Disembodied Sensation

I wrote a poem a couple of weekends back. It's a pretty odd poem, and every time I read it, I think: - yes, new for me, but very odd. I wrote it in the middle of the night after Yom Kippur. The disembodied sensation induced by neither eating nor drinking for 26 hours lingered in my mind.

At the same time, during the day - while I was out at synagogue with my dad - I'd left Emily at home. I didn't realise she was getting sick from not drinking enough water or caffeine, and felt half like I'd abandoned her. And I'd also intended to write a blog about our walks on the Isle of Wight for some time. I still want to write one or two on that - something pretty special happened there - although unlike the poem to follow, in a comic rather than tragic vein. Somehow all this hazily mingled together to produce something not entirely about any of that.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The sea is green because I want to kiss you.
She takes it out on me physically.

Her ceaseless waves casually erase your feet
After mine were split to ocean from air.

Split by your lips' quiver, at sea's say
How I no more am your amour than a dream.

Touch me: I do not shimmer like water
Though my feet are fled beneath shoreline forever.

And when I clutch your hands, mine seem no less wind
Than sand fumbling at a romance that never was.


.

The Trial: Law v. Poetry

George Bernard Shaw said 'All professions are conspiracies against the laity.' In my darker moods, I sometimes think that the entire legal and economic system is a civilised fraud imposed upon people. It makes civilisation seem real - even though held together by rules, procedures and mechanisms that exist entirely in people's minds. In its favour, it displaces the madness of nature with the happy fiction of decency and self-respect. On an existential level, it clothes the rude purposelessness that bleakly surrounds us all.

By contrast, Auden wrote that "In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." While most people associate poetry with fancy and fantasy, throughout English literature there has been a vital strand that disenchants: from Chaucer's Wife of Bath through Skelton, Swift, Pope, Byron, Auden and now poets like Geoffrey Hill (e.g. 'To the High Court of Parliament November 1994'). Don Paterson would be another good choice, with his richly sardonic meditations on the transacting darkness (note the economic pun). 

In certain directions, my understanding of poetry and law pull me in exactly opposite ways. And I rather like this sensation - this vertigo-like sense of freefall. On the one hand, I'm utterly compelled by the need to maintain what people have, to prevent all human societies going to pot; on the other, when you look at our relationship to nature, you realise a lot of our human arrangements are all nonsense.

The final line of Paterson's most recent volume 'Rain' have little or no rational justification, and yet they sum up this position well:

"and none of this, none of this matters."

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/05/26/080526po_poem_paterson

Before and After

1995 http://yfrog.com/mebsdyj
2011  http://yfrog.com/h8bsl5j

Dollsing 2: Expiry Date

Shortbread 2003
Matzah meal 2003
Scampi + Prawns 2007
Custard 2007
Spinach, Asparagus, Ricotta Pasta Sauce 2008

These were some of the things we are considering keeping. Keep - you read that right.

This house has a personality of its own - a pathological personality, some might say, but one I am affectionate toward.

Today, Emily and I waged war on the kitchen. The trigger for this conflict was the discovery, by our cleaning lady, of some maggots residing in the doormats by our backdoors. The cause of the maggots? A dead green mouse. The cause of the dead green mouse? Poison - but when living, he ate a sizable chunk of matzah. Here: http://yfrog.com/nw21qtj .

We began with the freezer - beef bourgignon from 2005? chuck it; lamb so old the label can no longer be read? chuck it. Plastic bag with little dribble of ice cream???!!! Why is that still there? I think my elder brother Max made it. Nostalgia purposes? Who has nostalgia over frozen ice cream? Jam jars maybe. All we can say is goodbye to our over full freezer.

Then we went through the canned goods, the bottled sauces and jars of spreads/jams. Our findings were farcical, and yet nostalgic. The oldest find was lemon juice from 1990. Some real classics included sun lollies, yellow food colouring and jelly packets from 2001. The most curious was mushroom ketchup. http://yfrog.com/mg95qmj . On the way, we also discovered Swiss vegetable bouillon from 1997, beef stock from Jackson's of Piccadilly and emulsified cranberry sauce. There were many other interesting things.

This is what happens when consumerists forget to be consumerists, and fail to get rid of stuff that has a consume-by date. By our reckoning, we got rid of over £200 worth of goods. Although its value now is probably less than £20, or possibly even £10.

These products of our contemporary wasteland are the equivalent of the dolls from the Isle of Wight house, shocking and hidden but with less charm. They take us back to an era of innocence, when freezing lollies was SO exciting and making cakes with food colouring was radical. I wonder what our digestive systems would have been like in the age these foods were created. If only I'd been advanced enough to see this happening and prevented it...oh the waste that piles up through our modern lives!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyfLER3Z0-Q&ob=av2n (not that we think much of this song, but scrubbing up afterwards, it feels right)

Robbery and Reenactment

Most of our lives we sally through, immune to everyday risks because we’ve thought of our response to them long ago. Every so often, dreams conjure threats to our habituated experiences, but we wake to find them unreal, inconceivable.

On the particular day I want to talk about, my best friend Ollie had dreamt that the council were lopping off the trees of Ruskin Park. The residents were up in arms at the outrage. Anyone reading this must realise that this action would be such a public nightmare that it could only exist in the night.

The particular day was the 26^th August. If you look back to my blog on that day, I wrote something in the morning anticipating how hot the day would be. Ollie called me up to ask if I wanted to have a few drinks at the Fox and Hound (Champion Hill, Southwark), play a few games of chess. What better way to spend a day?

I began the day with £15, and ended it with £0. We alternated buying jugs of Pimms, and maybe a packet of crisps. From the amount I spent, I’m pretty sure we drank two jugs each, and I also bought a packet of Cheese and Onion. I thrashed him at chess: he made the same mistake each time – he’d start from a strong position, initially appear to win and then allow a key piece to become vulnerable and me to swipe it. From there on, I just overwhelmed him with superior pieces. Later in the day, I would become the key piece.

So on the bus home, I was feeling pretty good about myself, not least because of the Pimms and good times with my best mate. I took out a volume of Peter Mcdonald’s Pastorals and opened it at the delightful sonnet ‘At Castlereagh Castle.’ An archetypal couple wander down a country lane; in the last six lines, we discover it’s the poet’s parents, poor but happy.

