19-26 December 2008 £1.70 the DISCOVER THE CONTEMPORARYFriend QUAKER WAY Culture at Christmas Poem by UA Fanthorpe Friend writers share 2008 highlights Essay by David Yount Quaker jokes Eye launches the bookclub Two-page quiz the Friend INDEPENDENT QUAKER JOURNALISM SINCE 1843 CONTENTS Vol 166 No 51 3 Eye presents ‘Follow the star’ Colin George Now UA Fanthorpe 4 Babylon: memory and survival Rowena Loverance 5 Beatrix Potter: an exceptional life Mary McKerall 6-7 Launch of the Friend book club Eye and Friend writers 8 Rothko’s influence James Hugonin 9 A valediction by George Fox Barry McGibbon 10-11 No jokes please, we’re Quakers! 12-13 A Quaker appreciation of human nature David Yount Cover image: An interpretation of ‘Now’, the poem by UA Fanthorpe. Drawing © 14 Every day is a sacrament – or is it? Cally Gibson. www.callygibson.co.uk. Cally’s Keith Minton illustrations feature throughout this edition. See 15 Saluting a literary perfectionist page 3. Stephen Taylor Illustrations this page: AN413345 The Tower of Babel; 1595, Oil on panel. Artist: Lucas 16-17 Our 2008 highlights van Valckenborch (Inv. No. MRM M31) © Friend writers Mittelrhein-Museum Koblenz. See page 4. Reflections on Grasmere lake. Photo: ArtToday. 18-19 Christmas greetings and Friends & Meetings See page 5. 20 Christmas quiz: brain teasers for post-prezzies Merry Christmas The Friend Subscriptions UK £72 per year by all payment types and a happy new year from including annual direct debit; monthly payment by direct debit £6.50; everyone at the Friend. online only £45 per year. For details of other rates, See page 18 for more greetings. contact Penny Dunn on 020 7663 1178 or [email protected] the Friend 173 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ Tel: 020 7663 1010 Fax: 020 7663 1182 www.thefriend.org Editor: Judy Kirby [email protected] • Production editor: Jez Smith [email protected] • Sub-editor: Trish Carn [email protected] • News reporter: Oliver Robertson [email protected] • Website editor: simon gray [email protected] • Arts editor: Rowena Loverance [email protected] • Environment editor: Laurie Michaelis [email protected] • Subscriptions officer: Penny Dunn [email protected] Tel: 020 7663 1178 • Advertisement manager: George Penaluna, Ad department, 54a Main Street, Cononley, Keighley BD20 8LL Tel: 01535 630230 [email protected] • Clerk of the trustees: A David Olver The Friend Publications Limited is a registered charity, number 211649 • Printed by Headley Bros Ltd, Queens Road, Ashford, Kent TN24 8HH 2 the Friend, 19-26 December 2008 presents… The Friend Christmas issue Eye has devoted this special edition to the arts. We hope that during the peace and joy of Christmas there will be time to reflect on how culture can be the link that connects us to our creative voices. On this page Now Colin George describes how music, drama and art are the great enablers, After the frantic shopping and with this in mind we have a poem from UA Fanthorpe exposing the The anxious road hidden messages of Christmas. Right through to the quiz on pages 20- After the office parties 21, Friends give their interpretation on various aspects of the arts. We The crowded inn hope that you enjoy it. Before the quarterly bills The stones gathered Before the January sales ‘Follow the star’ And Stephen, broken Already it has arrived: the Christmas card with the After the carols and lessons three wise men on their stately camels following The psalms, the prophets the star. I have followed a star from my youth, After the gifts are wrapped not in the sky but on this earth. It is the theatre. The swaddling clothes There have been several articles in the Friend this autumn about Art and the Quakers. Misguidedly Before the Queen’s speech some define an artist as someone who puts paint A baby’s cry on a canvas. Friends from Glasgow were the first to Across the morning suburbs point out what a narrow view this is. It ignores the The Light of the World sculptor, the dancer, the actor and all those in the world of music and drama and literature, and the UA Fanthorpe performing arts. In a theatre contract, for example, the performer – whether a leading actor at the National Theatre or a comedian playing the clubs or busking the streets – is described and dignified by the word ‘artist’. As for the artists who create great literature or music – how can anyone say that Mozart or Chekhov have not directly contributed to the betterment of humankind? To take the word ‘betterment’ literally and prosaically: since his death, the works of Shakespeare have been used and adapted by revolutionaries all over the world under the guise of classical theatre to fight dictatorship; and the music of Mozart has a scientific record of