More Chinese symbolism

Here’s what I learned at the Musée Canadien des Civilisations across the river when earlier this month I visited the current exhibition there, Trésors de la Chine.

A mountain symbolises stability and tranquility.
Surging waves and mountains in a picture stand for riches and a long life.
The peony is the king of flowers and a symbol of spring, beauty and honour.
Butterflies = joy.
Plum blossoms represent purity, longevity and endurance. (“Plum vases” in ancient China, so called because they could hold a single branch of plum blossom, were also used as decanters for wine and as burial articles in tombs.)
A gourd stands for a high salary, or fertility.
Pomegranates are a token of numerous male offspring.
The sight of a day lily will help people to forget their sorrows, perhaps because these flowers can be “consumed” (as the exhibition notes put it) as an anti-depressant.
The Chinese word for “bats” is a pun on “fu”, meaning good fortune, so many Chinese artifacts feature flying bats.
The image of an egret and a lotus conveyed the wish for success in passing exams and in getting promotion.

Infinite Pleasantness

On Labour Day, September 3rd, Carol, Francine, my mother and I paid a visit to the Montreal Botanical Gardens, Le Jardin Botanique de Montréal. After wandering through the rose garden, the native garden, the shade garden (remarkable for its range of begonias) and past the ponds, we came upon the Japanese and Chinese Gardens in the centre, which are gifts to the city from these countries.

In the Chinese Garden was a Pavilion of Infinite Pleasantness, this choice of name having a poignant explanation:

The name of this small building refers to a poem penned in the 9th century by Bai Juyi describing an emperor’s melancholy as he stood before the deserted pavilion where his love once lived. The woman was killed to save the kingdom from violent uprisings.

Practically every feature of the Chinese Garden is meant to be symbolic. The rocks and stones, some imported from China despite the fact that Quebec isn’t exactly short of rocks itself, represent the masculine element (Yang), the water features being the feminine (Yin) that flows around them. Elaborate lanterns were hanging over the pathways and pavilions and floating in the ponds: boats, dragons, birds and fish, their garish colours rather excessive, but they were beautifully made for the Lantern Festival. There’s a harmonious mixture of the artificial and the natural, with lotus buds, symbols of purity, opening in man-made ponds and decorative gaps in the walls revealing the trees and flowerbeds behind.

A girl in the Friendship Hall was playing the erhu, the traditional Chinese equivalent of a violin. Her name is Shen Qi, whose blog you can access here. Disconcertingly, her instrument was plugged into an electronic amplifier and the melodies she was playing, admittedly in the Chinese style, were western (Amazing Grace, etc.).

It was Shen Qi who played the theme music for the wonderfully original 2003 French-Canadian film La Face Cachée de la Lune by Robert Lepage, which has no connection to anything oriental as far as I remember, apart, perhaps, from the goldfish who plays a pivotal role in the plot. I bought the video of this film because I’d so much admired Lepage’s one-man stage version when I’d seen it at the NAC. When I asked Shen Qi about this though, she confessed that she’d performed the music without ever seeing the film.

The Popocatepetl rap

While Chris was reading a back copy of the London Review of Books in the bath last night, he came across a reference to Ernst Toch, an Austrian-Jewish composer who in 1930 wrote a fugue for voices, known in English as The Geographical Fugue. The extraordinary thing about it is, this is a composition for spoken voices.

You live and learn! Looking this up on the Internet at my husband’s request, I made another gratifying discovery, an amusing article about the composer by his grandson, Lawrence Weschler, in The Threepenny Review, who calls The Geographical Fugue a kind of “Weimar rap”!

Here’s how the German version goes (I’m thinking of introducing this to our Konversationsgruppe):

Fuge aus der Geographie

Ratibor!
Und der Fluss Mississippi
und die Stadt Honolulu
und der See Titicaca;
Der Popocatepetl liegt nicht in Kanada,
sondern in Mexico, Mexico, Mexico.
Kanada, Malaga, Rimini, Brindisi,
Kanada, Malaga, Rimini, Brindisi.
Ja! Athen, Athen, Athen, Athen,
Nagasaki, Yokohama,
Nagasaki, Yokohama,

Ratibor!

