Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Christianity, Culture, Poetry

TS Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’

ASH WEDNESDAY

Intro: The prayers of Lent are a key guide to Eliot’s obscure sequence of poetry

Sometimes, people read TS Eliot’s sequence of six poems, Ash Wednesday, in the hope of better understanding this first day of Lent in the Western Christian Church. The poem is meditative and pivotal which marks his conversion to Anglicanism, and chronicles a journey from spiritual despair to tentative faith. 

Structured around the Lenten season, the poem moves through themes of repentance, purgation, and the desire for divine, transcendent love amidst the emptiness of modern life.

Knowledge of Ash Wednesday – and the rest of Lent – which falls on February 18 this year, is a prerequisite to understand Eliot’s poetry.

Ash Wednesday is obscure. It begins: “Because I do not hope to turn again.” This is a quotation from Guido Cavalcanti, who died in 1300, a friend of Dante’s. How the reader is meant to know that, I’m not sure.

The words had been translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1861, as: “Because I think not ever to return”, a reference to Cavalcanti’s exile from Tuscany. But Eliot knew that “to turn again” is an aspect of repentance, as the Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611 translated the Greek word metanoia, “change of mind”, found in the New Testament. The Ash Wednesday Epistle, from the prophet Joel, begins: “Turn ye even to me, saith the Lord, with all your heart.”

In St Mark’s Gospel, the first words of Jesus are: “Repent and believe the gospel,” and those are now one of the forms of words to accompany the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. But in Eliot’s day the Latin formula was: Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris, “Remember man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” In his poem, Eliot, with his Cavalcanti quotation, picks up both the return to dust and the turning again or repentance.

In Ash Wednesday, Eliot incorporates unsignalled quotations from church prayers. In a letter to Bishop George Bell of Chichester in 1930, Eliot addressed Ash Wednesday’s obscurity: “Most of the people who have written to say that they couldn’t understand it seemed to be uncertain at any point whether I was referring to the Old Testament or to the New; and the reviewers took refuge in the comprehensive word “liturgy”. It appears that almost none of the people who review books have ever read any of these things!”

In Part I of Ash Wednesday Eliot quotes the popular Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary.

In Part II he uses the question “Shall these bones live?” to make reference to the extraordinarily vivid passage in Ezekiel 37, where dry bones are reclothed in flesh and live.

In Part III, on the stairs, he ends with, “Lord, I am not worthy”, a prayer in the Mass before Communion: “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof; but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed,” an echo of the Centurion’s words in Matthew 8:8.

In Part IV, “And after this our exile” is taken from a medieval prayer, the Salve Regina, where Mary is asked to “Show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

In Part V, “O my people, what I have I done unto thee” is taken from the Improperia or Reproaches in the Good Friday liturgy, based on the prophet Micah (5:3).

In Part VI, the last line, “And let my cry come unto Thee” is also in the Good Friday liturgy, from Psalm 102 (101 in the Vulgate) – in Latin: Domine, exaudi orationem meam, et clamor meus ad te veniat.

Before that, Eliot puts a line, “Suffer me not to be separated”, which is from the 14th-century prayer Anima Christi (taken up by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits). The context is: “Within Thy wounds hide me /Suffer me not to be separated from Thee.”

All these would have been very familiar to a practising Roman Catholic, less so to most Anglicans and utterly unfamiliar to the leading critics of the 1930s.

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Art, Arts, Exhibitions, France

Art: Seurat and the Sea

COURTAULD GALLERY

Intro: A first-of-its-kind Courtauld exhibition brings together the French artist’s haunting seaside paintings

– Join the dots: Georges Seurat’s La Maria at Honfleur (1886)

Never before has there been an exhibition of seascapes by Georges Seurat, which is odd, given that the short-lived French artist’s “marines” make up the bulk of his output. So, the Courtauld in London – which excels at jewel-like exhibitions based on enterprising scholarship – deserves praise for mounting one. Let’s be clear, though. Seurat’s chilly Channel views are magnificently weird. But if that puts you off attending and buying a ticket at the exhibition, you should at least give the show and gallery a chance.

