Weeping in the temple of delight

                                           If we could tame the gods

Mr Mulhern wore a three piece pin stripe suit. It was blue and, being the seventies, the lapels fanned across his chest to caress his shoulders. He was tall, thin and his black hair fell in gentle waves to his white collar.  At the beginning of the academic year he would stand before us, his skin sautéed by a Hellenic sun, and sing a song of full throated ease. Mr Mulhern was my English teacher and he brought me a gift. I never thanked him for it but I have never let go of it.

The myth of Mulhern was this: when the bell rang to signal the end of the last lesson of the summer, he would grab the handles of his leather holdall and head for the airport. For the next six weeks, wearing two of his three pieces - the jacket slung over his shoulder - , he would voyage amongst the Greek Islands, clambering over rock, hill and the bleached bones of goats, to seek out temple, urn and the nectar of poetry. When the hammer was limbering up for the first clang against distant bell to signal the start of a new year, he would stuff the collected poems of Keats back into his bag and return for his first lesson on English poetry.
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                                                                            the poet weeps

My melancholy grew in infancy but how to sing about it came in adolescence. Thanks to Keats, the cockney scribbler, I discovered that the shrine of sadness is housed in the temple of delight. And, even if your head drifts towards despair, a broken heart plays the best tunes. Some prefer other frequencies, but there is where I am most alive. And this is where art matters most. Not whether it carries a historically relevant idea or is bundled into the stiff, theory-ironed sheets of Procrustes bed,  but whether its elements marry, whether form and content are entwined in a way that enlivens you. You may not know why but the skin prickles, the blood zings in the arteries, you're lost in communion, trembling in the thrum of vitality.
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My introduction to Keats, his chiming with something deep inside me, was the start of something. I was an outsider, within the family and without. At school I was the only boy from a council estate; at home on the estate, I was the only child who loved poetry. Mr Mulhern’s initiating me in to the ‘seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness' was the stepping stone to my construction of a personal pantheon of writers and artists. A lifelong endeavour to which new idols are added and some former favourites are shifted a little further from the light.

                                                  Diane Arbus  (Stephen A. Frank)

​Sanctom Sanctorum is a riveting and ravaging exhibition of photographs by the American artist, Diane Arbus. The agony of existence laid bare in forty five black and white prints. Arbus has been accused of voyeurism, of seeking out the ugly and then parading these grotesques before us for our revolted delight. I don't see it. When you stand in front of these photographs of fellow human beings, their isolation and rawness reaching beyond the frame, what strikes you is tenderness. A tenderness to shape and realise existence. A tenderness in letting their vulnerabilities see the light. A tenderness to give space and time to someone, someone who sure as hell doesn't look like you but deep down, well...  how far are we prepared to look inside ourselves. The flaws that she was attracted to run through us all.

In many of the photographs, Arbus is in their bedroom, the inner sanctum of the house where dreams and desire thrive. And, she seems to be in the inner sanctums of their hearts, where the longing to be seen rubs up against the fear of what might be seen. Almost all of her subjects stare at the camera offering up themselves; the selves they do know and the selves they don't.

       Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home - Diane Arbus (1966)

In one wonderful photograph, a former debutante of the year reclines into her fading youth. In bed, swathed in a white stole, her painted face, defiant and despairing, rises from her former glory. Lines invade but she inclines to elegance; her dark eyes belie the agony of beauty's composure. One slender arm rises from the whiteness, wielding a cigarette, gesturing defiance, decadence, resistance. Arbus captures the ridiculous splendour and the desperation of desire. Her look is beseeching - see me - and embattled  - I am still what I once was. It is too easy to lob a dismissive chuckle into her fur rather than unlock the gaze of admiration, an acknowledgemnet of survival in an unbearable existence.

In an age of visual conformity, an age where the aches and blemishes of being are filtered out, Arbus's images might feel confrontational, threatening, difficult, grim or too slumped in reality. They might be, but... they  capture the ambiguity, the ambivalence, at the heart of our lives. They are raw and tender and alive.
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                                                                       The Little Pastry Chef, Chaim Soutine (1923)

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​Chaim Soutine, the brilliant Lithuanian painter, blast his way into my pantheon almost forty years ago. I stumbled across his work at the L'Orangerie in Paris, which houses the largest collection of his work in Europe. Standing before his contortions and colours, his rich slathering of paint, the twisted buildings and bodies, I was lost, quivering with delight. I had never heard of Chaim Soutine but he was about to become a lifelong companion.

As with the work of Arbus, it's easy to get lost in the torturous turnings of his work and life - they are there - but so is the rich celebration of life. The dense working of paint to capture something elemental, the raw breath of being human. His paintings - the portraits of cooks and choirboys, the writhing landscapes and the wracked beasts and beef - throb. They throb with the stabs and smears of oil. They throb with the unleashed energy of his hand. They throb with longing.

His stunning paintings also throb with the stories of Soutine; the myth, the sensational tales, the viewer carries to their encounter with the work: the brutal beatings he suffered as a child, the devastating poverty and hunger of his early years in Paris, the violent slashings of his own work, the ulcerated pain that stopped him painting.

Celeste Marcus, in her recently published biography, Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession and a Dramatic Life in Art, tries to dim the depiction of the painter as suffering hero: the romantic artist who poured all his anguish onto the canvas.  She argues for Soutine to be seen as an artist driven in his dedication to painting and as a painter who ceaselessly sought to capture the energy he saw in the world around him.  And there is truth in her telling, which adds another layer of complexity to our understanding of the artist. Sadly, the book is a disappointment: the writing often overwrought, full of vagaries and patronising lines like 'to the non-painters this won't mean anything but....' Marcus offers an early apology for the thinness of her portrait - Soutine didn't leave much in the way of letters and nothing in the way of diaries or journals - but after the epilogue, the most engaging chapter which quotes extensively from writers and painters, you are left wondering did it need a whole book to tell you his life is in the painting.

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                                   Smoking in Céret

​Soutine and Arbus made sense of the world through their work. Both were dead by fifty. Arbus ended her own life; Soutine, his stomach bleeding, risked entering Nazi occupied Paris for surgery. It failed. Both left beautiful legacies: Art. Art that is complex, compulsive and invigorating;. Art which holds potent sway over my meaning making. The part that art  - the creating and the appreciation - plays  in sustaining a life worth living is immeasurable.  The foundation blocks of that life were laid for me when I first encountered Keats, a shy and awkward twelve year old discovering something precious. 

​Recently, clambering over the parched hills of Sifnos, I found three goat skulls. I smuggled them into my bag with the poems that I carried and brought them back to London. Thank you,  Mr Mulhern.
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A blind couple in their bedroom - Diane Arbus (1971)

From the darkness​


rectangles of light
bled by fragile net
hems licking up the dark

shadows linger
sulking in cornered retreat
the hulk of hope gathered

in the weight of their holding
its twenty to four
​on the bedspread of afternoon

left in gravity’s dilemma
his black shoe hangs
in the liberation of air

lips lifting to sightless content
hands drape the folds of  love
she nestles, nesting longing

against the bulk of his shoulder
his shirt smoothed to pride
for eyes celebrating this couple
in the unlit mystery of love

Simon Parker

 
​I do not claim ownership or rights to any images posted unless stated.  If you hold rights to an image that I have used and wish me to change credit or delete the image, please contact me and I will do so immediately.