AMAZING GRACE

Pip's Country

2011-12-02T15:13:00.001Z

Sunday dawned bright and cold, just the sort of day I’d beenwanting to visit Pips’s country. For the Kentish marshes in winter are a country none too gay, ifDickens be taken at his word. The memorable passage that opens myfavourite among all the novels of the inimitable Mr. D, describes it thus:

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, asthe river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broadimpression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on amemorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out forcertain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; andthat Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above,were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger,infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the darkflat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds andgates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the lowleaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from whichthe wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growingafraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

- Great Expectations,Chapter 1

Was Pip! And it is in search of Pip that we set out thatday, more particularly of the tiny hamlet of Cooling, where Charles Dickens inhis indefatigable rambles once pitched up, only to find himself in contemplationof no fewer than thirteen infant graves grouped around their parents’melancholy monument. Thus the seed was planted for Pip’s vanished brothers –the wise author, well aware that fact always trumps fiction and must be allowed that privilege, reduced the numberof dead siblings to five – and what more delicious evocation of childhood’sconfusions than this:

As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From thecharacter and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of theAbove," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled andsickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, whichwere arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memoryof five little brothers of mine - who gave up trying to get a living,exceedingly early in that universal struggle - I am indebted for a belief Ireligiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with theirhands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state ofexistence.

- ibid.

The little stone lozenges are still there, much as Dickensdescribes them and as to trousers-pockets, I can testify that such an actionrecommends itself in that blistering sea wind. The little church of St. James,where one easily imagines the infant Pip wedged miserably betweengentle Joe Gargery and the perpetually furious Mrs. Joe (‘On the Rampage, Pip,and off the Rampage, Pip – such is Life!’) (And for all those who share myenthusiasm for wayward punctuation – how about the force of Joe’s capitals! Wewould never hear him half so well without ‘em.)

Why Great Expectations? It’s not as funny as, say, Pickwick, for itshumour is so often tinged with cruelty. Think of the Christmas dinner, wherePip is tormented by his elders, while Joe attempts to console him with everanother spoonful of gravy.

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with amournful presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, "Why is itthat the young are never grateful?" This moral mystery seemed too much forthe company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, "Naterally wicious."Everybody then murmured "True!" and looked at me in a particularlyunpleasant and personal manner.

Joe's station and influence were something feebler (ifpossible) when there was company than when there was none. But he always aidedand comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he always did so atdinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty of gravyto-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at this point, about half a pint.

-op.cit., Chapter 4

We miss in this book the feeble-minded dickensian heroines with theirwinning smiles and heads of bright curls who have their original in theidealised mother to that greatest of all imaginary autobiographers, David Copperfield. Into her place stepsEstella, who is never winning, but always proud, cold and distant, a belle damesans merci whose heart is as bleak and desolate as those Kentish marshes – and she’sonly a child! A genuine child, for she cannot be more than ten or eleven years old whenfirst we make her acquaintance. Yet she has none of the childish gracesthat Dickens gave to his many youthful objects of desire, first among themDavid Copperfield’s Dora, who is nota child but persists in behaving like one to a degree that, to my taste, is atleast as irritating as it is adorable. Dickens had a faible for silly girls, wecan guess that much, and a while back when the world and he were young, a young Miss by the name of Maria Beadnell turned him down. (It seems her fatherbelieved the young Charles would never amount to much…) He carried the torchfor her, and don’t it burn that brightin the eyes of Dora and Clara and little Nell - but Estella’s eyes burn with analtogether different sort of fire. Indeed, Estella’s eyes are to prove identicalto those of a murderess.

‘But her hands were Estella's hands, and her eyes wereEstella's eyes, and if she had reappeared a hundred times I could have beenneither more sure nor less sure that my conviction was the truth.’

- op. cit., Chapter 48

By the time Dickens came to write Great Expectations he had made a train wreck of his life. He hadleft his wife of many years and his numerous children to pursue a very young actresswith whom he had become utterly infatuated. She barely tolerated him. Becareful what you ask for, they say... When the child-wife appears again, in thebrooding pages of his unfinished masterpiece, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, she is now inexplicably unable to command the love of her affianced cousin, despite - or should that be on account of? her girlish charms. What's more, her exaggerated innocence now excites the villainous anti-hero, Mr. Jaspers, to sadistic excesses of violence and lust.

Great Expectationsgives us the darkness. It is Dickens writing as if he’d been interrogated byDostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, and found the answers wanting. There's a story that the twowriters met once, briefly - an unimaginable encounter, is it not? What mightthey have said to one another, the English upstart genius and the Russianvoluptuary monk? Whether this meeting ever took place in the ‘real world’ is amatter for dispute among scholars of such things, but the darkness at the heartof the book is what interests us. Look at Miss Havisham!

‘I saw that everything within my view which ought to bewhite, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded andyellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like thedress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness ofher sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of ayoung woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk toskin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair,representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I hadbeen taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of arich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now,waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. Ishould have cried out, if I could.’

- op. cit., Chapter 8

Hats off, ladies and gentlemen. A round of applause if you please.

The book begins, as we have noted, in a churchyard, wherePip stands shivering amongst the graves of his dead family. This sets the scenefor what may well be the most terrifying opening in all of literature: hisencounter with the escaped convict.

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as aman started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch."Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on hisleg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied roundhis head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamedby stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; wholimped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in hishead as he seized me by the chin.

"O! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded interror. "Pray don't do it, sir."

- op. cit, Chapter 1

The Reader’s heart, too, is in his throat I think.

Pips’s childhood world is a violent one – his sister, Mrs. Joe, assaults him on a daily basis with a large stick known as ‘Tickler’,and what looks like an escape, through his ‘great expectations’, will turn outto be a deceitful trap. And he’s at least as much sinning as sinned against,this Pip. From those who humiliate, trick and torment him he learns snobbery,deceit and cunning. Redemption, when it comes, if it comes, will not be easyfor this boy, this man Pip. No diva-ex-machina with a head of quivering curlswill descend on a cloud of love and glory to rescue him from himself. ‘Tis an honestbook, a truthful book, a book almost entirely devoid of that appealing, and appalling! dickensian cant that we all fall for, and fall for gratefully, greedily, sogreat is the art with which that cant is delivered by the likes of Little Nelland Tiny Tim.

Scrooge sees the error of his ways before it’s too late – just!Pip’s revelation comes a good deal later than that, and I, for one, shall alwayslove him for it. The great rhyming plot unwinds itself like the great rivercreeping across the marshes, and whirls us at last into its vortex along withMagwitch, the convict, and Compeyson, and Pip himself, who nearly, but notquite, drowns. We come up gasping for air, wondering if anything of valueremains in this world at all. No answer is given but sorrow.

St. James' Church, Cooling and the marsh country

Pictures: The-Blacksmith's-Shop, François Bonvin; Pip's Country photographed by Grace Andreacchi; Miss Havisham, by Harry Furness; Tiny Tim, by M.F. Taylor.

Prophet and Loss

2011-07-22T00:59:00.006+01:00

A PROPHET INDEED
Julian Grant’s ‘Prophet and Loss’ astonishes with music of unearthly beauty

reviewed by Grace Andreacchi

We break with tradition to bring you this report from the operatic front line.

On Wednesday I had the far too rare privilege of attending the premiere of a brand new opera by composer Julian Grant. ‘Prophet and Loss’ was commissioned by the Oundle International Festival, and is written to an original libretto by Grant himself. Being already well acquainted with this composer’s very impressive oeuvres, I set out for the picturesque little town in Northhamptonshire with high hopes and great expectations. To say these were surpassed would be to understate the case fundamentally. Like a tsunami, ‘Prophet and Loss’ swept aside everything I had ever heard before. This was music as elemental, as necessary, as great as anything I have ever heard in an opera house.

The plot centres round the character of Nessa Husk, only child and heir of an immensely powerful but ailing tycoon. She loves and fears him, and fails to love her own children, caught up as she is in the constant demands of the Husk Oil Company. An encounter with a waiter (he spills the coffee, then demands her phone number) leads to a series of ever more mysterious messages, accompanied by ethereal music:

'To know you is to trust you
To trust you is to hold you
Do you need to be held?'

Nessa’s unhappiness and her quest for freedom from a life where she ‘cannot breathe’ take us to some very unexpected places, not least a village in the Himalayas. The story offers an answer of sorts, and one that will take your breath away.

During a fascinating talk before the performance, Julian Grant spoke of not being afraid to be ‘obvious’, to go for the big dramatic musical moment – how interesting that when these moments come, while they may be ‘obvious’ as effects, as music they are of supreme subtlety and delicacy. The opera is also deliciously funny, as the spirit world and the everyday, the real and the surreal are interwoven as playfully, as lightly as that light the characters are seeking.

‘How did you find us?’

‘My mobile phone started singing to me…’

Major roles were cast with professional soloists of very high calibre, all of whom gave fully committed performances. Victoria Simmonds, at the heart of the piece as Nessa, gave a full-voiced, emotionally nuanced performance. Edwin Hawkes, as her father, was alternately intimidating and pathetic, and sang with a rich, even tone. Derek Lee Ragin, as the mysterious waiter Naya’il, had both the sweetness of tone and the presence to convince in this unusual role of spiritual mystery man. Particularly moving were the talented young singers Tristan Stocks and Adrian Ward in the roles of the fractured and dysfunctional teenaged sons, while Alison Charlton-West as the 'proxy-mum' brought a very convincing warmth to the proceedings.

The community aspect of this opera brought much delight, as we were treated to a rousing chorus of very small statured shareholders (children of Polebrook and Glapthorn Primary Schools), while the adult chorus brought at least as much verve to their many roles. The orchestra under Alexander Walker negotiated this refined and exciting music with remarkable clarity. The team of director Alistair Boag and designer Rebecca Desmond demonstrated with great ingenuity and skill just how much theatrical magic can be conjured up with two parts paper and string to three parts faith. That the reach of the Oundle Festival sometimes exceeds its grasp can only be commended as a high intention. Credit all round, and I in no way wish to detract from their achievements when I ask – why isn’t this major work to be seen in one of our major opera houses?

Thanks to the Oundle Festival for acting as midwife to this beautiful, magical child. Now somebody please make me Queen of Bavaria so I can build a proper opera house for the further performance of this marvellous opera.

One more performance on Friday 22 July at 7h30. Tickets are available from the Oundle Festival Ticket Hotline 01832 274734
The green and pleasant village of Oundle is only two hours by train or car from London. If you care about opera, go there.

A Little Bit Sacred

2011-04-21T19:00:00.003+01:00

I don’t think I ever seriously considered any other path in life than that of the writer. From as early as I can remember I was fascinated by words, their seemingly magical ability to create an alternate reality. Is there something in me that prefers my own reality to that of the so-called ‘real world’? I know there is.

My approach to poetry is not fundamentally different from my approach to prose – both are for me exercises in self-discipline. I’d say the difference lies in the absolutely concise nature of poetry. It is, if you like, prose distilled, words reduced to the happy few. I think there is more ‘room’ in prose, both literally in the sense of more words on more pages, and figuratively in the sense that a story or a novel has space within it for the ego to expand, the self to demonstrate, expostulate, even show off. I don’t think that works in poetry. When I write a poem I try to leave my self out of it. This has become more and more true for me over many years of struggling to write good poems. I feel the poet must be present as eyes, as ears, as heart, but absent as ego. I don’t like poems that tell me too much about the poet’s inner state. I don’t even like poems that tell me too much about anything. I think the whole art of poetry lies in telling just those few things, it may be even that one thing, that count.

I’ve learned much from a lifetime of reading many great poets, but this ‘less is more’ philosophy is something I learned most of all from the classical Japanese school. At its best Japanese poetry, which, I hasten to add, I only read in translation! achieves this quality of egolessness, of lightness in the sense of not being weighed down by the gravitas of the poet’s perpetual self-consciousness. Basho’s frog is just a frog, his chrysanthemum is just a chrysanthemum – it’s not a poet looking at a frog and remembering all the frogs of his unhappy childhood, nor all the chrysanthemums he sent to his disappointing lover. It’s something to aim at, that kind of purity.

Another important influence for me is classical music, especially the opera. I was practically raised at the ‘Met’ in New York, where my little brother worked for several years as a child singer. At an impossibly early age I was already in love with the melodrama and passion and above all the sensual beauty of opera. Although I’m not a musician, I approach words with a musician’s ear. Be it prose or poetry, it is not right until it ‘sounds’ right, and I will worry a sentence or a line until the rhythm and weight are as perfect as I can make them. English prosody poses particular problems, for our language does not lend itself easily to poetic forms. It is perhaps this very awkwardness that has raised it to the first rank, as English language poets have never been able to fall into the kind of easy answers that plague, for example, several centuries of French verse. I cut my teeth on such Old Masters as Milton, Spenser, and the high Victorians – you really can’t beat Tennyson for a good old-fashioned piece of high-class prosody. This was my meat and drink as a child. Not that I think anyone should attempt to write in that style today- God forbid. But I learned to listen very hard to the sounds of words and the sounds of lines and the whole great ringing music of poetic language from these poets.

Finally I would like to say that the greatest quality of all for a poet is something I’d like to call purity of heart. This is not to be mistaken for mere sincerity – ‘All bad poetry is sincere’, an observation first made by Oscar Wilde, and seconded by every poor soul who’s ever read a stack of poetry submissions. But that is not as much as to say that good poetry is to be insincere. The whole trick of it is to write with that same sincerity that informs the gauche and miserable doggerel of the sincerely untalented, but to do it as beautifully, as gracefully, as magnificently as a bird singing, a wave crashing or a dog biting. I really don’t have time for ‘academic’ poetry, poetry that is just showing off – ‘Look how clever I am!’ Such things are tedious beyond belief. Every time I sit down and try to write a poem, and I use the word ‘try’ advisedly, I feel I am doing something a little bit sacred.

A new poem for Easter, TO CHRIST, THE BRIDEGROOM
This piece first appeared as part of the 'Poet-Speak' series for Magnapoets Magazine.
Photo: Lotus Flower by wasoxygen on flckr.com

Hadewijch of Brabant and The High Palace of Love

2011-01-30T00:00:00.010Z

I was in the small Flemish town of Bruges, it was an afternoon in early December, and the snow was falling fast. Falling on the peaked rooftops and frozen canals, on the narrow streets and bare, solemn trees. At the edge of town I crossed a bridge over an icy waterway, guarded by flocks of swans, oblivious, magnificent. On the other side of the bridge in a field of snow I found the modest low buildings of the Beguinage. There were once thousands of these beguinages all over Flanders, and in France and Germany as well, though they persisted longest in the low countries, perhaps the very lowness of the landscape rendering them less visible to the eyes of disapproving authority. A beguinage was something like a nunnery, and yet it was not quite a nunnery, for the ladies there were free to come and then to go at their own good pleasure. They lived each in her own small house, and kept company with one another in prayer in their own small church. They wore a modest dress of black and white, and they earned their own modest means through their own modest labours. What they did most immodestly was to love God, and some of them have testified to this great love in words.

'For nothing in life contents them – neither their gifts, nor their service, nor consolations, nor all they can do. For inwardly Love draws them so strongly to her, and they feel Love so vast and so incomprehensible, and they feel themselves so small and so inadequate, unable to satisfy Love.’

- Hadewijch, from the Letters

It was in just such a place as this that the 13th century poet and gentle lady Hadewijch lived her life of service to Love, nobody’s sure precisely where, for she vanished with barely a trace into the dark well of history. But it was certainly a place like this one, a Flemish beguinage, and her eyes must have seen many a winter day such as this one, when the silence of holiness is rendered even deeper and lovelier by the white silence of snow. A high palace of love! For not in marble palaces, but in such humble places as these the humble heart dwells in high service to Love. The following poem is from her Strofische Gedichten[original text]:

OF GREAT LOVE IN HIGH THOUGHTS [No. 31]

I.

Of great Love in high thoughts
I long to think, day and night.
She with her terrible might
so opens my heart
I must surrender all to her.
In the high birth of her battles
I sought my true delight
So she took me and threw me into her prison.

II.

I thought I might suffer there without harm
thought myself safe in her embrace
that she would lead me well
down those narrow paths of hers.
But when I sought to rest in her grace
she only assailed me with fresh commands.
This is a wonderful report!
The greater the love, the greater the suffering.

III.

This is a great wonder, beyond understanding
Love’s giving and her taking.
When she gives comfort
the tender fruits tremble on the vine.
I bid and beg of Love
that she open noble hearts
and teach them to sing her song:
the low notes of fear and the heights of hope.

IV.

Comfort and cruelty in one person
that’s the true taste of love.
Were wise Solomon still living
He could not unravel such a high thing.
No sermon can explain it
The song surpasses all notes.
The time I spent going after fishes
Hid in itself its own reward.

V.

Hook and sea, both are long
But not the time, for those who love
thus shun worldly company.
It’s a song of losses and great gains.
Pride counsels me to hold fast
to hold so tightly, I shall capture
a Being beyond all bliss.
This music surpasses all songs.

VI.

The music that surpasses all songs -
I mean: Love in her might.
I say but a little, and yet not enough
for strange hearts, ever cold,
have suffered little for Love’s sake.
They don’t know how Love betrays
her riches only to high and noble hearts
nourishing them at her breast.

VII.

The might of Love is great
above our understanding
whether near or far the same
a peace that destroys all peace
this peace that dwells in love.
Those who make up their minds to follow her
shall find comfort on her breast
beloved in Love’s own lovely love.

VIII.

He who wishes to follow Love’s way
Must regard neither cost nor shame
Nor pain, he must stand to everything
Even her most terrible commands
And render perfect service in every manner
alike in her coming and in her going.
Those who serve Love in faith and truth
Shall be made perfect lovers at last.

- Hadewijch of Brabant, 13th C

translated from the Dutch by Grace Andreacchi

MORE HADEWIJCH

Photo: the Beguinage in Bruges, by Grace Andreacchi

Simple Things - the Poet Eva Strittmatter

2011-01-04T16:35:00.005Z

'I write of the simple things

Birth, death, and the time in between...'

The poet Eva Strittmatter [1930 - 2011] is dead. Her gentle voice, that won her a place as the most read poet in modern Germany, now falls silent. Although she is nearly unknown in the English-speaking world, her poems of 'simple things' are universal in their appeal. She writes of her garden and of the forest, of children who grow up and away, of lovers who enchant and betray. She writes with a melancholy typical of that generation that came of age in the blasted ruin that was postwar Germany, and with an emotional clarity and sense of mystery I find typically feminine, in the best and strongest sense of the word.

