of the environment, here we are at the stage when, having abused it, we owe it everything in our power to help regenerate it. But also, in Taylor’s words, to recognise its sanctity.

Next time I run my creative project, I will take my students to Shelley’s iconic sonnet about the legendary king’s arrogant illusion of power before mightier Nature:

Ozymandias 

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

                             by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)   

And I will ask my students to evoke, in the mode closest to their heart, the devastation they would not want future travellers to find in our antique land.

‘Empower the youth so they can help rectify the endless mistakes we have made.’ Jason de Caires Taylor

Additional recommendations:

• Yann Tiersen will play at the Barbican Centre, London, on 19 April

• copies of Georgia Rose Murray’s notebooks available from 'Unseen Notebooks'

• reportage of glaciers shrinking between 2002-2024

• stunning pictures of life and work in Ny-Ålesund (most northern research station)

• full documentary about Jason deCaires Taylor ‘the artist who redefined the relationship between art and nature’:

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‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’

Gwendolen Fairfax to Cecily Cardew, Act 2 - The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Aside from active, if erratic, use of notebooks (writing, sketching), what I really love about them is the feeling of opening an old ‘volume’, and landing upon chapters from a personal narrative that is curiously both mine (in a fundamental, formative sense) and no longer mine (removed by time, written in a timbre familiar but out of date, preserving details long forgotten, places that are no longer home).

When I start a new notebook, I fill in random pages with doodles, saved mementos, scraps of imagery or quotations that come to mind as result of where I am in that moment. I do this with a degree of superstition: when my future entries will reach a page already inhabited - you guessed it: I ‘see’ a premonitory connection between the entry about to come into being, and its landing ‘pad’. It’s a whimsical game I play against the anticipation dormant between the leaves. By weaving the synaesthetic textures of the ‘spirit of a place’ into the materiality of a fresh notebook, I lay the foundation for written entries about the period of time about to be preserved between the covers.

I used to regard this habit as a messy character fault - particularly because I often randomise the sequence of the main entries themselves until the completed ‘whole’ becomes a montage of lived time instead of a measurable chronological journey. I’d take it as symptomatic of disorganisation, something to correct: each new notebook therefore started off with ever-neater attempts at pre-filling, in nicer handwriting or with better doodles than the one before. Yet sooner or later, chaos took over anyway.

Much to my amusement (and relief!) I recently found out that a disorderly approach to documenting ideas and experiences carries a kind of historical gravitas. Since then, if only as cheeky excuse for a strange habit, I duly recognise the serendipity of haphazard connections and fragmented logic as not only poetic, but actually generative, potential footprints in a greater journey.

This entertaining but timely change in perspective was prompted by my encounter with the concept of zibaldone in Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. In its 2016 entry , Atlas Obscura describes the zibaldone as the 1300s ‘answer to Tumblr’ (to which we can now add Pinterest, Substack, etc):

A strange melange of diary, ledger, doodle pad, and scrapbook, these volumes—along with similar “hodgepodges” and “commonplace books”—served as a pattern for interior life from the 14th century onward, bringing comfort and inspiration to everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Lewis Carroll.

Originally, the zibaldone notebook was used to chart the rapidly evolving cultural, scientific and spiritual landscape of the Italian Renaissance, essentially capturing its beating heart. However, it is in fact the polar opposite of a commonplace book which is deliberately well-organised in thematic sections and sub-categorised entries relevant not only to an author’s interests, but to his expertise: ‘a register of continuous learning’. By contrast, the free-spirited zibaldone ‘thrives in its chaotic, free-form nature’, qualities embodied by its very name (‘miscellany’ or ‘heap of things’ in Italian). L'Atelier Nomade: On Keeping a Zibaldone', elucidates it as ‘timeless reminder of the beauty of thought in motion’. This can only be the result of unbridled flexibility.

Additionally, Allen expands his evaluation of notebooks as originally of the male domain. He highlights the misleading image of the ‘So-called Sappho’ of Pompeii, a portrait of a woman holding a stylus, as more likely to represent a Muse than a real woman, therefore an idealised rather than realistic representation of the role of women in the history of ideas, or of the barriers they faced in accessing instruments of intellectual life. He points out that the stylus and tablet she holds are anachronistic to Sappho’s era (she would have written on papyrus or wax tablet) and closer to later, Roman instruments. Moreover, the lack of the typical hinges which would have been visible on a closed Roman tablet emphasises the symbolic intention of this portrait.

There are those who insist the zibaldone is making a comeback. If it does, I’ll be delighted for my haphazard journals to join the ranks. Meanwhile, if you are interested in learning more, particularly by plunging into a treasure of Italian culture, read Farnam Street on Leopardi's zibaldone, probably the most famous of specimens (incidentally also a work of seminal philosophical interest).

Back to Roland Allen’s history of the notebook: its consummate balance of erudite research and measured enthusiasm captures the universal magnetism of an otherwise ordinary object; an object which has been galvanising the landscape of human progress up to, including, and even despite of, today’s inexorable digital march.

Allen chronicles the loaded potential of notebooks, from their beginnings as Sumerian clay tablets (cc 2144 BC) to the legendary - and legendarily commercialised - Moleskine. And numerous instances of individual resourcefulness and inspiration engendered on notebook pages, and which generated scientific, commercial, creative and ethical milestones for our civilisation.

However, in case your bedside book stack is already threatening to topple, here is a comprehensive interview with Allen’s main findings, and these are highlights from his teaser:

• having started off as ‘a history of stationery’ the book quickly became ‘a history of ideas’ as he realised that ‘when the notebook was invented, it had such incredible effect on the way we think’.

