Mirror Images

- Stills from Brett Ratner's Film
'Red Dragon' (2002)

I am truly fascinated by mirrors. I am of the opinion that sometimes they can retain the image of what they reflect, and this is one of the principal reasons why they are so otherworldly, for, if I am correct, this would mean that a mirror can unknowingly reflect an incident from any time of its actual history. During my life, I have found them both fascinating and uncanny, and although my reason always informs me that the afterlife, the Other Side, call it what you will, doesn't exist, there is something fantastically eerie, yet magical (not to mention, indispensable for a dandy like me, darlings) about them. And  the fact remains that some of my most uncanny experiences have happened via mirrors. For example, in the spring of 2023, following what can only be described as one of, if not the most harrowing experiences of mine and my fine lady's lives, a time when we very nearly forced into homelessness due to being a victim of the hideous "section 21: no fault eviction" law, at the behest of our previous, greedy landlord, we were, to our everlasting gratitude, rescued at the final hour by a couple who have become dear friends of ours, and who, like a miracle (the CF social worker at the hospital at the time actually called it that), offered us a property they owned to rent. It came after we had spent the previous four months frantically trying to find somewhere to live in the town, down by our beloved sea, that we had worked so hard over the previous ten years to build a life in and make our home. Just a few short weeks after the immense relief of finding out we did indeed have somewhere to move to, we were then in Brighton to see James perform with a full orchestra, the first concert we had attended since 2019 because of the pandemic. And then, after the extraordinary concert, as we were having a quick nightcap at the Grand Hotel before we went back to our room at the Travelodge, I happened to glance in one of the old hotel's many mirrors, and very naturally announced to my fine lady that, "I've just seen Oscar in the mirror." She, understandably, suddenly went cold and said, "Oh my god, don't say that, I'll never get to sleep tonight," but I had mentioned it to her in all innocence, and was simply relaying who and what I had just glimpsed: Oscar Wilde. As I was still in such a heightened state of emotion after everything that had happened to us in the last few months, not to mention the heart-somersaulting concert we had just attended, who knows if it was my imagination or actually Oscar that I saw in the Grand Hotel's mirror.  But I had also mentioned it so casually because, to this day, I am convinced it is Oscar that I saw. As any regular readers will already know from these pages, Oscar Wilde is a huge influence on my life, and he and Bosie actually stayed at the Grand Hotel in the late nineteenth century, so there is every possibility that his spirit lingers there, and it felt like he had been one of the many energies fighting in our corner during those previous hellish few months. Was it actually him or my overheated emotions? Who knows how these things actually play out, but, when all's said and done, why not? And, who among you, dear faithful readers, with hand on heart, would not feel a tremble of uneasiness if you looked into a mirror, during the bewitching hour, at an old hotel or theatre that is steeped in over a hundred years of history? 

Mirrors, like eyes, and photographs, are full of strange, hidden depths, and can anybody say for absolute certain that mirrors don't somehow retain an imprint, of everyone, and perhaps even everything, that they have at some point reflected? And what if these reflections are then, perhaps, somehow visible to us, even if it's only during rare, perceptive moments, when we are in an emotionally overwrought state or when the soul in question is desperately trying to make itself known and visible to us, from beyond that silvery veil?

Anyway, with all that in mind, here are a few of my favourite pictures of Lydia involving that spectacular, eerie, and magisterial phenomena that is human beings and mirrors. Oh, the magical mysteries they contain!

'Mirror Images'

"I love mirrors. They let one pass through
the surface of things."
- Graham McNeil

"It is the spectator, and not life,
that art really mirrors."
- Oscar Wilde

World Book Day

 Happy World Book Day, everyone! These are my shortlist for the next couple of months on our shelf - some already read and adored awaiting to be reread, a few others waiting patiently for their turn.