MOON-SNOW

Moon-snow lies on the meadows

as from you I go.

We’ve loved one another long now

not just since the last snow.

Yet every time, I come to you,

it’s so:

I don’t know, who I am, or where,

I’m sad and I’m madly happy.

(Part heathen and part saint.)

- Eva Strittmatter, Moon-snow Lies on the Meadows

She lived to be eighty years old, she endured a long and stormy marriage to the writer Erwin Strittmatter, she raised four sons and wrote fourteen books of poetry, as well as several in prose and a few titles for children. Although recognised as a writer by the powers that once were in the DDR, her work in no way betrays her, for you will find nothing in it of that cretinous positivism that passed for 'thinking' in the looking-glass east. She is always true, both to the reader and to herself. Let men argue about politics, the 'simple things' are enough for her.

LOVE

How terrible was the flame

In which together we once burned

In the end an ember remains

And the usual happens, even to us.

That’s not ash, that last trace of fire

Shows our daily work. And how precious

this tiny bit of warmth, I learned

in this worst year

of all my years.

Should another winter like this come

and another such snow fall upon me

Only this warmth can save me

from death. What else

should hold me? What remains of our Love:

We had each other. No grass

will grow over us, no stone

so long as this ember glows.

So long as there’s an ember

there might be fire…

- Eva Strittmatter

Translations from the German are by Grace Andreacchi

Photos: Eva Strittmatter, photographed in front of a mirror by Erwin Strittmatter, 1965, Neues Deutschland; 'Hot Embers' orchids, western Australia

la Madonna di Maggio

2010-05-31T19:35:00.001+01:00

It was on an evening in May, Mary's month, that I stumbled across the little church of San Giovanni Battista, high on a rocky hillside overlooking the Bay of Amalfi. A strange, rather frightening lament echoed inside the empty vault - was somebody crying? Gradually I realised it was the voice of a dove, nesting somewhere in the clefts of the ancient stonework.

'O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs,

let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice;

for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.'

- Song of Solomon 2, 14

Twilight was falling fast, and I could just make out the delicate swirled patterns of the 18th century majolica tiles beneath my feet. I was looking for the Madonna, and I did not have to look far. As is nearly always the case in the south of Italy, hers is the place of honour directly over the altar. She looked down at me from that holy spot, where she waits patiently for all the banished children of Eve who care to visit her. She holds her baby close up to her face, and her eyes are turned towards us to receive our prayers for, like any good mother, she is always listening. I said what I had to say, then turned to leave and found there, on a small table beside the door, the following prayer of astonishing beauty. I don't know who wrote it, but it bears the inscription: In ricordo del restauro della Statua della Madonna di Maggio, a devozione dei fedeli e del parroco don Pio Bozza, Maggio 2010.

Here it is, in both English and the original Italian:

PRAYER TO OUR LADY OF THE MAY

You are entirely beautiful, O Mary.
Beautiful is your head upon you like Carmel.
Your most pure eyes are signs giving faith and hope wherever you turn your gaze.

Beautiful are your merciful ears,
that listen to our cries.
Beautiful your mouth, your tongue and your lips for, like Jesus, you have words of eternal life.

Beautiful your hands, filled with favours and graces to give to us. Beautiful your feet that crush the head of the serpent. Holy your pure breast, for there is the throne and temple of our Saviour.

Precious your most pure blood, from which the Son of God was formed, and made Man. Sweet your heart, O Mary, a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit, your soul, the most perfect picture of God. You are beautiful in conception, beautiful in life, beautiful in death. Truly, you are beautiful, O Mary.

God has given you the beauty of the moon and the splendour of the sun, the loveliness of the rose, the candour of the lily and the purity of the dove.
You are the star of the sea, you are the gate of heaven.
All the universe sings of your beauty, you are praised by the Lord God himself, who sings that you are entirely beautiful.

O Mary, O Mary, in my so great misery I too dare to salute you, Virgin and Mother of God, adorned with spotless beauty.

And Thou, O Mary, through your intercession, make my heart ever spotless, and at the final hour of my life let my soul expire in your arms.
Amen. Thus I hope and thus may it be!

PREGHIERA ALLA MADONNA DI MAGGIO

Tutta bella sei, o Maria.
Bello è il tuo capo, sublime come il Carmelo.
Gli occhi tuoi purissimi sono i segni che danna fiducia e speranza in chi li rivolgi.

Belle le pietose tue orrecchie,
che ascoltano i nostri pianti.
Bella la tua bocca, la tua lingua, le tua labbra, perché, come Gesù, hai parole di vita eterna.

Belle le tue mani. colme di favori e di grazia per dispensarle a noi. Belli i tuoi piedi che schiacciano il capo del serpente. Venerando è il casto tuo seno, perché trono e tempio del nostro Salvatore.

Prezioso è il tuo purissimo sangue, da cui si formò il Figlio di Dio, fatto Uomo. Dolce è il tuo cuore, o Maria, sacrario dello Spirito Santo, e l’anima tua, è il ritratto più espressivo di Dio. Bella tu sei, nella concezione, bella nella vita, bella nella morta. Veramente sei bella, o Maria.

Dio ha ta dato la bellezza della luna e lo splendore del sole, la soavità della rosa, il candore del giglio e la purezza della columba.
Tu sei la stella del mare, tu sei la porta del cielo.
Tutto l’universo canto la tua bellezza, sei lodata dallo stesso Iddio, che tutta bella ti canta.

O Maria, o Maria, in tanta mia miseria ardisco anch’io salutarti Vergine e Madre di Dio, adorna di bellezza immacolata.

E tu, o Maria, con la tua intercessione, fa che sia sempre immocolato il cuore mio, e che nell’ora estrema della mia vita spiri fra la tua braccia l’anima mia.
Amen. Cosi spero e cosi sia!

trans. Grace Andreacchi & Daniel Hadas

Picture: Madonna della Roccie, Filippo Lippi, 1406 - 14697

Semimaru - A Metaphysical Tragedy

2010-05-07T16:15:00.003+01:00

There is not another play in the whole of Noh quite like Semimaru. A highly stylised form of drama that has its origins in 14th century Japan, Noh is a sophisticated affair, something upon which the aspirational samurai class of the day might test their poetical appetites. Zeami, the author of more than fifty plays, is the foremost practitioner, and he brought the art to its pinnacle. The plays typically deal with a problem of karmic or cosmic disorder, only to see it resolved through the intervention of a virtuous spirit. Semimaru is different. Although it outwardly appears to follow the typical set-up for Noh, in fact nothing in this play is what it seems.

What we have here is a pure metaphyscial tragedy, a 'theatre of the mind' that takes place outside space and time. The starting point is a legend - or rather several legends which, as so often in Japan, have become tangled like vines. A blind Prince has been banished to a mountain - this is Semimaru, master of the biwa (Japanese lute), poet and possible guardian of the famous pass at Osaka barrier. The dramatic highpoint of the play is a visit from his beloved sister, Sakagami, who is mad, whose name means both 'upside down hair' and 'spirit of the mountain'. Her brisltling hair is the outward sign of her inward turmoil:

Though born a princess, some deed of evil
From my unknown past in former lives
Causes my mind at times to act deranged.
And in my madness I wander distant ways.
My blueblack hair grows skywards;
Though I stroke it, it will not lie flat.

As one reads on, one becomes ever more aware of the deep strangeness of this play. It is not the Princess, but the world that is upside down:

My hair, rising upward from my body,
Turns white with the touch of stars and frost:
The natural order or upside down?
How amazing that both should be within me!

When she hears the refined notes of the lute she is startled out of her madness, and recognises her brother. Weeping, they fall into one another's arms. For a brief moment time stands still, and brother and sister are reunited, isolated in their love as in some chambre séparée métaphysique, 'twin blossoms on a single bough'. It is this state of togetherness-apart that defines the tragedy. The reunion is only momentary, Sakagami must wander the mountain paths forever, while Semimaru is left alone in his little straw hut to sing his songs of everlasting sorrow.

Hear him call on the Osaka road,

a frightened bird, as darkness falls,

yearning still for her long, black hair.

The last quotation is from the translation by Royall Tyler. All others from the Donald Keene translation.

SONNET FOR SEMIMARU is my own tribute to Brother and Sister.

Pictures: Noh mask for Prince Semimaru; Semimaru, Ando Hiroshige (1797 - 1858)

The Gifts of the Fairies

2010-04-15T12:45:00.001+01:00

Presently the fairies began to bestow their gifts upon the princess. The youngest ordained that she should be the most beautiful person in the world; the next, that she should have the temper of an angel; the third, that she should do everything with wonderful grace; the fourth, that she should dance to perfection; the fifth, that she should sing like a nightingale; and the sixth, that she should play every kind of music with the utmost skill.
- Charles Perrault, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood

An interesting list! This Princess will be well equipped for a theatrical career, should the royalty thing fall through. Everybody knows what happens next, how the bad fairy curses the Princess, and the curse is turned aside by the last fairy, from death to a deep sleep. Like Brünhilde, the Princess must sleep until a Prince arrives who has the power to wake her, 'un chevalier sans peur et sans reproche'. The tale, with its deep overtones in the unconscious, exists in many versions the world over. But I'm interested in that little list...

Is it really enough to sing and dance to perfection, to be good-tempered and beautiful? These admirable accomplishemnts will be of scant use were one to find oneself (let us suppose) washed up on a desert isalnd. As we all do from time to time! What gifts then ought one to covet for one's infant princess? I recall a film in which a very old lady who had suffered very much at the hands of the Nazis was asked - How did you manage to keep your spirit and your heart and even your sense of humour? And she answered: Consider the alternative.

Faith and hope, fortitude and perseverance - hard! So hard. If they weren't hard, why - they wouldn't be virtues at all. For some reason it's hard for us to be good. Were it not so, this sorry world would be a Garden of Eden. Patience too is a virtue. Which reminds me of the Contessa (an old Venetian acquaintance), whose English nanny taught her this:

Patience is a virtue,
Possess it if you can.
It's seldom found in woman
And never found in man.

Back in the USSR! Good and bad fairies fight it out:

Picture: Marie Petipa as the Lilac Fairy and Lyubov Vishnevskaya as an Attendant, 1890

Easter Tidings - The Dream of the Rood

2010-04-01T23:37:00.008+01:00

A man is dreaming of a tree. The tree is covered in gems that shine with an unearthly beauty, but slowly he begins to discern among those gems streams of blood. The tree is bleeding, bleeding from a wound in its side:

Wondrous that victory-beam--and I stained with sins,
with wounds of disgrace. I saw glory's tree
honored with trappings, shining with joys,
decked with gold; gems had
wrapped that forest tree worthily round.
Yet through that gold I clearly perceived
old strife of wretches , when first it began
to bleed on its right side. With sorrows most troubled,
I feared that fair sight. I saw that doom-beacon
turn trappings and hews: sometimes with water wet,
drenched with blood's going; sometimes with jewels decked.

[trans. Jonathan A. Glenn]

This is The Dream of the Rood, arguably the first poem to be written in English, though not in an English that is any longer readily accessible to us. The text comes down to us in a manuscript that dates from the 10th century, but portions of it can be seen engraved on a large stone cross dating from the about the end of the 7th century. The Ruthwell Cross is still standing, eighteen feet high in a quiet corner of rural Scotland, and bears some fragments of the poem in curious runes upon its stony sides. In this ancient poem the tree itself speaks to the dreamer, and tells him how he bore Christ, the King, like a hero on high:

Then saw I mankind's Lord
come with great courage when he would mount on me.
Then dared I not against the Lord's word
bend or break, when I saw earth's
fields shake. All fiends
I could have felled, but I stood fast.
The young hero stripped himself--he, God Almighty--
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows,
bold before many, when he would loose mankind.
I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth,
fall to earth's fields, but had to stand fast.
Rood was I reared. I lifted a mighty King,
Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend.

Dared not to bend! I wish all my dear Readers the perseverance and courage of the Holy Cross on this, the holiest of feasts.

Read my TALITHA, CUMI the story of a young life renewed.

Picture: Crucifix, Unknown Italian Master, 1190s

Slightly Fishy - Mr. Leigh Hunt

2010-03-19T13:08:00.004Z

'I cannot describe to you the despairing sensation of trying to do something for a man who seems incapable or unwilling to do anything further for himself, - at least to the purpose. It is like pulling a man out of a river who directly throws himself in again.' - Byron to John Murray 2 April, 1823

Among the less eminent Victorians we find the quasi-comical figure of Leigh Hunt, poet, essayist, radical publisher, inveterate flirt and impoverished bohemian to the fingertips - he seems to have been a good-hearted sort of man and good company, if you didn't mind his six unruly children destroying the household furnishings. He went to jail for calling the Prince Regent 'a fat Adonis of forty.' Ouch! While a lot of his poetry is not particularly distinguished, some of it continues to delight. He didn't only write 'Jenny Kissed Me', but also a set of remarkably odd sonnets about a fish, a man, and a kind of transmigration of fish soul into man. My own favourite is the fish sonnet, wherein the fish doth answer the man:

Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
For ever stare! O flat and shocking face,
Grimly divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow!

O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth? What particle canst share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?
I sometimes see of ye an actual pair
Go by! linked fin by fin! most odiously.

All three sonnets are HERE.

'Unwet' strikes me as particularly inspired, as does that idea of the 'flat and shocking face,Grimly divided from the breast below'.

Dickens had great fun with Hunt under the guise of 'Harold Skimpole' in Bleak House, and though he later denied he meant any harm, or indeed meant anything Hunt-ish, the damage was done. One has the impresion Hunt's character was simply too ridiculous to resist.

'When we went downstairs, we were presented to Mr. Skimpole, who was standing before the fire telling Richard how fond he used to be, in his school-time, of football. He was a little bright creature with a rather large head, but a delicate face and a sweet voice, and there was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so free from effort and spontaneous and was said with such a captivating gaiety that it was fascinating to hear him talk. Being of a more slender figure than Mr. Jarndyce and having a richer complexion, with browner hair, he looked younger. Indeed, he had more the appearance in all respects of a damaged young man than a well-preserved elderly one. There was an easy negligence in his manner and even in his dress (his hair carelessly disposed, and his neckkerchief loose and flowing, as I have seen artists paint their own portraits) which I could not separate from the idea of a romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of depreciation. It struck me as being not at all like the manner or appearance of a man who had advanced in life by the usual road of years, cares, and experiences.'

Clearly, a hopeless case Mr. Leigh Hunt, a fellow who'd spend your money, seduce your wife, and somehow expect you to see it all from his point of view. But say what you will about him, he did write 'Jenny Kissed Me', and I know of no more perfect little thing of eight lines in the language.

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.

Pictures: Red Tai, Utagawa Kunoyoshi,1797-186; Mr. Skimpole, Mervyn Peake, 1911-1968

International Women's Day - les Dames d'un Certain Age

2010-03-08T13:41:00.003Z

SLIDESHOW OF LOVELY LADIES

Today is 'International Women's Day', and I'd like to seize the moment to remind us all of the tremendous beauty of the feminine, especially that glory that comes to us when we are no longer in the first flush of youth. For, while the beauty of young women is justly celebrated by poets down the ages, it takes a finer sensibility to point up for us the glories of that 'gold oft tried, and ever new'. Here that master of the metaphysical, John Donne, reminds us what it's all about. From a self-confessed 'dame d'un certain age' - thank you, John!

ELEGY IX. THE AUTUMNAL.

by John Donne

NO spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face ;
Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape ;
This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape.
If 'twere a shame to love, here 'twere no shame ;
Affections here take reverence's name.
Were her first years the Golden Age ? that's true,
But now they're gold oft tried, and ever new.
That was her torrid and inflaming time ;
This is her tolerable tropic clime.
Fair eyes ; who asks more heat than comes from hence,
He in a fever wishes pestilence.
Call not these wrinkles, graves ; if graves they were,
They were Love's graves, for else he is nowhere.
Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit,
Vow'd to this trench, like an anachorite,
And here, till hers, which must be his death, come,
He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb.
Here dwells he ; though he sojourn everywhere,
In progress, yet his standing house is here ;
Here, where still evening is, not noon, nor night ;
Where no voluptuousness, yet all delight.
In all her words, unto all hearers fit,
You may at revels, you at council, sit.
This is love's timber ; youth his underwood ;
There he, as wine in June, enrages blood ;
Which then comes seasonablest, when our taste
And appetite to other things is past.
Xerxes' strange Lydian love, the platane tree,
Was loved for age, none being so large as she ;
Or else because, being young, nature did bless
Her youth with age's glory, barrenness.
If we love things long sought, age is a thing
Which we are fifty years in compassing ;
If transitory things, which soon decay,
Age must be loveliest at the latest day.
But name not winter faces, whose skin's slack,
Lank as an unthrift's purse, but a soul's sack ;
Whose eyes seek light within, for all here's shade ;
Whose mouths are holes, rather worn out, than made ;
Whose every tooth to a several place is gone,
To vex their souls at resurrection ;
Name not these living death-heads unto me,
For these, not ancient, but antique be.
I hate extremes ; yet I had rather stay
With tombs than cradles, to wear out a day.
Since such love's motion natural is, may still
My love descend, and journey down the hill,
Not panting after growing beauties ; so
I shall ebb out with them who homeward go.

Photo: Dame Emme Kirkby, singer

Perfect Joy

2010-02-17T15:58:00.003Z

Today begins Lent, a serious time, if not necessarily a sombre one. For those unacquainted with the joys of high seriousness, I would like to recommend a very famous little book (famous among Christians, that is) - it is called The Fioretti or 'Little Flowers of St. Francis' and it was written over six hundred years ago by an obscure Italian friar and companion to Brother Francis, Fra Ugolino. There is so much poetry, humour and delicate wisdom in this little book that, no matter what your personal state of belief or unbelief, you will find yourself delighted by it. There is, for example, the story about the time Brother Juniper cut off a pig's foot to succour a sick brother - that one ends badly! (Hint - the poor pig is very much alive at the time), the story of how this same Brother Juniper kept giving away his clothes to the first beggar he saw, and wandering about town half-naked, much to the consternation of the locals.

