Wednesday 29 April 2020

Alchemy

This paperback has been with me for 40 years. I loved it as a teenager and am just as engrossed today.  Wiser by a lifetime?  I guess not, in the final analysis, we discover only ourselves.

Hats off to the chemist’s son who recommended Mann, and detail of Lovis Corinth's self portrait is still the right cover illustration for me.


Tuesday 28 April 2020

and eat no fish


Tom Fleming, memorable as Kent in the 1971 Peter Brook and Paul Scofield production of Lear.  I’m reminded how good he was seeing a portion of the recent production the other night.  A good cast, as I judge and all enthusiasts, BUT, Kent cuts to the soul of the piece, we reduce his part at our peril. We need his age and quality.  Marvellous bloody play


KENT
I do profess to be no less than I seem; to serve
him truly that will put me in trust, to love him
that is honest, to converse with him that is wise
and says little, to fear judgment, to fight when I
cannot choose, and to eat no fish.
LEAR
                               What art thou?
KENT
A very honest-hearted fellow,
and as poor as the king.
LEAR
If thou beest as poor for a subject
as he’s for a king, thou'rt poor enough.
What wouldst thou?
What services canst thou do?
KENT
I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious
tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message
bluntly: that which ordinary men are fit for, I am
qualified in: and the best of me is diligence.
KING LEAR
How old art thou?
KENT
Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor
so old to dote on her for any thing: I have years
on my back forty eight.
LEAR

Follow me…




Tuesday 7 April 2020

Macaroni

Two corona touched poems hitched to video below.  My video chops.  And more here:   YouTube




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Clean hands

Around here, Covid-19 remains at a distance despite cautions growing into the shape of a crisis.  A devil’s advocate piece below didn’t make the film and narration practice linked through above, which in the end included a shot of McG washing his hands rather than my fiddling about with autofocus over the taps at home. Here we wait, follow the daily count, weigh the human cost as best we can. Predictions are only a working out of the problem.

Pilate Washing His Hands, Matthias Stom

Clean hands


The old man believes in legalese: Clean hands,
he says, shows seamless palms to illustrate
a point, in part he means to keep good conscience.
As if he thought, like Pontius Pilate,
washing hands gained distance from his office.
I’d say, sophistry lacks heart.

The stain runs deep below the skin
and will not fade,

                        duty is owed community,
neighbours, parents, it will not do to say:
I do not know, I did not act. 
In truth, I did not want to know. In fact, 
I dare not think about – what would you say? –
the family at large.

In short, he might say: Let them rot.
Humanity. That seething mass,
in all its dirty ways.

Thursday 2 April 2020

Cuckoo



Oh the Cuckoo she’s a pretty bird,
 She singeth as she flies,
She bringeth good tidings,
She telleth no lies.

She sucketh white flowers
For to keep her voice clear,
And the more she singeth cuckoo
The summer draweth near.

Symbols of Transformation


Wm James on the perennial attraction of the cross is echoed in Robert Lowell’s Prayer for the Union Dead -  “he rejoices in man’s lovely, peculiar power to chose life and die.” Lowell would have been familiar with James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.  As the reading runs deeper, sacrifice returns with Jung, seeing the direction of the adult life-energy broadly channelled – canalised - towards rebirth, utilising the unconscious as the ‘creative matrix of the future… establishing a relationship between ego [consciousness] and the unconscious.’ I won’t confound myself offering more.  ‘Nietzsche probably means something of the kind in his poem:

Why hast thou enticed thyself
Into the old serpent’s Paradise?
Why hast thou stolen
Into thyself, thyself?

A sick man now,
Sick of the serpent’s poison;
A captive now
Who drew the hardest lot:
Bent double
Working in thine own pit,
Encaved within thyself,
Burrowing into thyself,
Heavy-handed,
Stiff,
A corpse –
Piled with a hundred burdens,
Loaded to death with thyself,
A knower!
Self-knower!
The wise Zarathustra!
You sought the heaviest burden
And found yourself.’

Frederick Nietzsche


Perhaps this brings Pound’s The Return, to mind. And we might find deeper significance if we bear in mind Christ’s last journey through Jerusalem.  Jung concludes his passage on what it is the hero carries – the burden is himself – noting :  ‘As Gerhart Hauptmann says:  “Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word resound through the common word.