Seurat is remembered above all as the painter of interminable dots. By the time of his death in 1891, at the age of 31, he had produced only a handful of major canvases, mostly speckled with tiny spots and flecks of pigment, applied according to a rigorous and quasi-scientific method. (A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884 (1884-86), in the Art Institute of Chicago, is undoubtedly the most famous.) As he result, he came across as an automaton. Compared with other modern artists, he’s uptight and hard to love.

Some will not be sure whether the Courtauld’s show of 26 works – including attractive oil sketches and preparatory drawings in Conté crayon, alongside 17 canvases – will convince sceptics that Seurat had a heart. His dotty views of ports and the open sea, produced on the northern coast of France over five summers between 1885 and 1890, contain anthropomorphic elements: masts, semaphores, bollards, buoys. But, with one or two matchstick-like exceptions, these seascapes are devoid of people.

The effect is rather uncanny, as if his subject were a model village. By representing glittering sunshine, fluttering pennants, and sailboats bobbing about on enticing, turquoise water, these pictures suggest summer holidays. But where are the holidaymakers? Seurat’s contemporaries sensed a “penetrating melancholy” in his seascapes, which, for all their luminosity, appear to anticipate the eerie landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico.

Nonetheless, Seurat was clever and original. Earlier artists, tackling marine themes, depicted seething waves; Seurat’s seas are calm as a millpond. His canvases are expertly composed and executed. They seem to contain the seeds of geometric abstraction and Op Art, even Minimalism.

Conceived during his final summer, and set at dusk, The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening (1890) is a meticulous mini-symphony in shades of purple, rose, and pink. In it, are established curious and yearning dynamics between inanimate objects – including, in the foreground, a lamppost and two prominent anchors that seem to move in concert, like synchronised swimmers. Seurat rejected the idea that his works contained “poetry”, arguing: “I apply my method and that is it.” Yet, others will say that if this wistful and mysterious painting isn’t what poetry looks like, then what does? 

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Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Books, Defence, Military, Science, Technology

Robocops to become part of UK’s defence vision

FUTURISTIC VISION FOR DEFENCE

Intro: Weapons technology scientists recruit sci-fi authors to prepare military for droid soldiers and AI

In the 1987 sci-fi blockbuster RoboCop, actor Peter Weller growled: “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me”. The idea of cyborg law enforcers roaming the streets was a fantasy.

Now, British military scientists believe AI-powered cops like those seen in the film could become a reality – and have teamed up with science fiction writers to create a vision of what that could look like.

The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) has unveiled Creative Futures, a book of short stories designed to inspire the developers of future weapons tech.

The collection, edited by Dr Allen Stroud of Coventry University, brings together authors and defence experts to imagine scenarios stretching as far forward as 2122.

Professor Tim Dafforn, the chief scientific adviser at the Ministry of Defence, said: “Innovation isn’t just about inventing new technology – it’s about understanding how it will be used, and by whom.

Fiction gives us the freedom to explore those scenarios in ways traditional analysis cannot, helping defence prepare for futures that are complex, contested, and unpredictable. If we only plan for what seems likely today, we will be blindsided tomorrow.”

The stories in Creative Futures explore how emerging tech, a changing society, and global challenges could shape the world of defence and security over the next 100 years.

They cover everything from robot policing and the rise of AI to quantum technology that can predict the future, and wars fought between autonomous machines – already seen with the use of drones in the Russia-Ukraine war.

The DSTL says one of its aims is to help Britain’s defence and security services avoid being taken by surprise by the use of tech in a conflict.

It believes that, by combining scientific expertise with storytelling, the short stories offer a “unique lens to consider alternative futures – both desirable and undesirable”.

The DSTL futures programme management team says the anthology is aimed to “engage, evoke, and provoke”, and in pushing defence scientists to “imagine new ways of working” and “rethink what the future could be”.

It says that preparing for the future means thinking beyond the next upgrade or system. Science fiction challenges us to consider the human, societal, and geopolitical dimensions of technology.

Dr Stroud said: “Science fiction isn’t just entertainment – it’s a strategic tool. These stories help us explore the risks and opportunities of emerging technologies beyond today’s horizon that we might otherwise miss.”

– Creative Futures is available to buy online

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