Got off the bus, went home. Paused in front of my house. I wanted to write a note about the poem, and it would never get written if I went inside with the stilted muggy air in my house from that 27-degree day. Go to the park. Find a bench in the half-light. Write note (slashes represent line-breaks) :

25^th?            11:55pm At Castlereagh Castle: / with the second stanza, you realize / not generic couple     his parents   /   walking from their wedding.

When Burnside talks of   /  stepping aside  / or Paterson, of poetry beginning / at the point of self abandonment / Walcott          of self-forgetting.

You’d forgotten you are / a minor force on a massive earth / not much of an I, against / the tremendous accretions, the sustained / language games in which every / man woman + child participate + / negotiates their own contribution / every day.  a generic self existing in a / language covenanted by others to you, which / you share with them.

So far / your parents have hosted you long, / your bed you take for granted / spend too long there, hide behind it / as you stare at the elegant outer construction / of your house and realise you paid and / have no equity towards the house.

And each scenario is different / but with practice, experience, the forces / within it can be weighted / Just as legal language alters with / judgments, incrementally, molecule by molecule.

After finals, you could see yourself / as a generic, as a spectator of your / own times and were not scared to / gain some vantage on your I. / You will need money/ you will need advice / then maybe you can act on I, as well as think it. /

the presumption of ‘we’ / they tried that where my grandparents came from / I cannot begin to evoke the horror of presuming a ‘we’ cohere / the personality becomes a proxy of / the state’s wishes. Not really a / proxy, but repressed   + encouraged to think not of its own force, but some / abstract faceless corrective / non-entities.

At this point, I decided I’d written enough and should go back. Exit down the ramp between the tennis court and the basketball court. A shadowy figure, shouting. Walk on – you walk straight on. Four of them. Older teenagers, 17-18, South American descent I’d say.

Another shout, this time closer – I can make out the word “want.” The shouting figure is behind me – fool I turn the slightest bit – can’t run, my white shorts are too full of stuff. His hand grabs me.

“Give me your phone.”

“No.

“Give me your phone” “ NO”

“Come on, man – just give us your phone.” I clasp my iPhone desperately.

Before I can stop them, they’ve taken my wallet and my oyster card. Hands clutching inside my pockets – eugh.

-GIVE ME YOUR PHONE.

-The police can find you if you take it.

Desperate hands clasping at my pockets. My shirt with a leaping rockstar shreds as they tug at it. Three of them - Punches – I fall on the ground. Punches on my back.

-The police can find you if you take the phone.

After at least a minute – the shorts have torn – ‘take his watch’ – the watch strap, already hanging by a thread, is broken in two and taken – finally after several punches, I’ve relinquished the phone. My arm now looks like this:

 yfrog.com/kl94k6j 

and my back is similarly scraped.

I find my wallet (haha, no cash, no point nicking it) and Young Person's Rail Card. I go home, talk to my neighbours (who are outside) to say I’ve been robbed, go inside and wake my mum up. I decide to call the police because I know the iPhone can be recovered with the Find My Iphone. Online, it appears to show the phone at Brandon Street near the Walworth road.

Two police arrive – they are incredibly reassuring. They take evidence and tell me that they’ve got ten police on the ground at the site. “All phones should have this – this is incredible.” Can I make the phone ring?

After fifteen minutes, they’ve had no success – the device must be at least ten metres off and is on the move again. I hear periodic voices from the walkie-talkie system – weird to be in the position of Big Brother, looking down at the phone from the skies.

The descriptions all seem completely wrong – they’ve found some young South Americans, but one’s arm is in a sling. They’ve found the phone, but the thugs have dropped it. They suspect that they may have been checking what I said, and it turns out I was right. Thank god they've found the phone.

They prepare me for doing a line up. We head off in a police car to Camberwell High Street.

Before the line up takes place, we unexpectedly charge through a red light when they see a licensed minicab speeding. They stop him.

“I’d book you if we didn’t have a charge in our care. Your license would be revoked. You should know better as a cabbie. Consider yourself lucky.” Cool. Never deliberately gone through a red light before.

Back to the line-up. None of them are the suspects. We go over the territory but see nothing. Later, all the leads – CCTV tracking the places where the phone went + DNA evidence – run dry.

Later, on the 12^th August, I go to a party at Tatum Street, some 7 or so minutes walk from where the phone lingered so promisingly. I decide not to bring my phone or wallet. No risks this time.

When I get there, I see Tom C – and say hi, give him a hug, catch up.

“Why isn’t Emily here?

“She’s tired. Also when I got robbed, my iPhone was held only five minutes walk away from here – so she was scared of coming with me.

A pause from Tom. I say

-Give my your phone.

-No.

I lean over. –Give me your phone.

-No, Ben, NO.

I reach into his pocket and touch the phone. Then I let him go.

In a program about child psychology I later watch, they say that the child who reacts to injustice by saying “No – don’t do that” gives a somewhat intellectual response. What are we like?

Family History 3: My Mother's Mother's Father

I'll say little on this one, and let the obituary speak for itself:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2122097/?page=1

Two Dreams of Reason: Of Vice and Good

Yesterday, I was part of a jury that unanimously pleaded guilty. The defendant was an 18 year-old accused of wounding with intent to cause GBH ("serious harm" (DPP v Saunders)). It was his "first imprisonment." And until 40 minutes before we reached our verdict, I would have pleaded not guilty.

I don't want give many details of the case (as I don't know if it may affect the victim's reputation), but suffice to say: if you are a homosexual, I don't recommend oral pleasure on a dark, foggy canal in the middle of the night. You may get spotted, then chest-slashed by a cocksure youth out to prove himself the big man.
(The doubt arose as to whether it was him or his small mate who did it; watching the CCTV footage close-up clarified my doubt.

It was my second trial; many of us agreed on our first that though we pleaded the defendant was not guilty on the evidence, our gut instinct was that he was guilty; also that this minor incident didn't deserve to go to trial despite the defendant's potential guilt)

It's the kind of thing you might see on TV. What particularly struck me were the roles of prosecution and defence.