 

Nobody Reads Gogol Round Here

I recently discovered that a book by a writer called Mark Hodkinson had been published, back in 2022, with the rather humorous title, Nobody Reads Tolstoy Round Here. I haven't actually read it myself, but reading a Guardian review, it certainly got my mind racing. The premise of the book seems to centre on Hodkinson's "addiction" to books, and how he even sought advice from a therapist because he felt that perhaps there was something wrong with his great love of books and his need to collect them. Sadly, this very fact has probably put me off wanting to actually read it, as it stands in direct opposition to the heartbreak I sometimes feel when it comes to my actual collection of books (my library, darlings). If it were possible, I would dearly love to actually have every single book I have ever owned (and borrowed from a library, for that matter), but, for financial, and particularly, actual available physical space reasons, that has been impossible. My wife and I lived in bedsits for almost ten years and the space we had was minimal, with most of my books stored with friends or family members. In 2014, we were able to move into a flat and we had relatively more room, and thus, a good many of my favourites were able to be back at home with us, and this was a wonderful feeling. But, then, in 2022, I had a very dangerous severe allergic reaction to mould, which hospitalised me for over two weeks and, because of which, we discovered our flat had appalling damp problems that had been completely ignored by our landlord, who then had to rip out entire parts of the flat and refurbish it before it was safe enough for me to return to. As well as the shock of my health situation, this also led to the heart-breaking discovery that pretty much three quarters of my library had become mould-ridden and would be unsafe for me to hold or even be within breathing distance of. I can recall with great sadness how my wife went through the titles of each book I owned in our little garden, with me sitting about fifteen feet away, as she inspected each one and I wrote down the titles of the many that simply had to go. At that moment, I was just relieved to still be in the land of the living after the severe allergic reaction I'd just had, so it didn't quite hit me at the time how tragic a situation this actually was, but once the dust had settled (so to speak), and I looked at what remained of my now severely deleted library and looked through the absent list that we'd jotted down of a deeply loved - not to mention the rare actual value, the even greater irreplaceable sentimental value - collection of a lifetime, and the heart-breaking reality of the situation truly hit home. And just as an added bit of salt in that gaping wound, the allergic reaction that recently had made me so unwell had also left me with a much higher sensitivity to mould, thus meaning that treasured older editions of books (a type I dearly love), would be too risky for me to not only own, but even risk borrowing from a library. Ah, Life can indeed, at times, be a Pigsty, as one great lyricist so accurately wrote. 

But, there is a silver lining to this black cloud, and it came through a type of reading that I was initially extremely mistrustful of, and resisted until I realised it was a consoling way of soothing my aching heart:

Online book reading.

Of course, it's not like the real thing. Nothing can ever beat that entire sensual experience of reading a physical book. Especially when it's a treasured edition. One of the greatest losses from my library was a 1949, Secker & Warburg first English edition of Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann. I still feel this loss deeply, even though I have replaced it with (thank goodness, a very handsome hardback Everyman's Library edition), as it just radiated magic. I remember buying it in Manchester, around 2000, in a second hand book shop where it was waiting for me, in a glass cabinet, where it proceeded to somehow choose me, rather than me choose it. The dark green caught my eye immediately, and the gold lettering gave it a genuine sense of mystery and class. It also felt wonderful to the touch, as it was made of a soft felt material, despite it having the sturdiness of a hardback edition, and because it had been so well cared for, the pages had a fascinating, subtle smell, and it felt like I was holding a sacred charm in my hands whenever I picked it up. And then there was my reading history with it. The first time I tried to read it, I had to give up about half way through as it was just too dense for me to make sense of or connect with. And so it sat on my bookshelf, like a diamond, patiently waiting for the time when I was ready to take it up again. Which happened, I would estimate, about 2006, and by this time I was in a place where I could begin to understand and appreciate its strange wonders, and as I read I became utterly enthralled yet terrified of its haunting contents. To this day, it is one of my favourite ever reads, and I am looking forward immensely to taking it up again, in the Everyman's edition I now own, in the not too distant future. But, I digress slightly, back to online reading! To my utter relief, the vast majority of those beloved books that I had to give away are available in their entirety online, via websites such as Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and Scribd, and I thought it might be a nice thing to take a little personal journey through them here, in no particular order. 

