I turned up your TV and stomped on the floor just for fun

If I thought there was any chance my downstairs neighbours would appreciate it, the next time they banged on their ceiling because I dared to walk across my own living room at a time that didn't suit them, I'd pop two things through their letterbox. First, this cartoon by Graham Laidler (aka Pont), published in Punch in 1939:



And second, this passage from Pnin, perhaps my favourite of Nabokov's English-language novels:

During the eight years Pnin had taught at Waindell College he had changed his lodgings - for one reason or another, mainly sonic - about every semester. The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody .... There had been (to pick out here and there only special offenders) that room in the eminently hermetic-looking Duke's Lodge, Waindellville: a delightful kabinet, above which, however, every evening, among crashing bathroom cascades and banging doors, two monstrous statues on primitive legs of stone would grimly tramp - shapes hard to reconcile with the slender build of his actual upstairs neighbours, who turned out to be the Starrs, of the Fine Arts Department ('I am Christopher, and this is Louise'), an angelically gentle couple keenly interested in Dostoyevsky and Shostakovich.

Leningrad Symphony: Part 2

(Part 1 here.)

And his thoughts then turned to other people, those he had left behind in Leningrad. How many had died in the time it had taken them to pass through this village? How many others had given up hope and succumbed to the numbness of hunger and horror? He concentrated on their emptiness and fear until he felt them burning within his own chest, and during quiet moments his mind was filled with the noise of air raids. This was all he could do for them now.

He had tried to do more. His eyes were too weak, and his reputation too valuable, for military service, so he'd volunteered as a fire warden. They had taken a photo of him in his helmet, to be distributed to the world's press, and then hurried him off out of harm's way. What they really wanted from him was music: music to raise the people's spirits and show the determination of the Motherland, music to uphold the glory of Socialism against the fascist evil. Music that in happier times they would have cracked skulls by.

In his jacket pocket was the one possession he had left, since he had refused to part with it even to the extent of packing it in a case: the manuscript of the first three movements of a symphony. He had written these movements in the nine weeks before the order came for them to evacuate, and had brought it along planning to compose the last. But as he had pushed his way onto this train crammed with refugees, he had been overcome by the sudden feeling that writing music now was useless and even impertinent. The thought of working on the symphony any further had become repulsive, yet somehow he couldn't throw it away. He held onto it as he held on to the memory of his besieged city.

***

His wife, having more foresight, had carried a suitcase on board with her, which held her clothing and a few pieces of crockery. At their first stop he got out and scrubbed the dishes with handfuls of snow, rinsing them in hot water he had begged from the station (the stationmistress had handed it over with a total lack of surprise or interest; such requests had become commonplace even in the smallest towns). His hands went so numb that he could not tell where they ended and the dishes began; but the crisp dry snow scoured surprisingly well, and he soon found himself taking satisfaction in his work. The hot water slopped onto the ground and seeped under the surface of the snow, leaving a thin layer of crystals on the top. All around the train were similar patches -- some made by water, some by urine from the chamber pots. His fellow passengers wandered back and forth along the tracks, looking into each other's faces for a hint of fellow-feeling or understanding. At first the only noise was of the snow crunching and squeaking under their feet. Then, gradually, they began to talk.

Word of his lost possessions soon spread through the train. His companions pressed upon him with gifts: a razor, a pair of heavy socks, a flowing tunic several sizes too big, of the style he had worn in the 1920s. He murmured "thank you" over and over until he began to feel he was using the phrase in self-defence, as a seal to stop their flow of generosity before embarrassment overwhelmed him completely.

After the gifts they began to bombard him with advice, and his "thank you" was replaced by a new phrase: "possibly, possibly". A small war broke out among his helpers concerning where he and his family should leave the train:

"Tashkent, of course. They have plenty of food there, everything you could need."

"Nonsense! How can he ride all the way to Tashkent with the little ones? Would you keep them cooped up in this carriage for an extra week? No, Dmitry Dmitrievich, stop in Kuibyshev: they will do just as well for you there, and it's much closer."

"Don't be ridiculous. Should he risk his children going hungry just to spare them a few days' journey? Listen, Dmitry Dmitrievich, it's not for nothing that they say 'Tashkent has bread in abundance'."

"Do you really think they haven't got bread in Kuibyshev? All the artists are going there, and the chairman of the Committee; they'll be well provided for, all right. Take it from me, Dmitry Dmitrievich, you'll like it in Kuibyshev. I can remember visiting -- "

"Possibly, possibly."

Tashkent had bread in abundance, but Kuibyshev offered a quicker escape. He would go to Kuibyshev.