By clicking here you can hear a short excerpt. Clever, isn’t it?

In case anybody was wondering, Ratibor is the German name for a town in Silesia, now in Poland.

To the scientists

Over the main entrance of Ottawa’s National Research Laboratories at 100 Sussex Drive is carved an inscription chosen by the wartime Prime Minister, William Lyon MacKenzie King, which I noted down the other day because I think it is so apposite to science. It is a quotation from the 2nd Book of Esdras, in the Apocrypha:

Great is truth and mighty above all things. It endureth and is always strong. It liveth and conquereth for ever more. The more thou searchest, the more thou shalt marvel.”

Here’s a picture I took of the Rideau Falls adjacent to 100 Sussex Drive:

Sixty-eight years ago

During her stay in Canada my mother reminisced about her experience of the outbreak of war in September ‘39, when she was a twenty year old Londoner. Her recollections brought it to life for me, so I’ll share them here.

A couple of days before the beginning of the 2nd World War, when Poland was being invaded and everyone knew that war was inevitable, my mother, who had a “half-season” ticket to the Proms — costing her 9 (old) pence rather than a shilling per concert — went to a performance at the Queen’s Hall which turned out to be the last ever, because these concerts ceased for the duration of the war and the old Hall was bombed. Being Friday, it was a Beethoven night, with Henry Wood conducting. Few people came to the concert, so she had a good view of the orchestra, but it was a “poor performance,” she said. It was difficult to come down the steps afterwards, as the blackout had now been imposed. Busses drove by with hooded headlights, and no lights on inside. The destination sign was likewise blacked out so a prospective passenger would have to shout to the bus driver from her bus stop, “Where are you going?” Nor could she see the coins in her purse when the conductor came round to collect the fares, so perhaps she only gave him a farthing, instead of threepence.

On normal occasions, she would often walk the three miles home to save her threepence.

The first my mother heard of the declaration of war was in a Methodist Church in Holborn where the famous pacifist, Donald Soper, happened to be preaching that morning. He interrupted the service to make the solemn announcement which was immediately followed by the sound of an air-raid siren. Everyone got up and left the premises, making for the safety of the nearest underground station. As it was a Sunday, none of the escalators was working and officially the station was closed, with no one to sell her a ticket, but Mum went down below all the same, carrying her gas mask in its “clumsy box”. A tube train came by, stopped, and she got on, for the first time in her life taking a free ride. She came up again at her home stop, Holland Park, expecting to see devastation, but “everything was the same as usual.”

Trenches were dug along Holland Park Avenue; there were sandbags and barrage balloons and “a funny atmosphere” during the phoney war. Everyone anticipated drastic events, but for a while “nothing happened”. Mum worked for the Civil Service in those days at an office in Hammersmith, Olympia, which before long was evacuated elsewhere, some of the employees being transferred to a place called ZA which everyone knew to be Harrogate. Mum, knowing this was about to occur, wrote to the authorities, saying: If the town concerned is less than fifty miles from Darlington where my aging parents live, I would like to be included in the evacuation. (In fact her parents were only in their early sixties; even so, my grandfather was to die of a stroke in the spring of the following year.) Her real motivation was to “get back to the countryside” because she was homesick for the moors. Her ploy worked; she was transferred to Harrogate and every three weeks was able to go back to her “old life” in Darlington at the weekend, playing the flute in her father’s chapel orchestra, though psychologically she no longer felt that she really belonged there. It was an unsettling, she said, living two lives.