1. Robert Wernaer, Romanticism and the Romantic School in Germany (1910)

I will forever recall finding this treasure chest of a book whilst in Edinburgh, and being captivated by its contents. I was still in the relatively early days of my coming to understand the different strands of Romanticism, and this glorious book was the key to unlocking much of its majesty to my ever hungry, enquiring mind. I had heard of the writer Novalis before, but this book introduced me to the hypnotising symbolism of Novalis's Blue Flower (it represents "sehnsucht," that is, deep longing or desperate yearning), and made my heart and soul almost explode with overflowing emotion and made me truly realise just how out of step with the times, and my contemporaries I really was. Here was a book published in 1910, written by a commentator fervently praising these rebellious, passionate young poets and writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, with names such as Novalis, Tieck and Eichendorff, and I felt like I had far more in common with them than with the culture of my own time. This became my true stepping stone into the haunting worlds of Dark German Romantic Fairy Tales, such as Motte la Fouque's devastating, mysterious tale Undine, about a mermaid in search of a soul, Friedrich Schegel's erotic, feminist (and banned at the time), Lucinde, which dares to propound the obvious, but at the time, scandalous and much disputed fact that women actually possess sexual desires, too, and, of course, the tragic but transcendental Novalis, with his Blue Flower tale, Henry von Ofterdingen, and his gothic masterpiece, Hymns to the Night. I simply cannot imagine not having these influences in my life, and the door to them was initially opened for me by this long out of print, 1910 hardcover edition that I discovered on a trip to the Festival in Edinburgh in 2001. Knowing it is available online certainly helps minimise the sadness I feel at having to lose this book that would still have such a treasured place in my library.

https://archive.org/details/romanticismandr00werngoog/page/n12/mode/2up?view=theater

2. Molly Lefebure: Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (1974)

Again, this is a book that opened my mind to the greatness and tragedy of one of my favourite poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Just the cover grabbed my attention when I first saw it. There was Coleridge, aged just 42 years of age and looking like the perfect Romantic with his white ruffles, and yet, looking so much older with his full head of bright white hair. As he said of himself, at 42, "In all but the Brain, an old man!" But, again, there was something seductively gothic and even risqué about it. The sleeve was coloured opal grey, and the two words, "bondage" and "opium" suggested something decadent and secretive about its contents. Again, this was a glorious hardcover edition, and as I read about the often very melancholy aspects of Coleridge's life and how he first became addicted to opium, at a time when there was little to no knowledge of how addiction actually affects the body physiologically, I found, at the same time as learning a lot about addiction, through Coleridge's struggles with illness (one chapter is called 'The Tyranny of the Body'), that I now had another much admired hero figure. For despite his battles and sorrows, Coleridge touched the divine. It was fleeting, admittedly, but without doubt, here was a figure who had been in direct contact with the sublime, and it is there in his 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel' (among others) poems, of which my own appreciative knowledge had now been greatly deepened. Understandably, this book is also a great loss, and it is a great comfort to know that I can still open it and read it online whenever I feel the urge to do so.

https://archive.org/details/samueltaylorcole0000lefe_i6w3/mode/2up

3. Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba and Other Tales (1962)

This was a treasured, pocket sized Everyman's Library hardback edition from 1962, and it was because of one particular story in it that I loved it so much: The Mysterious Portrait. Gogol is a figure that has a uniquely special place in my heart, for when my very fine lady and I were in our courting days, I serenaded her with some of Gogol's fabulous and fantastical tales, and Diary of a Madman, and The Nose had us both laughing till the tears rolled down our faces. But these stories were in a Penguin Classics edition I had, and nowhere else was that strange, eerie tale, The Mysterious Portrait available, than in this old edition. I did read Taras Bulba, trouper that I am, but it wasn't that main story that I loved about this little edition, it was the short tale that was included in it, and it is another book that I am greatly relieved is available online, as it is a story I will return to many more times, I am sure.