And then there is Brother Francis's story about 'perfect joy'. Wherein he explains to Brother Leo that perfect joy is not to be found in what we achieve, but in what we bear, willingly, for love. First he describes a whole slew of incredible achievements – you achieve great holiness, you convert all the heathen, you speak with the tongues of men and angels, you heal the sick and raise the dead. Are any of these perfect joy by any chance? No way, says Francis. And then he imagines a scenario where, exhausted, they arrive at the monastery on a miserable night. The porter refuses, three times, to let them in, every time growing more angry:

"And if later, suffering intensely from hunger and the painful cold, with night falling, we still knock and call, and crying loudly beg them to open for us and let us come in for the love of God, and he grows still more angry and says: 'Those fellows are bold and shameless ruffians. I'll give them what they deserve.' And he comes out with a knotty club, and grasping us by the cowl throws us onto the ground, rolling us in the mud and snow, and beats us with that club so much that he covers our bodies with wounds - if we endure all those evils and insults and blows with joy and patience, reflecting that we must accept and bear the sufferings of the Blessed Christ patiently for love of Him, oh, Brother Leo, write: that is perfect joy"

A POEM FOR ASH WEDNESDAY

Picture: St. Francis of Assisi, Francisco de Zurbarán, 1598-1664

Love on the Heights

2010-01-30T00:00:00.006Z

“I cannot express it, but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning. My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be. And if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger -- I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath -- a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind -- not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again. It is impracticable, and – "

This passage from Wuthering Heights struck me, the very first time I read it, at about eleven years old, as the truth about myself. I don’t know whether ‘everybody’ has such a metaphysical notion, as Cathy suggests. I suspect, from my experience of life, most people think nothing of the sort. But I knew instantly that it was true about me. And that all my (then still very short) life I’d been on the qui vive, looking out for this person who was ‘more myself than I am’. That I’d recognise him instantly, this much I knew for certain. But the years rolled on and he never turned up… And I began to think he never would, that there was a fatal mistake somewhere. Not in my intuition, that was impossible, but in the divine plan. That I was left incomplete, a sort of human Australia, an unfinished project. And then one day... ah, but that is another story.

This is love not as attachment, but as completion. You might call it 'metaphysical love'. We are not little shallow streams, we may love a few people in the course of a lifetime, sincerely and deeply. But only One can be that 'missing piece' that completes us.

"Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half." - Plato, Symposium

A strange book, this Wuthering Heights! A most unusual young lady, the author Emily Brontë! She spent her entire short life in a Yorkshire village, she seems to have had no lovers and scarcely any friends. Indeed, she barely ever crossed the threshhold of that gloomy country parsonage where she was born. Yet this great-souled woman wrote a book so wild and crazy it defies explanation and merely demands to be read. She develops the idea of a metaphysical love that unites two people in a manner absolute.

“So don't talk of our separation again. It is impracticable, and – " says Cathy. And what?

‘She paused, and hid her face in the folds of my gown,’ says narrator Nelly Dean. Because Heathcliff and Cathy are separated, and this separation is the source of all their suffering. But the separation is only apparent. Even death, in the end, only serves to reunite them. Well, many people might think this a lot of romantic nonsense. Nelly Dean certainly does!

"If I can make any sense of your nonsense, miss," I said, "it only goes to convince me that you are ignorant of the duties you undertake in marrying, or else that you are a wicked, unprincipled girl."

Ah! me too, I am a wicked, unprincipled girl. Always have been.

ENJOY a metaphysical love sonnet
READ my own metaphysical love story POETRY AND FEAR
WATCH the classic film of WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Picture: Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in the film Wuthering Heights, 1939

'Life Is Sweet, Brother'

2010-01-05T19:31:00.006Z

“Life is sweet, brother.”

“Do you think so?”

“Think so!—There’s Night and Day,
Brother, both sweet things.
Sun, Moon, and Stars, Brother -
All sweet things -
And there’s the wind on the heath, Brother.
Who would wish to die..."

It was on a golden afternoon in September, when the leaves were just beginning to turn their coats, that I came across this curious inscription on a gravestone in Berlin's Friedhof Dahlem. There were two names on the stone, like this:

Chrisopher Hoffmann

1937 - 1956

Professor Wolf Hoffmann

1898 - 1979

And that was all. No attribution, no explanation offered for these lovely and mysterious English words in a German cemetery. I wondered who the two Hoffmann gentlemen might have been - father and son perhaps? The younger had preceded the elder by many years to the undiscover'd country. And the English given name of 'Christopher' suggested something anglo-saxon or at least anglophile in the family. Perhaps the father had first chosen these words to soften the blow of a son lost.... I noted them down, and over the years sometimes returned to them, and wondered anew - Who might have written them?

In fact they belong to a little known autobiographical novel, Lavengro by the English author George Borrow (1803 - 1881). I like the sound of Signor Borrow - he got into boiling hot water for lampooning the good citizens of his native town, the infamously backwards Norwich. He taught himself several languages, including Romany and Russian, and wandered as far as St. Petersburg and Istanbul before settling down to write his curious books, half novels, half traveller's adventures. His The Bible in Spain is still popular in that country, and his account of a wild journey through Wales, enhanced by his agility in that tricky tongue, is also worth reading for its glimpses of a vanished world. But Lavengro has a peculiar charm all it own. Maybe it's something to do with the gypsies who populate its pages, for gypsies have a way of charming us, as needs must by wastrels and wanderers the world over. George Borrow lived with gypsies, walked the highways and byways with them, opened himself to their language and their wild poetry. The little exchange that first caught my attention continues in a manner rather less satisfactory for a gravestone. Here's a fuller account:

“What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?” said I, as I sat down beside him.

“My opinion of death, brother, is much the same as that in the old song of Pharaoh, which I have heard my grandam sing—

Canna marel o manus chivios andé puv,
Ta rovel pa leste o chavo ta romi.

When a man dies, he is cast into the earth, and his wife and child sorrow over him. If he has neither wife nor child, then his father and mother, I suppose; and if he is quite alone in the world, why, then, he is cast into the earth, and there is an end of the matter.”

“And do you think that is the end of man?”

“There’s an end of him, brother, more’s the pity.”

“Why do you say so?”

“Life is sweet, brother.”

“Do you think so?”

“Think so!—There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”

“I would wish to die—”

“You talk like a gorgio—which is the same as talking like a fool—were you a Rommany Chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed!—A Rommany Chal would wish to live for ever!”

“In sickness, Jasper?”

“There’s the sun and stars, brother.”

“In blindness, Jasper?”

“There’s the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever. Dosta, we’ll now go to the tents and put on the gloves; and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!”

*

I never did find out anything more about the Hoffmann family, may they rest in peace. And whether life be bitter or sweet - that's a question I'll not venture to answer, having had a few fine mouthfuls of both those flavours. But I'm grateful for this delicate piece of writing, that came to me, a gift across worlds and time, once on an afternoon in golden September.

Picture: A Young Girl Raising Her Veil, by Bartolome Esteban Murillo, 1660

I Sing of a Maiden

2009-12-23T21:57:00.004Z

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Blessed New Year to all my Dear Readers!

Under the tree for you this year:
A NEW CHRISTMAS SONNET
THE PRODIGY - A NEW NOVELLA
(AS FREE E-BOOK, ON-LINE, OR PRINT BOOK)

I sing of a maiden
That is makeles;
King of alle kinges
To her son she ches.
He cam also stille
Ther His moder was,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the gras.
He cam also stille
To His moderes bowr,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the flowr.
He cam also stille
Ther His moder lay,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the spray.
Moder and maiden
Was never none but she;
Wel may swich a lady
Godes moder be.

How beautifully this well-known little carol from the 15th century captures the delicate mystery of Christmas. The middle English is not difficult, nonetheless I dare to disagree with the usual translation of 'makeles' as 'matchless' - the German word 'makellos' seems to me a more likely source in this context, for makellos means without any 'Makel' (spot or blemish), it means spotless, immaculate, virgin and pure, it means everything that Mary is.

'He came all so still', and this silence at the heart of holy love was written down one Christmas Day in 1841 by the self-styled 'Scardanelli', aka Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), a German poet unlike any other, and a personal favourite of yours truly. Hölderlin was a genius and a madman, not an ordinary run-of-the-mill artistic madman, but the genuine article. He spent the last tragic decades of his life incarcerated in a tower by a friendly carpenter and his wife, who looked after him as best they could. Meanwhile he continued to write some of the most remarkable poetry in any language, poetry of mystical depth, philosophical complexity and linguistic simplicity that was to set the literary world on fire once he was safely dead. His best friends were the swans that populated the river Neckar below his tower. Perhaps, who knows? they were distant relations to those swans I met often on the darkest days in Berlin, when I too had need of such white-winged and pure-hearted companions. Here, without further ado, is Hölderlin's poem 'Winter':

WINTER

When the green is long gone from the plain
then a whiteness falls in the valley
Yet the day is bright with the sun’s high beams
The Feast glows wide at the city gates.

This is nature’s peace, this silence of the fields
is like to the holiness of men, and here’s
the difference, for nature’s highest self
is shown us here, not in spring’s gentleness.

(trans. Grace Andreacchi)

WINTER

Wenn sich das Laub auf Ebnen weit verloren,
So fällt das Weiß herunter auf die Tale,
Doch glänzend ist der Tag vom hohen Sonnenstrahle,
Es glänzt das Fest den Städten aus den Toren.

Es ist die Ruhe der Natur, des Feldes Schweigen
Ist wie des Menschen Geistigkeit, und höher zeigen
Die Unterschiede sich, daß sich zu hohem Bilde
Sich zeiget die Natur, statt mit des Frühlings Milde.

d. 25 Dezember 1841.
Dero
untertänigster
Scardanelli.

Enjoy THE PRODIGY!

Pictures: Madonna and Child, Domenico Veneziano, 1435-37; Neubrandenburg, Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1817

THE PRODIGY

2009-12-21T19:11:00.001Z

THE PRODIGY is a novella I wrote several years ago, at a time when I was obsessed with the beauty of the male countertenor voice. Ahime! A troubling obsession, about which we need not enter into needless and perhaps distressing detail. The book is now available in several formats (the above link will take you to all of them), and I made this little video in the depths of a snowy night while the world slept around me and Vivaldi's strangely morbid aria echoed again and again inside my overheated head. I think it captures something of the unbearable loveliness that made me write this book in the first place. See what you think!

Careless Love

2009-11-30T18:24:00.002Z

Love, oh, love, oh careless love
Love, oh, love, oh careless love
Love, oh, love, oh careless love
You see what careless love can do.
- traditional

'I'll never cry for you again!' Who hasn't told that sweet, sad little lie to himself? Oh careless love! In Great Expectations, my favourite among the many beautifully crafted novels of Charles Dickens, young Pip experiences just such a moment, rendered with all the delicacy and grace we expect from the Master. In the (almost) equally great film from David Lean (above), the child actors perform with astonishing candour, the dialogue is all Dickens's own, and the match is well-nigh perfect. Pip has fallen under Estella's spell, and Estella is as troublesome a specimen of das Ewigweibliche as you'll find in the whole of world literature, or anywhere else for that matter.

As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella stopped all of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting manner, with her face quite close to mine,—

“Well?”

“Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.

She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.

“Am I pretty?”

“Yes; I think you are very pretty.”

“Am I insulting?”

“Not so much so as you were last time,” said I.

“Not so much so?”

“No.”

She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with such force as she had, when I answered it.

“Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me now?”

“I shall not tell you.”

“Because you are going to tell up stairs. Is that it?”

“No,” said I, “that’s not it.”

“Why don’t you cry again, you little wretch?”

“Because I’ll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose, as false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for her then, and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.

Another fine example of high Victorian passion is this memorable passage from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, The deliciously Byronic Mr. Rochester (mad, bad and quite dangerous to know) is contemplating the idea of separation from Jane when this little exchange takes place:

"Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"

I could risk no sort of answer by this time; my heart was full.

"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near to me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly."

You see what careless love can do? Let that great lady Bessie Smith explain it to you...

Two Hands Clapping

2009-11-25T11:02:00.004Z

We first met almost by accident, in cyberspace - I was looking for an artist to illustrate a book of children’s poems, the artist Alexandra Rozenman was thinking about a collaboration with a writer or poet. The children’s poems were soon put aside in favour of something else – a series of poems directly inspired by the original drawings. There is a quality of strangeness about Alexandra’s work, an ‘otherness’, something surreal, delicate, fleeting that invites fantasy. ‘Every picture tells a story’ the saying goes, and these really do, but the stories are as complex and disturbing as our dreams. Who are the wiry bird-like creatures, tragi-comic in their awkward postures, that inhabit this world? What is that dripping through the ceiling? Sky? Tears? And are those eyes lying on the floor? The poems suggest but don’t dictate: in this book you’re invited, through pictures and poetry, to form your own answers to these questions. Alexandra and I hope you have as much joy along the way as we two have done. What is the sound of two hands clapping? Open this beautiful little book to find out.

ON SALE HERE
A high quality art book printed on thick coated stock

TWO HANDS

Two hands
are better than one
to stroke strike pet and polish
Two have more fun

One sharp smack! and it’s clear
what we wanted to say
A smack like that
flies free through the air
might land
anywhere
light as bird upon tree

What is the sound
of two hands clapping?
Open and see…

Out There - The Poetry of Youth

2009-11-10T15:53:00.006Z

About halfway through Mikael Covey’s Out There an astonishing moment occurs. The young narrator, a boy at that difficult, exciting time of life when the simplicities of childhood have fallen away but are yet to be replaced by the greater, even more exigent simplicities of the adult world, has lost his way in a snowstorm and is in serious danger of freezing to death, ‘frozen in time and space’ in the middle of a Nebraska winter. His rescue comes in a manner that is at once so unlikely and yet so utterly natural that a perfect little apotheosis is created, lifting the book onto a plain of truly spiritual beauty. That one can use such a phrase as ‘spiritual beauty’ in connection with a novel at all is something of a rarity, and should give the reader some idea of the richness hiding inside this deceptively simple tale of sex, drugs and rock and roll in the ‘70’s. The hero, part Holden Caulfield part Jack Kerouac, has just finished high school when the story begins. He sets out with a couple of buddies from his godforsaken home, a small town lost amidst the vast prairies of Nebraska, in search of fun in sunny California. The journey across country is lyrical, memorable:

Then crossing the border into the wild wide-open Montana sky of a million miles of blue and dark green hills and get this, no fences just wild wide-open, no people, animals nothing, not even birds, just nothing for miles and hours and you better not run out of gas because there aint nothing here…
Easy promises of paradise are soon blighted by harsh realities, nothing is ever quite as bright as hope, and the boy may never escape the hateful, mean life he dreads. But how he tries! He tries with drugs, he tries with girls, he even tries with work, and there’s a wonderful bit about the pleasures of life in a seed supply shop. The boy’s a star, with his clear-eyed, compassionate, unflinching gaze turned as effectively on himself as on those around him. The prose is free, lyrical, as wildly beautiful and harsh as the land from which it sprung.

But while I suspect Covey draws somewhat on his own biography - like his hero he hails originally from Georgia but grew up in Nebraska - this is so far from being just another coming of age novel. It cleverly undercuts the boy’s passionate enthusiasm with an older, wiser voice, that speaks with a Buddha-like resignation, looking back on his old self with insight and wit. For it’s also a very funny book sometimes, funny in a way that makes the reader squirm with recognition. But the comedy is there, like the drugs, to relieve the pain, for in this quiet American prairie boy’s life, nothing shall remain in the end but tears.

I was deeply impressed by Covey’s beautiful, symphonic language as well as by the delicate, nuanced truthfulness he brings to his task. This is a memorable book.

On sale HERE and HERE

Andromache Books, 2009
ISBN 978-1-4092-8869-5
Published: July 2009
Pages: 174

Cover Photo by Olivia Bee

TWO BROTHERS

2009-10-19T12:35:00.003+01:00

Open publication

One brother is rich and selfish, the other is poor and noble-hearted. When the poor brother helps a little swallow with a broken leg, he's rewarded in an extraordinary manner. What's growing inside those giant pumpkins anyway...? A tale of brotherly love and hate from ancient Korea. Based on the Pansori tale 'Heungbu and Nolbu', this first appeared in Horizon Review.

Now available as a high quality PRINT BOOK or as a
FREE E BOOK (click above) or on MOBIPOCKET

Or read it right HERE (no flash required)

Happy Poetry Day!

2009-10-09T18:33:00.002+01:00

It seems that Britain is a 'poetry nation' (whatever that may be...), having declared this National Poetry Day, Amazing Grace is determined to make a contribution. Here it is then:

Bolshie Kids and Christian Soldiers

2009-08-03T12:44:00.006+01:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More theatre

The stories of two remarkable young people, Agnes and Lawrence, as told in these classically structured verse dramas, are now published as a beautifully crafted print book by Andromache Books. You can get your copy HERE. Or enjoy the free E book by clicking on the little book.

I AM AMAZED

2009-07-21T12:00:00.004+01:00

Today I am truly amazed at the REVIEW of SCARABOCCHIO, a 'quantum novel' by yours truly, that has appeared in SEIN UND WERDEN. Written by the mysterious and beautiful (judging by her WEBSITE) V. Ulea, author of THE SNAIL and ABOUT ANGELS, ABOUT GOD, ABOUT POETRY, this review is not your usual wham bam thank you ma'am, but a long, thoughtful critical essay that engages with the text on at least as many levels as its author once did in writing it. It would seem that serious literary criticism, along with serious literature, has mostly migrated to the vast and friendly virgin pastures of cyberspace, where there is world enough and time to indulge in such forgotten rituals as thought, philosophy, reflection and in depth analysis. My thanks to the Professor (for she is indeed a Professor at U Penn) for her many illuminating insights, as well as her generosity of spirit.

From A Quantum Fugue of the Lilies: Exploring the Depths of Scarabocchio

A Review by V. Ulea in Sein und Werden

Scarabocchio is a remarkable work by a remarkable writer. This masterful, stunningly imaginative, polyphonic piece is a harmonious unity of thought, imagery, and a unique technique. It's a quantum fugue of shocking philosophies, odd lives and wild experiences woven into historical times, artistic movements, and personal fates. Its richness is inexhaustible, its depths are bottomless. This is a living universe of manmade forms, flourishing and metamorphosing - a genuinely Goethean synthesis of art and nature. One who ventures to embark on the journey along the "mythopoëic sea" should remember that "there is no road back through the woods from knowledge to original innocence". It's a non-Euclidean reading that requires non-Euclidean thinking. As Goethe once said to Eckermann, who expressed his admiration with Wilhelm Meister, "My dear young friend … I will confide to you something which may help you a great deal. My works … are not written for the multitude, but only for individuals who desire something congenial, and whose aims are like my own."

Violins Make Me Nervous

2009-07-07T14:26:00.001+01:00

Something about that sound they make - so like crying but not crying, so like singing but not singing, so like a cat in heat but no it's not a cat in heat either. It's a nervous violin, when it's not a sentimental one, it's sometimes irritating, sometimes of an unearthly beauty. It took mankind thousands of years to bring it to perfection - the violin. Why did we bother?

