Jack and Jake

Something of a new venture for me: a (very) short story.

Jake had worked for the firm for as long as anyone on the present work force could recall. Most of them, had you asked around, would have spoken warmly of him, maybe said they had a soft spot for him. To say he was popular, though, would be grossly overstating the situation. Dissent went with him the way flies go with cattle. There were those who called the bosses bloody angels for giving him a job at all, believing that in any practical sense of the word, he was unemployable. The firm was doing him a massive favour. Others thought them to be taking an unfair advantage, both overworking and underpaying him. Certainly it is true that any other worker doing what Jake did would have been paid more. (This was in the days before the minimum wage, you understand.)

Jake, you see, had mental problems. Mild ones, to be sure, nothing that would ever rock the boat (they all thought), but of the sort that might be inconvenient at times, could make life just that little bit more difficult than it might otherwise have been. For example, he didn't speak. He could speak, but mute was his preferred mode. He rarely even said Hello to folk; just nodded - and occasionally smiled. If he did acknowledge someone verbally, it would be because protocol demanded it. He would make it very formal. Sir or Ma'am if they were bosses; otherwise it would be Mr Curtis, Mr Hills and so on. No one had ever heard him address anyone by their first name.

Jake signed on in the factory at half past eight each morning and, but for breaks, odd jobbed his way through to the five o'clock whistle. Then he walked the quarter of a mile or so to the firm's offices. At half-past five the office staff began to leave, and Jake would make a start on his cleaning duties. (Hence the overworking charge: two jobs, one salary.)

Then there was Jack, a recent replacement for George who had been as garrulous and chirpy as Jack was dour and retiring. Jack had moved south from Bolton some months earlier at the death of his sister, Ruth. He appeared to have no further relatives or significant others, as the saying is, a fact which had made him something of a target for the motherly types in the office, who rather vied to take him under their various wings. The opportunities for doing so were sparse, however, and Jack was having none of it. Then again, no one could quite get over the extraordinary fact of having two such characters on the staff. Except for the fact that Jack wasn't actually on the staff... still, that's how they thought of him: as one of them. In truth, he worked, as had George before him, for Lunch Box, an outfit which, as its name implies, supplied the local workers with the necessary sustenance to last them through the day. Somewhere around mid-morning, Jack would appear, pushing his trolley from office to office (For some reason he didn't cater to the factory), tempting the workers with his different coffees, sticky buns and doughnuts. At lunchtime he would be back with sandwiches, sausage rolls, pies, yogurts, fruit and soft drinks and in the afternoon with biscuits, soft drinks, tea and cake. It will come as no surprise, perhaps, to hear that, by any way of reckoning it, the majority regarded Jack with a degree of warmth and even affection that was not accorded Jake. The popular wisdom was that Jake was buttoned up, surly even, whilst Jack was shy. He, too, was mildly afflicted, but whereas his contribution to the working day was looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed by all, they tended not to appreciate the way Jake cleaned (or didn't clean) the toilets.

It follows from what I have told you of their duties and their timetables, that Jack, a relative newcomer, and Jake, had never actually met. That, however, was to change. They were to meet on the occasion of the firm's Christmas party. Jack, of course, was not eligible to attend the party, not in his own right, but he had been invited by Maggie from R and D to be her escort. Jake didn't do parties, but was asked if he would stay on after his cleaning stint to help prepare the boardroom for the coming fun and frolics. Which is how it came about that he happened to be leaving by the front door as Jake entered. They met just inside - and greeted each other: a cheery Hello Jake! eliciting a nod of the head and a grunt that sounded a bit like Jack! Now, whoever it is in the universe who organises such things, must have organised it so that there was, standing nearby, mere yards away, outside the ladies' loos, well within earshot, Stan from accounts, who was married to Rose, one of the office gossips. A few moments later, Rose made her reappearance. Stan greeted her with:
You get a surprise a day here, don't you?
What's happened now? asked Rose with that peculiar mix of tiredness and enthusiasm which is the trait of a gossip on the trail of what she hopes will be a tale worth telling.
Did you know that Jack and Jake know each other? he asked.
No - and I don't believe it either! How could they?
There came a moment's silence. Then:
I dunno how, but I know they do. They've just greeted each other very warmly and by their Christian names, said Stan, exaggerating a tad and stressing the last two words.

By the time Jack arrived with his trolley the following morning, Frank, another newcomer, but the one deemed to have the closest relationship with him, had been detailed to investigate the mystery. His brief was to discover how two people, neither of whom seemed to know anyone, who certainly would not be expected to acknowledge anyone, and never by first names; one of which pair had worked at the firm since forever, while the other was a recent import from the north; two people who had had no opportunity to meet at work until the previous evening; and who lived miles from each other at opposite ends of the county... he was to discover how these two had come to know each other well enough to greet one another by first names. He plunged straight in:

Hey, you're a darken and no mistake, you are!

How's that?

Some little bird or other tells us you and Jake know each other!

Might do.

So how come…

We don't talk 'bout it. Private.

Well, fair enough, but you know what some of these bloodhounds are like. Just give me a snippet or so to satisfy them. Like where you met, or when. Just that. That'll be enough to do the trick.

No more?

Definitely, no more!

1940

There came a slight but audible intake of breath as the eavesdroppers took in the information.

Yeah? Well that could have been in the war then, I s'pose?

Was.

So then, that solves their tiny mystery for them, don't it? All sorts of people who never would have buddied up in peace time, got together in the war. Had to. That must've been it?

Jack didn't reply, so Frank adjusted his approach:

That was right in the dirt, that was - the dark days of the war, and no mistake... 'ere, wait a minute though... just a tick, hold on... 1940? Wasn't that Dunkirk? I wonder, now... were you... by any chance... at Dunkirk, you and Jake?

Again no reply. So Frank went on:-

You were, weren't you? That's it! You were, the two of you! You only went and got yourself a bloody gong for bravery, one of you? That it?

Jack shook his head

Both of you then?

Another shake of the head.

So where did you meet - Oh, I know Dunkirk, but how at Dunkirk? Whereabouts?

There's only one possibility if they met at Dunkirk, said Joe, coming out of concealment: they met on the bloody beach!

That it? asked Frank, but Jack had clammed up. It was quite clear he had said more than he had ever meant to, and he was saying no more.

Frank, however, had not finished. He, too, could now sense there was a mystery to be unravelled. He waited for the appearance of Jake at the end of the afternoon.

