MEDITATION 111

I am sitting here by my candle as always and gathering my thoughts. Or rather my memories. Memories of Hollywood. I never worked there of course. I do not think I would have been a good film director except maybe as a ‘dialogue coach’ on individual scenes. However, I imagine I might have been a good character actor in the Golden Age of Hollywood, as it is termed, when the big studios reigned. I could see myself working in a major studio in a variety of roles in a plethora of movies. As a youth, I would have liked to pursue a career as a character actor. I had no ambitions to be a leading man.

I could see myself as a screenwriter too, knocking out scenes for whatever assignment a studio handed me. Writing for school was like that, when I was a Drama teacher. I would knock out a scene or two quickly ready for the next rehearsal. I have been writing a script for school again recently or rather re-writing it (in a more gentle manner than mentioned in the last sentence!). It is my play ‘Will and Juliet’ (first performed in 2017). It is about the boy apprentices who were in Shakespeare’s acting company. It is also an attempt to answer the question ‘Who was the first boy to play Juliet in ‘Romeo and Juliet?’ I have re-written the script for younger students and I am directing the play myself. Rehearsals have just begun and it is interesting working with students whom I do not know at all.

Those memories of Hollywood that are flickering in my thoughts like an old movie are of the three times I visited there, while staying in LA. They have resurfaced because of an exhibition on the film star Marilyn Monroe which is currently showing in London. The visit was a birthday present for a friend. It was quite an unusual experience as the tickets included both the entry to the exhibition and a cabaret with actor Suzy Kennedy playing Marilyn and it took place on a Saturday evening.

Miss Kennedy gave a vibrant impersonation, not only singing the songs from Marilyn’s films but also injecting anecdotes and biographical details about the star into her patter. It was a hugely entertaining 90 minute cabaret (I imagined it would be much shorter) and very upbeat (as all Marilyn’s songs were).

There was no mention of Marilyn’s tragic death from a presumed overdose at the age of 36 in 1962. But why should there be? It would cast a pall over the lively show. Besides, Marilyn lives on in her movies. And she is still drawing the crowds, I thought to myself, as I scanned the enthusiastic audience (of around 200 people) around me. She has not been on the screen for over 60 years and it will be her centenary next year. Yet her image is still everywhere, fixed in time as, because of her untimely death, she has never grown old.

She has become iconic. This is thanks partly to Andy Warhol’s famous picture of her. Images of her images are still as ubiquitous as when she was in her heyday as a star.

As might be expected, displayed in the exhibition were photos, film clips, newsreel extracts, magazine and news articles, original posters and costumes from her films. But of the 250 items on display there were also many of her personal effects, some of which were rather poignant. For example, some of her books (she was an avid reader), school books and sketch books as she loved drawing when she was a teenager, especially making sketches of the latest fashions. There were personal clothes and shoes. Some were from when she was a child and teenager too, which were also quite poignant and of course many items from her adult wardrobe. Her short life was displayed through the clothes she wore. There were numerous letters, postcards, film scripts and even some of her household bills, not to mention a bottle of unopened expensive champagne!

The exhibition comprised the personal collection of Ted Stamfer, and came from Marilyn Monroe’s private estate. When she died in 1962, her private effects were bequeathed to Lee Strasberg her acting coach and mentor, which he passed on to his daughter Paula. They languished in storage until they were finally auctioned in the late 90’s. Some of the auction catalogues were also on display. I remember seeing some of her personal effects in the Hollywood Museum in LA , including her fridge and a sofa and some of her famous sweaters, which made me realise that she wasn’t as tall as she appeared on film. In fact she was 5’4”. I think the museum collection may have been donated by other private collectors.

I have had an interest in old movies from quite an early age and have developed a keen interest in film history as a result. So exhibitions of film memorabilia have always attracted me. I’ve always been fascinated by costumes, props, furniture, scripts and film equipment that have survived down the years. So I was impressed by the exhibits on show at the Marilyn exhibition.

However, as I wandered around the exhibits I began asking myself why I was as fascinated by her private personal effects as everyone else there. They are a kind of biography of their own I suppose, coupled with explanatory panels beside the display cases. They are a sort of social history too. But most of all a glimpse, a tantalising glimpse, into what Marilyn may have been like as a person off screen. What it might have been like to be a guest at a dinner party at her modest Hollywood home for example. In some strange way the exhibits created an opportunity to get a little up close and personal to Marilyn. Something which the numerous biographies, documentaries and movies about her cannot provide.

