Monday, January 22, 2018

22nd January - rambling




Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt, crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, 
tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely,
with too high a spirit to be cumbered 
with your old nonsense.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I came across this today and thought it spelled out a way to approach life;) Well it is cold, the snow fell from 1.30 pm yesterday afternoon, but was not heavy as to lie thickly on the ground, though Paul took Karen and Lillie back an hour earlier to catch their train, along with Teddy the whippet.
Poor Teddy got bullied by Lucy and he spent most of the time creeping round her and staying upstairs.  I had bought fillet steak for the meat eaters, then had to tell them that I had just signed the Avaaz pledge to not eat meat, or at least to eat less.   Usual idiotic banter from those with a guilty thought that maybe it is not just right to send all these animals to the slaughter.  I have lived with this conundrum a good deal of my life, feeding people meat whilst not eating much myself.  Will the new vegans triumph? doubt it, and I myself eat eggs and cheese and put milk in my coffee.  Sometimes I think we are made to go round with a great burden of guilt for every action we take, but do those vegan eaters have a feeling of superiority, does that carry them along in their actions?
Enough, a friend brought along a catalogue of Paul Nash's paintings they had seen at an exhibition 'up North' and I wandered with rapt attention amongst his megaliths and landscapes of the moon.  There are essays in front of the paintings but somehow I am not interested in where he painted only on what he painted.
I have a problem with art, Ravilious and Nash are favourites, but to my eye the paintings are naively done yet that is not so, the subject matter catches the imagination and is this not the whole point?
Perhaps in seeing different work we delve into the mind of the artist we see the images that cloud our own minds.  Here I see the stone avenue at Avebury in the background is that flat topped Silbury and Glastonbury on the left with the maze path.

Landscape of the megaliths


Landscape of the Vernal Equinox

When ever I see those funny mushroom shaped clumps of trees, these are the Wittenham clumps in Oxfordshire, I am reminded that their neat undersides are nibbled by countless generations of sheep than cattle to produce that evenness,  a delicious idea of trees dancing on the hills, did Tolkien ever admire Nash I wonder!

November moon
'November moon' was seen on an evening but I always see the moon on those crisp cold mornings against the blue of the sky, though now at the moment it is but a thin sliver of cheese.

8 comments:

  1. So much here to think about and to agree with Thelma. I too eat very little meat - apart from the angle of eating animals I don;t really like it veey much.
    Like Paul Nash and Ravilious and also John Nash, Paul's brother. I like too dip into Ronald Blythe's books - he was a great friend of the Nash brothers and lives in John Nash's house in Suffolk. He is now well over ninety and writes about religion and nature - amongst other things. I don't much care for the religion but his knowledge of literature and art and nature is second to none.

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  2. That is true Pat, I don't like the taste or feel of meat but also of course less animals slaughtered would be a wonderful thing. As for painters, choice is a very individual thing, but the wider frame of the societies they lived in is just as fascinating. For a start I did not mention Nash's horror paintings of warfare, the crashed planes, the blackened stubs of burnt trees. Mostly his artwork is symbolic of a feeling or emotion I suppose

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  3. One of my daughters is a vegan, another is a vegetarian. I eat fish and fowl, but much less than I used to do and never in front of them.

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    1. It is difficult, everyone different, my philosophy is to give people what they want and not make judgements (hopefully;)

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  4. Nash has a beautiful eye for a muted palette. I've not encountered his work before, but it's very calming.
    Arilx

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    1. He belongs to a particular time and as you say his use of colour is gentle.

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  5. We have many extended family and friends who are vegetarians of one sort or another--some use eggs and dairy, one eats fish--also a number of vegan friends. Others follow a gluten-free regime. Whether one makes such choices for spiritual/religious reasons or to accommodate dietary/medical issues, we grant them respect. I do find it tiresome if someone seems judgmental of those who choose to eat differently.
    We eat meat in small servings--my mindset leans more to the vegetarian way than Jim's. He likes to see a meal in recognizable dollops of meat, potato, vegetable. Increasingly, I don't enjoy considering the process from live animal/fowl to what has ended up on my plate.

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  6. "I don't enjoy considering the process from live animal/fowl to what has ended up on my plate."
    That of course is the nub of the matter Sharon, it is how far one allows the imagination to run.

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