Inside-Out Thinking

Why I Prefer Film

Perhaps I should say why I often find theatre embarrassing. I sometimes find myself feeling embarrassed for the actors, because they're up there 'showing off', drawing attention to themselves - my father's nonconformist roots showing again. Tut, tut, tut. Then I also think there's a pressure on the audience, which leads to phony behaviour. For example, I hate it when they laugh louder than they would if it were a film, because it's a social interaction. The audience is then being theatrical too and that, surely, is completely inappropriate?

Does anyone else feel this or am I going mad?

Esoteric cinema - the Great Lynch

There's block of flats I visit lunchtimes maybe twice a week for the gym. Called Dolphin Square, it has a slightly strange atmosphere, inhabited by rich, rootless people from different parts of the world. You can't help wondering how they came by their money and what they do all day. I think Princess Margaret had a flat there for a while. AN Wilson captured it perfectly in his first novel, The Sweets of Pimlico.

Lately I've been surprised to see Britain's bluest comedian, Roy 'Chubby' Brown (whey-hey-hey!) emerging from the gates and also the edgy, disconcerting actor David Warner. He's famous for his Shakespeare and surreal 60s stuff like Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment, but he's been on my mind because I've been watching series 2 of Twin Peaks.

He plays Thomas Eckhart. Is this an allusion to Meister Eckhart, the great Zen Master of Christian Theology, famous for mind-bendings such as:

God is within, we are without

and

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing...?

In the UK you can only get Twin Peaks series 2 to work on your machine as a Dutch import, switching it back to English language - but it's worth it.

I think maybe Tarkovsky is the greatest esoteric film-maker - another major artist much influenced by Steiner. His Mirror has what i think is the modern art's most powerful, numinous image of the great world-weaving thoughts that also weave through our minds. He shows great winds moulding the landscape - an image David Lynch repeatedly alludes to, showing the winds bending the trees around Twin Peaks to their will.

I think I've worked out that you should watch the feature film Fire, WaLK wITH mE, half way through TV series two.It then sheds light on a lot of things you've recently seen that otherwise don't make sense. In the middle of the second series the great mystery of Twin Peaks seems to be solved and Laura's Palmer's killer dies..

And then it's as if David Lynch loses interest for a bit. The following episodes are written and directed by other people, and seems to descend into whimsy. But the Log Lady's intro to the third from last episode is one of the clearest ever expositions of esoteric philosophy..

There are clues everywhere, all around us. But the puzzle-maker is clever. The clues, although surrounding us, are somehow mistaken for something else, and the something else, we call our world. Our world is a magical smoke screen. How should we interpret the happy song of the meadow lark or the robust flavour of a wild strawberry?

Is the wild strawberry an allusion to Bergman's Wild Strawberries?

The last episode of series 2 IS directed by David Lynch himself. I found it much more frightening than any conventional horror film, perhaps because of it's genuinely philosophical underpinning. It makes a difference that this isn't cynical exploitation. Lynch believes that he is telling the truth.

That Face

I rarely go to the theatre - I find the whole set-up oddly embarrassing and phoney - but I really wanted to see this new play, recently written by Polly Stenham when she was 19. It's created such a stir, I wondered if it would be like seeing the first production of Streetcar Named Desire or Look Back in Anger- a historic moment in the theatre, a turning point.

It stars Lindsay Duncan and Hannah Murray, who's also Effie, the youngest and darkest character in Skins. For a while, although it was quite harrowing,I was anxious i wasn't feeling what i was supposed to feel, then shortly before the end it overwhelmed me. You know how great actors can sometimes make you feel that they are addressing you personally among all the hundreds in the theatre? I've been very happy when, just a couple of times, people have told me they thought my book had been written just for them. It's the best thing anyone can say. Well, watching this play, by the end, I was feeling the same, thinking This is my life, my ultimate fears.

I write in my book about how drama, tragedy emerged out of Greek initiation centres. In tragedy as in initiation our ultimate concerns at last concern us as much as they ought. Tragedy and initiation rip open the carapace of habit that helps us to get by day to day and makes us face the reality of our life-choices.

