An attempt to climb Mt Impossible

Ever tried to explain why you bought a picture? Objectively? Honestly?

The one I have in mind purports to show the natural world. Except it doesn’t. The random colours, lines, shapes and shades that constitute nature have been replaced by an ordered view. Ordered but not predictable. An order that carries the type of logic that is just about detectable in a language you do not understand. For this is a work of art, and that’s a fact not necessarily a compliment. The word art has links with artificial and artifice.

From 3 m away the picture is seen as a pattern, not of course symmetrical. A pattern defines something that is whole. Closer examination reveals that the logic – recognised if not understood – is worked out so that all parts combine harmoniously to create the pattern. The pattern in no way resembles any other picture I know but the certainty of its logic does.

The picture is unique and matches my untutored prejudices. The decision to buy is not based on the desire to own but to live with the picture, an important distinction. Buying refines the assessment processes; it tests their validity since there is nothing sadder than a picture that has managed to dupe itself into acceptance.

Pictures change because we change. This one already has. Once it consisted of a foreground containing the subject matter and a small, much darker background. The latter is now more dominant by, paradoxically, becoming more distant. There is now a sense of “out there”. I have tried to avoid subjectivity but I must accept a newer brooding quality, even confrontation. The picture would not look well on a chocolate box.

It's chalk what talks

SPEAK MEMORY The years roll by, the eyes gum up, the synapses disconnect, the joints cease to flex and the brain turns to Angel Delight. Everything declines except the importance of the chalkboard. Forget the nano-second responses of email – this is how members of the same household communicate. This is our defence against the moment that is the very symbol of old age: “Damn, we forgot the flat-leafed parsley.” For the Bondens, both of them, have always striven to be middle-class.

On this day the chalkboard suffered data overload as we prepared for a visit from our elder daughter. As far as our worn minds can recall, all was acquired. And then came the beautiful, self-purging moment when a wet sponge reduced the black surface to shining nothingness. After which, as Housman said, “all’s to do again.”

DO I STILL EXIST? Recently I googled my real identity – the dull-as-ditchwater surname preceded by the mildly exotic Vorname. Alas I share the combination with an American quarterback and the initial pages were devoted to his college career, his entry into the pros, his lacklustre performance and his final “release”. Then came pages about an eponymous Pennsylvanian pervert and a Tennesseean arsonist (I kid you not) before I finally re-read an article I wrote for an American plastics magazine. Very much a sic transit moment.

Whereas when I googled Barrett Bonden, Works Well was fourth up. So my fictitious self has a greater presence than my corporeal self. Could someone of a philosophical bent provide me with much-needed reassurance about this?

Fifteen minutes of Warhol time

A post for Zu Schwer (neé Rouchswalwe) which has roots in one of her posts.

Each nationality in the press party contributed to the sayonara evening which ended the Citizen Watch visit to Japan. I said, “The guy from The Financial Times insisted I should speak for Britain. Not, as I had hoped, because I am the best British journalist here, but because (long pregnant pause) I am the oldest… and Japan venerates the aged.”

I was 53. I went on to sympathise with Japan about its diminishing population. “For what else could explain the plastic rather than organic policemen that dot the roads we have travelled on?” It took time for the audience to realise I was referring to an anti-speeding system then in vogue, where every tenth plastic policeman became a real one equipped with a radar gun. But when light broke through the laughter was encouraging.

I delivered my formal felicitations in phonetic Japanese, to the consternation of the amazingly expert woman translator who, up til then, had been freewheeling with English into Japanese.

It all sounds feeble now. But I faced people eager to hear what I would say next. I was able to pause creatively, to milk the laughter and the use of the translator. It was the high spot of my brief (and previously inauspicious) public speaking career. Since then it has been a steep and humiliating decline and I have retreated into the Nabokov Defence (the basis of a sonnet I posted): “I think like a genius, I write like a man with talent, but I speak like a child”.

A momentary indulgence

It’s a turn-off, I know, but I need to write something about maths. Wrestle with it. I can’t do maths but I have a probably unjustified feeling I dimly understand its broader contours. Whatever, I am drawn to it unlike other seemingly impenetrable subjects like voodoo, haute cuisine and chess.

Fearful of bidding my readership goodbye let me invoke a 1960 article by the physicist Wigner called "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences". It starts with a truism – that physics has a mathematical structure. But then comes the rather more startling point: equations decribing relationships in physics often contain pointers about the way physics may develop in the future. I find this fascinating.

Lazy people like me have often referred to maths as a language, a way of saying something precisely and rigorously. It is of course but it’s much more. There is a case for saying that the maths of physics is physics. For Wigner adds that in some cases these so-called pointers to the future are far from airy-fairy; they may be regarded as empirical (ie, susceptible to development by observation, experience and experiment).

There are many examples but the classic one is the work done by Maxwell on elementary electrical and magnetic phenomena in the mid-19th century. His equations also describe radio waves which were discovered by Hertz in 1887 a few years after Maxwell’s death. And radio waves are at the heart of the later physics we all love and are totally baffled by. Hey, doesn’t this sort of stuff leave astrology bobbling about in its wake?

