Going, going, gone...

Caitlin Moran in yesterday's Times cried Goodbye, cruel world. I'm off to live on the internet. Not for me, such luxuries. My cry is Adieu Fair web, I'm off to re-engage with the unpalatable real world. Or maybe it will prove neither cruel nor unpalatable. I shall write more on that anon.

For now I remember how I used to speculate as a boy about what it would be like to be one of those medieval monks who contrived to get themselves walled up in some monastry or castle for some grave crime or sin. I am beginning to find out. I am almost there. There remains a chink in the growing wall of boxes, books, small items of furniture and other portable artefacts from downstairs, a chink just large enough to squeeze through. But not for much longer. Any moment now the electrician and the decorator will arrive to begin the ground floor's makeover. Then the invasion of my small junk room-cum-study-cum-computer room will be complete. I must retreat to saner areas, vanish from the internet before I vanish from the physical world completely. Fare thee well, oh friendly web! Adieu good friends for the space of half a moon at the most - or so I have been reliably informed by the decorator using his well-polished trust me, I'm a builder tone of voice.

But not all is lost. I have scheduled posts to appear, almost as normal, though at intervals a day or so greater than my usual, and I hope to see any comments left, though alas, I doubt I will get to answer them.

So trust me, I'm a blogger: I shall return!.
Farewell good friends.

Art for My Sake!

Henry Darger's Me to the Moon

Back on the 3rd of April this year I posted a poem of mine looking back to an obsession I had in childhood with a make-believe world of subterranean tunnels, caves, vertical shafts and the like. I had dreams about this world. Indeed, although I can no longer be sure, I think it may have all begun as the result of a dream. The world became an essential part of my my play world, though the games that resulted were for just one player. Me. I had fantasies about this world and about it dozens of secret entrances, all cunningly concealed, each by a different device, mostly natural, such as an old tree stump covered in ivy. I drew intricate plans and maps of my world, made several large paintings and at least one model. At that time I was suffering a lot of bad health and had to spend long periods in bed. I developed ways of folding and rolling the bed sheets to model my underground tunnels and built caverns between sheet and blanket. I suppose that had my obsession lasted into adulthood the appropriate response to it would have been for me to build installations to interpret to others what was going on in my head.

Earlier this year the Haywood Gallery in London held an exhibition of installations purporting to do just that. The exhibition was called: Walking in My Mind. Ten internationally recognised artists prodused works by means of which they hoped to convey to the gallery's visitors just what it was that was taking place inside their heads.

That seemed hopelessly optimistic to me, but now there is a gallery dedicated to going well beyond that brief, but paradoxically, with a somewhat greater chance of success - or so it seems to me. The Museum of Everything, newly opened in a disused dairy close to Regents Park in London, displays works made by artists for themselves and for themselves alone. These are works that for the most part were made for the artists' eyes only, works that spring from and feed the artist's fantasies and have no other purpose. Many of them are whimisical it seems, some verging towards the dark. But I stress: the one thing they have in common is their intended privacy. There is, or was when they created their works, absolutely no intention to communicate - and is not that intention an essential element in the making of a work of art? The exhibition contains, for example, works from a vast collection that was discovered by the late artist's landlord. No one other than Darger knew of their existence prior to his death. Henry Darger has since become rather well known - given that that was not part of his game plan - for his Vivien Girls, delightful creatures, nude for the most part, who are pursued through his paintings by absolute evil on account of their intrinsic goodness.

It was in reading about this exhibition that I was reminded of my childhood indulgences. Among the 95 artists whose works are currently on display are Calvin and Ruby Black, a couple who lived in the Mojave Desert where they created their own miniature world, a wind-powered city with the endearing name of Possum Trot. (Sounds like the name of a blog, does it not?) They populated it with lovingly made wooden dolls dressed in beautifully hand-crafted clothes. The parallels with my subterranean world seemed amazingly close, though in my case the population changed a few times: originally it was inhabited by the military, a special military with a brief to save the world, later it was given over to International Rescue (yes, really, I was the first, though there were no rockets). Then a mutant strain of humanity who had been subject to a death ray that had not quite worked. None of these proved as satisfying as the army, however, so finally they recaptured it.

So what is all this nonsense in aid of, then? I have already given a clue in a question I raised earlier: Is not the intention to communicate an essential element in the making of a work of art? I have been trying to think of precedents, but I have not exactly come up with an armful. What other examples can you think of for art-making in which no thrid party is involved, just the artist and his work? Where the art work has no role in communicating something? I thought of Cave art, but we cannot be sure what that was all about. Magic has been suggested, to give the hunter greater skill and more success. But the bones in the caves were not from the same animals as depicted on the walls - in many cases. Spirits are another suggestion. The works were not meant to be viewed, not even by the artist, which is why they were painted in such inaccessible places. The important fact - the only fact that mattered - was that they should exist. Somewhere. In and for themselves. Rites of passage is another suggestion. In which case they would be expected to convey something, to communicate. But we don't know. Ikons, I thought of, but then decided that of course they communicate, not something new from the artist, something familiar via the artist, but they communicate all the same. Child art, I thought of, and then found myself argueing against myself. I began by thinking about my tunnel-world. I never did think of it as art. Not even the paintings I made of it. And then it struck me that I didn't think of any of my other paintings as art, either. Not until... and then I realised that I have no idea at what stage I first began to think of my paintings as art. We all know that the child is a fine artist. And then he stops. Why? Could it be because he begins to think of his art as art? Begins to think in terms of others, trying to say something to others, and loses the freshness of having to satisfy only himself?

So: Can you think of any other examples of private art? Non-communicative art? And is it art? Can it be? Or does art have to be at least endeavouring to communicate? If so, what objectively distinguishes the two conditions?

Self-Portrait : Moving with the Trees

Well overdue, I thought, for a digital doodle.

On being "On"

As Antony Gormley's One and Other 100 days project for the fourth (empty) plinth in Trafalgar Square neared its conclusion I found myself, like many others, wondering what it would have been like up there for the 2400 participants.