Jack's been telling us 'bout you and him at Dunkirk! said Frank.

Shouldn't 'ave! growled Jake.

Oh, come on, no harm done, we're all mates here.

Shouldn't 'ave! Promised! Both promised!

So why all the secrecy?

Now it was Jake clamming-up.

Must 'ave been bloody hell! said Frank. And then, still with no response from Jake, but at least you both got back to Blighty in one piece - well, in two pieces, I s'pose, said Frank, laughing at his own weak joke.

So it seems. said Jake

What you mean, "so it seems"?

Well, didn't know, not 'till last night, did I...

No?

Not 'till last night, no.

You didn't come back together?

No, didn't Jack say? They carries him off. Time they gets back for me, his boat's gone, ain' it?

Carries?

'Sright. Stretcher cases, us. Three days on 'em with all that shit flying overhead.

Cripes, so when did you next see each other, then?

Last night acourse.

Wow, let's get this straight: you're side by side on stretchers... I s'pose you were side by side - that right?

Silence

We'll say side by side then, on the beach for three days, then you gets separated and you don't get to see each other from that day 'till last night, forty-odd years is that, and yet you recognise each other straight away, in spite of how much you must both have changed? That it?

'Bout it!

Well, I think that's bloody marvellous!

Well it weren't, 'coz I'd seen his ugly mug every night from then on - and I'm still seein' it! Be seeing it for a long time to come, I shouldn't wonder. Course I recognised 'im!

That's incredible!

No 'taint, if e'd tried to kill you, you'd recognise 'im ok, wouldn't you?

What!

Yes. Tried to kill me! Woke up with 'is 'ands round me bleeding neck, didn't I? Day bloody one, that was. Gawd alone knew 'ow many more we'd got to go.

So what happened?

Weak, see, so couldn't fight 'im off...

So what happened?

Couldn't do it, could e? Nearly did an' all, but 'e was weak too, and couldn't finish me off.

So why? What made 'im?

Dunno. Worse thing there that was, him being one of us, like. Never asked him why. Never said anything 'bout it. We just spent the next two days pretending he'd had a bad dream. But we both knew it was no bad dream, he was wide awake and he meant it, right enough. Never tried it again, though. So that's it, that's the end of the matter!

Only it wasn't, no one in the office could ever see Jack in quite the same light again. The arrangement with Lunch Box was quietly discontinued.

A Word of Apology

to those who I might have neglected a bit of late. I have not got round to all the blogs as I would normally wish to do, and certainly have not commented on them all, the reason being problems with my browser. Indeed it seemed for a while that my computer was being hijacked. It worked perfectly until 11.30 each day. On the dot of 11.30 the cursor would change to the hourglass form and I could do nothing with it until mid afternoon some time, when it reverted to normal functioning, as though there never had been anything amiss. Then my security software alerted me to the fact that the browser was picking up infections. I junked it, tried the other (I had two) and the problem disappeared. It seems okay now, but I am keeping my fingers crossed.

For the same reason I have not been answering emails. Again, my apologies.

I shall try to catch up, but am facing something of a backlog. If anyone has any advice to give on the basis of similar experiences, it would be most welcome. Thank you all for your continued interest and support.

Writer's Block

Recently I visited a couple of blogs new to me on which the owners had posted thoughts about writer's block. The thing is I have never been able to make up my mind whether I believe in the existence of it or not. It goes without saying that there are times when, for one reason or another, writers find themselves unable to write, or unable to write to their usual standard. It must happen to most folk who are engaged in work that comes from the firing of neurons in the brain - or, indeed, the body - and that covers just about all of us. After my visits, it so happened that I then sat down with The Guardian, and there was my favourite (equal-favourite!) columnist, Hilary Mantel, pointing out that the advice from the old writing hand to the somewhat greener version has always been to just get writing, write anything, simply to get the flow going again. (You can always knock it into shape later!) The old hand, though, often finds it difficult, if not impossible , to take his own advice. The reason, she thinks, lies in the nature of the beast, in his characteristic desire to have his cake and to eat it, in his inability to commit to a line of development because once you do that you are throwing out so many other potentialities. Once you sketch in a line of thought and begin to develop it, you are already committing yourself to it, if only partially. It begins to assume the weight of something that is predestined.

I have typed the above from memory, but think (hope) I have stated her case fairly. It sounds a likely explanation to me. Select your plot, your standpoint, whatever it is, from those buzzing, jostling, or just ghosting around inside your head, and the rest become also-rans, in theory they could still be there at the finish, but it is unlikely. In practice they will not get a look-in. And - dreadful thought - among them maybe the one with most potential, even the top ten may have been binned in the process! And the artist is as fearful of confronting the virginally white canvas as is the writer his sheet of paper. I can see all that. I can see how it might happen that way, though not for me. I'm slipping away from novels and paintings now, to poetry, you see. Does that make the difference? I think it might. It was consistently drummed in to us at art school that if you can see an object, really SEE it, you can draw it. That is in part what the Picasso bulls were about in my recent post Picasso Stuff. Really see the line of stress and you will be able to convey the character of the bull. Similarly, for me there is no chance of throwing down some words and then sorting them out later. For me, if you can see your hoped-for subject in poetic terms you have the possibility of a poem developing. If not, you might as well write something other than a poem. Many better poets than I would disagree, though Seamus Heaney for one might not. I am currently reading Stepping Stones. Thus far (I am only on Chapter 2 it is bio/autobiographic, but told in an interview format. In answer to one question, Heaney speaks of there having been great rivalry between Mahon, Longley, himself and others to come up with a worthy poem for MacNiece's grave. He quotes MacNiece's saying that there are poems you are given to write and poems you would like to write. That was a poem Heaney would have liked to write.

I have several volumes of those. The question is: are they all victims of my writer's block? or are they that only if and when I try to write them down and fail? Or maybe (and Mantel mentions this herself), maybe there are no thought lines, no ideas, no potential plots or images buzzing or ghosting around in the would-be author's head. Maybe he has written himself out, temporarily or permanently, maybe the well is dry. If so, is that a form of writer's block? It doesn't sound like one to me. Block sounds like an obstruction, an impediment of some kind barring the egress of something that is struggling to get through. But if there is no something... Mantel mentions that it would be cruel to suggest that, and she may well be right, though that may depend on whether the problem is a passing one or a permanent condition.

