Style

At art school in the early fifties, as I recall, there were two five-letter words that were as taboo as any with four letters: style and taste. I speak only of the students, for I cannot recall what the position of our lecturers was on these issues. Taste was a rude word signifying a person who knew what he liked- usually translated as meaning a person who liked what he knew. Style was a no-no, I think because it was seen as something trivial, not part of anyone's great vision. Yet it is difficult to conceive of either a painting or an example of literature that does not display a style of some sort. If it is pared to the bone, that in itself is a very distinctive style.

How times do change: only last week we were reading of Damien Hurst's former girl friend who owns a painting by him, his first according to her, given to her by Damien while they were still an item. It is a perfectly straight-forward painting of a cat. She has been fondly imagining herself to be sitting on a fortune, but alas, when she took it along to Sotherby's recently, she was told that it was worthless. Why? Well, not because it was an early, immature work - which it was, of course. And not because it was poorly conceived or crudely executed. Any of those would have been good and valid reasons for declaring a painting worthless - in my humble opinion. But, no, she was told that it was of no value because it was not in his trademark style. Translated, that means, it is a painting and not something preserved in formaldehyde. Okay, someone has now offered her £5000, but she still wants - or wanted, I might have missed out on the final chapter of the story - at least ten times that figure. (Yes, quite!) In the same paper I read a piece on Gerhard Richter, an who insists on swimming against the current tide by refusing to limit himself to a single (trademark) style. A trademark style, he insists, is not necessary for success. All power to his brush!

So when did this all come about, this general insistence on the trademark style? Picasso certainly did not have any truck with it. He experimented with most of the styles around (and maybe a few that were not) as the three accompanying images are intended to illustrate. And that was not just in his salad days, but right through his career. His various periods took in Naturalism, with his blue and rose periods,African Art, Primitivism, Cubism, collage works, Surrealism and various degrees of abstraction.

We get the same attitude in poetry. There are many good things to be found in his poetry, says a critic, but he is lacking his own voice. It is an ambiguous remark to the extent that it can sometimes be taken to mean that he is not saying anything original, at other times that though he has an original take on the world, he is not expressing it in an original way. In actual fact I am not sure about that as a possibility where poetry is concerned. There are two main positions, each defended by enthusiastic poetic combatants; there is the dualist view that style allows you to express very similar (though not identical) thoughts in different ways; and the monist standpoint that form and content are inseparable, that if you change the form you will inevitably change the meaning. Where poetry is concerned I am a monist. (And I think I am one where painting is concerned - though I might have to give that a bit more thought.)

For me, poetry must always involve an interplay between form, content and style. One poet piles on image after image, another pares them down, and just as for one painter meaning is inseparable from detail, whilst another gives us acres of one slightly scintillating colour, so does poetry have its counterparts to those.. Within each of the various genres (literature) and schools (painting) is a structure of accepted conventions which readers and viewers well understand. Style is (or was) one of those conventions. Once it meant that works of art coming from a certain place and time could be attributed to that place and time by means of their distinctive style. Today the situation is not that straight-forward, but even now, if you depart too far from the accepted conventions, you may not carry your target audience (to use the current jargon) with you.

Alternatively, depart far enough and your work may become a breath of fresh air blowing through a stifling atmosphere becoming ever more stale. T.S.Eliot's Wasteland had such an effect. Perhaps not immediately, so far as the majority were concerned, but late in the day it became a breath of fresh air for me. I recall when I was first exposed to it - though that was more than three decades after it was written. I still find it incredible to think that there was that time lag. What were our poetry teachers reading all those years? To me the breath of fresh air was almost scriptural.The wind bloweth where it listeth, you hear its sound, but no man knoweth whence it comes or where it goes. (John 3.8) I didn't understand where the ideas were coming from, not at first. Neither did I know where they were taking me. It has often been like that for me: understanding may not come at once, perhaps not for a long time, but it may perhaps be enough to stand in front of a painting and take it in. The eyes may have thoughts of their own of which the brain is unaware. The ears may react to an unfamiliar verse form long before the brain can catch up.

Sometimes something unconnected with the art form, say a technical advance or a social change, will bring about a new style. (Once it would have been something of that nature, for sure, but these days it could as easily be just someone striving to be different.) For the the Impressionists, for example, the catalyst had to do with the paints. For the first time in history it was no longer the case that the artist had to mix his own in the studio, but was able to buy them ready-mixed in tubes. Consequently, he was no longer confined to painting in the studio, but could take his easel, his canvas, his brushes, and his tubes of mixed paint out into the countryside and paint the scenes before his eyes. At the same time there were the twin influences of Japanese prints and of the photographers with their revolutionary cropping of the image, sometimes across a figure. All this, of course, led to changes that went far beyond what we would normally think of as style. Style, content and meaning (whatever that means!) become inextricably mixed. As they did, for example, when Picasso began to play (I chose the word instinctively, but allowed it only after careful thought) with images from African sculpture. Picasso was always playing around with images and techniques, but perhaps sometimes he played with more than he might have appreciated at the time. The simile that almost invariably comes to mind when I think of the artist playing, let's say absent mindedly, with the power that can reside in an image - which is a creative thing to do - is of Humboldt, the explorer, on the banks of the Orinoco River coming upon some native children playing with the dried seed pods of a sunflower-like plant. They were rubbing them vigorously and then holding them high in the air, at which point all manner of tiny creatures, small objects and debris blowing around in the air were drawn to them and stuck there. They do not know with what they play, said Humboldt, it being, of course, electricity. Picasso could not have seen in the African heads, masks and figures, what their makers had seen in them, but what he was playing with, as it turned out, was the power that drove him to his Demoiselles d'Avignon. There had been other influences, the painting had had a lengthy gestation period, but African Art was what lit the fuse and produced the blast that was to blow his artistic development completely off its old course and on to a new and previously unsuspected one. African art solved for Picasso the dilemma that was holding him back: how to come up with a radically new structure and form without losing the content and the allusions to real-life issues that were so important to him.

The Poet Laureate

The post of poet laureate will soon be up for grabs, it seems, as Andrew Motion is coming to the end of his ten year tenure. In fact, the phrase up for grabs may be somewhat misleading as it it rumoured that all our leading poets are running for cover, demanding police protection or diplomatic immunity (if they can prove a Gaelic connection) or generally going into all kinds of hiding, for the post is perceived as something of a poisoned chalice. Which is why, I suppose, it is now a ten year sentence and not life.

Many are the opinions now being expressed in the media and across the internet. Reading them has been something of a surprise to me - and rather salutary to discover the depths of my own ignorance. For example: I had thought the post in question carried something of a national responsibility, that the poet laureate was supposed to produce poems to mark the notable events in the life of the nation. Okay, so it's sort of difficult to come up with much that the poor guy could be celebrating in verse just now... maybe the exploits of our olympic and para-olympic teams? Not much to go wild about on the political front, though. Still, there are issues to be addressed: global warming, of course (yes, I know that has a political dimension, but this is thinking at the keyboard).

But no, actually, that is not what he does; it is what I had thought he did and it is what a lot of those who take an interest in such things think he should be doing. Indeed, many seem to think it could become an excellent blueprint for the modernisation of the post (sorry, poisoned chalice), but it is not what the job is about. What the job is about, apparently, is writing poems for the Windsors; a rap-inspired poem for Prince William's twenty first birthday, for example; a ceremonial thingy for the royal diamond wedding. Neither of these, according to their author, being exactly well received.

Another surprise, which stopped being a surprise when I thought about it (that is, when I realised that I could not recall a significant poem from his pen in the last ten years - more ignorance on my part, perhaps), was his writer's block. He has himself given the impression just recently that he has not written anything of his own account for a long while. The post (poisoned chalice) has been incredibly thankless, he told a recent arts festival, and has left him unabe to write anything at the present time. I was surprised because I had fondly thought him to have been a good poet laureate. And so he has been, in terms of the status of poetry in our society. He has worked tirelessly to promote the reading and writing of the stuff... though that, as I understand it, was no part of the job.

There are voices being raised demanding that this impossibly limiting conception of the job must go, must undergo dramatic revision before the next victim is picked upon. The change last time around, from life tenure to a ten year stint was acknowledgement that change is due. Overdue, some would say. This time there is pressure for a more thorough-going change.