---

The weather's not been very conducive of late to the rearing of poetry blooms, so here's another forced in the greenhouse of nomuse.

---

The Empty Plinth

I felt I was great art for that brief hour,
but later, when I saw the others on the plinth
I thought how much they'd wasted their grand chance
and wondered if I too had looked as amateurish.

But I'd imagined I was one of Gormley's men,
you know the ones - those standing off the shore.
I told myself the crowds who milled below
were waves or ripples in the sea that stretched before.

I wondered too what Gormley might have made of me:
he used his body for those standing in the sea.
I used mine to show the world I'm me - a different me
for all great art involves a transformation.

Was I transformed? Or have I been? In my view
or the view of those beneath me on the square?
But wait, why does only greatness seem worthwhile?
Why can it not be run of mill, like song or dance?

I danced a few steps on the plinth myself, I did -
and I'm no Fred Astair, as all my mates would vow,
yet somehow those few steps made something rock
that otherwise would not have rocked in me.

Strangest thing... as popular as Gormley's One and Other
has become, the people streaming by did not look up,
did not enthuse, admire, form audience.
They were as waves ignoring cliffs to far above to love.

As folk in quiet times see their bones (I'm told)
dark-buried in the all-concealing earth,
so I now, when I close my eyes, see mine
transformed: dry, colourless, arranged as art.

---

On the Top of the Pops list

Interesting result to the BBc's National Poetry Day poll to find the Nation's favourite poet (again!). This time, though , it was an on-line poll and T.S.Eliot came top. (A similar poll conducted on radio recently put Kipling top. This time Kipling did not figure in the top ten.
Numbers 2 to 10 were: John Donne, Benjamin Zephaniah, Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, William Blake, W.B.Yeats, John Betjeman, John Keats and Dylan Thomas - a very different line-up from any radio poll results I've ever seen! What is one to make of that, I wonder?

The Man Booker 2009

Cross country

Six runners at the tape
had run
their six unequal distances,
had covered ground
as different from each other
as a Haiku from a fable
or a vignette from a sketch;

had traversed land
as varied as
ploughed fields and grass,
as meadows, moors and bogs;
some with the benefit
of spikes and shorts,
some in their normal togs.

Yet still they found a winner.

---

Congratulations to Hilary Mantel - and the judges.

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An Unlikely Subject.

I have been struggling again of late to keep up with my visiting and commenting etc. The latest inroads into the time available for the keyboard have been made by our grandson reaching the grand old age of 21 - and a very special football match. When he was a toddler and not much more I began to take our son to see the local football, which at that time was Gillingham - the one in Kent. When we moved to our present abode for my next teaching post he and I began to follow Southampton. Since when they have risen to the dizzy heights of the Premiership before a mortifying slide to the ranks of Division 1 where yesterday they met Gillingham! That being so, my son returned the ancient favour and took me to see them. That and Friday's Chinese nosh-up for Matthew's coming-of-age (how quaintly old-fashioned that sounds!) have taken their toll and the process of catching-up has flagged a bit. Neither is it about to get better, for we have to prepare for builders, electricians, decorators and other distractions over the next few weeks, so the time-squeeze is unlikely to go away any time soon. However, I will do my best.

In the meantime, from yesterday (not for the purists), these:

The parked car cowers
like a frightened bird
beneath the hovering black cranes.

A pizza-pod
mistaken for a pasty.
My teeth unleash hot, molten cheese.

Climbing to our seats -
do birds get puffed
before they get their bird's-eye views?

Movement, repetitions, patterns:
something intangible
gets physical expression.

Twenty thousand rise expectantly
then sink down in despair -
the ball a foot too high.

Graffiti in the loo
foretold the final score -
and warned against the pizza pods.

Sleep and the Poet

First draft - made late evening before retiring..


On Eating a Grape

It was not meant for this,
but to tumble into slime,
to rot - men say to die -
to mingle with the soil,
its seeds to germinate,
initiate new life.

I stroke its skin,
touch it with my tongue.
I use the dampness of my lips
to burnish it,
then hold it in my teeth
and kiss its fervent blackness.

Then finally bite into it.
A stinging jet.
Acidic juice,
is shrivelling my taste buds.
Sweet revenge on me,
subverter of its destiny.




Second draft - first thing the following morning.



The black grape bitten,
its bitterness at its lost seed
strikes at my throat.

On Turning Over a New Leaf

When the apple tree turned over a new leaf
it began producing plums.

When the pear turned over a new leaf
it brought forth grapes instead.

When the cherry turned over a new leaf
it found acorns on its branches.

When The Book of Life turned over a new leaf
a skeleton crawled out.

When the woods turned over their new leaves
a million tiny creatures saw the sun.

When these turned over the dead leaves
the dust and ash beneath began to smoke.

When humankind turned over its new leaves
it took leave of its senses

and not until it turned again the old leaves
did the trees bring forth their true and ample fruit.

What sex is your computer - & 3 Brilliant ideas

Are you one of those for whom time always seems to be moving at the wrong speed? When we are bored it slows and drags, when engaged in some exciting project it flies by and there are not enough hours in the day or days in the week. Lying awake at night it almost stops. At my age it is increasingly lethargic. For those unfortunate enough to have such problems, the depressed find that it crawls and cannot be prodded into faster life, but for the manic it, too, goes at a hundred miles an hour and there is nothing to be done to slow it down. If you happen to be a tad obsessional you will be focussed too firmly on time future at the expense of the present, whereas if anxiety is your black dog you will be interested mainly in time past.

This is all very well known, of course. I mention it only because this last week I discovered that there was help at hand. Well, if not help, then certainly illumination.

You have but to click here to be whizzed away to the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory. Here you will be asked a series of questions and rated according to the degree to which you are influenced by : Past Negative, Past Positive, Present Fatalism, Present Hedonism, Future and Transcendental Future. You can also, should you so wish, take what they call the Transcendental-future Time Perspective Inventory - but I'll leave you to discover all about that for yourself. (Just so there's no misunderstanding: so far as I have been able to make out none of this has anything to do with Transcendental Meditation - just thought I'd make that clear.

