Paul's blog

Daffodils

The French President came to the UK this week for a State visit. He impressed us with his Anglophile speeches and effusive praise, and his wife wowed us with her glamour and French chic. They stayed at Windsor Castle where they had lunch with the Queen and attended a State Banquet in their honour in the evening. The following day they mixed politics with pleasure and then left for home, leaving behind feelings of admiration and thoughtfulness. It seems apparent that when you’re being criticised at home, arrange a visit abroad and you can usually receive genuine appreciation from your host which builds your international stature.
 
Of course this doesn’t always work when what you do at home is already incensing international relations; but the French have always been linked to the British and certainly for the past one thousand years. Maybe it is this familiarity that sometimes causes contempt and the occasional friction. From the time of the Norman invasion in 1066, the two nations have been in conflict right up to the mid-nineteenth century. But in the twentieth century we began to understand the importance of France to Britain and standing together, the importance of both countries to Europe as a whole.

Mind you over the past few decades, there has been some suspicion in both camps as to the importance of each to each other. As the largest island in Europe, we have often ourselves as more an outpost of Europe rather than an integrated part, and France has often said ‘well suit yourselves!’. So to be addressed in such a warm manner as the French President did last week, was a surprise. Maybe we do have more in common than we have always thought and maybe continental Europe is important to us. Hopefully the gentle but straightforward encouragement that the French President offered our politicians, will bring home the reality that we can no longer sit in splendid isolation as when the British Empire covered large parts of the globe. That globalisation is no longer so specific and we have to accept our natural differences, but understand that we actually live in the same camp.

I'm about to embark on an attempt at starting a new career in voiceovers, but first before I offer my voice to any service, I must be able to produce a high quality recording. So I'm doing a twelve module course on the fundamentals of digital recording. As yet I don't understand a lot of what I'm reading and the specification of an audio program I'd like to buy is total confusion to me - but I'm going to try. I'll learn more and new connections will be made in my brain. Hopefully I'll achieve what I set out to do, but I am doing this while I'm still in full time employment. The idea is that when I eventually retire, I shall have the voiceover activity to simply continue with. I know there's a lot of competition and I know that my voice is not right for everything. The important thing to me is that it keeps me active and also that since my accent was in effect given to me by my mother, I carry on a heritage in a living way.

I didn't originally set out to get into voiceovers. What I had originally done was make a CD where I read different literary pieces that I liked and sent it to an Internet friend in Brazil. The quality wasn't good but the pieces were. Then from comments I received from works colleagues and friends, I decided that there might be something more in this vocie recording business and I've gone on from there. It seems to me that everyone has a lot of potential but doesn't always have the confidence to realise it, or is late in understanding what they're capable of. Whether or not I succeed in my venture will not only depend upon more on my marketing abilities than perhaps on my voice alone, but I have the optimism of not knowing precisely how the future will pan out. So unlike a lot of people who forecast doom and gloom, I have decided to see a light at the end of the tunnel. 

Aeronoise (1923) by Giacomo Balla

With the fast moving technology of today, we become impatient at anything that doesn’t move as fast as we can think. If a program takes longer than we expect to execute a command, we’re either shouting at the computer or are generally irritated. Technology is part of daily life and has increasingly been since the Industrial Revolution of the mid-1700s, but our acceptance of this fact has resulted in a loss of wonderment.
    In the early twentieth century several art movements which also incorporated political and social changes at the time, embraced the machine as something powerful and beneficial to the common man. Electricity was in its infancy and so was the cinema. Art, architecture, literature, science were all moving out of the constrictions of centuries of a class structure that saw the very few and very rich as being in control of new developments through their patronage.
    Futurism was an Italian movement that saw the aeroplane as a free and independent spirit of the age. Mechanical machines that could defy the natural pull of gravity and fly above towns and countryside at ever increasing speeds and with amazing dexterity. On the ground cars and trains were achieving similar feats. Ultimately the raw power of these new machines were reflected in the manipulated power of politics. Thus illustrating that no one person can be left in charge of such power without some curb being put into effect. This is more true today than perhaps even then, for we know—or should know—the consequences of absolute power.
    Giacomo Balla was a founding member of the Futurist movement and like a number of Expressionist artists of the time, his paintings are dramatic interpretations of the effects of power. In the one above he describes the whirring noise of an aeroplane as art on a canvas—turning a 2D image into an impression of sound. Futurism lead to associated movements in England, as Vorticism and Russia as Constructivism. These movements took the machine image further still with their display of angular lines imitating the elements of modern construction. In the painting below C.W.Nevinson illustrates through a series of juxtaposition, the industry of a major seaport with its ships, tugs, buildings and workings.