An Experiment

I am hoping with your help, O good and faithful friends of the blogosphere, to test a pet theory of mine. It was revived for me when I recounted in my previous post the odd anecdote of Kandinsky finding in his studio what he at first took to be an unknown masterpiece.

You may, alas, not qualify to be a participant in my experiment. To do so you must be UNfamiliar with Marcel Duchamp's painting of a A Nude Descending a Staircase. If you are at all familiar with it, I would still appreciate knowing what you think of the experiment.

I will make the theory apparent after the experiment. For now It is enough to know that below are tow versions of Nude Descending a Staircase, only one of which is as Picasso painted it.
I would like you to say which you think is the true version. Simple as that. The ideal would be to make the decision at the instinctual level. Not to puzzle it out, but to respond in that way would really require the images to be larger yet to see them together. I will leave you to make the necessary accomodations. Depending upon your browser, the ideal may not be possible.



























Please do not scroll further than the bottom of the second picture until you have decided.

















The correct version is to be found HERE

The pet theory I was hoping to test is that the way we "read" pictures is very much influenced by the way we read - i.e. from left to right in the case of western traditions.

(It would perhaps be too much to hope that some visitors might stray on to the blog who were brought up reading other than left to right.)

The theory here was that a slant thus / would be taken as ascending, whilst \ would indicate descending - as per our "steep hill" road signs.

Kandinsky did it first...

... unless you know better, of course. I didn't. In fact, I had no thought of posting on Wassili Kandinsky until a few days ago, researching Chagall in a somewhat hefty tome of over a 1000 large pages (Art of the 20th Century - part of a retirement present from my former colleagues) I came across an article entitled With Closed Eyes. I almost couldn't believe mine. As those of you who know my post with almost the same title, With Eyes Shut Tight, might well understand. As you will have surmised, the article in question was not about Victor Pasmore, one of the twin subjects of my post back then, but Wassili Kandinsky. Reading the text I became even more engrossed, for it seemed to throw some light on the phenomenon that had formed the other half of my post, those images we see after closing our eyes. I do not recall ever having looked at the page in question before, and it is quite possible I had not. It is a book I dip into, and being of the size it is, there are probably other pages I have missed. I was also intrigued by two reproductions accompanying the text. The year (each of the book's pages deals with a specific year, the number of pages devoted to each year varying in accord with its significance) was 1944. Kandinsky had died on December 3rd of that year after coping with failing health since early March. By the summer his eyes had become almost permanently half-closed. After his death his widow Nina explained that He possessed the rare talent of being able to represent in his mind the world of his paintings with their colours and their forms, exactly as he later set them down on canvas. It has been suggested that these forms, their myriads of rings swimming across the surface of the work, were the effects of phosphenes that can be impressed on the eyeball when the eyes are closed. Towards the end of his life Kandinsky would have been painting what he was seeing with his eyes closed.


That might suggest that he lost his grip on reality to some extent, but Nina says not. What may not be generally known is that Kandinsky is credited with producing the first pure abstract painting, a watercolour. There is a story that goes with the event. It is that he had returned to his studio after a day painting in the countryside, to discover that someone had left a canvas propped against the wall at the far end of the studio. He was amazed at the painting, which he immediately recognised as a masterpiece, and amazed that anyone should have left it there while he was out. He approached it excitedly, only to be confronted with the fact that it was but one of his own, though on it side. The way he told it was that in that moment he realised the harm that had been done to his art by figurative painting.

Until the age of about forty (somewhere around 1906) he produced some of the most superb landscapes. For a while after that there came a period of equally superb watercolours. A few quotes of his I think worth passing on:

Of all the arts abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have heightened sensitivity for composition and for colours, and that you be a true poet.

I applied streaks and blobs of colours onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could...

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

There is no must in art because art is free.

The final? frontier

I can believe I'm going
home to ash. I've seen
the Saviour in a crystal ball,
crucified, embedded in the glass,
consumed by clouds of dust
as if by locusts in a swarm.

Earth voracious -
as it always was. But earth
can tumble worlds out
of a speck of grit - or
pack them back
where time and space
or lack of either
seal our fate.

I can believe
I'm going home to ash
that might reform itself,
that might become
a grander substance
structured into some
God-like perspectives,
some essence of;
a sperm of; seedling of;
a blue-print for; instinct
towards; or imprint of;
mind, flesh or spirit of.

The question mark
remains, but does not
freight or frighten as
with faith's more
stressful narratives.

Here I give (below)what is possibly Stanley Spencer's most famous painting, that of the Resurrection. The venue for it was, as it nearly always was, his beloved home village of Cookham, which is on the River Thames. His vision was of Cookham as host to the events recorded in the Gospels. Most critics and commentaters have put it the other way around: the vision is of the Gospels taking place in Cookham, but to me it makes more sense to see the vision as first and foremost focussed on his home town and the inhabitants, known personally to him and faithfully recorded by him. Either way, it is a personal, some would say quirky, vision in which sex plays an important role. We see Christ throned in majesty in the church porch - beneath a bridal arch; we see Spencer himself, naked by the ivy-covered bed on which his lover lies, we see the inhabitants of Cookham rising, slightly bemused and only half with it, as though the alarm clock has just gone off; and we see the pleasure boats waiting to whisk the good ones to Paradise.

The other painting is a medieval one of the same subject. There is, I think, a lot of affinity.

The elderly keep slipping into graves.

The real subject of this post is a book for which I have been waiting avidly for some time now. It has recently appeared and I have only just now ordered it, George Szirtes's Collected. It must be the subject of some future post. Let me explain: something like eight or nine years ago I bought a collection of poetry called The Budapest File by George Szirtes. I can't recall how or why I bought it: was I browsing in the local bookshop and just happened upon it, or did I read a review and order it? I don't know, so I must assume that at the time of purchase I regarded it as no big deal. If that is how it was, then it did not stay no big deal for long. I knew the work of Szirtes, of course. Which is to say, I had read some of his poetry and thought I knew it. But the moment I began to dip into The Budapest File there came a seismic shift in my understanding. Which in itself was strange, because The Budapest File was Szirtes's tenth collection, or something like that, and most of its poems had been published in those earlier volumes, were distributed among them. I must have read many of them in the years before I bought the book. Whatever, I can't explain what happened, I can only recount it. Suffice to say that I was plunged into a world the like of which I had never inhabited before, indeed would not wish to inhabit save in the safety of Szirtes's poems.