I must admit that I would have liked to have met Marilyn. I think she would have been good company at dinner or fun at a party. I said so to my friend after we left the exhibition. I have a feeling she was far more intelligent than those around her understood. It was just that she had little formal education. I think she may have been eager to discuss those books she read but few people wanted to listen to her. And she was talented: as an actress (especially in comedy) and singer and dancer. Perhaps her greatest tragedy was that she had so little confidence in her own talents.

Before we sat down for the cabaret my friend and I had time to look around the exhibits a little. We looked mainly at the room which was adjacent to the cabaret space. This was the room that focused on her home and displayed photos of her modest bungalow and all sorts of household things, even examples of kitchen ware and that unopened bottle of champagne I mentioned earlier.

It was also the final room in the exhibition and included photos, newsreel extracts and newspaper coverage of Marilyn’s untimely death and of her funeral. On the three occasions I have visited Hollywood, there has always been a moment when I have experienced a sadness like a chill breeze. And just for a moment what came to my mind each time was all the unhappiness in that town, past and present. Going through that one exhibition room, that sadness, that chill breeze returned. Just for a moment. But it was there.

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Golden Age of Hollywood

Los Angeles

Marilyn Monroe London Exhibition

Film history

Lee Strasberg

Ted Stamfer

Suzy Kennedy

Hollywood Museum, L.A.

MEDITATION 102

MEDITATION 102

As I sit here by my candle and look out to my garden as evening approaches, I am reflecting that my own evening is approaching too. I hope it will be as still as this one and that my own light will fade as gently and almost imperceptibly as the light is fading now. But then perhaps I will not notice it fading. For who notices the light fading in the evening unless they sit still for several hours and watch it fade. I am not yet ready to sit still for a length of time unless it be to read or write or watch a performance in a theatre or a film in a cinema. “I’ve still got a lot of living to do’ as the song says. I remember the line from the lyrics but not the song!

Do people notice their light is fading? I suppose they do. If they do and if I will eventually I hope my light fades to a beautiful twilight – my favourite time of day – and then gently fades out.

I promise you this will not be a maudlin meditation, reflecting on old age. I have not been thinking about the years ahead – hopefully there will be years! Quite the opposite. I have been thinking about my youth. This has led me to think about my life now as well. It was so many years ago since I was a teenager. What a journey I have travelled in the interim.

It is important I think to look back and see how far we have travelled. This is not necessarily a reflection for retirement but for any time of our lives, even if we are still young. This can be a positive exercise and can help us to get closer to ourselves. And also enable us to look at our younger selves with a greater understanding, even compassion.

I once attended a workshop at the National Theatre given by the Scottish director Bill Bryden. He spoke of every character in a play having a journey: a physical journey; an emotional journey and sometimes a spiritual journey. It is a way for an actor to approach their role. I think it is a way for us to approach ourselves too: to look back and see where we have travelled from and important places we have visited on the way; to see how we may have changed as a person and also to explore our own spiritual journey, perhaps for the first time.

Two years ago, I attended a reunion as a result of one of my meditations. In one of them, I had mentioned being a member of Teesside Youth Theatre when I was a teenager. Another member, Paul, somehow found my blog and so found me again after all those years. We arranged the reunion of some of us at Ormesby Hall near Middlesbrough, which was where we rehearsed sometimes, in the large kitchen. From this several other old members have joined us and we are giving a dramatic presentation at the Hall in September, as part of their Heritage week. It is called appropriately ‘Drama in the Kitchen.’

Dear me: we are part of a building’s heritage now! Well the Youth Theatre ran from 1970 – 77, a long time ago. Have you noticed that word ‘heritage’ on restaurant menus? ‘Heritage carrots’ or ‘heritage potatoes’ as if someone has left a sack of Jersey Royals to someone in their will! But I digress.

We will be reading scenes from plays of course and sharing anecdotes with the audience. I was only a member for the first two years before going off to Oxford. What I had forgotten was that along with performing, some of us wrote poems. An anthology of these poems was published (in a makeshift way) and Shelagh, Paul’s sister, has kept her copy. So we will be reading a select few in the presentation too. She scanned her copy and sent it to us. I looked through it the other day and discovered four of my poems in the book.

