Category Archives: Culture

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, Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Culture, Society, Technology

AI-generic-slop is theft from real artists

CREATIVE ART

Intro: Art generated by online tools is painfully bland and is leading us down the path to cultural stagnation

Pablo Picasso, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, admitted that “Great artists steal.” The Spanish genius assimilated African mask imagery into modern art, and many other greats throughout history have done something similar. Essentially, this is how creativity works. But behind their masterpieces are struggle, friction, and unique vision. Enter another entirely different beast, the theft by proliferating AI engines. These are killing creativity, harming real artists, and fuelling an epidemic of unoriginality.

By serving prompts to generators such as Midjourney or DALL-E, people can generate images on screen, in just a few seconds. Anyone can conjure up a Vincent van Gogh-styled still life or Leonardo da Vinci-inspired selfie and at once exhibit it online. Social media platforms such as X are filled with fans of this technology who declare: “AI art is art.” But this doesn’t make it true.

In fact, AI “art” doesn’t even exist – it is an illusion. AI models work on pattern recognition, not artistic decision making. While an “AI artist” may serve prompts to this technology, they cannot be considered the author of its output. It has simply been remixed from ready-made imagery without thinking, feeling, intent, or ingenuity. Absent from AI “art” is creative process, which should take more than a few seconds. This is apparent in the low-quality, generic slop that’s produced. Lacking a distinctiveness of style and voice, it can only offer a dynamic of smooth homogeneity.

It bypasses craft, which is what great artists develop – with brushes and paint, pencils and paper – over months, years, and even decades. AI artists celebrate the power of technology to make creativity accessible, and this forms their central argument and tenet as to why it’s so great. True craft, however, takes dedication, consistent practice, and experimentation.

John Constable not only worked tirelessly inside his studio but made countless studies en plein air – as revealed in Tate Britain’s current exhibition, Turner & Constable. Celebrating two of Britain’s greatest painters, it shows what being an artist really takes. On display are watercolours, oils and sketches, as well as paint-covered palettes, paintboxes, and even a sketching chair.

Among Constable’s masterpieces is his 1836 work Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow, where prismatic hues glide through menacing clouds. His technique looks effortless but was suffused with genius-level skill. And behind it, unseen by the average enthusiast, are more than 100 cloud studies he created in an attempt to capture their transient energy.

Where AI generates pictures in an instant, Constable was committed to an ongoing process; the experience gained through observation and documentation was ultimately of immense benefit to him.

Similarly, JMW Turner made around 37,000 sketches of landscapes he’d seen with his own eyes. Determined to evoke the raw power of nature – from blazing sunsets to howling storms – he pushed realism towards abstraction with an excitement that’s visible in his energetic brushstrokes.

In contrast to Constable and Turner’s radical compositions, AI’s aesthetic is flat, twee, and often old fashioned. Defined by a saccharine palette of candy colours and hazy tones, automatically generated landscapes are hollow, sanitised, and no match for Britain’s great painters and artists. Working some 200 years ago, they painted emotive, not idealised, places of both personal and historic significance.

What is more, both Constable and Turner began their paintings by looking, and really observing the world. This fundamental act is absent from the process of AI’s so-called artists who are more like a client giving instructions to a graphic designer than an artist painting at their easel. AI engines are also doing real harm to contemporary artists and their hard work.  

Among those who have already experienced its damaging effects is Australian painter Kim Leutwyler. She says her distinct style has been copied by app-generated portraits. “My issue isn’t with AI itself, but with the unethical way it has been trained without artists’ consent,” she said. “The right to opt in or out of having your data scraped for AI training should be fundamental, not optional.” This view is widely held across all of the creative industries.

AI, then, is pilfering from artists, the very people it relies on. It harms us all with its blandness. Rather than moving art forward, like Turner and Constable did in their day, it contributes to what has been termed “cultural stagnation”.

Anyone infuriated by Hollywood’s endless remakes of viewer favourites has a similar impact. It threatens both originality and individual thinking. And because future AI will only draw from more of this generated material, it will continue to create typical rather than unique visions.

AI art isn’t art, it’s a mirage, and it won’t be looked at for longer than a doom-scrolling second. In our world of efficiency and productivity, creative pursuits are one of very few remaining places where human endeavour is vital. Behind the brushstrokes of Turner and Constable are years of looking, thinking, making and struggle, and that’s what creative art is.

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Arts, Books, Culture, Drama, Films, Literature

Hamnet

FILM REVIEW

Intro: This film adaptation is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s deeply moving historical novel that reimagines the life of William Shakespeare’s family, specifically focusing on the death of his only son, Hamnet, and how that tragedy may have influenced his most famous play, Hamlet

In 1596, William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. Sometime between three and five years later, Shakespeare wrote a play which almost shared the boy’s name, and which has since become one of the most lauded dramatic works in existence. The possible link between these two events was the subject of an acclaimed 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell.

Now comes this quietly astonishing screen adaptation – with a script sensitively adapted by O’Farrell and the film’s director, Chloe Zhao – and with Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare.

As in the book, Hathaway is here called Agnes, the name she was given in her father’s will. Her husband, meanwhile, is no famous playwright yet – his name is not mentioned for more than an hour – but the educated son of a Stratford glovemaker keeps pootling off to a London theatre for work. Agnes, meanwhile, remains with their three children – daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet – close to the ancient woodland with which she shares a deep and strange bond.

– In cinemas now

We see in this play that Zhao has swapped the Terrence Malick-like lyricism of Nomadland and The Rider for a less insistent style that allows the story’s emotions to naturally drift to the fore. These emotions are often tough – Agnes’s life, alongside her mother-in-law (a superb Emily Watson), can be hard, even before the plaque comes that will claim the life of one of her children. But there are also constant flashes of everyday wonder and joy, many of which we’re invited to imagine might have inspired elements in Shakespeare’s future work. (The twins often disguise themselves as one another for a game: very Twelfth Night.)

The slow start to this production is groundwork, and the sober visual approach puts a greater burden and expectation on Zhao’s leads, but they don’t so much rise to the challenge as spiral above it. Mescal has never been better, while as Agnes, Buckley seems to discover her character before your eyes: every moment she plays rings transparently true.

This is a category of film that is described as devastating, heartbreaking, even hard to watch – and at times it is certainly all of these things. But, without any doubt, it isn’t a downer, thanks in no small part to the sublime final reel.

Here, Agnes makes the journey to her husband’s playhouse in London – only for her grief to be both complicated and clarified by this play he has written called Hamlet, and is now staging with acutely moving variations on the same two-humans-swap-places trick that the couple’s children once adored.

One of these springs from the casting: the actor appearing as the young Danish prince is played by Noah Jupe – the real-life older brother of the child actor, Jacobi Jupe, who portrayed Hamnet in the earlier scenes.

The play’s speeches are raw and revelatory, despite being among the most worn in the English tongue: that sense of freshness is one of the film’s wildest achievements. What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration. 

Hamnet U cert, 125 min

Verdict: An exceptionally delivered adaptation ★★★★★

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