The prosecution must make you sure the defendant did it. For him, the victim is an upstanding citizen and almost always right; the police are heroes and almost always right; and the defendant is a lying cesspool of vice. He argues humans get vicious, and this defendant (in particular) is criminally vicious.

The defence must prove that the victim is lying or mistaken, the police evidence is flawed and the defendant is alright. He sees the good in the accused, and looks out for alternative explanations, minority reports. Here the possibility was of a delayed reaction by the victim, and him being stabbed earlier. But the victim's account was much more convincing when matched with the CCTV.

Though the defence's argument was ultimately unconvincing, I found his Yorkshire flair persuasive. The prosecution was even more of a character, a deep-toned, but incredibly posh-accented black man. He had this cool vehemence that was gripping.

Thinking about these two led me into a discussion with Emily about my aversion to criticising specific people and things in my direct experience. How I've found it leads me to brooding dark visions of humanity, a pessimism that I prefer to do without. I prefer to see the good in people. She claims she can make me see that a sharpened critique of my immediate fellows need not lead to pessimism. I'm intrigued.

Family History 2: Walking in the Land of the Blind

It's all very well my (patrilineal) grandfather documenting his history. But who will tell the stories of my father's mother or my mother's father?

While my mother's mother is still alive, I may yet portray her; but those two have crossed Lethe. Bar summoning my parents or other relatives to recollect their presences, amnesia sets round them. For me, their lives dissolve into myth forged by the scraps of what I understand about them.
How dim are the lights of memory?

(For reference, for the rest of the blog my father's mother will be referred to as sabta and my mother's father as grandpa.)
-----------------------------
Their stories have subtly informed my life. Before I get to that point, spare me a digression:

At a party at Tom C and Aisha's house last night, a guy called Richard, a Cambridge medievalist, asked me questions that avoided the obvious 'so what do you do?' Instead he wondered 'who were you before you were you?' He was intrigued to know how the respondent's sense of self had changed. All I could say was that it was difficult to segment my life that way; then I recounted my transition from sober, politically-interested secondary school student to more colourful and eccentric gap-year student. Not very satisfactory, but then the question is so vague. How can you get back to 'you' before you were you?

With each passing day, I inherit a set of stories from the former me, and I continue some of them, forget about or disinherit others. This is one of many ways in which inherited stories shape our view of life. (I lift phrasing from a review of a John Burnside novel; Burnside is fascinated by never-to-be-told narratives, much as Geoffrey Hill is with "the tongue's atrocities.")

One inherited story is of my grandpa and sabta as walkers. This story particularly interests me because, firstly, I am the only one of my brothers who takes great pleasure in walking; secondly, I find walking stokes the memory, and brands landscapes not only in the mind, but in the bones and muscle.

From the dark ages of my family history, I know that walking runs along two lines of my family. When I was five, I walked up the Eiffel Tower swiftly; dad said I had inherited "mountain goat genes" from my grandpa. Later, our parents would take us on many active holidays. While my brothers would set off on some high octane sport, I would often go walking with my dad, or both mum and dad, and enjoy the Alps or the coast of Corsica, and so on. Later too, I discovered that sabta had also been a walker.

She was born in Stryi in former eastern Galicia, now western Ukraine. She grew up not far from the Carpathian mountains, and walked there often in her youth, before she met my grandfather.

Somehow I imagine later, she took my dad walking. Or else, why did he walk more than my mum, whose father was such a 'mountain goat'? especially as my dad's girth is not so healthy? But I should ask, because maybe it's just that dad would walk a little more.

By all accounts, sabta was a wonderful woman. My mum says, "Most women don't like their mother-in-laws...but I'm very sad you never met her. She was so kind and considerate." Mum also remembers her phrase "Be careful what you possess, or it can come to possess you." I'm very interested in that maxim. One of the pleasure of walking is feeling disburdened from the weighty, dense properties of city.

As for Stryi, I am glad she got out. I once took a tour of Jagiellonian university in Krakov, where Copernicus studied. It's in former western Galicia, now Poland. At the end of our tour, the guide answered questions; somehow she got on to talking about her interest in helping out with the dire poverty in western Ukrainian cities like L'viv. Had she remained, that would have been her plight.

Also the bloodlands. The bloodlands were atrocious. Her eldest brother (she was one of six) died from the Nazis; and if it weren't for the Nazis, the Soviet deportations would have...
They leave me speechless.

My grandpa's story is also interesting. Like me, he studied English at Oxford. He was the first member of his family to go to university, and he went to Brasenose College. Towards the end of his degree, his already severe eczema (which I also have inherited) worsened and he got cataracts. He had an operation on his eyes. The procedure was risky in those days. The procedure sent him completely blind.

Darkly, it saved him. For he could not fight in the war. And he met my grandmother who was a nurse at a special hospital for the blind. To this day, my mum notes that granny (who she's currently looking after) always looked after her husband and put more care into him than any of her children.

Despite his blindness, he continued to enjoy walking (more strangely, he continued to enjoy art!). The absence of light affected his circadian rhythm and he often slept badly, but the rhythm of walking helped. The memory in the bones or along the blood in the legs, it's quite nourishing somehow.

And I've now walked in some of his favourite spots - Coniston Old Man in the Lake District, or across the South Downs Way near my grandparents' home in Sussex.
I owe my independent walking to him, and another (beyond the teachers on maybe half a dozen school trips - Snowdonia, the Atlas mountains near Marakesh in Morocco, the Lyke Wake Walk, northern Lake District, Siena to Rome). My grandpa interested mum's friend Jon B (who convinced her to become a doctor though he decided to study Literature). Jon was apparently interested in the links between blindness and literature - Milton's epic memory, his intensely otherwordly visual imagination; Aldous Huxley's doors of perception maybe; less likely Borges, but no doubt blindness helped Borges conjure impossible infinities.

Jon was willing to lend his cottage ('Curlew Cottage') in Hawkshead to me. I persuaded Alex K to come on a walking trip there. The first was spectacular. The second was a winter wonderland. South Downs Way, Yorkshire Dales. I've also walked in Peru, to the Polish-Slovakian border in the Tatras near Zakopane (with Niklas), Yosemite California (with Nina), Olympic National Park near Seattle (with Zack and Kate), Adetepe in Turkey.

