Autumn

Yesterday I heard someone at work say, "It's the first day of autumn."

I've heard this before in the U.S. for seasons, but I don't believe that growing up in the UK anyone ever talked about a season as having an official first day. It sounds very strange to me - seasons are nebulous, blend into one another, and though you can say "autumn is on its way" or "autumn is here", announcing its official commencement seems very weird. But there you go, "commencement" is another odd thing: where in the UK school just begins or ends, in the U.S. you have commencement, which oddly is the graduation ceremony right at the end, and furthermore you have graduation from high school where in Scotland you just leave. Things are set up differently here.

To me, autumn is here when the weather and the trees say so. Coincidentally, our turn in the weather in Maine came at the beginning of this week. After a seemingly endless hot and sticky late summer (not at all what we'd hoped for from Maine), it is at last cold enough at nights to keep your limbs under a quilt, and cool enough in the day to sometimes even wear a second layer.

Interval

I'm not done with Hall of Mirrors yet - far from it. Just taking a little break for a couple of other things floating around in my head.

The word "curfew": I went out for a short run this morning and was listening to Journal en Francais Facile on my iPod (the iPod clip I've had for a few years, which deserves a mention of its own this week: on Friday morning after heavy rain I was cycling to work and accidentally knocked it from my bag strap and right into the middle of what seemed to the only standing puddle in the vicinity. I turned it off, dried it, took it home later and put it in rice for a night- and I'm delighted to report that it still works.). The "Word of the Week", which they have on every Saturday edition, was couvre-feu - to do with the couvre-feu having been lifted in a part of Turkey. Couvre-feu: covering the fires, putting the lights out. For the rest of my run I struggled to remember the word in English, with the sense that it had to be related - but that sense that it was related also helped to hide the word from me, I think. I came up with "curfew" finally when I got home - closely related, indeed. It's funny to have known this weird word (a word I would have learned much later than curlew) for years without ever having looked up where it came from.

Jeremy Corbyn: Happy to see the news this morning of his election to the leadership of the Labour Party. It's not that I know much about him - I've been following this leadership contest only vaguely and distantly, mainly wondering why it was going on so long (because I never read enough to know when it was supposed to end). However, from the little I did see, Corbyn managed to come across as a real human being with driving principles and beliefs - someone quite unlike the media-savvy unmemorable centrists who seem to dominate all parties now. I think he's what people need - a breath of fresh air, someone to make people feel involved. A lot has been made of the support of young people, but I'm sure that there are plenty of people of my age who have similar feelings about this - people who voted for Tony Blair in 1997 and were caught up in the excitement when he won, and then suffered the disappointment of finding that under his leadership the Labour Party blurred into the edges of the Conservative Party and that nothing at all was going to change for the better.

The edition of the Journal I was listening to this morning reported Corbyn's victory as something to give hope to the left wing across Europe - interesting to think of it as having that possible significance beyond the U.K. when it seemed to me so specific to our own political situation. I was taken aback to read an article in the New York Times about it, though, which stated: "[Corbyn's] success underlines the extent to which European political structures have been destabilized by the aftershocks of the financial crisis in 2008, with voters increasingly attracted away from the political center ground, either to the socialist left or the nationalist right." This isn't how I see it at all. I don't see this as a left-wing correlative to the increasing support for the nationalist right - this isn't the Socialist Worker's Party we're talking about here. I suppose from the American point of view someone like Corbyn must seem extreme, but from a U.K. point of view I can't see this as a "destabilization" of political structures at all - just a re-opening of a political field that had narrowed down unhealthily. Another New York Times article talked about Corbyn as being unelectable. Electable or not - and I have no idea which it is - I can't see that this is all that matters.

I.Hall of Mirrors, 1964 (3)

What's most remarkable for me in the ending of the poem is that "the life perpetual" is clearly something quite different to "the life eternal."