When charity should stop at home

Yesterday I did a task I'd been meaning to do for a while, and amended my Direct Debits to charities. Out went CAFOD and Amnesty International, and in came Oxfam and PEN. My reason for dropping CAFOD is quick enough to explain: I simply don't think it's appropriate to support an agency of the Catholic Bishops' Conference at this time. Saying goodbye to Amnesty was a lot harder. I've been writing to prisoners via their Greetings Card Campaign for several years now, and participating in letter-writing appeals to goverments as well.

So why did I decide to stop giving them money? Well, it was mainly to do with them cosying up to a jihadist group and forcing out an employee who blew the whistle. But I've also been troubled by a general sense that the organisation is drifting away from its original purpose. Poverty and violence against women are very bad things, to be sure, but I'm not sure how much use Amnesty's traditional methods can be in combating them -- and there are already organisations to deal with both issues, anyway.

But the most obvious example is Amnesty's fixation on capital punishment in the U.S. I am opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances, but again, there are already a number of groups dealing specifically with this issue. More to the point, there are groups within the U.S. campaigning actively to end the death penalty there. Unlike activist groups in some of the countries Amnesty covers, they are free to speak their minds and take full part in the political process. So for Amnesty UK to constantly try to mobilise its members on this issue seems like a waste of resources that could be better used elsewhere.

Also, just because you don't think someone should be killed by the state doesn't mean you have to pretend they're a nice person. In America, people are not sentenced to death for changing their religion or having sex outside marriage. Every single person on Death Row in the U.S. is there because they've been convicted of something very nasty indeed. Yet for the past year or so, it's seemed like every issue of Amnesty's magazine has included a near-hagiography of one of these characters, allowing them ample space for their standard "I didn't do it, and besides, I've reformed" spiel. (Which is beside the point anyway; surely if you believe the death penalty is inherently wrong, it doesn't matter whether the person facing execution is guilty or not.)

This is not what I signed up for. I've been paying my monthly dues to help political activists who risk everything to stand up to a dictator, or journalists who are sent to prison for reporting the truth about their government. I haven't paid them for the benefit of some murderous thug who was stupid enough to commit his crime in Texas. The latter actually exhibits exactly the same evil as the tyrants Amnesty does so much to oppose. He just hasn't been given a country to run, that's all.

Leningrad Symphony: Part 1

I expanded the prose piece I posted a while back and handed it in for my final assessment. It got a distinction, so I thought it might be worth posting here. I've decided to break it into four parts, since it's quite long.



The forest clearing seemed hardly big enough to hold their plane, but the wheels stopped just in time, churning up the snow in deep ripples. The pilots -- there were four, as many as the passengers -- helped his wife and children down the steps and then guided them all to a hut between two oak trees. The interior was bare, and they perched on their suitcases, as they had during their flight; he had begun to forget that any other furniture could be used for the purpose.

He sat by the only window, holding his sleeping son, and watched the silhouettes of the pilots going about their brisk but hushed business. One thin tree disappeared from the starry horizon, then another, the axe-falls seeming oddly muffled by the snow and darkness. The pilots divided them into branches and laid these diagonally against the plane, propping them first against the wings and fuselage and then against each other. Within an hour the plane was entirely concealed by a prickling mass of sticks, like the shelter of a large but timid woodland animal.

In the morning they were driven to a hotel in the capital, and went shopping for new toys for the children.

***

By the railway lines outside Moscow, entire factories were waiting to be evacuated, the machines swathed thickly in tarpaulin and the workers shivering at their feet. He too was overshadowed by the belongings they had gathered for their journey: their suitcases and crates stood in haphazard towers on the platform at Kazan station. When they reached their carriage, they found a young woman stretching her muscular arms across the entrance, shouting that it was only for the use of the Bolshoi Theatre. His wife began shrieking something in reply, but the words of both women seemed to be swallowed by the noise of the crowd. He was still struggling for some word that would prove his right to be there when a tall man, whose angular face he vaguely recognised, leaned over his shoulder and ordered the ballerina to let them pass. As the train pulled away he realised he had left their mountain of possessions behind.

For several days afterward, he dreamed that he simply stepped off the train and found himself in the same spot on that platform, among their earthly belongings again -- except that the stacks had grown taller and broader, and even developed corridors within them, forming a dwelling larger and grander than anything the Party could have awarded him for his patriotic services. His rare moments of sleep were spent wandering those makeshift hallways and looking at the remnants of their former life. There was the worn doll, with its scanty pigtails and one glass eye clumsily reattached, that his daughter had carried everywhere in Leningrad; and there was its replacement, bought in Moscow, which she had barely given a name before it too was lost. His wife's sewing machine had grown to enormous proportions and stood over the whole arrangement like a monumental sculpture, so that any light filtering through the stacks was divided into triangles by the spokes of its wheel. He began to feel that there was some specific thing he needed to find in this mishmash, something that would make sense of their situation, but he was always awakened before he could find it -- by a change in shifts (the women and children lay down at night, the men took it in turns during the day), or by an actress crying over her own lost things.

