Late Summer (Atlas, Herbal, Ritual)

 

Here we are in the late summer under the infinite azure sky! The air seems laden with sultriness and perfume of the flowers; campanulas, agrimonies, roses and sweet Williams in the garden. The wind-swayed wheat in the field has ripened and the farmers said that they would be ready to harvest by St. Swithin’s Day. 

The earth turned brown, parched and started to crack under the weight of oats and barley like thickly encrusted paintings by Frank Auerbach. Auerbach is well-known for his uncompromising way of painting in which he keeps adding several layers upon layers of thick paint until the paint take on the sculptural quality of a relief and the weight of paint becomes insupportable on canvas.

 

We are having a heat-wave which is most unusual in this part of the world. This fishing village has been busy lately with elderly visitors, artists and day trippers who have succumbed to the sweltering heat of the city, and they come here to find a place of refuge and take the seaside air. 

At home, all the windows are wide open during the day to welcome the fresh, cool sea breeze and to dispel the humidity inside the house. I shall never forget the sound of late summer, especially the sound of the ice-cream van that comes from a loudspeaker while driving past the streets. 

Its mechanical, tinkling melody reminds me of a chime of the old-fashioned, wind-up automaton that is filled with fine specimens, primarily associated with ornithology, inside a glass dome. It gives me a keen sense of nostalgia, which miraculously summons up remembrance of things past.     

We have our lunch outdoors in the shade of the garden. Lunch is a very simple affair with a slice of sourdough bread made by Gordon and cold salads. After the main meal, we usually have a slice of watermelon or strawberry jellies with elderflower ice-cream. 

“To be sensual I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.” ~ James Baldwin ~ 

Gordon would play a record of Fernando De Lucia, ‘the last singer of the rococo age’ and the master of the Bel Canto style, singing famous arias while we are in the garden. 

 

“In our life the days are not all equal. To get through each day, natures that are at all highly strung, as was mine, are equipped, like motor cars, with different gears. There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.”

— Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Swann’s Way

 

Happy Birthday, Marcel! Proust was born on 10^th of July 1871. A typical Cancer, the fourth zodiac sign, who was highly intuitive and imaginative, and who was devoted not only to his families (especially the mother) and loved ones but also to his vocation. I always make sure to read a few pages of his novel or a few pages about him on his birthday to celebrate the special day. 

I love reading in the natural daylight. I also love nature when it is bursting with green. I love flowers most of all. I am making the most of these last days of summer before this part of the world slips into the stony indifferent world of winter. 

If the winter is a world of cold abstraction that is too icy to move, the summer is all about hyper-mobility. All things seem to be transfigured and set in motion whatever direction one looks. 

The fishermen with their boats are coming in and out of the harbour, the creels on the harbour are quickly disappearing day by day – it seems a futile effort to count them, and the sound of the boats, the tractors from the fields and the ice-cream van on the street - they all possess the alluring, monotonous sound of summer like the concluding antiphon of the season.   

This evening I am listening to Joyce Breach, one of the most sophisticated jazz singers that I have ever heard. In particular, I love the two records she made with two famous jazz pianists, Richard Rodney Bennett and William Roy. 

I love these two CDs so much that I often listen at night time when I am tired of reading. What is it about her voice that moves me so much? It is her intimate style of singing, influenced by the great Mabel Mercer, with an emphasis on storytelling, interpretation, lyrics, diction and refinement which transcends the limits of popular song.

 

The title song of the album, “Love is the thing” (composed by Ned Washington & Victor Young) was first recorded by Ethel Waters in 1933.  I have heard this song performed by so many different singers over the years but no one has moved me to tears until I heard Joyce Breach sang that song. I love the way she starts with an opening verse that is rarely heard in other versions and she slows down the tempo to let the lyrics speak straight to the heart, especially these lines from the song have such a special meaning to me when I listen to it now:

 

While others fight for power

We can walk among the flowers

Knowing that the best thing in life

Is the thing that's free

Love for you and me 

   

A House of Gathering

 

Yeats, Valery stalk through this house.

