December 2008

And so it is Advent Sunday and the beginning of the Christmas season in all its mystery and strangeness.
Already in the Cotswolds it has begun to snow, and in my studio my stove is flaring red, and through the long windows there is the white of the snow and the grey underside of birds’ wings.
I am listening to Handel’s MESSIAH, because I love it, and because it offers such rich and formal beauty, and I like the contained space of the emotion, which is not at all the same as a constrained space.

You know, because I keep saying so, that I find art offers emotion that is contained but not constrained. There is freedom and power, but there is also safety. Sometimes people confuse this safety aspect with the idea of art as consolation. A few nights ago I was at the opera, and at a dinner, later, someone called art a life-belt, and without thinking at all, I said, ‘Art isn’t a lifebelt; art is the sea.’
But I would have to revise that and say that if art is the sea it is also the open boat on the sea.
There are many images, many possibilities, but what is certain is that art allows us to feel in ways that we couldn’t otherwise manage – it would be too frightening, too stormy, too wide, too far.
So why will I never call it consolation?
I suppose because consolation is not enough. There has to be another journey, another fight, another chance.
But I guess that is the me that I am. And perhaps I don’t believe that there is such a thing as consolation – not anywhere to be found – and perhaps I will find that I am wrong. That might be good…

Back to Paris this month, and my favourite Sunday walks along the Seine in the late light. I love that city, and perhaps I am wrong about consolation, because if anything could be called that – to me, for me, it would be Paris.
This last few months spending time there, working there, has been important. I suppose anywhere that lets the mind loose is a way of finding out how tight is the mind normally. We are such creatures of habit.
Yet, I couldn’t be like a previous girlfriend of mine and just move from place to place, job to job, however exciting, without anything that really felt like home. Balance is everything, and so difficult to achieve.
I was talking to a friend who is an airline pilot – just small planes nothing fancy, and he said how relaxing it is to be a passenger in a small plane with an experienced pilot. I asked him what he meant and he said that in a small plane there are countless buffets and changes, and a novice is always rushing to correct the off-course lurching, which makes the plane lurch even more. A good pilot, he said, is correcting all the time, but effortlessly, intuitively, and so the ride feels smooth, though it is as turbulent as any other.
A nice image…

So what will you do this Christmas? I steadfastly refuse to call it the holidays. Whatever you do  – check out the mince pie recipe recipe  in my JOURNALISM, and don’t forget to read HENRI’S ASTRO COLUMN – which we are very lucky to have. And even if you don’t fancy the astral advice – the poetry is great! For those who want a New Year Reading – Henri can be called on 00 44 207 371 6473. Why not?

If you are looking for a different kind of theatre and are in London this month or next – try the TS ELIOT Festival at the Donmar in Shelton St, Covent Garden. If you are not sure about Eliot, read my piece on him in this month’s Journalism. I have also used him this month as Poem of the Month. Try reading it outloud… it works

I shall have my very ancient father to stay for a couple of days  over Christmas, and push him in his wheelchair round the Cotswolds. He likes that, though it nearly kills me, though I suppose I should be thankful we don’t live in the Alps.
I will take us coffee in a flask and some of those homemade mince pies of mine and just let him be.
Then friends I think, and lots of books. And the fire blazing. And the house will be decorated with branches from the woods, which I love to do.
I will have my usual Boxing Day supper with Ruth Rendell, whose latest book, PORTOBELLO, is just great if you like a Mystery story at Christmas, and a handy buy for Xmas relatives…
And I hope that the cellist Natalie Clein is coming to stay for a night or two – if you are looking for a good present for someone – get one of Natalie’s recordings – The Romantic Cello, or The Elgar Cello Concerto are my favourites.

And life remains as beautiful and painful as ever.

I love Christmas, whatever my state of mind, and this year is about a million times better than last year when I was giving a huge lecture in Holland and had no certainty that I could actually stand up and deliver it. I did, of course, but only by calling on strength deep-made over many years. It was a good example of why it is so necessary to have inner resources. The reason I exercise well and eat well is so that I can depend on my body. The reason I tend my soul is so that it will support my mind when I fear I am losing it.
For 4 months – December to March 2007-8, it was not obvious to me that I would come through.
And yet, when I got back from Holland, so broken that I sat on the floor and ate cold baked beans from the tin, I also wrote that night one of the best things of mine – the Christmas Story, THE LION THE UNICORN AND ME, which next year will appear as a beautiful book. And that will happen because one of the directors of Scholastic, the children’s publisher, read the story in the Times, and it made her cry, and so she emailed me, and we began.
And yet when I wrote it I felt I had nothing left.
It was an example of grace. It saved me. Sometimes you just have to trust the thing you claim to trust – and for me that is the shaping spirit of creativity.
Well, this year is not last year. I am not through, but I am in every way better and able to continue this journey, which is worth everything.

I will be putting up a story – but not a Christmas Story this year – rather a piece for the New Year, so you’ll get it in January – around the 6th, when the site is renewed.
Till then, have another look at THE LION THE UNICORN AND ME.  Hay and dung and another world

I wrote The Passion for her, and I loved her very much. She was my agent for a time, and she was the one who found a publisher for The Passion, (Bloomsbury), after Faber turned it down.
She made a huge difference to my life, and it is true to say that I had to write about her/us/love again, in a different way in The PowerBook, because these things, these things that mean so much to us, come back and back in different shapes and forms. We go on working with whatever is real to us.
It has very little to do with autobiography in the tabloid sense; simply, it is the workings of a life. Memory, recognition, feeling, some hope of understanding – that is why we go back and back.

So for all of you, in love, or in loss, in hope or in what feels like the absence of hope, may this Christmas time bring a chance of peace, and a new story, because that is what the Christmas story is – a new story from an old world. The known that becomes the unexpected, the miracle that happens.

Here’s to miracles – because they happen.