My vote for the new poet laureate? Carol Ann Duffy. Yes, I know; she hasn't got a hope in hell of being the next victim: she's bisexual and she's Scottish, two facts that damned her last time around. But she's what the nation deserves. I really don't wish her any harm, but I would like to see her take on the role. She would make something of it, I am sure... Oh, but there is one other thing against her: she has been brutally honest about the vacuity at the heart of contemporary British (sorry, English) society. The first two verses of her Head of English are typical:

Today we have a poet in the class.
A real live poet with a published book.
Notice the inkstained fingers girls. Perhaps
we're going to witness verse hot from the press.
Who knows. Please show your appreciation
by clapping. Not too loud. Now

sit up straight and listen. Remember
the lesson on assonance, for not all poems,
sadly, rhyme these days. Still. Never mind.
Whispering's, as always, out of bounds -
but do feel free to raise some questions.
After all, we're paying forty pounds.

See what I mean?

Haiku thoughts from Guernsey

Recollected in tranquility: most of the following originated on the day I forgot to take my camera. I was about to bin them, but then thought: "No, not yet... wait and see".

A seawall for a catwalk
and the gulls in turn
show off their feathers.



Time out from the parade:
two mannequins mount guard
against maraudung swallows.



No victor, no escape.
Two rutting stags:
eternal stalemate.



          Vertiginous path.                
 Footprints left in wet cement    
 end at the cliff edge.    

Small things - a cracked wing mirror -
and we leave the world behind
more fractured than we found it.


Sliding towards the ferry,   |    A sculptor's genius?
the Autumn sea's             |    No, only the sea
grey avalanche.              |    can ripple stone like that.




From above the cliffs
a tranquil sea
threatened by a casement gun.


The old moon swells with pride   |   Upended ice cream cone,
nearing the skyline              |   a castle in the sand
which brightens at her touch.    |   creating its own moat.

The Photobooth

It's good to be back. My thanks to those who visited during my absence, and especially to those who left comments. I will get to all as soon as I can - inbetween catching up on a backlog of chores, of course! We did eventually escape the nice doctors with their nasty procedures and made it to Guernsey for a few (warm and sunny!) days. Whilst idling on the beach and the cliffs above, it struck me that I have my own version of the seven ages of man. The first age was characterised by building sandcastles on the beach, the second by beach cricket, the third by swimming. The fourth age was back again to building sandcastles, though now pretending that the building of them was not for myself, but for a small son or daughter. Ditto the beach cricket of the fifth age, I suppose, though a distinct lack of breath must have made it obvious that it was not my first choice of activity. The sixth age took in cliff walks. During the seventh age you write stuff like the following - though you might think it has much in common with sandcastles. How many similarities can you find?

The Photobooth.

The man in the photobooth was two,
who knew a thing or two, who said:
these pictures of me
are new of me,
Yet every hue and line is true.

You delude yourself, said the twin in his skin,
your lines and hues
come from dust in the air,
from the fog and fug and mud of the world,
the jog and the smudge,
the fudge to begrudge
the insights that you claim.

Not insights as such:
these stills of me
are as Hubble shots
of a galaxy.
They show what we always knew to be there,
but amplified and rearranged,
with emphasis and focus changed.
They resonate to strains that were laid
before the world began.
An essential part of the general me,
though a stateless me, a refugee,
at odds with the world,
they're at home in this photobooth.

There is no home in this photobooth.
It and the world are one.
It has no special measures or meanings or truths,
its rules and the world's are the same:
"Keep still, turn that,
put your coins in the slot,
do this, not that,
keep your head in the center
and all in the frame..."
It's wise in the ways of a broken world
and replicates what it knows:
so the cabinet judders, the body corrodes,
the shutter sticks and the flash explodes.
A lightball hits your eyes.

Which all translates as the power of life!
Just look at those overlapping planes!
See the broken lines and the jagged truths,
the liveliness that the booth exudes!
The energy that it gives to its art,
The meanings that come from the booth!

There are no meanings to the booth
and none that it can give.
Like the world in which we're cast to live
it's one great accident,
a mischance, an oddity, not profound,
whose images strike one as sound,
of impeccable provenance.
But art must follow intent.
An image possessing a sacred power,
has that power invested by man,
it's an image to keep pristine, not exposed
to whims of the passing hour -
or debates about what it means.

So that's that!
The world stays flat,
any roundness might strike as obscene!
The booth has been firmly put in its place
that raised its art from copying
to inventive genius,
from colouring between the lines
to a new sublimity,
from drudgery to grace.

Tracey Emin : two questions

I came across two observations by Tracey Emin in The Independent of 08/08/08 which I thought might be worthy of further consideration and comment. I had planned to use the following in a somewhat longer post at some time in the future, but then reading comments to my Heads, tails, both or neither post, thought it might be more relevant and to that extent more intersting to post them now.

The first followed a description of the effort involved in the installation of her retrospective exhibition at The Edinburgh Festival,
as part oof which she complained about how personal were most of the reviews - not surprising really, I thought, given that the exhibition, like most of her work, is focussed on the personal aspects of her life and its hardships. Then came a comment about how great it would be if she was to die and it turned out that all her work had been made by a really thick-jawlined 6ft 2in Geordie guy and that she herself had hardly ever existed. It's a topic that comes up frequently in one form or another, Tracey just makes it personal, because that is what she does, life having made of her what it has. The basic question, though, is: What difference would/should it make to a work of art if it was suddenly discovered to have been made by someone else? (You could argue, of course, that the question cannot be asked of Tracey, because the work, being what it is, could not have existed in her absence. That does not affect the validity of the question, of course.


She then went on to suggest that most of us, given the choice, would not have come here (i.e. been born) to this planet, to everything I know, uninvited. But this is why I feel so lucky. Art came and got me. Art with its big ideas and its engulfing arms picked me up and swept meaway to another world. It is another of our familiar modern cries: does evrything (life) have to have a meaning? If so, where does that meaning originate?I have to agree with Tracey that life has no meaning except we human beings give it one. (I have not always thought that.) Where she and I part company is ober her contention that art can supply The Big Idea that will give life meaning. It is not the artist's role, I fear, to do that. The artists role, it seems to me, is to work within the framework of the big idea, to express, expound - and maybe to extend - it. Michelangelo did not originate the big ideas on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He expounded them, developed some, propogated some offshoots, but the big ideas themselves he had found in the scriptures. The scriptures themselves were not the source. The big ideas predated even them. The scriptures, too, were working within the framework set be society. The scriptures have long ago lost their pre-eminent position. So have the priests along with them. There are various candidates out to succeed them: artists, philosophers, scientists. The latter seem to be winning - is that where society took the wrong turn?

Why Books?

Overheard in the supermarket: a woman bemoaning the fact that she had visited the local public library with aview to using one of its computers, only to find that they were in great demand and she should have bookedher session beforehand: They just don't have enough computers, she announced with some venom, they seem to be spending all their money on bloody books! What they want them all for? So that's my question: Why books? For the purposes of this post books are: novels, short stories, plays - truth-telling verisimilitudes of any kind, which from this point on I will call TTVs for short. That out of the way, it is a fundamental question right enough, particularly so at this point in time when there is so much coming on stream that threatens to trivialise, or to appear to trivialise the TTVs. There are e-books, for instance, electronic book readers, techno-books, soaps, games machines, docusoaps, docudramas and much else, none of which are in themselves necessarily trivialising, though the ways in which they have been, and are being, used tends to make them so. I have even seen the soaps proclaimed as today's novels - more on that later. So, given all that, what are books for?Do they have purpose which cannot be fulfilled by any of these would-be usurpers?

We first encounter the TTV as children - not necessarily in book form, and always assuming we were lucky enough to have that sort of childhood. For us then they had much the same purpose as play. With no experience of the world, we role-played to discover as best we could what it mught be like to be a bus driver, fighter pilot, parson or parent. From stories read to us we heard what others thought it would be likeor had found it to be. Or maybe we encountered threats, real or imagined, that our small world held for us, and in the safety of the game or the story we rehearsed the ways to deal with them. We learnt, too, that actions - including our own - have consequences and began to realise that we should have to deal with those as well.

Some things never change, or not much. I remeber that our professor at London University used to impess upon us that: There are more ways of living a life than can be lived by one person living one life. If we want to try the other ways - or some of them! - we can probably best - or most easily - do it in a book. And the book in question will be a TTV, a novel or a biography, a mask of artifice revealing in its fiction a valuable truth.