I had forgotten about the anthology and I had forgotten I had written the poems. I did write poetry then, when I was in the sixth form. I remembered that. And I have written poetry since but intermittently – no rarely.

There is a lot of alliteration in them. I’ve always loved alliteration and I can’t help myself using it in my writing. Two poems are about the industrial area I grew up in and one is an anti-war poem too (trendy at the time but a stance I have always taken). Young people of my own age feature in them as might be expected. One poem is religious about the Crucifixion of Jesus and quite graphic and devotional. I had a kind of faith even then. There are none about the sea. I grew up near the sea and would work out the angst burning in me by walking by the waves. I remember writing poems about the sea. I have an old folder somewhere ….

I will not say that I was shocked when I read my poems again. But it was a strange experience seeing my much younger self behind the words. They weren’t intensely autobiographical. I did not bare my soul in them. I don’t think I would have offered them for the anthology if they were. I was, perforce, secretive abut my sexuality then, although my feelings were very intense and I did struggle. Looking back I should have tried to work out that struggle in my poems or in a play. But I didn’t because I was a teenager and scared to be open (as teenagers still are about their sexuality in the main I guess). Instead I was reticent and became customarily so.

Yes, my much younger self behind the words: alone, separate, different, almost an outsider in the world I grew up in. Yet I was accepted or tolerated: bright, academic and of course an actor and would-be director (which the Youth Theatre encouraged). My father called more Shakespeare sometimes (what a compliment). He also called me Tchaikovsky because of my interest in classical music – but ironic since Tchaikovsky was gay – maybe he knew something even then. I was a high achiever and a performer but deep down, lacking in self esteem and quite lonely at times. The final poem is about waking up in the morning and feeling lonely.

Dear me, these poems have evoked so many memories. I wish I could embrace my younger self standing alone on the shore and looking out to sea. And tell him that all will be well. It has been well on the whole. In the interim.

Ave atque Vale

Neilus Aurelius

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Retirement

Reflection

Spirituality

Bill Bryden

National Theatre

Acting theory

Teesside Youth Theatre

Ormesby Hall

Poetry

Alliteration

Sexuality

Shakespeare

Tchaikovsky

MEDITATION 79

I am seated here again beside my candle engaged in my occasional nocturnal pursuit of composing a meditation. Unlike Marcus Aurelius, whose own Meditations are the inspiration for mine, I do not present to the reader lists of philosophical maxims or observations. My own philosophical observations (if any) arise from descriptions of places I have visited, people I have met or have admired and from revisiting my memories.

The Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770- 1850) explained that poetry is inspired by ’emotions recollected in tranquillity.’ He might be describing these modest meditations. For it is only in tranquillity, in stillness, that I can be detached enough to glean some small seed of philosophy from moments in my life. If we cannot learn from our memories, from what we have lived and felt, what can we learn from?

Books, you might say, or the internet. I would consider using the internet as ‘casual learning’ as it is not so easy to assimilate information and deeply reflect upon it, at least, that is how I find it. Learning from books I find easier, perhaps because that was my method of learning since my childhood. That must be be true for most of us who are not young enough to have been exposed to the digital revolution in education. I feel I can bring my whole self to a book rather than a screen, which includes my life experiences and memories of course and hence there can be an interplay between the book and myself. The book may even bring memories to the fore in my consciousness. Although, it must be admitted that memory can be deceptive and even chaotic and confused at times. Hence the need for the cool air of detachment.

Cool air or rather the lack of it, has been on my mind these last few days, because of the high temperatures we are currently enduring. I have also been thinking about cool water lilies. I have been looking at photos I have taken last week of water lilies at Swanwick in Derbyshire while attending the annual Writers Summer School there. I spent some time stopping and looking at patches of water lilies on my walks around the lakes in time out from the week’s activities of talks and workshops.

Water lilies are among my favourite flowers. If my back garden was big enough and grand enough I would have a pond of water lilies. One of my favourite places at Kew Gardens is the water lilies hothouse where they have the largest one on record. There the lilies recline resplendent on the dark waters, colourful, exotic and expansive (like myself – well expansive anyway!).

