The voices that will not be drowned

A late posting, after spending the better part of the last two weeks in Suffolk. There is something about that odd bleak coast that gets to you after a while, particularly as autumn shifts to winter, and the trees become ghosts of themselves (some so windbattered they morph into lanky-haired witches turned to wood by some conjurer’s spell). My last post came from that most mysterious and haunted of locations, Orford Ness, and as poems begin to appear in my inbox from the Mendham group, the echoes of that excursion remain.

It was perhaps appropriate then that those echoes were picked up for me at the opening event of the Aldeburgh Poetry festival, which paired the poet Jackie Kay and the artist Maggie Hambling in conversation. Both poet and artist have been influenced extensively by place, Kay by the Glasgow of her childhood, and more recently, by the Nigeria of her birth father. But it’s Hambling’s fascination with the Suffolk coast, which I am just beginning to feel might be my coast too (having traded in the Atlantic coast of my childhood), and what she had to say about her process as an artist that extended the conversation I had with my fellow poets out on the Ness.

Hambling has been working with the wave as an image for some time, and she explained that she begins her working day with a walk by the sea (or by the Thames when she is in London). Although her wave paintings don’t always resonate for me, I think they are part of a larger project, which is about finding continuity. Hambling said that the purpose of art is to make people stop for a moment (she mentioned the poem’s ability to halt us as well). And maybe those wave paintings are her way of trying to halt the sea, to capture it in different moods and seasons, a sequence of waves, all distinct but from the same source. In relation to this, she talked about the limitations of photography: ‘a photograph can only ever be the record of something – a painting is a live thing’. Her waves work best for me in unison, each singing its moment, like a motet.

Hambling talked about the artists she values, who ‘speak in paint’: Rothko, Twombly, Titian, Rembrandt, and why we revisit certain paintings and artists again and again (as we do certain poems), because they are living, because they carry on a dialogue with their viewers, tell us different things at different times. And that’s why we engage with certain places, keep returning. The Suffolk coast has become one of those places for me, familiar enough now, but still new.

Which brings me to the scallop, Hambling’s monument to one of Aldeburgh’s greatest sons, Benjamin Britten. It is a work of public art which has divided opinion vehemently, so its opponents and supporters might be locked in a bitter political election or a religious war. It comes down not so much to Hambling’s sculpture (which is certainly more effective than her ‘sculptural bench’ dedicated to Oscar Wilde outside Charing Cross station) but its position. On the side of the detractors, there is this articulate response (as opposed to some of the other responses) from Humphrey Burton, which was published in the Guardian when the sculpture was first unveiled:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2004/jan/14/guardianletters1

I am on the side of the supporters (and plucked up the courage to say so to the famously-irascible Hambling herself as she was leaving the talk last week). I disagree with Burton about what he describes as ‘casual violation’. The scallop is firstly not ‘casual’, in that it has been very carefully designed to be seen from many angles and distances, to have an impact from afar as well as up-close. It has become well-worn by the countless children who climb on it (and public art that doubles-up as climbing frame can be no bad thing – the fact that it is not cordoned off or prohibited from being touched is the very thing that makes it truly democratic, truly ‘public’). It is neither purely figurative, nor completely abstract, but somewhere in between, which should appeal to many, and also somehow captures Britten himself, whose music occupied the middle of the twentieth century, and brought together the traditional and the experimental. The scallop’s edge is inscribed with a line from the libretto of Britten’s most famous opera, the one which is most situated in Aldeburgh, Peter Grimes: I hear those voices that will not be drowned. In that way, it is also a tribute to that older generation who made their living from the sea, and to Aldeburgh’s other great son, the poet George Crabbe, in whose work The Borough the tragic Grimes first appears.