No day passes without a visitation –

Rilke, Mozart.

I am always a lover here,

Seized and shaken by love. […]

No one comes to this house

Who is not changed.

I meet no one here who does not change me.

Gestalt at sixty ~ May Sarton ~ [From her collection of poems, A Durable Fire (1969-1972)] 

 

Towards the end of July, the combination of heat, humidity and grain dust at harvest triggered off my asthma. I was feeling breathless, wheezing and very tired by recurrent nocturnal asthma after exposure to grain dust.

 

It was a true blessing that a kind invitation from my dear friends arrived just in time, asking both of us to come and stay for a long weekend at their house in the country, faraway from the dusty fields.

 

Gordon made my friends’ favourite Italian dessert, Panna cotta to take them as a gift inside the ice-box during our two hours car journey. We left home in the morning as we had been asked to arrive for lunch at my friends’ home. Staying at my friends’ country residence for a long weekend gave me enough time to let the grain dust settle in the surrounding fields near my house. It turned out to be a good way of preventing asthma exacerbations.

 

Staying at my friends’ country residence for a long weekend gave me enough time to let the grain dust settle in the surrounding fields near my house. It turned out to be a good way of preventing asthma exacerbations. 

I was an invalid who did not have any appetite when I left home. But I was healed instantly when I got to my friends’ house. The air was pure and free from harvest dust. The first thing I heard when the door opened was the friendly familiar voices of my friends and soothing music of Bach, played by their favourite Swiss-American lutenist, Hopkinson Smith, in the background.

 

As May Sarton put it in her poem, Gestalt at sixty, as soon as I entered their house, I had been “seized and shaken by love” and also, I should add to that, cured by my friends’ kindness and friendship. Both my friends are excellent cooks. They do not consume the delivery junk food. Their lunch was absolutely delicious and nourishing for both body and soul. I got my appetite back on that afternoon.    

Gordon made my friends’ favourite Italian dessert, Panna cotta 

While we were staying at my friends’ house, I came across a collection of poems by the French poet, Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) on their bookshelves. One of the poems in the collection struck a chord with me. 

Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé (1876) by Édouard Manet

While we were staying at my friends’ house, I came across a collection of poems by the French poet, Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) on their bookshelves. One of the poems in the collection struck a chord with me. 

It was written as a response to Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel – Against Nature (A Rebours in French) and its one and only character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aesthete who becomes weary of Parisian society and retreats to an isolated villa in Fontenay-aux-Roses, where he collects what he believes are the most precious works of art and the rarest objects and indulges in study of classical literature and sensual experiences.   

 

And I love the lines from the second stanza of the poem as follows:

"because by knowledge I induct

the hymn of all hearts spirituel

to this labour of my patience,

atlas, herbal, ritual."

 

Stephane Mallarmé's Prose pour des Esseintes. Translated by C.F. Macintyre.

 

The role of artist is similar to that of a poet. It requires a patient and sustained form of attention and labour, which are tied to this particular type of calling (in a way, it is parallel to the spiritual calling, committed to daily regimens of work and prayer). 

The artist is someone who strives to gain the carefully balanced or scrutinised view of our turbulent world (atlas), of the natural world (herbal), and above all, a better understanding of who we are and how to live more meaningfully (ritual).  

 

After I came back home from our relaxing and healing weekend at my friends’ house, my breathing was no longer troubled. My asthma is now under control. I quickly wrote down these three words as a reminder in my journal – atlas, herbal, ritual. I might even share these lucid words from Mallarme with my friends in my thank-you letter.    

"because by knowledge I induct

the hymn of all hearts spirituel

to this labour of my patience,

atlas, herbal, ritual." 

Stephane Mallarmé's Prose pour des Esseintes. Translated by C.F. Macintyre.*

* I am using this translation by C. F. Macintyre (Poems: Stephane Mallarme, University of California, 1959) that I found in my friends' library. I only have a copy of more modern translation by E. H. Blackmore, Oxford World's Classics (2006) at home.