The water lilies at Swanwick are much smaller but no less colourful: deep pink petals with white tips, enthroned on large dark green leaves. They float on top of the lake, congregating together in shady corners. Just as we delegates have been congregating together and hopefully floating ourselves, born up by new ideas and perceptions, by the deep but gentle waters of creativity.

I have mentioned the Swanwick water lilies before in one of my meditations. That was in 2019, after my second visit and now I have just completed my fourth (as 2020 was understandably a fallow year for the Summer School). It was on my first visit, in 2018, that I was encouraged to write this blog. New ideas and new directions always emerge from that place.

Swanwick has two lakes adjoining each other, but strangely no swans! It has extensive gardens and terraces and is an Edwardian house with modern extensions, housing the dining and conference rooms and a large residential block too. As I would return from my lakeside visit to the water lilies, I would see some of my fellow delegates moving around on the terraces to another talk, to their room or to tea, cake and more conversation in the lounge. Conversations with others who share our burning interests or enthusiasms are as important as the talks and presentations on offer at any conference.

As writing is a solitary activity so conversations with other writers are essential to keep going. It is why individuals join writers’ groups, not just to get feedback on their work and to learn from others and to receive hopefully support and encouragement, but to feel validated as a writer sometimes. To make being a writer seem real. The same is true of the writers’ summer school.

I do not think I have talked so much over the six days I was there. One evening I even developed a sore throat. I was giving talks myself on scriptwriting, four one hour sessions over four days, which led to more conversations from delegates so perhaps that contributed to it. It was good to be teaching again and to adults for a change who were eager to learn, unlike my former students at times! I have never felt so much at home there as this time.

Because we are all together for a intense six days, over that time we become an informal community, forming an invisible bond. This is quite extraordinary when you think that every year this unofficial community fluctuates. Not everyone attends every year and there is always an influx of new people. Yet over the days we are together, amidst all the activities and chatter, that bond silently evolves. It reminds me of rehearsing and performing a play. For a short length of time the cast become a community – as at Swanwick.

I was reminded of this informal community when I arrived at Derby station in 2021. I walked over the enclosed bridge with my luggage and down in the lift as usual to wait for the coach to take delegates to the summer school. Looking over the bridge as I waited for the lift I could see some familiar faces below at the coffee bar who would be getting the coach with me. I felt quite emotional as I hadn’t seen them for two years and we had all gone through the pandemic in the meantime.

In my mind’s eye I am returning to watching those delegates ambling around the property as I wander up from the lakes. Why are they here I ask myself? To learn, to improve their writing in some way, to find out about different genres of writing, about the world of publishing perhaps or how to self-publish. They may want to spend most of the week just writing, using the summer school as precious time away from home to concentrate and create. They might be successfully published themselves, or trying to get published, writing may be their career or a sideline or they may be an enthusiastic amateur. They might be writing articles, short stories, crime novels, children’s books or poems or plays or just scribbling. They all have a passion for writing, they have to write. To make sense of the world in some way through words (as I am doing now). They all need a creative outlet otherwise, as the American Dorothea Brande (1893-1948) observes in her excellent 1934 handbook ‘Becoming a Writer’, without a creative outlet life can be ‘unhappy, thwarted and restless.’ I have felt this myself at times.

What have I learnt from my week at Swanwick, you may ask, even though I was a tutor there? Well I have learnt many things from talks and conversations. And from the adult students on my course, just as occasionally I would learn something from my young students when I was engaged in my teaching career. I feel inspired to get on with ‘Driftwood’ my collection of short stories, having had a consultation with another tutor.

Most of all, I have learnt that it’s all about the writing and not the end product. It’s not about winning a poem or short story competition or the Booker Prize for a novel or even to be published in some way, wonderful though these would be. It’s about the writing, the process.

The great Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavksi (1863-1938) came to same conclusion about acting: the process, the in depth research and rehearsals were as important than the final performance. In the last stage of his life he formed his own studio of young actors who concentrated on the process and performed rarely.

It is all about the writing, the process. Because I have to write.

Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

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Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

Meditation 58

As I sit here this evening, beside my candle, memories from my youth come to mind. These have been prompted partly by my time of life and partly by our current situation. Inevitably, retirement is a time for thinking back on our lives. Our minds are no longer filled up with the busyness of work, so they are freer to roam and inevitably we find ourselves revisiting paths already trod. Sometimes these moments of recall will arouse a smile or a laugh, sometimes feelings of pride, sometimes regret or even embarrassment! For myself the lockdown has created even more time and space for this, as the active retirement I envisaged has been put on hold along with everything else. But then, I have been active. After all, I have continued writing these meditations if nothing else.

