Steve_Bamlett_blog

The Next blogs – the plan:

I intend to keep up the blogs, lest the pin of my mental world is withdrawn in the present crisis in my husband’s health. For Geoff has become increasingly breathless over a week or so – the GP surgery thinking that at 83 all that was required was consultation and then, on insistence, with a nurse with that nurse prescribing steroids.

On Monday he insisted on seeing a doctor who, finding his blood oxygen levels poor, ensured they weren’t so by getting him to breath heavily. The doctor did not accept the sputum sample for laboratory analysis that Geoff had taken with him. His blood readings had raised white blood cell count, so he was given the most general of antibiotics – Amoxycillin.

Yesterday, with no improvement, we insisted on another doctor who wrote a letter for Casualty insisting that he not walk until the issue was investigated. Yesterday I took him to Casualty. The harm that diagnosis by receptionist following rules remains heinous, and I do not think this is only at Crook, County Durham.

We were hours sat in Casualty (he in his wheelchair) but his blood oxygen refused to rise. He was put on oxygen, an X-ray revealed ‘shadows on the lung’ and tests later leading to a diagnosis of pneumonia. This morning, though being on enhanced oxygen supply has corrected his blood pressure his blood oxygen remains in the dangerous are of 88 – 92. He still has had no breakfast and cannot sleep in the noisy ward.

How can I do my daily blog in an attempt to keep sane? Only by showing my plans. I still feel that my Van Gogh piece lacks what I want from it in order to add to my learning and understanding. I also think that I must use the opportunity to see the link between  Francis Bacon and his favoured painter, Van Gogh, before writing on the Bacon: The Human Presence exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery. Moreover this is Durham. I can only visit Geoff in visiting hours 2 – 4 & 6 – 8.

I started before the GP appointment a first blog to bridge the personal learning gap. It had to start with some response to reading  Émile Zola’s The Sin of Abbé Mouret (La faute de l’abbé Mouret) translated by Valerie Minogue (Oxford World Classics ed.) Oxford, Oxford University Press, an edition recommended in the essay by Julien Domercq (2024) ‘The Montmajour Drawings Series: Between Observation and Imagination’ in Cornelia Homburg (ed.) (2024) Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers, London, National Gallery Global Limited, 56 – 65 as a way into Van Gogh’s Provencal themes. These are the very themes selected by Bacon for learning about the use of colour.

Here is the working title of the first blog, but it need more thought than I have cognitive and emotional capacity at the moment. After that working title I detail my plans, with my Geoff hopefully home.

Bridging Gaps in Personal Learning: This blog is an attempt to understand my own process of  learning. It is based on a highly situated and contextualised reading of Émile Zola’s The Sin of Abbé Mouret (La faute de l’abbé Mouret) translated by Valerie Minogue (Oxford World Classics ed.) Oxford, Oxford University Press, an edition recommended in the essay by Julien Domercq (2024) ‘The Montmajour Drawings Series: Between Observation and Imagination’ in Cornelia Homburg (ed.) (2024) Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers, London, National Gallery Global Limited, 56 – 65 and in between visiting that Van Gogh exhibition and an equally innovative one, with one eye on Van Gogh as Bacon’s model as a colourist, at the National Poetry Gallery (the blog on that exhibition to follow).

The attention of the later nineteenth century (as in the pictured Pre-Raphaelite Collier painting (circled detail) and a feminist conceptual new film, (surrounding the circle) The Death Of Albine). Albine dies by suicide facilitated by overwhelming herself with the scent of multiple flowers from the garden in Paradou (the scientific-modern & traditional symbolist ‘Paradise’ of the novel). The Oxford cover of this translation uses Van Gogh. That suggests a much deeper engagement with Zola’s contribution to the theory of the Naturalist arts, which should not be confounded with social realist arts, as it often is.

I think the essay in the Van Gogh catalogue insufficiently theorises the significance of the  Zola novel. Domercq calls it ‘a modern reworking of the Fall of Man’ and although his description implies that much gets changed in the reworking (including the recalibration of the relationship of the ‘pure’ and the ‘wild’ from a religious to an evolutionary model), they never say so explicitly.[1] Hence my need to make those issues of the naturalisation of religion significant, for the term ‘anti-clerical’ on its own oversimplifies Zola (and van Gogh’s relationship to spirituality and religion).

Much needs to be worked out for this blog and I am not equipped for that. My plan thereafter is to write the following series of bridges across the Rhône delta of my argument.

Topic	Comment
2. Re-reading Van Gogh’s method through Zola naturalism as a means of bridging the symbolist and observational perceptions of the drivers of physical nature in humans and in the flora and fauna of human nature’s context. Why this must evoke the religious model and revise it,	Ambitious. Will it work?
3. Van Gogh, the arbitrary colourist and the debt of Francis Bacon to him and his shadows.	There is material to collate on this already, even in the NPG catalogue.
4. Then the blog on the Bacon: The Human Presence exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery.	Back on course.

So now to walk Daisy. Have a bath. Ready for Geoff at 2 in the hospital Ward 12.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxxxx

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[1] Julien Domercq (2024: 58) ‘The Montmajour Drawings Series: Between Observation and Imagination’ in Cornelia Homburg (ed.) (2024) Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers, London, National Gallery Global Limited, 56 – 65