Szirtes came to this country as a refugee from Hungary. It was sometime, apparently, before he began to write about his childhood memories of Budapest, but when he did, it was as though it had an inevitability about it - which likely it did have - and it became a theme, a major one which was at the same time very personal and distanced enough to place the personal in its political and social setting. His remembered world, his lost childhood - perhaps I should say his nearly lost childhood, maybe to some extent and in some ways regained in his poetry - is redolent with threat. It is a world in which nothing can be taken at face value, anything at all might turn out to be other than it seems. It is a place of echoing voices, of assaults on the senses that seem to have no rational cause. And indeed, very little of it could have been called rational. It is all the fears and nightmares of childhood that you and I have ever experienced, but multiplied a thousand times. It is all that, but experienced by children and adults alike. It is darkness which is always hostile, always malevolent, never neutral. The Budapest File has conveyed to me the horror of that time, and of the regime that made it possible, with greater clarity than all the political speeches, photographs or magazine and newsprint articles. It is horror writ as such horror is always writ: personalised.

I committed whole chunks of the poems to memory. Some, I didn't need to, for they lodged there, quite naturally, without any conscious help from me. But I have prattled on enough. Let me give you a few tasters of what I mean:-

The first verse from The Photographer in Winter:-

You touch your skin. Still young.The wind blows waves
Of silence down the street. The traffic grows
A hood of piled snow. The city glows.
The bridges march across a frozen river
Which seems to have been stuck like that for ever.
The elderly keep slipping into graves.

and the fourth verse:-

The white face in the mirror mists and moves
Obscure as ever. Waves of silence roll
Across the window. You are in control
Of one illusion as you close your eyes.
The room, at least, won't take you by surprise
And even in the dark you'll find your gloves.

This from Undersongs

Desire again, the Undersongs. The lost
Children feel it in their sleep,
and turn uneasily to the wall through which
Symbols pass and cool their blood like ghosts.
My mother's family has passed through it,
No one remains, and she is half way through.
Her brother disappears, the glove has closed
About him somewhere and dropped him in the ditch
Among the rest. The ditch becomes a pit,
The pit a symbol, the symbol a desire,
And this desire's the thread. The tunnels creep
Under the skin, the trains with their crew
O passengers can glide through unopposed.

This from part 5 of TheCourtyards

Think of an empty room with broken chairs,
a woman praying, someone looking out
and listening for someone else’s shout
of vigilance; then think of a white face
covered with white powder, bright as glass,
intently looking up the blinding stairs.

There’s someone moving on a balcony;
there’s someone running down a corridor;
there’s someone falling, falling through a door,
and someone firmly tugging at the blinds.
Now think of a small child whom no one minds
intent on his own piece of anarchy:

Think of a bottle lobbing through the air
describing a tight arc – one curious puff –
then someone running but not fast enough.
There’s always someone to consider, one
you have not thought of, one who lies alone
or hangs, debagged, in one more public square.

This from Transylvana: Virgil’s Georgics:-

May
Poplars full of thrushes. Sky leans
on earth. The river dreams.
Shrubs light their torches. A bullfinch
sputters on a branch, bursts into flames.

So this review has not been about the book I have been waiting for, the book I have now ordered. I have done myself proud of late. It will be my third new book within a month - well over my usual budget. But if I had to ration myself to just one for 2009 it would be George Szirtes Collected, even though he has referred to Collecteds as Tombstones. I am confident enough to believe that this will not turn out to be a tombstone, merely premature.

Skyscapes

The image below was sent to me in an email. It is obviously doing the rounds, so you may have seen it. It is the sunset at the North Pole with the moon at its closest point. I am posting it for no other reason than I think it uncommonly beautiful.


The fragment below I wrote some time ago. It was intended to grow a bit and become part of a longer poem, but I think it must have been still born, for there has been no development since.

Grey the slates, green-grey the tiles,
the walls like grubby sheets hang down -
could not be said to rise. No sign
of any spark where life has been;
no tree, no meadow, flower or stream.

But now look up, see school is out;
the clouds, like children bursting through the gates,
play every sort of landscape game they know.
Transformers of a different kind, they
flatten tufts of prairie grass, build
table mountains, gulfs and
crevises, pile pebbles high as cairns, become
grey crags of anvil-shapes. Behind
it all, meanwhile, the sun
grafts its pink fingers - strange
graffiti - on them all.

Pistol-whipped

He was my friend. I pistol-whipped him
with a wooden gun my father made.
(War time: such trifles were in short supply.)
Bad enough if I had hit him in the street,
but doing so in church, my would-be crime
became a sin. He'd reached across the pews
to snatch my illustrated, treasured
Holy Bible from my grasp. In doing so
he'd torn the prophet Moses clean in half,
ripped out the the Ten Commandments and had trashed
the Golden Calf. I lashed out, blind in a
red mist of rage, the gun - my contribution
to the Sunday School's Toy Sunday service -
firmly in my hand. The priest, as blind as I
in his red mist, then missed the obvious:
would not allow the righteousness of my
response, my holy anger, pious grief....
And so I left, walked out on all those
coloured stamps of Jesus making wine
and bringing long-dead people back to life -
images we'd added to our albums
week by week. I went to seek a better way:
agnostic for a month, then atheist for two.
I bought a book on Godlessness,
and reading it, became - I know not how -
my erstwhile friend's companion once again.

Party Time

This post really follows on from the second part of my previous post, in reply to which several of you, either in the comments or by email, made the point that drawing involves putting in only the important lines. In other words, it is essentially an excercise in leaving out. The trick is in the deciding which is which, which are the lines of stress and which the lines that just confuse and muddle the work. This is an excercise intended to make you an artist in seeing, as it was once put to me. A Picasso in seeing, maybe. It is really no different from what I described last time.

If you are skilful or confident enough to draw freehand, there is no problem. Do that. Choose one of the images I give below and try to draw no more than twelve lines to convey its essence.

If you are not yet at that stage copy an image into your graphics program, but not straight into it. Open the program with a background layer first, then copy the image into it as a new layer. Now place another layer on top of the image, either a transparent layer or one sufficiently transparent for the image to show through.Now, making sure that the top layer is the active layer, draw in your lines. When you are happy with it remove the image layer, leaving just your lines. (Of course, you could do this using tracing paper, but it is much easier to remove lines and change tings using the programme.)

