Iris Murdoch and Yellow Snails

Back late from another extremely long day at Stirling for the Book Cultures, Book Events Cultures. Today we were hearing papers presented in the Iris Murdoch Building  home of the Dementiant Centre. A monochrome photograph of Iris Murdoch is framed above the foyer of this building which sustains a strange kind of balance between the cheerful and the poignant. Obviously used frequently by groups of the elderly and particularly those dealing with Alzheimer’s or other dementias, rooms were clearly signed with pictures and colours – bright yellow toilet doors an example of this. Rooms were set out for professional or academic conferences while signed with pictures of multiple chairs and the moniker ‘room’. Colour photos, blown up to picture frame size, of the elderly, adorn the short hallway. The people photographed appear happy enough, many obviously enjoying human company and the small gestures of help such as a touch on the arm or a proffered cup of tea. Here we all gathered for coffee and sandwiches during lunch and the swift breaks between academic panels. Beyond the glass panels of the room was an attractive terraced garden with the most beautiful, though foggy today, view of the surrounding hills and trees. I took a stroll around and saw a fish pond mosaic inlaid into the stonework, and then, as though escaped from a nearby children’s playground, a large yellow snail, and a little further along, a big blue frog. I suppose the garden is used and enjoyed by the dementia patients and their relatives and carers. I pondered on how such a space does indeed echo the bright features of a playground, but with the quiet aura of a settled elderly person rather than the hectic discoveries of the young.

Some wonderful papers today. Most of the salient points are already out in the twittersphere as I saw several fierce tweeters at constant work throughout the panels – indeed I was sitting next to one @pressfuturist – my friend A. He’s changed too – never used to be such a prolific tweeter, although always very cyber-savvy. I’ve got lots of notes on most of the papers so may be blogging reflectively (how old fashioned) from the train tomorrow.

For now, as a contrast to the peace of the Iris Murdoch Building's Terrace garden, a delightfully apocalyptic quotation from an excellent paper given by PhD candidate Rebecca Bowd on the history of book auctions in eighteenth century Leeds. In the 1690s Ralph Thoresby kept a diary recounting some of his visits to an early Leeds book auction (the first ever book auction in England took place in London in 1676). ‘...rest of day at the auction, where in the evening had like to have been a dismal conclusion, but for the watchful providence of a merciful Saviour...the main beam breaking, gave so terrible a thunder-like crack, and the floor yielding below their feet, the people set up such a hideous noise, apprehending the fall of the whole house, at least the sinking of the room...’ Luckily Thoresby was able to escape intact and help one or two others as well.  Reading and browsing were clearly risky activities in those days.

We end the day being whisked swiftly from the Iris Murdoch Building to The Junk Rooms, a restaurant with a great atmosphere and food but rather slower service. It actually had something of the atmosphere of an old fashioned or second-hand bookstore itself with shelves of random volumes which provided good starting points for conversations – or indeed, useful objects to allow a pause from such conversations. While waiting for starter and mains and feeling increasingly faint with fatigue and hunger I was being asked by delegate S about my postgraduate work (so long ago I could barely remember the names of  novels I’d studied with such close attention in the British Museum/ British Library reading room (as it then was), but found myself recommending Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, a classic of writing-practice-as-meditation, and then, as the conversation moved on to gender and spirituality, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations – of course the first woman to write a book in English. ‘All Shall Be Well,’ I explain. S duly notes this in her notebook and smiles (we are all still half in conference mode). I feel suddenly emotional but don’t really know why; the day has gone perfectly well already and I am in good company. Perhaps it was this message of spiritual comfort that could have gone out to those at the collapsing book auction room in 1793, and should touch those in the antechambers of mental confusion, so very different from the clarity of insight and vision among this weekend’s conference delegates.