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From a source that must remain anonymous, I learn that a certain police sergeant was in trouble with his inspector for referring to one of his P.Cs (female) as a W.P.C.. This, apparently, is offensive in the present climate. It is like referring to an actor (female) as an actress. Well beyond the pale, no? This one worries me, though, and not least because I had not realised that computers came with gender differences. How do you tell? What is it about my friendly inspector's computer that marks it out as being female? Is there a test for it? Can I buy one in P.C. World? It really worries me that I have not noticed any such distinguishing features in any of the computers I have had dealings with in the past. And certainly not in the one I am up close and personal with at the moment. What has happened to me? Am I slipping? And what mightn't I have done in close contact with them over the years, and not even been aware that I was doing it? It does of course answer one mystery: the question of why it is (allegedly) that so many officers would prefer to be in the station playing with their computers rather than out on the beat.

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No doubt it had to happen, and on the 5th November it will happen, for on that auspicious day Penguin will publish a volume containing over sixty of the world's classic novels Twitterized. This, apparently, is what Elizabeth Bennett is reduced to: It's as if the less he seems to care about me, the more drawn to him I am. This seems the opposite of how it should be? Oh well.

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From a source which modesty forbids me to divulge comes the most brilliant idea of all. An idea that foretells the day when you will click on File on your word processor and see, not just the options New, Open, Save, Save as, but now: New, Open, Save, Save as, Save as verse. Think about it: You will have typed into your W.P. (something like) It had been a wet night, but Jim had remained focussed on the small float bobbing in the dark pool at the end of his line... and at that point the muse had walked out on you, slamming the door as she went - obviously not intending to return any time soon. Dejectedly you click on File, are about to click on Save as when inspiration (daughter of the muse who has just left) whispers in your ear. Following her suggestion, you click instead on Save as verse and are rewarded with:

the angler -
his dreadful intensity
in the evening rain!

Okay, so Buson (painter-poet, 1716-83) got there before the computer on that occasion, but one day the computer will get there first and you will be famous. I understand (from my not-to-be-divulged source) that the originator of the idea is prepared to let Microsoft have the idea to develop for free, as that is all it is just now, just an idea.

Nude descending to an entrance - or an exit

Nude Descending a Staircase Marcel Duchamp



Slowly the ball of her right foot descends
to press down gently on the stair below,
rolls like a marble on an endless track,
seeks out the spot - the only spot - that does not creak.
Slowly her weight transfers to it.

Slowly the left descends to add its weight,
she feels the pace of life take a new leash.
The house is full of echoes: voices, rasps and groans,
she hears the sound of someone shuffling cards.
A fortune being told? Perhaps a fortune lost.

The warm air from below seduces her, clings
like a robe to her nude form. She moves her arms
as if to draw the garment round her, but instead
looks through the window on the mezzanine. A flash
of light from moon or car illuminates the scene:

a fox runs headlong, through a field and down the hill,
then lets the forest swallow him. STEEP HILL, she reads.
Then: 1-IN-5. ENGAGE LOW GEAR. The catseyes glint,
and all but freak her out. DANGER LORRIES TURNING
screams at her. She turns, looks back to view the screen,

sees overlapping versions of herself - fifteen
she counts. They clunk a bit. Walt Disney-ish,
the way they portray movement. Spread below
an engineer's delight: what passes in these more
enlightened times for what we used to call

a life class: cat-walk, film and video
The students cheer and throw their cameras
and mobiles in the air. The right foot's off again.
The window mists and seems to move. NO PARKING looms
and TURNING NOT ALLOWED... BEWARE PLANT CROSSING. Arms

appear. Two hands. The hands sweep back and forth.
The window fails to clear - her body-heat, perhaps.
The willows - or the window cleaners - gently tap
the glass. Her boyfriend's naked form falls limply on her lap.
The window clears, the local constable peeps in.

The verities of life vie in her consciousness,
the who and where she is, how life unfolds;
expressions of her hopes and memories.
As easily she slips between them as to sleep,
like being born or fading into death.

The Venus of Willendorf

                1

He who created me,
my nomad, hunter-
gatherer, shaped me
for consort on the trail,

gave me no feet -
what need had I of feet?
He held me in his hand,
fondled as he walked,

whose sharp eyes
picked me out,
half-formed in fine
dense limestone,

half-exhumed from
stone and scree;
whose stone blades
chipped me free,

gave shape
to my rotundity.

                2

Part rosary, part
worry bead,
part pebble in the palm,
tactile he wanted me;

tactile I was - and am.
Venereal.
(Don't ask!) These days
they land

all sorts on me:
Earth Goddess for a start;
Goddess of fecundity -
I ask you,

I, who was his Titty
Babe, who gave
him feelings
as he walked -

assured him
of his manhood - me!

                3

He'd give me girlie gifts
like body paint.
(Red ochred
I was then.)

Stone chisels shaped
my hair in plaits
and laid them round my head
for him to finger.

Yet not for those
he trekked with me,
but my great vulva - My
high mountain pass, he'd say.

Nor that alone,
but five prodigious globes
would keep his fingers
busy as we went.

(Didn't seem to mind
my age or motherhood.)

                4

No one knows
how long my sleep -
twenty-, thirty-
thousand years?

They guess! That I
was lifted lightly
to an evening's light
is more the point.

Since when
the earth has opened up
its secret store
of stone-age Venuses -

like cold Kostenki,
Moravany,
Savignano
or (Fanny)Galgenberg.

Riff-raff! Starchy, stylized.
They'd not have thawed his bones!

Hot on the trail!