(Ooh - a brown butterfly has flapped onto the chair beside me. Apparently children will remember this summer's abundance of butterflies as they did a year with similarly hot spring in the 1970s.)

Though I cannot bring sabta and grandpa back, through walking I continue their legacy. To paraphrase Wordsworth, I cannot narrate what then they were. Nonetheless, my progress bounds with a hidden, inner ghostmap. A map to the land of the blind, the dumb unwritten stories of my sabta and grandpa.

One day, I hope to have descendants. I hope to be similarly forged into myth. And through my walking, I hope I leave behind a rhythmic memory in blood and bone that will energise them to take up walking too.

Dollsing 1

Outside in West Square, children from Charlotte Sharman sing in unison:

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream..
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream..

 Harmony suggests this crazy sense that we're more alike than we think. At the same time, the lyric (la vida es sueno) pushes against the facticity of our physical existence. This charming innocence seems particularly fitting for the young, and a sense of the idyllic beyond the real. The song takes me back to the ebb and flux of the Isle of Wight.

The Millers' house on the Isle of Wight has many dolls. They are old dolls, possibly older than us (this year's Isle of Wight group). This year, their freakish dollness, both childlike and plastic, was exploited to great effect. Dolls were planted with aplomb all over the house to shock and scare in unusual places - not just hidden eerily in beds, but towel clothed in sinks, with razor blades, or lodged above doors so as to fall on a victim. The name Dollsing was born.

Dolls had an added significance for Emily, as she was meant to be working on her dissertation on dolls and Dickens when she met me three weeks ago. She was interested in dolls as human reproductions, and as a means for Dickens characters to achieve control over their heavily industrialised, patriarchal environment.

In the Shearwater house, dolls were fun, prankish objects. They suggested a previous era, and thus offered a slight sense of release from our own. Far removed from cria cuervos. Not so far from 'row, row, row your boat...'

London Clutter

On return from the Isle of Wight, I've become aware of how cluttered this city is. No sooner have you set eyes upon a rotund lady skidding her feet insistently across Waterloo station, but your next remembered person is a bulky bloke with strident hair (hair-gelled of course) wandering past the Millenium park on Waterloo road as an old lady with a far too heavy sack cycles past...
let alone all the other cars, roadsigns, commercial options, and other distractions that constantly usurp my attention.

Perhaps the confused construction of that sentence overstates the perverse compression of memory induced by metropolitan sensory overload. But it's really weighing on me in this room where I write. The inside of this dining room is an elegant Georgian space with a Turner print hanging over what used to look like a fireplace but is now doused in stack after stack of unread newspapers. It's as if my mum, who is normally a wonderfully industrious and organised person, wants to reproduce the city she loves on the inside of her home. It's really quite Dickensian. And what a contrast it is to the blissful holiday I have just had on the Isle of Wight.

I don't want to forget the long walks with Emily along the shifting-coloured contours of the beachscape. Or the calm friendly immersion of the community at the Millers'/Whitworth's place in the Duver, Seaview. To paraphrase Pete, walking in London cannot be relaxing in that way; you'd be too worried about being run over by a car.

And Yet the Books, by Czeslaw Milosz

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are,” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

------------------------------------


If I'd not decided to write the notebook in the park, the robbery would never have happened. But what would the world be now without books?

A gentle freshness flourishes

The weather shamans were right. Today will bake, releasing gentle plant odours. Light illuminates fresh details - the white fluff of a seed caught in a spiderweb, a dried-out shoot wrapped like Asclepius's snake around a hose. This is light on nature's bounteous continuum, remembering decay and the renewal of life.

Family History 1: Russia and the Rule of Law

Manabohzo will have to wait a while, till the spirit of party is once again upon me. I've been wanting to do something on my patrilineal history for a while now, and I now feel confident writing about it.

My father runs the Moscow office of a major London-headquartered law firm. His grandparents came from Russia and much of his favourite literature is Russian, so in historical, cultural and business terms he loves working there.

Nonetheless he also says he was born into a boring age. Had he been born into his parents or grandparents' time, he would have been like them - politically active, possibly even revolutionary. Instead he realised he would thrive as a lawyer, and chose that career. He really enjoys it, and compares Russia to the Wild West.

I don't quite understand the analogy - maybe something to do with commerce springing up, to the point where Moscow is bustling with hypercapitalism; the occasional maverick businessman; crooks to stay away from, and wild gamblers; and the fact that there are some notable gaps in Russian law which can be exploited. People like my father can provide advice and thoughtful criticism to help solve the problems this creates.

The real legal problem, as many distant observers see it, is unpredictable government behavior - particularly when they seize commercial assets for purposes which are, to say the least, hard to justify and seem like pure exercise of state power. My brother, who has also spent a lot of time in Russia, is less optimistic and deeply worried by the autocratic tendencies of Putin, and the appropriation of private property by Medvedev's government.

Of course, it was once a lot worse. Flicking through my dad's Introduction to Jurisprudence (a far more interesting subject than we were allowed to study on the GDL), I noticed in the margin to 'Law in the Soviet State':

 "resulting in that bloody, lawless regime - perhaps a prime example of a lawless state, nonetheless imperative and coercive"

My dad and his father before him absolutely loathed the Communists.

-------------------------------------------------

At an early age, my great-grandfather was persuaded to join the Socialist Revolutionary Party. My grandfather, who wrote a book about his early life and his father, says this:

When mother met father, he was a law student studying law at the university in Kiev, the capital of the region.  In his youth he was well know as a Talmudic scholar and was a promising Rabbinic student.  But somewhere in between being immersed in the learning of the old and venerable Talmud, he somehow became exposed to Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Lermontov and Pushkin, and others, all books that a devout Rabbinic scholar is not supposed to and is not expected to read...Nothing could hold him back once he discovered the secular world of learning beyond his Yeshiva.  