• beyond ancient clay tablets, friable papyrus scrolls and effaceable parchment susceptible to forgery, an early modern highlight comes from 1300s Florence, from amongst the first paper notebooks: the surviving fragment of one of Matino Manucci’s business ledgers, source of methodology and terminology still used in digital accountancy today

• next in the procession come the notebooks of authors, musicians and scientists followed by the sketchbooks artists, without which, for example, the transition from 2D Byzantine iconography to 3D perspective and human figure realism, might not have taken place

• the zibaldone (also originally Florentine), receives particular attention because of how it changed the literary landscape - from Italian to English literature, and beyond

  

Allen’s history of ideas also simmers through cookbooks, the journals of explorers and other travellers, sailors’ logs, the diaries of authors. We learn that scientists and philosophers ‘depended on notebooks for breakthroughs’; we read about forensic notebooks. This wealth of information then dovetails with the role played by the contemporary notebook towards ‘happier lives’, from therapeutic use (PTSD patient diaries, ADHD bullet journals) to a host of current issues. Allen concludes with a neurobiological examination of the effects of notebook use on the brain, and philosophical reflections on how it might affect the mind and consciousness.

Somehow, perhaps unintentionally, he also demythologises the eureka moment by showing that illuminating findings and instances of poetic surprise aren’t the exclusive privilege of Leonardo da Vinci, Virginia Woolf, or anyone in-between, nor a magical effect of a notebook brand, like Hemingway’s infamous Moleskine.

All this thinking about notebooks reminds of the 2024 publication of the anthologised notebooks of Turkish author Orhan Pamuk (Nobel Prize 2006): Memories of Distant Mountains preserves the legacy of Pamuk’s original, youthful dream, of becoming a painter. It is reviewed here by his compatriot, author Elçin Poyrazlar for The Guardian as showcasing a ‘private dreamworld’ which yields insight into his creative process, where: ‘the entries are not chronological but, as he puts it, in “emotional order”’, ‘a museum of Pamuk’ that pulls us ‘into his private writing world’:

‘We are writers who carry novels like strange countries inside us. Perhaps this is where all writers belong – in a land of dreams, images and words where we feel both fearless and sentimental; at home only when we write.’ (Elçin Poyrazlar)

A home, one might add, safely nested between notebook pages:

Confronted with this parade of notebooks - friable and indelible, systematic and unhinged, creative and scientific, philosophical and commercial - we come to realise the possibility, however humble, that perhaps one day we too could grasp, retrospectively or forward-looking, a vision of our own ‘moments of curiosity or loneliness’, of ‘minds trembling on the brink of a new idea,’1 - but on pages of our own.

Part One: ‘Art Does Not Exist in a Vacuum’

In the summer of 1990 I landed onto the shores of my new life in a foreign country with nothing but a small suitcase, my pocket-sized command of English, and a zest for learning which can only possess someone presented with the freedom of choice (any choice) for the first time.

I will always remember the simple, black on white ‘A Level Choices for 6th Form’ booklet handed to me by Someone Very Important at the school which had offered my bursary: I could pick anything I wanted? Really, anything? And I don’t have to study 16 subjects?

Encouraged to opt for just three A Levels to ‘immerse myself in’, I momentarily wondered how such an ostensibly limiting education system could work. But, giddy with possibility, I didn’t succumb to doubt; stroke of loss or luck, ‘options’ was a honeyed word. In the end I ticked four:

History and Appreciation of Art - because I grew up surrounded by my grandfather’s paintings and his small but mighty history of art library (you know those post-war books with manually glued-in colour plate illustrations on glossy paper?); and because I had no Art GCSE (a requirement for Art A Level).

English Literature - as homage to an extraordinary woman, my first English teacher; and to cultivate proficiency in the culture and language of my host country

Mathematics - being a universal language, and because I was good at algebra

Classical Civilisation - because my Ancient History teacher back home had for four years gripped our class of 40+ otherwise restless and hungry teens with the inexhaustibility of his infectious subject knowledge; and because I had largely forgotten my middle-school Latin and never touched Greek, so couldn’t opt for straight Classics.

But pursuing four A Levels was a rare thing, even before the A Level reform. Another Important Person advised me to drop one subject at the end of my first 6th Form year, to concentrate on the three that will prepare me best for university entrance (albeit with further embarrassment of choices). In the end I dropped Classical Civilisation: it was the subject I could most easily continue independently - and the boy behind me regularly got away with squirting ink on my white school shirt…

The lesson I was most excited about - the very idea of it as school subject was ungraspable, akin to brushing past celebrity shoulders - was History and Appreciation of Art. Indeed, the take-away from our first lesson stays with me to this day, be it due to the vivid literal picture (of a vacuum cleaner!) conjured by my rudimentary English, or because I was hooked on the timbre of Miss Johnstone’s voice as she paced with deliberate calm towards the heavy mahogany table where our class of six sat poised and ready to take notes.

With resounding clarity, Miss Johnstone announced:

Today, working with students of any age, inclination or ability, I often bring them back to this core idea: that art does not, cannot exist in a vacuum; that it has always been and always will be a product of its times, for its times.

In discussions of ‘art’ I mean all modes of creative expression. I’m neither an Art nor an Art History teacher, I work with literature and with language. If I were to guide my students through these outside of the ‘wider’ picture, much of what enriches our culture, the stories we read and the stories we tell, would remain obscure to them.The words on the page invariably belong with other words on other pages. They also belong with other modes of creative expression, currents of thought, historical tides.

---

An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his1 work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it.

Andrei Tarkovsky, film director

History of Art has long fallen casualty to subjects that apparently lead to more ‘real’ professions - in 2017, only 16 state schools and 90 fee-paying schools in the UK still offered the subject. This problematic reduction in creative subjects and the impact of this on the younger generations remains a subject of debate and scrutiny in the UK.