Last month I posted on a visit made to the Royal Horticultural Society's gardens at Wisley, Surrey. The day proved to be the hottest of the year that far. Last week, honouring a long-standing arrangement with Doreen's cousin and a friend of his, we returned to Wisley. Weather-wise it was a re-run of our previous visit. Even hotter, clear blue sky, unbroken sun, etc, etc. There were differences. In August the schools were out and it was very much geared to the interests and needs of children. This time we were greeted by a sculpture trail of 64 sculptures organised by The Surrey Sculpture Society, a Science of Gardening Trail, showing what the Wisley scientists are doing to further the cause of horticulture, and a Global Warming Walk.

I did suggest that perhaps we should try to follow all three at once, see where that would get us. Where it got us was to the early signs of impending nervous breakdowns, so we gave up and just followed our noses.

Here then, the day in a few photographs - emphasis on the sculptures, you will notice. They were of somewhat uneven quality, as they were bound to be.

The first two to greet us. The three-eyed monster had something that worked on me, though I could not work out what.

Above, a quiet - and shady! - spot beside the lake where we rested for longer than we really needed to, and just chatted - the best part of the day.

The photograph below shows a sculpture that reminded me very much of The Marini horse and horseman that used to be one of my first stops visiting The Tate. I am not not putting them on a par for quality, though I do confess that I rather liked this long-legged version!

An attempt to right two omissions from that earlier post. Firstly, the new glasshouses. In my previous post I showed something of the plants within, but gave no idea of the houses themselves or their setting.
And below, a view of the rockery which I previously showed from the top looking down - a view which seems to have caused some confusion. This then to put the record straight, what might be called the more normal view - looking up.

Above, the sculpture of all the sculptures I would have most liked to take home. And below another, longer, view of the rockery.

Eliot : Disturbing the Universe

This post has in a sense been handed to me by two or three responses to my post On not getting it. In the course of discussing how a reader might react to difficulties in a poem they all said (something like)... otherwise you end up just problem solving. (What preceded the three dots varied in each case, but had to do with unravelling apparently meaningless lines, phrases, images etc.

The question turns, I suppose, on that word just. I think I answered for the most part gaily (glibly might be a better way of putting it), but later it occurred to me that there is another, more important, side to the matter, illustrated perhaps by the way in which T.S. Eliot used it to revolutionise English poetry.

Eliot, at that time a bank clerk in London, was appalled by what, in his view, the Victorians had done to English poetry. They had allowed it to flounder in a great soup of sentimentality. Emotion and feeling were all. It had lost that all-important contact with the intellect. He hatched his master plan to rescue it, to drag it to the firm land of reason before it drowned altogether. Accordingly, he produced three great poems: The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady and "La Figlia che Piange" (The Weeping Girl).

Here is the text of The Weeping Girl

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair--
Lean on a garden urn--
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair--
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise--
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.


Is that not beautiful? So are each of the other two, in their rhythms and in their cadences (something that Eliot did masterfully), so beautiful that you may easily not spot the plan, as I believe most people do not until it is pointed out. My personal opinion is that these three poems are as good as anything Eliot wrote, with the possible exception of The Four Quartets.

The public were baffled, as they had every right to be, for technically, theoretically and actually these three poems are incomprehensible. Eliot intended them so to be. That, indeed, was the master plan - to make them completely and permanently incomprehensible by withholding the essential information that the reader would need if s/he were to understand them. That way, he reasoned, the intellect would be continually engaged with the poems in its unending effort to understand them. The alternative, to give sufficient information for complete comprehension, would result, he reasoned, in the reader losing interest the moment that the problem unravelled. But of course, the plan would not have worked if they had been incomprehensible conundrums and nothing else. They were not. As I have indicated, they were - and are - poems of great beauty. They also contain some brilliant images which alone would have kept me reading. If we look at J Alfred Prufrock first - for no better reason than that it was the first one I read - we find that it opens in this wise:-


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.


In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.


To my way of thinking the image contained in lines 2 and 3 is brilliant - though not completely understandable. I still am not sure HOW the evening is like the patient. I'm not sure either, what a half deserted street is like, but following like a tedious argument does it for me. Eventually, though, we come to the overwhelming question. The stricture not to ask runs right through the poem, as an attitude when not actually spelt out. We never do find out what it is. We never do find out what is this visit we are to make. And then we come to the two lines

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

Who are these women?
Why do they come and go?
Where from and where to?
Where is the room?
What sort of room is it?
Why are the women talking constantly of Michelangelo?

These two lines appear twice in the poem, so you would think they must be of some importance, yet none of those questions are ever answered. These opening lines, in what they offer and in what they withhold are typical of the poem. Indeed, they are typical of all three of these poems.

Portrait of a Lady begins

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem to do—
With “I have saved this afternoon for you”;
And four wax candles in the darkened room,
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb
Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.

The second verse begins:

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
[For indeed I do not love it … you knew? you are not blind!
How keen you are!]
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you—
Without these friendships—life, what cauchemar!

We are in similar territory. We do not know who the Lady is or who the young man is. Much less do we ever discover what they are to each other, not - despite the many clues and false clues - what they want from each other. Is it a healthy relationship. At times it does not seem so, but we do not know, we are never told. Nevertheless, much as I want to know, I for one find that I have to keep reading. And yes, the brain is permanently engaged upon the matter and the matter is beautiful.

What we do se here, it seems to me, is that Eliot did not jettison feeling. He did not go to the opposite extreme. There are feelings in plenty in these poems. Many of the feelings that we encounter in The Waste Land, for a start, feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, waste, the triviality of modern living, resignation and even martyrdom.

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons from Prufrock.

I shall sit here serving tea to friends from Portrait of a Lady. (Another refrain that appears more than once in the poem.)

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while, - from Prufrock

Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands”;
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
“You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.”
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea. from Portrait of a Lady

Perhaps you can write to me.”
My self-possession flares up for a second;
This is as I had reckoned.
“I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark. from Portrait of a Lady

And there is wit:
My smile falls heavily among the bric-a-brac. from Portrait of a Lady

And humour

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

This is not a Meme!

Did you know that the nation has been voting for its favourite poet? I am not sure whether I did know or not. I read about it in Tom Sutcliffe's column in The Independent. It did seem to ring a distant bell, but to be honest there are so many of these lists of favourite authors, novels, films and god knows what these days, especially on the net, that the distant ringing may have been from some quite other bell.