https://archive.org/details/tarasbulba0000unse/mode/2up?view=theater

4. Joachim Mass, Kleist: A Biography (1983)

This incredible biography of the tragic genius, Heinrich von Kleist, left an indelible mark on my psyche that will remain for as long as I am on this earth. Having previously read the Penguin Classics edition of Kleist's stories and novellas, I was intrigued to know more about this unusual and uncanny German post-Romantic writer. His stories had left a very deep impression on me, as they often explored situations that put his human, all-too- human characters in very extreme situations, thereby challenging pretty much everything we as a liberal society consider to be the morals of our reality. But Kleist's writings became clearer to me after I read this brilliant book, for his life actually unfolded in an eerily similar manner to the characters in his absorbing but unsettling stories. I look forward to rereading Kleist's tragic biography again in the future.

https://archive.org/details/kleistbiography0000maas/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater

5. William Anderson, Dante the Maker (1980)

This was one of my favourite books around 1997/98, and it was invaluable in helping me try to get a deeper understanding of Dante's La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy. Those works, particularly The Divine Comedy, are rich in allegory and symbolism, and I can clearly recall reading it and making copious notes during a two week admission to hospital in Liverpool for an exacerbation of my CF around the time I purchased it. For this reason alone, it contained links to my past that were very precious to me, not to mention that it helped me have a better understanding of Dante himself, and it saddens me hugely that this was another book that simply couldn't keep its rightful place in the Dante section of my library. But, to soften the blow, it is available here in its entirety. Another precious book to add to my reread list.

https://archive.org/details/dantemaker0000ande/page/n5/mode/2up

6. Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes On (1971)

My Taid loved reading, and during the last few years of his life, he moved into my mum's place, and many were the evenings there were when he and I sat up talking about pretty much everything under the sun, from politics and history through to the Welsh international footy team, Everton F.C and how money was destroying the game that we had both once loved so deeply: top flight professional football. I had bought If The War Goes On by Hesse in a huge, famous second hand book shop in Llangollen, and I recall very fondly reading aloud a couple of chapters to my Taid, which concluded with us discussing what I'd just read in great detail. For a moment, it was almost like being in a Thomas Mann novel. Hesse's If the War Goes On, a diatribe against fascism and imperialist war machines, struck a very deep chord with both my Taid (a lifelong socialist), and myself. That particular evening remains to this very day a very special memory for me, and I always remember my Taid's parting words before we said goodnight (well, nos da), and I headed home. "It's brilliant that you're reading incredibly important books like this," he said, "but make sure you don't get depressed, as often these issues can make us feel like the situation is hopeless and helpless. History proves that isn't the case."
He was a wise man, my Taid.

https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780374509255

7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels (1899)

Last, but certainly not least, was an 1899 edition of the Romantic Bible of the eighteenth century, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels, translated by Thomas Carlyle. Once again, this was another book that I bought from that trip to Edinburgh Festival, and reading it was a transformative experience. This contained a world I wanted to luxuriate in, and the fact that the book itself, not just Carlyle's language, felt so archaic made me feel such a willing inhabitant and therefore considerable outsider to the culture of my own time. My main memory is reading it in the late summer of 2001, often with Debussy tinkling away in the background, and again feeling transformed and changed by the experience. Its loss is a very sad one for me, but at least I know, that at the opening of a laptop or a fire tablet, it is there in all its glory for me to peruse and enjoy once again. Grateful is not a big enough word.

https://archive.org/details/wilhelmmeistersa02goetuoft/page/n9/mode/2up?view=theater

Treasure your precious libraries, fellow readers.