We could widen the question, of course, and ask what are T.V. dramas for? For have I not already mentioned hearing them proclaimed the new novel? That proclamation was put out by no less a person than Jane Tranter, Controller of Fiction at the BBC in a recent speech to The Royal Television Society. What she actually said was that: television has supplanted the role of the novel in addressing the big social issues of the day. She was comparing the nineteenth century novel with present day television drama, but her words leave scope for some ambiguity: did she mean that in the nineteenth century folk read novels for the same reasons that people today watch T.V. dramas? Or did she mean that the world of the imagination has moved on from the nineteenth century novel and is better served now by T.V. drama, an altogether superior commodity? Certainly, those nineteenth century readers were an enthusiastic bunch, going to much greater lengths to satisfy their passion than we are likely to have to do today. Many clubbed together to buy the instalments they could not afford by themselves, many were illitierate; in both cases they would gather together and have the latest instalment read out. Today we sit mostly in family groups in front of the box for our nightly fix. Maybe even the family group is doomed; the writing has been on the wall for some time in the form of games machines, but now there is another threat: a television set that two programmmes at the same time. Which one you watch depends upon the angle to the screen at which you sit. Of course, you need earphones so... But I digress:There seems little doubt that Jane Tranter meant to imply that the T.V. drama was superior to the novel in terms of imaginative content and the variety of experiences available to the viewer. I find that a staggering assertion at a time when B.B.C. drama, if not actually being dumbed down - and I think it is - is certainly at an all-time low.

To test my feeling, I retrieved an old Saturday Guardian Review from the recycle bin and found in that one paper the following books reviewed: When Will There Be Good News?, described as a crime novel that is funny, clever and always surprising; Casanova, a biography of energy and brio;From A to X; A Story in Letters, John Berger's long-listed Brooker contender; Palace Council by Mark Lawson, a historical thriller that chronicles the fortunes of black America; The Bellini Madonna by Elizabeth Lowry, a mischievous tale of high and low intrigue that entertains; and Girl in a Blue Dress, by Gaynor Arnold the re-telling of Dickens's life with his estranged wife taking centre stage. There were others I could have added, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, for example, not new I know, but then neither is everything on the box. The point is that just taking the books listed here, you would be hard put to it to find a comparable selection anywhere in the T.V. schedules.

Barely had I written the above, than Doreen suggested we sat down to watch My Zinc Bed, a BBC2 drama I had recorded a few days earlier. It was everything I have just been suggesting is no longer to be found among the schedules. It was on the theme of addiction, which did not immediately endear it to me, I having seen so many on that subject that were harrowing and nothing else. This was not like that. Indeed, nothing much happened. For sure, there were no tummy-wrenching scenes. The plot, such as it was, meandered, but mostly it was words. Dialogue. dialogue that made you listen and listen attentively. The pace varied, as did the emotive charge. It was difficult at times, but totally original. The exception that proves my rule, obviously! Encouraging, though.

More Bits and Pieces

With this post I emulate (in some respects) the protagonist from my recently posted poems and execute a partial disappearance from the blogosphere. I shall not push the analogy too far! I hope to continue to post, but fear I shall not be able to get around to you all as I would like. We have a busy, busy week or so on the horizon, with things not too pleasant to contemplate, and (hopefully) a few that are. So not all bad. See you all soon.

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Some Greek orthodox monks who have lived an ascetic life on the remote Mt Athos peninsula since Byzantine times, who are noted for having banned women completely (and even female animals), and for having chosen (some of them) to live solitary lives in caves, have made a giant leap into the twenty-first century by providing themselves with broadband internet access. I assume that the ban does not extend to images of women.

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Maureen Lipman related the following anecdote in The Oldie magazine recently:
A white-haired ladiy leaving a performance of Chekov's Cherry Orchard (in which Lipman was playing Charlotte, the governess), was heard to remark yo her companion: Well, I thought it was very enjoyable, didn't you, Mary? But why on earth they had to set it in Russia, is beyond me

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A survey has found the following books to be unreadable - i.e. unfinishable

1. Vernon Little God - DBC Pierre
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - JK Rowling
3. Ulysses - James Joyce
4. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
5. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
6. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
7. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
8. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
9. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
10.Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Each of the above had recently been included in a must read or not-to-be-missed list.

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This from The Independent on Sunday:

A sculpture of a crucified frog was threatened with eviction from Bolzano’s new modern art museum after being condemned by the pope, but the minister of culture and local right-wing politicians insist it is staying where it is.

Today the museum's governing committee decided "by a clear majority" to keep it on display.

The work by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger shows a lurid green frog, warty and bug-eyed, nailed to a cross with its tongue hanging out - but holding a foaming tankard of beer in one hand and an egg in the other.

Exhibited in the inaugural exhibition of the new Museion in the centre of this German-speaking city in Italy's far north, it was said by the museum curators to be a self-portrait of the artist "in a state of profound crisis." But attacks on the work, which began locally, culminated in a letter to a local critic from the pope and a condemnation by the minister of culture.

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Quote from Sir David Hare, playwright:

The principal question you can ask of any artistist is: what difference would it have made if they'd never existed?

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I am pushing my luck perhaps, but at the risk of becoming an absolute bore, a few further words on my recent three poems, my trilogy, as I have called them. For those of you who have been good enough to show an interest - even to suggesting that I should try to bring the three parts together - this, as they say on News 24, is breaking news to the effect that I am pruning the third poem, Going Back (posted under the title The thing a poem has to be), cutting out redundant words etc, and have reinstated the original ending, which I did not post. Here, if you are still with me, it is:-

To him it must have felt
the dream would never end: the stress;
continuing uncertainty - all this
releasing memories... somatic some
and only later of the mind:
a smack returning to the face...
from what: a hand?
a wave? The churning gut...
sea-sickness? fear?
and still the strain, the
ambiguities that fed
the fantasies; the slow
unfolding tale.
And even as he plied
the iron, to smooth
the creases in that tale,
a coast guard on the promontory
abseiled down to rocks
and tiny spits of sand,
where boys trapped by the tide
had been reported seen, and found
there, two of those who'd thrown the knives
and taunted him, and further round
the headland, washed-up on the sand,
the body of the boy who'd disappeared.

Heads, Tails, Both or Neither

Only for tails read hearts. Very familiar in the world of art - or art myth - is the person who knows what he likes, of whom it is often said that, what he really means is he likes what he knows. And why not? How is anyone to like what they don't know? Which begs the point of the remark being made of him, which is that he is too set and does not try to go beyond what he knows to other riches that art, literature, whatever, might have to offer him.

Art, music, poetry all sing when the intellect understands what it is it is looking at or listening to and when at the same time the heart embraces it and feels its way into it. When' in fact, the critical faculties and the emotions respond together. But there is no need to wait for that glorious occasion, no need to be limited to it. It is possible to admire a work of art, for example, without being able to love it, without being able to embrace it, as I have put it, with the feelings. At this moment in time the public is being asked to raise - or at the very least, to approve the raising of, a large sum of money (£50 million each) to save at least part of a valuable art collection from being sold abroad. The pride of the collection are two of Titian's finest: Diane and Actaeon and Diane and Collisto. (The image shows his painting The Holy Family and Palm Tree another from the collection .) I admire the work of Titian greatly: I can appreciate a whole spectrum of aesthetic qualities, I acknowledge that he was a great master in his field, but the works do not sing for me. That is a fault in me. Whatever it is that a Titian painting resonates with in other people is missing from me. Yet I shall be mortally disappointed if they are lost to the nation. Milton's Paradise Lost I would put in the same category, along with much (but not all) of Browning. Certain works do it for me, others do not. But judgement - hopefully - need not be affected.

On the other hand it is equally possible to love without qualification a work and yet not be able to fully comprehend it with the intellect.The first time I read W.S. Graham's The White Threshold, I think it is true to say that my intellect made nothing of it at all, yet it lept from the page telling me that whatever it was, it was not nothing. The heart saw something in it, feelings were aroused and responded to it. (I wouldn't want you to run away with the idea that all Graham's work is like this: there are more beautiful poems and there are certainly many less difficult ones - most of them in fact. My illustration is limited to this one example.) Indeed, the whole of this poem is not like this. These are the first two verses of a first section of six verses, half a page of a poem of perhaps seven pages, five sections in all:

Let me always from the deep heart
Drowned under behind my brow so ever
Stormed with other wandering, speak
Up famous fathoms well over strongly
The pacing whitehaired kingdoms of the sea.

I walk towards you and you may not walk away.

