Snow on snow...

Here are some more pictures I took as I went out to dice with the chance of a broken hip this morning, Cambridge's pavements being a mass of transparent, inch-thick, mirror-smooth ice.



(A bit of King's.)



(The classic Cambridge Christmas view: King's College Chapel.)



(Part of the main court of my college, as I went to collect my mail.)



(Senate House.)



(Old Court, 'Porterhouse'.)






(The gardens, 'Porterhouse'.)

Cruise control

It took me several seconds to realise that this is a small child, and not a woman with primordial dwarfism. Suri Cruise is three and a half years old.

Omens

(Harold Bloom)


Thoroughly enjoying Harold Bloom's Omens of Millennium: the great literary critic is so much more enjoyable when not doing his tired 'Ain't it awful?' number, that is, when not writing about literature.

The book has his usual faults: it reads as though Bloom actually wrote a 50,000 word long essay and then left his put-upon research assistants to pad it out to book length. It is full of repetetion, often telling us the same thing twice in the course of five pages: that Elijah became the angel Sandalphon, for example, or that when the next 'authentic' American prophet comes to follow Joseph Smith, 'we will not recognise her (at least at first).' It has Bloom's bad habit of adding '-ism' to words to create unclear abstract nouns---'angelicism', for example----or using technical terms in non-technical ways; Nietzsche's 'perspectivism' is pressed into service to mean something like 'a vertiginous evocation of soaring height and plunging depth', and 'vitalism' is used to mean 'irrepressable vitality'. It has irritating tics like his dislike of Jung's thought ('a reductive cult'), which he clearly doesn't understand at all, and his ironic fondness for Mormonism. There is a strange sequence of pages in Chapter II ('DREAMS') in which the prose suddenly ceases to make sense, Bloom going incomprehensibly off on one for about 3,000 words. As I read it, I assumed I was failing to understand a word because I was drunk, before realising that I was, in fact, perfectly sober.

For all that, it's an enjoyable book, if you like delving into Kabbala, Sufism, Swedenborg and the like; full of incidental hermetic joys, its main interest for me was in listening to Bloom telling us a little about himself and his own ironic, neo-Gnostic religious sense, rather than talking his usual old bollocks about 'self-overhearing' in Shakespeare.

Garden

The view over the Scholars' Garden from my office window at 8.45am.

RIP

This is my grandad's obituary from The Guardian.

* * *

The psychiatrist Arthur Hyatt Williams, who has died aged 94 after a long illness, was a pioneer in treating criminals psychoanalytically. Widely known as Hyatt, he was a warm, energetic and optimistic person, both boyish and paternal. He believed strongly that even the most hardened criminals, including murderers for whom there was no chance of direct reparation, could be helped to work on their sense of guilt and modify their destructive tendencies, and he would put himself out to a great degree in order to treat them.

This belief was one source of his enthusiastic campaigning, along with Leo Abse and others, for the abolition of the death penalty, which came in 1965. Hyatt also did long-term work with people who might otherwise have become violent. It is hard to demonstrate the full value of such preventive work.

He was one of a relatively small group of prominent psychoanalysts who combined their high level of commitment to psychoanalysis with a passionate dedication to the public sector. Moreover, where tough work was to be done – with very disturbed adolescents, or psychotically depressed postnatal mothers, or couples involved in domestic violence, say – there Hyatt would be.

As a child brought up in a family of modest means on the Wirral, Cheshire, Hyatt developed a lifelong passion for all things living. At the age of 13 he was so fascinated by the butterflies on a visit to Liverpool Museum that the curator asked his mother if the young enthusiast could come each week and help. He first wanted to become a zoologist. Instead, partly as a result of winning a scholarship, he studied medicine at Liverpool University, later specialising as a psychiatrist, and going on to train as a psychoanalyst, qualifying in 1952.

His first analyst was Elizabeth Rosenberg (later Zetzel), till she returned to America after a year. Then he saw Eva Rosenfeld; she had helped Sigmund Freud and his family leave Vienna in 1938 before herself settling in London.