The Arrival (at Dunkirk) 1914 by C.W.Nevinson

People sometimes talk about an out of body experience when they’ve had a serious illness or suffered an accident from which they survived unscathed. The precise definition of this is neither explained nor really analysed, but the religious among us claim that it is in this area that we would do well to look at. Not look for answers, but to understand that a direction of some sort is being offered. Whatever religious beliefs I have—and I would say that they border on logic first and mystery second—I don’t always think that we can take such a simplistic view. Neither can we really define such things in scientific terms. I believe that we have to accept that there are things we do not fully comprehend and that maybe in time we will get closer to whatever the real meaning is. And it’s not like predicting what life is like on another planet by dreaming up all those weird creatures in science fiction films. That comes from an amalgamation of what we already know, and that we simply reassemble. No, I think that it’s possibly something that we have no conception of at the moment, and we will probably be taken by complete surprise when we learn more.

Our heart essentially controls the functions of the various parts of our body. True the brain gets involved by sending signals to the different parts pointing out pain, cold, heat, etc. but these are automatic functions which we take for granted. We also take for granted the way we understand how to live in society. We know the consequences of actions in certain situations and often don’t need to plan a strategy to deal with them, it’s done almost automatically. These are really the basics, like walking or even driving when we can think about different things at the same time yet arrive at the right destination safely. Our own internal guidance system operates in the background like some computer program, and only when we meet an obstacle does our fully conscious mind awaken to the demand and take over.

Nevertheless there are times when we start to think about a particular emotion and sometimes arrive at a super-concentrated thought. In this state, the world around us becomes a series of objects as if we too were an exhibit in a museum. We become objects that we can examine, initially from within as we go through different scenarios in our mind—acting out all the possibilities that result from how we can project our current thought process onto different events. This thought process becomes stronger as we delve deeper into our mind and ultimately we have detached the abstract from the physical. We are now a thought bubble outside of our bodies and looking back at ourselves. In one sense we have disconnected the experiences of our lives from our physical body and reduced it to that of a child just starting out in life. We have become two entities, a physical and an abstract. The physical is now a vulnerable being who you could probably could knock with a feather. And certainly in this state any vexation would result in that child curling up into a ball like a hedgehog, in an attempt to defend themselves against unknown fears.

The abstract entity however, is like a body of knowledge no longer shackled to a physical prison and therefore able to arrive at many thought permutations. Like a child learning from a story in a tv programme, our thoughts are reflected back to ourselves and in this ethereal state we can derive a conduct that seems suitable—at least at this time. The danger we have at this point is of allowing our thought analysis to go even further and become too distant to re-engage with our body. Physically we are still one person, but inside our brain a kind of wall has been created that separates our ability to join thought and action together. So the automatic functions provide essential life support, but the learning process is now operating as a complete individual within a cage. We can still survive and appear to be part of the society around us, when in fact we have become too distinct personalities. One that keeps us in touch with the basics of everyday life and one that is running both in the background and the foreground, re-interpreting everything to suit our new state.

Lady Agnew of Lucknow

After the nightmare picture below comes this one of ethereal beauty. The sitter was recovering from an illness at the time which may have contributed to the melancholic atmosphere. But it cannot be denied that the painter—John Singer Sargent—knew how to paint the aristocracy. He painted people as they would like have been seen and not all his paintings are so dreamlike. There is however, an elegance in his style that makes even his most forceful subjects to somehow exist on a different plane.