Madly in love!

When her husband, Max, is appointed director of an asylum in Essex, Stella is not overjoyed.  She is bored; ‘dying of chronic neglect’.  She resents the restrictions of her position and the limited perspectives of the other wives.  To relieve the monotony, she develops an attraction to Edgar, a handsome and charismatic inmate, a one-time sculptor who is assigned to duties in her garden.  They fall in love.  When she learns from ‘her friend’, the senior psychiatrist Dr Cleave, that he has brutally killed his wife in a fit of jealousy, she is in too far in to pull back.  Nearly discovered in Stella’s bedroom, Edgar steals Max’s clothes and flees the asylum in the boot of her mother-in-law’s car. After a while, Stella abandons her family and joins him to live in a derelict warehouse in East London. At first, all goes well. Stella claims she is happier there than she has ever been. But Edgars dark side emerges; he becomes jealous that she is encouraging the attentions of Nick, his assistant.  He beats her up.  She is rescued and returns to her husband, who has been ‘relieved’ of his post in Essex and taken another position in North Wales.  Edgar discovers where she is and comes for her, but the police have followed him and he is arrested and sent back to the asylum again.  Stella, distraught and preoccupied, fails to respond when her 10 year old son, Charlie, drowns in a lake while out on a field trip in her care.  She is certified and locked up in the same asylum, also as a patient of Dr Cleave.   

But the urbane Cleave has other designs on Stella.  Some months later, when Stella appears on the route to recovery, Dr Cleave suggests an ‘arrangement’ whereby Stella is released but lives with Cleave as his wife. He takes her up to the clock tower and proposes, but not before he has informed her that Edgar is back in the institution and they might meet at the annual ball. At the last minute, Cleave prevents the meeting. Edgar does not go to the ball.  Stella walks away and kills herself by jumping off the tower.

 

This gothic tale of erotic obsession and possession is shocking in its intensity and apart from the last twist, Cleave’s proposal, its credibility.  Patrick McGrath, whose father was once medical superintendant of Broadmoor, is the master of dark suspense. In prose of steely control, he captures the reckless dangers of falling in love for those who have little self control. We observe with horror how Stella and Edgar become possessed by a magnetism that is bound to destroy them and the lives of those connected to them, yet we sit in hypnotic trance, watching the plot work its inexorably deviant route to an inevitable conclusion. 

When Stella refuses to answer Cleaves question about love, he comments;  ‘There’s no defining it then.  No discussion possible?  It springs to life.  It cannot be ignored and it tears people’s lives apart.  But we can’t say more.  It just is.’ 

But doomed love affairs have a structure, a sequence which with some variations, they all conform to.  First, there is the recognition, the look. ‘I feel that you are the one I have wanted all of my life.’  

Then, the identification; the lovers let each other into their imagination, become part of each other. ‘Powerless to control the hunger they had for each other, their bodies flaring at the slightest contact, they lose any independent will and can only live for the time they can become one again; body mind and soul.’  

Next, the relationship develops a structure, they make assignations. Pragmatic thoughts are never far from the thoughts of the secret lover, but for a single purpose. 

But there are complications; there are always complications, but as Stella fears, it may be the very constraints of their situation that drives their passion, the excitement and danger, the effect it would have if it were known, the dreadful risk to another’s happiness. That’s the awful power, the evil, dark side of love.  And when all is known, disillusion sets in with the cold test of reality.  Familiarity, uncertainty, squalor gnaw into passion and blight the fruits of love. Jealousy, the paranoid anger generated by a terror of abandonment, destroys it. Edgar would kill Stella to keep her. And Stella cannot live without him. The conclusion is inescapable.      

So is falling in love a form of madness?  It seems so. The obsession, the compulsion, the delusion, the despair are all make believe; a dangerous departure from the normal rationality of human behaviour. And yet its a magic that so many of us want to experience just once in our lives. But we must contain it otherwise it will overwhelm us.    

Edgar, Stella, Max and Cleave are all in their own ways, mad with love.  Their innocent victim, Charlie, is dead. 

Edgar has been institutionalised for committing the kind of horrific act that threatens the stability of the social order; he has killed and mutilated his wife. He continues to believe he was justified in doing so and is sufficiently charming and plausible for Stella to identify with his sense of grievance and injustice.  He occupies a no-mans land where the making of art and the maintenance of sanity had a precise and delicate relationship. Disturbance in one would create a dysfunction and breakdown in the other.  The very nature of the work, the long periods of isolation followed by the public display, the admiration so intricately balanced with the risk of rejection, all conspire to create unnaturally intense relationships with friends and sexual partners   But like many artists, he has the soft core of a child, a touchy, clingy child. Any expression of distress from Stella, he receives as imminent desertion.  So when disillusion occurs as it inevitably will, the sense of betrayal is profound and murderous.

And what of  Stella?  Fragile, impetuous, and spoilt, with a provocative and dangerous beauty, she is the hysterical focus, where sanity and madness elide with each other in  dramatic gestures and impetuous acts. For the first time in her life, she desires somebody with all a physical and emotional intensity that overwhelms her; she abandons herself, mind body and soul to her passion.  But Stella has met her match, a man with all the darkness and passion that she possesses and less of the control.  She accepts him without reserve, ignores all the warning signs. She has to. To love him conditionally would have implied criticism.  It simply doesn’t arise.  So she surrenders her whole being to him; is possessed by the thought of him.  She has no will, no choice, and without him, no life!  She just lives in and for the moment of her madness.        