During the second world war, Hyatt did three years' service in military hospitals, followed by three years in military psychiatry, with Indian troops, in India and Burma, where he was mentioned in dispatches for his work in a forward area. He was also involved as a psychiatrist in the innovative War Office selection boards.

One of his stories from this vivid period concerned his calling a fellow officer a "moronic psychopath". The officer complained to the commander, who listened carefully and said: "This is a serious situation. I have known Dr Williams for a long time and have followed his work closely. I have never known him to be wrong in the diagnoses he makes."

After the war, Hyatt worked first in Maidstone, Kent, and then, during the 1950s, began a part-time involvement with criminals at Wormwood Scrubs prison, west London. This became the field of his most significant work. No doubt for personal reasons, but also to help him in dealing with the destructiveness of some of his patients, he went back into analysis, first with Melanie Klein – as one of her last two patients – then, after her death in 1960, with Hanna Segal.

In 1962, his work in prisons was complemented by his joining the staff of the Tavistock Clinic, in Hampstead, north London, as consultant psychiatrist and subsequently chair of the adolescent department (1969-78). He played a big role in the recognition of adolescence as a specific entity, rather than as merely an intermediate waiting period between childhood and adulthood. His psychoanalytic work included treatment of adolescents and adults presenting a full range of difficulties.

Hyatt's book 'Cruelty, Violence and Murder' (1998) outlines his concept of the "death constellation": the tilting of the balance between destructive and constructive elements in the personality, so that in some cases, for a combination of constitutional and environmental reasons, an imbalance arises. When this imbalance coalesces into a character trait the person has to kill off whatever is too painful. Through a relationship in which mourning and remorse become possible, people in this situation can be helped to find their more human potential. Hyatt stressed that mourning is indispensable for mental health in general, as well as in the processing of murderousness arising from the death constellation.

He was no stranger himself to loss and mourning. When his first two wives, both psychoanalysts, died relatively young, Hyatt was devastated, and characteristically not ashamed to show it and share it. In 1939, he married Lorna Bunting; in 1972, Shiona Tabor, nee White; and, in 1987, Gianna Henry, nee Polacco, a child psychotherapist and later a psychoanalyst.

Hyatt's love of nature led him to spend time in cottages in the country in Britain and Italy, and to do voluntary work on the protection of butterflies. He is remembered at the Cassell hospital, west London, where he also worked, for changing from his suit (and his challenging work with troubled families) into his gardening clothes, and producing lots of vegetables. He is said to have grown aubergines in pots on the sunny window-ledge of his office at the Tavistock – he was equally prolific with ideas. He loved literature, knowing by memory large chunks of Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge and writing beautiful papers on their work. He taught and lectured widely, not only in Britain but in Australia, the US, Italy and Spain.

From 1982 to 1985 he was director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, where he was helpfully straightforward to colleagues and students alike. He was an excellent supervisor; I remember him speaking about a patient who had dreams of working for the charity War On Want. Hyatt's comments about her making war on her own wanting helped me to understand in a new way something about the death instinct. This was a typical intervention: bold, insightful, graphic and non-judgmental. It was characteristic, too, of his love of and respect for word play.

Hyatt recalled becoming the target of a lorry driver's rage while he was driving from treating a murderer in Pentonville. After Hyatt had managed to defuse the situation, the lorry driver said: "If you don't want to get into a fight you'd better not look like that" – which Hyatt took as a helpful warning to him to create more space in order to separate himself better from the impact of the murderer's personality.

After his official retirement from his NHS post in 1979, Hyatt continued to teach at the Tavistock and to co-chair a workshop in the adolescent department for at least another 20 years, well into his 80s. He also worked as a psychoanalyst up to the age of 88.

He is survived by Gianna, by four sons from his first marriage and by four stepdaughters.• Arthur Hyatt Williams, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, born 23 September 1914; died 27 August 2009

Nine Lives, the Barbican

As a promo for his new Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple had arranged an evening of readings and music last night at the Barbican Centre. There were the wandering, God-intoxicated minstrels from Bengal, the bauls; then Pakistani sufis singing the rapturous poetry of the 18th century saint, Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit Shah; then dalit Theyyam dancers from Kerala; and then finally Anglo-Tamil singer Susheela Raman singing traditional and then reworked hymns from Chola-era Tamil Nadu. The fabulously talented Raman was, I suspect, the main draw for most of the westerners in the audience.