Always the welcome-roaring threshold
So ever bell worth my exile to
Speak up to greet me into the hailing
Seabraes seabent with swimming crowds
All cast all mighty water dead away.

I rise up loving and you may not move away.

Graham can leave you mentally wallowing in his wake, while you are at the same time being dazzled by the something you cannot catch up with. The trick, I think, is not to worry about the meaning. Least of all should you attempt a prose translation of it. That is an absolutely fatal mistake. It will take you nowhere but away from the poetic meaning of the piece. Meanings will come with reflection and re-readings. I am still at that stage with The White Threshold. Other once-difficult poems have revealed themselves more easily. I recall the first time I heard Chinese poetry recited aloud in its original tongue. I was in my teens. Obviously, I did not find it intellectually satisfying, but the feelings clicked in. I thought it was beautiful.

But what if there is no contact, either with the mind or the emotions? I have written earlier - as I know Jim has - about the personal difficlties that arise when you can make no sense of a work on which other people, whose abilities and judgements you respect absolutely, are lavishing great praise. What do you do? What do you tell yourself? That all these people of sound judgement (so you believe) are deluded? I have this problem with Tracey Emin and the now famous (or infamous) bed - which I take as an example, for I have the same problem with most of her work. And it is this: I can see what she is at, so to that extent the brain is engaged, but it does not respond because she has done nothing with it, it is still, in my opinion, raw material. It is not a found item, yet she has not sublimated it. (Yes, I know, I have changed the usage of the word sublimate, applying it to an object, rather than an impulse, but it is as near as I can get to saying what I want to say.) I see what she sets out to do, but cannot see that she has done it, or even tried to do it. She has not turned her material into a work of art. Sadly, neither does she speak to me through the emotions, not beyond the feelings that she arouses, the normal human feelings that all must surely have when we hear about the troubles of her early upbringing and the traumas they have left her with in adult life. But as attributes of a would-be work of art they do not speak, for the very same reasons that prevent it working on me intellectually. But there are these many people whom I admire who absolutely rave about her work. So what is a poor bewildered chap to think?

I have an almost equal difficulty with someone like Francis Bacon, not because the raw material has not been processed, for it obviously has, but because the point of it is lost on me. I join the ranks of the philistines and ask: why does he have to paint nothing but what I can only interpret as ugly and evil, a distortion of reality that does not seem to portray any hidden truth? If you do not know his work, click on the link I have given to see one of his portraits in the famous/infamous Screaming Popes series.These are a real difficulty for some, but how would a person think about the Pope, the ultimate authority, who was a 100% dyed-in-the-wool atheist and card-carrying homosexual who had been brought up in Ireland? Interestingly, he expresses my heart/head dichotomy in rather different terms: Some paint comes across directly to the nervous system, other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain. He was not interested in the latter. Art for him was completely visceral or it was nothing. You coud not talk about an image; if you explained or analysed it, you rendered it worthless. The distortions that most satisfied him were those he took from medical books, of bodies twisted into grotesque shapes. And yet he is perhaps the most popular English artist since Turner - but turner painted pleasant landscapes, stuff the public like to see. recently a study for a figure by Bacon went for £14million. The critics (mostly) adore him. What am I missing?

The two images given here to the right and above depict two of his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the next three are works by a great hero of mine, Graham Sutherland, a painter in the best traditions of English landscape painting. The first of the Sutherlands is Boulder in a Landscape, on the extreme right is Thorn Head and lower down Entrance to a Path. You may think there is a superficial affinty, a blood brothership almost between the Bacons and the Sutherlands.

Many have remarked upon it when I have professed to being moved in heart and mind by the Sutherlands, whilst being left out in the cold by the Bacons.

To me the difference is all, the resemblances merely show the importance that motive makes to the all-important processing of the work.
Yet maybe it is a blind spot that I have. Maybe, maybe.... but to return to my original contrast: there is an important similarity (and difference) as between Bacon's work and Emin's. The similarity relates to their childhoods. Emin's I think is well known. It was, as I have said, traumatic.The nature of the trauma was that of not being wanted - or at east believing that she was not wanted, a trauma still unresolved. In Bacon's case three facts are critical: the first that he was an ugly child, told he was ugly by his parents; the second that he would often visit his grandmother whose second husband would cut off the claws of cats and feed them to the dogs before tying the cats up by their legs and torturing them; the third critical fact is that Bacon discovered he enjoyed witnessing this. Given the emotionally vulnerable nature of a young boy, it is not difficult to see how this last could happen. It perhaps was not pure enjoyment that he felt, but there was something there in his feelings that he could not deal with, perhaps has never been able to deal with, is still trying to deal with. It has been said that these figures at the base of the crucifixion are animals with human physical characteristics, because we are animals. The truth it portrays is that of our ugliness towards each other and ourselves.

But it is, as I say, when a work of art speaks directly and 100% to both head and heart that we experience the sublime. Let me therefore give an example of a poem that does that for me. (I confine my literary examples to poetry partly from personal preference and partly because the point is more easily and thoroughly made than would be posssible with, say, a novel.) I have chosen T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding, the last of his Four Quartets (read all) Here are the first two of the three verses that make up Part 1.

I

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

I have to confess that I find that sublime. And my final is image is of a sculpture that I find equally magnificent: The Horseman by Marino Marini.

The thing a poem has to be.

So, against all my expectations, it is here. There were certainly times I thought it would get no further than the bin, but what you see making up the second half of this post is the third of my three poems, my trilogy on the boy who disappeared. I have to say that it's been fun. Great fun. Whether it's been poetry I'm no so sure. For one thing, a poem, so far as I am concerned, has always had to have compression as one of its qualities, and these poems have precious little of that. To recap a moment for the benefit of those who may have just tuned in, the first poem, A Tale for Today was given, as I like to think of it - or was as close to beinggiven as anything I have ever experienced. I have had these flashpoint moments before, when someting has sparked off a poem, but it was never quite as complete before, never producing more than a vague outline which had to be worked on - often unsuccessfully. On this occasion it produced far more: I was going through some papers, and got as far as looking down a list of words and phrases when something sparked between a couple of them. (I could not now say which two.) More quickly than I could get it down on paper I had the first verse, and more. I don't wish to suggest that it was dictated, or was some form of automatic writing, certainly not that it was another Kubla Khan (I don't fancy myself as Coleridge), but that the feel and style of the poem and the uncompressed nature of it (which at the time seemed the whole point of it) were all there. Furthermore, the lines, as I wrote them down, suggested further lines. The whole thing came very easily, really like unwrapping a parcel. It was extraordinary, but so was what happened after I posted it. First of all Ken and then Ellumbra followed by Maekitso, Hope at The Road Less Traveled and Dick at Patteran all commented as though the poem had been at least partly based on a true story (which it was not, though in developing the poem I did have in mind the public concern, much publicised in the media just then, with knife crime and with missing young people). The suggestions mostly were that it would be nice to know a bit more. They were saying, with good reason, that there was a quality of incompleteness about it.

Now these are all people whose opinions I value highly, from whose blogs I get both inspiration and pleasure, as indeed, I did on this occasion, for their comments led me to explore the story further to see whether I could unearth a little more information about the boy and what might have happened to him. This had not been even a remote thought when writing A Tale for Today, so I had not prepared the ground, had not introduced difficulties with a thought in mind about how they might be resolved. Least of all had I sketched out a scenario from which to select facts for the poem.

The second poem, The Almost Lovers (both earlier poems are in the ealier posts list in the side panel), which was meant to prepare the ground for this final poem, was a real struggle, and I thought it showed. This one has been somewhere inbetween, bits have come easily, bits I've had to struggle with.

The title for the post came from an email I received from a lad too bashful to expose himself in the comments to the blog. He picked up my earlier remarks concerning the necessity for compression and added: "There is no one thing apoem has to be."
Initially I thought it sounded sane and sensible, even if I couldn't wholly subscribe to it - without fully knowing why - but later I thought it sounded like one of those exam questions: "There is no one thing a poem has to be: discuss."
Going Back

Into the house of mourning walks
one claiming to be him, the boy
who disappeared - repeatedly - and is feared dead.
He's like enough for hope, sufficiently dissimilar
for doubt; in looks and speech he is
and yet is not: the badger streak
much wider in his hair; the voice
less hoarse; the rudimentary third ear
less clear, less well-defined.
Suspiciously, he recollects
no further back than when he disappeared.
Before that day... zip, zero, nix. A set
of picture post card images begins
with the most perfect rainbow that began it all.
So by the light of that he gives
his affirmation, turns
the sadness of that house
to muddle and dismay.

