Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Archives for 2010

Revision

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Revision is a bit like piano-tuning, trying to develop perfect pitch. Shake your page so that all unnecessary words fall off, so that what remains is tighter, preciser.
Revision is easier when you view the piece of work at a distance, far from the memories of the ecstasy, ardour, sweat and love which attended its conception and creation. 

Revision

By

Revision is a bit like piano-tuning, trying to develop perfect pitch. Shake your page so that all unnecessary words fall off, so that what remains is tighter, preciser.
Revision is easier when you view the piece of work at a distance, far from the memories of the ecstasy, ardour, sweat and love which attended its conception and creation. 

The Gift of an English Country Idyll

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I have thoroughly enjoyed the 5 years we have lived in the English countryside, in Garsington. One of my favourite novels (if it can be called a novel) Naipaul’s “The Enigma of Arrival” deals with a similar idyll.

“Naipaul’s 19th book yields its pleasures slowly. Its plot is essentially the passage of ten years, during which the writer lives in a cottage on the grounds of a Victorian-Edwardian manor in a Wiltshire valley within easy walking distance of Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain.
What engages, indeed mesmerizes, his attention is his sojourn in rural England, “this gift of the second life in Wiltshire, the second, happier childhood as it were, the second arrival (but with an adult’s perception) at a knowledge of natural things, together with the fulfillment of the child’s dream of the safe house in the wood.”

Jesus, I just want to hang out with you.

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 Jesus, I just want to hang out with you.
I don’t want to say anything
I don’t want to ask anything
I just want you.

Want to hear what you say,
Curl up like a cat against you
And just relax with you,
In your presence.

Jesus.

Sabbath: The Wonderful Gift of Sanctified Leisure

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Sundays! Oh the immense relief of a day in which one doesn’t have to do anything, achieve anything, write a book, make a fortune, bake a cake!

A day to do nothing but rest and be! To remember that incredibly God enjoys us just as we are. The relief of that!

Sabbaths, well-observed, (or even “mediocrely” observed, since we are no longer under the law, but under grace!) are a sheer gift!

Our family owns a publishing company. I write books, and have monetized blogs. So the boundaries between life and work are flexible, always interruptible with an email.

So Sundays are particularly blessed. A time to sit back, relax and trust God to bless the labours of the last week, and the week to come.

Taking one day off out of seven to rest is an act of trust in God to bless and multiply your efforts on the other six.

The miracles of self-seeding

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 Glory be for self-seeding nasturtium


Irene’s little nasturtium patch, planted last year, is now blooming orange. And her sunflowers have also self-seeded. Beauty persistent in the universe against all odds!

Pet Rabbit BABIES

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Well, here was a magical moment. I looked into the hutch and said, “There’s a baby rabbit there!” Roy and Zoe denied it, but at last saw a little sweet black rabbit. We looked into the nest, and there were three more. So that was why fat little Empress became so thin. We thought she was dying, so have been giving her lots of treats for the last 2-3 days, thankfully. The rabbits must be 2-3 weeks old.

One is black, with a little white; one white with a little black, and two brown and white. Empress is black and white, and Bandit is brown and white.

Now to find out what to feed baby rabbits!!