Sorry about that. Regard it as an aberration.

Cheap clothes can embarrass you

Query: Does this post touch on one of those hard-wired but rarely admitted differences between men and women?

This morning I discarded a pair of underpants - a gift from my mother-in-law, dead these last seven years, so they were possibly ten or twelve years old. Unlike the rest, these pants were made of silk. Presumably more expensive than cotton but, it seems, more durable.

I only buy cheap clothing - other than for ski-ing. I conclude that good clothes wear out while cheap clothes disintegrate. The prelude to this disintegration is when long lengths of thread wrap themselves round my buttocks, calves or elbows. Cheap clothes are cheaply stitched. The so-called track-suit I wear when cycling in the shed (qv) came from Primark and cost £12. Much thread has already detached itself and no doubt, one of these days, I shall walk, embarrassed, from the shed back to the house.

I briefly abrogated the cheap-clothing policy when I bought a Savile Row suit prior to crossing the Atlantic and presenting myself as an archetypal Englishman at job interviews. This suit neither wore out nor disintegrated; I simply got too fat to wear it. The fact that the drainpipe trousers were eventually fifteen years out of fashion didn’t worry me.

I assume that all clothes, cheap or expensive, are machine stitched. So why do some machines do the job while others don’t? Then there’s the matter of buttons. If I were more interested in clothes (Chinos are the only trousers!) I’d have given all this more thought. Luckily the people who read this blog do just that and I await their soothing answers.

Nothing so dangerous as a keyboard

Dedicated to all those I have
unwittingly – and wittingly – hurt, insulted,
misunderstood, put down or passed by

This is a modern type of dance: we sway,
With thoughts engaged but hands that never touch.
Our partners may be half a world away,
Unheard, held only in the pixel’s clutch.

Words normally succumb to charm and style
On television and in politics
But here they’re all we are - no frown, no smile,
No waving hand, no nervous facial ticks.

Consider now that oh-so-witty phrase
Launched nude, destined for distant scrutiny,
Mere words that lacked the normal artifice
Of gesture, tone or personality.

Arriving, frozen, in its shorn-lamb form
The letters fixed, the burden divergent,
A dozen novel voices in a swarm
Of unintended causes for dissent.

Misread, the words return as bleak response
Like local wine they have not travelled well
The wit that wore such nonchalance
Is now dull-voiced, a melancholy bell.

I could be bland for blandness rarely hurts
And many people search out Mother’s Pride*.
There’s comfort in a cliché as it flirts
With what is known, well-worn or lately died.

I could attach a photo of my face
Its drooping gauntness admirable proof
That age and underlying lack of grace
Are reasons why my prose can sound aloof.

To blog – that ugly word – is idle fun
With answers that supply a rich reward.
But oh the flaw of simple words alone
Without the aid of physical accord.

For what is said and what we want to say
Bestrides a gap as wide as any wound
It is the price that intellect must pay
When our humanity has run aground.

* Thermometers thrust into mouths
sometimes break and fragments are
swallowed. As antidote, sufferers were
made to eat cotton-wool sandwiches.
Technology has moved on and Mother’s
Pride sandwiches, lacking cotton-wool,
do just as well.

Save the BBs from poisoning

Any ideas? The upper surface is sticky, possibly even slimy.

Why I never invaded anywhere

Lee Enfield .303 rifle. The original design dates back to the turn of the century. But then the RAF was primarily into bombs.

Bren gun, known in the RAF as an LMG or light machine gun – so christened by some brass hat who never had to carry one.

Before the RAF capriciously decided I would be taught to repair radio equipment I underwent basic training - squarebashing (UK), boot camp (USA). I was warned about lying with loose women, about not brushing my teeth and about espousing the teaching of Bertrand Russell rather than those of the RAF’s Yahweh.

More important were: obedience to orders (including those requiring me to go out and get killed by the enemy) and killing skills. I’ll forgo the hysterical yet comical bayonet training and concentrate on the three loaded guns I discharged.

The first was a .22 rifle on a 25-yard range. One instructor got into position on the ground and another bawled explanations. When the prone instructor took aim silence descended and nervous anticipation rose. The discharge was like the tiniest of farts. Suppressing a snigger (which would have been unpleasantly punished) caused my sternum to ache.

I then shot a .303 Lee Enfield rifle on a 200-yard range. Did I hit the target? It didn’t matter. For me an enemy 200 yards away was a notional enemy, a mere theory. With the Bren gun we reverted to 25 yards. A burst required squeezing the trigger during the time taken to say “A thousand and one”. There was a caveat: “Don’t count to a thousand and one,” screamed the instructor.

Two bursts and the paper target tore apart, then – to my delight – detached itself from the holder and flew into the air. For the first time I had an inkling of why some men get addicted to shooting guns. Soon, however, I was wielding a soldering iron. Haven’t squeezed a trigger since.