Prams
Are these the last days? Flames run from bourse, basilica and tower block. The suburbs are a terminal moraine of rubble. Out of town, in countryside scraped to bed-rock, a lady in black mourns over her account book: "My husband on his return—”
There is no comfort. An elderly gentleman, well connected to his watch chain, looks over her shoulder and offers: "The future is without assets."
These images are Paul Eluard's, the words are by R.S. Thomas from his catch crop of poems Ingrowing Thoughts culled from Herbert Read's Surrealism and Art Now. Here, among paintings where others once saw a new day dawning, Thomas picks over "the ruins of an idea."
What idea? Judgement has clearly caught up with us. I think of Octavio Paz's sentence: "Cathedrals are the ruins of Christianity as skyscrapers are the ruins of capitalism." Paz saw Christianity as the foundation of western culture. Broken, it won't come again; but we can't do without it: it is our heritage.
Thomas, interviewed for Planet, describes our inheritance differently, not simply as Christian but as Graeco-Judean. One arm of this cross is the religion followed by the leader called, in the Jerusalem Bible, Rabbi Jesus. Grown in wilderness, and nurtured in exile, this is, in Thomas's phrase, "always avant-garde." The other is the Christianity adopted by Constantine to shore up the unity of the Roman Empire. On this our cathedrals, monuments, museums, the great body of our art have grown, transforming but keeping going the vieux regime.
It is the ruins of the latter that are exhibited by Ingrowing Thoughts. Here, Roland Penrose's encirclement of the globe finds, not of Eldorado but "spirit blowing itself out in the emptiness of the Poles." Bigge's wind-jammer, bound for the new world, sinks, leaving "the wreckage of the old". Its companion hurtles on, lookouts fore and after "both lamenting." While Magritte's cannon is bangs away at the sky, beyond limits but without aim.
Here too is Picasso's Guernica. When this of was first shown, the painting's difference from the art of its time took the eye away from what it truly was: a song of the old sea. The flattened figures, episodic treatment, the unshaded tones, large size and long shape might belong to a Grecian frieze, Roman mosaic or Byzantine wall painting. Picasso used his Mediterranean inheritance to commemorate the attempt by Franco, using German and Italian air squadrons to wipe out the centre of Basque culture. Guernica means to us now, not just the evil of modern warfare, but the survival of a minority culture in the face of totalitarianism. Thomas doesn't touch this but picks one thread: "the painter of has been down to the root of the scream" and he found "the atrocity of its flowers." Leaving the monument, he goes off with a phrase that in carries in our minds: "love in reverse", a memento of the fascist inferno.
Thomas is more at home with the painting Father and Child by the American, Ben Shahn. At first this looks like Eluard country, but not for long. The ruined town, devastated countryside, family of refugees are there. But where Eluard gave us the artist as new man, recording the demise of the bourgeois world, Shahn's world is the ground of our love and need. His refugees might have queued at Ellis Island for the medical to find them fit for the new world or only to go back where they came from. Thomas, who has registered his failure to smell "the holiness suspiring from forked humans", writes here with the tenderness of the Coventry Carol:
Heaven is far off, back
of the bombed town. The infant
is human, embraced dearly
like a human mistake.The father presses, his face set,
towards a displaced future.
The mother has salvaged her mother's
portrait and carries it upside down.
We are reminded that Exodus is now; the flight into Egypt the flight from eastern Bosnia.
Reminded too that the time of distress when the sun will darken, the moon lose its brightness, is marked by birth pangs as well as by destruction. It is the new life pushing forward that claims Thomas's attention. In Eluard's picture the only traffic is two prams, wheeled by looters from the ruins. Thomas catches this. It is his transport towards the future, scavenging puns, conceits, scraps of ideas from the old galleries. Somewhere in 'Between Here and Now', facing Rouen Cathedral where Proust was a pilgrim, and Monet painted the light's changes, he spots the chipped "budgerigar faces" of the sculptures. The work of man means less than what God has done to it since; and heritage In at its best slightly decrepit, echoing the "deciduousness" of man, rather than when the restorers have been at it, sticking the leaves back on.
Thomas's contemporary, Geoffrey Hill, pleads for "a revival of Christian architecture in England" in judicial language and form made for a master guild or corporation of burgesses. Thomas expresses his disdain for cathedrals where "we have overfurnished our faith" and "blood drips from regimental standards". He gives us, not a tradition made whole, but what's left after fire and frost: the bones of a sonnet, rhymes and pentameter worn away; poems begun mid-sentence and ending in questionable answers. Where Hill leaves the impression that the future is best avoided, the present not mentioned, Thomas is at home among our ruins, lifting what he needs for the apocalypse. The Roman eagle hovers over Hill, Charlemagne and Christendom. Thomas watches the sparrows at the door, picks up words “as though they were crumbs"; greets the robin with its winter fire, its "sharp song" like Christ's, its footprints leading to the cross or the cradle:
Time and again I was
caught with a crib in my pocket.
In his life story The Echoes Return Slow he comes out, not as Christian priest or Old Testament prophet but as a Hasidic wanderer "picking up pieces of the smashed dream", taking us back to a time before we came in.
Now that our planet is sick and like to die, and the hand that would help is shut out, a sharp eye, sharp beak and speedy turn of the heel may be our best hope of escape and return. Thomas has a recent poem which describes our future in space. The space travellers turn in their craft to see the plundered earth "blue with cold but waiting to be loved". I think of a fellow traveller on the Graeco-Judean trail, W.H. Auden who also believed "we must love one another or die” and wrote to the future in hope:
Nurses to their graves are gone
and the prams go rolling on.
Page(s) 24-25
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