The Violin - A Little Bit Nervous
Vladimir Mayakovsky

The violin got all worked up, imploring
then suddenly burst into sobs,
so child-like
that the drum couldn't stand it:
"All right, all right, all right!"
But then he got tired,
couldn't wait till the violin ended,
slipped out on the burning Kuznetsky
and took flight.
The orchestra looked on, chilly,
while the violin wept itself out
without reason
or rhyme,
and only somewhere,
a cymbal, silly,
kept clashing:
"What is it,
what's all the racket about?"
And when the helicon,
brass-faced,
sweaty,
hollared:
"Crazy!
Crybaby!
Be still!"
I staggered,
on to my feet getting,
and lumbered over the horror-stuck music stands,
yelling,
"Good God"
why, I myself couldn't tell;
then dashed, my arms round the wooden neck to fling:
"You know what, violin,
we're awfully alike;
I too
always yell,
but can't prove a thing!"
The musicains commented,
contemptuously smiling:
"Look at him-
come to his wooden-bride-
tee-hee!"
But I don't care-
I'm a good guy-
"You know, what, violin,
let's live together,
eh?".

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg

Скрипка и немножко нервно

Скрипка издергалась, упрашивая,
и вдруг разревелась
так по детски,
что барабан не выдержал:
"Хорошо, хорошо, хорошо!"
А сам устал,
не дослушал скрипкиной речи,
шмыгнул на горящий Кузнецкий
и ушел.
Оркестр чужо смотрел, как
выплакивалась скрипка
без слов,
без такта,
и только где-то
глупая тарелка
вылязгивала:
"Что это?"
"Как это?"
А когда геликон -
меднорожий,
потный,
крикнул:
"Дура,
плакса,
вытри!"-
я встал,
шатаясь полез через ноты,
сгибающиеся под ужасом пюпитры,
зачем-то крикнул:
"Боже!"
Бросился на деревянную шею:
"Знаете что, скрипка?
Мы ужасно похожи:
Я вот тоже
ору -
а доказать ничего не умею!"
Музыканты смеются:
"Влип как!
Пришел к деревянной невесте!
Голова!"
А мне - наплевать!
Я - хороший.
"Знаете что, скрипка?
Давайте -
будем жить вместе!
А?"

1914

Jon Rose Plays a Fence (this will make you nervous too)

Read more about the weird beauty of violins in Music for Glass Orchestra

Picture: Blue Violinst, Marc Chagall, 1923/4

The Big Bad Wolf

2009-06-16T16:33:00.015+01:00

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? I am, for one. Nowadays you won't see a wolf in the quiet and civilised countryside of western Europe, but there was a time - oh! not all that long ago either, when the fierce and beautiful creatures had us for lunch. In the more out-of-the-way parts of the world that sort of thing is still sometimes possible. 'The wolf is at the door' we continue to say, when we mean the last extremity, and our folktales are strewn with the remnants of men, women and children 'thrown to the wolves.' Here is a tale from Willa Cather's My Antonia that made my hair stand on end when I first read it as a little girl living in Manhattan, where the only wolves I had to fear were those that roamed the dark forests of my imagination. This tale is told by the old Russian, Pavel. He is one of the sledge drivers at the head of a large wedding party, and they are making their way back to the groom's house on a winter night, when they are attacked by a pack of wolves.

The wolves were bad that winter, and everyone knew it, yet when they heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up and echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming together. There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A black drove came up over the hill behind the wedding party. The wolves ran like streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there were hundreds of them.

Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control-- he was probably very drunk--the horses left the road, the sledge was caught in a clump of trees, and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the snow, and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that followed made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and lashed their horses. The groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest-- all the others carried from six to a dozen people.

Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear; the people who were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost. The little bride hid her face on the groom's shoulder and sobbed. Pavel sat still and watched his horses. The road was clear and white, and the groom's three blacks went like the wind. It was only necessary to be calm and to guide them carefully.

At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked back. 'There are only three sledges left,' he whispered.

'And the wolves?' Pavel asked.

'Enough! Enough for all of us.'

[One after another the many sledges glide off the slippery road and into the jaws of the wolves, until at last there is only one sledge left. Suddenly you realise the actual meaning of that common phrase 'to throw someone to the wolves.']

When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone upon the familiar road. 'They still come?' he asked Peter.

'How many?'

'Twenty, thirty--enough.'

Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel gave Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He called to the groom that they must lighten-- and pointed to the bride. The young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away. In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered exactly how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it before--the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early prayers.

One of our most underrated writers, that consummate stylist Robert Louis Stevenson, has written in his delightful Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes of a wolf who became a local legend.

Wolves, alas, like bandits, seem to flee the traveller's advance; and you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe, and not meet with an adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the frontiers of hope. For this was the land of the ever- memorable BEAST, the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. What a career was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gevaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and 'shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty'; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king's high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender, and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for that. 'Though I could reach from pole to pole,' sang Alexander Pope; the Little Corporal shook Europe; and if all wolves had been as this wolf, they would have changed the history of man. M. Elie Berthet has made him the hero of a novel, which I have read, and do not wish to read again.

No consideration of the wolf is complete without mention of that greatest of all wolf tales, How Saint Francis Tamed the Very Fierce Wolf of Gubbio, and 'Se non è vero, è ben trovato!' The people of the town of Gubbio are being terrorised by 'a fearfully large and fierce wolf which was so rabid with hunger that it devoured not only animals but even human beings.' Saint Francis hears about it, and decides to have a little chat with Brother Wolf. The people beg him not to go, certain that the wolf will devour him as well, but Saint Francis was never the man to turn back once he had got the bit in his teeth. He marches right up to the that wolf's door.

Then, in the sight of many people who had come out and climbed onto places to see this wonderful event, the fierce wolf came running with its mouth open toward St. Francis and his companion.

The Saint made the Sign of the Cross toward it. And the power of God, proceeding as much from himself as from his companion, checked the wolf and made it slow down and close its cruel mouth.

Then, calling to it, St. Francis said: "Come to me, Brother Wolf. In the name of Christ, I order you not to hurt me or anyone."

It is marvelous to relate that as soon as he had made the Sign of the Cross, the wolf closed its terrible jaws and stopped running, and as soon as he gave it that order, it lowered its head and lay down at the Saint's feet, as though it had become a lamb.

Pictures: Le Petit Chaperon Rouge et le Loup, engraving by Gustav Doré,1832-1883, St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, fresco in the Church of San Francesco at Pienza, 14th century

Pen Pusher's Poetry of Place Competition

2009-06-05T13:52:00.011+01:00

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule-
From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE- out of TIME.

- Dreamland, Edgar Allen Poe

Our good friends at Pen Pusher Magazine are running a poetry competition. Poets are invited ro submit 'one original poem about where you live'. I'm not surre exactly where Poe's poem about Dreamland would fit on the poetry map, but I'm sure he'd be a hit at the Latitude Festival, holding his peculiar own with the likes of Mr. Motion and Mr.Armitage. If you'd like to enter, the deadline is 3rd July.
My own contribution: ATLANTIS

Picture: Illustration for Dreamland by Edmund Dulac, 1882-1953

Un Petit Chose ou Trois

2009-05-20T14:06:00.017+01:00

When it all gets to be a bit much (it's all a bit much at times, is it not?) I head for la civilsation, c'est-à-dire la douce et belle France, cher pays de mon enfance imaginaire. This time I'm heading south to Languedoc, land of the misty mountains and crumbling castles, of the troubadours and jongleurs, where the cathedrals resemble fortresses, and Crusader knights once sang for their stern ladies of impossible love.

Non chant per auzel ni per flor
Ni per neu ni per gelada,
Ni neis per freich ni per calor
Ni per reverdir de prada;
Ni per nuill autr'esbaudimen
Non chan ni non fui chantaire,
Mas per midonz en cui m'enten,
Car es del mon la bellaire.

I do not sing for bird nor for flower
nor for snow nor for frost
nor for cold, oh no!, nor for heat
nor for the meadows that turn green again;
no: no other marvel
I sing, or ever did sing,
but my lady, in whom I am well pleased
for she is the most beautiful woman on Earth.
- Raimbaut d'Aurenga ENTIRE TEXT

The same esprit de chevalier breathes from the pages of Alphonse Daudet's childhood memoir, Le Petit Chose, a book that every French schoolchild knows, but that remains largely ignored among the barbarians of the Anglo-Saxon world. It begins like this:

Je suis né le 13 mai 18..., dans une ville du Languedoc où l’on trouve, comme dans toutes les villes du Midi, beaucoup de soleil, pas mal de poussière, un couvent de carmélites et deux ou trois monuments romains.

The young hero, known as 'Daniel Eyssette', passes an idyllic childhood playing at 'Robinson' (as in 'Crusoe') in the large garden of his father's (failing) factory with his loyal parrot. When the family business collapses, they are forced to decamp to the dirt and cold of Lyon, where the young Daniel, small, frightened, badly dressed in an old-fashioned 'blouse', is christened by his schoolmates 'le petit Chose'. In this luminous passage, he says good-bye to the village one last time:

Or ; savez-vous quel est ce quelqu’un de la ville que le petit Chose veut voir avant de partir ?C’est la fabrique, cette fabrique qu’il aimait tant et qu’il a tant pleurée !... c’est le jardin, les ateliers, les grands platanes, tous les amis de son enfance, toutes ses joies du premier jour... Que voulez-vous ?Le cœur de l’homme a de ces faiblesses ; il aime ce qu’il peut, même du bois, même des pierres, même une fabrique... D’ailleurs, l’histoire est là pour vous dire que le vieux Robinson, de retour en Angleterre reprit la mer, et fit je ne sais combien de mille lieues pour revoir son île déserte.

Do you know who this 'somebody of the town' was, that le petit Chose wanted to see before he left? It was the factory, that factory that he'd loved so much, cried for so much... it was the garden, the workshops, the great plane trees, all those friends of his childhood, all his early joys... What can you say? The human heart has its weaknesses; a man loves what he can, even wood, even stones, even a factory... Elsewhere, you can read the story of how the old Robinson, after his return to England took to the sea once more, and travelled I don't know how many thousand leagues to see his desert island once again.

(translation by Grace Andreacchi)

There's a sad and funny surprise in store for le petit Chose, but I won't spoil it for you. Get hold of a copy and read it for yourself. Meanwhile, I'm off to see ma douce France again. So it's all aboard for the Eurostar! 'Oui, je t'aime/ dans la joie ou la douleur...'

Picture: Pauvre Ecolier, Antonio Mancini, 1852-1930

The Art of Storytelling

2009-05-18T13:58:00.002+01:00

Russian-American artist Alexandra Rozenman has a wonderful exhibit opening 4th June in Washington, DC. Alexandra's art is rich and evocative, surreal and mysterious - she leads us into a labyrinthine dream world of dark fairy tales. Alexandra and I are collaborating on a book to be published by Andromache Books next fall, putting stories and poems together to create an eloquent dialogue in two media. A visit to this show is highly recommended! There not many artists working today who combine such fine draughtsmanship with such a strange, dark imagination.
More info HERE

Rainbow Crow

2009-05-11T19:23:00.006+01:00

If you look hard enough at the glossy black feathers of the crow, you can see all the colours of the rainbow shining there. The story goes that, once upon a time, the crow was the prettiest and sweetest-sounding bird of all, but how he came to his present state you may find out HERE. The crow inspired these wonderful pictures by Maginel Wright Enright, sister of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and it's clear the lady has been having a good look at the art of the Japanese print masters. These were done as illustrations to a delightful little tale, BANDIT JIM CROW in TWINKLE AND CHUBBINS - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland by one 'Laura Bancroft' (actually L. Frank Baum of The Wizard of Oz fame).

For my own rivetting crow story see HERE and to hear a podcast click HERE

CROW BRINGS DAYLIGHT

An Eskimo Legend

A long time ago when the world was first born, it was always dark in the north where the Inuit people lived. They thought it was dark all over the world until an old crow told the them about daylight and how he had seen it on his long journeys. The more they heard about daylight, the more the people wanted it.

"We could hunt further and for longer," they said. "We could see the polar bears coming and run before they attack us." The people begged the crow to go and bring them daylight, but he didn't want to. "It's a long way and I'm too old to fly that far," he said. But the people begged until he finally agreed to go.

He flapped his wings and launched into the dark sky, towards the east. He flew for a long time until his wings were tired. He was about to turn back when he saw the dim glow of daylight in the distance. "At last, there is daylight," said the tired crow. As he flew towards the dim light it became brighter and brighter until the whole sky was bright and he could see for miles. The exhausted bird landed in a tree near a village, wanting to rest. It was very cold.

A daughter of the chief came to the nearby river. As she dipped her bucket in the icy water, Crow turned himself into a speck of dust and drifted down onto her fur cloak. When she walked back to her father's snow lodge, she carried him with her. Inside the snow lodge it was warm and bright. The girl took off her cloak and the speck of dust drifted towards the chief's grandson, who was playing on the lodge floor. It floated into the child's ear and he started to cry.

"What's wrong? Why are you crying?" asked the chief, who was sitting at the fire. "Tell him you want to play with a ball of daylight," whispered the dust. The chief wanted his favorite grandson to be happy, and told his daughter to fetch the box of daylight balls. When she opened it for him, he took out a small ball wrapped a string around it and gave it to his grandson. The speck of dust scratched the child's ear again, making him cry.

"What's wrong, child?" asked the chief. "Tell him you want to play outside" whispered Crow. The child did so, and the chief and his daughter took him out into the snow. As soon as they left the snow lodge, the speck of dust turned back into Crow again. He put out his claws, grasped the string on the ball of daylight and flew into the sky, heading west. Finally he reached the land of the Inuit again and when he let go of the string, the ball dropped to the ground and shattered into tiny pieces. Light went into every home and the darkness left the sky.

All the people came from their houses. "We can see for miles! Look how blue the sky is, and the mountains in the distance! We couldn't see them before." They thanked Crow for bringing daylight to their land. He shook his beak. "I could only carry one small ball of daylight, and it'll need to gain its strength from time to time. So you'll only have daylight for half the year." The people said "But we're happy to have daylight for half the year! Before you brought the ball to us it was dark all the time!"

And so that is why, in the land of the Inuit in the far north, it is dark for one half of the year and light the other. The people never forgot it was Crow who brought them the gift of daylight and they take care never to hurt him - in case he decides to take it back.

More Native American legends HERE

There's a fine new literary magazine, FULL OF CROW , well worth your attention.

All pictures: Maginel Wright Enright, Illustrations for Bandit Jim Crow, 1911

Hard Times

2009-04-23T19:21:00.011+01:00

I hear a great deal of moaning about 'hard times' these days, here in Britain and also from the USA. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls - these are not 'hard times' by any decent and reasonable understanding of the word 'hard'. THESE (see below) were hard times. And let us be grateful to God that we do not live in hard times, but in days of comfort and ease, when a cancelled vacation counts as a a 'hardship'.

1 March, Sunday evening [1941]

This morning the milkmaid refused to come by: She’s not allowed to deliver to Jewish houses anymore.

At noon to the bank where instead of the 409 marks of the previous months’ pension, 178 marks were paid in: that’s the new ‘social security tax’ for Jews, 15% of your income for the first three months, January – March all taken off at once. Then after that the butcher explained, from now on he’d have less to give because the deliveries are so bad.

In the afternoon the news that Bulgaria has joined up with the Three Way Pact. So Greece is lost, while Russia watches peaceably from the sidelines, so the way is clear through Turkey right into Egypt, and so it seems Germany will win the war.

In the evening we went to the ‘Pschorrbräu’ but found nothing there to eat without meat coupons, we went to the ‘Monopol’ and found only swedes, so we went to the railway station and found nothing at all, went back to the ‘Monopol’ and ate the swedes. (All this in spring weather and mud.) The minute we got home, the Police came to check on us.

A day of my life in the Third Reich.

Excerpt from the wartime diaries of Victor Klemperer . Translated from the German by Grace Andreacchi
'Die Sprache lügt nicht ' - a film about Klemperer's diaries from Arte

Picture: from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives , the sign says 'Only for Aryans'

Lest We Forget

2009-04-15T13:57:00.009+01:00

One of the freedoms so important to every writer and scholar, to every lover of language and literature, is the use of the library. In the days before the internet, this meant access to the buildings themselves and their treasuries of printed books. This short excerpt from the remarkable wartime diaries of Victor Klemperer , a German Jew and professor of romance languages who somehow managed to survive the Holocaust living inside Germany, gives a rare glimpse into the reality of totalitarian terror for Germans both Jewish and non-Jewish alike.

3 December [1938], Sunday

Today is ‘the Day of German Solidarity’. Jews are forbidden to go outside from twelve noon till eight o’clock. As just around eleven-thirty I went to the postbox and the grocer, I had enormous anxiety. I can’t bear it any longer. Yesterday evening an announcement from the Home Office, the local authorities are now authorised to impose restrictions on the Jews regarding both time and place. Yesterday afternoon at the library, the Book Loan Official, Striege or Striegel, a man of middling position and years, the same man with whom [my friend] Gerstle, at my instigation, left books for me: I should follow him into the back room. Just as a year earlier he showed me the ban from the reading room, now he showed me the ban from the entire library, so - a complete checkmate. But he was different from a year ago. The man was in a state of stunned agitation, I had to calm him down. He kept stroking my hand, he was unable to suppress his tears, he stammered: ‘It’s boiling over inside me…If tomorrow something should happen…’ ‘Why tomorrow?’ ‘Because it’s the Day of German Solidarity… They’re gathering together… One might get hold of them… But not simply kill them… torture, torture, torture… They should first realise what it is they’ve done… If I couldn’t perhaps take my manuscripts to some consulate or other for safe keeping…If I couldn’t get out of here… If, too, I would truly write to him a line or two.’

Translated from the German by Grace Andreacchi

Picture: Professor Dr. Victor Klemperer, October, 1954

Easter Glory

2009-04-12T00:00:00.021+01:00

For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. - 1 Cor. 2:2
My own poem on the theme of RESURRECTION

I wish all my dear Readers the many blessings of Easter. My gift to you, a new translation of the typical German baroque 'shape' poem, Uber den gekreutzigten Jesus, by a lady who has long been a favourite with me: Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg.

On the Crucified Jesus

See the King of Kings hangs there/

sprinkles us all with his blood.

His wounds are the fountain/

flowing with our salvation.