Just as Miss Johnstone must have done with our small class, I often engage my students in discussions about the meaning and impact of creative endeavour as intrinsically rich and malleable, fluidly subject to new readings and interpretations specific to an audience, in its own time and place. I tell them this is its super-power.

So how can there ever be room for art that is exclusively for art’s sake, regardless of the mode in question, when:

… we immerse ourselves in a hobby that holds us actively, creatively, spell-bound ‘in the moment’

… at the end of a day’s work, we lend our voice to a choir or a dance ensemble

… creative output becomes successful enough to provide material as much as spiritual sustenance

Regardless of output, be it serious or whimsical, creative expression will always be defined by our own, personal, time and place, cradled in the wider context which - for better or for worse - nurtures us.

Selection of tongue-and-cheek thumbnail graffiti scattered all over the stairs and walls going up to the Emotions Retold by Contemporary Art exhibition, Chiostro del Bramante, Rome (December, 2024). There’s an additional layer of self-reflexive irony in the fact that this graffiti is in fact part of the exhibition experience.

Once we expose a creative contribution - if only by slightly lifting the veil of self-doubt - to an audience of any kind, and they catch glimpse of it, it [also] becomes theirs. Often (think of fashion, pop music or art postcards ‘in [this] age of mechanical reproduction’2), a creative contribution somehow belongs more obviously to its audience than author. The meaning an audience will assign to it - itself a product of their own personal time and place - will most often refract and reach far wider than originally intended.

The 2nd, 5th and 6th images are from the Emotions Retold by Contemporary Art exhibition, Chiostro del Bramante, Rome (December, 2024).

Plurality of audience equals plurality of meaning. And so with creativity, comes great responsibility. Which is to say: creativity is power. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is therefore not only philosophically inconceivable: in our time and our places, it is actually undesirable.

Don’t get me wrong: I find contentious the idea of placing the burden of responsibility upon anyone’s creative shoulders. Anyone investing themselves in expressing their authentic voice should be free to choose, and choose freely. The actual impact of their output, the fluidity of its meaning, isn’t a compulsory requirement to agonise over in the process of making. I believe in freedom of choice and stand against any kind of dictatorial agenda.

And yet…

A few days ago, a friend of mine referred to a contemporary visual artist who, despite significant professional success and the inevitable exposure to worldly issues that comes with it, is a ‘climate-change denier’.

How can someone working in a relatively privileged context, in these increasingly complicated and urgent times, someone who has the power to spread word or image, be a ‘climate-change denier’ with any degree of integrity, even confidence? Today, when we see the devastating impact of climate change reaching ever more widely, ever more uncontrollably, year after year, season after season? When we see how it affects not only underserved nations vulnerable through lack of resources and protection, but also the crowned ‘glory’ of the ostensibly ‘immune’, developed world?

I’d like to think that ‘climate-change denier artists’ are a rare breed. That, instead, the world is full of creatives from all walks of life, who more or less deliberately advocate for everything and anything that matters to them and therefore to all of us. From the beginnings of time, creativity has leant into, carved or at least chipped away at, collective consciousness. This includes artists whose work is deeply, even obscurely personal. It includes artists whose work deliberately ‘resists meaning’: such intent is itself a comment for and about its times, all the richer for its adamantine persistence.

As Ancient Greek theatre or Shakespeare’s plays continue to teach us, the personal is always, inevitably, also political. Whether with fatal or comedic consequences, moral corruption in a leader will result in the suffering of the state and its citizens, while endemic prejudice can injure the most intimate bonds of trust. How we treat our kin is our cultural context in microcosm.

From identity politics to acts of resistance to meaning, every artistic choice is essentially political: a response of sorts to pressing social, environmental or personal issues.

‘Was it accidental that Degas’ women are always seen to their least advantage, with fatigue in their eyes - exhausted, heavy-limbed dancers, cleaning women hardly able to drag their heavy pails around? Was this denial of lyricism and expression of cynicism, or was it an expression of non-conformity which rejected feminine beauty along with convention?

François Mathey: The Impressionists and Their Time

We are fortunate to encounter, in our travel, leisure pursuits and daily life, all forms of creative talent - voices that engage with the world around them, whether deliberately or tangentially, timid or outspoken.

This publication, Beyond Beauty: Art and Intent, spotlights examples, individual or collective, from various fields of creativity and different cultural contexts, which have touched me through their sensibility to the vulnerabilities of their (and therefore our) time. An anthology of personal encounters, rather than evaluative inventory of ‘most successful’ or ‘best at’: because ‘art does not exist in a vacuum’.

Future newsletters (in no particular order, and subject to the elements):

• From Echo-Chambers to Eco-Systems: Museums for a Vanishing World

• Rhetoric for Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

• When We Dance

• Old Masters, Never Mistresses: Great Daughters of Famous Fathers

• Elegant Wit: the Legacies of Sei Shōnagon, Poet and Lady of the Heian Court (Japan 794–1185) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Medical pioneer, Travel Writer, Poet (England and Europe, 1689-1762)

• Palestinian Embroidery

• A Vacuum is a Bell Jar: The Sanctity of Knowledge

For two weeks this post has been waiting for an opening. Many possible introductions passed by:

• something about creativity - imitation vs originality; the value and purpose of each; cultural or historical variations in attitudes towards them

• inspiration: what drives us to respond to someone else’s creative output? Why are we easily open to influence?