Leaving Four Mile Wood, I saw it straight ahead,
a spray of light and colour in the nettles by the barn,
a spirit wake that arced the heavens where a messenger
had flown, wings folded back like hands in prayer
the way my world was folding back
to Miss Melissa's cadences;
to listening one blissed out hour that never left -
would never leave - my being. No,
not then, not after leaving Grey Moon Cottage;
not following the mallow trail -
sprigs left by either of the Mallows to beguile me
to the broken egg
and to the baffling nest above it in the tree.
I knew I must go back
(my life will be a life of going back),
my nature bade me back; a prelude
viewed in hues hung in the sky; an anthem
tasted, felt, or smelt in thunder or in flowers;
sonatas played by subtle plays of light;
things seen, not heard (as children used to be,
so we are told): all bade me back
and spelt out why
she called her works
small children of a soundling God;
why nothing now could slake my thirst
but her primeval sounds.

She'd meant to play him Phantom of the Idle Moon,
a psychic tour de force if ever there was one -
a psychic force, in fact. It would have stoned his mind.
The reason that she did not follow through
was down to his much altered state of mind,
because of which she did not pick up on his vibes.
He being now anonymous to mystic sense,
she missed his hour-long, second transit of Grey Moon.
He passed unnoticed and unsung,
without the contemplated change of tune.

Near where he'd walked had been
the other boys, the ones with knives, the ones
who'd thrown them at the hares.
They'd called to him. Perhaps he'd like to join their gang?

He would, part of him would, a big part would, a lot of him.
One word, a yes or no, but at its back.
those clamourings of fantasies;
ghosts carried under lock and key since prepubescent days,
now spilling out, too long denied - a fledgling mugger, he!
The boys had split their sides, derided him.
No matter then, the truth was there for all to see,
the genie out, no chance of its recapture.
The truth made manifest in words - and he within himself
could feel what others must have seen. And so,
from those who'd known him best he'd disappeared,

Like colours in a rainbow or like ink in milk,
his memories beyond that point, bleed one into the other:
Gutted he's missed out on the tall ships, slips. An old man
helps him to his feet; the Mallows ask him why he's crying.
(Boys don't cry.) They promise him a breeze
in Sea Sprite; catch the tall ships; picks
his bunk, sees not one sign of a tall ship; slips
silently to sleep, to dreams of snakes and spiders,
mushrooms and the Mallows -
who are fondling his hair.

There is a diary. A log. It doesn't seem to help.

... and still no sign of a tall ship, no ship of any sort,
nothing more than blackness like a sea of ink -
and navigation lights, occasionally them, though even they
are not reflected by this unresponsive sea.
Perpetual night.
I can't explain the total truancy of day. Nor dizziness,
not motion sickness, mal de mer... there is
no movement. And yet still the darkness dredged
up from the ocean floor, from Davy Jones's locker.
Hour on hour it works on me.
My mind begins to hang in shreds, like torn sails in a storm.

Then comes a sudden change of style:

... waking up last night and thinking I was buried...
Someone thought I'd died and buried me.

By contrast, dreamt of being born,
but not of woman, of the sea;
a whirlpool hurled me high upon the land - or deck,
perhaps,
I am a sea-horse made of quartz.

A little light, but half-awake, the day and I.
I stagger round the deck half dry
and try to catch a flying fish - of which
the sky is full. I see them falling back into
the sea, the sea, the sea holds everything.

The night outside is like a woman's gown,
jet black and starred with diamante, the whole robe
hanging on a living frame. Some life form is behind
the sky, beneath the sea and making inroads in the boat;
you see it in the way it moves,
the way the folds flow round the form.

The radio reports my sister's death. I shall jump ship
and make my way - hitch-hiking home - along the coast.

So now it's Jim and me!

Okay, I put my hands up, I have been a trifle tardy in getting round to coin a few words on Jim's book, Living With the Truth. Actually, that is partly because I was a trifle tardy reading it, and that in turn was because I had to finish War and Peace first, which, foolishly I had chosen for my bed time reading, which would have been okay but for this tendency I have to nod off as soon as I get into bed. (Senior moment type 2.) Why didn't you read it during the day, then? I hear you ask. Because the tendency to nod off is even greater then, I reply. (I didn't nod off reading Living with the Truth funnily enough! Make of that, what you will.)

But to resume: finding myself (not for the first time in my life) the tail-end stooge, I thought I might put aside my desire to review the book for a while yet in order to hit the blogosphere with it when the intial excitement had died down. In fact, it was just beginning to dawn upon me that this might never happen, that Living With the Truth might become a web phenomenon, when, Lo and behold, I hear that Jim has dished out a blog award to me. Naturally, I would want to say a word or two about that, so putting those two developments together, it seemed now might be a good time after all to rush into print with my review.

The award first - of course! My initial reaction was much like Jim's: a certain concern that the method of making the awad - i.e. the blogger having been given the award, then chooses up to five further blogs to be awarded - has the potential, eventually, to award everyone and make the award itself meaningless. My instinct was to suppose there should be some criteria at least, on which the choice is based. That's the professional coming out in me, I am afraid. I was overlooking the traditional amateur nature of the web, which is in fact one of its strong points. Being given a commendation by someone whose judgement you rate highly is in no way inferior to be awarded it by a committee ticking all the boxes. This one has come down to me via Jim (see his Kick-Ass Blogger Award post) and Cataherine at Sharp Words, so the pedigree is as good as it gets - which means I now have to contemplate choosing a blog or blogs, a task I fancy I will not find easy. Not because of their rarity value, but because there is no shortage (so far) of worthy blogs who are yet to be awarded, and because the choice will, by definition, be personal and to that extent subjective and therefore prejudiced. I will do my best, for which read: I will take a day ot two.

So to the book. Living With the Truth. In a sense I feel there is little I can add to what has already been said, and in the main, well said. I found it a thoroughly enjoyable book, and an easy book to read - that not being intended as a criticism by the way. Quite the reverse. It is a serious book that pretends it is no such thing, and a humerous book that does not care who knows it - a combination which I find particularly attractive. The seriousness runs below the slightly acerbic wit and sarcasm, but not invisibly so; it shows in the same way a bone structure shows in the shape of a face. The net result is a gentle and humane portrait of humanity.
The first two sentences set the tone admirably:-

Had it been death that had called that day everything would have been all right. After all, he had been waiting patiently on death for some time and, by his calculations, The Grim Reaper was well and truly overdue.

But it wasn't Death, of course. It was Truth. Hence the consternation that the call would occasion. Death, he was ready for, Truth... ah, well that was an altogether different matter! Our protagonist, Jonathan Payne, is in a sense Mr Everyman: he tells lies to himself, mainly about himself. His is a very fashionable attitude, but one with all sorts of dire - though initially unrecognised - consequences for himself. Some of Truth's colleagues get cameo parts (Destiny for one) and just when you think it might turn to farce it clicks back to serious.

If you know Jim's blog you will already have a fair idea of what to expect (and if you don't know it I would recommend that you remedy that forthwith): the width of his interests and knowledge, for example; the well thought-out and thoroughly researched material; a well-paced and lively, lucid text that leads you into areas you had not altogether expected. Actually, it always gives you rather more than you had expected. It does so here. Read it, read it anywhere: if you have not yet taken your holiday, read it on the beach or in the plane. You could even read it in bed - but not if you want to fall asleep.