Max, the husband, continues to function, but he is burdened down with what has happened.  He loses all spontaneity and humour and responds to the pathology he observes everyday on the wards with a sensitivity that does not allow separation.  The line between sickness and sanity is blurred and Christ-like, he suffers for all humanity.  He can never again be refreshed, he loses weight and begins to read philosophy.

And what do we make of the mysterious Dr Cleave?.  Why does he issue his shocking proposal to Stella?  He is not a man of passion (or if he is, he keeps it very hidden).  Does he not realize the impropriety of his behaviour?  Does he not appreciate the danger it has for his patient?  He is an intelligent man, but is he playing a game of power and control, seeking to break the will of Stella as well as Edgar?  Is he a kind of crazed despot, who gets a detached satisfaction from the possession of another’s soul?  The lasting horror of this story is not the inevitable death of Stella, but the way that Cleave changes from the harmless and interesting yet compassionate psychiatrist into a sinister psychopath who has engineered the conditions for the tragedy for his own omnipotent purpose.  

‘I have resumed my habit of returning to the office in the evening.  The police were most accommodating, and I now possess all the drawings he made of her in the studio, and also the sketch done in the vegetable garden.  They are curiously tentative in outline and feature, and as a result have a sort of softness to the eye, what the Italians call morbidezza. I also have the head. I have had it fired and cast in black bronze.  I keep it in a drawer in my desk.  He worked so obsessively on it, those last days before he left Horsey Street, and so he worked it down, that it became slender and tiny in the end, no bigger than my hand; but it is her.  I often take it out, over the course of the day, and admire it. So you see, I do have my Stella after all.

And I still, of course, have him.’

 

How much of what we call love is possession?

 

 Asylum was first published in 1995.  It is still in print and was made into a film featuring Natasha Richardson as Stella and Ian Mackellan as Cleave.  

 

 

 

War without end. Amen.

Armies pursued each other around Europe; soldiers, little better than animals laid waste the countryside, taking what they wanted, burning, raping, killing, no longer knowing, if they ever did, the reason why.  It had been a good war for Mother Courage, for a time. She became a camp follower, trailing the armies, selling food, blankets, clothing, brandy and even ammunition, changing allegiances when it was expedient to do so, always keeping one step ahead of the game. Her sons were killed; one was too crafty, another too honest.  Her daughter saw it all but couldn’t speak. She was cut and raped. But she beat the drum and paid the price. And Courage survived for want of anything better.  

The talk over the long breakfast table at 22 York Street was about other wars; Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe; brutal, unwinnable, neverending wars.  There have been 250 major wars since the end of the second world war and over 23 million people have been killed. But why? Who really understands why we are fighting in Afghanistan or why we really went to war in Iraq?  Bush’s war against terrorism is a tautology. War against terrorism is like war against war!  It doesn’t make any sense.  And there are no winners in this war. It’s war for the sake of war; completely futile. Nobody gains the moral high ground. We were shocked by the atrocities committed by our boys (and girls) at Abu Graib prison, but why? Of course our troops would commit atrocities as much as the enemy.  It has always been so.  Frightened people do the most awful things.  And war degrades humanity; murder, theft, rape and destruction becomes a way of life.  Soldiers become inured to feeling. It’s dog eat dog.  When the Duke of Wellington inspected his troops in the Peninsular War, he was heard to comment,  ‘I don’t know what they do to the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.  But it’s not only the enemy that is injured, mutilated and killed, it’s innocent civilians as well.  And there are always people like Mother Courage, ready to make a quick buck out of it all.    

The attendant at Anish Kapoor’s exhibition, a young man from Bosnia, said that many people had been offended.  Every twenty seconds, a cannot shoots a pellet of soft red wax across the room through an archway to splatter against the war of the next room.  Kapoor claims not to have any preconception of the meaning of his work, but you really don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to understand how it uses sexual metaphor to explore he brutality of war.  The large erect penis shooting its bloody  ejaculate through the doorway, stains the virgin-pure white walls of the Royal Academy, leaving a large crimson mark, that resembles brutalized female genitalia. Blood stained labia enclose the gaping wound like a scream, and the matter that slithers from that gruesome gash forms a mound, which winds like a crimson glacier, from the dead, white, empty womb. It is a shocking, yet compelling image.  The twenty minute beat of the cannon will continue until January.  By that time the Academy will be awash with blood. 

 

Fiona Shaw is brilliant as the feisty, calculating, yet  indomitable Mother Courage; a woman with balls!   The play, like war itself, is unrelenting in its dark brutality, the music by Duke Special and his band, a thumping accompaniment.  It is wonderful performance that shocks and disturbs.  Anish Kapoor’s exhibition is at The Royal Academy until January.  It is art on a big scale, shocking and impressive.  22 York Street is in Alastair Sawday’s book.  It provides an interesting and enjoyable stay just off Baker Street and within easy access to the west end. The long curved breakfast table with abundant coffee and a variety of fruits, cereals, croissants, pastries and preserves, is conducive to conversation.  By yourself in London?  What a good way to start the day, even if all the talk is about war!       

 

 

 

Possession – on stage and off it!