When he was seventeen, [he] enrolled at the University of Kiev. [This task was hard.] Jews were admitted under strict quotas after passing extra examinations...After admittance, the Jewish student could hardly take part in the life of the university as an equal.  The Jewish student was the butt of all jokes and kept on separate seats in the back of the class.  Naturally, Jewish students were thereby left as easy prey to the recruitment by the varieties of revolutionary political parties.  When father was in his senior year at the university, he was arrested as a member of the S.R. (Socialist Revolutionary Party) and sentenced to serve three years at the Fortress of Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, after which his sentence decreed that he serve for two years in the army.  Upon conclusion of his army service, he was sent into “internal exile” to be kept away from any industrial area to “prevent him coming in touch with the industrial segment of the working classes”.  He chose and was allowed to go back to Krivoy-Rog.  

By this time, my great-grandfather was alienated from the Revolutionary cause. When he asked his "comrades" to respond to the Tsar's pogroms, he was told "Jewish blood is the best lubricant for the wheels of the revolution." Instead he devoted himself to the Jewish revolution, Zionism.

"There, mother was waiting for him, and as soon as he arrived, they were married.  Theirs was a love that bloomed from their youth.  But no sooner did they settle, and discovered that mother was with child, than their happiness was threatened on the very first year of their life together, when the Russo-Japanese war broke out. (1905).  Word reached them through their underground connections that father was about to be mobilized – outside his draft turn – as a continuing punishment for his past revolutionary activities, and was to be sent directly to the front in the Far East. "After long discussions, both father and mother decided that he would not “go to war” for the Tzar and they made plans for his move abroad.  He would go to England in preference to any other country in Europe because it was “a Country of Law”.  In a short while, father left and reached England.  Mother followed him.  She could travel without any legal difficulties and they were reunited in London.  For several months, father tried to find suitable work for himself.  Unfortunately, one of these periodic recessions set in and when the JCO (the Jewish Colonization Organisation) which was settling Jews of eastern Europe in Argentina, offered him a position in their school system there, he gladly accepted especially with a child expected soon.  And so their first child was born, of all places, in Argentina, a most unanticipated place for them to be settled. "

Over the following years, they would move back to Israel and then be forced into Egypt, where my great-grandfather contracted tuberculosis and died. (I hope to discuss this in more depth later.) My great-grandmother decided to return to Krivoy-Rog. Her family (the Streltzovs) had been boyars, by then a minor level of the aristocracy, and had been exiled there when her grandfather converted their whole family to Judaism. Nonetheless she still had some sway in the Ministry of Education, and managed to persuade the government to transfer the Jewish school her family had been running to her sisters and her.

Then came 1917, and once again the rule of law broke down:

"By the end of the year civil war was in full conflagration.  Bands and newly sprouted armies roamed the length and breadth of that endless country.  All of them making their own law and order and robbing the citizenry.  Some just robbed, others did it with some decorum.  While taking over the region or town they would issue “their own money”.  The people had to accept their money or be declared “enemy of the people” and be shot on the spot.  Of course, supplies were hard to come by as the peasants were afraid to bring their produce to the market.  One had to stand in line for bread as for everything else.  The boy became an expert “line stander”.  As school was completely disrupted, he spent much time in “lines”.  He would stand in line for his mother; for some neighbours, and especially for the refugees.  There were a number of refugees in the neighbourhood.  These were mostly elderly people that were driven out of the western provinces bordering Austrian territory.  These border territories were where the Russian Armies suffered the greatest losses and the official as well as unofficial excuses for the losses were the “traitors and spies”.  And these elderly were the saboteurs and spies.  They were naturally destitute and often sick.  The boy would be asked, and did stay in line at the drugstore awaiting and delivering their medicines to them.  It was a constant adventure to the boy.  He always saw all the shatterings and upheavals going on all around him as a preordained adventure designed for his life."

Eventually, Krivoy-Rog was besieged and my grandfather witnessed devastating combat on the streets. My grandmother realised that even though the Reds were not anti-Semitic (or didn't appear to be as yet - see the recent book Bloodlands for what actually happened), they would not tolerate the Zionistic ideals of her family, and once again she was forced to flee. And that was the end of my family's centuries old existence in Russia. Communism was the final straw. 

So it's pretty obvious why the rule of law matters so much to my father, and why even though a streak of idealism runs through me, I'm wary of taking any part in activist left movements. The repercussions of the Russian revolution were so awful, and still affect the nature of power in Russia to this day. Establishing the rule of law firmly will be a slow and difficult process.

Manabozho the trickster god

Pagan is a great theme for a summer party. Painted druids and woodwomen with garlands in their hair wander about with confident energy. As per normal, I lope through in my Amerindian wolf-headress t-shirt and with African rug draped across my shoulders... more to come.

Old Notebooks

I'm rather busy with exams at the moment, so am reluctant to write up with anything new or involving non-legal intellectual exercise. However, as my next exam was on constitutional and administrative law, I thought it salutary to refer back to one of my old notebooks from election day last year. The notebook was written for personal perusal, so is rather fragmentary and lacks the even threadbare cohesion my blogs often have. Nonetheless it should be intelligible:

[NB I've inserted a couple of notes that clarify references in brackets.]

06.05.10

so i’d voted in the morning, partially to show by example that Mirka [1] should vote. but also because i wanted to vote
voting is r democracy.

to the point (now 10.20pm ish), went to N Gallery, after cycling to Waterstones for Stillinger’s Complel Keats Complete, and happened upon LaRoche Foucauld’s Charles I Insulted. [2]

what happens to these kings + queens
when translated into a society such as ours

common, and commons, and that r inexact impossible ‘common man’ blowing smoke in the haughty’s reader’s face, as his immaculate historicity was being reconstructed.

It makes no sense to tell a country about Europe,
where English history was all Kings + Queens, [3]
The historical record is scratched bombed and torn,
just as much as a map of Charles I’s face.
Godsend of an image. [4]

[1] our Polish cleaning lady. She had been here long enough to vote. No, I'm not proud of having a cleaning lady.
[2] a painting on display at the National at the time; Charles is shown haughtily reading a book, while a roundhead blows smoke in it; the image of his face was damaged during WW2 and had yet to be repaired when I was there. http://bit.ly/jVIyZH
[3] paraphrasing E H Gombrich's Little History of the World
[4] Charles believed in the divine right of kings to rule.