Until next time, I remain...

Your Nocturnal Butterfly

Happy Birthday, Lord Byron

Happy Birthday, Byron. Here we are at your glorious home about ten years ago. When we arrived we had to stay in the car for ten minutes as we were greeted by a sudden, ferocious thunder storm complete with forked lightning. How very apt, we thought. And how unnerving it was. And I still get a shiver down my spine when I recall how that beautiful peacock looked right into my soul when our eyes met. xx

 

Anactoria

""The witch is at once female divinity,
female ferocity, and female transgression.
She is all and she is one.
The witch has as many moods,
and as many faces as the moon.

She is the intuitive, seeing and hearing things others do not. 

Most of all she is misunderstood."-
 Kristen J. Sollee

"Yea, thou shalt be forgotten
Like spilt wine,
Except these kisses of my lips on thine
Brand them with immortality."
- Algernon Swinburne, 'Anactoria'

Happy Halloween, darlings.

As always, Bites & Kisses!!

- xx -

Harvest Moon

 

"Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,

Glimmered the white Moon-shine."

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

The Tiresias Question

"Once, with a blow of his stick, he had disturbed two large snakes mating in the green forest, and, marvellous to tell, he was changed from a man to a woman, and lived as such for seven years. In the eighth year he saw the same snakes again and said ‘Since there is such power in plaguing you that it changes the giver of a blow to the opposite sex, I will strike you again, now.’ He struck the snakes and regained his former shape, and returned to the sex he was born with."

- Ovid

In Book III of Ovid's Metamorphosis, the god Jupiter, and the goddess, Juno, are happily drinking and chatting, when they suddenly come across the subject of sex and sensual pleasure. This conversation escalates and before long, the two of them are in high-disagreement about whether it is men or women who derive greater sensual pleasure (voluptas) around love, sex and sensuality. Jupiter maintains that it is Juno and women who have the greater pleasure, whereas Junos disagrees with this. To ascertain for certain, they call on Tiresias, who was a man who had once been punished by the gods for hitting two mating snakes with a stick by suddenly being turned into a woman, and had lived that way for seven years before he was then changed back into a man again, and so, as Ovid describes, "has known Venus in both ways." (It's not about to get much better for Tiresias, either). Tiresias confirms Jupiter's contention that, in his direct lived experience, it is indeed women who derive the most pleasure from love and sensuality. Angered that he has revealed this truth, the goddess Juno then suddenly blinds him as punishment (I told you it wasn't going to get any better for Tiresias!)

I've been thinking about this story quite a lot, recently, as, in a way, I have had a kind of Tiresias experience myself, although not around matters of gender and which sex finds sensual pleasure more enjoyable, but more of a lived experiment around a hugely interesting aspect of Ancient Chinese Thought. As some of you who have read my blog may recall, in terms of Ancient Chinese theory, I am a Yin Fire. This means that my energetic make up is principally composed of certain traits which are typical to Fire types: i.e., I am energetically more healthy and happy when I have things like connection with others, performativity and art in my life, fun, sensuality and Romance. The key concept here is Joy, as that is in fact the over-riding element of Fire. But, as well as Fire types, there are also four other elements as well: metal, water, earth and wood. And I, like most people, have lesser elements as well as the dominant one, which in my case is Fire. But because I have been on a very high dose of steroids for the last six weeks because of my latest CF health issues, I have experienced something which I'd not really been aware of before: the Wood element. And let me tell you, dear reader, it's been quite a revelation!

So, whereas my Fire element is in its fullest flow when it involves the things I have just listed above, the Wood element is rather different. And, to be honest, especially when I was on the highest dose of steroids for the first month, I felt like I was starring in an episode of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers as I could hardly recognise myself or the way I was now responding to the world.

For Wood personalities have very different energetics to Fires, and here are a few of them:

No. 1:
They are morning people ("...oh, the horror, the horror! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast!)"