When you are happy with the result, try again, using fewer lines. The challenge is to use the smallest number of lines possible.




And the Party stuff? Ah, yes, well, with just a little judicious adaptation, it can make for a good party game, should you be planning the right sort of party.

Picasso stuff

A blockbuster exhibition, Picasso : Challenging the Past opens next week at The National Gallery - and not , as you might expect, The Tate, which would normally be the venue for exhibitions of Modern art.

The history to this is that twelve years ago the two galleries reached an agreement. Modern art, they said, began in 1900. It was perhaps on a par with the government deciding in its wisdom that history finished with the building of the Berlin Wall. This, of course, was to ensure that no untoward politics could creep into the syllabus. It created anomalies, as it was bound to: for instance that the building of the wall could be part of a history syllabus, but the knocking down of it could not. So the kids could have the first half of a story, but not its conclusion. In the case of our two galleries, however, their agreement was meant to ensure that the Tate was free to acquire anything dated post 1900, but before that The National gallery was to have the monopoly. (Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery, is keen to renegotiate the definition of Modern art, but meanwhile points out that the agreement covers acquisitions only, not exhibitions and loans.)

Seven years ago it was the Tate launching a Picasso plus... blockbuster exhibition, that one highlighting the intense personal and artistic rivalry that existed between him and Matisse. They showed it in blow-by-blow fashion, two great artists slugging out their I-can-do-that-better-than-you obsessions. The exhibition was a wow and so The National is hoping they can work the same trick and pull off a similar financial success. Their hope is pinned to a show which will give us Picasso taking on, not Matisse on this occasion, but the old masters as he vies with them for the ultimate accolade: tell us, pictures on the wall, who is the greatest artist of us all. We will see him, metaphorically, of course, giving the icons of the past a bashing. Alongside, Goya's Naked Maja, for instance, we will see Picasso's version. Well, not actually alongside, for the curators do not want to encourage a spot the difference attitude in the viewers. Not much chance of that, I would have thought, as in most cases there are few similarities, if one is being literalist or formalist, that is.
I shall hope to get along to the exhibition at some point, if only because included in it is a Picasso of which I am particularly fond, in which I think I see something of Guernica for instance. The painting in question is The Rape of the Sabines, which I show below, beneath the Poussin original - can I call it that without intending any disparagement to Picasso? It should be an interesting tournament,for, as Chris Riopelle, points out, in these types of engagement the Old Masters usually win hands down. I hope I can be there to see for myself.

---

Picasso employed a system called refactoring to develop an image from a purely naturalistic form to one abstracted to show the essence of a subject.

In 1945 he produced a series of 11 lithographs of a bull which has come to be regarded as a master class in the use of the system. Here I reproduce some of these images, each one of which represents a stage in the development of his image. I pick the sequence up at the second lithograph. Before this, Picasso had drawn a very life-like bull (the first lithograph) and now we see him beefing it up to make it almost more life-like than life.


At the third stage he begins to analyse it, putting in lines of force and delineating contours created by bones and muscles. His lithographic crayon follows much the same paths that would have been followed by a butcher chopping up the carcass.



From stage 4 onwards Picasso is simplifying, taking out unimportant planes and combining others, producing a new distribution of weight and balance, making the bull appear more solid even than it was before.




My last image is also Picasso's last in the series. It is the destination to which he has been headed throughout the various transformations.



If you are interested in following this process in greater detail, you might like to go to here, where the full set of lithographs, together with a more complete explanatory commentary, can be found

With Eyes Tight Shut : 2

If you have not read part 1 to this post, With Eyes Tight Shut : 1 you might like to do so in order to get the back story, as they call it these days.


Battalions of ant-like warriors,
seen from some high vantage point,
act out the world of men and things
in some huge kreigspeil on the beach.

And then, or so it seems, the tides push in
and every piece and pawn upon the board
becomes but my reflection in the sea -
ten thousand images and congeners of me.

Because of some interstice in the land
(our language is inadequate)
I cannot reach these images or see
what makes each always him and never me.

Repeatedly the pieces move;
I understand their strategy
and analyse their moves,
but cannot see
who moves them with such mastery.

From where I stand
the waves distort the images they carry
and pawns seem bent the way the tides are flowing.
I watch the fluctuating mirages
that ever come back different from the sea.

Is this illusionary flux what I call thought?
Is thought coerced in me?
The sea heaves up its greasy back;
the pieces and the pawns dissolve and break,
are shattered by the wave's caress.

And where the symbols of the indivisible divide,
do we reach consciousness?

Above is the first poem still extant to have come from my eyes closed experiments. It is certainly the longest, and thereby hangs a tale of sorts. Back then - and then would be four or five decades back, something like that - closing my eyes would work amazingly well, the trouble was I didn't realize how well until it no longer did. (You don't appreciate what you've got until you lose it may be a cliche, but it has a knack of proving itself to be only too true.) Back then, shapes, patterns, colours would evolve, not so much before my eyes as behind them. At times it was like having my own inbuilt video machine playing to me. As you will have guessed from my remark above, it didn't last. The shows got shorter and shorter until they were mostly static affairs, single images that were intense to begin with and then slowly faded. The early animated ones were ideal for poetry writing, of course, for they tended to be linear, to have a development, although that would not be a narrative unless I read one into it - quite easily done in some cases. More recently they have been less productive of poetry and more suitable for art work. Strange then, that this did not occur to me until I saw the Victor Pasmore exhibition. The images are fewer and further between now - on a par with other aspects of the ageing process, I suppose - and have achieved something of a scarcity value since an operation to remove a cataract. This I find very strange. It has been explained to me that where the brain expects to find a signal in a nerve ending and fails to do so (e.g. because an aural nerve has been damaged or because the eyes are closed), it will find something in the system to compensate and the individual concerned will experience tinnitus or some sort of image. Cataracts and their removal and the insertion of implants would seem on that basis to have nothing to do with it. But there it is. That which I once had in spades is now in short supply - or I need more patience, need the eyes closed over a much longer period of time.