They are beloved, of course, of networks where the aim is to encourage relationships. They serve to highlight areas of like mindedness among their participants, and for that they are appropriate. That is to say they tell us more about the people taking part than about the subjects for which they are voting. All well and good. But what are we to make of this national thingy? The results, when they come out, will be anonymous, they will tell us nothing about anybody. Okay, it may boost your ego - or do the opposite, depending on your stance - to know that Shakespeare, your own personal favourite, is also, as it turns out, the nation's favourite, but where do you go from there? Ooops, silly of me, you couldn't have voted for Shakespeare, he wasn't on the list. Didn't make the shortlist - again! After me, he must be the most under-rated poet of all time!

So who did make it? Oh, I don't know, there were thirty of them, nice round number, all Brits except for four - two Americans and two Irish. Well, that's fair enough, I suppose: we Brits aint a'gonna vote for some non-Brit to be our favourite, are we? So you've guessed, I know: I didn't vote. Can't now because the voting's closed,. and wouldn't have done even if I'd known about it in time.

Tom Sutcliffe reckons it might have been more appropriate to vote for the best poem, that at least, he maintains, would have put the focus back on the poetry and away from the poets. Which brings us back to the old, much argued-about conundrums of how do you rate one poem against another and is this competitive element appropriate in the realm of art? If so, what about introducing poetry and painting as events in the next Olympic Games?

His last sentence was the most interesting - and this is the bit that is not a meme: I don't give a damn who the National Favourite Poet is but I'd be interested to know who might be voted The Most Unsettling Poet. Changing that a bit, I was wondering if there is a work of art that has really unsettled - discombobulated - you. I know which mine would be. Not a poem, but a sculpture. One I saw at the Tate back in the sixties, for me the jewel in an amazing exhibition of Mexican Art. It was found at the Platform of the Eagles and Jaguars at ChichenItza, Yucatan, and shows a sculptural figure reclining on its elbows and holding a hollowed-out bowl or plate, which was presumably for offerings. None of the images that I have been able to find come anywhere near the sense of threat and savagery that being up close and personal to it evoked in me, perhaps because none were of the actual example which I saw in the exhibition, though they seem to have been produced to something of a formula and there is a conformity linking them all. Chac was a Mayan rain god. Chac Mool's bowl is said by some to have been for the purpose of catching rain - not as exciting, perhaps, as the alternative explanation. More reading here

And Death Shall Have Its Dominion.

A work in progress: 2 verses are in their first draft, the rest are in a second. So any feedback would be gratefully received.

Pale and brittle, wilting to a stranger beauty,
the hydrangeas know the score, know that
the withering is not the dying, but a mask,
an act of mourning, a long process
brought on by the sudden shock of death
and cushioning its worst effects.

Wise in their own wisdoms, they
know death for what it is:
a momentary singularity in which
all space in all of its dimensions
is removed from time, and time is drawn
immeasurably brief - a singularity,
which when it seems to linger has passed by.

What lingers are the echoes of a life that was.
Imagine you are in a country house.
You're in a window seat and looking out.
You see a ha-ha and beyond that sunken fence
a herd of rare breed cattle in the fields.
The house resounds to life's activities, it seems,
but what you hear are echoes of the life that was,
the life that made it what it was, the body processes
that run on pointlessly because they cannot stop.
And what you might have thought were death-bed sounds
are made by children playing, are reverberations
of a new existence brewing, not upstairs,
but in the garden, nursery or hall. Outside,
the cattle are the earnest that the life goes on.

Ah, but there we have it, for between the two, between
the past and future, death's hiatus lies -
a ha-ha we've internalised. To one side stand
the masters of the house, and to the other
lie their bodies. On the one side erstwhile mistresses
still entertain, whilst on the other lie
their corpses in their graves. Between the two
is no communication, neither now, nor ever was,
though something passes, though we know not what, between
our space-cum-time continuum and that lost world
in which each nano-moment now exists,
and must exist, apart from space and other time.

The dead are buried in the dust and faeces
of a world that was not meant to be, that no one planned,
that happened anyway, at night, when no
one was on guard. But some have been cremated
and their ashes spread. Blown by the wind, they've found their way
across and deep inside the ha-ha, deep, so deep,
where no light falls. Our singularity has all
the attributes of the astronomer's black hole.
We can go in, cannot return. Yet still they sing
and still there is there life abundant -
as the cattle testify, their life somehow
more spiritual than ours. But we

who are still living, cannot know
the ways of any world in which they're not,
and of our loved ones it may be we cannot spot
the crossing points at which they leave for good:
the body dies, the mind expires and someone
must pronounce the patient dead - and all
at different times, perhaps. And all that while
the inside and the outside states are out of key.
We see it still in the hydrangeas, though
their season has wound on and there are other deaths:
the fox cub in the road shows how
each death of every kind is timeless in its way.

The 7-Day and 7-Minute (Nearly) Poem

For seven days
the seven buds
had waited
hesitated
looked around them
far below them -
seven fledglings

psyching themselves up
for seven days
to brave the drop
and fly the nest.
They chose a stormy night
of drenching rain
that battered the hydrangeas.

Bursting from their bondage
they opened,every one.
By dawn
the seven buds
were seven roses
claiming their just prize -
some seven hours of sun.

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And now a haiku from the same source:-

Fifteen red roses
have turned to face the sun.
One yellow rose has turned its back.

On Not Getting It.

I drift in and out of sleep when the show is on, that way I find that it makes sense. (Quote from the comments on a BBC Radio 2 Blog.)

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David Lister, writing in The Independent a few days ago (26.08) and commenting on the current popularity of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, gave an amusing account of its recent rise and rise. Music generally has been more in demand it seems, which more than one commentator has attributed to the financial downturn and the need which the populace has suddenly discovered for tranquility and a spiritual dimension. Certainly music can supply both of those commodities, but The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain... I am not sure.