Good actors, declared Sir Richard Eyre, speaking last week at The Guild of Psychotherapists’ annual public lecture, have to be possessed by the characters they are playing.  They have to immerse themselves in their world, feel what it is like to be them, experience the passion and then act it out.  But it is impossible for an actor to experience the same degree of emotion every night.  They would be emotionally and physically shattered by it. Having just seen Fiona Shaw in a matinee of Brecht’s, Mother Courage, I observed how much that performance had taken out of her, but as the run continues, she like all good actors will distance herself from it; express the passion but not be overwhelmed by it.  Judi Dench, according to Eyre, exhibits the perfect balance. She allows herself to become possessed by the role but maintains an observing eye.  Actors are people who imitate others. ‘ They are great pretenders’,  Sir Richard declared, expert at the arts of deception and seduction, but they have live in the real world too. 

Sir Richard summed up the qualities of good actors.  They must be conscious of themselves but not self conscious.  They must be narcissistic on stage, but humble off it. They must live the role but then forget it.  They must have a perfect balance of good sense and warmth, rationalism and emotion.  They must captivate their audience, but then become anonymous. They must create empathy in people’s minds and leave.  They should feel the part, but never try to go beyond the feeling.

Courage is essential to a good actor, death to a bad one.  Actors must present a buoyancy of spirit even though their heart may be breaking.  Eyre described finding Ralph Richardson looking glum after rehearsal.  When asked why, he  replied ‘Oh dear boy, I just learnt today that my brother has burnt to death, but’, he added thoughtfully, ‘there’s one consolation; it can’t happen again.’ 

Actors must learn to contain their emotions, avoid being too worried about their performance, work as a team but never imagine they are the play. That’s a route that runs close to madness. The psychotic actor, can imagine that they are the stage, upon which others play out their emotions.   

It seems to me that acting is not too different to psychotherapy.  The effective  psychotherapist enters the clients world sufficiently to set up a confident and trusting therapeutic relationship  They have to understand, empathise and be compassionate, yet maintain a detachment. It’s a delicate balance that cannot be prescribed, only felt. The quality of any therapy depends on the quality of that engagement. Like the actor in relationship with the character, the therapist must maintain an observing, intelligent mind. They must not descend into their client’s abyss, they must remain on the brink, in communication, connected, yet able to see the possibilities of freedom. There is no redemption, no rescue, if both get lost.

But doesn’t the same principle apply to all relationships?  We are, after all, social creatures. We need to engage with other people but we must not become them.  We bring our independent selves to any relationship, creating the possibility of insight, growth and the joy of discovery. Merger may seem like stability, security, but it’s stagnation.  We should not seek to confine others with bonds of obligation and dependancy. 

But what of falling in love; that wonderful delusion of discovering ourselves in the other?  Therein lies the seeds of madness; the suspension of reality in the service of the dreadful seduction of the feeling.  People can fall in love with falling in love and often do. They can become completely lost in the abyss unless they maintain the observing eye of the director that can see how the play could work out. But what would happen if they fell in love with the director?     

And what about actors who play the same character for years on the radio or in television soap operas?  Norman Painting, who played Phil Archer, died last week aged 86. Three days previously, he had recorded another episode for November. He had said he wanted to die in the role. So had he become Phil Archer?  Therapy too can go on forever. The patient may get out of the abyss into the therapist’s safe house, only to find herself unable to leave. Many couples persuade themselves and others that they are in love forever. So why can this seem so boring?  Have I just become an old cynic?      

Afterwards, finding Sir Richard alone with a glass of wine, I explored the idea that  directors combine characteristics of both therapists and actors.  They work with the company as well as the play, coaxing the correcting nuance out of the actors, calming their insecurities, interpreting plot and character.  In this God-like status, I added, warming to my argument, was there not a danger that they could become the stage, upon which others play out their emotions, like the charismatic conductor of a symphony orchestra?  

Perhaps I had gone too far. Eyre looked alarmed. He replied, somewhat huffily, that he never analysed what he was doing; it was intuitive.  In any case, the director is not the stage. The plays the stage.  A-ah!  I could have pursued this, but at that point, some ‘lovies’ came to the rescue and I departed, stage left!

Sir Thomas Beecham was immensely narcissistic, but he recognized the knowledge and talent of his musicians and did not attempted to impose his will  on the orchestra, merely guide it.

 

Rewriting the story.

Our spirit or soul is like a book upon which we write the story of our life;  a narrative that explains our attitudes and beliefs, accounts for our actions and may mitigate  our misdemeanours.  It’s our personal identity, how we see ourselves. It doesn’t have to be based on what actually happened, more on our interpretation of what happened in the light of our previous experience – our version of the truth.  It doesn’t even have to be happy story.  Some desperate souls are tortured daily by tales of self doubt, condemned by harsh accounts of guilt and shame.  But for the rest us, who survive the life’s vicissitudes and live on into old age in relative peace, it is a story that comforts, contains and generates hope.  There’s something almost religious about this.  A personal narrative, such as this, is remarkably like the ancient cultural concept of a forgiving God; a projection or our own needs and aspirations; the temple we build in our own minds.  We don’t have to deliberately deceive ourselves; that way leads to madness. But if we are to live out the rest of our lives in peace, we do need to create a credible story that supports and contains us.    

It’s a magic book; the story is not carved on tablets of stone or even inscribed in ink on vellum, it is scrawled on shifting sand and the tide keeps coming in and erasing bits so it has to be written again.   Throughout life, we update our internal website, we adjust the emphasis, create new links, introduce new characters, rewrite the plot.   