[Also see this great article on prisoner's rights: http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/02/prisoners_voting_rights]

Things Can Only Get Better

New Labour came to power in 1997 with the anthem 'Things can only get better.' Now look at us. Real wages are falling at their fastest rate since the 70s. The impossible promises were too good, too untrue.

Not that I disliked New Labour that much. It's just that at some point they must have realised 'no more Mr Boom and Mr Bust' was a fiction; but they kept on spending.

All the major political parties agree the country needs to cut - the debt mountain is so gross. I think the speed of the Conservative cuts is potentially crippling, but I understand the logic - to my mind, it is analogous to a fat man who needs to get fit - better sooner than later, before another heart attack.

SO now the economy is in for a horrible two+ years.

Thank you Conservatives, Lib Dems, Labour. You've done us proud.

A Proper Philosopher on Portraits

http://bit.ly/kLh5F5

A Moving Portrait

I cannot help but see everything through the present. For the moment of the past is always gone, and even the present can only ever be understood in relation to the past.

Take Walcott's phrase "Insomniac since four" from his poem 'Nearing Forty'. "Insomniac" is too polysyllabic and too psychologically objective for a four-year old to grasp. Yet Walcott's narrating self, nearing forty years old, can only understand the word 'Insomniac' through the identity in himself, his own repeated experience of the non-repetition of sleep, of that four-year old agency.

Thus, we can only understand our present experience as a constantly moving portrait. This portrait is tinctured and textured with the emotional fabric of the past, and modifying itself as it assimilates new sensory awareness and new fields of information.

Moreover, it can only ever be represented through the means at hand (and the understanding at head!). Laura takes a snap that encapsulates a party's zing. Madeleine paints, burrowed in her bedroom, with a Blakean intensity of colour that will one day inform her photographic portfolio. Karys swivels between retro and black-and-white filters to frame atmospheric vistas that leave the human aura in tact. At times, their eyes see the world as it would appear in their cameras.

And their memory is a little fresher.

And that is only one of many means.

-------------------------

Most of us are unaware of how complex this process is. I'll illustrate with some paragraphs I wrote at uni on the mutual influence of Coleridge and Wordsworth:

Coleridge's mode of uniting and separating ego contemplans (mere self-consciousness, the fact of “personal identity” (Literaria Biographia, chapter 4)) from ego contemplatus (the visual image, object or form we imagine to represent our past selves) would inform Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey.’[1] In the central section of the poem (ll. 66-80), Wordsworth reflects on the absence or repression of self-consciousness that occurred to him five years prior. With the present tense “hope”, the reader is left in suspense as to what the word “hope” applies to. It is a retrospect much like Coleridge’s “hot-fair day”, but it is one which illuminates why Wordsworth sees it as central to his survival as “a man” not to “doubt” that “in this moment there is life and food / For future years.” Five years prior, Marat was executed, the Bastille was stormed and Wordsworth may have been in France; it was a disorientating experience. In contrast with definite nature (“the sides…the deep…the mountains”), he is uncertain what he was analogous to (“a roe…a man…one”; reinforced later by “I cannot paint / What then I was”). His former self was impelled by “dread” so powerful that this sentence has no main clause; the relativity of perception is underscored; the motives and determination of Wordsworth as ‘man’ were and are obscure like a “sounding cataract”. In Wordsworth’s application of language, separating ego contemplans from ego contemplatus entails a radical uncertainty about the category of ‘man’, even ‘Wordsworth’ as man.
The obscurity of man to himself had been central to debates about the course of the French Revolution from 1788 onwards. Rousseau emphasises a primal self that needed to be recovered from the mystification of social conditions, leading to the French Revolution. Burke appealed to history, arguing for innate “prejudice” and “habit”, even what motivates isolated monks and other “inferior classes” to experience unnecessary suffering, as a healthy corrective to the abstract impracticality of the Revolutionary self. Godwin asserted the progressive triumph of reason over the ‘false consciousness’ (to use an anachronism) of ‘prejudice’. Malthus had restored a Burkean sense of ‘inferior’ man who needed to be educated out of his prejudices to keep the political economy healthy, or be destroyed.
In The 1805 Prelude (and prospectively The Recluse), Wordsworth offers his own version of man’s liberation from his obscurity to himself. Where his predecessors had classed or de-classed types of men, he offered a context-dependent (or to forge a neologism, a memory-dependent) model of human nature, where man must reflect and clarify the classes of his previous sense-experience; only through this movement can he escape the twin-errors of “prejudice” and abstraction.

---

[1] “ego contemplatus…the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed” (Biographia Literaria, chapter 4. Qted in Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996),138; Leader reads this discussion of the Irish bull as clear evidence that Coleridge thinks we make or create our images of ourselves in memory, so that he can show that for Coleridge publication was an important factor in the creation of a coherent self.

------------------------------

Lastly, I might relate all this to the movie I saw tonight: F. W. Murnau's delightful The Last Laugh. It is a tragedy tinged and framed with delirious comedy. An Walrus-bearded old man (the magnificently expressive Emil Jannings) loses his prized position as a hotel doorman, has a drunken party in his flat where it is assumed he is still a porter (dazzlingly shot with his Point of View, blurred and experimentally shifting) and is forced to be a bathroom wash attendant. These are intercut with flashbacks, which lurch towards the surreal as he gets drunker and drunker, capturing how the present purgatory sets in relief the gleaming pride of his former self. Murnau captures the buzz and exteriority of the city through that simplicity of expression that was perhaps only available in the silent era. As one critic put it, he "set down the first form of the cinema: the simple universal theme without complexity of narrative details. And it realised, as well as articulated in intention, the principle of constructed environment converging upon the character in relief." (Harry Potamkin) 'Relief' is an appropriate word for Murnau's dreamy poetic artistry. He sculpts in film. He creates a constantly moving, three-dimensional portrait of a life without means of colour and without means of word.

Should death be celebrated?

