Ambivalence

Artemisia Gentileschi Susanna and the Elders 1610 Oil on canvas Schloss Weissenstein, Pommersfelden.
Image: WGA
The first known work of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – c. 1653) is a classic study of sexual harassment. Other painters often portrayed Susanna looking coy, sometimes willing, a starlet enjoying the attention of producers at the pool.
This Susanna is unambivalently saying NO

Some male painters visualized Susanna leading her old, fat, powerful voyeurs on to commit a completely consensual act of physical contact.

  Alessandro Allori Susanna and The Elders 1561 Oil on canvas, Musée Magnin, Dijon. Image: WGA.
No ambiguity here, jusr a compliant girl and a cute dog in a male abuser’s fantasy.

“I have been bullied by men and women, but the first to bully me were women.” Noelle Mackay #NotMeToo

Hecate or the Three Fates by William Blake, c. 1795. Tate Gallery London.
Image source: WGA

Hecate, sometimes on her own, sometimes three-headed, a triple deity, incarnates the ambivalence of all female power, from witchcraft to motherhood.

Artemisia Gentileschi The Penitent Mary Magdalen 1620-25
Oil on canvas, Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence. Image: WGA

Of all women, why should the Magdalen repent? As a composite of erotic and spiritual love, a victim of patriarchy who earned her own living and became a player in global religion, we should be honest enough to celebrate, not punish her.

Whatever the true source of her anguish, the distraught Magdalen is looking into the darkest shadows of her psyche. She is examining her own actions, thoughts and feelings, holding herself to account.

In 1611, when she was about 21, Artemisia Gentileschi was raped by her art teacher (Tassi). She and her father were not afraid of disclosure. During the trial, as part of checks on her virginity, Artemisia was tortured.

The abused women in her mature paintings are strong, introspective, assertive, independent.

Nothing frivolous intrudes on the monumental composition of her paintings, where a constant battle for light and dark is played out with unforgiving realism.

She painted women in moments of terrifying self-knowledge, finding reserves of violent, sometimes murderous, passion they had never guessed before. Her subjects are not victims or martyrs, projecting self-pity or self-promotion. They take responsibility for their actions and emotions. They are heroines, avengers and fighters for justice; they are autonomous women.

“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
Jane Austen Mansfield Park 1814

 

 

No longer the country

“It’s no longer the country they understood it to be their whole lives.”

William Blake, Jerusalem Plate 51. Image: Wikipedia

It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are,
especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good heart
whatever they might have to say.
Mahatma Gandhi

Britain is a “hollowed-out country,”

“ill at ease with itself,”

“deeply provincial,”

engaged in a “controlled suicide.”

The biggest own goal in history

Will this country die from obstinacy? Why won’t the patients take their medicine?

Increased support among European nations
including the UK for EU following Brexit

Simpkin at the Tailor’s Bedside c.1902 Helen Beatrix Potter 1866-1943 Presented by Capt. K.W.G. Duke RN 1946 Photo © Tate

No-one reading this who holds different opinions should feel offended. I intend no disrespect, but I must speak, and I’ve been given this insidious tool to amplify my thoughts. I’d be saying the same things aloud in solitary confinement.

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
Coco Chanel.

I’m not addressing individual members of the audience. This is a platform, a virtual theatre. I’m not attacking you, I don’t dislike you, I should have lived 200 years ago, and published pamphlets or books anonymously (by a Lady), and if you didn’t like them you could have burnt them after reading or used them in the privy.

“This is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.”
Euripides, The Phoenician Women

I know I’m not going to change minds or influence people. I rant on about the same thing in messages in bottles, repeating myself, adding a fresh quote or two after a quick online search, skimming the surface of thought.

And it is a tirade. I know that. Give me a break on this weaselly platform and admit this is not blogging, it’s polemic. I’m impotent but loud. You’re afraid to let me in, because I’d overturn your tables and scream your house down.

I’m not talking to you personally, I can’t even see you.

I’m not part of your community, I don’t want your Likes or your Follows, I’m not even me, I’m inhabiting a role of a better me. I’d prefer to have lived 20

I’m standing on the wall, berating destiny. Call me Cassandra, if you like. You may think I’m mad and ignore me – I can see you are, by the paltry number of Likes – but you need me as a particle of collective consciousness in the grand muddle of truth.

Cassandra, Cassandra,
You’re fated to madness, it’s out of your hands
Destined to say what no one wants to know

‘Cassandra’, Famiglia album, written by Sophie Michelle Ellis-Bextor, Ed Harcourt, sung by Sophie Ellis Bextor

Her  again – the unknown woman lamenting by a burning city

J’accuse: the right-wing Brexit conspiracy, in which too many of us are complicit, is an act of vandalism, trashing our country’s history and laying waste to its future

Wake up, Britons! Avert this catastrophe! Don’t you hear Drake’s drum beating again, alerting him to save us from national danger?

