I am re-reading Great Expectations and the wonderful scene where Pip as a gentleman in London is visited by Joe Gargary the blacksmith, his brother-in-law and erstatz father figure from his lowly childhood on the Kent marshes. Pip has become a snob, or at least a young man having difficulties integrating his lowly past and grand present frequentations. He can see himself as a kind of monster but is unable to manage the situation to help Joe feel at ease. Pip is comfortable with Herbert Pocket meeting Joe, a friend he likes but does not fear, but wants to keep Joe away from Bentley Drummle, a contemporary he dislikes but fears. It is a marvellous evocation of our complex relationship with the past and our inability to put into practice what we know to be the right behaviour. There is even a secret allusion to Dickens’ own hidden past where Joe tells Pip and Herbert of the London sight he has seen, the blacking factory, where they make shoe polish from, amongst other ingredients, human excrement. Dickens himself had been forced to work there are as child but never in his life revealed this humiliating fact about his past. The shameful past is again alluded to in that Joe is a blacksmith and Pip had been his apprentice, blacksmith and blacking being the secret code of this hidden past. It is a remarkable piece of writing, comic and dreadful, walking that fine line of high control and yet also material that is mysteriously beyond the writer’s control because it is his own chaotic life. Once artistic material is totally controlled it becomes dead meat. Here is the reason why modern creative writing courses or manuals produce awful content, writing by numbers.

We are all constantly confronted by our past and our present colliding, moments where we need to manage what we think we once were and what we think we are now, moments where our personality is stretched like india rubber. If, like Pip, you come from one place and end up in a completely different place, you need to have a personality large enough to contain both. This is something Pip learns over the course of the novel (I don’t know if Dickens ever learnt it) and is a competence we all need to face over the course of a life.

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I went to a little concert alone this evening between 6 and 7. It was Schubert’s Quintet in C Major with two cellos. It is a well known piece; many people’s favourite. I used to listen to this piece many years ago very often, so it brought back memories of that time. The yearning strains of the second movement. How I would have affixed my desires and melancholies of a young man onto this music. The piece this evening acted to reacquaint myself with my younger self. These days there are yearnings, I suppose, but not so much. I don’t function the same way The melancholy now is about the passage of time and the people I used to spend time with, now mostly distant, out of my ambit, for whatever reason. As I was leaving my seat with the rest of the crowd there was an argument going on between two men. As I understood it, one of the men had tapped someone, perhaps the other man, on the shoulder during the music to stop them making a noise of some sort and the other man had taken umbrage at it. For him too, perhaps both of them, this music was some special resonance of their past that must not be interfered with. The music was a vessel that contained the normally unreachable past. The man tapping on the other man’s shoulder had broken the vessel.

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I was at a concert last night in the Royal Festival Hall. It was Messaien’s Turangalila symphony, one of the longest and loudest symphonies you could come across, a piece that is ecstatic, rhythmically-driven, very loud, relentless, with an enormous percussion and brass section, a piano, a celesta, various glockespiels and xylophones and an ondes martenot, a weird electronic instrument which gives out sounds as if from a1950s sci-fi film and lasting about an hour and a half. I was sitting on the side but close enough to the massive orchestra and also with a side view of the main bulk of the stalls. Halfway through one of the loudest movements I heard this tormented death rattle come form the centre of the audience. When I looked across I saw a man of a certain age with his head thrown back letting out what seemed to be his last gasp. Over the next ten minutes concert hall assistants, security men and finally paramedics arrived and he was eventually taken away, fortunately still alive, in a wheelchair. Throughout all of this the relentless concert went on.

Before the incident I had been thinking about the music. Did it represent our reality? Or would a more domestic modest texture best reproduce the everyday? The soundtrack to the life and death moment was rather effective, though. Some moments are pretty ecstatic and life-affirming or life-destroying. It’s just that they are few and far between or that we don’t face them. Still, he did not die, so we can all get back to the domestic now.

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