See / he stretches out his hands to catch us all;

How he’s longing to press us to his burning heart.

Yes, he bows his dearest head, greedy for kisses.

His thoughts and his limbs alike poured out
to our salvation.

His side is open /

to show his gracious heart:

If we look with a full mind

we shall see ourselves there.

So many stripes/so many wounds/

we may count on his body/

So many springs of victory and blessing

He longed to create for our souls.
Between heaven and earth

longed to offer himself up

and reconcile us with GOD.

To strengthen us/ he faded away:

Yes, his death/ has given life

to me and all the world.

Jesus Christ! Your death and pain

Live and breathe in my heart again!

- Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg , 1633-1694

(trans Grace Andreacchi)
German text

Picture: Pietà, Giovanni Bellini, c. 1460

Pilate's Wife - Thoughts for Holy Week

2009-04-07T14:12:00.001+01:00

When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him. - Matthew, 27:19

Pilate's Wife to a Roman Lady

by Khalil Gibran

I was walking with my maidens in the groves outside of Jerusalem when I saw Him with a few men and women sitting about Him; and He was speaking to them in a language which I only half understood.

But one needs not a language to perceive a pillar of light or a mountain of crystal. The heart knows what the tongue may never utter and the ears may never hear.

He was speaking to His friends of love and srength. I know He spoke of love because there was melody in His voice; and I know He spoke of strength because there were armies in His gestures. And He was tender, though even my husband could not have spoken with such authority.

When He saw me passing by He stopped speaking for a moment and looked kindly upon me. And I was humbled; and in my soul I knew I had passed by a god.

After that day His image visited my privacy when I would not be visited by man or woman; and His eyes searched my soul when my own eyes were closed. And His voice governs the stillness of my nights.

I am held fast forevermore; and there is peace in my pain, and freedom in my tears.

Beloved friend, you have never seen that man, and you will never see Him.

He is gone beyond our senses, but of all men He is now the nearest to me.

Picture: A mosaic from the Basilica of San Vitale at Ravenna, 6th C.

Annunciation

2009-03-27T12:00:00.005Z

This week we celebrate the beautiful feast of the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel brought the good news to Mary that she was to bear a child. 'That holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God'. Another, infintely more modest announcement, is given here. AMAZING GRACE will be retiring from the weekly blogular grind to work on her novel. I may post the occasional article or short piece as time allows and the spirit moves me, but the regular weekly posts are, at least for the time being, ended. There are many posts here on everything from fairy tales to Christian saints to perverse corners of literary glory, from German poetry to Arabic and Persian beauties, from fox tales and folk tales to intimations of immortalty. So, if you're new to AMAZING GRACE, have a look around. If you're an old friend, stop by from time to time - you never know what you might find here.

I finish with a poem from the great Rainer Maria Rilke. Verkündigung is the German word for 'Annunciation', and that's exactly what this poem is about.

Annunciation

The Angel speaks

You are not closer to God than we

We’re all from Him so far

Yet with such sweet wonder

Your hands blessed are.

So do they ripen, so they shimmer

from the sleeves as by no woman before.

I am the day, I am the dew,

But Thou,

Thou art the Tree.

I'm weary, for the way was long

Forgive me, I forgot

What He, who sits in gold array

as in the sun sent me to say,

You thoughtful one

(great space bewilders me)

You see: I am the beginning

But Thou,

Thou art the Tree.

Wide I spread the arc of my flight

I found myself so strange and far

And now your little house is drowned

in the folds of my great, bright dress.

And yet you’re alone as never before

You don’t see me at all

As if: I’m a breath of wind in the wood

But Thou

Thou art the Tree.

All the angels fear like this

Let one another go:

Never had we such desire

Uncertain yet so great

Perhaps that something happens soon

You only know in dreams

Hail, for thus my soul now sees:

You ready and so ripe.

You, Lady, are the great, high door

that soon shall open wide.

You, most beloved ear to my song

Now I feel: my word is lost

in you as in a wood.

So I came and I fulfilled

A thousand and one dreams

God looked at me; bedazzled me…

But Thou

Thou art the Tree.

- Rainer Maria Rilke (trans Grace Andreacchi)
German text

Picture: The Annunciation [detail], Giovanni Bellini, 1430-1516

Well Met by Moonlight

2009-03-20T12:00:00.001Z

The story is told of the man who is arguably China's favourite poet, Li Po , that he died when, drunk and disorderly in a boat, he reached over to try to catch the moon's reflection in the water - and drowned. I suppose there are worse ways to go, for a poet. His famous poem Drinking Alone with the Moon has been translated so many times, one may take the fascinating exercise and read 32 translations brought together in one place. For those with less time or inclination, here's the always inspired Arthur Waley.

Drinking Alone by Moonlight

A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.

Po Chu'i , never a poet to be outdone in anything, has his own exquisite moments with the bottle. As in this poem, where he thinks of an absent friend,

A Suggestion to My Friend Liu

There's a gleam of green in an old bottle,
There's a stir of red in the quiet stove,
There's a feeling of snow in the dusk outside --
What about a cup of wine inside?

Picture: Ishiyama Moon, from One Hundred Views of the Moon by Yoshitoshi (1839-1892)

Holy and Unholy Drinkers

2009-03-13T12:00:00.014Z

If this your mother knew,
Her heart would surely break in two.

- The Goose Girl (Brothers Grimm)

These are the words spoken by the severed head of the beloved horse Falada to the poor little 'goose girl' in Grimm's heartbreaking tale of the same name. The goose girl is really a princess, but she has been stripped of her identity by an evil maid, who has taken her clothes, her jewels, and even her husband-to-be. But the princess's horse, Falada, is able to talk, so the maid has him killed and his head nailed up over the gate where every day the dispossessed Princess must pass in and out on her way to mind the geese. What was the writer Hans Fallada thinking when he took this as his pen name? Did he wish to see in himself the magical talking horse, who sees through disguises to the truth of other people's pain? Or perhaps to be reminded of his own shame and indignity by the truth-telling horse Falada? The Drinker was Fallada's last published book, and he wrote it a clinic where he had been sent for attempting to murder his estranged wife while in an alcoholic haze.

At last I lay once more on my bed, exhausted, carried away by this crazy fear: Was the end already so close? So quickly? I really hadn’t drunk for very long at all, nor very much at all. Did you become a drinker as fast as all that? Did alcohol destroy a body just like that? No, but I didn’t want to die! I’d always regarded this drinking as just a passing phase; I was fully convinced that I could stop any time I wanted without any damage to myself – and was this now the end of everything?

- from The Drinker (1950), Hans Fallada (trans. Grace Andreacchi)

There is such a wealth of suffering behind those simple, banal words. 'If your mother only knew..!' Fallada was also a drug addict, and eventually married another woman, as sick as himself, and eventually died of it all, as one does, as they all do. What drives a man or a woman to such bouts of terrible self-destruction? There is no answer here, only the quiet chronicle of the downward spiral.

Another such map to the martyred soul can be found in Malcolm Lowry's wildly beautiful novel, Under the Volcano. Famously rejected by numerous publishers for being 'too difficult', it tells of an alcoholic British consul's last hours during the Day of the Dead in a forgotten Mexican town that lies on the slopes of a volcano. The book is holy, funny, perhaps even wholly funny, a comedy of errors that ends in an absurd human tragedy. Lowry too died young(ish) of a 'misadventure' while under the influence.

Happy Skull by Teresa Lucero

And what he wanted then, ah then (he had turned right without looking at the sign and was following the path along the wire fence), what he wanted then, he thought, casting one yearning glance at the plains - and at this moment he could have sworn that a figure, the details of whose dress he did not have time to make out before it departed, but apparently in some kind of mourning, had been standing, head bowed in deepest anguish, near the centre of the public garden - what you want then, Geoffrey Firmin, if only as an antidote against such routine hallucinations, is, why it is, nothing less than to drink; to drink, indeed, all day, just as the clouds once more bid you, and yet not quite; again it is more subtle than this; you do not wish merely to drink, but to drink in a particular place in a particular town.

- from Under the Volcano

A somehwhat different, but equally fine vintage may be tasted in Joseph Roth's last work, The Legend of the Holy Drinker. In this gentle tale, told nearly in the manner of a fairy-story, a drunk who lives on the streets of Paris is given a generous loan of money by a mysterious stranger. He promises to return the money by bringing it to the chapel of Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux at a church in the working class district of Batignolles. One mysterious event seems to lead to another, a whole series of peculiar miracles unfolds, not least his encounter with a pure young girl who calls herself 'Thérèse' and gives herself to him without explanation. Roth's work is little known in the English-speaking world, outside, perhaps, his Radetzsky March, an absurdist novel that chronicles the decline of the Hapsburg Empire through the rise and fall of an unlikely hero. In The Legend of the Holy Drinker Roth makes use of a language of Biblical simplicity. The helplessness and childlike simplicity of the drunk may well remind us all of our own frailty. In her own magnificent autobiographical book The Story of a Soul , Sainte Thérèse struggled with demons every bit as powerful as those that beset these holy drinkers. She would have loved them all with the love of Christ, that surpasseth all understanding.

Among the numberless graces that I have received this year, not the least is an understanding of how far-reaching is the precept of charity. I had never before fathomed these words of Our Lord: 'The second commandment is like to the first: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' I had set myself above all to love God, and it was in loving Him that I discovered the hidden meaning of these other words: 'It is not those who say, Lord, Lord! who enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the Will of My Father.' Jesus revealed me this Will when at the Last Supper He gave His New Commandment in telling His Apostles to love one another as He had loved them. I set myself to find out how He had loved His Apostles; and I saw that it was not for their natural qualities, for they were ignorant men, full of earthly ideas. And yet He calls them His Friends, His Brethren; He desires to see them near Him in the Kingdom of His Father, and in order to admit them to this Kingdom He wills to die on the Cross, saying: 'Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' As I meditated on these Divine words, I saw how imperfect was the love I bore my Sisters in religion. I understood that I did not love them as Our Lord loves them. I know now that true charity consists in bearing all our neighbours' defects—not being surprised at their weakness, but edified at their smallest virtues. Above all I know that charity must not remain shut up in the heart, for 'No man lighteth a candle, and putteth it in a hidden place, nor under a bushel; but upon a candlestick, that they who come in may see the light.'
- from The Story of a Soul, Sainte Thérèse

Pictures: The Goose Girl, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), Happy Skull, Teresa Lucero , photograph of Ste. Thérèse, circa 1890's

No More Cakes and Ale?

2009-03-06T12:00:00.006Z

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

- Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night

Yes, it's that time of year again, Lent is here, and we of the Christian faith are called to sackcloth and repentance. In the spirit of perversity, I think it only right we turn our attention to that school of literature that takes its inspiration from over-indulgence, otherwise known as the pisshead school of poetry. (And prose as well for that matter, though your genuine pisshead has a tendency to burst into versification.) I've no propensity for this sort of thing at all, having been drunk exactly once in my life. That was when a Christian Brother sat me on his knee and made false representations regarding a glass of vodka. He said it was water, and I drank it, and being all of thirteen years old, I fell on my face. Now don't get me wrong, I love a glass of fine wine, make it champagne and I can even manage two, but to be drunk - no. Unladylike and what's more, you risk missing out on some important information vital to your welfare. But the state of intoxication induced by excess, well, that's another thing entirely. Let each name his poison, and this lady names no drug but opera. A vice so costly that, were the population in general to develop a taste for it, we would see a crime wave of unprecedented proportions sweeping through our streets. Hollow-eyed opera addicts would be snatching pocket change from unwary schoolchildren and battering old ladies about the head to support their habit. Mais je divague...

There have been many fine pisshead poets down the ages, and this week I shall serve up a mere introduction, an aperitif.

Mingle, my boy, a little draught for me
In such wise, now, as I shall tell to thee.
First, mark my words, into this goblet run
A little of that old Anacreon.
Now take that slender flagon over there--
'Tis Sapho's own, no better anywhere--
And pour into the glass to give it strength
Just about half your little finger's length.
"There now, my master, surely it will do:"
Nay, boy, not yet; a little Pindar too.
There, there. 'tis full, the glass o'erflows the crown;
Just hand it me and I will drink it down.
Methinks Apollo, should he chance to come
Upon me now, would say, "Just mix me some
Of that same brew I see you tippling there".
Or if the Paphian maid should this way fare
With Eros, her companion, wandering free,
They both would cry, "Ho, Servus, make it three."

- Anacreon (570-488 B.C.)
translated by Samuel Crozier Irving

But while Anacreon sings the praises of wine famously, there is serious doubt he can claim the title of true pisshead poet, for scholarly opinion holds that he could not have written these elegant lyrics while actually drunk. Not so the Welsh bard and pissheaad poet par excellence, Dylan Thomas, for there is serious doubt he was ever completely sober once out of infancy.

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world’s gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
- from Altarwise by Owlight

Hmm, does that sound like the ravings of a sober man? The ecstasy of drunkenness has often been a metaphor, and nowhere more so than in the work of the 13th century Persian poet, Rumi .

It is the rule with drunkards to fall upon each other,

to quarrel, become violent, and make a scene.
The lover is even worse than a drunkard.
I will tell you what love is: to enter a mine of gold.
And what is that gold?

The lover is a king above all kings,
unafraid of death, not at all interested in a golden crown.
The dervish has a pearl concealed under his patched cloak.
Why should he go begging door to door?
Last night that moon came along,
drunk, dropping clothes in the street.
"Get up," I told my heart, "Give the soul a glass of wine.
The moment has come to join the nightingale in the garden,
to taste sugar with the soul-parrot."

I have fallen, with my heart shattered -
where else but on your path? And I
broke your bowl, drunk, my idol, so drunk,
don't let me be harmed, take my hand.
A new rule, a new law has been born:
break all the glasses and fall toward the glassblower.

- trans. Kabir Helminski

Moslems, of course, ought not to drink, but then there's drinking and there's drinking, such as John Keats sings in his Ode to a Nightingale.

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South!
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.

Clearly this is poetical drinking, a highly spiritual affair, and not to be confused with the ordinary kind of pissing about. And though Byron once called him 'pissabed Johnny Keats' he was sorry later when he heard of the poet's early demise.

Who killed John Keats?
I, says the Quarterly
So savage & Tartarly
'Twas one of my feats .'

- attributed to Shelley (letter of Lord Byron to his publisher John Murray)

Byron was known to knock back a fair few himself, and in his cups would terrorize his impressionable young wife, Annabella Milbanke, with his extravagant behaviour. A spot of indoor shooting practice was not unheard of.

I was just beautifying him, don't you know. A thing of beauty, don't you know. Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says. (Produces a greencapped dark lantern and flashes it towards a corner; with carping accent.) Esthetics and cosmetics are for the boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.

- James Joyce, Ulysses , Episode 14

But then, Joyce was an Irishman.

Pictures: Drinking Bacchus, Guido Reni, 1623, Whirling Dervish, Ottoman miniature (detail), Bacchus, Caravaggio (detail), 1596, Illustration from Who Killed Cock Robin, Palmer Cox (1840-1924)

Women and the Hijab

2009-02-27T12:00:00.009Z

Or Why Is That man Shouting at Me?

It was not without some trepidation that I set out on my first ever journey to the Middle East this winter. I’d be visiting Istanbul first, with my husband, and then we’d be undertaking an extensive tour of Syria with our two sons, one of whom has been perfecting his Arabic during a year at the University of Damascus. Due to unforeseen difficulties in obtaining a visa for Syria, I’d be on my own in Istanbul for several days.

Americans are not exactly flavour-of-the-month at the moment in the Islamic world, albeit with extremely good reason, but my own personal beliefs regarding war and peace wouldn’t necessarily shield me from the hostility aimed at the government of the country of my birth. And then there’s the whole issue of the Hijab. To cover or not to cover – that is the question. For many western women I suppose the answer would be self-evident – not to cover. To cover is to submit to oppression, to deny one’s fundamental freedom and equality with men, to betray one’s sisters, longing for the right to feel the wind in their hair. But I wasn’t sure it was all that simple. On the practical level, I wished to benefit from my time in new and fascinating places without the distraction of unwanted attention. A bit of research on travel forums yielded the following highly interesting results: Among western travellers, the men reported back (for both Damascus and Istanbul) no special dress was necessary for women, as plenty of local women wore western dress. But, and here’s where it gets interesting, the women travellers universally recommended that you cover, cover, cover. Long sleeves, long skirts, and yes – a headscarf were advisable ‘if you don’t want to be harassed’. And who does? So, as a matter of sheer practicality, I decided in favour of the Hijab, and also equipped myself with a couple of jilbab, or loose-fitting ankle length dresses from the Whitechapel market, London’s place for all things Asian. These were not ‘bin bags’ but quite attractive and comfortable gowns, not unlike a beach cover-up, that you simply slip over your clothes. I wasn’t sure whether I’d need them, but I liked the idea of having them, just in case.

In the event, I did wear the Hijab, and the jilbab as well, and the experience was an enlightening one in many ways. I did not find it ‘oppressive’, but liberating, and , in some ways, quite seductive. Dressed in this manner I became, in the eyes of my hosts, something I am, namely a respectable woman who is not interested in sex with strangers. Dressed in my ordinary clothes, which are, I can assure you, in no way outrageous by the standards of twenty-first century London, I would’ve been a whore on the make. I was treated with respect and even courtly deference by the men, and with sisterly solidarity by the women everywhere I went. Did they take me for a Muslima? Probably. Was this dishonest on my part? I hope not. The message I wished to give, which was wholly honest and true, was simply this – I am a decent woman.

What is a decent woman? How do we know one when we see one? However far we may have wandered from such Christian ideals as chastity and modesty in the west, the idea of respectability or decency still has some meaning. Dress is a means by which we give out information about ourselves to the world, and the code is different in every society. When you change cultures, you risk giving out the wrong signals about yourself. Add to this the generally low opinion of western women in the Muslim world, and you can see that such misunderstandings are practically inevitable. It’s true that many women, in both Istanbul and Damascus, don’t wear the Hijab, although far more do. Do these women suffer harassment? I’ve no idea, but I suspect to some extent they do, although not nearly to the same degree that a foreign woman, and especially a foreign woman travelling alone, would do. It’s also safe to assume that local women are familiar with nuances of dress that are beyond the visitor’s ken. Exactly which types of western dress are appropriate and when and where – it can get pretty complicated. The unwritten rules are always the hardest to learn and the easiest to break.