I was intrigued when I saw this in a friend's twitter feed - it's a genuinely interesting question and few dare to broach it. As it turned out, this was a reference to Osama bin Laden's death, which somewhat dampened my enthusiasm. Of course, the question of whether his death should be celebrated is a controversial topic at the moment; it interrelates to all sorts of questions as to whether this will escalate tensions between patriotic Americans and radical extremists, or serve to improve things (less likely!); as to whether the use of military force against a possibly unarmed man is legal in international law; and as to what heroism and martyrdom mean in a world where science returns most well-educated people's frame of reference to within the immanent, though not necessarily to atheism. Yet beyond this reference to a specific, historically significant person, the question is a profound one because in most cultures death is so strongly associated with mourning.

Of course, it is right that, in most circumstances, rituals to commemorate a person's passing (funerals and interment, etc) should be sad. In the Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead (Keil Malai Rahamim), it is said "may their soul be bound up in the bond of life." Here, bond of life means the bond of eternal life in God; but I, who am more convinced of the present reality, always think of the bonds of life we form here: the intense emotional attachments that are formed from our inception through to our birth, interlinked with our siblings' birth and then our teachers, mentors, friends and loved ones. The majority (I hope) have formed such intense bonds in the hearts and minds of a few around them - a husband or wife, children, and certain others - that their sadness at having a person wrenched from them must be respected.

At the same time, I am fond of a memory when a friend of mine studying history recollected a detail of a town in France where death was celebrated, ritually and with an upbeat passion. Long ago, and very rare, it gave me a sense of what perhaps is underrepresented in mourning for people - to celebrate that people have really lived and fulfilled themselves within the human span.

Wittgenstein said

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." 

Perhaps it is because I am young and irreverent, but I enjoy jubilation and humour, expressions of a person's vision and desire for achievement, at a ritual of passing and think it is often apt. My uncle, who died in 2006, has written on his tombstone his bumper sticker: 'Defeat terrorism / Have a nice day!' And at his funeral I gave a speech about an article he'd been telling me about, which described the technology for a bridge spanning the Atlantic possible. I think funerals should also be about our striving and our sense of possibility.

I also like macabre humour, if tasteful. At my grandfather's funeral, I read the famous song from Shakespeare's Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
 Nor the furious winter's rages;
 Thou thy worldly task hast done,
 Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
 Golden lads and girls all must,
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

 Fear no more the frown o' the great;
 Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
 Care no more to clothe and eat;
 To thee the reed is as the oak:
 The sceptre, learning, physic, must
 All follow this, and come to dust.

 Fear no more the lightning-flash,
 Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
 Fear not slander, censure rash;
 Thou hast finished joy and moan;
 All lovers young, all lovers must
 Consign to thee, and come to dust.

I love the pun on 'come to dust' at the end of the first stanza; it's so dark and materialised, and puts such a spin of working life on the 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' formula. One that was incidentally repeated at my grandfather's interment, when the church warden was attempting to pour his ashes into the pedestal, and some of it blew away in the wind, on a lovely summer's day.

My grandfather would not have been pleased. He did not want to die, and he wanted to be buried, not cremated. But he was so demented by his death that he was barely whom he had been, and frankly we had all said goodbye to him long before. And we had bought no plot to bury him, and his desire for burial was, I think, not a religious one. (In some societies, they toss the corpse wrapped in a sheet into the ground). In his last decade, he attended church (incidentally, his surname was Church) and became moderately religious; but he had confessed to my mum that looked at as a story, the story of Jesus Christ was one of the most horrible and bloodiest ever written. (One can see that I lied to the man at the door two blogs back). The Christian myth has its positive aspects too, but I think death for my grandfather was not to be celebrated.

If anyone reads this, I'd be interested to hear their thoughts on the question.

Encounters with the Islamic periphery

I came across a quote today from J.M. Coetzee, probably recording a well-known detail:

"The waterskater, that is an insect and dumb, traces the name of God on the surfaces of ponds, or so the Arabians say. None is so deprived that he cannot write."

But it's new to me and brings to mind this famous passage from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria:

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION.

Coleridge, like the Arabians, saw God instanced in nature. In both the natural world and in human nature. But, from what I've seen of the Islamic arts, where I've encountered it in, say, the British Museum, in the extraordinary palaces and interlocking geometrical patterns of Turkish mosques or in the (unfortunately) least celebrated of Israel's pasts, they take humility to God to such an extreme that they barely represent animals in their holy places (as can be quite frequent in Judaic symbolism, mindful of the second commandment) let alone human beings.

Returning to the quote, what is striking about Coetzee's tone is the peculiar mixture of reverence ('None is so deprived...') and loathing ('dumb', which is true by most animals standards, not just humans) in which the waterskater is held. The universality of writing is mythicised in the waterskater; at the same time, in many Arab nations, literacy is low for the lower socio-economic classes so this elevation of literacy disguises the absence of will to create universal literacy in reality (see http://bit.ly/mjNvzU). There's some strange aestheticisation of illiteracy and deprivation as the literacy of divinely-bestowed nature, even when it is couched in reference to the non-human and circumscribed as so beautiful that only the divine could have put it there.

It makes me think of an encounter I had with a hostel-owner called Harry in Selcuk in Turkey. He was a very affable person, often very willing to give any advice and he provided a good breakfast. I later discovered that a friend of mine, Katie Murphy, had been to the same hostel and had wonderful memories of Harry's barbecues. But my lingering memory was what I heard him say to me one morning during Ramadan.  [I had obviously made him aware that I had been at Oxford, not sure what else; certainly I said nothing about wanting to make money]

"So what if you get ten scholarships to study at Oxford, or you make a lot of money and feel so proud because you're rich and successful..."

That was the gist of it, though it's perhaps a poor rendering. I believe he may even have referred to the Devil. It shocked me, what he said, both because I saw a resentful side of his character that I wasn't expecting, but also because the old religious language of pride as a vice seemed so far-out and, at least in English terms, antiquated. At the same time, it made me appreciate how far removed the Western education I have been given is from the old morality, gave me a real shock of alternative attitudes to the world. A lovely thing about the opening quote is that it returns a sense of awe and humbleness to the natural world, even if circumscribed by religion.

The other side of the resentment is, perhaps, that noone likes being underrepresented in world affairs, or others falsely overrepresented as no doubt Europeans and Americans of today are (though what in half a century?). Five centuries ago, Islamic civilisation was dominant in the Indo-European region, and the Islamic empires were as revered for their advancements in understanding and knowledge, in science, as they were abhorred for what was perceived as their decadent, decaying dynasties. 
Now they are written out of most people's understanding of history. Like the insect. 