No.2:

Irritable or Angry

No. 3:
They struggle to find the correct posture between confidence and arrogance (it's a fine balancing act, dahlings!)

No.4:
Frustration




And, to my huge surprise, I have been feeling all of these things to a degree that I have never experienced before. For the first two months of the steroid treatment, my sleep has been so affected as to have left me pretty much sleep deprived. I have found it much harder to get to sleep and have been waking very early in the morning and found it pretty much impossible to get back to sleep again. This has led to me feeling increasingly snappy and irritable, and although I think I have side-stepped the confidence/arrogance part of the wood element, I have also felt increasingly frustrated, and this is one of the areas that I have found most interesting to ponder. For it's not only my frustration at the huge change that Covid being in the world has brought to my life - in that I still have to be very careful and do everything in my power to not catch it, as I am still clinically extremely vulnerable to it - but I've also been feeling really deep-seated frustrations that go back decades. I had to give up my beloved professional singing and acting career when I was in my mid-20s, and although it was heart-breaking for me and I felt the loss terribly, there were at least other things to soften the blow. I was able to sing at open mics when I felt well enough; I had friends I could go out for a drink with, and I also met my Delectably Fine Lady a few years later, and we had a lovely circle of friends and attended many incredible concerts and events, and I even managed to study for a BA Hons cultural degree, which was a wonderful experience. But now, because of Covid, very few of these things remain open to me. I haven't sung in public since February 2020, and now autumn is here and winter is also lurking just a couple of months away, I won't get any opportunity to do so until next Spring at the earliest, when hopefully there will be some outdoor open mics I can attend. I have had a handful of catch ups with friends this Spring and Summer, but they were few and far between, and now it will be back to isolation as the temperature will be too cold to sit outside until next April. And as for concerts and events, well this is really in the hands of the gods. And at some point I may well have to decide: do I refrain from attending concerts and going to the theatre for the rest of my life, or do I take a chance, knowing that if I caught Covid at one of those events it could be very serious indeed. It's quite a conundrum. And my god do I despise whoever or whatever brought this virus into the human population, probably because of humanity's despicable attitude to the non-human, animal world, as well as the appalling response from the various governments once it had started spreading around the globe. I do, thank goodness, have my Lady to share my life with, but I would imagine that every single couple that has ever been or ever will be would struggle to not find a strain on their relationship if they were in the same situation as us. There are so many life experiences that we could have had if Covid hadn't happened. But, I guess, I have to let that all go, for contemplating that with too much thought is probably where madness lies, and mental health is rather precarious anyway in this fucked up world we have created, where we are busier than we have ever been, and are pretty much being forced to exist in a state of frenetic activity, yet not really achieving anything at all, (described as non-stop inertia by Ivor Southwood), and where we are more connected than ever because of technology, and yet, in reality, have never been more isolated from each other as communities vanish, and we all just stay within our little bubbles and watch Netflix rather than making the effort to genuinely connect with others. And this, for a Fire, means to be forced to sail on very tempestuous waters indeed. But all this bring me back to the original Tiresias Question, and from my direct experience, who has the richest experience of life, fires or woods?

Well, I'm sorry if this offends any wood types out there, and I hope some woody maniac doesn't do a Juno on me, but I wouldn't swap being able to experience this life as a Fire type for anything. Although business type personalities have monopolised our society with their own values (I bet most neoliberal capitalist CEOs/Tory politicians/Right Wing Think Tank robots are all wood types), there is no way they will ever persuade me that their approach to life is the best. "You can cut off all my fins but to your ways I will not bend... I'll die before I let you tell me how to swim", as another sensational Fire, Prince, so devastatingly wrote in 'Dolphin'. 

So there we go. In my experience, the Fire type wins, hands down. And as Tiresias knew, the Fire element is far more feminine than wood, so who am I to argue with one who experienced life as both sexes?

Until Next Time, etc...