I have put my best print, Devenish up for sale on my website: http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/p/0055/index.html
I recently wrote a letter to a correspondent, a clerical student, talking about the symbolism of knotwork, from a cosmolgical view point. With students who are trained in a theological background, I feel comfortable in speaking to them in these terms, which draw upon a way of thinking for which I rarely meet an audience. It is symbolic thinking, and I can draw on my own experience with drawing knots, remembering how significant even the simple act of placing a dot on the blank paper could be to me, it made me imagine the beginning of the universe, the birth of the cosmos. This was my introduction to the intelligibility of form in traditional pattern.
I remember Coomaraswamy's dictum that symbolic art of this kind serves as a support of comntemplation of first principles, and these principles are most naturally expressed in myth and sacred scriptures as accounts of how the world began. Cosmogenesis is a genre of philosophical speculation, which I first met in comparative religious studies, through the writings of Coomaraswamy and Guenon, Schuon and others of that mid-20th century, comparative religion studies group.
How many people still read those authors? I doubt if many ever did, they were an obscure specialist niche within the field of comparative religion even then. But now when I meet a student with a back ground in religious studies, I tend to take advantage of the possibliity that they are familiar enough with the cant of cosmology and ontology to tolerate my airing my speculations and special interest, as an artist, in the subject.
Finished my book of Somerset Maugham stories. Interesting change of style in the last two, Miss King and The Hairless Mexican, from his Ashenden spy series: written in a snappy thriller style, evey sentence a statement of fact, furthering the narrative, like a detective's report, barely relieved by dialogue or descriptive observations.
Miss King is oddly anticlimactic. I did not get it at all on first reading. Maybe I will when I reread it. It seems like a dream, inconclusive and disjointed. The narrative is hard to follow, there are so many characters, he takes the reader to a hotel and lists every guest one after that other, it seems, then introduces Miss King, only to kill her off with a stroke saying only "England", but we don't know what she means by that, it seems we are left to make of it whatever we want. (Could it be that he recorded this story as received in a dream? That would explain the combination of structured story and illogical, disjointed subject).
He speculates, as if to give us a choice of interpretations, but leaves it swinging in the wind--most unsatisfying. Is he parodying the taste of the day for flouting the rules of good story writing, for originality at all cost, the unexpected, for its own sake? He has criticised modern writing often enough, he seems to have come around to it, and perhaps his ambivalence leads him to subvert the form because the times have forced him to adopt it, the market demands it, to prove he is not outdated, but he does it with an ill grace, and yet, despite himself, has fun with it. That would be plausible if he was feeling cynical about literature, the craft of authorship, when he wrote it. The style is infuenced by the spy genre, the mystery novel, the detective story. The lack of plot seems modernistic and existential, Beckett meets James Bond.
I popped into the framer’s, and found they sell canvas stretcher bars, cheaper that de Serres or Opus. Good prices, could maybe buy stretcher bars in bulk from them. It would mean standardising my sizes, do I really want to do that? I don't know that I do.
My gut rebels at the thought of standardising my artwork, bu this may be thoughtless reaction. I recall seeing a photo of Francis Bacon working at a large canvas on which he had a portrait happening that was all ruled out square, but had acres of margin, allowing for possible alterations of proportion as the picture evolved. I could imagine doing a figure, then feeling inspired to add a border, and make the picture bigger. Best to start on a large expanse, and cut the canvas to size after the work is finished so that it does not become cramped by the predetermined size of a canvas that may be too small for the image as it turns out. I have felt this about some canvases I did earlier. Maybe I should try this. I can have the canvas stretched afterwords, if I choose.
Taking the bus home, I found I had time left on my ticket, and so I thought I would go have a coffee and write some music; I had a tune running through my mind all the way there, but when I got to Broadway, and popped into the coffee shop on Commercial there, found I had forgotten my wallet; after ordering a coffee I could not pay for it. The waitress was friendly, said it didn't matter, and I caught the bus back, just in time. But I wrote the song down, on the way up to Broadway, and called it Heat Wave, which it felt like inside that bus.