Or, for those business leaders and prominent men minded towards action and objectivity, the imagination. The 'renaissance', which marked the beginning of the ascendancy of Western power, was fascinated by the 'Turk' - from Tamburlaine, Selimus, Othello...on through Robinson Crusoe, enslaved by the Turks before becoming a slaver himself, and beyond.

Now when we look at regimes like those of Mubarak or Gadaffi, there is nothing from these modern states that most Westerners know of or look up to, because Western media so dominates most of our cultural fields. (I don't claim to know anything about whether Egyptian or Libyan culture is actually any good or not. I also don't claim these are Islamic, though they have predominantly Islamic populations. and are predominantly Arab) What is left is the horror at the creaking dynasties and the brute inhumane ways of these outmoded polities. 

What will replace them is a question thousands of political scholars and journalists are picking apart right now, no doubt. Not what we have certainly, but they'll have some of what we have too - big business will want what slices look good, if indeed things look like stabilising. Along with big business will come the globalised infrastructure - the bankers, accountants, lawyers, etc - which is making the world a safer, if little less unfair, place to take wages home.

'The Truth' hurts

I've spent most of this week alone at home, quietly studying. But it hasn't been without its occasional human diversions. One of the most interesting was on Monday, when the door rung unexpectedly.

I wandered downstairs in my shorts and the shirt I had slept in, and opened the door. A man stood there with a leaflet in hand, which was headed with 'The Truth.' Aha, I thought - there is a way to deal with this situation. I said emphatically:

"I'm Jewish, and I'm not interested in Christianity."

He paused for a second, and in a tremendously soft-spoken and reassuring voice (with that depth that comes easier to black men, and which led me to suspect he was probably quite good as a social worker and comforter of people): "OK - but, don't you think, what with the wars and the crime that are taking place, that it would be a better world if we could stop all the violence and hatred?"

Now the obvious answer would be 'Duh - of course'; but I had just been studying criminal law and was in no mood for a ridiculous conversation.

"I think        human nature is incredibly complex and that I have no power to resolve these problems.

(pause)

I am, however, interested in the newspaper." I walk past him and grab the Financial Times lying on our doorstep. Of course, the paper would resolve nothing but the stare on his face.

"OK...so you're not interested in Christianity, but do you want me to come back so that we can discuss these issues."

"No."

And that was that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agTeW67f_y0

The Imaginative and The Factual

Wahey...new blog - fanfare, delight...or maybe just a pet project for a week or two.

Basically, I've set up the blog because I want something active to do in the evening, after revising for my law exams. My core theme is going to be the imaginative and the factual.

I've recently noticed that the specificity of legal exams is affecting the way I write to people. Someone sent me a text asking whether I had plans for the wedding day, and I immediately wrote back that I have no plans for Friday, and did they have time off Friday, making absolutely no reference to the big event. Even in a later text, I mentioned Will and Kate, specific people, rather than the royal saga/media event and any of the romance or frankly stupid revery the event is arousing. That's just one example of how it's affecting my writing.

On the other hand, I'm also getting time to let my imagination roam a bit. As recommended, I'm spending no more than 40 minutes at a time absorbing information in revision. In the 5 minute breaks and occasional naps in between, I try to let my mind do exactly what it's not allowed when I'm working - dream up wild and wonderful things.

For instance, I hear an electric saw on a building site that's been vaguely irritating me for a while, and think of the place where the works are taking place. This reminds me of the Shard, the spiky pyramid of a skyscraper shooting up into the London cityscape with extraordinary velocity. Then, of the fox that was reported as having climbed the Shard. Returning to my imaginary construction site, I imagine other animals at work on the building. Chimpanzees are busy scrambling up to their workspaces, bearing electric chainsaws, and screwdrivers in their teeth; giraffes supervise, swinging their long heads into any potentially errant corners; squirrels chuck nuts and bolts to each other; that kind of thing.

Another time, lying on my bed awake but dreamily, I notice the humming in my wall - and immediately the Bhuddist monks of Tibet are there, droning out some immense hymn to the skies and mountains. All sorts of crevices, shifting and evacuating air, are humming in harmony as space is resonated with human rhythm.

This brought my mind onto Byron's Manfred and his journal about the Alps which I decided to look up this evening and from which I shall quote to end my blog:

                           Ye toppling crags of ice!
Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down
In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me--
I hear ye momently above, beneath,
Crash with a frequent conflict (Manfred, Act I Scene II)

It is not noon -- the sunbow's rays still arch
The torrent with the many hues of heaven
And roll the sheeted silver's waving column
O'er the crag's headlong perpendicular,
And fling its lines of foaming light along,
And to and fro, like the pale courser's tail,
The Giant steed, to be bestrode by Death,
As told in the Apocalypse...

                      while the hues of youth, --
Carnation'd like a sleeping infant's cheek
Rock'd by the beating of her mother's heart
Or the rose tints, which summer's twilight leaves
Upon the lofty glacier's virgin snow,
The blush of earth embracing with her heaven,--
Tinge thy celestial aspect, and make tame
The beauties of the sunbow which bends o'er thee,,,, (Manfred, Act II Scene II)

Before ascending the mountain -- went to the torrent (7 in the morning) again -- the Sun upon it forming a rainbow of the lower part of all colours-- but principally purple and gold -- the bow moving as you move--I never saw anything like this--it is only in the Sunshine...

The height of the Yung frau is 13000 feet above the sea--and 11000 above the valley--she is the highest of this range,-- heard the Avalanches falling every five minutes nearly--as if God was pelting the Devil down from Heaven with snowballs-- from where we stood  on the Wengren [sic] Alp-- we had all these in view on one side and on the other the clouds rose from the opposite valley curling up perpendicular precipices--like the foam of the Ocean of Hell during a Springtide-- it was white & sulphery -- and immeasurably deep in appearance --- the side we ascended was (of course) not of so precipitous a nature -- but on arriving at the summit we looked down the other side upon a boiling sea of cloud -- dashing against the crags on which we stood...

(Alpine Journal, Sept. 23rd).