influencing the mind – inspiring the student or sometimes bringing harmony and peace to those disturbed or confused. What can serve as a guide to the true artist? From my perspective as an actor, our Quaker testimonies. Simplicity – the innate quality of a great performer. Equality – between members of the best theatre companies. And above all – Truth. What about Peace, you say? Well, that may come when a good performance connects with and influences the audience. But I would deceive you to say that there is not a lot of fierce fighting on the way. If any one of the three wise men had been seduced by the star of the theatre, he would have had a far more uncomfortable ride than on the road to Bethlehem. Colin George UA Fanthorpe and RV Bailey are Colin is a member of Luton & Leighton AM. a book club choice, see page 6. ‘My son – Will!’, RSC Fringe Festival. Courtesy Colin Festival. RSC George. Fringe ‘My Will!’, son – Colin George as John Shakespeare in his one man show the Friend, 19-26 December 2008 3 exhibition Babylon: memory and survival Jewish exiles hanging their Opening the exhibition are the fall to building Babel all over again. lyres on willow trees by the most spectacular survivals from ‘But when the Eternal stirs in him, waters of Babylon; mad king Babylon, the blue- and gold-glazed then he has some little glimmerings Nebuchadnezzar on all fours eating brick relief panels that adorned of his estate… Then he gathers grass like oxen (below); a doom- the processional way into the stones and makes mortar to build laden finger tracing Hebrew letters city through the northern Ishtar up a wall and raise a tower, that he on the wall plaster at Belshazzar’s Gate. They depict, alternately, a may not be open to the deluge of Feast; it is quite extraordinary how roaring lion (above right) and an wrath.’ much European myth and legend, elegant mushushu, the Babylonian The Babel story in Genesis 11 much of it commemorated in great dragon. Thereafter, however, it is a reads as if, originally, people had works of art, has derived from matter of a cuneiform tablet here a single language, which God a period of little more than two (several of them, however, helpfully then deliberately confused. Fox, generations, the mid-sixth century enhanced with audio) and a Blake though, characteristically goes BC, and from a single city, Babylon or Burne-Jones picture there, as the one better. Restoration to the on the Euphrates, which, even curators struggle to span the 2,500- pre-fall situation, achieved by before the recent efforts of Saddam year divide. the crucifixion and witnessed for Hussein and the US army, had left Perhaps the most interesting the first time at Pentecost, is to a little archaeological trace. section for Friends is that dealing state in which people can perceive The British Museum’s latest with the Tower of Babel (see spiritual truth directly, without exhibition seeks to address this page 2). The exhibition explains relying on natural language at all. conundrum. It is not a blockbuster that this tale of men trying to One cuneiform tablet rang like the terracotta army, it doesn’t build up to heaven may enshrine a bell with me about another command the historic Reading a folk-memory of the ziggurat contemporary language row. Room but squeezes into Norman of Babylon, a mud-brick multi- Time for one of those Christmas Foster’s modest exhibition space, stepped temple built up over cracker-type questions: What do and it’s not all the museum’s many centuries and known as beetroot, leek and turnip have in own work, having already been Etemenanki, ‘House platform of common? Answer: they feature in seen in Paris and Berlin. It does, Heaven and Earth’. a Babylonian plant list but they no however, provoke reflection about Babel was a staple theme of longer feature in the latest edition the relationship between the ‘real’, seventeenth-century Quaker of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. We biblical and mythological pasts. moralising. George Fox warned can’t be sure whether this tablet of the dangers of over-reaching was used, as many were, to teach oneself, of out-running one’s Babylonian children their letters. Guide. Margaret Fell condemned But we do know why beetroot and the teachers and ministers of the the rest (including, appropriately established churches who drew for the time of year, holly and ivy), people ‘from the light and spirit have been omitted from the OJD: of God within them, unto their it’s to make room for such essential inventions, imaginations, meanings words as blog, broadband and and expositions of the scriptures bullet point. Babel, it seems, is with without them: so they have been us still. building Babel in many languages’.