Have we lost that vital spirit of place?

The first paragraph John Fowles' 1965 novel The Magus concludes with the words "...I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be". The Magus is sometimes criticised for being a rites of passage novel; which may or may not be the case. And even if it is there are some other very fine novels in that category: for instance J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. And other great artworks can also be interpreted as rites of passage: for instance Mahler's Fourth Symphony.  


I first read The Magus soon after its 1965 publication, and around the same time as a student I spent two summers on the Adriatic islands of what was then Yugoslavia. Much of the action of The Magus happens in and around the mysterious villa of Bourani on the fictional Greek island of Phraxos. It is known that the villa which is the lair of the magus in the novel was loosely based on the Villa Giacemia on the island of Spetses, which Fowles had visited. But that still did not prevent a sense of déjà vu when I returned to the Dalmatian islands recently after an absence of more than half a century.


On the island of Brač off the coast from Split I discovered the idyllic deserted beach seen above, where I was able to swim alone and undisturbed day after day. It could easily have been the scene of this erotic episode in Fowles' novel:

'What was going to become of my life I didn't know; but lying there that day by the sea it didn't seem to matter much. To be was enough. I felt myself in suspension, waiting without fear for some impulse to drive me on. I turned on my stomach and made love to the memory of Alison, like an animal, without guilt or shame, a mere machine for sensation spread eagled on the earth. Then I ran across the burning stones into the sea'.


When I first stumbled on the cove, the fictional beach in the The Magus immediately sprang to mind. But the similarity ran much deeper: because set back from the beach is an abandoned villa.


Abandoned for a long time, the villa is set in vast but badly overgrown grounds. The surrounding slopes have been expensively terraced and are planted with a vast number of untended olive trees. On one of my hikes across the island I met a German lady whose parents are Croatian with property in the area. She explained that the villa and grounds were the work of a lady who was not a a native of the area. She had attempted to make the beach private; this had antagonised the locals who according to my informant are "as stubborn as mules". Shades of Conchis in The Magus, she had fallen out with the locals, the villa was abandoned and the grounds left to return to nature.


In 1955 the situationist philosopher Guy Debord defined psychogeography as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals". While in his 1960 essay Landscape and Character another connoisseur of Mediterranean islands, Lawrence Durrell, wrote "the determinant of any culture is after all - the spirit of place". Similarities between the Villa Bourani in The Magus and the abandoned villa outside Milna on Brač are undoubtedly a pleasing coincidence. But they are also a fascinating example of how the environment influenced my emotions and behaviour. Have we lost that vital spirit of place? Is our current bleak culture a reflection of the abandoning of physical place for the virtual world?

Comments

Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
Read more

Classical music must be doing something wrong

Image
Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
Read more

Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

Image
These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
Read more

I loathe crooners and swooners

Image
Reading today's news trivia reminded me of a passage in Arthur Koestler 's 1960 book The Lotus and the Robot . References to the "under-privileged classes with their undeveloped tastes as consumers of mass-culture" may not sound well seven decades later. But Koestler was a brilliant man with important things to say, and he said them well; most notably in his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon . This, together with Animal Farm and 1984 , was essential reading for a generation of intellectuals falling out of love with the Soviet Union.    In the following passage from the epilogue of The Lotus and the Robot  Koestler reflects on how the Westernization of Eastern cultures is being superseded by another form of cultural osmosis. Despite being written in 1960, Koestler's thesis is, sadly, so very true in today's digital culture. Because as King Charles' 2025 Birthday Honours remind us, there has never been fewer creative talents facing a vaster audience of consume...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
Read more

Lise Meitner - the forgotten Lady Atomic

Image
Today's successful switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland takes us down an overgrown path that leads from a masterpiece of contemporary music via the Manhattan Project to the forgotten lady seen in my header photo. Legend has it Manhattan Project scientists working on the atomic bomb at the uranium-enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee listened repeatedly to Nicolas Slonimsky's recording of Edgard Varèse's Ionisation . Scored for thirteen percussionists Ionisation , like many of Varèse's works, takes its title from science. Today ionisation, which is part of the process of nuclear fission, is irrevocably linked with weapons of destruction and the work of Robert Oppenheimer , the so-called Doctor Atomic . But the study of radioactivity and nuclear physics predated the Manhattan Project by decades and many of the key research figures were committed to the peaceful application of their work. One such figure was Lise Meitner wh...
Read more

The Accidental Pilgrim

Image
There are an awful lot of books around about the journey to Santiago de Compostela in particular, and pilgrimages in general; and let’s be quite truthful a lot of them are rather average. But one that stood out from the crowd for me was David Moore’s The Accidental Pilgrim which was published in 2004 as a paperback by Hodder Headline Ireland, and is available in both the UK and US. The serendipitous path that links these posts meant that I bought this book in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport en route to the Danish Thread Subtitled 'Travels with a Celtic Saint', The Accidental Pilgrim is the story of a 1500 mile bike ride by the author from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy via France and Switzerland. The journey follows in the footsteps of the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus who made the journey in the 6th Century. (Which coincidentally, and linked to other threads , was around the time that Gregorian Chant was emerging as the official musi...
Read more

The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

Image
Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics? Flinging merde - ' Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21 , and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett. The true beauty of the effort - ' Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness. My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo be...
Read more

Walking the walk with Alma Mahler

Image
Today it is different. The steady war of propaganda avalanches loosed by press, radio and film makes it impossible for the thought to hear itself. It wavers, weakens and ends up in resignation. And the worst of it is that the evil is not confined to the "totalitarian" parts of Europe, but that it is spreading and infecting the intellectual life of all nations with a strange anarchy mixed of doubt, discontent and confusion. That extract is from a lecture given in Paris by the the Czech writer Franz Werfel in 1937. The evil that Werfel spoke of forced him, together with his wife Alma - seen above - to flee Vienna a year later and follow an arduous path to freedom in California. For part of their journey they had to walk - with Alma carrying the autograph score of a Bruckner symphony - along the torturous path seen below. The path is in the region of south-west France where the hills known as the Albères reach the Mediterranean. These hills are the eastern extension of the P...
Read more