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fearful mess it is simply because she thinks backwards instead of forwards. Hunt kept thinking back to
the Early Church instead of forward to the Impressionists. Isn't his sun breaking through the cypress trees
in the Fiesole canvas of 1868 as fresh in its wayas Monet's studies of light and shadow on the Seine,
painted in the same year? I suppose the answer is, No, it is not. Just as this woman's remembrance of
things past is not a patch on Proust's, though she may have suffered as much.
Here we sit, then: Hunt and she and Calder and me. Calder's in the best position; his time escape-route
lies in the future, because his book is not even published till next week; nor does he exactly address
himself to the denizens of the V & A canteen. But the rest of us are paralysed by time. So's her sister,
stuck in Harrods waiting for her. And her third husband, down outside Torquay. As for me ... has any
critic before ever tried to arrive at an objective viewpoint in similar circumstancesand admitted it?
Critics ought to confide more, the way this woman does; we need to know more often what's in it for
them.
What's in it for her? She didn't even go to look at the Hunts. She says she doesn't like paintings much.
She did when she was a little girl. What the hell's she doing here anyway? I shouldn't have imagined she
came to the V & A especially to revel in the delights of the cafeteria. Not with orangeade at
one-and-three a carton. Perhaps she comes every morning - captive audience always on tap. 1 must
break away. I notice she tells me every-body's name but her own. This hysterectomy she's telling me
about now - would she be so liberal with the gruesome detail if we had been properly introduced? No
painter has ever painted a hysterectomy, to my knowledge.
Some awful academic social realistic painter in Moscow -he must have done it. Glaring light; thick-set
surgeons; anaes-thetists in green overalls; devoted proletarian nurses, almost sex-less; scalpels gleaming,
the op nearly over; bust of Lenin in the background, surrounded by flags; the womb emerging; general
moral uplift. Or perhaps the Russians consider it a decadent capitalist operation. The way she tells it,
they're right!
Anyway, Hunt, William Holman. My review. Primarily a religious painter. More competent than his
colleague Millais. The only one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren to stick to his princi-ples. I came away
from his canvases primed with the suspicion - no, confirmed in my opinion that, while he may be by no
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means the greatest of the Victorian painters, Hunt's place is assured - no, it is the colourist rather than the
moralist that today - no, no, no
This woman's making more sense than I am. I cameaway still feeling a strong bond with Hunt. One of
the great comic painters: comic-macabre, asThe Shadow of Death proves. Born too late. Too early.
Nothing but cliche ... I must escape from this cliche of a life unrolling before me ... Majorca to recover,
indeed! There she met this rich Spaniard. If only one could suspect her of lying. That uncomfortable
pause be-tween life and art is not for her, any more than it was for Hunt.
She's on about sex all the time, you notice, without actually daring to tackle the subject head-on. Dear
God, we all live out such muddled lives, and so many lives at once. Calder should write a book about
controllingms !
Hurriedly, I swig down her untouched orangeade and make off with scarcely a farewell, heading
towards Harrods, where my wife awaits me.
Confluence
The inhabitants of the planet Myrin have much to endure from Earthmen, inevitably perhaps, since they
represent the only in-telligent life we have so far found in the galaxy. The Tenth Research Fleet has
already left for Myrin. Meanwhile, some of the fruits of earlier expeditions are ripening.
As has already been established, the superior Myrinian cul-ture, the so-called Confluence of
Headwaters, is somewhere in the region of eleven million (Earth) years old, and its language, Confluence,
had been established even longer. The etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet was privileged to
sit at the feet of two gentlemen of the Oeldrid Stance Academy. They found that Confluence is a
language-cum-posture, and that meanings of words can be radically modified or altered entirely by the
stance assumed by the speaker. There is, therefore, no possibility of ever compiling a one-to-one
dictionary of English-Confluence, Confluence-English words.
Nevertheless, the list of Confluent words that follows dis-regards the stances involved, which number
almost nine thou-sand and are all named, and merely offers a few definitions, some of which must be
regarded as tentative. The definitions are, at this early stage of our knowledge of the Myrinian cul-ture,
valuable in themselves, not only because they reveal some-thing of the inadequacy of our own language,
but because they throw some light on to the mysteries of an alien culture. The romanized phonetic system
employed is that suggested by Dr. Rohan Harbottle3one of the members of the etymological team of the
Seventh Research Fleet, without whose generous assist-ance this short list could never have been
compiled.
abWEtel min: The sensation that one neither agrees nor disagrees with what is being said to one, but that
one simply wishes to depart from the presence of the speaker
arn tutkhan: Having to rise early before anyone else is about; addressing a machine
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bagi rack: Apologizing as a form of attack; a stick resembling a gun
bag rack: Needless and offensive apologies
baman: The span of a man's consciousness
bi: The name of the mythical northern cockerel; a reverie thatlasts for more than twenty (Earth) years
bi san:A reverie lasting more than twenty years and ofa re-ligious nature
biSAN: A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of ablasphemous nature
bi tosi: A reverie lasting more than twenty years on cosmological themes
bi tvas: A reverie lasting more than twenty years on geologicalthemes
biui tosi: A reverie lasting more than a hundred and forty-two years on cosmological themes; the sound
of air in a cavern;long dark hair
biut tash: A reverie lasting more than twenty years on HarDar Ka themes
cano lee min: Things sensed out-of-sight that will return
ca pata vatuz: The taste of a maternal grandfather
cham on thZAM: Being witty when nobody else appreciates it
DARayrhoh: The garments of an ancient crone; the age-oldsupposition that Myrin is a hypothetical
place
en ioplay: The deliberate dissolving of the senses into sleep
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