But above and beyond the practical side of the matter, I’m a bit puzzled by the glib assumption in the west that the Hijab is an instrument of oppression. I felt no compunction about wearing it – ‘It’s only a scarf!’ I said to my husband, to my sons, as they looked on, baffled and bemused. We seem to have forgotten that, as little as fifty years ago in our own culture, no respectable person, man or woman, was seen in the street without a hat . It was not unusual for women to veil themselves in the west, particularly women of high caste, or women in mourning, or, significantly, women travellers. A last vestige of this practice can still be seen in the persistence of the bridal veil, nowadays often worn as the bizarrely incongruous accessory to a dress that leaves the bride’s shoulders and bosom bare. In the last fifty years our dress code has changed so radically that it’s difficult to tell, on a Saturday night in London, who are the streetwalkers and who the innocent suburban girls in town for a night of fun. Only the deadness in their eyes gives it away, their clothes certainly don’t.

Now as a prelude to my journey I did more than check a few travel forums. I read the Qur’an , and read it carefully and seriously, and what I found there surprised me very much. I found nothing that oppressed or demeaned women, or relegated them to second status. I found much that was beautiful, respectful, and admirable. The Hijab, or act of covering, is described as obedience to God [S33:36], as modesty (to protect women from molestation) [S33:59], as purity of heart for both men and women [S33:53], as Shield: ‘Allah, Most High, is Heaven, is Ha'yeii (Bashful), Sit'teer (Shielder). He loves Haya' (Bashfulness) and Sitr (Shielding; Covering).’ The Hijab is righteousness, the Hijab is belief, it is the natural ‘bashfulness’ of women, and the ‘gheerah’ or natural dignity of the woman who does not wish to excite sexual interest inappropriately. These are beautiful virtues that take us very far from the mores of the secular west. However, they intersect closely with those of an earlier Christian tradition, which, while practically abandoned in Europe, still has some currency in the United States. St. Paul tells us: ‘In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array. But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.’ [1Timothy, 2, 9-10] Well, it’s hard to argue with good works, and handsome is as handsome does is an old but sound adage. St. Paul does spoil things a bit by going on to admonish us to ‘learn silence with all subjection’, and then to bring up that old business about Eve and the serpent, a convenient stick always. Still, while I’ve no intention of keeping silent so long as I’ve got something useful to say, I do rather suspect we’ve thrown the baby out with the proverbial bathwater on this one, that traditionally gender-specific virtues such as modesty and chastity have gone largely missing in our brave new world, and we are the poorer for that. There is an argument to be made that a woman has a right to her honour and dignity, to the beauty of her person as a private and sacred thing, to her sexuality and power over men as something serious to be taken seriously and used wisely in the service of God, not bartered in the marketplace. I’ve not space here to make the argument at length, but I’d ask the reader to entertain the possibility that such virtues, which have existed in most cultures and at most times, may not be intrinsically oppressive but rather enlightened and enlightening.

Whether you agree with any of this or not, you can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about a piece of cloth on a woman’s head. Why does it matter so much to so many people? Isn’t it a woman’s own business what she chooses to wear? Why is it always men kicking up a fuss about what we have or haven't got on, and never, ever the other way round? In Turkey women are not permitted to enter public buildings if they’re wearing a headscarf (a policy currently under review). This cuts off the education of all those girls who choose to wear one, and make no mistake, many do choose to do so, sometimes for the reasons outlined above, sometimes for other reasons which may include an identification with political Islam, an adherence to a tradition with which they are comfortable, and no doubt many others, as subtle and manifold as the complexities of the human heart and the individual’s intersection with society. In France too, the doctrine of so-called laïcité has been interpreted to mean that girls and women are not to wear the Hijab in public buildings, including schools. All this can seem manifestly unfair to one brought up in the American tradition of ‘freedom of religion’, where the Amish children attend school in the quaint garb of yesteryear without raising a murmur. Meanwhile, women from the streets of Iran to the classrooms of Anatolia to the bainlieue of Paris and the airport queues of London are fighting for the right to wear the Hijab or the right to take the damn thing off.

At the heart of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow lies the dilemma of the Hijab. The plot centres around a writer who has come to a remote town to investigate reports of numerous suicides among the so-called ‘headscarf girls’, high-school girls who are killing themselves under pressure from the authorities to remove their headscarves. He puts the following speech into the mouth of one such girl. ‘If a lot of girls in our situation are thinking about suicide, you could say it has to do with wanting to control our own bodies. That’s what suicide offers girls who’ve been duped into giving up their virginity, and it’s the same for virgins who are married off to men they don’t want. For girls like that, a suicide wish is a wish for innocence and purity.’ (trans. Maureen Freely). Now, there are real problems for women living in Islamic cultures, there are evil traditions of oppression and domination, false and murderous notions of honour, a whole catalogue of horrors, sometimes justified, however unjustifiably, in the name of religion. But I don’t think we can just ignore the voice of that girl. We ought to listen, and try to understand what she is telling us. Salma Yaqoob, a British-born Muslim and political activist, has spoken eloquently of the ‘woman’s right to choose’. She sees the banning of the Hijab, rightly, as racism and xenophobia in the west, and insists that both banning and enforcement are equally oppressive, as both deprive a woman of the right to choose for herself what she will wear. [Salma Yaqoob,‘Women and the Hijab’, If you doubt the racism and xenophobia, just try a little experiment - put on a headscarf and go for a walk in London. I sometimes wear one, just to keep my hair dry – it rains a lot in London, not generally a steady downpour but more of a persistent drizzle that soaks gradually into your clothes and hair, and a headscarf makes sense. The Queen often wears one, for example. And more than once I’ve had strange men shout insults at me such as ‘Go back where you came from!’ or ‘OOOOHH I can see your HAIR!’ and so on. There you are, men shouting at you again. In one part of the world they shout at you because you’re not wearing a headscarf and in another part of the world they shout at you because you are. Can’t win.

I spent a few days in Istanbul and a couple of weeks travelling in Syria – this hardly makes me an expert. But I discovered something by wearing the Hijab than I could not have discovered in any other way. When I had it on, I was exactly the same person as I was when I didn’t have it on. I was just as intelligent, just as curious, just as funny, just as observant, just as critical, just as everything, just the same! I see women in Hijab differently now. I’ve tumbled to their secret. They’re just like the rest of us.

This article first appeared in Her Circle Ezine.

Pictures: Hejaab by Please! Don't Smile cc on flickr.com, Whitechapel Market by Cactusbones cc on flickr.com, la Donna Velata, Raffaello Sanzio 1516, Saturday Night Fever by banoootah-qtr cc on flickr. com, Virgin Annunciate, Antonello da Messina 1476, Two Women by Indigo Goat cc on flickr. com, Audrey Hepburn in a headscarf circa 1960's.

In Praise of Censorship

2009-02-20T12:00:00.006Z

The Home Office Got It Right

As writers we are all concerned with freedom of speech. Whenever that freedom seems threatened by government control of any kind, and particularly when censorship is political in nature, we rightly become very, very uncomfortable. When the views being censored are generally considered to be abhorrent, we trot out the old chestnut about ‘defending to the death your right to say it’. As if it were that simple.

It’s not. People who spread lies and slander, people who seek to stir up hatred against particular groups are dangerous. If lies are repeated often enough, especially lies that appeal to some of our commonplace doubts, fears and prejudices, those lies can become accepted as truths by far too many people. The consequences can be catastrophic. Anyone who doubts this should make a study of the Nazi propaganda from throughout the 1930’s.

Civilisation needs to be protected from the corruption of lies. No society can permit complete ‘freedom of speech’, as most of us acknowledge when we accept limits, for example, to the pornographer’s ‘right’ to exploit children. The thorny question is this – Who is to decide the limits of that freedom? The answer is, We are.

In East Germany at the time of ‘die Wende’, the tremendous upheavals that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, a slogan was heard again and again on the streets, it was painted on homemade signs, it became the unanswerable answer to tyranny. ‘Wir sind das Volk’. We are the people. We, the people of a democracy, are the ones who determine for ourselves what is and is not acceptable as civilised discourse. In Britain today the government of ‘we the people’ has decided correctly. The Dutch Dr. Goebbels can go back home and stay there.

Picture: Nazi Propaganda Poster, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive

Away with the Fairies

2009-02-13T12:00:00.016Z

What is it about fairies? Have you ever lost yourself in a wood at twilight when the mist is rising and the owls are calling and the moon begins to shine, have you ever paused, confused, in a dark glade and caught, out of the corner of your eye, something tiny moving in the grass, something bright and quick and lovely, have you ever heard a song in your dreams that goes something like this - Come hither, come hither, come hither.... Fairies are real. As real as dreams, as real as old tales, as real as wildflowers, as rain-spangled cobwebs , as childhood. In the English-speaking world our oldest and strangest tales are known as 'fairy tales', whether or not they actually have any fairies in them. Shakespeare demonstrably believed in fairies, as did J.M. Barrie, who taught us how important that belief can be. The eminent Victorian Andrew Lang devoted most of his life to pursuing them down the mossy lanes. Walter de la Mare seems to have been best friends with them, insofar as this is allowed to mortal man. His Come Hither is a poetry anthology that might have been compiled by the little folk themselves, so bright and strange are its timeless contents.

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?
Give them me.
No.
Give them me. Give them me.
No.
Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.
- Harold Munro

How well I remember the delicious shiver that passed down my back when I held in my childish hands William Allingham's terrifying poem The Fairies :

Up the airy mountain

Down the rushy glen,

We daren't go a-hunting,

For fear of little men...

Yeats tells us that fairies are 'fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost.' And Milton gives us a singular glimpse of one Sabrina, a water nymph, at the delicate busines of her toilette.

Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber - dropping hair;
Listen for dear honour`s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save!

And what of today's fairies? Have they retreated altogether, far away from our world which is too much with us? Why no, they are here among us, if you will only take the trouble to look for them. As always, they are not found in the bright markets, but in those quiet and crepuscular places where unusual things begin to happen. One such place is the Cabinet des Fées , and anyone with a serious interest in fairy things should get hold of a copy toute de suite. So many voices call like sirens from its pages, I cannot name them all, but consider, for example, these lines from Sonya Taaffe's Bonny Fisher Boy,:

For its glint, I would not kneel in the waves
that idle around my ankles like fingers lightly
closed; I would not pillow my cheek on cobbled
shingle and sand for the mussel-black drip
of his hair; even for his eyes, luminous
as the colors the abyss makes for itself
when the farthest sun has been flattened to dark...

He seems a fit companion to Milton's amber-dropping Sabrina. In Brambles by Amanda Downum we have a sudden, vivid encounter with a fairy woman at the edge of a wood: Thorns snag her wine-dark velvet cloak, tangle in russet curls. Her eyes widen as eye approach... And what is one to make of Patricia Russo's haunting little fantasia Cinder Road : The shoes looked the same as I remembered, felt the same, smooth and shiny as glass, but as I went to draw the first one on, I saw that my feet were not the same; they had decided to change. The story invites you in, making the unreal real and the impossible utterly plausible.

Another corner where the fairies live on is Goblin Fruit , a journal devoted exclusively to poetry. There are many fine poets at work here, but Caitlyn Paxon captured my heart with her strange lament She Asks for Dresses:

Bring me a sea dress
Deep blue like my eyes
Grasping, dark, drowning waters,
Tempest tossed, full of the cries
Of dying sailors
And their mourning wives,
Dripping pearls like tears,
Sand coated in lies.

Again the sea, and death, and something indefinable but distinctly unheimlich that sends a delicate shiver down your spine. One of the strengths of this material is the way it transcends the everyday, giving us access to the whole rich heritage of myth and legend, that otherworldliness that haunts our collective memory and invokes in equal parts childhood and dreaming.

Another author whose work I enjoy is Theodora Goss . Her delicious tour de force Sleeping with Bears manages to be somehow both very funny and quite scary at the same time, no small trick. Here's a little excerpt from her poem The Bear's Daughter:

She dreams of the south. Wandering through the silent castle,
Where snow has covered the parapets, and the windows
Are covered with frost, like panes of isinglass,
She dreams of pomegranates and olive trees.

But to be the bear's daughter is to be a daughter, as well,
Of the north. To have forgotten a time before
The tips of her fingers were blue, before her veins
Were blue like rivers flowing through fields of ice.

And for those who enjoy a good yarn, I'd also like to mention the wildly entertaining Chronicles of T'ville . It's an anthology from as unlikely a place as fairyland, i.e. Queensland, Australia, it's free to download and it features a multitude of talented voices ready and willing to take you up the airy mountain and down that rushy glen.

For my own poem about fairies and lovers see HERE.
For a Valentine's Day treat see SACRED HEARTS.

And this is my own modern fairy tale THE GOLDEN DOLPHINS , the strange and wonderful tale of the beautiful Mélusine, who lives with a band of thieves deep beneath the streets of Paris, until the day she encounters a golden dolphin...

Pictures: All illustrations are by Edmund Dulac.

Sein und Werden - Paw Prints

2009-02-06T12:00:00.005Z

My copy of SEIN UND WERDEN'S winter print edition came sliding out of its envelope to reveal a fetching cat woman, gently licking her lovely manicured paw. It is bound with a pink silk ribbon and printed on thick, deliciously tactile rag paper, it is enticing, gently seductive, a pretty pet. Inside - a selection of short fiction, poetry and images all devoted to the 'philias and fetishes' theme. If you purchase a copy of this magazine, and I urge you to do so, yours will have its own unique cover. But if that isn't enough to tempt you, read on...

Things begin with a bang courtesy of Jennifer Chesler's The Strap-on Nurse. This is deliciously horrible, dirty writing. It captures perfectly with very few words the peculiar nausée that lurks on the dark side of sexual experience. This first piece serves as a kind of trope, for the issue is riddled with secret structures (and strictures) - things fold and unfold, double back upon themselves, we meet them coming and we meet them going, the teeth, the feet, the paws, the men in white coats, the Herr Doktors, the tangled instruments musical and otherwise. My own Judy Rosenberg Papers (pace Johannes Rosenberg ) makes use of the diary format and the hospital/asylum setting. The hospital reappears in The Tangential Thoughts of Dr. Filth by Pablo Vision , a delirious, surreal, subliminal text that comes with its own 'dissection' at the back of the book, like those 'answer keys' you may remember from school workbooks. Meanwhile the 'filth' is picked up and carried (smeared?) in the mysterious, slightly blurred images by N. Ayad of limbs half-buried in mud and leaves, and by Juliet Cook in her succint poem Purple Speculum, which is also rife with mysterious animal imagery:

Beak, beak, beak until I am tizzy with new imprints.
My ruffled underside. My plucked spine. My peeled skin
a browning apple dumpling under your spoon.

Cook has a way with foody stuff - her Older Woman Fantasy begins with the image of 'a fresh custard-filled donut' and urges ASK ME ABOUT/OUR ICE CREAM SOCIAL LOBOTOMY! The Q & A format is put to good use by Roberta Lawson in The Temple and the Fortress, a free-floating, surreal meditation on love and loss, women and monkeys... I found this piece oddly moving. Or should that be moving oddly?

I'd like to give special mention to Nick Jackson's Anton's Discovery. This is a beautifully written story, with a strange and powerful mood all its own. A young boy's encounter with a dead bird leads him into a labyrinth of discovery, to sex, power, hatred, maybe even love. The dreadful sister is unforgettable. Also fine is The Theory of Amazement by Richard J. Polney, a well-structured piece in which a self-disgusted, self-styled 'Ganymede' to an impossibly aged King Lear wanders across a war-torn landscape and muses on death, destruction and ennui.

SEIN UND WERDEN is going from strength to strength, and editor Rachel Kendall is tending a very special garden among those many new plots that are flourishing outside the mainstream. Her garden is a strange one, lit with a hellish light, and playful for all that, in the way that dangerous animals can be playful. But find out for yourself.

The Print Issue of the Philias and Fetishes edition of SEIN UND WERDEN can be purchased HERE
Biographies for all contributors to the print issue are HERE
My review of the Philias and Fetishes on-line edition is HERE

Pictures: Catwoman from Sci-Fi Desktop.org , Photo of donut by Uberculture cc on flickr.com

Sein und Werden - curiouser and curiouser

2009-01-30T12:00:00.004Z

'Here's a curious thing,' begins editor Rachel Kendall's short-and-sweet introduction to the winter issue of SEIN UND WERDEN. Curiosity is indeed aroused as the assembled talents turn their attention to the peculiar and compelling world of 'philias and fetishes'. Leave your prejudices, your fears, your everyday sanities behind you and prepare to say, with young Alice 'Goodbye, feet!'. The writers here telescope in on a variety of strange and compelling behaviours, each of which becomes a window onto some dark corner of desire. In Boys Flying Like Bees , a revelatory essay on the language of Guy Daveport, W.C. Bamberger gives us the following snippet from one of Davenport's letters:

Jacques Lacan was, as far as I can tell, quite mad, but he has the only true theory about fetishes. They are 'le petit autre', true signifiers of the beloved. Freud, who had no compassion, saw them as perverse. . . . He would have taken candy from a child.

Sein und Werden is already well-known on the literary scene for its self-declared mission as 'a literary magazine of experimental prose, poetry and artwork that seeks to merge and modernise the ideas behind Expressionism, Surrealism and Existentialism'. That's a lot of -isms, and the litany conjures up much of the best in european writing, particularly of the entre deux guerres. One can safely assume that the German title is referencing innovators from Nietzsche to Kafka, with slight, continental bows for everyone from Maigritte to les Six. This new issue explores that interesting place where desire becomes absurdity, attaching itself to obscure objects, a process that can lead to anything from death to laughter, not excluding even death by laughter.

To begin with the on-line contents: Certainly B. Drew Collier's piece Evidence of On-line Lalophilia is laugh-out-loud funny, taking us to those strange places on the net that have you wondering, Did somebody really just say that? Tell me somebody didn't just say that... Also funny, The Other Suitcase by Jonathan Woods, wherein a suitcase contaning Kafka's lost pornographic stories, said to have fallen into the hands of one 'Waffen SS Gruppenführer Grass' (pace Herr Günter?) is the beloved chimera of the haplessly condemned protagonist. At the other extreme are pieces that explore the terrifying implications of seriously deranged desire, i.e. the chilling Dead Boys Don't Tell by Alan Kelly, and my own poem Messalina's Monkey. Also interesting is that moment of tenderness evoked by the gratification of desire - this especially well done in poems by the so-genannte 'Bambi Barker' Oral Addiction and 'Bendi Barrett' in the delicately nuanced rarely naked: an exploration. (Are all these alliterative B's for real?) At the end of desire lies tristesse, rendered palpable in Tyler Millisaw's Schlesisches Tor , set in a bleakly beautiful Berlin overground station, where a couple wait, suspended in time, as an old man shuffles past 'carrying two groceries sacks full of empty beer bottles that knock together like bells as he shuffles, their echoing swallowed by the storm...' I also want to mention Loise Nortie's Letters, especially the last, Letter to a Young Agalmataphiliac which is at once vivid, sad, horrible... It reminded me of the young Oskar Kokoschka, who, having been dumped by Alma Mahler , had a life-size doll made to resemble her in every respect, and so carried on...