Consider those stories we told ourselves years ago; those early drafts – what we were going to do, the adventures we would have, the success we would achieve, the celebrity, the power, the glory, how we would fall in love and live happily ever after, have children who would make us proud.  We were indestructible then; our tales of ‘derring do’ encouraged us to take the more awesome risks and made all the striving worthwhile.  The plots we devised then were so adventurous and always worked; triumph over adversity, good vanquished evil, true love conquered all adversity and led to lasting happiness.  They were tales of hope, life and death, but life always won; the hero would be back next week to survive another adventure. 

But for most of us, life is not an adventure story, neither is it always happy or successful. Your career is not as exciting as you thought it would be.  The endless meetings are boring; you lose interest and do not get the expected promotion.  Your son, the apple of your eye, fails his exams, cannot get work, and takes occasional drugs.  The woman you fell in love with, beautiful, charismatic and kind, the embodiment of all your dreams, now leaves dirty underwear around, makes smells in the bathroom and can be totally unreasonable. The trick is to live with the disappointment. She is human just like you, part of you and you are attached; you love her with all her minor irritations.  The narrative has to change to a story that is less exciting, more to do with  overcoming adversity, building a steady career, providing a stable home, finding  joy and happiness within the family, rearing confident and independent children.  Respect, peace and satisfaction are the new themes.     

But consider another scenario. You discover that the one you would love forever has deceived you. It takes maturity and wisdom to adapt the story and forgive.  More often than not, those chapters have to be crossed out with a red pen and redrafted.  The romance is turned into a triumph of good over evil. You eliminate a major character to protect yourself.  The one you once loved to distraction, you must now hate to destruction.   

Things rarely work out the way we thought and we have to adapt our story many times.  We make compromises, explain, justify, excuse and forgive. As our mountains we built in our youth are jostled by tectonic forces and eroded by time, so our story changes to one that is more complex, more understanding, more modulated and forgiving, more human.  The goals we set ourselves now are less thrilling, our hopes less ambitious. Experience and the mellowness of middle age softens us in reflection. And if we are to live out our life in peace and hope,  this gives us the wisdom to accept and forgive. 

Not everybody is like that for most of the time. Some feel so threatened and insecure, they cannot come to terms with what happens.  They cling on to the good things and attempt to eliminate the bad. They are suggestible and impetuous. ‘Our house is a dream. A holiday in the Seychelles will be magic.  This will be the happiest Christmas ever.  I think I am falling in love all over again.  That guy’s a monster’ They inhabit a polarized story; the bright recital  is performed for all to admire, but dark gothic tales lurk in the shades, ready to be projected out, condemning any deserving object that frustrates their desires and inhibits their triumphal progress; mother, difficult siblings, a previous lover, the estranged husband, erstwhile friends, the boss, the government – always the government. And the story they tell, has to be defended to the last rampart and ditch.  Experience is adapted to consolidate their position, evidence denied, characters condemned.  ‘Oh, he can seem so kind and caring, but it’s just a trick to get round me.’  For some tormented souls, everything and everybody is a threat and they are the victim.  Films, plays, books, television illustrate this black and white world.  It is exciting; it creates good drama. 

People who have never built up a strong narrative by which to lives their lives; those with what we call a fragile identity can all too easily come to live somebody else’s story.  This is the power of the media, the church.  In traditional cultures, it may be illustrated by the evil eye or pointing the bone.  How many of us start off in life, like Philip Larkin, living out our parents ambitions and grievances?  We may think we won’t  end up that way, but life does have a habit of consolidating the narrative that they gave us.     

Just we need our personal narrative to sustain us, so society needs its collective mythology to hold it together. Couples, families, fraternities, tribes, nations gain comfort and identity from a shared mythology.  Cultures throughout history, have been defined by their stories; the Australian aborigines had their songlines, the Norse, their sagas,  the Greeks, their myths, the Hindus, the adventures of their family of Gods.  History itself is made up of stories.  Or as Alan Bennett wrote, ‘History is just one bloody thing after another.’ 

We have to believe in something. Otherwise we are lost.  In the past, this took the form of religious faith.  God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world!  Jesus loves us!  Allah be praised!  Now the predominant collective mythologies tend to be political doctrines, social advice, scientific evidence and the opinions of media pundits, but they’re all stories. We comfort ourselves with our imaginings and delusions.   

Narrative is the cognitive backbone of our lives.  It imparts meaning and convinces us that things are known – we are known. We are ‘the rational species’.  At least that’s the story we tell ourselves!  We need to explain.  As Descartes indicated; that is the engine of our existence. The unknown is a vacuum that demands to be filled.  If life becomes meaningless, we lose the will to live. It’s not so much the reality that makes us feel good or bad, it’s the story we make up about it.  There’s nothing so good or bad as thinking makes it so.   

Our stories can be life enhancing, but they can also so easily leading to torment, melancholy and madness.  The voyage of life is never without its storms and dangers.  We suffer loss, sometimes dreadful loss, and can wander for years in a meaningless wilderness without plot or purpose.  We don’t always behave well, but instead of forgiving ourselves and letting go, we refuse to rescue ourselves from a punitive narrative and like mediaeval penitents, flagellate our souls with loathing and depression. Grief is a process of retelling the story, but when the reality of what has happened seems so dreadful and the story we try to tell  ourselves cannot console us, then we get anxious and may seek refuge in a world of make believe and fiction. Only sometimes the memory is so traumatic that it cannot be processed by story telling; it short circuits the narrator and is relived endlessly taking control of the individual.  People who are mentally ill, suffer from reminiscences.   

