Short Official Guide VI

My Short official Guide to Ancestral Home reaches its conclusion with a look at the grounds. If you have stayed with me, my thanks. If you were not around for the earlier posts you can catch up on them by clicking on the label short_guide.

The Parklands

From the avenue that brought you to our door,
interminable though it would have seemed,
you would have seen a tiny fraction
of a small part of our land.
The work of many owners and the consequence
of many annexations. It contains:
a fountain (high-Baroque),
a lake with islands,
islands with fantastic grottoes,
grottoes with attendant ghosts
skeletons and water gardens,
woods,
a French parterre,
three formal gardens,
kitchen garden,
maze,
two burnt-out towers (North and South)
small theme park - and

The Sculpture Gallery

currently our hottest property. Cassandra Tiffany,
mother, father, midwife to the scheme,
self-styled Defender of the Average Man,
first ever data junkie, hooked
on ideas of a free society
and detonating smoke bombs in the halls of art,
found (as like as not)
polishing the bronze maquettes
of Epstein's Angel (wings like ruffled water),
a perfect combination of an earthly weight,
a gravitas with airiness
and what so nearly might have been.


In contrast, on a massive convolution of giant toes,
solid and supreme, a Hittite God;
purchase of stone,
earth-rooted weight,
Yazilikaya's finest, stands.
From toes to tip
of his comical,
conical hat,
a very modern model of the modern macho-man.


His sword has lions along its hilt.
The muscles rip.
The thrust is down and through the earth,
into an underworld of stone.
The lions are squeezed like hamsters in his grip.


The blade trepans the stone skull. Milt
of cold, cerebral thought is spilt:
red marrow from the bone.


Cassandra Tiffany departs
to keep the turnstiles clicking
with hurdy-gurdies, roundabouts
and throws in the casino.


You'll trust her as the dowager
survivor of Guernica...
The lithograph is value if you want a keepsake, dear…


Lord Noah for all his trekking,
could find no wilderness,
but hush! hush! deny them who dares,
Mandelbrot and Koch are mapping theirs
while all the frightened people say their prayers.


A louring sky, a souvenir,
a flurry of rekindled life
and sawdust in a dance.
Shabhala the ancient city is as near
to us as France.

Short Official Guide V

The penultimate page. Next week we finish with a stroll around the grounds.

The East Wing

The Chapel

door is opposite.
A place of meditation now.
(Shambhala the ancient city
can be reached.)
Put to many uses in its time:
mosque, temple, wine store.Popular with tourists,
it bids you pause
and spare a moment,
read (at the open page
and for your own enlightenment)
its “Angel Bible",
paraphrased by Clare
in blank,
unpunctuated verse
and annotated in her hand,
illuminated in the style of Blake
and bound in Angelskin -
the formula for which
died with her, we believe.
Her finest work.
And then the wagons really rolled!
Machines took over; Clare controlled
the commerce; visuals
were left to others.
Unit-planned, prefabricated frescoes
multiplied the scale
(and distribution schemes the sale)
by several-thousandfold. Of all those sold,
few went to churches.

The Eastern Priest's Room

part old, part new, was once the sacristy
and then The Figurine and Puppet Room.
Now furnished in pale greys and greens,
its damp walls, blotched with portraits of past owners
(faces grow like fungi in the gloom)
and tapestries of scenes
that moulded them, this house and you and me,
allow each owner, son and wife
when tourists come to come to life.


Explorers all, the psyche was their continent who said:
All that we cannot know is flesh and bone.
The rest is local colour. They who led
us on in Pollock rhythms trailed around the world
or spent themselves in tricks and dribbles
(in and out of bed),
seem more substantial to us now they're dead.
Scene after scene is peeled away,
web after web of soft, reflected glow,
reflecting what we can and cannot know.

The Music Room

contains no instruments these days.
Instead,
a loop of tape
(and earpiece with acoustic boom
supplied at token cost)
gives flavour of
(a few short extracts only)
Ms Beatrice Paul's unlikely cult spectacular: A
Child Called Caryatid, or
A Pillar of Society.
Two verses from the lyrics follow here:


She'll dance with the devil for an offering on the drum,
the spirit of an age that has flown around the sun,
that wants to live for ever and believes it can be done.
Her brain is full of knowledge and her loins are full of love,
For a mind she has a gun-sight with its cross-wires trained above.
On how she will reach it, she is far from being clear,
for it's far beyond her range and she hesitates for fear
that the sun will melt her wings if she dares to venture near,
but she's calculated the trajectory and mapped it on a graph,
so suggest she will not reach it and she'll dance away and laugh,
and dancing to the music like a woman in a trance,
the images that come to her, she'll abandon in the dance.


