“She had clung here and looked up and out and it had been as if her whole self had filled with a need to leave here and let herself be absorbed by that endless blue — the blue, the blue, the blue!”
In a comment to my post noting a PNAS paper about rhythm structures, Julie Heyward asked:
Why does this feel a little like saying that a glass of Château Rieussec smells of ripe pineapple and honey because it contains ethyl butyrate and phenylethylic alcohols?
[Not that I've ever had a glass of Château Rieussec or know that they smell of ripe pineapple and honey, much less that it's because of the ethyl butyrate and phenylethylic alcohols – I just read and repeat this stuff ... and I hope you appreciate how long it took me to type ethylyl butyrate and phenylethylic alcohol three times.]
I didn't even know what Château Rieussec was, at the time, though of course I guessed that it was a wine. I've now looked it up, here.
I confess that all wines, and beer for that matter, taste to me like variations on the same sour, unpleasant theme. None of the finer details of aroma and bouquet reach me through the general sense that something unpleasant is rotting in my mouth. Which probably makes me a Philistine, but there you go (though while we're at it, may I point out that the Philistines are victims of a JudaeoChristian smear campaign). Brandy is a different matter ... but, I digress.
I do appreciate Julie's heroism in typing ethyl butyrate and phenylethylic alcohol three times, though I confess that I haven't typed either myself – simply copied and pasted them.
Anyway ... to return to the issue at hand ... Julie has a good point, though not an uncomplicated one.
Many moons ago, as a teenager studying English literature at A-level, I found my natural enjoyment of poetry and drama, in particular, eroded by continual analysis. In the year after I finished that course, I read almost nothing. Later, though, I returned to literature and discovered that the habits of analysis had now internalised and operated as an enriching layer which fed, rather than opposed, my enjoyment. The crucial difference was that I no longer stopped reading T S Eliot to think “hmmm ... Eliot is here echoing the contemporary debates around the meaning of time and the psychology of mind, through reference to Dante and the Vedas...” but, rather, allowed that knowledge (where it existed) to thrum away in my subconscious and generate overtones which enhanced the conscious reading ... or not, if I didn't have that knowledge available.
That distinction is one which I have since applied to every cultural interaction. Added layers of meaning are valuable if they enhance the "reading"; undesirable if they interfere with it.
I've made reference from time to time to habitat theory, particularly as espoused by Jay Appleton and proposed in his The experience of landscape. I find Appleton's analyses, and habitat theory generally, fascinating as an entirely self contained set of ideas separate from my twin loves of walking and art. When I am enjoying either a hike through the Wicklow mountains or a Maggi Hambling sunset painting, I never ever think consciously “aha ... what we have here is a set of three interlocking prospect symbologies...” because to do so would spoil either experience. On the other hand, the subconscious knowledge that such an additional dimension exists, and is being synchronously processed at another level, does add a layer of chromatic complexity to both experiences which increases my enjoyment of them. I don't offer this as a general rule, though; it works for me, but may not work for others. My ex wife, a painter and sculptor of great passion, always refused to read Appleton and was right to do so – because, although she had a rich and complex intellectual life, and would cheerfully argue the intertwining of history and myth in Shakespeare's Richard III, she knew from experience that some arts of it had to be kept away from her creative self if she was to avoid interference of the type which afflicted my A-level English lit course.
Coming back to Bach and Château Rieussec, similar principles apply. As I listen to the Matthaus Passion, I shall spare not one fraction of a second for thoughts of the power law underlying its rhythm structure ... but I can still enjoy that knowledge as a separate delight. It's possible that the knowledge will subconsciously add to my conscious and instinctive enjoyment of the music; it's also possible that it won't; but it certainly will not be allowed onto the stage where it can interfere. If I am ever forced, by politeness, to sip wine (Château Rieussec or otherwise), on the other hand, I shall probably find conscious, centre stage thoughts of ethyl butyrate and phenylethylic alcohol (again copied and pasted, not typed) a useful distraction. Transferring the spirit of the Château Rieussec argument to something I do sensuously enjoy, I have to agree that neither ascorbic nor salicylic acids have any part in my sensations as I consume a mango or a tomato ... although I find the properties of those ingredients interesting at other times, when not lost in the fruits themselves.
In general, then, my reply to Julie's comment is that parallel knowledge can, in the right circumstances and depending on the individual, be a useful amplifier of experience ... but only as long as it doesn't usurp it. The trick is ensuing that each stays in its place and time.
In commenting on Friday's "Acid drop" post, Geoff Powell mentions Aldous Huxley's Doors to perception and Dr C quotes from T S Eliot's The love song of J Alfred Prufrock. Both are curiously appropriate.
