not all is glory

Dispatch #4

I find myself struggling this week to deliver my dispatch. I had a great idea going – funny and innovative but I wasn’t quite feeling it, so I’ve put it in the idea file for later. Perhaps it is because I’m rereading Rebecca West’s Aubrey trilogy – The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Rebecca West’s writing is so exquisitely good that I feel daunted when I try anything. What’s the use, I whisper to myself.

I’m not going to recommend West though, because I will simply lose my mind if someone I love doesn’t take to her writing. If you must however, then I would say start with her densely rich two volume work Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. This vast and complex book is called a guide to Yugoslavia. It is more like a study of human nature on the brink of war. I’m a fast voracious reader but that book took me a year to finish. I could only read small bits as each of them was a feast onto itself and needed proper contemplation and digestion. The Aubrey Trilogy is not like that – it is the story of a family that is very much based on West’s own, in which the protagonist comes of age in the Edwardian era. The thing is – that if I had to choose one book to read over and over again – it would be The Fountain Overflows. It is heartbreaking and funny as hell, and political, and enraging, and hits upon everything that is both historical and absolutely current. Here are two quotes from it to give you an idea, though, Ron would tell you, that I want to read the whole book out loud to him.

“Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it.”

"The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly."

I have the same problem with my painting. If I look at a book full of amazing paintings – say van Gogh, or the Impressionists, then again, that wicked part of my mind utters what’s the use in your stupid dabs? I know this feeling must be soundly quashed or it’ll take over everything I do – what’s the use of setting a nice table when Martha Stewart can do it so much better, or why try for my pitiful garden when my friend Linda’s is a wondrous Eden? Very Eeyore I know. But how to quiet that voice? I know it is just a scared kid – frightened of being judged, so I must talk kindly to her and say that beauty or brilliance belongs to both the sunrise and the quiet tiny star flowers growing along the woodland path. That we can’t have too much of it and that a variety of the sublime, the pleasant, and the interesting is like a well-balanced dinner. Not all pavlova, some lightly sautéed mustard greens, and occasionally even a scrumptious mac and cheese.

I will leave you with a painting I did a couple of months ago that I’m quite content with!

So until next week keep on keepin’ on.

And for you new guys here – Dispatches will always be free. Leave a like or better still a comment or two. I like to hear!