DIARY
ANTHONY O'HEAR From 2 till 4 p.m. on Thursday, I was in the bowels of the BBC, recording The Can- didate, in which I was the 'expert', assessing the suitability of Douglas Adams for the Job of government adviser on education. (Thumbs down, I am afraid. Mr Adams thought that we do not understand our- selves unless we know about science, thus disqualifying Aeschylus, Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Proust from self- understanding. Then, in the week that the NUT had voted for a four-day week and stress counselling for teachers, he would tell the Secretary of State to quadruple teachers' pay.) Meanwhile, although I did not know it, a storm was breaking around my head. The BBC was looking for me everywhere except in the BBC, and so were News at Ten, the Press Association and the Times, and that was just for a start, The 72 hours of the Princess, the Professor and the Prime Minister were about to begin.
My notoriety arose from having con- tributed an eight-page essay to a book pub- lished on Friday, in which I analysed what had been happening to the country at the time of Diana, Princess of Wales's death. Some of the essay was critical of the public emotion at the time, and some was critical of the Princess (though I did say that the emotion was sincere and I did praise Diana's charity work). Most of what I said was not new, apart from a discussion of Burke and the monarchy (not a bit of which Was taken up by the world's media). We are in a crazy situation where comment, even recycled comment, can become front-page news. Was it that there was no news around (though there were Pal Pot, Ireland and the Middle East), or was it that a professor was pronouncing (which argues a hitherto unknown respect for academia in the world at large)? I still do not know.
Friday and Saturday were bedlam. My Only advice to anyone caught up in a storm like this is not to read the papers. Mostly I didn't. On Saturday I resolved to give no more interviews. You can only say the same thing 25 times, after which it becomes even more boring than it was to start with. On Sunday I was woken very early by someone from the radio news. 'You have been attacked by the Prime Minister. Would you care to comment?' No — sticking to resolve. Back to sleep. During the day fur- ther attempts were made to elicit a com- ment about Mr Blair while I was at a son's rugby tournament (serious). Apparently Mr Blair thinks I am a snob and out of touch. Has he actually read the article? Is it usual for a prime minister, even an emotional one, to enter controversies of this sort? More dignified not to comment. Philoso- phers are trained to expect reasoned dis- agreement, which they should respond to, but not to misdirected personal abuse. Dur- ing the week I received a huge post, 350 let- ters, ten to one in favour. How on earth am I going to deal with it? Curiously and touchingly, many correspondents imagine themselves to be my only supporters. I gather that the Sun has had a poll: 7,901 on my side, 6,706 against, which may bear on my snobbery and on the judgment of those who claim to speak on behalf of the whole nation. Perhaps I am in touch after all. All rather distressing for one who had compla- cently assumed that the modern world was not for him.
`Thank God for Sunday opening. We were right out of Communion wine.' 0 n Wednesday, I visited another world, that of 15th-century Russian icons at the Royal Academy. Russian icons are dif- ferent from the Byzantine, less stiff and hieratic, the figures supple and sinuous, more gentle, less judgmental. An astonish- ing moment, when a religion of absolute certainty, without compromising its faith, takes on a human quality. There is a lot of stuff in the exhibition about setting the icons in their 'actual historical time'. What they don't say is that the actual historical time was one of extreme cruelty and bar- barism, yet it nurtured a spirituality which we, for all our progress, moral and materi- al, can only wonder at. On to Anthony d'Offay's, to see what the cutting edge of our culture is up to. It is indeed the cutting edge: Jeff Koons and Josef Beuys, megastars both of Ednaesque proportions in today's art world. Koons has moved away from kitsch and porn, and back to ready- mades (only 85 years after Duchamp), in this case stacks of basketballs in their boxes. Beuys is represented by dull-looking objects placed in glass cases. Apparently Koons's balls, 'preserved in an absolute state of virginal intactness', are evidence of his 'deep engagement with commodifica- tion, advertising and consumerism'. Beuys's cases are not merely 'cabinets of curiosities, they are machines for meaning'. Does someone actually write this drivel? Does anyone believe it?
Yet in the art world, just as in the world at large, there is good sense, if one is prepared to look. There too one can find the people of England, that never have spoken yet, at least not in public. David Blackburn, a friend from Huddersfield, has an exhibition at the Hart Gallery (Upper Street, Islington). For 35 years he has been working in pastel, a subtle and meditative medium. In his visionary land- scapes he is developing the tradition which runs from Turner and through artists such as Sutherland, Lanyon, Hitchens and Paul Nash. As for Turner, so with Blackburn, light is God. Light hides as well as illumi- nates, veils as it reveals. In Blackburn's art, light transforms shapes taken from the natural world, recasting them as interior landscapes. Our culture is not religious in a dogmatic sense, but the work of Black- burn and the other artists of his tradition hints at something profound: a unity in things which runs deeper than either the material or the mental, and in the light of which each is revealed as a necessary aspect of the other.
0 n Thursday I returned to a measure of sanity and decent obscurity.
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