At the time of "acid drop" I was in the middle of my A-levels (for non British readers: a two year examination course usually taken from aged 16-18) – specifically, A-level English Literature. Prominent amongst the texts on the course were Huxley's Brave new world (which necessitated reading of other Huxley in general, including The island in particular and therefore, by extension, Doors to perception) and Eliot's poetry (explicitly including Prufrock).
Prufrock affected me deeply; not only in its own right, but in its unifying echoes down the halls of wider literature from Dante to Joyce. The particular phrase quoted by Dr C ("I should have been a pair of ragged claws...") caught in my imagination with especial force; in 1968 and 1969 I worked on a whole series of photomontages which sought to express what those words moved in me. And I have (not surprisingly, within my own psychology, though I am surprised to hear Dr C echoing it) often heard them clattering around my memories of the acid drop.
I had read Huxley's Island and Doors before that night on the beach and, being a teenager, drew from both a romantic view of chemically altered perception. Having a bad trip put an end to that rose tinted romantic view – perhaps unfairly, perhaps equally unrealistically, but certainly and definitively – for a long time. As an adult, I've often considered the issue with an intellectually open mind (and realised that a good trip would have had the opposite effect) but never remotely approached willingness to experiment with it in practice.
Literature never goes away; it's one of those graces which entwine with the roots of being, enriching and nourishing and informing, for life. Part of its ongoing wonder, though, is the fact that it goes on delivering slow burn surprises for ever. Though both Huxley and Eliot have both been linked to the acid drop incident in my mental attic, they have never connected through it to each other – until, courtesy of Geoff and Dr C, now.
I've had a spatter of queries about the title of yesterday's post, "Not trawling but drowning", most of them suspecting that it's a quotation they ought to know.
It's not a quotation (or not so far as I know, anyway; one can never be sure) but a subversion of one: I twisted it from the title of Stevie Smith's most widely known poem.
Not waving but drowning
(Stevie Smith, 1953)Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
To my annual "Hiroshima Day" post on the 6th, Dr C made a comment which deserved to be a post in its own right. I wish that I had said “Nuclear weapons are a sink that drains goodness out of those who have them.”
He also quoted aptly from Auden's "Epitaph to a tyrant" (1940):
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Nice one, Doc.
Dr C also refers to an editorial in Science last year. To save blog readers the necessity for looking it up, the full text is available here (you will need to sign in to read it – if you don't already have a subscription to the site, just ask: it's free).
Rain streams across a hotel window and breaks the street outside into a rippling impressionist geometry.
Rain on a window unfailingly triggers in my bed the recitation of a single stanza from a poem, in a classroom forty nine years ago.
The sick man from his chamber looks
At the twisted brooks;
He can feel the cool
Breath of each little pool;
His fevered brain
Grows calm again,
And he breathes a blessing on the rain.
The poem is Longfellow's How beautiful is the rain! and this is the fourth stanza of eleven.
Curious that an eleven year old should have felt such empathic pull from an image and an idea that meant nothing to him from his own experience ... and continue to feel it as a permanent and consistent association across the next five decades. I would have expected the opening line pairs from stanzas two and three to be the ones that stuck, because they are instantly recognisable – and stanza three ties very specifically to the visual image which I associate the poem:
How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoof
... ... ...
Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
But the mind is its own master, and stanza four is what has stayed with me across the gulf between then and now.
(Possibly the fact that I learnt the poem in the classroom of the monstrous Mrs F has something to do with it. Mrs F was the class teacher from hell – literally, perhaps, to judge by her constant warnings of fire and torment in the afterlife. Maybe I sat in the whiff of sulphur and brimstone, imagining the release of cool rain? But no ... I suspect that this is a fancy constructed well after the event, a poetic rationalisation of the past from a psychologically aware adult future.)
The whole poem, to be honest, has little appeal for me as an adult ... I left it behind about five years after I first heard it ... but that single stanza remains mnemonically wedded to sight of rain flowing down window glass.
If you want the whole Longfellow poem...
Continuing my occasional habit of inflicting childhood poetic memories on innocent readers, here is one which I remember with particular affection. It was introduced to my class by Ian Murray, grade 6 teacher at Elizabeth Grove Primary School in 1964.
Whatever else may have been good or bad about Australian primary education at that time, the teachers I encountered at Elizabeth Grove Primary had a knack for choosing poetry which would arouse my love of the form. There is a direct line (an elephone line, perhaps) of development from poems like this (and these) in my late primary years to my later embracing of Milton's Paradise lost, Dante's Divina commedia, T S Eliot's Four quartets, Muriel Rukayser's Speed of darkness, Elizabeth Browning's Aurora Leigh, Frank Jones' Everything is like fire...
