Art & Medicine

What I love about art is the way it stretches thought beyond the obvious. I am well aware of my Jungian preference for Intuition in the way I deal with information – and modern art is an ideal medium to spark off the completely random tangential thinking which so appeals to my psychological nuances.

I have just spotted an intriguing piece on Damien Hirst’s installation Pharmacy in the Tate Modern. Damien tells of how he came to make the work when he considered that people trust medicine more than they trust art. Prescribed drugs are seen as beyond doubt – problem solvers, death defiers, cure-alls. Clutching their comforting little prescription, people swallow the pill thoughtlessly, and yet they question art. The installation contains four step-ups with a bowl containing honey placed on each, and an insect killer mounted on the ceiling. This is Damien’s challenge in the chemist’s shop – where death is a thing which is denied, he invites it in and has set it up in the form of lures and electric shocks. The four beautiful apothecary bottles lined up on the counter represent the four elements – earth, air, fire and water.

It leads me into thinking about healing and personal responsibility – and how so many of us have surrendered our power and total trust to the world of conventional medicine.

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Gaudi and Nature

As a Pagan Druid, the natural world is my temple. But places of worship created by human hand can often thrill me – the mosques of Istanbul, the incensed, jewel-darkness of Chartres Cathedral, the pristine, white tall-forest-like beauty of York Minster – a collective conscious act of religious dedication, often over many centuries, is inherent in the fabric of these exquisite buildings – works of art in themselves.

Anyone who has visited Barcelona will know the beautiful architecture of Antonio Gaudi. The extraordinary, curving and organic nature of his work conveys his innate understanding of Nature and how to work in harmony with her. I had always wanted to visit the Sagrada Familia and it did not disappoint me. Bristling and gorgeous, it is as yet half built and a block of buildings will need to be demolished and the traffic system diverted to complete it. Where modern day artisans are still translating long-dead Gaudi’s vision into mosaics and stonework, I found this quote of his which encapsulated everything I had understood instinctively about him:

“the great book, always open and which we must make efforts to understand, is the book of Nature. The other books are based on it and have the mistakes and interpretations of mankind.”

A Gaudi

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Can you feel the sap rising?!!

In a little under two weeks we will be celebrating the Beltane festival. Beltane, the last Spring festival and the threshold of summer, is a high-energy, passionate and burgeoning time, full of growing light and warmth. It makes me want to dance with joy! I can feel the sap rising and the pulse of the earth growing stronger. I can feel it now.

We become more aware of the sensuality of the world and of our own physicality, feeling grounded, earthy and bodily focussed. Of course, this is the great fertility festival, and the Horned God and the Lady of the Land come together to create the climactic moment which creates new life for another season. This poem by fin de siecle French poet Paul Verlaine is layered with this physicality – it is sensuous and sensual and very much with the rising energy of the here and now:

‘Sap which mounts, and flowers which thrust,
Your childhood is a bower:
Let my fingers wander in the moss
Where glows the rosebud

‘Let me among the clean grasses
Drink the drops of dew
Which sprinkle the tender flower, —
– Paul Verlaine, Spring

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Beautiful Beeches…

As I work again on the Ovate grade of the Druid learning, I am much with the spirit of trees.

Beech is my totem tree, my graceful Queen of the Woods. Here in the South, they stand tall and silvery, their arching branches like waterfalls of green. The shimmering delicacy of their leaves – eye-achingly verdant in the Spring – burn like fire in the Autumn. They are a potent symbol of the land I live on.

Over to the West, the character of beech changes. They become Faw – glossy leaved and lichen covered, mosses growing freely in the unpolluted air. They become shrunken, fey-like, yet more robust. They become grandmothers, their bleached white bone branches seem brittle and delicate.

I took this photo on Berry Down in North Devon near some old sunken barrows. I loved the contrast of a few spires of foxglove in the foreground. Fairies and dryads seem less shy in the West – if you sit quietly for long enough the animals and the birds forget that you are there, and if you listen carefully, you may hear the spirit of the tree breathing…

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Trees are wonderful things…

… and the capable man I live with takes great photos. As the greening of the trees is almost upon us – here’s a favourite, with verdant blessings!

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Poetry – words & sounds?

I have heard a few performance poets lately and am unsure how I feel about hearing, rather than seeing, poems. It’s not that I don’t enjoy listening, I do, enormously, but there is a subtle change in my relationship with the poem which has stimulated a puzzled interest in me.

It’s the same with paintings. We often don’t need to hear the artists’ interpretation about what they have created – the important thing is the emotional response it triggers in the viewer. The art I love has this effect on me – it stirs me and creates feelings – good and bad – witness tears in the Van Gogh museum last Spring!

When we hear a poet reading their work this relationship changes – suddenly someone else’s voice is there, with all the cadence and tone present, with all the emotion they felt when they wrote the words. When the poems are funny or satirical, the listening pleasure is all the more! Accent and dialect add to the mix – Ian McMillan being the example which comes to mind, and hearing Yeats recited with an Irish accent is magical.

And yet I miss seeing the words on the paper – the way they look, the black symbolic shapes on the white space – the shapes of the letters and the shapes the words make on the page. The effect the words have on my feelings as I read them, the pleasure lingered over, and over and over. As many times as I choose. Repeating my favourite lines again and again if I want to.

Mary Oliver is one of my most favourite poets – it’s hard to choose the poem I like the most because all her work is so wonderful – simple, yet technically perfect. Like Robert Frost, layered with a deep connection with the Earth. Black Oaks is sublime, speaking to me of the release that comes from a life close to nature:

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,

or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.

Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.

But to tell the truth after a while I’m pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen

and you can’t keep me from the woods, from the tonnage

of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,

I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

Mary Oliver

Not long ago I stumbled on a website with an mp3 of Mary reading her most well known poem, Wild Geese, and it was really surprising – the tone and emphasis was very different to my interpretation. Here’s Mary reading At Blackwater Pond.

Perhaps I just need to enjoy it all!

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