I am aware that watching television has prompted memories of my youth. This is not to say that I have been glued to the nostalgia channels on cable to avert lockdown blues. It is possible to live in the 1970’s or 80’s or 90’s by watching them all day, I am sure. I discovered this quite a while ago when my aunt from Canada came to stay with me and loved watching old 1970’s series on my cable TV in the afternoons. Every afternoon we were back in the 1970’s as if the world outside was in the 70’s too. She still watches the old detective series ‘Murder She Wrote’ every weekday afternoon in her apartment on Vancouver Island. She has confessed to me that she must have seen every episode by now (all 264 of them!) and is now working her way through them all again. At least she has now moved on to the 80’s and 90’s! In her honour, I filmed a spoof version of the show (actually of the cheesy title sequence) for my retirement cabaret. I called it, ‘Murder He Taught’. Some of my lessons have been murder at times: either for myself or my students or both!

No, I haven’t been gorging myself on nostalgia TV. Like everyone else, I have been streaming away and sampling new Netflix and Amazon series. So I have been very much keeping up to date with my viewing. Well, inevitably these days conversations with family and friends end up with ‘What have you been watching on Netflix?’ so it is best to have something to share! The conversation usually continues with regurgitations of the labyrinthine plot of whatever series. I am being hypercritical. I tend to watch (and share with others) the shorter series as they tend to be more credible and entertaining than the longer ones, which drag out the plot like a piece of chewing gum until the holes can be seen in the middle.

I think watching and sharing TV series has kept us all going over the last year (as we have had little else to share). I include in that programmes from the terrestrial channels. This reminds me of when I was a schoolboy and sharing ‘last night’s TV’ with my friends in the classroom or playground. Of course, in those days nothing was streamed and nothing could be recorded either so if you didn’t see a programme when it was scheduled on one of the two or three terrestrial channels available you missed it. You would have to wait in hope for a repeat months later – or even longer! I remember at age 15, watching the first ever episode of ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ and being really enthusiastic about it to my friends at school the next day. By the end of the series, six weeks later, most of the class were watching it and sharing the funny lines of dialogue. With all the channels now available and with streaming, I suppose that communal aspect of viewing is receeding now.

I have made a serious effort, living alone in lockdown, to watch series on the terrestrial channels on the right day and at the right time as scheduled, just as I would all those years ago when I was at school. This would give some structure to my viewing (and the week) and also something to look forward to in the evening. I have generally found that I have been more focused on the programmes and have enjoyed them more as a result. I have started to adopt the same regime with streamed programmes, by making my own schedule in the evenings.

From talking to my friends, I am not the only one who dips into streamed programmes and half watches them or records programmes which never get watched at all. I think it is symptomatic of the malaise we have all been suffering: that inability to settle because of the unease caused by the situation we have been living through. To be honest, I haven’t indulged in ‘binge-watching’ on streamed channels over the last year as others have. I’ve taken in two consecutive episodes of a series at most. I guess I’ve been quite disciplined!

Recently the BBC has been showing past TV series to fill up the schedules, because the various lockdowns over the last year have to some extent affected the filming of current or future ones. Some of the series are old, dare I say it, venerable, such as ‘Fawlty Towers’ and ‘All Creatures Great and Small’.

Every Wednesday evening over six weeks at 9 p.m. I have recently been watching the re-run of the classic historical drama, ‘Elizabeth R’ starring Glenda Jackson as Queen Elizabeth I, a role that made her a star. The first episode of the series was screened on the exact date it had first been transmitted fifty years ago in 1971. I remember watching the series then. It was really useful as I was studying the Tudors in A level History at the time. I am unsure whether we had a colour TV at home by then. Or the correct television set. If you didn’t have a 625 line set you couldn’t watch BBC2 and would have to wait until the series was repeated on BBC1 (which it was). And of course, if you didn’t have a colour TV you would be watching in black and white, which would have been a great shame as, from my recent viewing, the costumes and sets were outstanding. It is odd but I do not remember watching the series in black and white or colour, though I did remember some of the scenes vaguely.