• something more specific, e.g. about imitatio, the Renaissance art of imitation and idealisation as response to the arts of classical antiquity; perhaps also its equivalent in other cultures and traditions

• poetry vs visual representation: which mode gets closer to the authenticity of human experience? Does it even matter? Interesting read here proposing that visual arts impact our ‘older, more reactive brain system’, while words, often ‘nuanced and ambiguous, might require more thought’ before affecting us. Evidence certainly suggests that in the trajectory of evolution visual pre-dates verbal literacy.

• the idea of dialogue between modes of expression, such as ekphrasis (responding to a work of art through another form, e.g. ‘translating’ a painting into a poem) and reverse-ekphrasis (responding to a poem with a painting).

My introduction could also easily have been something straightforward, like a biographical synopsis of Sappho’s life and legacy. However, as her life has already been subject to millenia’s worth of speculation, the focus here is on aspects of her legacy as a way into how and why we might participate in the art of ‘another’; the joyful experience this can be (regardless of one’s competencies).

In this acclaimed Virago Press volume (check this pithy review ), Anne Carson collects the surviving papyrus remnants of Sappho’s nine books of lyric verse (‘lyric’ because originally composed to be sung to the lyre).

‘Sappho was a musician’, Carson’s introduction announces, momentarily unsettling any orthodox image of Sappho as most prominent female poet of the antiquity. The subsequent revelation that none of Sappho’s music survives acts as melancholy prelude to the confirmation that indeed ‘Sappho was also a poet’.

It is as poet that we have thought of Sappho for over 2000 years, even though only one (or possibly, at most three) of her poems reach us in their entirety. Carson tells us that the numerous ‘whole’ poems in her complete anthology If Not, Winter are in fact citations of Sappho by (male) authors of the antiquity.

Sappho’s birth is estimated around 630 B.C. In Who was Sappho and why do we care?, Adwoa Owusu-Barnieh offers a perceptive evaluation of the ‘Sapphic persona’ across the 2648 years that divide us:

‘Was there ever even a Sappho? We simply do not and cannot know for sure. [She] has become a cultural icon … not an individual identity, but rather, a symbol …– not a person, a poetess, a lover […] The fragmentary poetry attributed to the name is emblematic of our cultural progress towards self-expression, individuality, humankind’s inherent multiplicity, sexuality, development, loveless-ness, longing and memory.’

[…]

When we speak of Sappho we reiterate the human desire for temporal markers of shifts in the collective consciousness. To speak of Sappho is to define when we believe the advent of the poetic ‘I’ began. A stylistic poetic feature that we, as contemporary consumers of literary culture, frequently take for granted […]: the expression of one’s private world.

Owusu-Barnieh highlights the eurocentric, even anachronistic lens afforded us by unabashed cultural and historical revisionism. She also pinpoints well-known literary works influenced by (the idea of) Sappho across time: Ovid’s Heroides, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet. To her list, I add my absolute favourite, the audaciously vivid prose, of timbre at once post-modern and threaded with Sappho’s discourse, of the Booker-shortlisted After Sappho (which also inspired my short piece From Handpress to Substack). If someone other than Anne Carson has so far attained the accomplished feat of truly ‘echoing’ Sappho and her legacy, then this has to be Selby Wynn Schwartz, whose fragmentary novel is a polyphonic ode to the female creatives of the Modernist movement.

Other than through her life choices, Sappho’s timeless cultural relevance is therefore deeply rooted in a vision and use of poetic voice that transcend boundaries of time and space. As Owusu-Barnieh observes, we should still ‘care’ about Sappho’s legacy because it offers an opportunity - in this increasingly complex, troubled and beautifully diverse world - to project our own experiences onto the iconic ideals of Sappho’s persona and poetry:

I too am swayed by the almost - yet never quite - mythical Sapphic persona; I celebrate her role as part of the cultural history I’ve inherited by reading her work and about her work, by discussing it, by painting the ‘echoes’ of it shared here.

Dwelling on Sappho’s creative output we contribute to exposing the largely Western, gendered paradigms that define the reception of creativity as historically male-dominated. I find particularly attractive the idea that Sappho’s ‘I’ might have been the first subjective voice in Western poetics, therefore worthy of the accolade of being the mother of lyrical verse.

What particularly engages me in literal and artistic re-readings of Sappho’s poetry, is its fragmented nature, the brittle, alveolar, coral-like structure of its remains. The unfulfilled ‘parentheses’, the potential cradled in the arms of Carson’s square brackets [ ], used to represent not omissions from the original poems, but loss: papyrus and lexical crumbs, disintegrations, perforations.

On the clinical candour of blank paper, Carson carefully lays, side by side in Greek and in English, 192 fragments of imperfectly preserved metrical feet of natural imagery and mythological allusions, assertive and dewy with longing, outstretched for our fingertips, our gaze. Held in square brackets, the emptied core of a line or verse becomes a visual signifier of [lost] potential. Something was there, organically contained, floating unfettered in the amniotic fluid of poetic syntax.

Through absence, the fragile materiality of these odd words and phrases pulverised by time only serves to highlight the power of collective memory - be it through the intangibility of oral tradition or the concrete preservation effort that is museum curation. Memory, in whatever mode, is what we owe our trail-blazing predecessors whose achievements illuminate our days - which, in Sappho’s case, is the path to re-calibrating voices and legacies written out of history.

Owusu-Barnieh observes that the incompleteness of Sappho’s poetry reflects a broader theme of absence in human experience, while for Carson the brackets are ‘an aesthetic gesture towards the papyrological event, rather than an accurate record of it’. To her, ‘They are exciting’, just as they are for me and hopefully, by the time you have finished reading this, also for you.

And yet, however skilful and culturally attuned Carson’s rendition in English might be, much more than friable phrases is lost to us: in the words of 20th century intellectual giant, Umberto Eco, translation can only ever be ‘almost the same thing’. Carson herself warns that translation should not be ‘a reason to miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes, or smaller than a postage stamp’; that ‘brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventures’.

