Steve_Bamlett_blog

Who do you spend the most time with?

Mine is the next train, and I sit here with my skinny cappuccino waiting for it, aware I hate leaving my hubby and doggy behind in Durham. But that’s what it is like to be driven to leave no vacant space that might get filled by experience. It’s fairly typical of depressives. Think of Tennyson casting all that into his Ulysses.

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

All that experience  accrued still leaves a hole, and even the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses tries to find that with which to stuff that hole in the streets of old Dublin. A hole, after all, is nothing more nor less than a deficit from the whole –  a lot of absence hangs around that missing ‘w’: the more easy to lose because it is silent.

Bloom traversing Dublin has become for me a train booked yesterday to Edinburgh in order to see the National Theatre of Scotland’s new version, all packed into an hour for a cast of 5, of Lear: https://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/events/lear.

How could that be resisted: to dive into the expression of the maximal experience of age death and dying to exist in our culture; that hand that must be wiped because ‘it smells of mortality’. In one hour! What more will be drained from the whole by attempting to use just a part of it. Will I miss the Gloucester plot if that falls? Certainly, the production pictures promise much in terms of the path that will be followed down this particular rabbit-hole:

Even stills move when theatre is essentialised, I think. To not experience the sensations, thoughts, feelings, and prompts to motion this production must fill would be a hole too large. Hopefully,  I will report back positively – perhaps by adding to this blog later.

At home I was aware that my train would arrive 2 hours before the play starts at 2.30. I thought to mysel: “John Bellany’s self-portraits will fill that gorgeously. They are showing at the City Arts Centre: https://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/john-bellany-life-self-portraiture.

Bellany is, a knowledgeable, and a dear friend says, ‘artist’s artist’. That makes sense. I have loved him for long as a kind of Scottish Ulysses,  who looked for ages to reconcile those images that would elsewise be entirely personal fragments.

And what of me?,I think of ‘flounders’ in Bellany’s work, for what was Ulysses but a kind of flounder,even in Tennyson and Joyce’s versions. And, as for me:

I feel I flounder in a way that is not true of that focused Braw Lad of Eyemouth.

By the way, we must have passed Eyemouth 15 minutes ago, for we have crossed the Tweed at Berwick, and the coast has opened up:

There is enough for separate blogs on each of today’s experiences,  so I will send love now to Juanne Mark and especially my Geoffee and Daisy.  For

... every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things;...

Bye for now

With love

Steven xxxxxxx

Bèn to Bellany. So .Moving it stuns  ut no photos allowed. Xxx