According to Lister it has been variously described as Hilarious. Glorious. Original. Well, just about every superlative under the sun. His comments were prompted by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain having been given a full billing in the BBC's Promenade Concert Programme. He went along to see. The occasion occasioned great excitement, he wrote. It was a complete sell-out. There were queues all round the block, he told us. Many, including the director, had brought their own ukuleles along. He made it sound like A Last Night at the Proms.

For Lister at any rate the promise was more than the reality, it seems. He reported that atThe Ride of The Valkyries he smiled. At Beethoven's Ode to Joy he half-smiled. After that the novelty began to wear off. Finally, he admitted, he just didn't get it. Now I have to admit that I have not heard The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, so cannot pronounce upon its achievements, its musicality or anything else. Whether or not I would have got it had I been there, I have no idea. What struck me, reading Lister's column, was the universality of the experience. It is universal in the sense that it happens, has happened, to us all (hands up any brave individual who wishes to claim that he has never been in the position of not getting it) and it is universal in the sense that it is common to all the arts. Maybe there have been times when it wouldn't have been so all-embracing, but today it is.

Which leads me again (I have raised it before, as no doubt the chorus of groans, could you but hear them, would indicate) to the question of what do you do when confronted by an alleged or intended work of art that you truly do not get. I am not referring to an encounter with a piece of art that just doesn't happen to be to your taste - I can be an even bigger bore on "taste", but that's not for this post, you will be pleased to hear. No, we are not talking don't like, but truly don't get.

I have in the past waxed prosaically about the poverty of the instruction I was given at school concerning all things aesthetic. Okay it was war time and there was a dearth of good teachers, but nowhere and at no time were we given any clue as to how to approach art, poetry, drama, music or any other art form that life might one day have placed before us for our approval. So far as literature was concerned the approach was that of good old comprehension. Well do I recall moments such as the following from a reading round the class session:

Me: Lady, you are the cruellest she alive if you will lead these graces to the grave and leave the world no copy. (Quoted from memory.)

Dicky Bird: What did he mean by that, King?

Me: He wanted her to have her portrait painted, sir.

Roars of hysterical laughter from the class. (An unusual success for me.) Roars of something quite different from Dicky Bird - and the rest of the session spent sitting in the corridor.

Not the sort of teaching - nor the sort of behaviour on the part of the pupil, I admit it - likely to send you out into the world equipped to cope with the difficulties of Eliot's Waste Land or post-modern literature - and remember, as I sometimes forget, That Eliot had written The Waste Land some 25 years before this, also that we were then well into the period of Post Modernism, we who were still reading The Jackdaw of Rheims, Lochinvar and other such versifications. I never did hear any mention of Eliot within those hallowed walls, much less Ezra Pound. What chance then, that Marcel Duchamp's famous "Fountain" - for which think: urinal? might get an airing in the art room?

There is an oft reiterated question which to my mind brings this whole question sharply into focus: "Ah, but is it art?" We have all asked it at some point, I guess, if only to evade a more difficult or soul-searching response, but it is a question which says more about the questioner than the questioned, for it is saying , in effect: "Yes, I do see that this found object, or this installation, or this whatever it may be, has something about it, but please point out what it has, specifically, that rings my art bell, falls within the parameters that for me define what is and what is not art.

Art must have its boundaries. Only the true anarchist thinks otherwise, but there always will be works and artists pushing at those boundaries. It is as though we have our own internal Venn diagrams. There is a circle for art (or maybe several), one for poetry (or maybe several), another for philosophy (or maybe several), and so on. We are confronted with an installation and the brain clicks in, weighing up the possibilities, where does this one fit? Maybe it goes in one of the overlaps, it's both this and that as well...

Back in my fourth paragraph I asked the question: what do you do when confronted by an alleged or intended work of art that you truly do not get. We must have our boundaries, but surely we must keep them flexible. When something truly original comes along it will not quite fit, for it will be something you had not foreseen when drawing up those boundaries. Indeed, by definition it will be something that no one had foreseen. So what could be the response? You could ask yourself: What preconceptions do I have, what assumptions have I made in the past that are preventing me from getting it? (The answer may be none, of course, the fault may not be in you, it may be another case of the Emperor's New Clothes.) The first occasion on which I can recall the question arising was back in 1952/3. What I recall is a public furore over Reg Butler's sculpture The Unknown Political Prisoner. (Butler is shown with an earlier version of the work, in my first image.)Had it ever been built it would have risen 300 - 400 feet in the air. It was, Butler said, specifically in memory of all who died in the concentration camps. The final maquette was destroyed by a Hungarian refugee whilst it was on display at The Tate Gallery. Everyone had a view about it. Few were complimentary. I cannot recall any work of art before it being given such a high profile. Certainly nothing to do with the arts had ever caused such controversy and consternation in our rather typical (I would think) household. The media then were not what they have become since, of course, but such as they were they went to town on it. It was exhibited at The Venice Biennial and at The Tate Gallery. Everybody that I knew - and I knew no-one who was in the habit of showing any interest in, let alone speaking about art - was talking about it and asking: But it's not art - is it? I, for my part, was thinking: Mmmmmm, it's got something... but it's not sculpture! Sculpture was solid. You chipped it out of a socking great block of granite. This was something, alrighty, but not that!

But then another thought dawned, a really transformative thought (I could have written about this for my contribution two post back): it's not beautiful in the normally accepted sense. I had to come to terms - for I was by then determined to fit The Unknown Political Prisoner into my Venn diagram labelled Sculpture - with the fact that it had nothing to do with beauty per se. Nothing to do with seeing in the visual sense at all - other than the fact that you had to see it for the brain to register it. So then scrub beauty, scrub the idea that art MUST have to do with beauty, scrub the idea that sculpture has to be something solid, like a gravestone - or bigger - and then.... well, and then, what? Does accepting all those modifications to the boundaries of your mental Venn diagram open the door to something else? Is that one of the obstacles that have prevented you from getting it? Does the work now offer you something that had not occurred to you before? Does it give something by way of compensation for the treasured belief(s) you might have surrendered?

