Flight – Meditations of Neilus Aurelius

As I sit here and begin to write this meditation, I do not really need the candle beside me. Even though it is the middle of the evening, there is still light streaming through the window. Perhaps I should begin writing a little later when the night draws in and when the flame will shine more brightly in the late night darkness.

In my last meditation, I was exploring the notion of being elsewhere: of escaping into the world of a book or a TV drama series or into memories through photographs of places we have previously visited.

I would really like to be elsewhere at the moment, but without having to go through the ordeal of a flight or train ride with present travel restrictions. I have begun to wish that I had learnt to drive when I was younger so I could go for a drive and then for walk in the countryside somewhere.

However. though I am saying to myself that I would rather be elsewhere because of three months of arduous lockdown, these last few days I have actually enjoyed being at home. Instead of Zooming on my laptop, I have been watching the birds zoom in and out of my little back garden. Ironically, now that the lockdown is about to be eased even more, I seem to have begun to enjoy being in my house. As this is my base in my retirement I suppose it is a good thing. And I count myself very fortunate to have a comfortable little house and garden to enjoy.

One of my home activities has been to sort through all the photos on my phone and laptop. I have obtained prints of some of them to put in frames for the lounge to replace some of the ones that have been gathering dust on my shelves. A long time ago, I bought a digital photo frame which has also been gathering dust and has hardly been used. So I have uploaded a selection of photos onto it. This means I can play a slideshow of my memories, of places I have visited, of my ‘elsewheres’.

Some of those pictures were taken in Pisa and Florence, where I had a short break with a friend just over a year ago. The digital frame is too small to do justice to the epic statue of David by Michelangelo. My photos cannot do justice to its grandeur either; no photograph can, except in concentrating on the detail. And my little facsimile of the statue at the end of my garden can’t either! I bought my own little David on a whim in the branch of Homebase very near me, just round the corner. When I left the shop I had to cross over the road with little David under my arm (not wrapped of course). On the other side of the road, I bumped into two or three of my students from school. It was an embarrassing moment, but after a few pleasantries I carried on walking as if carrying a copy of a great Renaissance work of art under my arm was as usual as carrying a bag of groceries. They didn’t comment in school after the weekend, which speaks volumes.

There was one statue in the David gallery in the Accademia that I hadn’t photographed. I thought I had as it greatly impressed me at the time. It was an incomplete marble statue of a slave of the god Atlas – the ‘Prigione Atlante’. Several other statues in the gallery were also incomplete. It was breathtaking to see each of these large figures emerging from a slab of marble as the statue of David standing at the end of the gallery must have done. I came to appreciate in a small way not only something of Michelangelo’s creative vision and artistry but also the sheer physical struggle it must have taken him to turn a huge slab of marble into this epic figure of David.

Like the other incomplete statues, the Prigione Atlante one was struggling and striving to be be out of its prison of marble. Its torso was writhing and turning towards the viewer. Its body seemed to be aching to be free from its cold marble womb, to take its first steps in the world like the Creature in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’

However, unlike the other statues, the Prigione Atlante had no head or face as it was more incomplete than the others. And as I have just mentioned, I have no photo of it. But the image stuck in my mind and came back to me a few days ago. I have checked my memory by consulting the Accademia Gallery’s website.

But why did I remember that incomplete work of art? Like the Atlas Slave we have been struggling and striving in this long lockdown and like the statue we are slowly emerging. However unlike the statue we are not headless or faceless. If you were standing in the gallery looking at this half-formed figure, you might imagine to yourself what the head might look like and what expression might be on the face. What expression will be on your face as you slowly emerge from the lockdown? Will it be fear or anxiety? Or relief and excitement? Or concern or wariness? Whatever our initial feelings, we must have hope. I do not think there is an accurate facial expression for hope. Because it lies in the heart.

Slave of Atlas. -Michelangelo (1530)

Ave atque Vale – Hail and Farewell – until the next blog!

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Many thanks
Neilus Aurelius

I am home again from my Canadian sojourn in British Columbia. Once again I am writing this meditation beside my familiar candle with its steady flame. It has taken a while to recover from my trip. My return flight was the customary overnight one and so I have been suffering from jet lag. This, combined with the extreme heat we have been experiencing here in the UK, has been quite a heady cocktail for me! Perhaps, when we suffer jet lag, our bodies are telling us that it is not right that we should travel such long distances in so short a time by air, (aside from the carbon emissions issue). Perhaps our bodies are telling us that we have travelled too far too quickly.

Nevertheless, it is wonderful to think that within half a day or so I travelled over 4,700 miles. And then made the same journey back again two weeks later. An impossible feat for Marcus – even though he was an emperor! Of course I did not have a real sense of those thousands of miles as I jetted through the clouds. Only a journey by sea would have given me a real impression of the distance travelled. It would take over a week, I imagine. This is the illusion that air travel creates: we do not realise how far we have travelled. Only a different time zone or a different language or culture reminds us of that – once we have landed at our destination of course.

Our lives sometimes create the same illusion as air travel. We do not realise how far we have travelled, how far we have moved forward. That is because we are thinking of the next destination: be it a job, a project or a relationship or another stage of our life. It is only when we have the chance to look back, to reflect, that we can see how far we have come as a person, and appreciate how much we have changed – hopefully for the better!

I do not think this perspective is only for older people looking back on their lives. It is a perspective we should all have, whatever our age. To do this we need to forget our immediate, pressing destination for a moment and take time to reflect, to appreciate how far we have travelled thus far. So often, when I was teaching, I have comforted a student with the observation, ‘You have come a long way since you started this course.’ It is a comfort. And it can be a challenge too to move on further. Reflection is rather like a plane landing to refuel before moving on.