At night he stood by the window, watching the dim shapes of trees and farm buildings. For hours they would pass through quiet countryside without even a visible light. He tried to pass the time by imagining the people who must be sleeping somewhere out there in that darkness. What were their lives like? What were they dreaming about, and what would they think of when they woke up? Did they ever think of the news coming from the north? It seemed to him sometimes that they could not, or they surely would not have been able to go on with their daily lives; surely they, like him, would be frozen, staring blankly out into the night.

Cats and landladies’ husbands

TE Lawrence grave
Originally uploaded by canong2fan

Sad news from the latest newsletter of the T.E. Lawrence Society:

Ivor Bryant reports that sadly, Elsa the tortoiseshell cat at Moreton churchyard has died at the age of 16. She was a semi-feral animal who adopted the cemetery many years ago and lived in a well hidden lair close to T.E.’s grave. Elsa loved to escort visitors to Lawrence’s memorial, but was not averse to the odd treat as well. She had been well looked after by a local lady, but remained semi-wild.

Thanks to Flickr, I was able to find this photo of Elsa visiting Lawrence's grave, taken by Terry Langton. She will likely leave less controversy behind her than Lawrence did.

A glimpse of paradise

Yesterday was a brilliant sunny day, so we headed out to Kew Gardens. It was very busy, but the Gardens are so vast that even the biggest crowd gets dispersed. Many of the visitors were foreigners, most of whom presumably have no way to get out of the UK at the moment. Yet the mood was universally happy and relaxed. And indeed, it was hard to see how anyone could be upset about being stranded in a place like this:







For all the havoc that the flight ban has caused, I can't deny it has certain benefits. London's skies were as quiet and clear as I've ever known them to be, with no vapour trails crossing its brilliant blue. And without huge crowds dragging their suitcases to Heathrow, the Piccadilly Line stations were a lot more pleasant than usual.

And on the last leg of the journey home, we saw another of the volcano's benefits:

A gold and red lining

If you've been stranded in Britain by the cancellation of flights, you should at least have some spectacular sunsets to watch while you're here. The ash and sulfate aerosols from Eyjafjallajökull* are likely to scatter the sun's rays, causing the colours of the evening sky to be far more brilliant than usual.

It took a while before people understood the cause of volcanic sunsets. After the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, debate raged as to what was causing the astonishing sunsets seen around the world for months. Among those who contributed their observations and theories was an English Jesuit who had a letter published in the journal Nature. This was one of Gerard Manley Hopkins's few appearances in print during his lifetime.

* I assume no one in Iceland has actually been hurt in the eruption, although the British media have understandably not found time to report this detail.

What kind of monster dresses their kid in Primark?

Since I don't have kids or shop at Primark, I missed the great padded pre-teen bikini row until it was all over. Call me cynical, but I suspect that the second part of this statement by the company may have played a greater role than the first in its decision to withdraw the product:

A Primark spokesman said it has "taken note" of concerns about the product which is said it sold in "relatively small" quantities.

Of course it's astonishing that any of them sold at all -- it's probably too much to hope that they were all bought by feminist art students for use in installations. But someone at Primark clearly thought they were going to sell much better, and that's depressing enough.

If a designer approached a retail chain with a range of pre-stuffed bathing trunks for little boys, don't you think somebody would call the police?

Don't you know there's a war on?

I don't mean to sound like a tabloid reader spluttering about "political correctness gone mad". I really don't. But after reading this story, and in particular the following detail:

Her commanding officer told her that the Army was a "war-fighting machine" and unsuitable for a single mother who could not manage her childcare arrangements.

I must appeal to readers to tell me: What on earth is wrong with that statement? Let's hope the Central Employment Tribunal never figures out that the military expects some of its "employees" to be prepared to die.

(And yes, I have read the whole article, so I know there was more to the case than that. But I'm also struck by the options that weren't even mentioned: using birth control, for example, or involving the child's father in some way.)

The devil's pocket

Some of my classmates from last term and I decided to continue an informal writers' group, and we had our first meeting this evening in a cinema bar in Soho. Looking around, we saw that we weren't the only club to meet there: a few tables away a group of youngish women, and a couple of men, were happily knitting.

"People still knit?" said one of my fellow writers. "That's so three years ago".

A few of us then remembered the knitting circles that had formed in our workplaces during the height of the knitting trend. I recalled how the knitters in my office had decided to do some charity work by producing baby clothes and blankets for maternity hospitals (I assume in some poor country, perhaps in Eastern Europe). One colleague was puzzled when instructed to knit an "angel pocket". Since no one in the office knew what this meant, she turned to Google. Several sites' worth of cherub drawings and Comic Sans later, she discovered that an "angel pocket" was a shroud for a stillborn infant.