I know what Dicky Bird would have advised. He would have said to read around the subject, the artist or the work - if the latter is big enough, important enough to have had books written on it. Much more chance now, of course, with all the reference materials of the Internet at our disposal. There are those - and sometimes I am one of them - who will see a problem here. The work of art should stand by itself, without explanation, without reference to the fact that the artist's wife had just suffocated their two children or what ever. And so it should, but for those who are of another time or culture, and so not immersed in the power and spontaneity of the artist's sources, who don't know the symbolism, the history, can't see the parallels, or for those who are faced by something new in the history of art, it can help to have notes - such as those on The Waste Land, for example, though they are hardly sufficient, given the extraordinary number of references. Indeed, unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Eliot's references it might be considered essential to do a great deal of reading around the subject - eventually, though not for the first reading(s) I would suggest. Let it sink in first. Let the words and their cadences do their work before looking further afield.

What would Dicky Bird have made of this, I wonder: from The White Threshold by W.S.Graham.

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 white haired 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
Speaks 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.


I know what Dicky Bird would have done. He would have written out a prose translation or equivalent of it. It wouldn't have done him much good, I think. I found it completely incomprehensible first time I encountered it. No strategy unlocked it. Only let it sink in from repeated readings did any good. (You might think that the poetic equivalent of drifting in and out of sleep. I wouldn't feel inclined to argue, but it worked for me - I think!) Whatever. You just have to find your own way in. There's no right way and wrong way. If Graham could have written it more simply, I am sure he would have. Interestingly, when I went to look up the quote, I found these words by Graham:-

The most difficult thing for me to remember is that a poem is made of words and not of the expanding heart, the overflowing soul, or the sensitive observer. A poem is made of words. It is words in a certain order, good or bad by the significance of its addition to life and not to be judged by any other value put upon it by imagining how or why or by what kind of man it was made.

I think Dicky Bird would have felt more comfortable with this from Tom Thumb by RF Langley - though maybe he should not have!

We should accept the obvious facts of physics.
The world is made entirely of particles in
fields of force. Of course. Tell it to Jack. Except it
doesn't seem to be enough tonight. Not because
he’s had his supper and the upper regions are
cerulean, as they have been each evening
since the rain. Nor just because it’s nine PM and
this is when, each evening since we came, the fifty
swifts, as passionately excited as any
particles in a forcefield, are about to end
their vesper flight by escalating with thin shrieks
to such a height that my poor sight won’t see them go.
Though I imagine instantly what it might be
to separate and, sleeping, drift so far beyond
discovery that any flicker which is left
signs with a scribble underneath the galaxy.

If you're still with me, you deserve a medal, but instead I am giving you a challenge: to find something that would not normally be associated with art, poetry or music but which when brought into focus by you begins to work on you in some way that might make it a candidate for one of the art circles in your inner Venn diagram. Which is to say, can you find a piece of found art? It could be a phrase on a corn flake packet, a snatch of conversation overheard in a shop, a mis-shapen potato, a smashed-up car or a workman's tool of some sort. It might be a sequence of sounds recorded on a country walk. (No, why country? Might just as easily be in some town centre.) You get the idea, I'm sure. Something that did not start out as a piece of art, but which, now that you have picked it out and shone your light upon it, begins to act like one. I, for my part, am going to cheat. I already have mine. Two posts ago I posted some pictures from a day spent at Wisley. One of many remarkable interludes from that day was walking among the fruit trees. At one point we sat down for a few moments. A family came by, and one member of it, a girl of - I would guess - about eight years, was pointing to the pears and saying what they suggested to her. (Thinking back to my childhood and climbing ladders to pick the fruit, I could not but be impressed by the fact that all - and I do mean all - of it was within reach, could be picked from the ground, most of it by a child.) This particular child was letting her imagination rip: this pear was an old man's head; another was sand castle. Amnd then this:
Look mum, a honey bubble dripping from a spoon! So we could argue about the word dripping being used of a bubble; maybe she had conflated two images, but not only was the phrase couched as a perfect iambic pentameter, but she spoke it rhythmically and the image was exactly right: the colour, the shape, and the sun imparting to it the appearance of a slight translucence. So it's not a world-beater, but if I come up with a better one, I'll post it for sure.

Stranger than Fiction

Author - Jim Murdoch : Published - fvbooks : pp180

If you enjoyed the author's previous book Living with the Truth - as I did _ you will enjoy this one. I enjoyed this one even more than the previous one. As with that one, Jonathan Payne is the chief protagonist. Living with the Truth was the story of his meeting with the personification of truth. As always with such stories you have to be able to accept the conceit on order to relax and enjoy both the story and the writing.

In many way Stranger than Fiction is a re-run of that first book, for it is again the story of Jonathan Payne's encounters with the figure of Truth. Only this time the story is not confined to humble Earth. Oh dear me, no: this time we have not so much a broader canvas as an endless wall available for the author to expand his grand designs. We have macro-universes - called macro-verses - for example. Our gallant protagonist and Truth may now range far and wide. But the conceit becomes more involved than that: before too long we learn that everywhere he goes and everyone he meets Jonathan Payne has generated himself from his own memory. For example, he remembers an early 70's pub, so that is what they find themselves sitting in when Truth takes him for a drink. It is a conceit that allows Jonathan to interact with people from his past. It allows him, to take another example, to face up to the memory of his mother and his own childish fantasies and to the consequent guilt feelings. You ask a child, he is told, why they did something, I don't know, wet themselves, stole a penny, scribbled on the new wallpaper and they answer if they dare, "Because," because that is all the truth there is. You want to know "Why?" but I don't have the answers you're looking for. Because they never existed. This is your chance to examine the other routes in your life to see if there are any better choices just waiting to be made.