I. Hall of Mirrors, 1964 (2)

I love the rich allusion of the three named greens used in the poem:

Famille-verte, the classification of a style of Chinese porcelain of the Qing Dynasty, striking for its use of shades of green - there's a particular kind of fine luminous pale-ish green that comes to mind for me. The use of this term to refer to the lightbulbs at the not-quite-fairground is interesting because (even just in the French name) it so clearly belongs somewhere very distant in taste and time, including from the then-child's likely frame of reference.

Antique green, the colour of the greenery on the mother's dress - I imagine as the deep green that you would see on the walls of a late 18th/early 19th century salon, a shade you might find in Goethe's library or the Brighton Pavilion or on Napoleon's couch (the former perhaps too dark, the latter perhaps too bright). I don't know if this is what the poet intends by antique green, of course - and I see too from looking it up that verd-antique exists as a term for a kind of dark-green decorative stone popular in Roman times and after (I'm not sure that this rules out my own associations, however, since I'm thinking of a style of decor with a distinctly classical influence). "Antique green" here seems the dignified counterpart of the corroded verdigris lamps of the "backrooms of the heart" to come, and seems to hint at the ancient repeated story of the fall from grace, the expulsion from Eden raised in the last stanzas.

Verdigris, finally - corroded copper, which makes me wonder whether the pigments used for famille-verte porcelain and for the greens of Regency drawing rooms are also connected to copper. The corrosion suggests the corrupt core of the young boy that he himself, until this unlucky glimpse, has been unaware of - the grotesque passageways lit with sputtering tallow candles where the homunculus that is his true self lurks.

There is also the green of vegetation that appears as smell rather than sight: the "mayweed and trampled grass" of the second stanza, "the perfumes that passed for summer / in towns like ours." I especially appreciated this because it recalled for me summer events of small-town Scottish childhood - fairs or fêtes or similar which always had about them the smell of trampled grass trapped in the stale air of a marquee - the perfume indeed that passed for summer in a place where summer is more of a time of year than a real season, an aspiration more than a reality - like the events themselves, not "a fairground so much; / just an acre of clay on old man Potter's land." To go back to the photographs I mentioned yesterday, this is a photograph of the fairground illusion with the edges clearly showing, the wretchedness of the reality contrasting with the desperate attempt to get caught up in the momentary pleasures on offer - the smell of candy floss on the one hand, and of diesel on the other.

I. Hall of Mirrors, 1964 (1)

It's a rare holiday Monday here, for Labor Day. We were looking forward to a cool early autumn weekend during which we'd be motivated to do all kinds of things we've been neglecting, but instead it just goes on being insufferably hot. We did manage to go on a gentle hike in Bradbury Mountain State Park on Saturday morning, though. It was cool amongst the trees.

To return to the John Burnside poem from last week, I. Hall of Mirrors, 1964, some first thoughts.

The title sounds like a title you'd read at an exhibition of photography - I suppose I'm thinking of one particular exhibition I saw a few years ago of a series by a photographer focusing on travelling carnival workers, where the illusion and excitement of carnival (little seen in the photographs, if I remember rightly) is contrasted with the not exactly sordid, but at least mundane or slightly wretched lives of those whose job is to create it. I'm also thinking of a more general impression of a photographic style from the 1960s or 1970s (I know almost nothing of photography, so this is more my own impression from exhibitions I've stumbled on over the years) of a kind of staged social documentary, focused on marginal or at least ex-centric human subjects in their particular environment, given further odd flavour by the use of lighting and shade, saturated colours contrasting with faded surrounds. I can imagine this poem easily as such a photograph - a moment that captures a mother and a young boy in the hall of mirrors at a small-town fair just as they both turn and catch sight of the boy's distorted reflection, with the colours of the mother's striking dress reflected in the mirrors around them. The pale colours of the "famille-verte and powdered-citrus light-bulbs" give the counterpoint to the saturated dress colours - "antique green and crimson" - also contrasted against the off-white of the material of the dress itself - as does the "verdigris and tallow" (corroded copper lamps of hidden passageways?) of the "backrooms of the heart" in the later stanza.

I have, as ever, run out of day and weekend.