Thus, beyond Sappho’s surviving words, the sight of empty brackets offers us a concrete, fortuitous space to participate, however whimsically, in a creative act. In reading a poem, each of us contributes to its meaning in our own way. Interpretation relies on unique emotive and cognitive reactions defined by everything that makes us who we are, and by the context in which we are reading, including environmental factors. How we fill empty parentheses or how we respond to lines or imagery, including by ‘echoing’ in another mode of expression, will always be uniquely ours, a subconscious act most likely driven by a primeval need to connect. Often, our contribution will spring out of emotive response and by-pass reasoned thought. Regardless of the shape it takes, the heartbeat of interpretation is wonder.

Nested inside the human need to connect, our drive for semantic and syntactic coherence is essentially a yearning to ‘make sense’ of something we are presented with in an unusual form (e.g. through artistry). Momentarily extracted from the comfort zone of prosaic existence, we depend on the power of imagination to help us make sense, to respond. This is regardless of how long we pause to think or feel: the gap between the object we are looking at, and what it might mean, is filled by our participation (the act of ‘reading’) in the first place.

This is not only true of poetry reading: it happens also when we read a comic: we ‘fill’ the space (called ‘gutter’) that separates panels in a graphic novel by ‘imagining’ the meaningful transition between them. It also happens when we bridge the silence between acts in a play; when we subconsciously connect (assign meaning to) split-second scene changes in a film - also in the speedy transitions between shots, even frames within shots. And it happens when we contemplate apparently disconnected or multi-sensorial stimuli of abstract art. Arguably, any form of creative output depends on an audience for meaning (be this even an audience of one: the author).

We can see this through a closer look to some of Sappho’s poems. Fragment 59, for example, is full of possibilities, like a window open towards luminously expansive fields:

Meanwhile, Fragment 62 throws the gauntlet of creative licence across the table:

69 is simply provocative - when has a set of 3 square brackets ever held so much potential, or carried a more serendipitously witty title?

The heart of 73A offers up the Goddess of Love herself, sumptuously rising out of a swirl of ‘sweetworded desires’. Aphrodite’s trappings are left to our imagination:

And 82B would make a perfect warm-up exercise for creative writing class:

If your stylus needs a helping hand:

• How might you fill some of the gaps in these fragments, with individual words or full phrases? Nouns or adjectives?

• Do you sometimes, instinctively, fill in the blanks with an emotive response?

• How does your version of what could be change the poem from how you initially read it?

• What does your contribution reveal about you, ‘here’ and 'now'?

• Would you have filled in the blanks differently on 14 February 2022? On Christmas Day ten years ago?

• …Or somewhere else, or when not alone, or not with other people… In a school? At a party? In a late evening writing group?

• What if working with a painter? A composer?

• Where were you tempted to be rude?

You could play this as brain (and heart) teaser to pose more significant questions, such as: What can parenthetical contributions reveal about ourselves, as audience, as society? After all, these shattered poems were composed to fit the flow of original lyre tunes, rather than being deconstructed in February 2025, to a Substack audience...

We can think of participation, through echoes, imitation or gap-filling, as collaborative with the author and with the cultural current which has brought her to us. If you are a woman reader or painter or musician, you might for a moment even feel part of a creative sisterhood.

Whoever we are, in reading and responding, silently or loudly, we contribute to human endeavour, to propagating a creative act, however humble or ephemeral.

And so the fractured survival of Sappho’s poetry can bring us closer to grasping the elusive nature of the creative spark smouldering inside every single one of us. In a more general sense, it is the fate and privilege of the artist / audience relationship to be bound by dialogue and echo across cultural and temporal boundaries: from private contemplation to political reflection, from inter-textuality to whimsical ekphrasis.

Carson concludes her introduction to If Not, Winter with a nod to Walter Benjamin’s declaration about the translator’s task, in that she is ‘not quite sure how to hear Sappho’s echo’, not beyond a ‘tingle’, ‘now and then’.

Carson may not always hear it, but we certainly feel it, turning the pages of her book from one fragment to the next. Sappho’s legacy lives on.

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Ludovico Einaudi, The Snow Prelude No.15 (click to listen as part of the reading experience)

One way or another this turned out a month about finding the hidden colour of things, from the 'the drunkenness of things being various' highlighted by new year snow and the nuanced intrusion of memories into the present, to rainbows offered by winter songbirds or saturation shifts in shots of white objects.

As for Ludovico Einaudi’s minimalist music, its liquid notes simultaneously transport into dimensions of ‘constructed’ time - nostalgic yet hopeful - and grounds the listener into the present. But if you pay close attention, you will feel it reaching valiantly into the depths of lived, experienced and imagined time, of ‘good time’ and of the right time, perhaps into the coloured swathes of cosmic time. Maybe this is just what happens when we pay attention (really pay attention), to any natural or human-made work of life, art or science.

The ancient Greeks had two different words for time:

1) The time we ‘have’, or kronos (quantitative, measurable time, the time we are born to chase and which is inexorably out of our grasp). Etymologically, kronos is also root to words such as chronological, anachronism, chronic, synchrony.

2) The time ‘lived’ or experienced, kairos (qualitative time, time as a value we might waste or make the most of, ‘the right moment’ or experienced time).

Modernists, most notably Virginia Woolf, Salvador Dali, Walter Benjamin and - why not - Marcel Proust, capitalised on the tension between these two concepts of time. Largely inspired by Henri Bergson’s philosophy and by Sigmund Freud’s ideas of the self, alongside the momentum of WW1 and technological advances, conversations with and around artistry exposed the complexity of lived experience as much as the urgency of recognising its value against clock-ticking. But also against the linear trajectories imposed upon urban life in particular.