Healing is not just about bringing about some structural or biochemical change in the body;  it treats mind, body and meaning (spirit or soul) as one.  Healers are story tellers.   From the shamans of Siberia, the Amerindian medicine men and the sangoma of Southern Africa to the exponents of state sponsored evidence based medicine; they all try to replace the embodied tale of woe with an enlivening message of hope. 

Psychotherapy is a subtle form of healing.  For me, it is about understanding a person’s narrative, where it has emerged from, what it represents, how it may limit and entrap and then helping them to create a version that can release them from their prison into a freedom that is happy and healthy.  I deal in subjective reality. I work with my patients’ truth.  Different people experiencing the same event will have different truths; everything is filtered through an individual’s own life experience, and changes according to what happens next.

I try to get at the basic theme of a person’s narrative, the story that defines them and lasts through life, and forms what we call their unique identity,  because that theme will influence through transference, every aspect of their attitudes and behaviour; every situation can be a suitable screen, every person a suitable vehicle for projection.  I try to get to know what presses their buttons and why, to understand what memories and meanings lies hidden away in the shadows and gullies of their shame and guilt.  I attempt to infiltrate the dark underbelly of their unconscious.  Only then can I help to ease their sentence and rediscover a narrative that is more life enhancing. 

To me this combines essential elements of analytic exploration within a framework that attempts to change a person’s narrative perspective.  This does not have a particular affiliation with regard to doctrine, but is more a blending of the most useful aspects of psychoanalytical and cognitive behavioural aspects of therapy within a context that encourages sufficient confidence to explore a different attitude.     

We are a cognitive species; we try to make sense of what happens, learn from our experience. The way we think affects who we are.  So when our thoughts, the stories we tell ourselves, are making us unhappy or ill, then the route to peace can only be pursued by seeking out the darker, hidden, human aspects of our common narratives, the things we are ashamed of, and integrating them into a story that is honest to ourselves.

 

A curious tale of butterflies. ants, wasps and the passage of thyme.

The large blue butterfly is the largest and rarest of our blue butterflies.  Clouds of them can be seen fluttering over heathland on a summer evening, but in the eighteenth century the passion of Victorian gentlemen for collecting butterflies nearly drove them into extinction.  Conservationists tried to protect them by fencing areas of heathland and preventing the grazing of sheep, but still numbers declined and by 1979 they had disappeared from Britain. Before that happened, a naturalist, Jeremy Thomas, spent six years living adjacent to one of the last remaining wild blue colonies on Dartmoor, where he recorded meticulously, every aspect of their life cycle.  What he discovered was truly remarkable. 

The butterflies lay their eggs on the leaves of the Wild Thyme.  When they hatch the caterpillars burrows into the buds and eat the developing seeds.  If there is more than one one caterpillar in a bud, it will be devoured.  The surviving larva then falls to the ground,  hides in a crevice in the earth and is discovered by an ant, which is driven into a frenzy, climbing all over it, licking its skin and sipping the sweet secretions from glands at the end of the caterpillars body.  The larva tolerates the ants attentions for up to four hours before curving its body and making it rigid so that it resembles the larva on the ant.  The ant, thinking that’s what it is, then carries it to its nest and deposits it with the other larvae, which the caterpillar proceeds to devour, biting through the soft skin and sucking out the body fluids. The ants might realize that there is an invader in their nest at this time, but the caterpillar produces a pheromone that is identical to the ants and so remains undetected until its skin becomes too tough to be attacked.  The caterpillar feasts in the nest for a year, by which time it has grown to 100 times its original size.  The workers treat it as a queen, fussing over it and licking its skin.  It even emits noises like those of a queen ant.  It then turns into a chrysalis and late the following spring, amid a flurry of queen like noises and frienzied activity from the attendant ants, it emerges as a butterfly and escapes the nest, where it expands its wings and takes off on its mating flight. 

What an amazing life story, but it still didn’t explain why the Large Blue became extinct.  To answer this, Thomas’s painstaking research discovered two crucial facts.  There are several species of red ant on heathland, but only one of them, Mermica sabuleti,  plays host to the caterpillars of the Large Blue.  This is because the Large Blue larva produces a pheromone that mimics that emitted by sabuleti ants, but not any other species.  The second is that the sabuleti are exquisitely sensitive to temperature and humidity and can only survive when the turf has been cropped by sheep and rabbits and thereby exposed to the sun. When early conservationists tried to protect the butterflies habitat by fencing it in and preventing grazing, they inadvertently broke a crucial link in the butterfly’s life cycle.

But here’s another twist to this tale.  Enter the villain, the devilishly attractive black and scarlet ichneumon wasp.  Different species of wasp parisitise each species of blue butterfly and here’s how they do it.  They seem to know, perhaps by some chemical signal, perhaps by the behaviour of the ants, which ants’ nest contains the larva of the butterfly.  The wasp then invades that nest in search of its prize.  Of course the ants detect the invasion and come out to attack, but the wasp sprays them with a pheromone that causes them to turn on each other instead.  Picking her way through the melee, she finds the larva, injects it with her ovipositor. The caterpillar continues to feed and grow and turn into a chrysalis, but when the skin of the pupa splits, it’s not a beautiful blue butterfly that emerges, but a shiny black ichneumon wasp.

The Large Blue was reintroduced into Dartmoor in 1983 and has since spread to heathland throughout the country, but is still not common.  The question is should scientists reintroduce the wasp that parisitises it.  David Attenborough thinks we should preserve these natural systems in all of their complex diversity. I wonder if we should let well alone, but let new complex relationships develop.