The print edition features entirely separate content, and each copy of the Philias and Fetishes' issue comes with a unique cover, making it an instant collector's item and objet du désir. My own contribution, The Judy Rosenberg Papers, takes the form of a series of diary entries penned by the sister of notorious violinist Dr. Johannes Rosenberg, whose work has been well chronicled by the brilliant musician Jon Rose . Further contributions are by Allen Ashley, N Ayad, Tantra Bensko, Jennifer Chesler, B Drew Collier, Juliet Cook, Phil Doran, Adele C Geraghty, Mark Howard Jones, Nick Jackson, Roberta Lawson, David McLean, Richard J Polney, Joseph Reich, Candice Rice, Willie Smith, Pablo Vision, Christian Ward, Elizabeth Weber and you can order a copy HERE .

Interview with editor Rachel Kendall.
Excerpt from The Blush by Rachel Kendall
My review of the Philias and fetishes Print Edition is HERE

Pictures: Tags by Rachel Kendall (used with permission), Girl with Doll by Oskar Kokoschka, 1921-22.

The Year of the Ox

2009-01-26T13:53:00.005Z

Riding the Bull Home

Mounting the bull, slowly I return homeward.
The voice of my flute intones through the evening.
Measuring with hand-beats the pulsating harmony,
I direct the endless rhythm.
Whoever hears this melody will join me.

From Ten Bulls or Herding the Ox by Kakuan (12th C) in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones

A Happy New Year to all!

Picture: Illustration by Tomikichiro Tokuriki based on the illustrations of Kakuan

The Angel Slept - Holocaust Memorial Day

2009-01-23T12:00:00.012Z

'I came home from work and looked for my sister, but she was no longer there. My father and I and my brother and mother cried for days.

I thought: why shouldn't my little sister live? My little sister was seven years old when she went away in the children's roundup. My little sister was a beautiful little girl. She had beautiful blond hair. It is a pity that I no longer have a picture of my little sister. All the pictures of my father and mother were taken away.'

- Werner Galnik, age twelve, writing in 1947 about his experience of the Riga Ghetto

THE GUARDIAN ANGEL by Rose Ausländer

Prayer strips don’t

protect

In the Garden of Olives

the Guardian Angel is sleeping

all day

all night

Behind the frontier of blood

the buried names are

blooming

'No one should say, he knew nothing of the horrors...What was going on in the concentration camps, everyone knew it, unless you were willfully deaf and blind.' - Werner Bergengruen

THE LAST EPIPHANY by Werner Bergengruen

I took this country to my heart
I sent messenger after messenger
I came in so many guises
Not once did you recognise me.

At night I knocked on your door, a white-faced Jew
A refugee, hunted down, in torn shoes.
You called the authorities, tipped off the spies
And thought, well done, all in the service of God.

I came as an old lady, trembling, weak

In my mind, screaming in fear.
You spoke of the future generations
And only my ashes were set free.

An orphan boy from the eastern plains
I fell at your feet, begging for bread.
But you feared the future repercussions

Shrugged your shoulders and murdered me.

I came as a prisoner, as a forced labourer

Displaced, sold, torn to bits with the whip.
You turned your eyes from the dishevelled slave.
Now I come as judge. Now do you recognise me?

Holocaust Memorial Day is 27th January.

Light a candle in sacred memory of the Dead.

Translations from the German are by Grace Andreacchi.

More poetry from the Holocaust by Nelly Sachs
Silent Heroes remembers the 'good Germans'.

Picture: Jewish children before the war, from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives

INAUGURAL HAIKU

2009-01-20T18:44:00.003Z

What if I just

don’t want to

Fear is

good for you

To see where fear can take you try THIS

Picture: Punishment of the Levites (detail), Fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Rome by Sandro Botticelli, 1481-82

CLEAROUT SALE poems and stories by Mark Edwards

2009-01-16T12:00:00.021Z

One of the joys of my occasional work as an editor is coming across something wonderful that I most likely would otherwise have missed. This was the case with Mark Edwards's beguiling work CLEAROUT SALE. I know nothing of Scotland, (I've never so much as set foot in the place), and if you'd asked me to read a book of poems and stories set among the denizens of Aberdeen my reaction would have been 'No, thank you.' But as an editor I read whatever comes my way that looks promising, without too much regard to my personal prejudices, I hope. And as soon as I began to read this I began to love it.

Mark Edwards writes in the language of Aberdeen - lilting, ironic, obscene, hilarious - but you don't have to know Aberdeen to know what he's talking about. His poetry is stark, beautiful, sometimes deliciously funny, as in the poet's mantra yer all shite, and sometimes plaintive and touching, as in the delicate ghost. With a few sparse words he can conjure up a world, a state of mind, a human soul in all its complexity.

ghost

had he lived
she would've called him John
a name like a blank canvas
leaving him free to weave his own thread
through the same grey cloth

a child’s voice calling for help
in the miaow of a cat
the squalling of gulls

she is seen going to the shops
she is talked about behind her back
she touches things with a hand
that wont let go its tremor

small quick steps on the path
he runs but she can never catch up
the cruellest trick
she has learned not to move

Then there are the stories, some of which had me smiling from ear to ear, while others made me think for a long time, the way a good picture does. Many of them are about young people, and some of my favourites are about children. A family holiday, a small boy's anticipation, fulfilment and disappointment, the inscrutable world of grown-ups, the adventure of travel - Holiday begins like this:

We're going on holiday, mam said.

We'd never been on holiday before. Some of the kids at school had been on holiday and had to tell the class about it. Kerry Fraser said she’d been to the Isle of Eigg for Easter and everybody laughed. I was quite excited. Now I’d have something to tell the class.

The boy's voice is so clear, so very much his own... will the holiday be a good one? You so much want it to be, for this disarming wide-eyed lad, but I won't give it away. In these stories people drink too much, get into fights, fall in love, or at least think about it...and it all happens in a manner so graceful and natural you don't ever see it being done.

Another favourite of mine is the delicious The Pinnacle of Experience. It's the morning after the night before, and our luckless hero is not quite sure where to turn for comfort.

He took off his jacket and spread it on the parkbench. He sat on it, looked across the playing fields. It was a misty, cold afternoon. There was hardly anybody about. Just one or two folk walking their dogs. It was a Saturday. But it felt like a Sunday. He sipped from a can of orange lucozade. It tasted sweeter and more orangey than he could ever remember. It was staying down so far but he was burping a lot.

I love the economy of that 'But it felt like a Sunday'. And I love the way the story pans out, with a secretive tenderness that catches you by surprise. Let yourself be surprised by Mark Edwards. His slim book will stay with you when noisier pleasures have long been forgotten.

CLEAROUT SALE is available now from ANDROMACHE BOOKS.

Interview with Mark Edwards HERE

Picture: View from Scotstown © by Pamela Adam

AGNES - A Wise and Foolish Virgin

2009-01-09T12:00:00.007Z

Read my verse drama AGNES, A MARTYR PLAY , first published DAPPLED THINGS, a magazine of 'Ideas, Art and Faith'.

I first became interested in the story of St. Agnes when I was about twelve years old, the age at which she died. Was it really possible for such a young girl to stand up to the terror of violence, the shame of sexual humiliation and the entire authority of the adult world - and triumph? I thought then, and I think now, that it is not only possible, it is wonderful. My own young life was turbulent and painful in the extreme, I was left to fend for myself against adults who were every bit as terrifying as those who tormented the child Agnes. If she can do it, so can I, that was my thought. Agnes chose to die rather than deny her love for Christ, her 'true bridegroom'. She was dragged to a brothel to be raped, but an angel appeared to protect her. Her story is told by no less a writer than St. Ambrose, who also wrote a beautiful hymn in her honour.(Scroll down for a NEW translation of Agnes beatae virginis.)

A more elaborate version of the story, and the one that caught my attention as a child, can be found in the 13th century Golden Legend. From as early as the fourth century Agnes has been held in the highest favour by the Church, and her name features among the canonical holy virgins who are called upon during the Mass. In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ speaks of ten virgins 'which took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom.' Five of them were wise, he tells us, but five of them were foolish. Agnes, whose wisdom was certainly foolishness in the eyes of the world, was nonetheless to be counted among the wise, for when her bridegroom came knocking she was standing at attention, her lamp burning in her hand. In this age of ours, when virginity is considered more a disgrace than an honour, and chastity is often a jest, I like to remember this wise young virgin, who was not afraid to appear a fool for Christ.

Was there room for a wound in that small body? And she who had no room for the blow of the steel had that wherewith to conquer the steel. But maidens of that age are unable to bear even the angry looks of parents, and are wont to cry at the pricks of a needle as though they were wounds. She was fearless under the cruel hands of the executioners, she was unmoved by the heavy weight of the creaking chains, offering her whole body to the sword of the raging soldier, as yet ignorant of death, but ready for it. Or if she were unwillingly hurried to the altars, she was ready to stretch forth her hands to Christ at the sacrificial fires, and at the sacrilegious altars themselves, to make the sign of the Lord the Conqueror, or again to place her neck and both her hands in the iron bands, but no band could enclose such slender limbs.
-St. Ambrose, de Virginibus

A church was built around the site of her grave on the via Nomentana in Rome, and is known today as Sant'Agnese fuori le mura (St. Agnes outside the walls). Agnes was easily associated with the lamb, due to the coincidence of her name which resembles the Latin word 'agnus'. I know of no prettier custom than that which takes place at this church on the feast of St. Agnes when two lambs, specially reared by the Trappist monks of Tre Fontane, are brought to the church. A procession is made up of young girls in white dresses and veils, and carabinieri in their blue and red uniforms, who bear the lambs aloft on their shoulders. The lambs are crowned with red and white roses, and carried in specially decorated baskets to the altar, where they are blessed. They are presented to the Pope, then brought to the Benedictine Sisters of St. Caecilia in Trastevere, where they will be reared until Holy Thursday, when they are shorn. The wool made from the fleece of these lambs is then woven into the pallia, the stoles which are given to newly appointed Archbishops. So this child's strength in weakness is passed on, and the great Princes of the Church are reminded of who it is that will be first in the kingdom of heaven.

The Eve of St. Agnes is a time when girls may hope to see a vision of their true love, for Agnes is the special protectress of girls. John Keats wrote a poem about it, and so did Tennyson. Prudentius, in his Peristephanon , devotes an entire chapter to her story. But it is perhaps the great Ambrose who captures something of the little lady herself, before all the hoo-ha about mirrors and secret lovers and so on had attached itself to her small but significant person.

HYMN TO ST. AGNES

Today is the feast

of Agnes the blessed virgin

When, made holy in her own blood,

She gave herself to heaven.

Old enough for martyrdom

Though not yet old enough to marry,

You’d think her on her way to the wedding

As they lead her out with smiling face.

In place of the wedding torch

The fires of infamous gods;

She says, ‘Such torches are not meant

For the brides of Christ.’

‘This fire extinguishes faith,

This flame steals away light,

Here, strike me here! and put out that evil fire

With my own flowing blood.’

Magnificent as they strike her,

She draws close her robe

One bent knee seeks the ground

In modesty she falls gently down.

Glory be to you, Jesus

Born of the Virgin

With the Father and the loving Spirit

In all eternity.

-Ambrose of Milan

(trans. Grace Andreacchi and Daniel Hadas)

AGNES, A MARTYR PLAY by Grace Andreacchi

Pictures: Photograph of Sofi by Carito on flickr.com (used with permission), Saint Agnes by José de Ribera, 1641, Mosaic of St. Agnes from the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč, Croatia, 6th c., Mosaic of St. Agnes from the Church of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura, Rome, 7th c., The Martyrdom of St. Agnes (detail), Jacopo Tintoretto, 1518-1594

NATIVITY

2008-12-25T00:00:00.004Z

by John Donne (1572-16310

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov'd imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod's jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith's eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.

I wish all my dear Readers a merry and blessed Christmas and a very Happy New Year! 'Amazing Grace' will enjoy a holiday until 9th January. Enjoy yours too.

For some fun and spooky holiday reading visit me here.

Picture: Mystic Nativity, Sandro Botticelli,c. 1500-01

SNOW by Orhan Pamuk

2008-12-19T12:00:00.003Z

I love the writing of Orhan Pamuk and I’m not afraid to say so, even if he did win the Nobel Prize. I suppose, by some strange twist in the fabric of fate, somebody with real genius has to win it once, and that somebody is Pamuk. How he ever managed to convince the Swedes that he’s the people’s choice I’ve no idea – perhaps it had something to do with ‘insulting Turkishness’, the alleged crime for which he was nearly jailed, and I’m thinking of casting a few aspersions in the direction of Ankara myself, just to see if it would work for me... Be that as it may, while his books are now bought in large numbers, I find it hard to believe they’ll ever be read in large numbers – another thing entirely, and they do appear on the remainder tables alongside the humbler offerings of mere mortals. Just the other day I picked up another copy of Istanbul: Memories and the City for a mere song, the first having been loved to death like the Velveteen Rabbit.

Snow is the kind of dense, literary novel that reminds you why you ever wanted to be a writer in the first place. At the same time, it’s the kind of book you bury yourself in, dreaming, eyes wide open, of the snow-filled streets of Kars far off in the remote mountains of Anatolia, of the poet hero’s lonely room in the mysterious Snow Palace Hotel (could anyplace ever really be called the Snow Palace Hotel? But this book boasts an abundant and wildly improbable poetical nomenclatura - the New Life Pastry Shop, the Beer Hall of Joy...), and of the haunting face of the impossibly beautiful Ipek, dressed for death in her black velvet gown. The plot is slight, shifting, a will-o-the-wisp, a deadly game and it runs backwards as well as forwards, enfolding disaster in loops like video tape. And then there is ‘the place where God does not exist’ - both the symbolic heart of the book, and, in a grand architectural coup, the key to the mystery.

On the surface a narrative about a poet who goes off to find a girl he once loved, using as his cover the intention to write a newspaper report about the epidemic of suicides among the ‘headscarf girls’, Snow gradually reveals itself to the attentive reader as something infinitely more complex and interesting. Who is the mysterious narrator, who occasionally refers to himself as ‘Pamuk’, and seems au fait with the poet’s innermost thoughts? What is the real nature of the strange goings on in the municipal theatre? Do things like that really happen, even in places as remote as Kars? Why does the snow never stop falling? There are diagrams of snowflakes, which are also diagrams of poems, but the poems themselves do not exist, having vanished along with a small green notebook. And then there is the mythical ‘Hans Hansen’, editor of an important German newspaper, who has given the poet his assignment, except he hasn’t, he’s only a handsome shop assistant who once sold him an overcoat in Frankfurt, the very overcoat he’s wearing to protect him from the never-ending snows of Kars, except he can’t really be that either because of course he is, he can only be, ‘the blue-eyed one’, the boy whose Teutonic good looks and brash Philistinism crush the heart of the young Tonio Kröger in Thomas Mann’s novella of the same name. And what about that ‘Snow Palace Hotel’? I’ve yet to see a single critic make the obvious connection (though perhaps somebody somewhere has done so) – for the Snow Palace is the home of the Snow Queen in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, and the boy whom she holds captive in quasi-erotic servitude in her snowy kingdom is named ‘Kay’ (our poet is known only by the name of ‘Ka’). Kay has been hurt by splinters of ice in his heart that prevent him seeing anything but the bad in everyone and everything, he is unable to love, and Andersen’s story relates how the innocent Gerda struggles to free him from this state of permanent unhappiness. So Ka, in the Snow Palace Hotel, experiences moments of deep happiness in the arms of the beautiful, innocent Ipek, but the ice in his heart isn’t going to melt all that easily... Ka, like Kay is critical of everything, unhappy with everything – himself most of all, and envious of other people’s happiness. Enchanted by the beauty of the soft, fat flakes falling ceaselessly from the sky, he is inspired to write his series of metaphysical poems, constructed on a pattern of snowflakes. In Andersen’s tale the boy Kay is disenchanted with everything once that splinter of ice gets into his heart, everything, that is, but snowflakes, which he views through a magnifying lens.

‘Look through this glass, Gerda,’ said he. And every flake seemed larger, and appeared like a magnificent flower, or beautiful star; it was splendid to look at! ‘Look, how clever!’ said Kay. ‘That's much more interesting than real flowers! They are as exact as possible; there is not a fault in them, if they did not melt!’

Is this a book about ‘the tensions in modern Turkey’? Is it a book about the mixed heritage of the Turks, their ambivalence towards the west, is it a book about the rise of Islamism, is it a book about the making of a terrorist? It’s a book about all those things. But at bottom it’s no more about those things than Anna Karenina is about the need for reform in the Russian Civil Service, and the safety of Russia’s railways. (Both books do have rather a lot of snow in them though...) What is it about then? It is about beauty and pain and poetry, it is about the mystery of life, the failure of love, it is about faith and how we break or keep it, it is about who and what we are or might be, or fail to be and it is all these things with such elegance and complexity and wit I want to rush out tomorrow and learn Turkish so as not to miss any of it were there but world enough and time. Read it - what else can I say?

This first appeared in Pen Pusher Magazine .
My own SNOW STORY

Picture: Adrienne Ségur, Illustration for The Snow Queen and Other Tales, 1961 edition

Look Who's Here - Newts Again

2008-12-16T15:00:00.004Z

On a recent trip to Venice I paused to admire this young man, courtesy of one of my favourite painters, the masterly Lorenzo Lotto . The young man sits in his study, a large book open in his hands, papers strewn about in the best writerly fashion, and a dreamy expression in his eyes that suggests he's contemplating his next poem. Although I've seen this young man many times before, I never once noticed the small companion in the right foreground of the painting. It's my pal, Andy! Famous newt of fine taste and questionable manners. I'll let Andy speak for himself at this point.

Right, so the two of 'em take off for Venezia - leave me behind in the ice cold Palazzo Londra - I'm supposed to put up with this? No way, says I. The lady's in for a SURPRISE. I like a nice holiday as much as the next newt, and what's more Venice is my kind of place. No city on earth more beautifully suited to a newt's special needs. Once I'm there, no need to scurry about on pavement, getting my little paws all raw - I dive into the Canal Grande and I'm off! What's more we had the aqua alta so was I in luck! Paddled all over the Piazza San Marco and right into the Scuola Grande di San Rocco without putting so much as a foot on damp marble. Meanwhile the poor two-legged suckers had to wear BOOTS. After a nice draft of the Renaissance it's a glass of prosecco for yours truly and a plate of that stuff they call tiramisu - picks you right up and turns you round again. Mmm. Molto bene!

