flying while pregnant & painting swans after the war
"This article is about the artist. For the balloonist, see Stanley Spencer (aeronaut)."
“I like my life so much that I would like to cover every empty space on a wall with it.” and “I am on the side of angels and of dirt.” - Stanley Spencer (BBC)
“Swan Upping in Cookham was painted by the mystical, eccentric1 English artist Stanley Spencer, who left it half-finished in his bedroom in Cookham when he went off to war in 1915, and the knowledge that it was there sustained him over the next three years. He longed to explain to his military superiors that he couldn’t take part in attacks because he had a painting to finish at home. On his return, he picked it up. ‘Well there we were looking at each other,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It seemed unbelievable but it was a fact. Then I wondered if what I had just come from was fact2 & caught sight of the yellow of the Lyddite or whatever the Bulgars used in their shells on my fingers & finger nails.’
“He finished his painting. But the war is caught up in it. Years before he had laid complex, sunlit ripples on the river below the bridge, but the lower post-war parts of the picture are lifeless, muddy and dark. Boats are painted off colours and have the wrong shapes, his familiar childhood landscape coursing with new and ominous strangeness.”
- Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights
so let’s talk about war
as I think I’ve mentioned, I’ve been really luxuriating in
’s slow read of Tolstoy’s War and Peace this year.“I wondered if what I had just come from was fact”, Spencer writes. Makes me think of Nikolai and Andrei’s early disillusionment and sense of unreality. Spencer initially wanted to enlist! As did Nikolai. But then in b1-p2-ch19, when Nikolai is actually in the midst of it, he is shocked senseless - “Who are they? Why are they running? Can they be coming at me? And why? To kill me? Me who everybody loves?”
The top half of the painting is like Nikolai’s last view of the perfect clear sky in b1-p2-ch8 - “How beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, and how deep! How bright and glorious was the setting sun! With what soft glitter the waters of the distant Danube shone” which even then Nikolai knows he can’t hold onto — “In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness; but here . . . groans, suffering, fear, and this uncertainty and hurry”
it’s all right there, in the painting, Swan Upping in Cookham crisply sundered by what Tolstoy describes “that terrible dividing line of uncertainty and fear — resembling the line separating the living from the dead” which lays before our war boys at the front.
Spencer went away to war halfway through the painting and you can see top-to-bottom what it did to him - “It is not proper or sensible to expect to paint after such experience,” he said. but he did it anyway. and we can see in the stark transition from glittering DanubeThames to the murkiness below that like Buffy, he came back wrong.
also we should talk about swan upping - “an annual ceremony in England in which mute swans3 on the River Thames are rounded up, caught, ringed, and then released.”
the British crown owns all unmarked swans.4 Why? only super special cool kids are supposed to eat swans or something, I dunno. But only the royally marked ones and the unmarked ones - the King doesn't own ALL the swans in Britain. (In fact, the marked ones are split evenly between the crown, the Worshipful Company of Vintners, and the Worshipful Company of Dyers. Because if you’re drunkenly dyeing fabric, a nice swan dinner might be just the thing.5)
If you try to poach a swan, you might end up on trial in a Court of Swan-moot.
Wikipedia insists that the wings of the swan are not strong enough to break an adult man's leg, which feels a bit suspiciously defensive, though tbf r/SwansBeingAssholes exists for a reason.
(who writes good lists and of whom I am therefore now a huge fan) claims that “Swans employ geese as their lawyers if they think it will be a particularly acrimonious divorce hearing.” (Crowder, S. (2024). Imagination.) (I am choosing to believe against all evidence that this is true, because in an infinite multiverse something something i deserve joy today as do we all)
Stanley Spencer (aeronaut) (unrelated? unclear) convinced a baby formula company to fund him building and flying his first airship. Then he took his 3mo baby Gladys out for a whirl, “claiming that she was the first female to have flown in an airship.”
Rose Isabel Spencer (Stanley (aeronaut)’s wife) then made history6 as the first woman to pilot a powered aircraft - “With her long Edwardian dress hiding her pregnancy, Rose Spencer took to the air alone aboard her husband’s steerable balloon and piloted it around the polo ground at Crystal Palace, London, in July 1902.” (emphasis mine because omg I could barely walk while pregnant but this lady flew a goddamn airship)
why does “flying while pregnant & painting swans after the war” sound more natural [to me] than “painting swans after the war & flying while pregnant”? I dunno, why does ordering of adjectives matter in English?
“In 2007, the psychologist David Kemmerer scanned the brains of volunteers as they read aloud sentences that either followed or upended the order of adjectives. Not surprisingly, he found that reciting strings of modifiers required more cognitive effort when the strings were beaded “wrong.””
hm this implies that reciting wrongly ordered strings of adjectives might (as a form of strenuous incoherent thinking) help you fall asleep
apropos of nothing - Gaetano Dario Gargiulo won the 2020 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Competition for this photo, but he didn’t actually take the picture - it was an octopus selfie! what a fraud - the octopus should’ve gotten the credit and the prize for itself
apparently he used to push a stroller full of paints around the local cemetery, and he painted his con-artist lesbian second wife nude with a leg of mutton
does everyone have to experience this kind of thing sooner or later? (or perhaps he went through war “in a state akin to feverish delirium or drunkenness” like Tushin)
“The mute swan is less vocal than the noisy whooper and tundra swans; they do, however, make a variety of sounds, often described as ‘grunting, hoarse whistling, and snorting noises.’”
But not the ones in Scotland, which belong to the people
you probably oughta fatten the swan up with barley before roasting it though
Rose Isabel Spencer does not, however, have her own Wikipedia page. (If you create one for her, I’ll.. uh… I dunno, write some weird rambly post inspired by the prompt(s) of your choosing. or something. which’ll take me longer than creating the Wikipedia page myself in theory would’ve, but here we are.)
Thank you! Great writing!
That register of swan marks is fantastic! Thank you for sharing 🤓