After 7 months, I can at last write a simple melody in notation now. I am beginning to be able to identify the key signature in my mind, by extending the scale up or down a few notes, to find the half notes, and by counting the whole intervals between one half note and another, I can identify the key note, and write the melody exactly as it comes into my mind.
This is kindergarten music theory, I realise, but I find it very exciting. I wish I had been taught to write music by a competent teacher, when I was a child, beying the tonic solfa we learned in church choir. This is an invisible and almost completely overlooked part of the curriculum. But art af any kind was almost wholly absent from my schooling. We were taught to sing, not to read music. We did into have an art teacher until half way through my secondary school education, in my mid- teens. There was no teaching of playing instruments, instruments, there was no dance at all. I don't supose my schooling was any worse than average, during the 1960s.
Heard a nice tune on the radio, Lou Reed playing a very beautiful guitar riff backing on a feel-good anthem by Bare Naked Ladies's Kevin Hearne, from his new recording, Coma. I'd like to get.
Listening to Posner and Garvelman playing Trimble's arrangements of Irish traditional tunes for 4-hand piano, I like it a lot. It has the freshness of modern classical music, in the traditional of Vaughan Williams, and Percy French, but with the zest of Irish tradition, which I am currently catching up on, as of a few months ago.
Updated my website to reflect addition of the new book, Maze patterns: http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/t/0006/index.html
I have started collecting together graphics for a study of the devlopment of flourishing with the quill pen 1515-1950. I have 45 pages of illustrations in one collection, and I don't know yet how many more may be turned up.
Listened to Jeno Jando on piano, playing Beethoven. I like the way he plays, he seems to play without obvious interpretation, just lets the music speak for itself. I listen to Beethoven's thought, rather than the pianist's. I think that is the mark of a great classical pianist. He's not to everyone's taste, I know, but his transparent style appeals to me.
Read some Leacock, Sunshine Sketches.
I had forgotten about Mahler. Listening to the opening of his second, the Resurection symphony, is just electifying. I love rock'n'roll bass lines in classical music (Beethoven's 5th, 3rd movement, for example), and this is one. He achieves with massive orchestration what Hendrix achieved with banks of amps, the wall of white noise, in this case, percussion and bass in fusion. Double bass, kettle drums, bottom feeding brass and woodwind supply the underworld substratum from which the first movement struggles to extricate itself in to the light of day. It's a thriller.
I am listening to it on the headphones while writing up the web pages for the Coracle Volume 2 Issue 8.
The reprise of those thunderous bombshells, is even more profoundly abysmal. Then the funeral march picks up again, once again, rising through an imperial death dance to a crescendo that colapses back into the pit whence it came, only to gather all its courage together and climb back out of the grave, defiantly, quickly securing a footing on the surface of the earth, when it pauses, basks in ecstatic wonder as dawn breaks on a vast plane of oceanic relief.
Barely has this registered when a shadow begins to rise from behind the horizon, storm clouds gather, swelling up to mass overhead, where they part, in a slow spiral, broken by sporadic flashes.
Out of this descend slowing winding notes of brass, to a tattoo of kettle drums, then they collapse, and alight, gently, on the earth, and rest.
The second movement opens with a complete change of mood, stately, courtly, romantic waltzing strings introduce a rapid staccato backbeat that scatters the atmosphere.
Out of this, the waltz returns, sounding slightly dazed, less complacent. It sways to a halt. In rolls the staccato, with a heavier ballast, and the waltz rouses itself to compete with it. The two contraries fuse, esplode. Plucked strings pick up the pieces and perform a cabaret carousel that turns around and around, until swept up by the waltz, in full fig, all crinoline and handsome hussars, waving ostrich plumes and fluttering fans, until the dance subsides into a serene caress.
Downloading Kevin Burke's 1999 Solo Fiddle and 1997 Hoof and Mouth albums from eMusic (building a reference library of Irish traditional revival of the last 5o years). I prefer the first, as I am more interested in the traditional fiddle tunes than the more modern folk-rock feel of the original material in the second, though I got a chuckle out of his song, Oedipus Rex, though, off the Hoof and Mouth album.
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