Of course the presentation was very different from today: scenes were mainly filmed on videotape in the studio with inserted outdoor scenes shot on film. Also scenes were longer and heavier on dialogue than today. In fact, ‘Elizabeth R’ is a series of six separate 90 minute historical plays each with a different scriptwriter, focusing on key moments in her long reign. The formula had been a huge success with ‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII’ a year or so earlier, with each of the six plays focusing on a different wife and with a different writer. I have a suspicion that this formula has influenced the structure of Peter Morgan’s recent series ‘The Crown’ about our own Queen Elizabeth.

Despite what now looks like an archaic technical presentation, the series holds up well because of the well-written scripts and the excellent acting, particularly from Glenda Jackson herself, who has to age from a young teenage girl to a very old woman (for those times) of 69. The scripts do capture the dramatic events and crises of her reign really well and therefore were most useful at that time in bringing my dry A level History notes to life!

Revisiting the series in 2021, I enjoyed picking out the actors and actresses who were regularly on the TV in my youth and whom I wanted to emulate. At that time in my life, I wanted to be on that screen with them, in a costume drama. I wanted to be an actor or perhaps a TV scriptwriter. That has come about in a different way of course. I became a teacher of drama instead and wrote plays for my students. I didn’t become a classical actor like Robert Hardy (who played the Earl of Leicester in the series), though I would have liked to. But then I can’t image Robert Hardy directing a school play or pushing pupils (talented or not so talented) through a GCSE Drama course. He has played Winston Churchill on various occasions so perhaps that would have helped!

The final scenes of the series depict Elizabeth’s death and closely reflect true events. In her final days, knowing that she was close to death, Elizabeth refused to lie down on her bed, let alone sleep. Instead she spent hours sitting up, on an cushion. The dramatisation has her sitting there in full regalia on a large high-backed chair, gradually going silent and refusing to indicate by even a nod to show her agreement that James VI of Scotland should succeed her to the throne. The scene includes the actual words of Elizabeth. Robert Cecil, one of her ministers, politely tells her she must go to bed; to which she replies angrily, ‘Must is not a word to use to Princes, little man.’ Eventually, sitting on the chair, with a finger in her mouth like a child, she passes away. It is a remarkable scene, watching her using all her strength (ebbing away though it was) to resist death.

Elizabeth reigned for 45 years until her death in 1603 and was the longest reigning monarch up to that point in our history and for many years afterwards: until the 18th Century and George III (60 years) then Queen Victoria (64 years) and our own Queen Elizabeth who has currently reigned for almost 69 years (as long as the first Elizabeth’s lifespan).

Elizabeth I had spent the 45 years of her reign holding onto the crown despite initial political and religious upheaval, several rebellions, numerous plots against her life (and numerous attempts to get her to marry, which she refused) and even an attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada. So perhaps she can be excused for using the last dregs of her formidable willpower to hang onto her crown even against death. All her energies since she was a teenager had been spent in survival, to the extent that it was ingrained in her. So why change now, in old age, even at the point of death? Or was she scared of the after life, having a religious faith, of meeting her Maker with the blood of those she ordered to be executed on her hands?

The scene conveys how difficult it can be to let go of power. We have been made very much aware of this in recent times with the scenes that played out in the White House last winter. Sometimes it is difficult to accept the inevitable, or more precisely, to accept that there is and will be a future without you. So, just as Elizabeth I refused to lie down on her bed, so Donald Trump refused to concede electoral defeat. Eventually, both had to give in to the inevitable.

Strangely I sympathise with these two powerful but disparate figures.

It is difficult to let go of the career that has defined you, especially, in Elizabeth I’s case, when it has defined you for a length of time.

It is difficult to let go.

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

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Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

I am gazing at the flame of the candle beside me. Normally it is a steady flame which reminds me of Marcus Aurelius himself or rather what I imagine him to have been like as a person. Statues of him show a steady stoical gaze on the world, confident but not arrogant. For surely it is a lack of self reflection which leads to arrogance in a person and from his ‘Meditations’ we know that Marcus was, par excellence, a man of reflection. There is a stream of humility flowing through his mediations. Some of our current world leaders would do well to drink from it!