Myself and Harold Pinter

Dream time

This is an account of a dream I had some short while ago. Doreen, my wife, is giving an address of some sort. She is standing on a dais in what appears to be a lecture hall. A rapt audience is sitting in what looks more like the nave of a church, though they are sitting in the sort of study chairs more usually found in lecture halls. Doreen is relating an anecdote about a woman who is "kicking off" in a supermarket. It is obviously going to illustrate something. She begins to gesticulate rather excitedly. "No one can do anything with this woman, so they send for the general manager..." She is really warming to her story now, and continues with it even more animatedly than before. "The general manger arrives, goes straight up to the troublesome woman and says..." She comes to a sudden stop. There is silence. Has she forgotten the punch line? Some of the audience begin to smile, but they are still looking earnestly towards her. She does not look discomposed or worried, she is standing in a relaxed manner, arms hanging limply by her sides, regarding the audience. I am reassured. She knows what she is doing. The pause is planned. It will be part of the point she is about to make. I look back at the audience. The first signs of embarrassment are beginning to show, a slight restlessness is apparent. Still there is no sound, either from them or from her. I look back at her. The same pose, the same demeanour. The fidgetting of the audience is growing, though still silently. They are most definitely embarrassed now, occasionally looking away from the dais towards their neighbours. Nothing, though, perturbs my wife. The silence continues, and I am thinking that whatever is coming next had better be good, when I realise the cause of the silence: I have woken up, I have obviously been awake for a few seconds, maybe a minute, difficult to know, dreamtime not being quite the same as real time, and me not being quite sure which one I'm in. The sound must have switched off when I awoke, but not the vision. I can still see my wife or the audience, whichever I choose to look at. I open my eyes, not having realised until then that they were still closed. It is quite dark and for a few seconds more I can see what is happening in that lecture hall, though now I can also hear what is happening outside, car doors are banging, an animal of some sort is screeching, someone shouts. Then the faint outlines of the bedroom replace the lecture hall, and the dream is over.

They say that when you die your hearing is the last faculty to go. I doubt it will be so in my case. Or does someone out there know better? On a scale from "dead common" to "unique" how usual or unusual is this? Does anyone know? It has never happened to me before.


Quotes from Harold Pinter.

"In a career attended by a great deal of dramatic criticism one of the most interesting - and indeed acute - critical questions I've ever heard was when I was introduced to a young woman and her six-year-old son. The woman looked down to her son and said: 'This man is a very good writer.' The little boy looked at me and then at his mother and said: 'Can he do a W?'"


I've had two full-length plays produced in London. The first ran a week and the second ran a year. Of course, there are differences between the two plays. In The Birthday Party I employed a certain amount of dashes in the text, between phrases. In The Caretaker I cut out the dashes and used dots instead. So that instead of, say: "Look, dash, who, dash, I, dash, dash, dash," the text would read: "Look. dot, dot, dot, who, dot, dot, dot, I, dot, dot, dot, so it's possible to deduce from this that dots are more popular than dashes and that is why The Caretaker had a longer run than The Birthday Party The fact that in neither case could you hear the dots and dashes in performance is beside the point. You can't fool the critics for long. They can tell a dot from a dash a mile off, even if they can hear neither.

The Almost Lovers

It was something of a surprise to get comments and emails asking for more information on my poem A Tale for Today. I did not have any further info' on the story. None that would have satisfied, that is. In a moment of weakness I mentioned the possibility of a sequel as a way of unearthing more. This is not it, but is... could be... might turn out to be... don't hold your breath... a step in that direction. Think of it as a possible presequel. It has not come as the other did, as a gift from heaven - orsomewhere. This one I have had to work for, and I think it shows. But like A Tale for Our Time it is not a final draft. However, if any good person feels inclined to offer a critique, I would be very happy for it to be written as of a final draft. This way of writing is new ground for me.

Jan, sister of the boy who slipped from view, found bed
exerted nothing like the pull 
of those bleak hills at night -
of death perhaps (she thought him dead), 
as if in some familiar field or wood 
he might take shape where he had disappeared. 
Then early in the second week and in the early hours 
she and the one they called
The Strange One met by Sangster's Copse. 
His footpath had come out on hers; they'd stopped
and eyed each other - she suspiciously, but still
she did not take exception when he chose 
to walk beside her, tried to keep in step. 
The next night he was there. And then the next,
and every night from then, no matter what the hour.
He'd sidle up as if he knew her brother's whereabouts or fate. 
One night came partial clarity: an understanding, not 
of how, but consequence, of end result, that she it was
who'd waylaid him that night. And more: that each
time either took a dark walk to the copse, 
the other would be there, would wait. They'd meet,
no customary time in mind and never by arrangement.

So much about them has not been explained,
perhaps is inexplicable; their rendezvousing just
the way they did; and how, like lovers almost, they
could understand, instinctively, the other's needs:
some warmth or tenderness, perhaps; some 
privacy or solitude. They neither of them spoke
the other's language, but by a certain look, a side-long glance 
from those green eyes, a murmur as of heart,
or by his yawning silence, she would know.
He'd hear the sounds of simple words,
their tone, that charge of feeling that non-lovers 
misconstrue, then take unerringly
the next step in their primal dance.

If you had seen them walking on the hills - which no
one ever did - you might have thought them lovers, though there'd be
the odd occasion when he'd vanish from her side -
heard something in the bushes (or the ditch), the murmur said -
to reappear almost at once, with blood around his lips. And once
her parents, over breakfast, asked 
about the blood trail down her chin.
"A nose bleed, nothing more," she said,
who'd never had a nose bleed in her life.

High in the hills on Three Cairns Way they'd hear the strains
of Miss Melissa's violin. Her Motifs Interlude, interminably 
played beside a window open to the hills. He'd feel 
the strain and howl in pure frustration or in fear, his mind
for one brief moment, turned - or as Jan often felt, unhinged.
For her part, Miss Melissa claims she did not hear
those wild, unearthly wails. (An oddity of nature, is it not, 
the way sound scales a cliff face, but will funk it coming down?) But be
that as it may, the sounds of voice and violin 
would thin at those times, lose their body, seem
to be in dialogue or difference. But when
the night was cold and Miss Melissa had her window closed
Jan let her mind lose on the neighbourhood. Then, looking down
she'd see the tesselated fields arrange themselves more formally.
In chess board style, her brother's board... it had to be...
the ponds and pollards, burns and barns his pawns and pieces... half -
just half - a kriegspiel game. The scudding shadows thrown by moon and 
                                                              clouds
were pointers to the moves he'd made: a field he'd crossed; a coppice 
                                                          entered... 
Pawn to king's knight four. Illegal move... 
But somewhere out of sight, she knew, were other boards: 
his adversary's with his adversary's pieces; 
the umpire's with an umpire's overview.
And that was how she saw things from the hills,
and seeing them the way she did, her mind, as if by fate, was set
to find the umpire's board, its insights, full position, black and white;
and lastly to wind back the game, back to that first forbidden move;
and set the bad position straight.

By early hours she'd feel the lack of sleep, they'd nod good-bye
and turn for home. As like as not she'd see the Mallows on the path
that climbs up from the bay where Sea Sprite spends her days,
too far away to speak, which pleased her well.
If you had asked about the sack that weighed them down, 
you might have heard of fish that swam by night out by the bank,
of a good catch, and then of how they'd caught that Jan, 
not only trespassing, but spying on their land, 
and how she was at risk and ought to be in care -
and no doubt "will be when The Social's told".

Just once she took her Strange One home. 
Her brother's birthday treat. She gave the surrogate the gift
he should have had, a school cap like the one
he'd lost - now something to be worn next time they met.
They shared a cake and spent the night (not quite) together in
the garden house, her brother's trains and model boats between them on 
                                                         the floor.
By morning he was gone. They found her late that evening,
laid (or so it it seemed) to rest in Badgers' Brook. 
Savaged was the way the press described her death - 
though no one thought to mention (either then or later)
that on her torn breast lay two sprigs of mallow crossed.

The farmers organized a shoot to cull the local foxes.

Chalk and Cheese

Found in the Attic

Sometime during my previous life, as part of an investigation into the relationship between the development of language and thought, itself part of my studies for a teaching diploma in special needs, I set up an experiment in an infant school in which a crystal ball on a perforated metal base was placed on the work surface of one of the classroom storage trolleys. The base of the crystal ball concealed a microphone and the line from the microphone was passed through a small hole in the centre of the worktop to a tape recorder in the lockable storage space below. Other items that I thought might catch a child's interest were placed around the globe and the whole was then covered with a large cloth.The tape recorder was set running and the cupboard locked just before the children, chosen for the experiment by the headteacher (I suspect primarily on the basis of dependable behaviour), were admitted. They, and I, sat round the trolley. I introduced myself and gave them an edited version of what we were going to do, before removing the cloth to a muted chorus of "oooh"s. At this point, and by prior arrangement, the school secretary entered the room and, as per our arrangement, pretended to whisper in my ear. I thanked her, she left the room. I apologised to the children and said I had to pop out for a minute. I told them they could talk amongst themselves, but they were not to touch anything on the trolley. I then left the room. Just recently I found the following transcript of what occurred when it became necessary to turn out the attic preparatory to the insulation being beefed-up.

