Monthly Archive

It’s early spring. The hedgerows peel away as I walk across field after field towards the broad lip of horizon beyond. There is such endless freedom in the remote Dorset countryside to cross boundaries. I have to do this once a month, or in London I become a crazed caged animal not being able to see the horizon everyday but instead being confronted by the indifference of buildings blunt with their denial of the fullness of the sky.

As I walk, I glimpse one half of a rainbow throwing its arch into a tree. The rest of the rainbow is invisible, until another arch lands three fields away. I am determined to try and trick the light so the whole rainbow will be revealed to me. So I try to change my angle, stepping out of a field lush with newborn lambs straight into the path of an oncoming car. That’s how I meet Gabriel a friend I haven’t seen for months who just happens at that particular moment, to be on that particular road, in that particular part of the countryside which is nowhere. He’s hundreds of miles away from home and about to go to Nigeria the next day. Serendipity - that’s what I think as he hugs me in the middle of this somewhere-nowhere, his wife beaming at me, and their two year old child Ben introducing me to Emily the dumper truck clutched tightly in his budding fist. Serendipity - I have been meaning to call you. Serendipity leading to the discovery that he and Sybilla have a friend who live two fields away from my father’s house. Serendipity - accidental happenings which lead to new knowledge.

In a world driven by the need to process our lives, serendipity is an endangered species It is undervalued and despised. Yet it is the triumph of the imagination and the very essence of any form of discovery. Without serendipity, Willelm Roetgen wouldn’t have discovered x rays, Henri Becquerel radioactivity, Isaac Newton gravity, Louis Daguerre photography. In science, serendipity holds a position which is inviolate but is seldom celebrated and shouted about. It threatens to throw science off its proud throne of high rationalism by introducing chance and imagination into the equation of living and discovery.

But serendipity is what art and science are all about. Just remember that moment when you write and your put two words together for the first time and they shout new meanings at you. Or think of when you pluck a random book from the shelves and you discover a new idea which feeds into your own thoughts. But with Amazon email recommendations, classes on how to be creative at the BBC, the proposal for GCSEs in creative writing, serendipity - the chance operation of the human spirit - is under threat. Society seems to be more and more driven to tame the imagination into a series of boxes
which can be ticked, to turn it into a series of processes which can be described and followed and not allow anything to chance. How wrong can we be?

In 1754 the great English eccentric who could never be boxed in, Horace Walpole, coined the term serendipity. He wrote a letter to his friend Horace Mann, an Englishman living in Florence saying:

“I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right-now do you understand serendipity?”

The fairy tale is replete with accidental discoveries leading to new knowledge. The three princes from the land of Serendip - the ancient word for Sri Lanka - can’t help themselves. Everywhere they turn, something happens which leads to something else. A captive girl they stumble upon in a forest turns out to be a princess and one of them is rewarded by having her hand in marriage. They are rescued from being put to death for identifying a camel they have never seen by a traveller steps forward to say that he has just seen the missing camel wandering in the desert. And so the King Bharam Gur doesn’t put them to death and they are given lavish rewards.

Randomness has its own rewards. As the American experimentalist composer John Cage said, his music was earthquake proof. By saying this, he meant that virtually anything could happen during the performance of one of his pieces - and it would be part of the piece. It was proof - precisely because it didn’t need to be excluded. Whether it was an earthquake, the sound of someone coughing, the blare of a siren - it would give his piece new life and lead to new music.

And so it is with life. Celebrate serendipity and who knows what words will ripple out of your keyboards on this soft spring day? Or what lines of prose and poetry will turn into the books which we can then pluck from the shelves and discover new ways of seeing the world? Take a chance. Throw away your map. Turn off your phone. Your Satnav. And go somewhere you’ve never been – with your words, mind and limb. Cross a field. Grab the arch of a rainbow. And just walk the line.

Best wishes -
Ariane Koek,
Director/Arvon Foundation

Ariane’s senses have been bombarded by:

Books
Southern Mail/Night Flight - Antoine Saint Exupery – Penguin Books

Exhibitions
James Turrell – A Life In Light – Louise T Blouin Foundation.

Film
Climates – Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Family Friend by Paolo Sorrentino

Music
A Chance Operation - The John Cage Tribute - Koch

Is the Hurst (The John Osborne Arvon Centre for creative writing) some sort of TARDIS? No, there’s surely been a mistake - we’re smaller on the inside!

The Hurst seems to have been at the centre of some sort of time warp for the last couple of weeks.