Perhaps I should point out that there is a difference in the way I use the images. In the case of those that suggest verse I use them exactly in that way: as kicking off points from which to develop the poem. For inspiration, if you like. The poem above was constructed from what was basically one image that morphed slightly two or three times. I have put in italics the phrases representing the various image states. Where, on the other hand, I try to reproduce the image visually, again I do exactly that: reproduce it as faithfully as I can. Most recently I have tried to do this digitally, with camera and scanner, using objects as starting images and manipulating them towards the desired result. The two shown below are such. They began life as glass ashtrays, but they represent (reasonably well, I think) images from my cataract operation. I have a real phobia about eyes and anybody/thing touching them. So the op' was quite a difficult affair for me - and could have been for the surgical team! Especially so as I was told I must try not to move the eyeball. Reasonable enough, but... I decided to try to focus on an imaginary point in space. Imaginary because the lens of one eye was being removed and the other eye was covered by a green cloth. Furthermore, the eye being attacked was also being continually irrigated. Accordingly, I imagined myself focussing on a point in what was a stygian darkness - and was rewarded by the alternation of the two images shown below. Susan, commenting on my previous post, mentioned the possibility of using the closed eye technique to face fears of darkness or the unknown. In this particular instance it was forced on me, but I would have to say that it worked a charm.














But back to verse. Also below I give some examples of shorter verses that have come from images seen with the eyes tight shut.








The darkness shivers,
is a wet dog,
shakes its fur from which
come stars, white
constellations of the mind.

Green railway lines lie left to right
in lateral perspective, and a smudge
pours smoke into the sky.

The light is soft and soothing,
effervescent, drains
into a white chrysanthemum
from which a river flows and into which
white petals fall.

With Eyes Tight Shut : 1

The final images below are from my now defunct website which I decided to revisit (cannibalise, if you will) a while back. They are a few years old and date from a day out that Doreen, my wife, and I had with two friends who were showing us something of the area in which they live: The Thames Valley around Walton and Richmond. We stopped at one point, thinking to take a walk along the towpath, but were stopped by a poster outside a small gallery announcing that within was an exhibition of work by Victor Pasmore under the title Seen with the Eyes Tight Closed - or something along those lines; memory fails over such detail these days. We went in.

I had thought that I knew the work of Victor Pasmore. He had first come to public notice as a leading light in the Euston Road Group and had then fallen under the spell of Ben Nicholson and moved into abstractionism.
Later still he pioneered the growth ofConstructivism in this country; but what we found in that small gallery beside the River Thames was unlike anything I had seen of his before. It was exactly as it had said on the tin, visions (could there be any other word for them?) seen with the eyes tightly closed.

Much of it consisted of arrangements of lines, squiggles splashes and flat areas of
paint. A sort of minimalist Jackson Pollock, I thought at the time. The work had,
though, more impact and was more thought-provoking than I have made it sound. But what struck me in retrospect was how different were his visions in the dark than my own. At that time I would tend to see recognisable images. This I knew because I had made similar experiments, but as a writer, using the sights that arose behind the closed eyelids as stimuli for poems. Strangely enough, I had not thought to use them for any form of visual art.

I experimented and found that what I saw was influenced by a number of factors.
In roughly descending order of importance they are:

• The last image seen before closing the eyes.


• My thoughts.


• Ambient sounds.


• The movement (if any) of the eyeballs.

Sometimes the images evolved in response to continuing stimulus. What is the relationship between dreaming and this phenomenon, I wondered?

The image above and those below are the results - recreations by whatever method I thought would get nearest to the remembered image. Oh, for the technology to photograph the image that the brain sees!) These days I tend not to see recognisable objects, but more of that later perhaps, in part II, which will deal with writing - if I proceed that far.
I wonder if any research been done on what people see with the eyes closed? Do any of you knowledgeable folk out there know of any? Or has anyone a theory or observation to offer?

Henry Moore

SkyArts recently screened a program entitled The Art of Henry Moore which I recorded and, a few nights ago, watched. Something that I had not realised when recording, was that the commentary was by Henry Moore himself. It was, he said, an introduction to some of the problems that have fascinated him in the course of producing his art. What struck me was that wrapped up in a fascinating reflection on his craft were a number of points, any one of which would have made an excellent discussion point. By which I do not mean that I found them controversial, merely that they might have had much more to give as such. As such I give them here - or teat them merely as thinking points.

• The Mother and Child is one of my inexhaustible subjects. It is eternal. But how does religious art differ from the everyday? Artistically speaking, what is the difference between a Mother and Child and a Madonna and Child? (I give Moore's answer to that question at the bottom of the post.)



• A straight line, a pure curve, solid geometric shapes, the perfect cube are considered to be beautiful, but they are best made by a machine. The artist's concern is with imperfection.



• Sculpture should always have some initial obscurity, some mystery not apparent to the quick observer (actually, all art should), otherwise it is merely an empty immediacy, like a poster intended to be seen and read quickly from the top of a bus.



• My little studio is an important habitat for me. I love its clutter and muddle. It throws up fortuitous associations and can send me off working in an unexpected direction.



• The theory that an artist's work is directly attributable to his imagination is a romantic idea. An artist's gift is that he can reject his imagination.



• Speaking of his air raid shelter drawings (which I had always thought he'd made in situ in the London tube stations), he said: Naturally, I could not draw in the shelters, I drew from memory later at home. It would have been like making sketches in the hold of a slave ship. One couldn't be as disinterested as that. (I thought how different from the present day photo-journalists, some of whom would have gone in close with their lenses.)



• Speaking first of his early interest in primitive art, especially that of Mexico, and then of the revelation that was afforded him by a six month stay in Europe, he explained that it was a long while before he was free to use the lessons of Europe in his art. That was because of the violent way in which they clashed with his pre-existing interests. He then asked: Is this conflict what makes things happen?



• Artists do not need religion. Art is religion. If one believes that all life is significant - and everyone who does not commit suicide has that belief - then one has religion in his art.



• Beauty is a deeper concept than prettiness or niceness, deeper than an arrangement of shapes and colours. People expect perfect craftsmanship, lovely artefacts, but never did I want to produce a beautiful woman, though I do want beauty in my art. (And later) My work is mainly intuitive, not erotic, though I have no objection to others finding it erotic, to others finding in it what I had not realised was there.



• Drawing, even for those who are not good at it, makes you look more intently at the subject. Just looking has no grit in it, no mental struggle or difficulty. That only happens when you are drawing.

---

Moore suggested that the difference between a Mother and Child and a Madonna and Child was that the latter should have austerity, nobility and grandeur.

Nature Poetry

extract from the poem Koi by John Burnside

All afternoon we've wandered from the pool
to alpine beds and roses
                        and the freshly painted
palm house

          all afternoon
we've come back to this shoal
of living  fish.