My zoology teacher, Dr Ernest Neal, famous for his doctorate on delayed implantation in the Badger, Meles meles,  once wrote a slim volume on the ecology of the Somerset woods.  It was he who introduced me to notions of biodiversity and the specificity of ecological niches.  The long suffering Ernest tramped his troop of recalcitrant youths through damp coppices, along scratchy hedgerows, across sodden and once, in a fit of pique, marooned us on the summit of Steep Holm in the middle of the Bristol Channel dive-bombed by angry Black Headed Gulls. 

But ecology has developed since Ernest.  Species are no longer regarded as simple organisms, but more as a system of interactions between many organisms dominated by a single species.  Think of the complex ecosystem of an ancient oak tree: the warblers and tits that feed in the canopy, the owls that nest in the cavities left by fallen branches, the woodpeckers that peck away the softer bark to get at the burrowing beetles underneath, the complex fungal mycelia that provide the fungi that supply the root hairs, the ants that crawl up and down the trunk, the ivy, the moss and lichen on the trunk.  And think of the complex relationships between us and the animals we keep for food or for pets, the plants we eat or provide shelter, the insects that live on our bodies or in our houses, the complex ecosystem of bacteria that live in our colons that salvage much of the plant food that we eat.  Symbiosis determines the lives of every species on the planet and drives evolution.  We are not alone.   

    

I listened to the Large Blue tale as a podcast from David Attenborough’s recent series of Life Stories on Radio 4.  Attenborough is such a wonderful story teller. I hope we are able to preserve the enthusiasm for nature that he so uniquely embodies.

 

Baiting Mr Griffin; the politics of the bear pit.

It was the politics of the bear pit.  In last night’s Question Time, Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party was harangued by the audience, his fellow panellists and by the chairman, David Dimbleby.  He was rarely given an opportunity to answer a question without being howled down.  In their determination to portray Mr Griffin as a monster, the BBC exposed a vein of fear that runs deep in British society.  You have only to join the crowd on the Kop or go to the pub after the match to realise that Mr Griffin’s views have more support that we might care to imagine.  In the industrial wastelands of Lancashire and South Yorkshire, the opinions of the BNP seep up through scuffed floorboards, they drip through cracks in the ceiling.  

To be fair, Griffin has tried to present a more reasonable face of British Nationalism, but the concept is outmoded.  We live in a multicultural society based on understanding and integration; we must welcome those who chose to live in this country, not isolate and alienate them. That way only leads to conflict and fear.

But was anything gained by the lynch mob that the BBC assembled to attack Mr Griffin?  In my opinion, no!  It exposed a nasty, vicious side of British politics, which, by contrast, left Mr Griffin almost ennobled by his calm demeanour under attack.  In holding such a mediaeval public trial, the BBC has just deepened the split in society.  Mr Griffin and the BNP won’t go away; a one time boxing blue, he clearly loves a fight – his grievous resolve will only be strengthened by such ritual humiliation.  

Peter Hain suggested that Griffin’s appearance on Question Time was an early Christmas present for the BNP.  It was, but not in the way he imagined it.  The way the programme was conducted ensured that the beleaguered Mr Griffin, another one-eyed political leader, will be regarded by many as a courageous martyr.  In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.     

It was Voltaire who said, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’  When politicians have been exposed as weak and vacillating or downright deceptive and manipulative, it has been the BBC that has upheld principles of democracy and free speech.  Last night their cover was blown.  The corporation’s poodle, David Dimbleby, the appalling Jack Straw, strident Baroness Warzi, forgettable Chris Huhne and an intelligent mob from West London savaged the Griffin unmercifully.  But he is an elected MEP; he represents a large body of people. He deserves to be heard.  And we must have the right to hear him and disagree.  That is free speech! But Dimbleby and his pack of rottweilers were frightened.  They rarely gave him chance to expound.  Only the lovely Bonnie Greer came out of it with any real dignity.  

Last night was a bad night for the BBC; a bad night for Britain!

 

All’s well that ends well; or is it?

All’s well that ends well.   The end justifies the means.  That seems to be the theme of Shakespeare’s clever, well observed but lesser known work; more of a gothic fairy story than a play.   

The plot is complex and dark, full of hidden dangers and motives, like the hooting and howling woods that surround the castle. Helena, as she tells us herself, is a simple maid, an orphan – the daughter of a physician.  She works for the recently bereaved Countess of Roussilion, a strong, determined woman, and is infatuated by her handsome young son, Bertram.  But Bertram is one of the lads; he enjoys nothing more carousing with his mates, especially the deviously camp, Parolles, and playing games of war and love.  Indeed, as Parolles explains to Helena, the game of love as more like a siege on a maid’s virginity.  The Countess despairs of her son and is delighted when she learns that Helena has designs on him.   

Helena conceives a plan.  She will use her knowledge of herbs to cure the King of his fistula-in-ano and ask him to grant her the hand of Bertram in return.  This she does. Bertram has to marry her on order of the King.  Entrapped and resentful, he departs for the wars in Florence without consummating the marriage, but not before he has left Helena a note to say that he cannot accept his marriage until she wears his ring and  bears  his child. 

In Florence, he meets Diana, a pretty girl of a good family and sets out to seduce her.  But Helena has, unknown to Bertram, followed her husband to Florence, where she persuades Diana to procure Bertram’s priceless ring in exchange for her maidenhood, then invite him to her bedchamber, blindfold him and change places with her so that she can consummate the marriage, thus fulfilling Bertram’s impossible conditions.