At the very least, perhaps they would not tweet so much or would stop and think before they did. Perhaps they may even begin to consider that their comments might be of little interest to others, except that they are the person posting them. But then that it true of all of us who indulge in media messages and posts. And blogs! Perhaps we should all stop and think carefully before we post or even blog. (I do try to!). Aside from important news, if we think before we post, there may be less posts flying around the Internet, but those there are, would possibly be more heart-felt or thought-through than knee-jerk.

I very much doubt that, aside from official pronouncements, Marcus would have indulged himself in messaging on Twitter let alone Facebook or Instagram et al. He would have remained aloof from such means of communication. You may be thinking it is alright for him to be aloof as he was an emperor and remoteness goes with his social status. But I have a feeling that his humility would also have prevented him from engaging in ill-considered internet discourse.

I am reminded of some advice an American Jesuit priest gave me when I was a student at Oxford. He was explaining that you can achieve highly in the world without losing your humility. He added that you could even be President of the United States and still be a humble person. I would like to know what he thinks about his current President! But then we do not know – deep down inside ‘the Donald’ might be striving to be humble – but sadly with little effect.

The flame I am gazing at is larger than usual. It is is not a Marcus steady flame and is not flickering either as if it might go out. It is dancing. I am captivated by its constant movement. The shape of the flame changes moment by moment, rising and falling in the air. There is no draught in the room from the open window. The flame’s movement has not been caused by that. It is because the wick of this new candle is wide and made of cord. It is not a mass-produced candle but made by an ex-student of mine who has taken up beekeeping as a hobby and makes his own honey and candles. So the wick of the candle I am observing is wider than a mass-produced one and so has a more spectacular flame.

The dancing flame gently flares up and down joyfully. It has made me think of the creative mind: constantly in motion; ideas and thoughts dancing around our consciousness and, at its best, a joyful process. I have realised that inspiration is not a steady flame but it flares up and down like this candle’s effortless choreography.

I have been thinking about the writer’s creative process recently. Last week I spent six days at the annual Swanwick Writers’ Summer School which takes place in a conference centre in the Derbyshire countryside. The summer school has been running for over seventy years and provides talks and tuition on all genres of writing: everything from full length novels and TV Drama to short stories and poems and children’s picture books as well as ways of promoting and publishing. It was a busy week as there were talks and entertainment into the late evening.

We were a disparate group of 300 people of different ages and backgrounds, with different interests, genres, skills and aims. Some were there for the talks, others so they can have a space away from home or work to write. Some are keen to find a publisher for their work or to self-publish on the Internet, others enter writing competitions (of which there are many) or they write as a hobby and go to a local writer’s group perhaps. Some are committed to most or all of these. Some were keen to promote their work among the participants there.

All were committed to writing: to expressing themselves in words and to learning the craft of shaping those words into whichever form or genre seems most efficacious to express themselves. I remember once writing to the celebrated actor Sir Derek Jacobi about becoming an actor. This was when my teaching career was getting off to a shaky start (did it ever improve?). His advice was the advice that had been given to him: ‘If you want to act, think twice. If you have to act, go ahead.’ It was advice I later gave to my own Drama students. Many of the participants at the summer school have to write. I have realised this about myself now.

Everyone I met there was keen to talk, to share and to help and encourage. This created a kind of solidarity among us and as writing is, in the main, a solitary pursuit, I found this both comforting and energising. I remember going for my daily walk around the two lakes on the Swanwick site. Both lakes have beautiful flotillas of water lilies floating on them. Some were already in bloom, a delicate pink and white; others were still green in foliage. But they were all clumped together in those large floating pads. There wasn’t one water lily floating on its own. Though highly disparate, and though there were 300 of us, we Swanwick writers were like those lily pads, at different stages of bloom, of development, but together. We became a community for the week. I find this remarkable. The school was like the flame in front of me now: dancing with ideas, flaring up and down with inspiration.

This was my second visit to Swanwick. I first went there last year. On my first visit I spent some time at the prayer labyrinth which has a water feature in the centre. The labyrinth is marked out on the floor and is like a maze without the hedges. When I got to the centre, I noticed the water feature in detail. It was a large silver globe on a raised bed of pebbles. Water poured from the top of the globe and cascaded down into the pebbles in a continuous motion. The water reminded me of the writing process. Like the flame I have just mentioned the water is carefree. It just flows down not worrying where it is going. I decided to see where my writing would lead me.
It led to this blog.

Ave atque vale until the next blog.

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Neilus Aurelius

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