Here you go ... Laura E Richards' Eletelephony
Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant -
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone -
(Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I've got it right.)
Howe'er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee -
(I think I'd better drop the song
Of elephop and telephong!)
It's possible that the last two lines are apocryphal. The version shown at The literature network lacks them. Other on line versions include them, or something like them, though some omit other lines. Ray Girvan would get to the bottom of it and track down the definitive version; so, if I were the respectable academic I pretend to be, would I; but my affection is for the version I remember, so let it stand.
(The spell checker has had a ball with this post, let me tell you.)
In the wake of Shake, rattle and custard came, from my brother a couple of weeks back, recommendation for light hearted verse of an entirely different ilk.
Pieces of intelligence: the existential poetry of Donald H Rumsfeld takes extracts from Rumsfeld's public utterances and presents them in verse form. It was published several years ago, when laughter was the only available defence against the blind man's buff juggernaut of international will to war, but I hadn't seen it until now. The laughter is just as welcome now as then, though, and I recommend it.
The book is divided into sections: "Twelve sonnets", "Lyrical poems", and so on. Don't take them too literally; the sonnets are not sonnets at all, the haiku not really haiku; but they nevertheless (perhaps even as a result) add to the depth of the humour.
Here are some extracts.
§ VI: Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for Saddam. Free verse.
Iraq
It's an enormous country.
You know, it's bigger than Texas,
Or as big, I guess.
I haven't looked lately,
But it is a very big place.Dec. 23,2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Page 73§ VII: Songs of myself.
Rappin' 'Bout My 'Tude
I don't get —
I don't get furious.
No!
I get cool.
I get angry!
But not furious!
Yeah!
True.April 10, 2002, Interview with Martin Kalb
Page 103
- Hart Seely, Pieces of intelligence : the existential poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld. 2003, New York: Free Press. 0743255976.
Two of the "other voices" in The Growlery's left hand column (Jungle igloo and Cabbagefactory) air the delightfully idiosyncratic poems of Martin Brown.
In September this year, Brown published a small book of his poems: Shake, rattle & custard!
It's available from various sources, including most large bookshops and Amazon.
One way and another, it took a while for me to catch up and get a copy, but I have it now and am pleased as punch with it.
It's been travelling around with me in my bag for the past week, "fifty poems to be read, recited, or worn as a hat" as it says on the cover, pulled out and dipped into at frequent odd moments.
Thoroughly recommended.
At the end of last year, just before Christmas, street artist AcerOne paid tribute to a homeless man on his "patch": a human acknowledgement that too few people make.
In today's post, "A bear lived here", he adds another, physical world, memorial ... and records a poem, I'm no con, written by someone for whom he obviously felt great respect, admiration and affection. "It is" (writes AcerOne) " a beautiful example of how Bear viewed the injustices he faced in his everyday life and a perfect reflection of the charming fella I spoke to that day - amusing, thoughtful, intelligent and tragic." Make sure you stay long enough to find it.
There are a lot of amazing people in the world; and a lot of broken ones. The first group are too often missed, the second too often ignored. They can very often be the same people.
Two new poems from Martin Brown caught my fancy this morning – one on each of his blogs:
“Eritrean nationals residing abroad celebrated the 19th anniversary of Independence Day in a colorful manner, according to reports from different parts of the world.
(Shabait.com, 28 May 2010)
So they did; and I shared the celebration with some of them, so far as it goes. But what a shame that the courageous and self sacrificing promise of those long years in resistance has been so little realised in freedom since independence. “Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart”, an Eritrean expatriate friend said to me a few years ago – quoting, of course, a poet caught up in another independence struggle not a million miles from where I am typing this. The poem is one which made a great impression on me when I was younger; later it was one of those studied on my A level English course; but I didn't finally realise how true it is until much later. The poet is caught up in the personal, his love for Maud Gonne, but the personal and the political are not to be untangled; my affection for Eritrea, despite its current darkness, lies in wonder at the resilience and warmth of many Eritrean individuals I know or have known.
Easter, 1916
William Butler YeatsI have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The terrible beauty in Éire brought a terrible civil war ... but, eventually, a modern and humane state, not without its problems but evolving along side the other European liberal democracies. I hope that Eritreans, at home and abroad, will eventually see the fruits, as well as the fact, of independence – and sooner, rather than later.
I haven't posted a landmark poem for a while. As a direct result of coincident conversations both with my two brothers and with Jim Putnam over at TTMF, here is one which enthralled me when I learned it at an Australian primary school in the early 1960s and still calls back a mythical golden childhood time.
