Phoenix Ark's Blog

The world has always had its horrors, its darkness, its sadnesses, but perhaps each new generation wakes up to new jolts. When did the world lose it’s innocence for you? It did for me when I read that the bones of Alistair Cook, veteran radio and news reporter and enlightened and liberal commentator, with his brilliant Letters From America, had gone missing in New York. Still, perhaps it’s only while you’re still around that things really matter!

Jane Eyre, which Charlotte Bronte wrote under the pen name Currer Bell, in an age when it was not decent for women to write, is one of the most romantic stories ever and like the story of Silas Marner involves a fictional blinding, when Mr Rochester’s home catches fire. With the shame of his psychic Grace Poole in the attic, of the past, his marriage and so thwarted love of Jane, he is redeemed and gets his sight back too, spiritually and literally, thanks to the love of the active not the passive and judging feminine, in the understanding, courage and love of the heroine, Jane.

Just as Silas Marner loses his soul to acquisitiveness, then loses everything too, but is redeemed by his love for and parenting of a little girl. That golden haired child he sees through the fog of his own blindness, at first thinking it is his lost money restored, but finding a far bigger prize. I talked of the film Half-Nelson too and the potential agony of an idealistic man getting so lost, and being so shamed too, but also redeemed by his friendship with a teenage girl. Such concepts and words don’t sit so easily in today’s world, but the ‘soul’ and its fears and problems, for men and women, are as real today as ever. We just need a language for that, and the spirit contained inside that, that is not necessarily religious, or split into easy labels and opposites. Out of my novel Fell, and so in the dark, I so cried out for my own Jane, for so long, and she never came. No one has a right to anything, but I am still understanding the why in me and in others. But it is another theme in the book The Seven Basic Plots, on the history of storytelling and its reasons, of why the strong but wildly inflated masculine, like King Lear, can so rage and go so dark when it loses touch with the balanced and honest heroine, like Cordelia. ‘I love you according to my bond, no more, no less.‘ Yes, indeed. That great, tragic play is also about blindings too, types of seeing and imagination, but as ever in Shakespeare how an alchemy is always going on inside people themselves, but most especially with people on one another.

The picture is of the original edition of Jane Eyre from Wikedpedia.

The BBC repeat of Fake or Fortune, with Philip Mould and Fiona Bruce, produced another little gem, with the story of the discovery of a Winslow Homer at The Antique’s Roadshow in 2008, perhaps the greatest American watercolourist, and its valuation at £30,000. Then the journey to prove its provenance in England, America and the Bahamas, its restoration and re-valuation, at close to quarter of a million dollars, but the stepping in at the New York Southeby’s sale of the original owners, the Murrays, right at the eleventh hour. It was highly dramatic, proved Philip Mould’s toughness, but now the ownership has been disputed for over two years.

There were some strange ellisions in the tale of why the original owners had showed no acknowledgement of a painting though, or theft either, in Southeby’s original due dilligance investigations. Family letters clearly proved the family had been one time owners, yet what they did not prove was how the painting, and drawings of relations too, got on a rubbish tip, if crime had been involved, or they had perhaps been given away, sold, or discarded in some folder. Surely the fact that an unframed and then rather grubby sketch had been with other sketches, suggests it had been in a folder, and so never hung illustriously on the walls of the ancestral home, Myrtle Grove, despite the family’s mounting passion for art.

To me it was particularly telling though when the young scion of the Murray family, Simon, and a former barrister and now lawyer, spoke on camera about his supposed sympathy for the family who found it on a rubbish tip, their natural disappointment that it was suddenly wanted back, now its true value had been flagged in the Telegraph, and how the finders were obviously thinking of the money in terms of ‘swimming pools or cars’. Oh those awful, greedy, ignorant and unartistic working classes! Actually what you saw were some rather nice people, four great kids and, despite an admittance of knowing nothing about art from the daughter, Selina, a rather moving sequence involving a charming American curator and her emotional response to one of Homer’s big sea paintings. Beyond the power of money, that is always the true value of art, how it speaks. That sea tussle, swept up in wilder forces, became her personal story, by natural association, and then the bigger story of a tug of war now underway, across the classes.

The sale was stopped, perhaps rather sadly for Selina, if she could have shared 30% of the sale. But Phoenix Ark would like to offer an enlightened solution. Why don’t both the finders and the original owners offer the painting to a major American Museum, brokered by the BBC, and split the proceeds 50/50, because it probably would not even be around if the finder had not gone on his fishing trip. Then honour would be served, money shared for swimming pools, cars, children’s education, or the upkeep of said Myrtle Grove. But above all the truer purpose of art would be served. People would actually get to see the damn thing, not have it languishing in some safe, so enjoy it and its rather strange story too, and America would have one of its favourite sons come proudly home. A truly democratic solution. We know, it will never happen!

The image is a wikepedia photo of Winsolw Homer

It’s just a quiet question, put out into the Universe, or in the way that Bhuddist do, or I knew something had changed before I got on a plane to America. Is what stops someone just picking up a phone and healing something really an entire firm, or no sense anywhere that the Universe somehow got badly out of joint in this? Because it did and something needs healing.

In line with the Class Action Lawsuit underway in New York, Phoneix Ark Press is delighted to announce that it is slashing it’s ebook prices. All our eBooks will now be available on Kindle priced between $.99 and $2.99, and their equivalent UK prices. Happy Reading!

I think it was ‘American’ consciousness that really wounded me, because it could not be more split, or absolute either. Drive down a Texan highway and you will see churches and huge neon crosses on one side of the road, and ranks of porn cinemas on the other. Democrat vs Republican, them and us, the creation of ‘other’, brutally done very often to energise the great captialist powerhouse. It could not be more a place of ‘tribal victories’. So here are three epigraphs to the unpublished Scream of the White Bear.

According to a series of studies by the U.S. Geological Survey, future reduction of sea ice in the Arctic could result in a loss of two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population within fifty years.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
Albert Einstein

“The modern hero…cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to caste off that slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live’ Nietsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of his tribes great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”
Joseph Campbell – The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Iran urging the UK Government to show restraint, German News comparing us to Mogadishu, a Russian Reporter claiming there are escaped tigers from London Zoo roaming the streets, and David Cameron’s Cobra Committee meeting in a building on Horse Guard’s, overlooking the US Olympic girl’s baseball team! It’s surreal, but the World Media are clearly having a ball and a field day turning the lens on Britain. The US Economist Joseph Steilglitz was right to say that when hope goes huge resentments can build and then be unleashed, but as for the idea doing the rounds on the Cyberverse and Internet that it is like the Arab Spring, the characters involved and what they are doing does not wash for a moment. The Summer of Discontent indeed, in the Anti-Social Network.

In fact, now is no time for playing politics like Ken Livingstone, or for complicated social arguments either, this breakdown in London needs to be stopped. When you see footage of a young boy, bleeding and knocked over, then ‘helped up’ but mugged by his so called helpers, and his things stolen from his napsack, the real bastards out there need to be stopped. So perhaps Jamie Oliver is right, or the Government should think of bringing in the army and water cannon. It could put out the fires too.