Family circle

On her visit, my mother showed me something my cousin had made: a record of our ancestors. It wasn’t drawn as a family tree but as concentric rings, my mother’s name—Dorothy Middleton Tullett—prominent in the innermost circle. A ring round that divided into two contained her father’s name and her mother’s maiden name, the next ring showing the names of her four grandparents (i.e. my grandson’s great-great-great grandparents), and so on to the outermost ring, eight generations back, which had room for 128 different names, very few of them filled in because my cousin must have had trouble finding a record of all those people born in the 17th century.

It struck me how many different surnames were shown, most of them unfamiliar although all directly linked to me, unless one of my antecedents was the offspring of an illicit affair … and who could ever tell, now? There were Mewars and Matthews, the Younger, Watson, Pattison, Vitty, Close, Gilpatrick, Hilton, Trotter, Dunn, Sweeting, Gill, Harrison, Hutton, Jackson, Wetherweld, Sprowson, Fawcett, Ostlins, Wilford, Green, Rawlinson, Parke, Gillard, Burgess, James, Smith, Hormer and Graham families. We had ancestors called Addy and others called Eddy; some were Brackens and some were Breckons. I see a Wilde or two who might even connect me with my son-in-law’s mother’s family. In fact we must all be far more related than we think.

A huge variety of occupations was listed. We were

cartwrights

joiners

a parish clerk

an innkeeper on the Great North Road

a cornmiller

a mail-coach driver

cordwainers

saddlers

yeomen

and a tin plate worker from Grantham

I don’t suppose my son has a clue what a cordwainer is and I’m sure the cordwainer William Woodford (1668-1719) would never have dreamt of having an astrophysicist for a great great (…) great grandson, but they appear to be firmly linked by a long genetic chain none the less and perhaps share more than a few qualities.

Apart from their occupations, I have only snippets of information about my ancestors. My grandfather Benjamin was the son of another Benjamin, himself the son of 19th century William, “a reprobate with 16 children” (I quote my mother) who founded an ironworks in Somerset where you can still see BISHOP BROTHERS written on manhole covers. Those Bishop brothers were devout Baptists who eventually converted William to the extent that he “cried over the Bible”, or so my mother’s great aunt used to say. The local Somerset lads used to make fun of the preaching Bishop family, one of whom once stood on a barrel to proclaim that

the Righteous shall stand and the Wicked shall fall!

at which some joker knocked his barrel over.

My grandfather’s mother, who lived till 1929, was the musical daughter of another William (Willis) who engineered a steam-powered waterworks and played the cello; during the singing of family hymns he was able to hold the tenor line while playing the bass line simultaneously. He was the son of an overman at the Jarrow pits who died in 1826. William Willis married Ann Thursby, who also came of a mining family.

Mum’s grandmother married a William (!) Foggin who, “a bit of a washout”, died at the young age of 43, having tried his hand at a series of jobs without much success, his widow having to send her daughter (my grandmother) to live with her better-off grandmother who made her sit up straight and sew long seams on sheets at the age of seven. This formidable person was the wife of a bank manager in Thirsk.

Then there were the Morton-Middletons, the Morton family being the connection of whom the family was particularly proud. Three generations of the Middleton family’s oldest sons were christened Lancelot, one of whom was Director of Education in Rhodesia and stood for parliament there in 1939. My mother’s great uncle, Robert Robert Morton Middleton, was a Kew Gardens botanist—and from 1904-1907 a missionary in Chile—who sent plant samples to Darwin and in 1890 presented some 3000 American and other specimens to the herbarium at McGill University.

Resumption

Now that the last of my summer visitors has gone I’ll be able to resume my blog. My mum is presently ZOOM-ing towards “her other life” in Cardiff, northeast across Labrador at 541 knots ground-speed, at 35000 feet above sea level, in a Boeing 763. I saw her off this evening in Toronto before coming back home by air myself.

Strange to think that she was walking round our park with me less than twelve hours ago, happy not to have missed the maple leaves before she left.

Curious to think how people often see September as the starting point of a new life. Maryam or George, for example, not just the swarming students.

Good luck to them all!