To modernist thinkers and creatives, features of city life that came to define their work were still mostly unfamiliar: they could step back and view the qualities and pitfalls of modernity with an objectivity which increasingly eludes us now. Speed and technology, objects of wonder and contemplation in the early 20th century, have been normalised, even all consuming. At the same time we would struggle to imagine life, work or play without them.

There is a moment in Mrs Dalloway (set on 13 June 1923, published in 1925), where Virginia Woolf depicts Londoners united in awe of an aeroplane writing slogans in the sky. The aeroplane motif, common in modernist literature, reveals the characters’ inter-connectedness and simultaneity of experience (as opposed to linearity), particularly in a busy urban context. By assigning this role to an advertising, rather than military, aeroplane, Woolf playfully draws upon the hopefulness in the air, the renewed sense of potential in the wake of the recent Armistice, inspiring wonder and curiosity.

Woolf’s prose is complex and melodious - we are immediately struck by polyphonic, joyous rhythms, by darting momentum and pace. Human excitement, young and old, is at one with the technological feat of the playful loops and sweeps of the aeroplane.

Although the only colour word featuring here is ‘white’ (unless, vaguely, ‘pallor’), Woolf evokes with kinetic sonority all the hidden colours of a shared and undoubtedly memorable moment of awe and wonder - ‘a mission of great importance’, that brings together disparate city dwellers. There is belonging, there is empathy, there is full and joyous appreciation of ‘kairos’. A kind of ‘urban Romanticism’ with a modernist twist.

There is also triumph in the re-purposing of flight technology from warfare to advertising, albeit heavy with the irony of encroaching commercialism. And a mindfulness of sorts: the characters’ purposeful traipsing across the city is paused in its tracks by kairos, rather than kronos (significantly, the movement of this novel is punctuated by the hourly striking of kronos - ‘Big Ben’). Everyone is ‘present’, fully focused, absorbing detail. They even collaborate in building the full picture.

It is ‘universally acknowledged’ that in the western world at least we may have reached a point of no return by assigning value to kronos, instead of making the most of our time on earth within kairos. Or at least instead of attaining a sustainable balance between the two.

This concern marks a significant shift from a progressively sophisticated consciousness of time to the somewhat urgent ‘motif’ in artistic and pragmatic endeavours: we are becoming more aware of the pain, suffering and even varied degrees of destruction we inflict upon the environment, upon our own society and - not always indirectly - upon under-served communities, including those at war.

The increasingly recognisable necessity of living in the moment shines through our art and literature, journalism and non-fiction, social media and wellness trends. Conversations about slowing down, noticing, living the moment - in the moment - are also commodified: step into any bookstore and you come across myriad journals, templates, manuals, kits, deploying marketing strategies to inspire customers towards untangling an increasingly crowded and stressed inner world. These goods promise healing, clarity, belonging.

Yet the value of kairos, of living in the moment, which begins by looking inwards and works towards a centering the self, is not as egotistical as it appears. But I am surprised by the number of conversations on the potentially selfish and even extremist uses of practices such as yoga: this article from The Times stood out for me in 2021, when I was new to yoga, and this blog from the same year, for aligning yoga with egotism, conspiracy theories and even fascism. (At this point I must acknowledge that an aspect of modernism itself slipped towards fascism, for example through the Italian Futurist voice of movement leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Italian Futurism engaged energetically with ideas about power, dynamism and masculinity - as currents of modern life and artistic expression).

Regarding mindful activities like yoga, I would argue that any practice which fosters reflection and a centering of the self, be it a creative, life style or wellbeing endeavour, is our first real opportunity to engage meaningfully with the world around us - and thus with our impact and responsibility towards it. ‘Stopping to smell the roses’, to appreciate a landscape or to express gratitude, are first steps towards compassion. And what is compassion if not the way to empathy, and to taking stock of our actions?

But are we so far advanced in our wisdom (and marketing strategies), when we reach out for the oneness of things, for ‘being in’ the present, that we call out for anything different from modernist excitement over simultaneity of experience - the here-and-now, the meanderings of the mind between reality and what we now call ‘constructed memory’, the attentiveness to how we are connected through a shared consciousness…?

In Mrs Dalloway Woolf deploys a narrative perspective which shifts from the consciousness of one character to the next, including characters not connected in any other way. The reader thus absorbs a multi-faceted version of human energy in central London, in full colour. Differently, her dynamic, contemplative essay ‘Street Haunting’ grants a reflective first person flâneuse narrative that threads Woolf’s own - clearly mindful - perceptions of the heartbeat of the city, from minute detail into expansive environmental observations. In the introduction, her quest for ‘a pencil’ is a deliberate excuse for appreciating the present by taking in, at walking pace, the colourful essence of 'London’. Take for example the polychromatic subtlety of this synaesthetic snapshot:

Read or listen to the full essay here.

Today, seen from the perspective of Einaudi’s notes rising into the colourful darkness of space, we’d probably look like a species utterly distracted from the very experience of kairos, focused instead on a predatory kronos, a construct of our own making and forever out of our grasp. We’d look caught in a self-destructive race simultaneously towards and against the clock, in the wake of discarded colours which we replace with the dopamine of the artificial and the virtual. Or just with beige, vanilla or grey.

In They're Stealing Colour from Your World, argues succintly about the danger of encroaching conformity - and how much of it is measurable against the ‘colour drain’ we are encouraging through our material, cultural, even ethical choices and modes of expression.