So over the last few days I have been in the throes of heat and jet lag. I have also been bereft. I am missing the big skies and the ocean; the tall pines and firs and cedars; the beaches with their rocks and scattered driftwood blanched white by the waves and that special moon I mentioned in an earlier blog. And I have met with so many people, who have been kind and generous towards me. So I am missing them too. There is an emptiness when you come back to your house alone after seeing so many people.

When I have laid awake at night, unable to get back into my normal sleep pattern, moments from my holiday have flooded in: people I have met, places I have explored or stayed in, details of conversations, views and vistas I have seen and meals I have enjoyed. A myriad of impressions, like a frantic slide show on a laptop or like one of those kaleidoscope toys I had as a child. I would shake the tube and look through the glass at one end and the colourful pattern at the other end would have changed. The moments of my holiday seemed to change shape too, melding into eachother.

One place keeps coming back to me. Maybe it is because it is a place where I could see myself. It is in a little town called Brackendale and it’s quite near to Squamish, an hour or so out of Vancouver, up the ‘sea to sky’ highway. My godson Jonathan drove me there as he has a friend who lives there. The journey itself is very spectacular. You can see the ocean below one side of the highway and rocks and mountains towering over the highway on the other.

It’s a small community and there’s a rail track at the back of it. We heard the train go through while we were in Jonathan’s friend’s home – that old fashioned train bell ringing that you usually only hear in Western movies. It’s a really small town and calls itself ‘the World Centre for Eagles’ as it is near Eagle Run, which we visited, where thousands of bald eagles spend the winter. Understandably, as it was summer, we didn’t see any eagles (though there are other species in the area) but we did see hawks circling around in the sky.

And we also visited the Brackendale Art Gallery. It is a small wooden building set in a lush little garden of greenery, where statues by local artists are scattered about. There are First Nations designs on the outside walls too. As I went inside from the brilliant sunshine, the gallery looked quite dark but welcoming nonetheless. There were some artefacts by local artists on display and pictures by local photographers too. As I stood at the top of the steps at the entrance and looked down into the gallery, the place was a hive of activity. A group of volunteers were arranging tables and chairs for what looked like some kind of meal that evening or maybe a party or cabaret. Because of the wooden architecture of the place, inside seemed snug and cosy and the volunteers were warm and welcoming. Then I noticed the stage: a modest black platform at one end with a black back cloth, a few theatre lights and some old church pews for seating. At the opposite end was a tiny bar, more like hatch, for interval drinks I guess.

I was quite excited by that stage. I wandered down the stairs to take a closer look. Standing in the centre of the room, I could see myself in that gallery, helping to run the place, performing and directing. What a way that would be to spend my retirement! Looking around at the little gallery and watching those volunteers shifting furniture there was a real sense of community. In fact, it felt like home.

I went upstairs where there was a loft area with some local Squamish artwork and some striking photographs of the forests and of course eagles and hawks. There was even an office behind a screen. And there at one end, underneath a window, were some copies of pictures by one of my favourite artists, Emily Carr (1871-1945).

On my visits to Vancouver Island I have got to know Emily very well, through her pictures and her books. When she stopped painting, she had a whole new career in her 60’s and 70’s writing books, mostly quirky memoirs of her youth in early Victoria and the boarding house she ran for a while. I have mentioned her once before in my blog.

I have seen the permanent exhibition of some of her drawings and paintings in Victoria Art Gallery several times. She was a true original who embraced tribal art forms and frequently visited far flung Haida villages by boat and canoe to do so, an amazing feat for a single lady to do at that time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her paintings of totems have become iconic. Most of all she is a great painter of forests (especially in the last phase of her work) and she was an early environmentalist. She finds the teeming life force within tree trunks and branches. The trees are never still, they are always in motion, sometimes even dancing in the wind.

I don’t know why I like her pictures so much. I normally prefer portraits or scenes with people in them. That’s why I love Rembrandt. His portraits are such wonderful character studies. Any actor or director should go and look at them: the hands and the eyes say so much about the person sitting for the painting. That’s what acting is about: hands and eyes.

But Emily’s trees? I guess I like them because they are so full of life, her forests are teeming with life. Emily and the trees are rejoicing in being alive, rejoicing in being. She made several sketches and paintings of areas in the forest where the trees have been cut down. The logging industry in BC was taking off in the early 20th century, when she was painting. Those pictures have a real sense of desolation about them, of stark tragedy.

So apparently Emily came across the water from Victoria on Vancouver Island to Brackendale on the mainland to look after her two nieces who were ill. This was in 1913 so that would have been quite a journey then. She made several visits to the area and made sketches of the forests nearby which led to some of the tree paintings I have just mentioned.

Somehow Emily will not let me go. I didn’t visit her pictures in the Victoria gallery on this trip but here she was in Brackendale, reminding me of herself.
What was it about that little gallery and art centre that made me want to be part of it? It is amazing to think that a place thousands of miles away could have gripped me in this way.

Was it Emily? Or that little stage? Or the friendly community of volunteers? Or the cosy atmosphere? It was more than somewhere where I felt I could do. It was somewhere where I felt I could just be. Where I could live another life -not that different from the one I am living now – but different enough.

Now that I am home, I have learnt that British Columbia has become a part of myself. I have also learnt from Emily and her trees to rejoice at just being. Here where I am.

Ave atque vale until the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’ as it pops up!
And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested.
I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.
Many thanks
Neilus Aurelius