When I was a teenager in Ipswich I was taken to very good rep theatre all the time there. It was part of the life of the town somehow, and conscious that my teenagers don't get to see Ibsen or TS Eliot or Stoppard or Arthur Miller or indeed Shakespeare, I recently made them watch a DVD of Bergman's Autumn Sonata - which i think is as good as Ibsen. Watching it again emotion gripped the inside of my chest - again shortly before the end - so firmly that it could've picked me up and thrown me across the room.

Bergman is a great artist. I didn't write much about esoteric cinema in my book, because i didn't want it to be too unbalanced in favour of the 20th century, but it's perhaps something to return to.

The Englishness of Glastonbury

Leonard Cohen didn't want to be filmed or recorded when he appeared at Glastonbury last weekend, but luckily I caught some of his performance on my daughter's mobile phone. She was there on her 18th birthday, right in front of the stage, waving her phone around, and I think I heard her shout out 'Leonard, I love you!' at one point.

On Sunday I did see Neil Diamond on TV. I noticed someone near the front of the crowd was waving a wig around in time with the music. When he was interviewed afterwards, still on a high, I wondered if he had quite tuned in to the combative, ironic, who's-taking-the-piss-out-who relationship that the British have with their celebrities.

My birthday had been a few days earlier and a dear friend had made me a compilation CD, with some of my favourites - 1,2,3 by Len Barry is as good as Mozart - and some favourites of his own. When his teenage son saw what he had been downloading, he said:

'I have finally lost all respect for you.'

It's mark of the subtle, constantly mutating nature of consciousness how the English middle classes have so totally absorbed black, American notions of what it is to be cool!

as soon as you put a thought into words...

Casaubon is a sad, dispiriting character in Middlemarch. At the beginning of the novel he impresses the much younger central character with his intellectual seriousness and she marries him. She gradually becomes disillusioned, though, when he never seems to get any closer to completing his great work, a key to all the world's mythologies

If you've read my book, you'll probably find it easy to imagine the astral form of Casaubon squawking on my shoulder, mocking me as raced to meet a seven month deadline. I could easily have spent a lifetime writing The Secret History of the World, but I don't think it would've been a better book as a result. In fact i think the tight deadline gave it a focus and a drive it wouldn't have had if I'd had more leisure, and towards the end - was it after I'd met Lorna?  - I felt I had 'help' that moved my writing up to another level.

But hard pressed, I sometimes put quotes in from memory. For example, there was a passage from Schopenhauer I'd loved as an undergraduate to the effect that as soon as you put a thought into words, it ceases to be true.When my German translator made me locate the passage, it was much better, much more explicit - more monumental - than I'd remembered:

The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech: there it petrifies and is henceforth dead but indestructible, like the petrified plants and animals of pre-history. As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere or at bottom serious.When it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us. 

what you're supposed to feel II

An unexpected invitation to the opera and Glyndebourne. It's a beautiful building in a lovely setting, in one of the valleys around Mount Caburn, the vegetation almost supernaturally lush at the height of summer and the beautiful people were there..in force

I feel slightly uneasy about the combination of high culture and extreme wealth and ostentatious privilege. I lived in Milan for a few months and got to go to La Scala a few times. There it's the same people as here would perhaps go to Country and Western concerts that fill the theatre, and they hum along to all the best tunes!

The opera last week was Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, a typically Russian take on the Byronic hero.(See also Lermontov's A Hero of our Times, one of my favourite books when I was eighteen.) The singer in the title role was very handsome, with a fine voice, but perhaps didn't have the galvanic, brooding intensity and charisma you hope to see in a Byronic hero.

Still, it was a beautiful production, the sets were beautiful, there was some very clever staging - in the duel scene, you couldn't see for a suspenseful few moments who had been shot - the dancing was magnificent  and looked authentically Russian, and there were a couple of achingly-wonderful tunes, perfectly, intensely sung at high points in the drama with a mounting sense of climax so that everyone was quite carried away. At its best opera is almost as good as Roy Orbison.