As to violation, well, this is more of an issue. As one of my fellow poets asked as we approached it, following our trip to the Ness, ‘it comes down to this: who owns the beach?’ A number of long-time residents, including Burton, somehow felt the beach had been ‘spoiled’ by the scallop. Burton suggests the sculpture could be moved inland, which would somehow make both its subject and the inscription invalid. It was designed to face the thing that obsessed Crabbe, and Britten, and Hambling equally: the sea. It could be nowhere else. I can understand that it upsets those true Suffolkers who like their flat surfaces flat and their big skies uninterrupted. Perhaps I am not a good judge, coming from an urban location, where views are changed all the time by what’s erected, what’s torn down. But this is not just a piece of public art, happily freed from the four walls of the gallery, it is a celebration of the sea, those who thought and wrote and sang and captured it in various ways. And so it needs to face its subject, to make us stop for a moment, and really observe the way the sea moves and changes.

I’m very late to this debate, started as it was in 2004. But in my short time in Suffolk, the scallop has become one of my favourite landmarks. That’s what it is, a landmark. Here’s the full quote from Montague Slater’s libretto:

But dreaming builds what dreaming can disown.
Dead fingers stretch themselves to tear it down.
I hear those voices that will not be drowned
Calling, there is no stone
In earth’s thickness to make a home
That you can build with and remain alone.

Rodin and Ageing

Strolling through the gardens of the Musée Rodin, I am thinking about getting older. Inevitable, seeing as it is my birthday – always a time for taking stock of the things I have yet to do, as well as the things I have done (and some I would rather forget). The sky is cloudy, there’s a light drizzle in the air, just enough to make me reach for my umbrella. Autumnal, rather than high summer. The manicured paths remind me of Last Year at Marienbad, which I’ve just seen again. The film made no sense to me when I first watched it in my twenties, but now I get it. It’s all about time – how memory is unstable, unreliable; how the mind twists narratives, creates new ones, until it is impossible to know what really happened, especially between two people with different motives towards an outcome. Some memories are like sealed rooms, like the over-decorated salons of the hotel in the film.

I move from the gardens into Rodin’s house, the Hotel Biron, a grand rococo mansion he occupied at the turn of the last century. It has a faded splendour about it, although perhaps too overly-restored to resemble the ramshackle palace that Rodin knew. Room after room of dusty nudes, all that passion stilled. Again and again the same theme: the elderly artist reaching upwards to embrace the torso of a young woman, his muse, both of them emerging from the marble or stone or clay, only half-realised.  It is Pygmalion, no doubt, but also perhaps the mature Rodin, straining to hold on to the youthful Camille Claudel. Rilke, who was for many years Rodin’s assistant, and who lived with him here, said:

Rodin developed his memory into a resource that is at once reliable and always ready. During the sitting his eye sees far more than he can record at the time. He forgets none of it, and often the real work begins, drawn from the rich store of his memory, only after the model has left.

These are visions which visit the artist; he conjures them from air and sets them in stone. It was Rodin who told Rilke that in order to understand a thing you have to observe it intensely, burn it into memory. While living in the Hotel Biron, the young Rilke wrote: we transform these Things; they aren’t real, they are only the reflections upon the polished surface of our being.

 In a breezy new building next to the old mansion, there are sculptures by Twombly and Giacometti and Beuys – Rodin’s successors, or as the exhibition describes them, ‘ambassadors’, I suppose because they are the bringers of the new. Their pieces sit alongside Rodin’s and re-envigorate them, lift them from the airless salons of the Biron to make us see again how modern they are. But what I find most moving is a corridor of Rodin’s studies for various busts, the heads of the great and the good awaiting commemoration, running alongside Ugo Rondinone’s Diary of Clouds, amorphous lumps of clay sitting side by side in pigeonholes which as you walk alongside them, take on moving, altering shapes.

 Something about these busts to be set in stone next to the embodiment of clouds drives home this idea of the haze of memory that we increasingly occupy with age. The longer we live, the more experiences we need to store and process, and eventually pull out of ourselves to set down in whatever form we find to record them.