Dalrymple's book, which I currently have on the go, is an attempt to examine the current situation of the great spritual traditions of the subcontinent at this time of huge change and economic growth. (India's economy is set to overtake that of the US by 2050, completely reversing the last century's world order.) Dalrymple accordingly tells the stories of nine people---the 'Nine Lives' of the title---including a Buddhist monk, a Jain nun, a possession dancer from Kerala, a devadasa or sacred prostitute, and a tantric skull-feeder. The story of the latter is a striking instance of the cultural and economic changes which Dalrymple examines: from an American academic journal, he had heard of a Tantric adept in Bengal whose role was to take the skulls of restless suicides and wandering virgins and to calm them by feeding them rice and dhal, thus setting their unhappy spirits to rest. After much searching, Dalrymple found the skull-feeder, and interviewed him. Initially happily forthcoming about his mysterious and grisly calling, the skull-feeder eventually clammed up. When Dalrymple asked why, given that the tantric had spoken at length about his work to an American anthropologist twenty years previously, the adept replied sheepishly that both his two sons were both ophthalmologists in New Jersey, and had warned their father that talking about feeding skulls might be bad for business. Thus speaks the New India!

The audience were strikingly divided. In the main, the westerners were shabbily-dressed old hippies, the women in beads and faded, shapeless garments Fiona McKeown-style, the men in jeans and T-shirts. Those of Asian origin or extraction, on the other hand, were without exception beautifully dressed---I was sitting next to a man of about my age in a three-piece suit of herringbone tweed---with the women in particular showing that luminously graceful, well-draped elegance and ability to wear bright colour that only Indian and French women seem to possess. In the jeans and T-shirt brigade myself, I felt awkward, realising that this was potentially a rather formal and indeed classical evening for many of the Indians in the audience.

The bauls---which means 'madmen' in Bengali, and rhymes with 'cowls'---were wonderful. An eclectic group of wandering spiritual minstrels combining elements of many faiths, they were dressed in multicoloured, harlequin-like patchwork, their devotional songs haunting and energetic at the same time, with very long, microtonally ornamented vocal lines. There was some gender thing going on too---these middle-aged and elderly men stepping and prancing with subtly, sweetly feminine gestures of yearning. Two great bauls were present: Debdas Baul, and the blind minstrel Kanai Das Baul, who is described in this article in the Guardian. Both performed near the end of the bauls' set, sitting for the first part on a low raised platform, crosslegged, absolutely still. Here are some bauls:



The audience loved them, but like Colonel Gadaffi, they overran their session, meaning that the fakirs of Bhit Shah in souther Pakistan who followed them had to do a a shortened set of only two songs. (Dalrymple, visibly sweating with relief, announced that the fakirs had only received their visas the day before, and had arrived at the Barbican at 7.25 for a 7.30 concert.) As the bauls represented a kind of Hinduism blent with mystical Islam, so the Shah Jo Raag fakirs represented Muslim mysticism syncretised harmoniously with Hinduism. Sitting in a row, the five musicians each played a damboor, slapping the resonator and plucking the strings whilst singing the verses of the their revered saint, who died in 1752 and at whose tomb their order has sung every day and night ever since. Their sound was frankly difficult for western ears, with moments of enormous beauty but also an unexpected roughness; it was like a three-way cross between Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's ecstatic qawwali (without the French bistro-esque accordion), the massive, sinuously cumulative power of dhrupad chant, and the noise of tomcats fighting in an alleyway. Here's the late, great Nusrat sahib by the way:



After the interval, we had the theyyam dancers of north Malabar, and this is one of the few occasions where I really can say I've witnessed something absolutely incredible. Theyyam (from Skt. daivam, 'god') refers to a Keralan custom of spectacular trance-possession, in which dancers drawn from the lowest caste, the dalits, are dressed in astonishing costumes and masks; possessed by the divinities and drummed up into ecstasy by a trio of percussionists, they dance, and are worshipped as gods, even by the most bigoted of brahmins. For the period of the theyyam, the rules of caste are reversed, and position and power are miraculously tranferred to the powerless. The custom---which is extraordinarily similar to Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian possession practices---seems to be a rare local survival of pre-Indo-European, non-brahminical Dravidian religion, later absorbed into Hinduism. Here's a theyyam dancer:



Under the red stage lights, the vast masks and costumes were seriously weird and very powerful, the dancing really quite amazingly primordial and violent, with nothing of the fluid, precise courtly grace one associates with kathak, for example. At the end, the dancer incarnating the Mother Goddess (?) blessed us all (I think) by flicking his/her fingers at the audience. Wiser readers than I will have to tell me if this is right: my ability to analyse the symbolism of the masks was hampered both by my ignorance of the art-form and by having lost a contact lens on the tube.

Finally, as the theyyam dancers were helped off to a roar of applause, we had the magnificent Susheela Raman, slinky in a red dress, presenting her version of ancient thevaram hymns from Tamil Nadu. These are devotional songs written by Tamil saints during the great Hindu revival of the Chola period, famed also for its exquistely delicate and sensuous bronzes. After winning a Mercury Music prize nomination in 2001, Raman moved to Tamil Nadu and studied the Thevaram tradition with one of the last great masters. She has an extraordinary voice, gauzy and delicate in the higher registers, very deep and resonant in the lower; she is also highly trained in south Indian classical singing. Dalrymple was lucky to get her, as her high profile undoubtedly was a draw for many in the audience. However, I felt as I watched her that her inclusion might have been a mistake. I personally loved her set, ancient Thevaram hymns gradually being accompanied by electric guitar and inflected with a full-blooded rock sensibility: but this non-traditional---and loud!---reworking was too much for many of the middle-aged and older people in the audience, and I saw numerous people get up and leave in something like disgust, including the couples on either side and in front of me. (You can hear the song Raman began with, a hymn to the deity Murugan, here.) As I left, one of the aging hippes was remonstrating aggressively with the unfortunate Irish girl on the door. 'I wouldn't have gone to a pop concert in England, why would I go to one in India?' I heard her asking, obviously so addled on nagchampa and rough dope that she hadn't realised she was in fact in central London. I felt like telling the silly cow to get her head out of her asana.

To round off, there's a fabulous hymn to the tamil divinity Murugan here, in which the mystifying imagery---six babies appearing in a puff of smoke in six lotus blossoms?---can be explained by the wikipedia article on the deity here. (Who'd have guessed that the six women who collect the six lotus-babies are the Pleiades?!)

Face/Off

Further to yesterday's post on Tori Amos, I must ask: what has she done to her dolly old eek?! She looks like a novelty candle of herself. I hope it's just duct-tape and butterfly-clips under that wig.

On that note, let me draw your attention to the work of the fabulously talented, but sadly late, Kevyn Aucoin, whose book Making Faces is one of the most gorgeous books about make-up ever written. Aucoin created a whole series of looks for Amos before his tragically early death at 40 from an undiagnosed pituitary tumour. Here's an Aucoined-Amos as Pocahontas---



---and as Simonetta Vespucci (is there any more beautiful name in the world?):



Aucoin was an expert at creating unnerving impersonations. Here's Callista Flockheart as Audrey Hepburn and Gwyneth Paltrow as James Dean (!)---



---followed by Winona Rider as Liz Taylor, with Gina Gershon as Sophia Loren:



Swooningly gorgeous. Reader, if I didn't spend my life sighing and saying, 'No, you've not translated the infixed pronoun', I'd have been a make up artist.* It's one of those things I just know instinctively I could do really well, unlike the much larger list of things I know I'd do really badly. For that matter, I want Lisa Eldridge's job: like, really, really want it. Look through her ravishing gallery of work here: old Naomi Wolf, whom (sorry Justine, I know you like her) I've always found a rather second-rate mind, can troll right off with her beauty myth. (Wolf is currently having a jolly old time defending the veiling of women in a fantastically dim piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.)

*Actually I'd probably have been a shrink or a garden designer, but never mind.