Bertram, thinking he has successfully besieged Diana,  abandons her for Paris, where the King and the Countess have learnt that Helena has died of a broken heart. They berate Bertram for his cruelty and when they see he is wearing Helena’s ring that was given him by Diana, suspect him of murdering his wife. Diana arrives at court to claim ‘her husband’ and shows them the Bertram’s ring. Then Helena arrives pregnant, receives the ring from Diana, is reunited with her husband,  whose matrimonial conditions have been fufilled and  – all’s well that ends well.  Or is it?  In the glare from the flash bulbs, we see Helena’s and Bertram’s happy smiles collapse into grimaces of horror as they realise what they’ve done.

Helena has been so obsessed with capturing Bertram.  She understands the power and politics of courtship, but has neither the station in life nor the looks to enthral and entrance.  She captures her man through a miliary campaign of  manipulation, coercion and deception.  In so doing, she reveals Bertram as feckless,  irresponsible and weak. They have been exposed; they now have to live together in the full knowledge of the depths of each other’s characters.   

 

‘All’s well that ends well’  was the second play transmitted live from The National Theatre to selected cinemas around the country.  What a good idea.  The company, directed by Marianne Elliott, was magnificent with star performances by Michelle Terry as Helena and Oliver Ford Davis as The King, Elliot Levey as Lord Dumaine and Clare Higgins as the Countess.  The gothic fairy tale set, with images of hooting owls, howling wolves, Reniger-like shadow puppets and silhouettes was a masterpiece.   But at Harrogate last night, the Odeon was half empty.   

 

Back to Basics!

The cottage peers anxiously over the terrace wall to where the road leaves the rushing Esk and winds up the hill to the rocky platform upon which the Romans built their marching fort and complained about the rain.  Then the focus is taken up again, up the repeating green slope and grey crag, past the tumbling water to the muscular ridges of Scafell Pike, where acrobatic Ravens surf the breaking storm and the Peregrine hangs motionless on the breeze.   

Bird How is a simple construction, such as a child would draw; a rough stone box with a gabled roof , two windows and a door painted green.  It stood there, timeless and impassive, when William strode the coffin route from Ambleside with Dorothy scuttling in his wake, to take out a lease in Grasmere.  Restless beasts still bumped and sighed in the shippon and provided underfloor heating when Ruskin worried about industrial pollution from his perspective on Coniston and Mallory practiced the crags of Great Gable.    

The National Trust rescued the house in 1963. The conversion retains the character and feel of the original dwelling.  You enter into a simple living space, a chair a settee, a table and a fireplace with plenty of wood.  The kitchen is behind a curtain and two bedrooms are at the back, one larger with twin beds painted sky blue, the other with a double bunk. 

This accommodation has no bathroom. You wash in the sink or take a bowl onto the terrace.  But after a  muddy descent from the summit across Great Moss and down through the treacherous gorge,  what bliss to wash naked in the rain and pour warm water from the jug onto the shivering spot between the shoulder blades and then run inside to dry off by the chattering fire.     

There’s a chemical toilet in the shippon.  It doesn’t smell but the bucket has to be emptied into the cesspit outside; it’s that rustic.  We might have stayed three nights in a hotel in Grasmere for the same price, but the luxury would have spoiled us with excess and depleted our initiative. Bird How just provides shelter and basic necessities, but accepting the challenge to make a home in the wilderness creates a frisson of adventure and self sufficiency that can never be achieved in a hotel or on a package holiday.  Only don’t forget your sleeping bag and a spare box of matches.    

This article was short listed for The Guardian’s Travel Writer Competition and published in the paper today.

 

The Look of Love; Waterhouse’s Women.

The long neck is bent, the skin pale, the gaze serious and sustained, sad yet determined, the lips are slightly parted, the body lithe, nubile, not a child but not yet a woman.  Waterhouse’s depictions of women express an ambiguity, an inscrutability, a mysterious, thoughtful reflection that enthrals and captivates. They seem to float endlessly between dream and reality, never betraying their secret.  The look is vulnerable, fearful; it evokes a timeless adolescent beauty, a touching innocence.  But the young women in Waterhouse’s paintings are not innocent.  They are comfortable with their nakedness.  And the parted lips and lingering stare express an erotic intensity, a longing, aching melancholy that demands satisfaction while arousing conflicts of excitement and fear. .    

Waterhouse’s women are unattainable.  Romance, after all, is a fantasy, a make believe, so far removed from reality that it generates an ineluctable sadness.  Waterhouse’s heroines may escape reality, but we know that no happiness will come out of it.  The sad beauty of A Mermaid (1900) is almost unbearable. Her yearning gaze evokes an overwhelming desire to comfort her, but at the same time, she is so totally absorbed in her own pathos, that she can never love any man nor indeed be loved by them.  The shell beside her contains pearls, the tears of the drowned sailors, who have given their lives in pursuit or her poignant beauty. The pale skin of her lower abdomen shades off into the impossible slimy muscular tail of a fish.  This combination of promise and withdrawal,  the handmaidens of sexual dysfunction and fear of intimacy, promote a state of frustration and addiction. Such women, beautiful, vain, narcissistic, drive men mad with desire.     

The Lady of Shallott (1888), Waterhouse’s most enduring image, is condemned to view the world through a mirror and never enjoy love.  For years, she refuses to submit, but no sooner than she gives way to desire for Lancelot – not the first to fall in this way – then she has to die for it.  The mounting erotic charge that builds to a dramatic conclusion is so perfectly narrated in Tennyson’s relentless metre, like Ravel’s Bolero in words; prohibition, desire, surrender and death – the haunting allegory of illicit sexual longing. 