But the conceit does more even than that, for it has yet more to offer both the author and the reader. It allows Murdoch to examine a variety of issues and to put forward various viewpoints. It must be said - and this is perhaps the one down side and my one slight disappointment - that it is not a debate between equals. Truth has all the big guns and the heavy armaments. Jonathan can only muse, something he does quite a lot - and even then his musings are often cut short! I was actually longing for him to win just one argument and so prove for all time that Truth could be false - Oh, all right: "wrong", if you must! - But that, I realise, was expecting too much. Maybe it would have sent the whole macro-verse spinning off course. I don't know; it is likely that only the author could say for sure. That was just one small me carping a bit - the me that instinctively feels it must champion the underdog or Justice will depart from this small universe of ours for ever.

So what are the issues that the author manages to raise? Well, Truth is one, of course. What it is and what it isn't. Xenophobia another. Then there is Reality. As in: Your mother was only as real as you remembered her to be. Belief in God and Relationships both get an airing. Not exactly trivial stuff, this, you will notice.

I am not - as some of you will know - a great film buff, although there was a time when I might have claimed to be one. However, I did very much appreciate the way the author took the presented opportunity to play around with films. This is obviously something that he very much enjoyed doing, and consequently it was enjoyable for this reader, who invariably derives great pleasure from the enthusiasm of a speaker or a writer for his/her subject.

If I was to be asked to pick my favourite scene or passage from this book I think I would choose one from near the end in which Jonathan is taken to a convention of Jonathan Paynes. Here he meets all those other selves from all those other times and universes across the macro-verse. There is a Father Jonathan, a prophet Jonathan, a Jonathan Payne from Earth 334, an android Jonathan Payne, even twin Jonathan Paynes and a Lady Joanna Payne. I found this extremely humerous, but it was humour with a point. And the point? Well, perhaps each reader will come to it differently, but what I did find was that much in this book could be taken in any of a number of ways. It was possible at times to see it as metaphor, parable, maybe allegory. No doubt you could read nothing into it and just enjoy what would then be a rather far-fetched story.

But having finished the book and reflected a bit on the author's two books, I found myself playing with the idea of these being the first in a Jonathan Payne series, a time travel series with a difference. We could have Jonathan visiting his distant ancestors, for example. Okay, I've gone beyond the remit of a reviewer, but I do believe it not impossible to imagine a cult following somewhere down the road one day.

Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa

The untold story : don't forget, you read it here first.

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                                     Cresting the wave
                         was always his way - noted for it - painting
                the dragons of his day -

                                                              Three sheets
              of three-sheet-see-through usugami* fluttering
       in winds that whispered of a truth
unsayable by humankind. It caught the ear
                                            of tides beyond his ken
But Hokusai,
inventive
fanciful
had laid the tracing papers on the beach
off which in past times dragons had been known to pass
                                                    or fish from rocks.

His brush became a choreographer's, notating dance,
yet still continued as an instrument
of calligraphic grace.

The merest thought
that dragons might be out there,
somewhere,
fiery,
fired him up
and filled his head with images -
a plein air painter with no thought
for structure
or of form.

The ichiji Shita-e,*
sheet one - the under sheet: sheet music
for a fugue not yet performed -
                     received
                     the veins and arteries,
                     brains,
                     firebox, flues and dampers,
                     the bones
                     and muscle, sinews,
                     thirty vital organs, claws
                     and tongues of fire
                     straight from his brush.

On this was laid the oversheet,
to take on board the dragon's scales
from brushes charged with Prussian Blue
(the latest hue) and sensual jade.

                        Above the under- and the over-sheet,
the layout sheet, the final sheet, the Shita-e* -
to which, by tracing through,
the sketches were transferred,
then fastened to a board of cherry wood.

Job done: replenishing
the jar to clean the brushes,
dipping
brush tip - hardly
having broken surface tension
                     before a cloud of jade and Prussian blue
                                            extruding from the hairs,
                       swam down,
      round
                     spun
                     whirled
                     formed
                     reformed itself - a perfect replica
                                                a perfect dragon,
clone of,
bone from bone of that which he had visualised
                           conveyed
                           in veins and arteries,
                           brains, firebox, flues and dampers,
                           bones,
                           muscles, sinews, all
                           those vital organs,
                           claws and tongues of fire


Then Hokusai, with great care, carrying
the jar with living, breathing, spitting thing
                                                  down to the water's edge
                                        released it,
                              watched it swim
                    and grow with every stroke.

Back at the block of cherry wood he found
    the dragon faded to the tint and texture of its ground -
          except the claws, except the tongues of living fire,
                more vivid than he'd thought.


                                    Later it was said
                            that over the horizon
                        the dragon lashed its tail against a wave.
                    Riposte was swift: the sea
              unrolled itself
          tore out the trees
      and avalanched across the land.
                    So much went missing...
                    so many and so much...
          The tracing papers for a start:
     layout and individual parts.
Weeks later, with the shita-e* still be missing,
but the cherrywood block found;
       a something magical had happened:
              the wave had gouged the block
                  with its own signature;
                     cut deep and crisp into its cherry pattern,
the portrait of a wave.
The dragon's claws and tongues of fire
remained as spray and spume flakes
                                        cresting the great wave.


*Glossary
Usugami is a transparent paper that will take paint and inks. Its special characteristic is that it remains completely clear and transparent through several thicknesses. This allows sketches and preparatory drawings etc to be laid on top of each other. These are known as Ichiji Shita-e and by superimposing them the artist can build up the desired layout, before tracing it on to the Shita-e, the final design. Hokusai very definitely used this method - there are sheets still extant - though maybe not for The Great Wave off Kanagawa. He used them for complicated compositions involving many figures.( Sorry I couldn't give the names in the original language.)

Wisley

Not photographs as such, just snaps of a day out at Wisley, Gardens belonging to The Royal Horticultural Society.



Two of these outside the entrance. I kind of made myself a bit persona non grata by refering to them as poppy trees. (Busy Lizzies, actually.)

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View looking down from the top of the rockery

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The arid sector in the glasshouse.

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August is Victorian Month at Wisley : A chance to be taught croquet by Victorian gentlemen.

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The House