Evelyn Williams R.I.P.

Evelyn Williams was an artist in whom 'From her earliest drawings, vision, dream and reality combined; she characterised her work as "inner thoughts, other worlds".'

John McEwan wrote that 'In his thoughtful and observant essay [Nicholas Usherwood] warns us against the inadequacy of the words commonly used to convey Evelyn Williams’ art: visionary, feminist, Romantic, apocalyptic, expressionist, Gothic, outsider ... Robust generalisation is peculiarly unsuited to an art of such delicacy of feeling, subtlety of tone and exact observation. As he writes: ‘Peel away all those labels however and Evelyn Williams will, I believe, emerge finally, and not before time, as a painter and sculptor, most fundamentally, of ‘people and their attempts to relate to one another’.'

Fay Weldon described Williams' work as ‘awesome’ – 'if we can get back to the true sense of the word. It fills you with awe.' Williams had created, Weldon thought, 'a body of work, imbued by an unmistakable mixture of grace and greatness.'

She spoke of death in typically consoling terms as a space filled with as much energy as the sky is filled with raindrops in a summer storm: ‘As each drop falls and touches the earth seeds of new energy are released to be recycled again and again.’

Read obituaries from The Guardian and Telegraph here and here.

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The Doors - People Are Strange.

The Dreams of William Golding

Last night's Arena documentary on William Golding was a fascinating study of a fascinating writer:

'In 1954, William Golding's Lord Of The Flies, a terrifying vision of the latent savagery of society and the struggle between good and evil, burst upon the polite world of English fiction. It was originally turned down by more than 20 publishers, but has since sold 20 million copies worldwide.

Golding, an unknown schoolmaster and D-Day veteran, went on to win both the Booker and Nobel Prizes. His dozen novels, awesome in their scope, range from the dawn of humanity to medieval man and maritime epics, and reveal an imagination which is dark and powerfully compelling. Arena has been given unique access to Golding's family and to his extensive personal archive for the first film to be made since his death in 1993. Rooted in the mysterious West Country landscape that Golding made his home, and with testimony from his neighbours including John Le Carré, James Lovelock and Pete Townshend, and his admirers Stephen King and Ian McEwan, it embraces the bewildering range of Golding's genius, and the continuing importance of his vision.' 

The Presentation Speech for his Nobel Prize gives a helpful summary of some of his core themes and approaches as a writer:

'Golding has a very keen sight and sharp pen when it comes to the power of evil and baseness in human beings. He often chooses his themes and the framework for his stories from the world of the sea or from other challenging situations in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow. His stories usually have a fairly schematic drama, almost an anecdote, as skeleton. He then covers this with a richly varied and spicy flesh of colourful characters and surprising events.

It is the pattern of myth that we find in his manner of writing ...

Golding inveighs against those who think that it is the political or other systems that create evil. Evil springs from the depths of man himself - it is the wickedness in human beings that creates the evil systems or that changes what from the beginning is, or could be, good into something iniquitous and destructive.

There is a mighty religious dimension in William Golding's conception of the world, though hardly Christian in the ordinary sense. He seems to believe in a kind of Fall. Perhaps rather one should say that he works with the myth of a Fall. In some of his stories, chiefly the novel The Inheritors, 1955, we find a dream of an original state of innocence in the history of mankind. The Fall came with the motive power of a new species. The aggressive intelligence, the power-hungry self-assertion and the overweening individualism are the source of evil and violence - individual as well as social violence. But these qualities and incentives are also innate in man as a created being. They are therefore inseparably a part of his character and make themselves felt when he gives full expression to himself and forms his societies and his private destiny.'

In his Nobel Lecture Golding said that:

'Under some critical interrogation I named myself a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist ... I meant, of course, that when I consider a universe which the scientist constructs by a set of rules which stipulate that this construct must be repeatable and identical, then I am a pessimist and bow down before the great god Entropy. I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore ... Twenty years ago I tried to put the difference between the two kinds of experience in the mind of one of my characters, and made a mess of it. He was in prison.

"All day long the trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicillin cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long year in year out the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals a reality usable, understandable and detached. The scalpel and the microscope fail. The oscilloscope moves closer to behaviour.

"But then, all day long action is weighed in the balance and found not opportune nor fortunate nor ill-advised but good or evil. For this mode which we call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it: touches only the dark things held prisoner, incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on. Both worlds are real. There is no bridge."

What amuses me is the thought that of course there is a bridge and that if anything it has been thrust out from the side which least expected it, and thrust out since those words were written. For we know now, that the universe had a beginning. (Indeed, as an aside I might say we always did know. I offer you a simple proof and forbid you to examine it. If there was no beginning then infinite time has already passed and we could never have got to the moment where we are.) We also know or it is at least scientifically respectable to postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in them outside it. Both, in fact, now believe in miracles, credimus quia absurdum est. Glory be to God in the highest. You will get no reductive pessimism from me.'

Watch the documentary on i-player by clicking here.

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Lou Reed - Waves Of Fear.