June: Which way ee go?
Janet: 'Wards Mrs Smith's room.
June: Don't go the office that way!
Janet: I know... ssstaff room.
June: Phone's in office.
Michael: So?
June: When she comes in and whispers like she did, is always urgent, 'coss they's wanted on phone.
Michael: No, t'aint.
June: 'Tis
Michael: Aint.
June: Is
April: Anyone hear what she said.
Michael: Nope!
April: Sounded to me like "bananas, bananas, bananas..."
Angela: Would have been rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.
April: I never heard you say you heard what she said.
Angela: Don't 'ave ter.
April Ow you know then, what she said, if you never heard?
Angela: Well, I do know, then, see! I know 'coz I know that's what they say,
April: Who say?
Angela: People who aren't saying things, but want you to think they are.
June: What are you on about? What people saying things?
Angela: No, people NOT saying things.
June: And how comes you happen to know so much?
Angela: My mum's in am dram.
April: Where's that?
Angela: It's not a place, silly, its acting. They dress up and go on stages and do stories and things. Then people pay to go and watch them, and sometimes they like pretend they're whispering to each other on the stages, but really and truly truly they got nothing to say to each other, so they just say "rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb".
Alfred: Incredible absurdity!
April: Could just as easy say bananas, bananas, bananas!
Angela: No they couldn't, then. That's quite wrong!
April: Oh? Is it then? Why?
Angela: Wouldn't sound right. When people whisper, words sound all smooth, like. Like rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, but bananas, bananas, bananas sounds lumpy. Don't sound right.
James: Sounds like rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, if you ask me! What about... What's these things here we mustn't touch?
April: Get orf! Don't touch any of them - not 'till ee comes back
James: I aint!
April: You are - you nearly did!
Michael: It's a crystal ball ...
April: Tells you what's going to happen in your life.
Michael: I was just going to say that! My mum's had hers done.
June: 'Er what?
Michael: Her future. This woman told her all what's going to happen to her.
James: Crap!
Alfred: Incredible absurdity!
June: How?
Michael: She had one of them. We could now. You look into it and you can see the future.
June: All I can see is the windows upside down!
James: They aint upside down, just bent at the edges.
June: Round this side they's upside down!
Michael: You have to cup your hands, see, like this. It cuts out earth light so there's only light in the ball what's came from the future. See, like this... now I can see the future.
James: Crap!
Michael: Yes I can, I see a cloudy path...
Sally: Oh yes, so can I...
and you are walking along it my dear,
things will get difficult for you, I fear!
April: That rhymes, it's like a song.
Michael: That's how they speak, singy-songy - fortune tellers, that is.
June: Had one at the fete last year.
April: Sally's a poet!
Michael: Now it's getting misty!
James: Let's see.
Michael: Don't push!
April: Now see what you've done!
June: Oh! You've moved it! You've done it now. ee'l arf be cross with you now, we wasn't meant to touch it. We never touched it. You did!
Alfred: Incredible maladroitness!
Sally: 'Snot much. 'Ee won't notice that...
Michael: No? Well, I jolly think he will... Hey! Hold on a blinking half a mo'... What have we got here?
Sally: What?
Michael: Only a wire coming out the bottom of it, that's all, my men!
James: What sort of wire? Is it electric?
Sally: Electric! That's why he said not to touch it! We could all get eletrocooted! Shocks an' all - or something!
Michael: Don't think so, not from this, not the sort of shocks thatflings you across the room. It's a thin wire, not dangerous. I know! - Could be a bug, P'raps ee's bugged us!... It's going inter the cupboard... See?
(Long Pause)
Sally: Miss Piper (the head) wouldn't let 'im do that, would she?
Michael: Might.
Alfred: Incredible misdemeanour!
Angela?: ??????????????????? (indecipherable)
James: So lets open the door, see what's inside.
(Long Pause)
Jake: Trying to - it's locked. Dodgy, that. They never ever ever locks these cupboards.
Michael: Oh, well, that's it then, we's all shot. No good pretending we didn't do nothing - eez 'eard it all!
June: I didn't do nothing!
Sally: 'Nor me. Who saw me do what? (long pause) See!

At this point I decided to return - and they all with one accord began to chat about the other articles on the trolley.

---

The Man Born Blind

They built an eye for a man born blind,
they gave him underwear prickly with pins,
with tingles in low resolution, whims
of the software, rogue pixels were there,
dragged like fish from the deep,
mapped from the lens and laid into skin.

Imagine a door or a tree in braille,
the edge of a wall, the shape of your chair,
think of your partner's face in your chest,
and suppose for a moment you took it all in
and imagined the world was exactly like that...
You do that exactly. Every day.

A Tale for Today

Near where a boy had walked
who had been walking home,
who would never be seen again,
had been other boys, playing with knives.
That is, they said that playing had been the whole of it,
they told the police they had only been playing,
and even as they told the police it was play,
the boy was walking home who would disappear
somewhere between the edge of the wood
and that new monster hotel they are building - and all
while Miss Melissa was playing her violin. (Bliss
themes mostly, from Things to Come and the ghostly
Motifs composition of her own.) Much has been made
of Miss Melissa having played her violin
beside an open window - knowing, his parents now
maintain, that he would pass that way, and knowing
the very disturbing and unprecedented way
her Motifs acted on his fragile mind.
It has been established, almost beyond doubt,
that the boy did pass her open window,
that he passed it as he was walking home,
that he stopped to listen, as she had known he would,
and that he did all this just before he disappeared.

It has also been confirmed that the Mallows were arguing.
It is thought that the boy heard their angry voices
and was never heard of again.
From the Mallows' cottage you can see the sea,
and just where the sea is deepest blue
a tall ship taking part in a tall ships' sail-past,
had thrown its canvas to the wind. The boy, who loved the sea
and vessels of every sort, and had perhaps been making for
the jetty (just a small diversion from his journey home)
to get the best view going of the passing ships,
would not have seen its graceful lines - nor any others - glide
out from behind the headland like a dancer from the wings,
would not have seen its bows and curtsies to the tides and winds,
would not have seen it cast its shadow long on sea and dune
as if it cast a net, as if
the fading footprints of the boy
were small fry in its mesh; as if
a crumbling edge of sand was all the world could know
of one strange lad who'd loved its touch-and-see-ness,
then had vanished from it just a breath ago.
The Mallows could no doubt have vouched for what had passed: the boy,
supposing only that he had been found, could have said only that
before the schooner cleared the bluff
they'd watched him disappear for ever.

It might or might not be coincidence
the way they found the bird's egg smashed
beneath the large oak close to Sangster's copse,
and on a bough above the nest, the boy's cap snagged,
and on the smashed egg
two fresh sprigs of mallow - crossed.

Outside The Prince's Arms, not looking where he was going,
the boy was seen to trip and graze his knee.
An old man helped him to his feet. The man, not being
recognized by any locals, has been dismissed by them
as having been a tramp. The boy, thanking him
asked did he like his trainers - they were new.
The old man knew nothing about trainers,
but knew something about sad boys with knives
and earlier had seen the boys who had said they were playing,
throwing their knives at the hares in the Mallows' field -
the field which had the tree, the boy's cap snagged,
the smashed bird's egg and the sprigs of mallow.
The old man warned the boy to take great care
and said the boys with knives had all been smeared with blood
and had been laughing, even boasting of a stray dog they had killed,
some mangy old dog that had strayed their way.
The boy, while maintaining that he could perfectly
well fend for himself, promised to be careful,
then advised the old man to go
and listen at Miss Melissa's window,
to which the old man said he surely would -
and all of that ocurred soon after the boy had disappeared.

The police, who admit to being baffled by his multiple
meltings into thin air - and even more so by
their synchrony, have appealed for witnesses.
The missing link in the evidence, they think,
is being held, all unwittingly, by someone
who didn't see the boy at all that evening.

The devil's not in Google!

I am about to finish "War and Peace". At last! It has been a mammoth, but totally enjoyable, read. I had read it before, long ago, and found it hard going, but this time I have had the benefit of the new (Penguin edition) translation and that or a greater maturity or both, has made all the difference. Easy to read though I have found it - even the names were no bar to my enjoyment - I have taken an inordinately long while over it, so long, indeed, that I am not giving any clues as to how long. The possible reasons for a slow read are legion, of course. Indeed, there are reasons and there are causes. A reason might be a desire to savour the work and to give due attention to its deeper issues; a cause might be technical or a tendency to nod off. Beyond saying which, I will remain stum - except to point out that reason and cause are not necessarily mutually exclusive and to add that I had been feeling very inferior about my declining reading powers, but that all has now changed, and I am feeling positively superior. And for why? Because I glean from an article by Nicholas Carr in The Independent that Bruce Friedman, a pathologist at The University of Michigan Medical School, a blogger on the use of computers in medicine, has put it on record that his use of the internet (and of Google in particular) has so messed with his mind as to have completely deprived him of the ability to read "War and Peace" at all. His internet searching has changed - and not for the better - the way he reads and, because of that, the way he thinks. It seems that this belief he has is shared by many, and is the basis of a polemic that has been rumbling around on the blogs for some time, though I must admit that I had not come up against it before now.