Kerry and Peter (our new Centre Directors) dashed off to London last Monday (as usual with just enough time to catch their train) for the initial programming meeting of 2008 whilst I spent a few days in the company of Paul Warwick and Ed Collier. “Not THE Paul and Ed?” I hear you cry. Yes the very same - Ex-Centre Directors and lifetime Hurstmen. They’ve hired the centre lock stock and barrel for the Dark Room, a development project for devising theatre companies (now in its third year) and settled into the office as if they had both put on a comfortable old pair of slippers. They commandeered the phone, complained about the heating, and unplugged all the network cables. Once logged into their fancy IMacPod Lap Arts Council funded thingies they adopted that familiar hunched stance emerging from their collective trance only to answer (in bullet point form) my inane questions about the state of their careers/relationships etc.

It’s a pleasure to have Ed and Paul back and the first two weeks of their visit seem to have gone off swimmingly. Once they have impro’d their way back to the big smoke, we will welcome Kings School for a week of prose and performance poetry from Lynne Bryan and Marcus Moore. Our old friend, teacher, committee member and general good egg, Katie Adam has engineered this course with her usual precision. Even though it looks unlikely that she’ll be here in person, I have no doubt her considerable organisational skills and passion for all things creative will shine through. Katie knows the centre so well, we sometimes ring her for advice on repairing the boiler and unblocking the dishwasher…

And then to the open programme, kicking off this year in mid April with a Playwriting course in the capable hands of Tim Fountain and Natasha Betteridge. Following hot on their heels - with Freedom in Form - will be Patience Agbabi and Patricia Debney. We will then be in the midst of a run that will last until December, with the centre resembling anything but a Dark Room..

Editor’s note - We can confirm that the Hurst is not a TARDIS (a Time And Relative Dimension In Space) - the blue police box made famous in Dr Who, and invented by BBC screen writer Anthony Coburn, after he edited C. E. Webber’s script of the very first Dr Who show. The TARDIS was conceived out of budget restrictions - the Doctor needed to travel in something but finances required the vehicle to be simple and cheap to make. The word TARDIS is now commonly used to refer to something that is bigger on the inside than the outside.

And in this respect perhaps, after all, Arvon is very TARDIS-like.

Best wishes
Dan Pavitt
Administrator
The Hurst

March, and Moniack Mhor is quiet. Little dots of rain are flecking at the window, while the sky casually threatens snow. The phone is not ringing but that’s fine. I’ve got peace and quiet to get on with some work.

There’s nobody here but me… well, me and the hares.

The hares, I hasten to add, are not in the office! (The sheep wouldn’t allow it – seriously) Anyway, as I drove down the track this morning I was greeted by the creatures.

I have seen glimpses of them before. Usually when leaving for home on one of those gold-lit, rainbow-basking late summer evenings that Moniack does so well, and they’ve snuck away, frightened.

Today they were nonchalant. The first one crossed the road slowly and ignored me while the second one actually galloped towards the car before ducking off into the field next to the track. I stopped and watched it for a wee while. It was all long legs and big, black-tipped ears. Its eyes were tawny globes looking straight back at me. Then it yawned! Yes! It stretched its’ gangly, feral legs and yawned right at me before loping off with a flick of its tail.

The wildlife around here has no respect!

Best wishes from Andrea Muir, Centre Director, Inverness-shire

This week saw the start of the new season at Totleigh Barton. Spring is a violent time of the year here in the South West, nature being reborn with all the force and clumsiness of the lambs slamming their snouts in their mothers bellies to extract the gallons of milk they need to grow into the healthy, juicy Devonshire specimens of which even New Zealanders should be jealous. The weather is erratic, sleet interspersed with patches of sunshine all doused in heavy downpours that flood the roads next to the river Torridge, a hose pipe ban seems highly unlikely this year! After a long winter the first novelists and poets have started battling their way down here. The programme for this year has been out for a couple of weeks and aspiring writers are banging the door down in search of that perfect course, some booking up in a matter of days.

All in all it is a very exciting time. This week we have a partnership week with writers from the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. A very diverse group, from all regions of the world with very different and sometimes troubled backgrounds, tied together by their shared experiences and desire to write. Neil Rollinson and Catherine Fox are doing a fantastic job in stimulating their imaginations and handling with delicacy the possibilities of what they feel their writing is capable - with astonishing results.

Huib Boekelman, Esther O’Toole and Julia Wheadon
at Totleigh Barton, Arvon’s writing house in Devon