Today has progressed more steadily than I could’ve imagined,
in part due to the arrival of clouds (at last!) which have cooled things down
slightly, but also because of the regularity of each talk, with a 45-minute
break in between. Their subject matter, however, was far from regular, starting
as I did with a man of many trades, Raymond Tallis whose talk Making Sense of the World touched upon
several issues familiar to me. Despite our ‘pin prick bonces’, as he playfully
worded it, we have achieved a great many things, not least of all because we
are the only creatures with a fully developed sense of causation, driven by a
totally pure sense of curiosity. In other words, we want to make sense of the world. If Tallis’s snazzy
purple glasses and blue-and-white striped deckchair blazer weren’t inspiring my
own curiosity, this point certainly did. As I later explained to him, in my own
nervous fashion, I had recently finished a dissertation on power and the cyborg
which dealt with issues of ‘making sense’ through objectification, so to hear
elements of my own research spoken about was certainly refreshing. However, as
he continued, this ordering of the world didn’t seem essential for survival – a
bee does just fine without it – in fact, our enforced transparency of the world
might be having the adverse effect: making it invisible! Our acquisition of
knowledge, to quote Tallis, ‘cannot diminish the mystery of knowledge’, and
neither, as was the inevitable turn, can God. Tallis handled this part of the
discussion with a self-assured eloquence, even when later asked what our
replacement god(s) should be – to which his condensed reply was simply ‘I don’t
know’. He just had so much to say and yet so little time to say it all in that
it was no wonder I felt my heart sink when I saw the price tag on his book Logos: The Mystery of How We Make Sense of
the World. I will, however, consider adding it to my [seemingly never-ending]
library in the future.
And speaking of never ending, my next speaker was Penelope
Lively, a woman whose honorary titles have been growing year by year. Now, at
the age of 85, she is Dame Penelope Lively DBE, FRSL, winner of the 1987 Booker
Prize for her novel, Moon Tiger. Her
talk, however, was uniquely centred on gardens, something which she feels is
embedded in our ‘national psyche’; we, as Brits, are a ‘gardening nation’ (to
the point that her son once remarked how she and her husband had a 15-minute conversation
about carrots!) We live in anticipation of the things growing in our flowerbeds
– or at least the women do, while the men fuss over their lawns (a feature I
recognised in my father). She spoke of the garden as an expression of order and
creativity, flourishing even in a poky basement-flat yard in London. Draped in
a leaf-pattern blazer, she very much resembled an emerging flower-bud herself,
and could feel like one standing as she was before a crowd of folk her own age.
So much so that I almost began to feel like the rogue weed in an otherwise
immaculate lawn.
Ironically, for Terry Waite’s talk on The Power of Solitude, I did not feel so alone: solitude has often
been an attractive state to me. As a former envoy to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Waite was involved in hostage negotiations throughout the Middle
East in the early 80s, until he became a hostage himself in Lebanon in 1987.
During this talk, he recounted – in a staggeringly composed and reflective
manner – how, for nearly five years, he was forced to live without books, human
interaction, or natural light, conditions which would drive the average man
insane. To channel this anger, he initially starved himself, before turning to
the more constructive method of poetry. Without any physical means to record
his writing, Waite wrote mentally, a dangerous decision given what one can find
in a brain so starved of company, yet, as he remarked, ‘suffering need not
destroy’, it can deepen the soul. This allowed Waite to survive, to light up
his darkest hours and, now a free man, even begin to enjoy his own company. His
booming voice throughout reminded me of the late Sir Christopher Lee, which
seemed to soften the edges of his story with a fantastical tone. Yet somehow, I
was still able to believe this man had been through hell, more so than his
anecdote about retiring a bishop whose continual drunkenness had caused him to
fall into an open grave, not once but twice!
Which leads me to my final talk in The Barn, at the fullest (and
hottest) I’ve ever seen it. This may have been due to my decision to sit right
at the back, the highest point in the room which, as we all know, is where the
heat would be. Fortunately, I soon forgot about the heat as the soft-spoken
Robin Ravilious stole my attention. Her nostalgic talk on the photography of
her late husband James Ravilious was filled with some of the 1,700 images from
his 17 years of work capturing the local community of Beaford, Devon (at the
behest of John Lane, Beaford Arts Centre director). A self-taught photographer,
James managed a professional degree of softness and light, despite the
monochromatic nature of his pictures, as well as a natural, ‘honest’
composition. Many of his subjects from Beaford show us a very different world
in the old days of farming, including three men dragging a ram up a road in a
tin bath tub, and a cow stuck in a henhouse. There is also a lack of political
correctness, as evidenced by another shot of a hunting party with no two
guesses what is at the centre of a writhing pack of dogs. But, as Robin
remarked, James always needed an ‘actor’ and would wait for one if necessary.
Sometimes the actors came to him, as seen in a biblical picture of a man lying
on the ground in just his pants (who apparently lived outside their house like
this for four days!) This kaleidoscope of black and white people and scenery
did for me what no history book ever could have: they brought history back to
life. For that one hour, we were all in 1970s Beaford.
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