 

She left the web; she left the loom,

She made three paces thro’ the room,

She saw the water lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume.

She looked down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide,

The mirror cracked from side to side,

‘The curse has come upon me’, cried

The Lady of Shalott.

 

Tennyson was such a horny old goat!

There is a world weariness, a wistful, troubled melancholy about Waterhouse.  His images capture with painterly symbolism the complex aesthetic of  emotional narrative with an intensity few can match. Even the innocence of Wildflowers (1902), evinces the wind of change that is about to sweep the bright young girl away into a darker sensuality and passion.  The same feelings are evoked in Psyche Opening the Golden Box (1903).   

But other images express a more disingenuous look of lust, a need to possess and exploit, a dangerous narcissistic love that has the power to destroy men. The Naiad (1893), who emerges from the stream upon the sleeping youth knows what she wants, the sex appeal, the power.  La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1893) kneels naked and vulnerable by her palely loitering knight, but she has bent him to her gaze, wound her hair around his neck.  He is lost!      

 

I met a lady in the meads

Full beautiful – a fairy’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light

And her eyes were wild.

John Keats (1820)

 

That same look is there in his depiction of Hylas and the Nymphs (1896).  Look at the confident unblinking hypnotic stare off the lead nymph, as she gently pulls at Hylas arm to unbalance him and draw him into the water.  Look at the dark intensity of her sister’s eyes.  Do we feel joy for Hylas in his bliss?  No. There is something disturbing, almost alien, in those looks.  Hylas will surely drown in their embrace.

Other paintings take the theme of la femme fatale, the ruthless sex goddess, a stage further.  Lycius, encased in armour, gazes down into the imploring eyes of Lamia (1905), her snake skin wrapped around her, who sucks the blood of those she seduces in vengeance for her betrayal. There is no fury like that of a woman scorned.  And regard the deep evil green composition of Circe Individiosa (1892), who, enraged by the refusal of the sea deity, Glaucus to desert his beloved Scylla, poisons the sea in revenge. ‘If I can’t have him, then nobody else will’.  The look is ruthless, cold and lethal.  And here’s the sorceress, Circe (1891) again, clad in a transparent grey-blue diaphanous gown, fragile and vulnerable, but with a hauteur that brooks no resistance as she holds aloft both her wand and the cup that will subdue Ulysses.          

So is Waterhouse exploring the fascination and fear that Victorian men had of female sexuality?  In ‘Consulting the Oracle’ (1884), seven middle eastern women listen with mounting excitement as the priestess relays the pronouncements that emanate from a shrunken skull.  These are not innocent maidens; they are impetuous, seductive, irrational, everything that Victorian women weren’t.  Victorian men had double standards; at home they might have respected their wife’s sexual repression, yet outside the home they were excited by the erotic assertiveness of the new woman.     

There was, nevertheless, deep concern about the independence of women.  For centuries, society has sought to confine women’s sexuality as a dangerous thing that can entrap, weaken and destroy men. Waterhouse is a man of his time.  He started painting women at a time when female sexuality was taboo and romance always had tragic consequences.  The Lady of Shallott is a ‘femme fragile’, who devotes herself to domestic duties and succumbs to ‘Irritable Weakness’.  Yet his time also witnessed a braver, more dangerous aspect of women. He was still painting in England when the Suffragettes were chaining themselves to railings. Consulting The Oracle celebrated what he saw as the emotional and sexual emancipation of women.    

He was also working during the early years of psychoanalysis,  Freud and later Jung were fascinated by the rich symbolism of myth, the archetypes.  They understood the terrible power of the seductress; Kali, Salome, Marta Hari, Isolde, the erotic enchantment that can enslave and entrap by the addictive combination of gratification and withdrawal.   Fear, as Jung recognised, is the antithesis of love, yet gains its power through the language of love. 

But why is Waterhouse more popular now than ever before?  Is it that we live a narcissistic world of make believe, romance and vanity?  Are  modern relationships based  less on the comforts of friendship and affection than on the manipulations of romance and fantasy?  Is this why relationships do not last as long and marriage as an institution is declining?  Have we become slaves to the deceptions of Facebook?  And don’t we have our own Pre-Raphaelite beauty?  A veritable cult has grown up around the haunting image of Kiera Knightly.  

Waterhouse weaves a wonderful spell, creates the impossible romance.  He glorifies the unattainable woman, who is worth it.  His work speaks to a deep-seated yearning for the merger of souls with The One who is our destiny.  But such make believe is so often doomed. Sooner or later, reality will disappoint and ‘The One’ will come to bear an uncanny resemblance to your mother.

 

‘I look at you in sheer despair

And see my mother standing there.’

 

High Flight

 

The mountains are their playground,

the crags, the fell, the muscular ridge,

the scouring dale, the tumbling water,

the gliding, striding, sliding edge. 

 

Beating time like boatmen,

their pinioned oars hum in the stiff’ning breeze.

Dark against the weather,

They surf the breaking storm.  

 

The sudden call, the stall, the mock attack,   

the plunge; the breakneck beak.   

The other, swerving to the pass 

makes high speed chase above the grass.

 

They’re such show offs!  Like clowns,  

they chuckle, roll over, fly upside down.

Like trapeze artists, they swing on the wind, 

As free as the fall; so near, so near to rocky death.