It is hard now to remember that this woman proudly stood
among her people as the sanity among the superstitions of the wood.
Then the coldness of her thighs and the coldness of her brow
held an image that was clear, but is lost to man for good.
She's the mistress of our passions, she's the passion we avow,
so we listen to her stories of the days that are long gone,
of public adulation and the offerings upon
the altar stone she stood before, high above the people,
motionless, expressionless, dumb beneath the steeple,
and we think her stern and distant, with an act to run and run,
a bowl of living water from a river on the sun,
and we listen to her murmurs and interpret what we hear
as meaning that all meaning passed its use-by date last year.

Short Official Guide IV

Loyalty is rewarded this time with a shortish extract.

The Study

Here, on a bureau, overlooked by most,
find stories, scrapbooks,
anecdotes
and photographs from Picture Post.


Cabinets display Noah's logs,
itineraries, trophies, relics,
souvenirs and diaries
of ocean voyages and treks;
of vain attempts
to find that most
elusive wilderness. Read
thoughts on sail-aways
and welcomes home,
including that last time,
The Voyager's Return.
We picture Noah
complete with bride, The Princess
Able Clare,
on whom he wrote a thesis for the tech'
and whom he treasured as a jewel until the fall.


Reluctant to reveal,
open at their arbitrary pages,
revealing in their very arbitrariness,
admittedly not all,
but much of our relationship
to those remote and foetal ages.


Shannat... Shannapse... Shambhala!
Shambhala the ancient city can be reached.
Tickets cost... excursion rates...
the native guides, 'shifty-eyed'
deserted - it was said.


Brochures and travel agents
flood the centers of our minds,
now difficult to reach,
with neon light.


See in the final montage: the long night
slowly freezing from its first beginnings to a stop
(the sunken eyes, the wasted limbs,
the questionings awaiting en famille
having screwed him to his station),
as Lord Noah,exiled from his milieu, stands,
boots no match for water nor Pak-A-Mac for frost,
out-waiting the reluctance of the dawn to break.
Before he gets his turn to pay, the milk is gone.
Then with the armistice comes liberation.


Too late by far: Noah's child has died.
Chi-Chi, you may spot, has tin upon tin of milk put by.
His child (well-overfed)
is dancing with the ballet.


Featured here: Petrouchka's final act.
Sprawling in the marketplace.
Sky grown dim,
stitches leaking sawdust,
every limb
disjointed.
(You'll find him in the nursery,
still in disrepair,
propped up in the corner with the teddy bear.)

Short, Official Guide III

If you have stayed with me this far, thank you and welcome to part 3, The Nursery.

The Nursery

 
Designed by Jane, Third Marchioness,
cradles of a culture, like or not,
faithfully preserved. Her taste 
(as always), careless, brash and bold.
Room for a thousand childhoods -
but the room was always cold.


You must not miss the dolls' house, very small,
a replica of this house and its contents,
and inside that a perfect replica again,
and inside that, 
                brought to you by the power of virtual reality 
                a host of life-size families
with every detail of those times 
scaled down 
to fit the present age. 


For a pound coin in the hardware
adopt the mind-set of a former generation:
experience at first hand, act 
with empathy,
see palaces of good and ill 
                           see local knights,
your heroes once, promoted or demoted to a myth. 
Ride out with us. 
                You'll see one or you'll see one not,
but where you see, there that uncertain king,
by Heisenberg , rides time past, present and continuing.   ref


And the word of God was Euclid's    ref
and the complex plane    ref
was void and vacant. Darkness lay
in the abyss.
             And men like Koch and Mandelbrot    1 2
said: "Let's give geometry a new dimension!" and 
infinity began to bleed into the world again.


See Adam's single fruit upon its single tree
bifurcating endlessly to such diversity.   ref
It seemed a simple plot 
                       before division ruled the roost,
before turbulence was king,    ref
when storm and chaos as we thought    ref
grew only out of fear
and Gaston Julia had yet    ref
to intuit how beauty met
with chaos and disorder
in a geometric set.












The lights flash on: GAME OVER! 
An invitation: one more 
coin, another world:
step right inside the dolls' house, step
right back to when it all began. There walk 
with Newton on his solid hills,    ref
meet Ptolemy or Abraham,     ref
wear on your sleeve the soul of Einstein, Blake    1  2
or Hubble - Caedmon even, he whose polygene,    1 2 3
yours for a coin, 
became our genius. 
Technology, our modern grace, 
enables you to sing 
as he sang: 
wild and hauntingly,
full-bodied, as a bird sings, 
matching every note
to the subtleties and splendours of a God who spoke.