It turned out one woman in the writing group was already familiar with the term. Her mother used to do the same sort of charitable knitting, and "angel pockets" were among the items requested then, too. But she added an even more disturbing coda. Apparently it had emerged that the "charity" her mother was helping -- like many similar organisations -- was actually a scam. The woman who ran it was selling all the volunteers' handiwork and keeping the profits.

Now, I can see how such a fraudster could sell baby clothes and blankets. But who bought her falsely-obtained "angel pockets"? Surely no mother-to-be would even want to contemplate needing such a thing, and by the time parents did need one, they'd be in no fit state to go shopping. The circumstances under which there would be a thriving market for these things are almost too dreadful to contemplate.

Not today, Fred

I am feeling almost physically ill because it turns out that recent rumours were true, and the vile followers of the Westboro Baptist "Church" are coming to protest in West Virginia. Their targets will include Catholic schools and churches and the state's two synagogues. It's unknown if they will reprise the signs they brandished after the Sago mine disaster near my hometown, reading "THANK GOD FOR DEAD MINERS", but it seems likely.

If I were still living in West Virginia, I would want to be involved in a peaceful counterdemonstration, but as it is I can only hope and pray that people turn out en masse to show that they reject this group and its hateful ideals. In particular, this is an opportunity for Christians in the state to bear witness to the true teachings of Christ.

Bone and blood is the price of coal

The first thing I thought when I heard of the disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine was, "I bet my friend Russell (who comes from Raleigh County) knows some of the people involved". And I was right, he did. Nothing like this happens in isolation in West Virginia; practically everyone in the state knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, who is affected.

The second thing I thought, sadly, was "I bet it was a Massey mine". And I was right about that too.

West Virginia deserves better than this. Maybe one day it will get it.

If you'd like to follow developments as they happen, I highly recommend The Charleston Gazette's Coal Tattoo blog. In recent days this blog has also been giving good coverage to the ongoing mine disaster in China. (I mention this partly because the Chinese miners and their families should still be in our thoughts, and also because in Britain, whenever something like this happens, "anti-imperialist" idiots surface to whine about the media giving preferential treatment to disasters that affect Americans. Here's proof that, even in Upper Big Branch's local paper, this isn't the case.)

Another way of looking at it

It's nice to see nature photography that focuses on less-obvious subjects. An example is the shot by Mariano Sironi which was recently announced as the winner of the Hilda Canter-Lund Photography Award 2009. At first glance, it doesn't look all that unusual: a southern right whale mother is guiding her calf through the sea off the coast of Argentina. But the Hilda Canter-Lund award is sponsored by the British Phycological Society -- phycology being the study of algae -- and to them, the real stars of this photo are the tiny plants, "tentatively composed of Lepidodinium sp.", that have turned the tide bright green.

I bet it was one of his best friends, too

I wasn't going to say anything about Raniero Cantalamessa's comparison of the abuse scandal to anti-Semitic persecution, partly because comment seemed superfluous, and partly because groups closer to the issue than me have already responded. But I will point out something I haven't seen mentioned in any of the news reports: that the "Jewish friend" whom Cantalamessa claims he was quoting hasn't yet rushed forward to defend him. I suppose s/he could just be busy celebrating Passover, but I'm not holding my breath.

(As it turns out, I took a nap yesterday afternoon and woke up too late for the Good Friday service. I'm debating now whether to go to the vigil tonight. Maybe if I avoid reading any more news.)

What I'm thinking about today

I suppose I should be having profound spiritual thoughts. But here's what will actually be occupying my mind most of the time:



A few years ago, on either Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, I broke my fast by eating some Port-Salut cheese we happened to have in the fridge. Since then, I've found I always crave the stuff after a long period without food. So when I was ordering the groceries yesterday, I treated myself to a wedge of it and some crackers (along with a lot of fizzy drinks, which I'd given up for Lent). That's probably what I'll be looking forward to all day.

I didn't go to Mass last Sunday -- for the first time since I was baptised nine years ago, except when I've been ill. There were various reasons I couldn't motivate myself to go, but a big part of it was that I'd spent the weekend pondering this. I didn't go to the Holy Thursday Mass yesterday either, but Good Friday and Easter are different. They seem to me to be about more than the Church's current power structure.

So I'm still fasting today, and I'll go to the Celebration of the Passion this afternoon, and to the Easter Vigil tomorrow night. And who knows -- when the faithful line up to kiss the crucified figure of Christ, or when we share the light of the Paschal candle, "divided but undimmed", I may be moved to think of something other than cheese.