Creative Rebels

They’re Stealing Colour from Your World

The polar ice caps are melting…

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2 years ago · 1111 likes · 109 comments · David Speed

As we drown in conformity, the issue of algorithms on the rampage to flatten contemporary life and creativity ‘out of colour’ is urgent. David Speed illustrates with convincing clarity the political and economic implications of a world constructed as increasingly uniform, globalised and ‘neutral’ in hue and tone. He goes as far as noticing colour as ‘human right’ and gives colour bold expression in his own art.

This resonates with me - and with the themes of my posts since I’ve started writing here. If manifestoes (and manifesting…) were not on the up-trend, I’d be a step away from calling out -

To unveil, reveal, spill, recognise, celebrate the colour of all things - animate, inanimate, natural or human-made.

To draft odes to bio- and geo- and human diversity, in every form of expression.

To recognise that belonging is about connection with all of nature and with humanity at large, away from the confinement of man-made, political, economic or ethnic boundaries.

Realistically, to the majority of us, the daily grind does not afford the luxury of pausing to take stock or smell the roses in any permanent, reliable way. Exhausted, we take refuge in the uniformity of beige, vanilla and grey - until we can treat ourselves with the warm polychromy of ‘time out’.

But what if, having found solace in neutral tones or the e-glow of a chronically plugged-in crowd - what if, when we surfaced for air, we allowed light in and looked out for the rainbow in all things?

For more depth and colour:

'Be here, now' with Einaudi - and other mindful music episodes

Paris Review article about Bergson and the Unreality of Time

short film about the history of sky writing: It's a bird, it's a plane - it has something to say! by National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian

London Review of Books: On Typing (entering the world and style of 'Mrs Dalloway' by typing the text (mindfully coming up close and personal to the subtlety of Woolf’s prose)

Alain de Botton: 'How Proust Can Change Your Life'

Review of 'Flâneuse' by Lauren Elkin, a study of the 'female spirit of idle strolling' through a city (typically presented as male endeavour)

birdsong and waterfowl acoustics from the lake pictured

Male Duck Contemplating the First Complexity of Winter

Before the frozen lake
the mallard hesitates
a moment:

'Miles of frost
on this lake - 
but the ice's my own.'

English version of two haiku used for the spin-off poem above:

1.

Before the white crysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.

 - traditionally attributed to Yosa Buson (translated by Robert Hass), but here's an interesting article arguing for Sōseki's authorship of this well-known haiku.  


2.

Miles of frost
on the lake
the moon's my own.

- by Yosa Buson (translated by Lucien Stryk / Takashi Ikemoto). Read more about Buson here

Where will your collage take you?

xxx

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January birdsong (needs full volume)

While for Thomas Hardy a bleak winter’s day was momentarily enlivened by the ‘ecstatic caroling’ of a thrush, for me it was the soft thump of nesting blue tits animating the tiny birdhouse in my garden, incongruous with the freshly settled snow.

But then again, snow itself is known to fall out of sync with the seasonal rhythms of life, as a few years ago in the same garden:

…or, allegedly, in the heat of August 358 AD on the Esquiline hill in Rome: wasn’t the basilica Our Lady of the Snows built on the spot where a moment of unexpected snow, anticipated a vision of the Virgin still celebrated by Italians today? A mere ten days away from the Ascension feast itself.

Back in the garden, the avian fervour for new life only serves as reminder that we’re still in January: it’s too cold even for snowdrops.

Yet the current hibernating bareness of trees is liberating: views of variously moody skies have become accessible and cleansed, there is room for new foliage. Even though I stopped replenishing the bird feeders when the cat crunched the third blue tit of last summer, the smallest of colourful local birds still come to pop on -and in-and out- of naked branches: goldfinches and siskins, long tailed tits and blue tits, robins, redwings, sparrows, bramblings, dunnocks, nuthatches, goldcrests… (endearingly, the goldcrest is the tiniest European bird, at 4-6 grams).

The sound of these birds’ English names captures their colourful liveliness in a permanent summer, while the binomial nomeclature assigns them the impersonal dignity of science, the worthiness of catalogue. It preserves them in kind, rather than individuality, but it also preserves them against time: there is something reassuring in a name that signifies the continuous line of a species, a belonging, implicitly ‘for as long as it can last in time’, despite individual losses to predatory jaws.

Although perhaps not also despite human impact. We therefore owe them more than seeds and suet. We owe them attention and at least some of our time - if not the recognition that somewhere down the line, albeit hundreds of millions of years ago, we shared a common ancestor (check this Birdsong, Speech and Language article that explores the evolution of mind and brain. And did you know we share half of our DNA with chickens?)

There’s also a lyrical sonority to scientific naming:

Cyanistes caeruleus (blue tit)

Aegithalos caudatus (long-tailed tit)

Fringilla montifringilla (brambling)

Fringilla coelebs (chaffinch)

Prunella modularis (dunnock)

Regulus regulus (goldcrest)

Carduelis carduelis (goldfinch)

Erithacus rubecula (robin)

Spinus spinus (siskin)

And this is where the soft labour of a -possibly returning- blue tit family, fissures the brittle day: it calls attention to the vast and omnipresent, if individually diminutive, bird population which tirelessly festoons cold air and bare branches with colours we can only truly notice at barren times of year. Times when we aren’t distracted by blossom or butterflies, foliage, a blazing sun, the cooing of woodpigeons, the hum of bumble bees or the call of a confident fox.

So I take the effect of Hardy’s lonesome birdsong as much more than a sign of hope in a colourless world: like the premature nesting of blue tits in my garden, the ecstatic caroling of his ageing thrush is a hymn to fully-fledged life, however hidden or distant yet. Because the anticipation of spring alone already propels thoughts of summer. It is a joy of sorts.