There dream his dream with us,
a man apart from what we call reality. There feel
his lack of choice, his wounded pride;
share with him his lowly station, 
experience his flat, untutored voice
and know as he knew, this:
that just because he sang so in a dream
the power came to his life.
You, too, may sing of things you know not,
hear your voice power through the pious monasteries
and watch the bleak religions of your day awake to pray.


His world was shadowy. 
You can explore that shade, 
learn how the cattle were reality, 
that Abbess Hilda was not real:   ref
he knew her, of her, fed her cattle;
she remained a symbol of his bread and butter.


Facing her across the hallowed study,
terrified to speak lest you should break the spell,
feel the symbols change, feel living water 
well up from the abbess in her, welcome him.
Be her and lose a servant;
be the world and gain a limb.
                  
               
And everywhere, the great abyss, 
the Dachau moment reigns supreme;    ref
our second Genesis   ref
begins in pain.  
Tiresius,     ref
blind hero of blind poets down the years,
blind in the way that all blind men are blind,
blinded by the light's ambivalence,
but snake-eyed, 
bridges our divide
                  uniquely 
                          with his twofold vision.
Divisions multiply. 
                   With visual cortex 
wired to sighted retinas around the world, 
he bids you turn the virtual page
and join his Masterclass. 
Here feel the moment grip and twist you, 
feel desire in either form, see images 
that freeze the sight-lines to the brain
and watch them spiral from the sky.
All that was human lies inhumed - until
a millionth of a thought-time later: miraculous free fall!
The dark sparks hammer in the brain again
to leave you breathless at the Berlin Wall.   ref

                             
From here and there, this one and that,
a world-wide web of whispers from the ruins
brings to the darkness of our cave, a patina of light.


The ivy broke the stones apart,
the dust encroached upon the heart,
the two towers crumbled into dust,   ref
swallowed by a holy lust -
the lust that saw the Caryatids fall
then raise this more surpassing hall.
She and the hall were ever one,
who holds the host above her head
to give us all our daily bread.


See her days exposed to view.
The Dreamtime spread its arms in welcome. Those who knew   ref                 
her in the old days 
might not recognize her now. 
The steel tap, tap on cobblestone and sett of her high heels
is both a proclamation and a provocation to their ears.


Wiser now and wealthy, elemental in her role,
she's our New Age Voodoo Lady with a mix of fetish doll.

Short, Official Guide Book II

Continuing the threatened serialisation of Short, Official Guide Book to Ancestral Home from its introduction of 12/03/08, the tour proper begins here:-

The Great Hall.

You enter next the Great Hall.
Grande it was in days of old, its oak 
carved with the chronicles of folk 
back almost to the fall. 
A gallery of excellence, a temple of the arts, 
A blossoming of hothouse plants 
before the frosts got in.


Facing you, the hardy Caryatid.               ref
See her now that her hour has gone:
the stones she proudly held aloft
are dust to walk upon -
or splayed in patterns round her feet,
white petals from a rose. 


Impassive as a firedog, 
older than steel, 
remembering the days when people used to kneel,
now daubed with pop art circles
to produce a modern feel,
she stands beneath a stained glass eye, 
has stood there long 
in glass-stained sun;
an apparition who has seen 
all changes come to pass, 
watched dispositions, forms, 
configurations move 
like adders in the grass 
or shadows on the carriage window 
as the engine gathers speed. 


Move in stillness if you will
to view the bas-relief.                      ref
Here all is shadowed flux and flow.
Think: shifting sands, life-giving bleed,
motif leaching into motif; light 
and dark, an ocean tide:
our ever-moving picture show. 


Our history in silhouette: 
shadows of a shade. The youngest son, 
not blooded yet
(and truth to tell, not quite
legitimate),
perplexed, beset
when chattels, house and grounds seemed lost, 
our father dead, the heir unfit -
and that far from the end of it, 
for then was found 
an unknown, virulent decay 
worming its spongiforming way                 ref
from floor to floor 
into the very heart and core 
of our imaginings - a modern
Atlas suddenly, a Jacob, took                   1 2
the world upon his shoulders, stole
birthright and title, self-esteem,
his brother's seniority, 
to sell abroad, illegally,
the instruments of dignity,
the family identity: 
our diaries and history, 
our manuscripts and tapestries, 
the precious jades and ivories,
the lily of pure gold. 


The family and house were saved, 
but narratives we'd loved of old 
and treasured beyond life were told, 
in strange, unsympathetic languages. 