I'm not a fan of patriotism, and don't usually go for purple pastoral, but I forgive this one on both counts for its power to call up my own good ghosts.
My Country
Dorothea MacKellar, 1904The love of field and coppice, of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance, brown streams and soft, dim skies –
I know but cannot share it, my love is otherwise.I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror – the wide brown land for me!The stark white ring-barked forests, all tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains, the hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops, and ferns the warm dark soil.Core of my heart, my country! Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us we see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather, and we can bless again
The drumming of an army, the steady soaking rain.Core of my heart, my country! Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine she pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks, watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness that thickens as we gaze.An opal-hearted country, a wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her, you will not understand –
Though earth holds many splendours, wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country my homing thoughts will fly.
Following on from my "Joy of cabbage" post, last month, Martin Brown has not taken up any of my requests but he has targeted another staple of my primary school memories: John Masefield's Sea fever.
Next stop Cargoes? I lack Mr Brown's talent, but I'll have a low-rent stab at the third stanza:
The first and second stanzas, of course, would be much more salubrious ... I can see those glossy, proud "cabbages of Nineveh" and "stately Spanish cabbages" in my minds eye...Over cooked cabbage in a school-dinners kitchen,
Shunted round the plate in the dire lunch hours,
With a backwash of swede mush,
Turnip, gristle,
Gravy, parsnip, and glum small boys.
It's been a while since I posted one of my favourite poetic moments. The appearance on Unreal nature of "The world's greatest tricycle rider" has prompted me to respond with Mulga Bill's bicycle. – like many of my comic poetic memories (Tumba-bloody-rumba, for instance), it is Australian*
Mulga Bill's bicycle
(A.B. "Banjo" Paterson)'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze;
He turned away the good old horse that served him many days;
He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen;
He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine;
And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride,
The grinning shop assistant said, "Excuse me, can you ride?""See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea,
From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me.
I'm good all round at everything as everybody knows,
Although I'm not the one to talk - I hate a man that blows.
But riding is my special gift, my chiefest, sole delight;
Just ask a wild duck can it swim, a wildcat can it fight.
There's nothing clothed in hair or hide, or built of flesh or steel,
There's nothing walks or jumps, or runs, on axle, hoof, or wheel,
But what I'll sit, while hide will hold and girths and straps are tight:
I'll ride this here two-wheeled concern right straight away at sight."'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that sought his own abode,
That perched above Dead Man's Creek, beside the mountain road.
He turned the cycle down the hill and mounted for the fray,
But 'ere he'd gone a dozen yards it bolted clean away.
It left the track, and through the trees, just like a silver steak,
It whistled down the awful slope towards the Dead Man's Creek.It shaved a stump by half an inch, it dodged a big white-box:
The very wallaroos in fright went scrambling up the rocks,
The wombats hiding in their caves dug deeper underground,
As Mulga Bill, as white as chalk, sat tight to every bound.
It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree,
It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be;
And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek
It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dean Man's Creek.'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that slowly swam ashore:
He said, "I've had some narrer shaves and lively rides before;
I've rode a wild bull round a yard to win a five-pound bet,
But this was the most awful ride that I've encountered yet.
I'll give that two-wheeled outlaw best; it's shaken all my nerve
To feel it whistle through the air and plunge and buck and swerve.
It's safe at rest in Dead Man's Creek, we'll leave it lying still;
A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill."
* Private autobiographical note – if my Australian national youngest brother is reading this: I first read, and laughed with, Mulga Bill while you were in antenatal care at the Lyell McEwin hospital, Elizabeth Vale, South Australia ... it therefore reminds me always, and in the best possible way, of you!
I've recently commented on the resurgence of Martin Brown's Jungle Igloo and Cabbage Factory blogs.
The Cabbage Factory, whose bizarre poetic obsession with Brassica oleracea really should be picked up by a publisher or radio producer, has this week delightfully spoofed two poems from long ago school recitations: Wordsworth's Daffodils and Shelley's Ozymandias.
I now eagerly anticipate the turning of Brown's attention to The wreck of the Hesperus... or The rime of the ancient mariner ... or Xanadu ... or...
Two of my "other voices" (column on the left) are poetry blogs by Martin Brown: Jungle igloo and Cabbage factory. You may not have noticed them, as they are infrequently updated and so don't float to the top of the list very often ... but Jungle igloo popped up in the top three this morning.
Clicking on the link to see what was new, I found the new poem "Baldies". As one who is, as time and a half passes by, follicularly challenged to an ever increasing degree, I am delighted to discover what this means...
A warm thought on a cold, snowy and icy morning.
For Unreal Nature:
Fragmentary Blue
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.(Robert Frost)