This time, the threat to our country, this precious stone set in the silver sea…this realm, this England, is not from a foreign Armada, it’s from ourselves.

The language of English-speaking myths had charm, once, before poetic inspiration for doing the right thing deviated into  facile slogans for knee-jerk nationalism.

The beauty of metaphor, the subtlety of irony, has been defaced. “My soul, there is a country” seen in a vision of Peace by Henry Vaughan, the “green and pleasant land” of Blake’s Jerusalem, were spiritual and political ideals, not nostalgia for an England that never was. Patriotism, at its best, has always been a personal myth; at its worst, it covers up crimes with a national flag.

Joan of Arc on horseback, miniature from a manuscript, Les vies des femmes célèbres d’Antoine Dufour, 1504, Nantes, musée Dobrée. Image source: Wikipedia

 

A great British, working-class, transvestite heroine, Joan of Arc, is a golden girl, forever fighting to liberate people from foreign oppressors and gender prejudice. It’s a minor detail to us that she was French, born Jeanne in Domrémy, later called la Pucelle, the maid of Orléans, inspiration, mascot, scapegoat of French resistance to English imperialism in The Hundred Years War, burnt alive by the English in 1431, when she was nineteen years old, because she’s still ours, we made her, she wouldn’t be special if we hadn’t cooked her.

The living Jeanne d’Arc was a victim of an English war crime, and the dead Jeanne of England’s greatest victory, of imagination, of story-telling, of creating national fictions in the face of historical evidence, of kidding ourselves that sentimentality and sensation – canonized as “empathy” – pre-empt responsibility.

Joan is one of the national symbols of our dishonest relationship with Europe, and with Wales, Scotland and Ireland, of our habitual raiding and resentment of  our neighbours, abusing and assimilating as we choose.  If and when Brexit goes ahead, we’re going to lose the choice.

We’ve lost the blessed plot. We’re no longer the envy of less happy lands; we’re the butt of the rest of the world’s bemusement and pity as England scores the biggest own goal in history.

Brexit is the biggest lie perpetrated by small political and capitalist elites on the English public since the First World War.

And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension

Brexit is the poison that will taint a nation, a fungus that grew in the ideological rifts of the Conservative party and then infected purer minds.

Drink the medicine.

Changing your minds is not a weakness. The greatest courage is in turning to face reality.

Cassandra, Cassandra
If I could just sit with you
We two could conspire and
We’d make them listen
You only tell the truth.

DOING THE MACARENA TO CATASTROPHE

The fate of the United Kingdom after the EU Referendum, 2016

Goya: Plate 1 from the series LOS DISPARETES (THE FOLLIES) or Los Proverbios, 1816-23. Image: WGA

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE DEMOCRACY?

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn’t that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena
Jon Stewart

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke

…the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
Isaac Asimov

Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority…
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.
Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World

William Blake A Little Boy Lost from Songs of Experience, 1794. Image: Wikipedia.

 SUGGESTIONS FOR RESTORING UNITY & STABILITY TO THE NON-UNITED & UNSTABLE KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND ACCORDING TO CONSTITUTIONAL LAW:

1. Through parliamentary sovereignty
2. Agree that the advisory referendum result was a draw
3. Take personal action; march, write, talk.

DO NOT GIVE IN TO

 1. APATHY
The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
Montesquieu

2. BIGOTRY
Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
Martin Luther King

             William Blake The Little Boy Found from Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1826 Copy AA. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Image: Wikipedia

THE DESTINY OF MAN IS TO UNITE, NOT TO DIVIDE. IF YOU KEEP ON DIVIDING  YOU END UP AS MONKEYS THROWING NUTS AT EACH OTHER
OUT OF SEPARATE TREES.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King

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48 – 52

“It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”. The Duke of Wellington describing the Battle of Waterloo, 1815

Reactions to EU Referendum Result

William Blake, illustration to Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion Plate 51. Collection of National Gallery of Victoria.

“There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.” Alexander Hamilton (Founding Father and First Secretary of the Treasury, USA, 1789 / Mr Showbiz multi-award winner 2016)

“The destiny of man is not measured by material computations.” Winston Churchill

“I am grieved at what you tell me,” said Pellinore, “but I believe that God can change destiny. I must have faith in that.”
John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, 1976

“…the spells of Merlin and the prowess of Arthur, or the victorious career of Aurelius Ambrosius, although they delayed and in part avenged, yet could not prevent the downfall of their people.”
John Mitchell Kemble, The Saxons in England, 1849

The Once and Future King, Arthur, now fast asleep, hasn’t woken up in time to save us from ourselves – yet. Christian Heroes Tapestry, c. 1385. Image: Wikipedia

“The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.”
Alexander Hamilton

“There was a moment in the sixth century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded…Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres [the kingdom of Arthur]. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell; a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.”
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1946

“Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.”
Alexander Hamilton

“The world is turned upside down” English Civil War ballad, 1646

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