Crimson and black
                 pearl-white
                            or touched with gold
the koi hang in a world of their invention
with nothing that feel like home
                                - a concrete pool
and unfamiliar plants spotted with light
birdsong and traffic
                    pollen and motes of dust

and every time the veil above their heads
shivers into noise
                  they dart

and scatter

           though it seems more ritual now
than lifelike fear
                  as if they understood
in principle
            but could not wholly grasp

the vividness of loss

I suppose most people when they think of nature poetry think first of someone like William Wordsworth, say:-

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

or John Clare, with a poem like:-

The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.

The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

From remarks I have heard or seen expressed recently, it would seem that many people now think of someone they regard as being a Romantic or a peasant poet, usually someone from the past. Indeed, that last criteria appears to be the most telling. And why is that? I've heard it several times expressed in recent days that it is no longer possible to write sensible poetry about nature. (Not sure in which sense sensible is being used there!) Nature is, to coin a phrase, all messed up. It is polluted, it has been genetically modified; its ecology, as often as not, is in shreds; it is threatened by global warming, and by much that is more insidious even than global warming. That which has raised and sustained, not only us, but all life over millenia, that which has been our cradle and our nursery, will be our grave, and still is (so far) our home; that which I have seen, ( as Wordsworth put it,) and now can see no more, has all but passed away. Or to quote again from the same verse: That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth. Had he been living now, he might have used the same words with a slightly different feeling. It is not personal mortality that spoils the picture now, it is universal mortality, the end of everything.

Therefore, it is said, people - and by implication, especially poets - cannot be interested in poetry as they once were. Really? I think that those who feel that way must have in mind a rather impoverished form of poetry, one that maybe just describes a sunset not very differently from the way it has been described a thousand times before; an outmoded form of poetry, in fact, one that has no truck with the darkening of nature that is taking place, one that ignores the fracturing of nature that we are engaged in, one that shuts its eyes to the disfiguring of the natural world. Yes, one that avoids mention of the darkening, the fraturing and the disfiguring even of our own natures.

Good nature poetry, to my mind, begins in accurate observation, continues with precise description and then moves you on, placing you not-quite-where-you-thought-you-were in the great scheme of things, so that at the end you feel differently about some aspect of nature - and therefore about yourself - than you did at the beginning. It changes your relationship to nature and weaves you into the fabric of it in a way you had not not realised you could be. Wordsworth's poetry did that. It still can do that. And so can the poetry of many contemporary and recent poets: Alice Oswald and John Burnside spring readily to mind, as do Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughs. Neither must we forget Seamus Heaney. He is not always thought of as a nature poet, but he is, and a splendid one at that. And I would specially recommend the work of Alice Oswald:

Easternight, the mind's midwinter

I stood in the big field behind the house
at the centre of all visible darkness

a brick of earth, a block of sky,
there lay the world, wedged
between its premise and its conclusion

From Field

The fact that nature has changed - if that is, indeed, a fact - has made no difference to the relevance of Wordsworth's poetry. Before he and the other Romantic Poets got to work on our sensibilities The Lake District and other such places were almost universally regarded as dangerous, unwholesome, ugly areas of wilderness. Wild places to be avoided. But now, some would maintain, nature is going back to being dangerous and unwholesome. And that is not just the wild places, which hardly seem to exist now, but all of it. Nowhere can you escape the desecrating, toxigenic hand of man. That someone needs to speak out about it hardly needs saying. Almost daily someone does. Certainly, it is true that man (who is himself part of natue, let us not forget) is the one most able - and morally charged - to speak up for nature. And why should the poet over all others have that moral obligation? Because it is also true that man is everywhere speaking out. Yet still the desecration and the poisoning goes on. Why? It surely must be that all the speaking out is failing to change hearts and minds. And that must be because the politicians cannot change hearts and minds. They are too caught in their self-made webs of expedience and compromise. The responsibility must fall to those who have chosen or been chosen to be the guardians and the first line exponents of language, the poets and writers of our generation.

We make language, it has been said, and language makes us, but not just language; we are physical beings; mental beings; spiritual beings, and our whole being must be involved in our dedication to nature - as it is involved in the finest examples of poetry and prose. For the sad thing is that we are no longer talking just about the nature that once was, our traditional environment, in other words. No, we are talking about nature adapted, modified, suffused by the habits of science, including, of course, bad science.

I chose John Burnside for my opening example because although in many respects he is a one-off, having bucked just about every trend going, his work nevertheless seems to me to point a way that nature poetry might go. He may not seem to be too focussed on nature. Indeed, he may not seem to be too focussed on anything much at all. His gaze is apt to pick out that which most folk would not stop to register: "a look we cannot place", "a lime-green weed", "a glimpse of powder-blue", leaf mould, a fungal trace or tracks in snow, a litter of leaves. But as he looks he seems to see out of the corner of his eye the presence of man, who doesn't get much of a mention, except as Burnside is both man and the narrator. Man's presence is implied, though, by the way it is felt impinging on the scraps that Burnside sees. Man is everywhere defining what he is and what is his, negotiating with his equally invisible companions and competitors, the rest of nature. So Burnside, who, miraculously, seemig not to mean to, can beautifully conjure up the English countryside, paints not so much a landscape as a borderland where all are engaged in something that is not entirely present, must be spiritual and (for those reasons?) is not precisely explicable. In a poem called Halloween the narrator peels bark from a tree to smell its ghost. Everything is insubstantial, flux and flow. The borderland is forever breaking up: the fern-work of ice and water.

I will leave you withan extract from Alice Oswald's Dart, a meditation on Devon's fabulous river of that name.


What I love is one foot in front of another. South south west and down the contours. I go slipping

between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can't get out.



Listen,

a

lark

spinning

around

one

note

splitting

and

mending

it



and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river



one step-width water

of linked stones

trills in the stones

glides in the trills

eels in the glides

in each eel a fingerwidth of sea

Faking it!

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth. Picasso

Scene 1 for My Confession, a play in one act, is set in an art school in the early fifties. The curtain rises to reveal a large hall in which an End of Year Examination is in progress. Art Theory. This is not an externally administered exam, but is important as it could decide whether I continue my studies or not. On the paper before me are five questions of which three must be attempted. One is compulsory and will attract the bulk of the marks. I cannot now recall the exact wording, but it is concerned with Paolo Uccello and with his painting The Rout of San Romano - of which there are in fact three versions extant. The examiner wants me to explain what drives the painting, what, in common parlance, makes it tick.


