Hello chronotopia old friend..?

‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’, said Kierkegaard. Regrettably, this is of course true. We are like maggots, chewing our way relentlessly forwards through Time, but we are thinking maggots who constantly need to look back and make sense of their lived life, what they have left behind them… It is a regrettable truth, however, because if we are living life forwards we are always at a different point in Time when we turn round to look at our past life, so it will always look different; which means it can never be understood. (Except, who knows, at the moment of death.)

Personally, I had resisted looking back to the beginning of Black Crow and trying to make sense of it all, until now. The present phase is so static, so boring, so unrelenting and apparently prospectless, that one’s mind turns idly to reading it all forwards in the memory (or in this blog) and trying to make sense of it that way.

The first phase, as I recall it, was marked by frenetic activity within sudden spatial limits. When Lockdown 1 was declared, anyone with any creative urges threw themselves into production. Very often, I think, it was of things that they had been putting off for years. I have never, ever, been sent so many manuscripts: four longish books, three plays, about a hundred poems, six short stories, numerous articles…

The second phase, when Lockdown 1 was lifted and we could travel about a bit, is associated in my memory with fine weather, sparkling day-visits to Norfolk, a long weekend in Bungay where enormous chub lazed in a sunlit mill stream, another weekend at a hotel for senior citizens, with spectacular sunsets over the marshes…

The third phase, the one we are in now, began with a definite event — 12,000 students returning to Cambridge — and initially had forward propulsion, a narrative: they milled about a bit, they gave each other Black Crow rather than the usual start-of-term glandular fever, the University rigorously clamped down, so successfully that according to BBC Look East the Government congratulated it. Cambridge was spared being put in Tier 2, although statistically it should have been. But then Lockdown 2 began and each day began to resemble another, ‘nothing happened’, life became a daily round, week in week out of the same. All narrative seems to have gone. Linearity has been replaced by the circle. Time has become cyclical…

Contemplating this, I suddenly realised that it is how Bakhtin describes the ‘chronotope’ of stories by Gogol, Turgenev, Flaubert or Chekhov set in a provincial town: ‘Time here is devoid of event and therefore seems to have almost stopped. In this form of time all people do is eat, drink, sleep, play cards…’ (Bakhtin, you will recall, took Einstein’s concept spacetime and applied it as timespace (chronotope) to literature, in order to describe the fusion of time-form and space-form that characterises a particular genre.)

Each phase of Black Crow as I’ve experienced it has had its own chronotope. The first was that urgency of creation combined with unwonted spatial confinement. I think it had burned itself out by June, but in any case it was superseded by the second chronotope, which was a relaxed time of enjoyment of the wider world enabled by newly permitted travel. The third chronotope, our present, is repetitive time+spatial immobility. Has one ever had to live through three distinct chronotopes in eight months before?

The thing that these three chronotopes have in common, though, is that we haven’t chosen them; they have been imposed upon us by Black Crow (or, some would say, the Government). These chronotopes are products of unfreedom. That’s what makes them so irksome, I think, and not just the fact that we have had to live through more changes of chronotope than we are used to. I therefore propose a second variety of ‘chronotopia’ to the one that long-term followers of Calderonia will be familiar with. It seems that the psychosis called ‘chronotopia’ afflicts us not only when we have to juggle two different forms of time in our brain simultaneously, but when we have to cope with one distinct form of chronotope following another and imposed upon us arbitrarily.

* * *

What has one achieved during two lockdowns?

Well, I have read, i.e. reported on and edited or proofread, four longish books, three plays, about a hundred poems…and even been paid as the consultant to one book.

But all this was other people’s creativity. What have I created myself?

When I come down to it, my most prolonged creativity has been this blog; dare I say it, I’m particularly proud of my unpublished article for the Spectator…

However, I am still privately staggered that between 19 March and 23 August 2020 I finished ‘Making Icons’, the poem in 34 stanzas that I began in 2008 and had written only 26 stanzas of by 4 April 2019. Thank you, Black Crow, for something.

It has taken me twelve years to write a poem of 408 lines. To put this into perspective, it also took Dante twelve years to write the Divine Comedy — but it has 14,233 lines!

I am very pleased to offer here, then, the last three stanzas of ‘Making Icons’. The icon of the Pantocrator, made and painted at St Seraphim’s church in Walsingham, has been completed, including being varnished with olifa (special linseed oil), and has been taken in February to an Anglican chapel where the Cambridgeshire and Norfolk Fens meet, for consecration in a service performed by a Russian Orthodox priest and choir. My first image below is of the icon, the second is of an officiating Russian priest, the third is of the ‘master’, the iconographer Leon Liddament, and the fourth is of oak tree branches. For some information on the verse form, see here.

‘He gef vs to be his homly hyne,/And precious perles vnto his pay. Amen. Amen.’
(Pearl, ll. 1211-12)

Skiwanken slightly, an oak-tree stands
in sallow grass beside the path.
We notice stubs of leaves, some stags,
as, silenced, we approach and pass
into the porch…which opens on fast-
ness of Saxon white, grey diamonds,
dark rafters hewn into lissom arcs!
The master is here, he clasps his hands
in prayer for his icon laid on its ambo.
We file onto tough rush chairs, we spy
space fill with folk: friends, locals, and
an -ov and an -aya, -eva and -sky.

skiwanken: a Norfolk word meaning ‘crooked’.
stags: dead branches in the crown.
ambo: a kind of lectern with sloping front.
-ov, -aya, -eva, -sky: i.e. Russian people.

Skywards the censer sears, ‘Glory!’
the choir soars, we all rise agleam,
‘For ages of ages!’ Taut priest tones the story
of Christ’s first icon that Abgar healed,
of how homage and love ascend to their home.
‘…endue with power, that we before it
may pray,’ he whispers, and three times
swishes across it, thrice bows, thrice thuri-
fies human work, then sings his tropari:
‘O good One, you filled all with joy
when you came, O Saviour, to save the world,
raised on a Cross against the sky.

swishes across it: asperges the icon with holy water.
thurifies: perfumes it with a censer.
tropari: Church Slavonic for ‘troparion’, a hymn in one stanza.

Skywards we look to you through your pure Icon.
Forgive our transgressions, send your grace
upon us, O Christ God, and heal all division.’
He slowly bows and kisses the Face.
Glory and alleluia thrice!
Veils of very beauty they sing us
in lovely lines of Jesus’ kondak.
‘…for he loves mankind’ ends the dismissal.
Some kiss a corner of the image.
Outside, the priest blesses us. I see
the master climb into his Hillman,
and branches rooted in the sky.

Jesus’ kondak: the first kontakion and ikos of the canticle ‘To Our Most Sweet Lord Jesus Christ’.
blesses us: individually.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.