The Darkling Thrush 
                         
I leant upon a coppice gate
      When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
      Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
      Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
      The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
      The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
      Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.                                                    by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Find out more:

Birdsong in Winter as 'temperature gauge' - The Guardian

How Listening to Birdsong Can Transform Our Mental Health

‘Snow miracle’' painting references:

Masolino and Masaccio, 1482 The Blessed Virgin Mary Overlooking Pope Liberius as he Scraped the Basilica’s Foundation in the Snow (The Miracle of the Snow), 1428, Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.

Perugino (c.1450-1523, attributed to), The Miracle of the Founding of Santa Maria Maggiore with a Fall of Snow (5 August 352) (predella panel), National Trust

Bird photography reference:

https://blog.happybeaks.co.uk/wild-birds/15-garden-birds-to-spot-this-winter/

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Ludovico Einaudi: Le onde (‘The Waves’) - take time to listen while taking in some of the many hearts of nature

someone, i tell you, will remember us, even in another time

Sappho (610-570 BCE)

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Perhaps it was the unassuming way in which this wild-growing malus domestica, offspring of the rose family, blended into the pastels of countryside dusk - with its flush of pink apples along wayward branches and the nonchalant dangling of a single dead twig. Or where it stood, joyfully brimming with life by that silent, empty road.

Its rosy fruit offering was at arm level but disturbing the balance of this tenderly visual feast seemed sacrilegious. I don’t know, but this tree had personality. Without wishing to anthropomorphise it, there was something about it that stood out: I could see its ‘essence’ in a way that I had not noticed it in other trees before. While this impression was undoubtedly enhanced by the soft colours of the particular light of those late July evenings, this tree could clearly only belong to that place and to that moment in time.

Absorbing and refracting the twilight, it endowed the vastness of sky and landscape with a sense of the here and now, of presence amidst ungraspable silence, of connection with the rare passer by. (I’m resisting the phrase ‘in a very human sense’ because I’m uncomfortable with anthropocentric readings of nature, although I realise these are the only readings we can have).

I walked past this tree on three consecutive evenings and the impression of presence and connection did not change. It still picked out the pastels of dusk in the glow of its leaves and in the blush of its apples. It still offered companionship.

The only difference on the third evening was that I found I wasn’t alone: a farmer who had seen me taking photos walked up to tell me to feel free to taste an apple. Taste is the word he used. Not try, pick, take, but taste. Does someone taking in a sight of this kind necessarily want to taste it too? I suppose synaesthetic attraction speaks for itself but his gesture was also simply an expression of local hospitality.

Except… this was not his tree - even if it grew on the boundary of his land - no more than the storks nesting on his chimney stack were ‘his’ storks. And hadn’t the apple tree, outstretched boughs balancing ripe fruit, already given its own permission, by stopping me in my tracks?

But also, who was I, who am I, to capitalise on this kindly, fertile beauty?

It was then that my perspective changed: and so it is that even now, in the thick of January on the other side of Europe, when I stop to photograph a tree, I can only think in portrait terms. And I understand that the only reason I hadn’t noticed the ‘essence’ of the many trees I captured over the years, is because I hadn’t stopped to look at them in the same way.

This shift in perspective has changed how I observe, pick or edit images of trees. I don’t know if this results in ‘better’ photographs - what matters more than anything, is the attitude that defines my actions. It feels like love.

It’s not that other trees showed up differently for me. It’s only that this small, roadside apple tree in a remote corner of Eastern Europe ‘happened into my dimension’ at the right time, a bit like Ted Hughes' deer: foregrounded by its quiet environment, as if waiting to be noticed, quite simply, for what it was.

While on the topic of trees, why not lose yourself, as I’m about to do, in Alice Allan's coming of age novel about connecting with nature:

The Whispering Trees, by Alice Allan

“…a terrific book: at once haunting, witty and witchy, with the tang of the real to it as well as the shiver of the uncanny. Here are shades of Susan Cooper, echoes of Michael Morpurgo, all in a living landscape set just askew from what might be expected.”

—Robert Macfarlarne, author of The Lost Words, Landmarks, Underland: A Deep Time Journey and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Or, for more down-to earth but no less fascinating escapism:

                             
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.                                                 
But I am done with apple picking now.

                                                                         'After Apple-Picking', by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
                                                   

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photo credit and book review: Booker Prize Longlist 2022

A favourite I keep returning to, especially if looking for imagery or phrases to use in a painting, Wynn Schwartz’ fragmented, poetic and momentously paced novel unravels the web of unabashed political artistry linking pioneering female modernists across C20 cultural and national borders.

The extract below presents Nancy Cunard enthralled by the prospect of a ‘handpress’ of her own - as driven for a device for ‘spreading the word’ as any of us out here. A wry Virginia Woolf warns Cunard that ‘Whenever Milady summons, you [will] abandon your afternoon of leisure’. And she should know, co-founder of her own Hoggarth Press (1917).

I love it how even now, when words and images spread faster and more widely than ever in human history, essentially we still share the same yearning as those before us: to make voices heard. Regardless if these voices belong to us or to those whose work, vision, attitudes or indeed, use of imagery, has touched us.

‘With a press of one’s own, literature became less of a wasteland of critics and more a moment glistening like pigment, red or black on the page'.

‘There is the drugery of it day after day, then ink spots eternal on one’s hands’

‘But to feel the click of the words under one’s fingers!’

Nancy Cunard and The Hours Press (source: Musée du quai Branly, Paris (10518)

Cunard (b. London 1896, d. Paris 1965) is best known as Jazz Age icon, Modernist Muse, avant-garde writer and publisher, and heiress to the Cunard Line, although she relinquished her privilege for social and political and activism. Her courageous achievements are summarised in this NPR entry .

Nancy Cunard by Man Ray, 1926

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