Dear visitor, you entered by the very door 
through which they came, those
auctioneers
and profiteers, 
financiers, and the whole cast 
of racketeers,
to strip and asset-strip and rip 
out all the grandeur that was here. 


Nowhere now, the words, the talk, 
the child-like figures carved in chalk, 
the riverside sold off for shops, 
The Queen Anne gardens ploughed for crops. 
Nowhere, the lead glaze earthenware, 
the chinoiserie anchorite,                  1 2
the painted alabaster bear,                 ref
the Buddhas carved in andesite,             ref
but here instead (from truckle bed,         ref
from engine head and hammerhead, 
nails, bow saws, axe and trowel) was born 
this strange, mutated quadruped 
with bullshit on its horn.

The Short official Guide Book

I have decided to publish my only long poem, here on my blog. Big deal! I hear you say, and for me it is, if only because until very recently I did not think I ever would. What brought about the change of mind, I have no idea. However, I am not publishing it in one go, but a "page" at a time, in serial fashion. An earlier version was on my web site until recently. Indeed, "Short Official Guide to Ancestral Home" has had been around in one form or another for quite a while. It began as the germ of an idea while on a guided tour of an ancestral house. Our guide was excellent in that he was lucid, witty and patient with questioners. He knew his material thoroughly and had a fund of anecdotes, each of which was associated, in his mind at least, with a particular room, and he kept the group interested and wholly amused. Occasionally he would bring from his store a colourful character we had not met before and would not hear of again, but mostly it would be past owners or residents already introduced to us, who who would be the subjects of some new anecdote. However, because the stories were linked to the various rooms, they were in no chronological order, so, for example, I would find myself wondering whether the "Captain George" of the present story was the "Captain George" who had escaped ignominiously through the kitchen window, or would that have beent his father? And did Fanny's wedding come before or after the accidental shooting of the Viscount? Would Lad May have known about the twins when she wrote the letter, or did the party take place at a later date? And so on. In other words, the details fascinated, but the broad picture escaped me. Sir Frank was obviously in fine fettle when he set sail, and in a bad way at the funeral, but which was the earlier occasion? Had his condition made good progress or had it deteriorated? I remembered having similar difficulties getting the broad picture from my school history lessons, but on the guided tour the ambiguity of it all struck me as a metaphor for society. Civilisation even. Indeed, it occurred to me that the house might itself be a metaphor for civilization. Taking that a step further, some of the house's major players began to assume roles corresponding to those of various figures from history, some historical, some mythical.

I should say that today I can recall almost nothing of the house itself or of its many occupants over the years. None of them appear in the poem - as far as I am aware! The slowly developing imagery of the poem has obliterated all the images of its source. I should also say that it would probably be unhelpful to look for symbols of the usual kind in the poem. Symbols are by definition constant. They stand for what they stand for. In the poem, though, these symbols, like those in the poem's meeting between Caedmon and The Abbess Hilda, are subject to change. The house, for example, may stand for different things at different times.

The drawings (not illustrations in the true sense) are by my grandchildren.

Short, Official Guide to Ancestral Home

Preface to the second edition

In houses such as this
was history shaped, were
revolutions planned. In rooms
like these great men and women
honed their special skills, found
passions ready-made -
and not just ready-made: arranged
like books on shelves for easy reference
and, ultimately: choice. All that are here:
dust, furniture, fine paintings speak
of other days and other ways; of past
explorers, knights to the Crusades,
missionaries of many faiths and creeds
(or none), exploiters, slavers,
traders, smugglers and murderers,
fools and vagabonds; all grew
within these walls, and then set forth
to work their wonders or disasters.
Inventors, torturers and doctors,
men of science, dancers
and romancers, artists,
artisans and engineers,
politicians, parasites and public
men of all descriptions,
bishops, generals and thieves,
all in their day
and in their various ways
lived here.


Walking sticks (unless you are infirm)
and brollies, bags (not handbags),
cameras and overcoats, mobile phones
and parcels, food and drink
must be surrendered in the Entrance Hall.
Whilst doing so, please note
(for we are very proud of them)
the geometric patterns in the floor;
intricate, they are
of Portland stone and Devil's Black.
Beyond (majestic is the only word),
the cantilevered staircase
rises to the upper rooms.
Staircase and the bedrooms may be viewed
on Tuesday afternoons, September
through to January, when
her Ladyship goes south
and you are free
to take the Long Tour, one
we have designed
especially for connoisseurs. Today
should whet your appetite. The door
beyond the staircase is your
open sesame, not just
to our world, but to many.