Today I found myself talking to a tea towel. The burden of the conversation went something like this: “Is it absolutely essential for you to fall off the hook so I have to bend to pick you up?” To cap it all this weekend I’ve just had a very forlorn Great British Bird Watch with many of my regulars participating in an organised boycott. There was the usual blackbird couple, a collared dove, two pigeons and a brace of house sparrows, or was it the same one twice? And there were the tantalising ones who suddenly flitted into a bush before I had time to identify them. Then of all things a very fat pheasant waddled in having heard that there was all this spare bird food available. But where were my tits (blue, great, coal and long-tailed)? I can usually rely on the coal tits. No robin, no wren, no gold finch. It’s no good arguing that it was too cold for the smaller birds, I think the whole no-show demonstrated a lack of gratitude and commitment. I had tried everything to lure my little regulars from neighbouring gardens: mixed seed, sunflower hearts, suet pellets, fat balls, whole meal seeded loaf. I can only think this is an avian plot to pretend to be rarer than they really are in order to get more attention. I once wrote a poem about feeding the birds which I’m sure I’ve posted before, but we are in a culture of repetition ad nauseam.
https://youtu.be/BEyLPrmp4ns . Will be published at midnight in a blaze of silence.
After all this incarceration such dilemmas and disappointments swell like Alice in Wonderland when she eats cake – which incidentally is another consequence of lockdown. The sheer scale of what’s happening overawes and I find my attention being redirected into trivia almost as a sort of self protection because I can’t contemplate the mortality statistics or the multiplying variants and their increasingly crafty hooks and spikes.
So in my History Today this month is an examination of Botticelli’s ‘Venus and Mars’ and instead of following the author’s theory that this was a pre-cursor to the pre-Raphaelites I asked myself the question when examining Venus in the picture below, Where is her right leg? This has led to hours of examination. It doesn’t look as if it’s under her draped dress. Is it because Botticelli found feet very difficult to do? She may have it tucked under her, but surely she would have contracted pins and needles waiting for Mars to wake up. We watched a woman banjo player on Celtic Connections the other night who had her leg tucked under her like this all evening. Deirdre thought it was impossible to sit like this just because she herself couldn’t. However, I triumphantly demonstrated that I could do it, and sat like that for an hour or two to prove it. When Venus arises from the sea shell in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, she looks very nicely apportioned and reasonably intact. In the Venus de Milo sculpture she has both arms missing so with only one leg remaining of the normal allocation of limbs Mars’s erotic tastes seem unusually inclusive. Also, I think her left arm is too long, possibly to compensate for the shortage of legs. We posed Deirdre in the manner of Venus on the couch to corroborate the fact.
Though none of us are looking at our best. As well as the unkempt hair I’ve noted how pasty faced we’re all getting, rather too like the survivor from the Flying Dutchman in the Pirates of the Caribbean aired on BBC this Saturday. We don’t need to be Trump orange but a little rosy tinge to our chubby cherry cheeks wouldn’t go amiss. I feel we’re having to survive a climate of failure: failure to look good, failure to achieve much, failure to plan effectively, failure to control our own destinies, failure even to dream or imagine.
There are quite a few books that explore the psychology of internment: Koestler, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Terry Waite, John McCarthy – all relating different reactions, but they all experience a state of resignation, indifference and inertia – an inability to imagine themselves free. Hearing this week how British holiday accommodation is rapidly becoming booked up brought home the fact that while I’m sometimes dipping down into this nadir, many people are not. I can’t imagine myself ever leaving home, or at any rate going through that process of booking holidays and having any faith that they will happen. I have my vaccination next Sunday; it will my first evening out for months.
I’ve just been zoom schooling Gothic writing and my scholarly victims had to write the opening paragraph to a Gothic story. It’s not Gothic but to illustrate a good opening paragraph I read them the opening of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ where the main protagonist awakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect. I think we’re ripe for exploring the Gothic horror of the mind; the tangled labyrinths of track, trace and test, can we drive 5 miles to go for a walk, can we chat over a fence – do I even want to chat over a fence? How it feels to make all your choices from about 20+ options in booking a vaccination, only to find one of them has been taken just as you press submit and you don’t know which one it was – so start again. Today we click and collect from Belper Aldi – what Kafkaesque twists await us there? Actually none – very straightforward with a complimentary bunch of roses because we were kept waiting 10 minutes!
The Count of Monte Cristo in Dumas’s story is imprisoned for fourteen years and what he learns is: “All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope”. So with my vaccination now in the diary I’ll do just that. Meanwhile I’ll contemplate the whereabouts of Venus’s right leg.