Omnibus Review by Anita Mathias of Rushdie, Ishiguro, Lahiri, and Manil Suri

By 

Anita Mathias 
Omnibus Review
Commonweal Magazine.
Salman Rushdie’s dazzling, densely textured maximilist novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Picador USA, $16, 575 pp.) tracks the brilliant rock stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, a contemporary Orpheus and Eurydice, through three great cities, Bombay, London, and, inevitably, New York; and through the familiar story of fame, desperately pursued, turning out to be less delicious than imagined, leading to paranoid, reclusive misery. Though Rushdie’s characters are often mere embodiments of an idea–Vina, like the painter Aurora in The Moor’s Last Sigh (Pantheon), incarnates the destructive concept of the artist as sacred monster, sacrificing morality, decency, and love for art–I found myself moved by the dumb, stoic suffering of Ormus Cama, an immensely gifted musician who wanted nothing more than calm married love, but loved the wrong woman for that life. The Ground offers vintage Rushdie: his erudition and humor; his magpie allusiveness and multicultural jokes; the lyricism, playfulness, and sheer plenitude of his style; and his trademark ricocheting between the sublime and the silly, popular culture and high art, all incarnated in the voice of the narrator, Rai, ostensible friend of Ormus, and Vina’s secret lover. “An everything novel,” Rushdie calls The Ground. Finally, in an uncharacteristic and Shakespearean peaceful conclusion, after the mythic figures of Vina and Ormus vanish–Vina dies in an earthquake, and Ormus is shot dead by Vina’s ghost in a tiresome flash of magical realism I wish Rushdie would abandon–the lesser artists, the photographer, Rai, and the popular singer Mira Celano, settle down to a life of mutual accommodation and domestic happiness.
The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton, $24.95, 256 pp.), a first novel by Manil Suri, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, presents five rambunctious families in an apartment building in Bombay, squabbling over the expenses of the dying (in the cosmos of the novel, reincarnating) janitor, Vishnu. Suri gives us a dead-on and hilarious portrayal of the melodramatic quarrels of the materialistic Asranis and Pathaks, and the simmering pettiness and viciousness engendered by a claustrophobically close society. In a conscious imitation of the progress of the soul in Hindu theology, the higher floors of the apartment building house the more evolved. These include Muslim Mr. Jalal, who desperately seeks the common truth underlying all religions (and, in a chilling scene, is lynched by a Hindu mob when his son elopes with the Asranis’ daughter), and the widower, Vinod Taneja, who has loosened all cords of desire. Though the dying Vishnu’s hallucinatory memories of love and the Hindu myths feel tacked-on and obtrusive, the book is a sprightly, realistic, funny portrait of lower-middle class Indian life and its pretensions.

The polished, elegant surfaces of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of nine short stories, An Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin, $12, 198 pp.) belie the howling emptiness at their depths. In her carefully observed, minimalist tales, Indian immigrants discover the nightmarish price of the American dream of lots of stuff. Strangers in a strange land, imperfectly understanding, imperfectly understood, missing their community-oriented society, they wrestle with unfamiliar New World problems–loneliness, depression, and isolation which destabilize the marriages that, in at least five stories, agonizingly disintegrate. In a savage story, “A Temporary Matter,” a suffering couple, Shoba and Shukumar, tell each other erstwhile secrets, and we watch them steadily, viciously destroy each other as they face the death of their love and marriage. “Mr. Pirzada” and “Mrs. Sen” present Indian faculty couples, alienated and adrift in a foreign world. More restfully, the final story, “The Third and Final Continent,” details the not uncommon odyssey of the restless Indian (like Lahiri’s and my own and, it’s rumored, Rushdie’s) from India through England to America; and the advent of love within the confines of an arranged marriage.

An Artist of the Floating World (Vintage International, $12, 206 pp.), a slender, perfect novel by the British-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro, explores the stream of consciousness of a self-deceived man in postwar Japan (reminiscent of Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro’s better-known, poignant The Remains of the Day). In fascinating sections, Masuji Ono, an artist dedicated to depicting the ukiyoe, “the floating world” of “the nightless city” of the pleasure district, pours himself into his art, painting fifteen-hour days as a student, and later as a sensei, a master. Later, exposed to Japan’s poverty, he asks the age-old question of the moral artistic spirit: Isn’t making art unconscionable in a world of pain? Consequently, he betrays his gift, and supports the Imperial Japanese armies. After Hiroshima, he faces a Japan craving amnesia, with the militarist faction shunned, and an epidemic of public harakiri, honor suicides. In imagistic dreamy sections, Ono reflects on his life, unable to face the tragedy of betraying his gifts, his promise, his joy for chimerical ideals, yet finding hope in the buoyancy of the young in the new Japan. Part of the novel’s pleasure lies in decoding Ono’s classic unreliable narrative, and the Japanese facade of invincible politeness. Ishiguro is a stunning writer with absolutely perfect pitch. His flawless novel, suffused with sadness and beauty, has the delicacy and restraint of the ukiyoe prints of the moon, cherry blossoms, migrating birds, and dreamy geishas with their admirers, sipping away all sorrow.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group