Back in April in my post One Man's Meat is Another Man's Haiku I discussed the contrasting mental processes involved in the reading of alphabet- and ideogram-based scripts. I also touched upon the consequences that it is thought this has for the brain, for the way we use the brain, for its future development and for the ways in which different parts of the brain are involved and their structures modified by the different demands placed upon them. Subsequently, I gave as a dramatic illustration of this, the case of a bilingual man (speaking Chinese and English) who had a severe stroke, as a result of which he totally lost the ability to read English, though his reading skills remained unaffected so far as Chinese was concerned.

What I did not make clear at that time was the degree to which these structural changes take place right across the brain, and are not restricted to the areas specifically concerned with reading and writing. They occur, for example, in those areas which give us our memory and in those devoted to the interpretation of visual stimulii in general, including those which on the face of it have nothing to do with reading and writing. They have also been shown to affect concentration. It is this more general effect, some now believe, that is the cause of Friedman's inability to read long texts slowly and with the deeper thought they require. To cast doubts on the unalloyed benefits of modern technologies or upon our ways of working with them is to run the risk of being dubbed a Luddite, and no one wishes that upon themselves, yet the Luddites have always been proved right in what they warned against. The machines introduced in the Industrial Revolution did cost jobs; the introduction of printing and even writing -(opposed by no less a person than Plato) did have the detrimental effects they were warning their peers about; computers have not been a total boon. Where they have been wrong, the Luddites, has been in failing to foresee (or to admit) the undoubtedly great benefits that would considerably outweigh their objections. But that is not to say we should close our eyes to the disadvantages and stumble blindly on, ignoring them.

So is there some way we can have our cake and eat it, have the benefits of Google, but perhaps a much enhanced Google capable of opening its doors to the desires of those of us who miss the more joined-up, bookish way of working? At present it would seem not, if only because there are too many vested interests stacked against that idea, too many providers, sponsors and promoters on the internet who would have too much to lose if we were ever to stop bouncing from site to site. The more we bounce, the more the cash tills ring for them.

Carr was simply reporting how Friedman and others now believe that other differences in reading and study methods influence the development of our brains and minds in ways that they see as alarming and of the greatest profundity, that the alphabet/ideogram example I blogged about back in April is just that: just one example of a general effect, that the ways in which we choose to go about our reading, writing, studying and collating, and that whatever tools we decide to use for those purposes will have a profound effect upon the way we think, and through that upon the way in which our neural connections are made and broken. In other words, will have a profound effect upon the way in which our brains are structured. In a small way I have found this for myself: if I am working, let us say on the first draft of a poem, and choose to do so using a ballpoint pen, that will not produce the same result (I am absolutely certain, but have found no way to prove) as attempting the same end using a keyboard. Indeed, Carr gives an illustration involving Nietzsche which points in the same direction: Nietzsche when going blind and unable to read or write without considerable distress and severe pain to his eyes, switched to using a typewriter. Once he had learnt to touch-type, he did so with his eyes closed. The words, which had stopped, flowed again - but differently: where they had previously produced rhetoric, now they were telegrammatic. (read more)

What Friedman is saying is that his own thinking has become "staccato" in that he is regularly scanning short passages of text at speed and from many different sources, but can no longr absorb the information in an extended piece of text. The latter requires the ability to make less obvious connectios at a deeper level, which the former does not. He can no longer read War and Peace, but could presumably read a less demanding paperback. Scott Karp, another blogger, this time on online media, reports the same symptoms, but suggests an even more alarming diagnosis. It may be that some of us have had the same misgivings, have felt that because we skim and read shallowly a lot of the time, we are getting out of the way of reading deeply, as a marathon runner who, for whatever reason, took to training over shorter and shorter distances might soon discover that he could no longer run the full marathon. (Though Karp and Friedman would argue that the analogy is not apt, that what is going on is more profound than that.) Maybe we have felt the truth of that a little, but have comforted ourselves with the thought (reasonable enough so far as it goes) that we do what we do because it is the quickest and most convenient way in which to assemble the information we require. We Google because days of searching dusty books in dismal libraries are replaced by a few moments clicking away on the mouse. The living is easy, and if we no longer have the opportunity to make those deep and rich connections that reading (books) used to allow, well, that is unfortunate, we miss it, but for now such pleasures must wait.

"What, though," asks Karp, "if I do all my reading on the web, not so much because the way I read has changed" (he might have added 'or because the purpose for which I read has changed'), "ie I am just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?" Studies made into the way people use online facilities in institutions such as The British Library, have found that the vast majority "bounce" from text to text, skimming never more than a page or two at the most, usually a paragraph or two, and hardly ever returning to a previous page. The evidence would tend to suggest that they have become information decoders and rarely progress beyond that. I would love to try an experiment: give to a group of researchers and students the task of studying some topic new to them, and let them cut-and-paste to their heart's content or use whatever technique they might prefer, then give a matched group the same task, but with the proviso that they research it from books. I guarantee that the second group, though they would almost certainly take longer, would be more critically aware and that their resulting text would be characterized by more 'joined-up' threads of thought. Perhaps then we could even give the first group the books to read to see if there were any 'after thoughts'.

That short reverie brings us, I believe, to the heart of the matter: the differences and the relationships which exist between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. Computers work with data, but are the hub of information technology, so we will start there - and at the beginning. The word information from the Latin informatio / informationis means an outline, an idea, and from informare / informatum, to give form to, describe. But it is data that is the most basic element of Information Technology: the ages, test scores and ethnic origins of the children in my class perhaps. We - or the computer - may give the data shape so that it becomes information: say, the average age or the percentage of children being disadvantaged by having to learn in a language that is not their mother tongue, for example. From these we may be able to draw certain consequences, such as the degree to which the non-english pupils are being disadvantaged. This is knowledge. Wisdom might involve the ability to rank in importance the various pieces of knowledge we have gained, to see what can be done to improve the situation, and to establish priorities.

But computers are so good at processing data that they encourage us to stay at that level. They began life as cryptographic machines. That is where they have come from, and where, you begin to feel, they would like to stay, but they have become hugely influential in everything to do with reading, writing, the production of graphics and with printing. It is almost inevitable, therefore, human nature being what it is, that those who use them should tend to stay with what they (the computers) are good at. I could almost draw the analogy of a carpenter who for some reason decides one day that he will no longer choose the best tool for the job, but instead will confine himself to the jobs his favourite tool is good at.

But it doesn't even end with computers and Googling, for since the time when such means of research became all-pervading, the more pernicious aspects of the web's "good life" have spread out through the rest of society: Newspapers have begun to shrink in size and their editors have reduced the length of their articles; T.V. programme-makers have shortened their productions, face-to-face interviews have positively shrivelled and their tone has become less searching and more 'staccato', even when the interviwer is trying to be aggressive - though more frequently now they are shallow and the interviewee's answers are not followed-up, but we are bounced straight to the next prepared question. I can recall when in the '70's and '80's Michael Parkinson might interview no more than three guests at something like depth for anything up to an hour. More recently he would have interviewed half a dozen or more people in that time. Even the news, political and current affairs programmes pander to the quick-dip brigade - which, alas includes myself and, I guess, most of us. But if we cannot do too much to modify the nature of the technology, we could maybe put a little more of ourselves into the way we use it. My own feeling, which is little short of a conviction, is that the devil is not in Google, but in the hyperlinks. They have often been compared to the footnotes in a book. The analogy is apt in some ways, but with one mighty big reservation: when you break off from the thread of an argument in a book to consult a footnote, that footmote does not then present you with a dozen footnotes to the footnote, any one of which might lead you off to another score of footnotes, on and on ad infinitum, further and further from the thread you were following. Perhaps hyperlinks should come with a health warning... Bounce we must, I see that, but maybe we could at least try to bounce with our eyes open and the brain engaged to remind us of where we were before we lost our focus.