I stare alternately at the question paper and at the pile of foolscap papers topped by Answer Paper 1 on which I have carefully written,in their appropriate squares, my name and examination number. Apart from these small but essential additions, though,I have not ventured to spoil its virgin whiteness. I have been considering it for some five or more minutes. No doubt the invigilator, if he is looking in my direction, sees a student without a clue, gazing in blank dismay, waiting for inspiration to strike. He would be wrong. I am trying to gather together in my mind all that I know of Paolo Uccello and his three Battle pictures; and more than that, as each new piece of information swims into my mind I am trying to visualise it on the answer paper, trying to see how much space can be filled by the total of all I know, how far down I can move the bottom line of my essay, and how much more will be required.

So what do I know? Paolo Uccello, fifteenth century. Two things drive these battle paintings: Uccello's fondness for decoration, acquired during the early years of his career, five of which he spent working on mosaics; and his absolute passion for perspective, not so much the perspective that we all learnt in our art classes at school, the perspective that Massacio used to such good effect in representing nature. No, not that, for Uccello missed out on that particular trick, having been abroad when Massacio was thrilling the art world. Instead, here is Uccello forging ahead with the new thing he is turning into the new Big Thing in art: the science of foreshortening. Fantastically difficult, involving not just vanishing points, but also calculation points for complex mathematical formulae which he had begun to develop earlier, when commissioned to copy in paint a sculpture of a horse and rider. So realistic did he contrive to make the painting, that from a cursory glance, a viewer might have thought it another piece of sculpture. One thing, though: it was burdened (some would say) with two sets of vanishing points, one for the pedestal and another for the sculpture itself. It was a problem he never solved: foreshortening involves applying perspective to various parts of a subject individually. How, then, to devise a coherent system of perspective for the whole?

Furthermore, after the equestrian painting, he seems to have gone out of his way to paint whatever was most difficult. There is a famous painting of The Flood, for example, in which he has placed mazzocchi on two of the figures. Mazzocchi were hoops of wood or wicker which were used as foundations for
headdresses. The thing about them was that because they had a multitude of facets depicting them would challenge the draughtsmanship of the most able of artists. They were used as test pieces for those at the top of their profession. There was no reason for the two figures in the painting of the flood to be wearing them other than the difficulties they would cause Uccello in painting them.... hmmm... might be able to work that into the answer. I will have to see! But it is as I ponder how much padding it might provide that the dread thought strikes: what is really being asked of me is some evidence that I have at the very least, a passing knowledge of the formulae involved. And of course, I don't. On one level I know the work well. It hangs in The National Gallery where I am a regular visitor and so have frequently passed it. But that, alas, is exactly what I have always done: passed it - without a second thought. A massive painting, massively boring, a rather strange affair, indeed, all those huge wooden steeds like so many rocking horses and on their backs those men in armour looking more like robot figures from some sci-fi film. A different tack is called for. So what do I know that I might not know I know until I start to ask myself some leading questions?

Let's see how close I can get to the four to six sides of foolscap expected of me. I start to write something about Uccello and his obsession with mathematical formulae... that is, my brain dictates the words mathematical formulae, but my hand writes mystical formulae and I am away. Uccello is no longer a master of foreshortening and pattern, he is art's high priest of mysticism. It's all in the numbers. Numbers are the life blood of mysticism, I decide, and with so many horses, lances, bodies and whatnot, I can conjure almost any number I fancy out of the picture. And conjure is what I do, what Uccello did, what the mystics of old did. But it doesn't even have to be all numerical: the jumble of lances and other fallen weapons on the ground are no longer exercises in perspective or an intricate patterning, they are carefully camouflaged mystical signs, symbols of the occult. The background becomes a section of the lower slopes of a pyramid; there are all-seeing eyes everywhere on the harnesses that the horses wear; the chopped-up and carefully arranged fragments
of lance are broken triangles, pentagrams and squares; the lances carried by the riders on the left form inverted compasses; there is even an ankh, cut into small sections and distributed throughout the picture. Even the symbols shown in my two small images, which I now know are symbols used in the Bahai faith, were miraculously (we are talking about mysticism, remember) found by me, their fragments scattered throughout the painting. How I found them I now have no idea, but that I did I do clearly remember.

It is an excellent essay, as good as any I have written. I am pleased with it as a piece of writing, but... and the but is obvious, I think.

Scene 2: Two days later. A corridor outside the Principal's office. The Principal is a dapper man, tall and with a military-type bearing. He has a beard almost too extensive to be called a goatee, though that is what he insists it is. He is reputed to have been a monk, though my guess is that he was a lay brother. At any rate, he was the order's calligrapher. He carries a silver-topped walking cane and appears with it now at the end of the corridor, motioning me to precede him into the office, but it doesn't work out that way: we meet at the door. His big thing is truth, truth to materials, not trying to make a wood carving look like a bronze casting, that sort of thing. He must be seeing me as the Anti-Christ just now, for he will not have been deceived by my essay, that's for sure. So I am expecting a rough passage. By the thunder, King, he roars under his breath - a skill he has mastered and often uses - and by the forty-thousand purple beards of the Most Holy Prophets of Doom, what is a fellow who can write like that, doing in a place like this? Of course, you do not believe a word of it, and neither do I, but then the fact of your non-belief in what you yourself have written is something I cannot prove, and that being the case, I am bound to take it at face value. Ergo, dear boy, I am bound to give you an A-grade. It should have been an A+, but at that, I regret to say, my spirit baulked. And with that he marches off into the sunset - well, the printing room - noisily prodding the ground before him with his silver-topped cane.

The Epilogue

I would have been well satisfied with a C. Chuffed to bits, in fact. But that A-grade pricked my conscience and left me with a feeling of guilt that to this day I have not satisfactorily expunged.

Confession is good for the soul, they say, and so with this admission (and one other - watch this space!) I make my joint bid for whatever form of heaven eventually awaits us all.

Snow

Leaves, macho once,
now with white fur hats
are doffing them to no one.


The house-bound
thrill to welcome
this new landscape




Grey light,
in visiting the snow,
replenishes itself.

Like dust sheets in reverse,
snow, spread everywhere,
has covered our untidiness.

The snow lies weightless,
calm and unfazed
by its transience.

Lamplight jounces off the snow
flooding the late evening
in a mimicry of day.