Pictures: Portrait of a Young Man in His Study, Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556), photograph of aqua alta in Venice by Perrimoon on flickr.com

Let It Snow!

2008-12-12T12:00:00.009Z

I grew up in New York, where sometimes the snow falls with real abandon, turning the grimy city into a temporary Palace of White Beauty. Later I spent a few years upstate in something known, not without justification, as ' the snow belt', where the snow often lies in the morning as high as the legendary elephant's eye and you must dig your way out the front door with a large snow shovel and a great deal of energy. The light is so pure and strange, you almost believe you have been transported overnight to another, better world. We don't get snow like that in London, but occasionally a gentle white mantle is drawn over the crooked housetops and uneven gardens, and for a little moment this too is beautiful. Then it melts. This poem by Elinor Wylie was a childhood favourite - its simple images still magick me away to a white, whispering world.

Velvet Shoes

Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.

I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as a white cow's milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.

We shall walk through the still town
In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.
We shall walk in the snow.

The same silent magic reigns over the snow country of Kokan Shiren.(1278-1347). Shiren was a monk of the Renzai Zen school, a poet in Chinese, as well as an important founder of the Zen school of Japanese garden design.

Winter Moon

A mountain grove, leafless-
Cloudless skies, windstill -
Dawn colours pinch the frost; chill moonlight overflows,
All heaven and earth should bear the name-board
'Palace of Broad Cold'.
- (trans. Marian Ury)

Here's another from his pen dipped in frosty air:

Winter Moon (2)

Opening the window at midnight, the night air cold,
Garden and roof a gleaming white,
I go to the veranda, stretch out my hand to scoop up
some snow - Didn't I know that moonlight won't make a ball?
- trans. David Pollack

Snow has inspired some breathtaking prose as well as poetry. Tolstoy's snow permeates the memory so that nearly all his scenes seem to take place against a soft, white background. His late story Master and Man features some truly memorable snow.It's one of his finest pieces, and much, much shorter than, say, War and Peace. But the Russian way with snow is a theme in its own right, and we shall be turning there anon.

MY OWN SNOW STORY
Pictures: The Snow Queen, Adrienne Ségur (b. 1901), Snow Falling on a Town, Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858)

CHRISTMAS IS COMING...

2008-12-08T12:00:00.007Z

In case you haven't already heard, two of my more recent novels are now available as beautiful, high-quality, perfect bound books. Printed and shipped internationally, and price adjusted in all currencies. Isn't this what YOU want from Santa?

POETRY AND FEAR

A short novel written in poetic and elliptical prose, rich in emotion, sometimes playful, sometimes tragic. Set in the opera world of Berlin just after the fall of the Wall, POETRY AND FEAR is a gripping tale of spiritual love and pain and the whole damn thing. Orpheus singing in the Underworld. The melancholy Queen of Spain. For everyone who's ever been there, or wants to be....

'THE SOUND that I need to hear. Julio's voice. Julio's voice, that begins somewhere inside Julio's throat, is a temple built with invisible columns of vibrating molecules - a temple to the holy spirit that is Julio. Is it a beautiful temple? People say that it is, that my Julio has the most beautiful voice in the world. I would think so too, but I no longer think about Julio's voice - I simply need it. Beautiful or ugly, cracked or whole, tired or fresh, singing speaking whispering sighing laughing screaming in pain or is it fear? the sound that tells me yes , he exists - my Julio.'

SCARABOCCHIO

I stole out of Carlsbad at three in the morning, otherwise I hardly would have been allowed to leave.' These are the opening words of Goethe's 'Italian Journey', and it was this mysterious, pungent diary that would eventually result in the novel SCARABOCCHIO . To jump into a coach in the depths of the night, to run away from the oppression of one's delightful and highly-placed friends, one's work, fame, fortune, obligations and plunge headlong into the great adventure, careering over the Alps, aiming for the bright golden heart of civilisation, the only baggage one's poetical discontent... Add to this the Goldberg Variations of J.S. Bach, a fascination with murderous Sicilian puppets, a runaway diva, Beethoven's other nephew (the one who also shot himself in the head but, unlike Carl, appears, at least partially, to have survived), a catalogue of child murders and possible murderers, a treatise on the beauty of imaginary architecture and the golden section and you begin to get some idea of Scarabocchio. A piece of dizzying metafiction, a whirlwind journey through Sicily with an iconic German poet, a Canadan Bach specialist, a runaway diva and many others...

More exciting titles from various authors will soon be available from ANDROMACHE BOOKS.

Picture: Postcard circa 1910

Beloved Ghost

2008-12-05T12:00:00.037Z

There can't be many places on Planet Earth that constitute a total work of art in themselves, but one such Gesamtkunstwerk is the city of Venice. I'll be in Venice (again) when this post goes up, so what better excuse, if excuse were needed, to investigate her many incarnations. Is there a place on earth that has inspired so many outpourings of devotion, rage, delight, ennui, intoxication and distress? I think not. In pride of place stands 'Papa' John Ruskin, whose lifelong infatuation with the place gave birth to his masterly Stones of Venice - still the best book about the city ever written. Ah, Venezia! '...still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline : a ghost upon the sands of the sea,so weak so quiet, so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow.' The first volume of this book is not only a thing of beauty an sich, but also the only serious book on architecture you will ever need; you may learn everything there is to be learned about architecture from this book, just as you may learn everything there is to be learned about music from a close study of Beethoven's late string quartets.

Sesame and Roses - a short story of mine about Ruskin in Venice...

Following closely in Ruskin's giant footsteps we find Marcel Proust. His first visit to Venice was aborted when he became so overexcited at the mere Idea of Venice, he took sick and had to stay home. But he got there eventually, and whole passages of his A la Recherche de temps perdu are saturated in the place. Chapter III of Albertine disparue opens with our hero gazing from the balcony of his hotel room onto the legendary city of marble and liquid light:

When at ten o’clock in the morning my shutters were thrown open, I saw ablaze in the sunlight, instead of the black marble into which the slates of Saint-Hilaire used to turn, the Golden Angel on the Campanile of San Marco. In its dazzling glitter, which made it almost impossible to fix it in space, it promised me with its outstretched arms, for the moment, half an hour later, when I was to appear on the Piazzetta, a joy more certain than any that it could ever in the past have been bidden to announce to men of good will. I could see nothing but itself, so long as I remained in bed, but as the whole world is merely a vast sun-dial, a single lighted segment of which enables us to tell what o’clock it is, on the very first morning I was reminded of the shops in the Place de l’Eglise at Combray, which, on Sunday mornings, were always on the point of shutting when I arrived for mass, while the straw in the market place smelt strongly in the already hot sunlight. But on the second morning, what I saw, when I awoke, what made me get out of bed (because they had taken the place in my consciousness and in my desire of my memories of Combray), were the impressions of my first morning stroll in Venice, Venice whose daily life was no less real than that of Combray, where as at Combray on Sunday mornings one had the delight of emerging upon a festive street, but where that street was paved with water of a sapphire blue, refreshed by little ripples of cooler air, and of so solid a colour that my tired eyes might, in quest of relaxation and without fear of its giving way, rest their gaze upon it. Like, at Combray, the worthy folk of the Rue de l’Oiseau, so in this strange town also, the inhabitants did indeed emerge from houses drawn up in line, side by side, along the principal street, but the part played there by houses that cast a patch of shade before them was in Venice entrusted to palaces of porphyry and jasper, over the arched door of which the head of a bearded god (projecting from its alignment, like the knocker on a door at Combray) had the effect of darkening with its shadow, not the brownness of the soil but the splendid blue of the water.

- translated by Scott Moncrieff

It was on holiday in Venice that Thomas Mann caught sight of the young boy who inspired him to write Der Tod in Venedig - 'Tragödie einer Entwürdigung' he called it , a tragedy of humiliation, wherein the aging artiste Gustav von Aschenbach delivers himself over to temptation. But Venice can do that to you! The novella has been somewhat eclipsed by the Visconti film, which paints an altogether more lascivious picture than the good German ever allowed himself. (Camp would not be too strong a word for some of its posturing, but it's lovely camp, extremely enjoyable camp.) Visconti, famously, throws in the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth for good measure, but it's the haunting little Mussourgsky berceuse sung a capella by Masha Predit at the very end of the film that always takes my breath away. Aschenbach lies crumpled in the sand while the golden figure of Tadzio plays on in the dazzling light of the empty Lido, and the song in its tender melancholy lingers over them.

I almost died in Venice myself once -you can read about it here .

Listen to Herbert von Karajan out-Visconti Visconti

Read The Black Swan, a story of love and death in Venice (warning - contains dueling!).

Pictures: Sunrise,Venice and Early Morning on the Lagoon, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), Archivolt in the Duomo of Murano, John Ruskin (1819-1900)

Praise Him - A Poem of Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T12:00:00.007Z

This week we post a day early in honour of the holiday.

PIED BEAUTY

GLORY be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Happy Thanksgiving! For some uplifting and sobering thoughts try THIS .

Picture: detail from The Annunciation to the Virgin, Fra Angelico , 1395-1455

With the Eyes of a Child

2008-11-21T12:00:00.007Z

Three fair maidens, late one night,
Sat and spun by candlelight.
'Were our tsar to marry me,'
Said the eldest of the three,
'I would cook and I would bake -
Oh, what royal feasts I'd make.'
Said the second of the three:
'Were our tsar to marry me,
I would weave a cloth of gold
Fair and wondrous to behold.'
But the youngest of the three
Murmured: 'If he married me -
I would give our tsar an heir
Handsome, brave, beyond compare.'

The greatest of all Russian poets, Alexander Pushkin , was inspired by a complex and subtle folktale to write his own version of The Tale of Tsar Saltan . The story has many familiar elements - the youngest sister who is chosen to be the ruler's bride, the jealous and scheming older sisters and their evil mother, the talking bird who will turn out to be a Princess before the tale is over - but these are mixed and stirred to create an exotic dish that tastes wondrous strange to western palates. As in all great folk and fairy tales, the roots run deep in the psyche, for this is also a tale of horrible cruelty - of father to son, husband to wife, and mother to child, and of the redemptive power of love and penitence. Whle the Tsar is away at the wars his bride gives birth to a son of remarkable beauty and strength, but the schemers send a message that she has given birth to a monster. The Tsar is deceived, and the mother and child are put into a barrel and thrown into the sea.

Stars gleam in the dark blue sky,

Dark blue billows heave and sigh.

Storm clouds o'er the blue sky creep,

While the cask rides o'er the deep.

Like a widowed bride distressed,

Sobbed the queen and beat her breast,

While the babe to manhood grew

As the hours swiftly flew.

Morning dawned, the queen still wailed

But her son the billows hailed:

'O, you wanton waves so blue -

Free to come and go are you,

Dashing when and where you please,

Wearing rocks away with ease -

You, who flood the mountains high,

You, who ships raise to the sky -

Hear my prayer, o waves, and spare us -

Safely onto dry land bear us.'

So the waves, without ado,

Bore the cask and prisoners two

Gently to a sandy shore,

Then, receding, splashed no more.

Much is to happen before the Tsar and his family can be reunited, and in that happy end we experience all the joy of being enfolded and acccepted at last that eludes so many unhappy children in real life. As Pushkin the poet responded to the depth and power of the tale, so the artist Ivan Bilibin was in his turn inspired by Pushkin to create some of his most memorable images. His pictures draw on sources as diverse as Russian folk art, medieval illuminations and Japanese woodblock prints, and they have the richness of detail and narrative power that children crave.

The same Pushkin poem also served as inspiration to the composer Rimsky-Korsakov, and Bilibin later designed two (largely similar) versions of the opera (one for Moscow and another for Paris) based on his own earlier book illustrations. A recent performance of this opera in London by the ultimate Russians, the Mariinsky Opera Company, gave me a chance to see once more, with the eyes of a child, just how bright and beautiful the world of make-believe can be.

Merrily the breeze is singing,

O'er the waves a ship is winging

Listen to an Excerpt from the opera

Pictures: All illustrations for The Tale of Tsar Saltan are by Ivan Bilibin, 1876-1942

Tears, Idle Tears

2008-11-14T12:00:00.012Z

Nowhere is the fruitful exchange between poetry and art more evident than among the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood . They counted among their members poets and painters alike, and sought to restore to the arts the spiritual freshness and ardour of medieval Europe. Whether these Victorian gentlemen were equipped to do such a thing is another matter entirely, still one can't help but admire the nobility of the effort. Of course they initially garnered blame, but praise came from no less a quarter than the great John Ruskin himself, probably the most brilliant art critic the world has ever seen and an eminent Victorian in spite of himself. Ruskin was later to fall out with the pre-Raphaelites over a manifold confusion of issues, but for a while a close friend was the very talented John Millais . The sad story of Ruskin's unhappy marriage and how Millais brought things to a head by making love to the wife needs no further exegesis here. Millais had a talent for story-telling, and many of his pictures have a narrative quality that works particularly well. The Eve of St. Agnes , one of John Keats's more delirious romantic fantasies, takes as its starting point the ancient belief that a girl might dream of her future husband on St. Agnes' Eve providing she performed certain rites, i.e. to go to bed without looking behind her, and to lie with her hands beneath her head. The forbidden lover Porphyro has been led into his beloved Madeleine's chamber and is secretly watching while she prepares for bed:

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Millais's Autumn Leaves is different, for it does not seek so much to tell a story as to evoke a mood, inspired by the following lines from Tennyson's The Princess :

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking on the days that are no more.

For more on the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren and John Ruskin visit The Victorian Web . My play based on the true story of St. Agnes, the Virgin martyr HERE .

Pictures: Autumn Leaves (detail) The Eve of St. Agnes, and Autumn Leaves are all by John Everett Millais (1829-1896)

Curl Up with a Good Book

2008-11-10T12:00:00.002Z

For those of you who prefer an old-fashioned printed book to anything the marvels of technology can offer, I am delighted to announce that two popular titles by Your Author are now available for purchase, and just in time for Christmas. So don't wait! Visit my 'storefront' at ANDROMACHE BOOKS and get yours now. All our books are printed and shipped internationally, and price adjusted in all currencies.

SCARABOCCHIO is a piece of dizzying metafiction, a whirlwind journey through Sicily with an iconic German poet, a Canadian Bach specialist, a runaway diva and many others. POETRY AND FEAR is a short novel written in poetic and elliptical prose, rich in emotion, sometimes playful, sometimes tragic. Set in the opera world of Berlin just after the fall of the Wall, a gripping tale of spiritual love and pain and the whole damn thing. Orpheus singing in the Underworld. The melancholy Queen of Spain. For everyone who's ever been there, or wants to be...
Both books are also free to download, or available in portable format at MOBIPOCKET.

I'll have more to say about ANDROMACHE BOOKS in the months ahead, as we introduce new writing talent to the world, so watch this space.

Welcome to Hell

2008-11-07T12:00:00.004Z

I recently went to an Exhibition of paintings by Francis Bacon (1909-1992), and it got me thinking about the mutually nourishing relationship between literature and art. Bacon was influenced, among other things, by T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. Indeed, Eliot seems to have had a special place inside Bacon's terrible head, a head that gives us back, without flinching, our late and unlamented twentieth century. This is the way the world ends...he says to us, holding up his bleeding carcasses, mutilated animals, screaming Popes, this is the world you have made, the world without God, take a good look, here it is. Bacon was an avowed and militant atheist who spent his life painting Popes, Triptyches, Crucifixions and loved the poetry of T.S. Eliot. I find a terrible compassion hidden in the horror, a terrible question hidden in the contradicion, screaming out of the mouths of caged popes and eyless monsters - Where are You?

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Hell has often been defined as the absence of God, the place where God is not. This is not of course a place on the map, like Oklahoma or Dar es Salaam - it is a place inside your head, a place in your soul, a state of being that excludes the possibility of God. Free will, we are told, allows us to go there if we so wish. In the twentieth century the human race on a rather grand scale did just that. The results were there to be seen in 1945 when Francis Bacon was beginning his career, the results were highly visible at Auschwitz and Dresden and Belsen and Berlin and the whole sorry list of charnel houses. This is he way the world ends...

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

The Polish poet Tadeusz Rózewicz brings us round again, closing the circle with his remarkable meditation Francis Bacon or Diego Velazquez in a Dentist's Chair ..It's a rich, meaty poem that does full justice to the complexity of its subject without ever losing sight of the poetical imperative,as it were.

glass muffles cries
I thought
Bacon was performing his operations
without anaesthetics
in the manner
of 18th century dentists

The gentle and wise Bavarian philosopher who is now Pope recently made the observation that hell 'really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more.' Like Francis Bacon, Pope Benedikt was there in 1945. He doesn't have to wonder about hell, having had a good look for himself. In his Introduction to Christianity he has this to say about the descent of Christ into hell:

This article of faith, which in the course of the liturgical year belongs to Holy Saturday, stands particularly close to us today, and in a most exact measure reflects the experience of our own century… for Holy Saturday is the day of ‘the death of God’, it both expresses and anticipates the unheard-of experience of our times, that God is simply absent, that the grave has covered him, that he no longer will awake, no longer speak, that one no longer even needs to argue with him, but can merely ignore him….It seems no call is able to wake God. It seems the rationalist can in all easiness say to us: Pray louder, maybe then your God will wake up. ‘Descended into hell’: how much is this the truth of our time, the descent of God into silence, down into the dark silence of the absent one.

The little blind mouths in the twisted heads open to emit the final sound:

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

- quotations are from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

All pictures are by Francis Bacon, as follows: from Three Studies for a Crucifixon, 1962; Portrait of George Dyer Talking, 1966; Study for the Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin, 1957; Head VI, 1949; from Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (second version), 1944

AND ABOUT TIME TOO

2008-11-05T13:49:00.007Z

Congratulations to President Elect Barack Obama! This is America's new 'First Family', and high time, too. Because symbols matter. Because white America owes black America big time. Because he's got as much right to be President as anybody else. For everyone who's ever suffered fear, humiliation, injustice - this is payback time. You don't have to be black to be proud - but (for once) it helps!

Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel?
Deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel?
Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel?
And why not every man?

He delivered Daniel from the lion's den
And Jonah from the belly of the whale
And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace
Why not every man?

The Moon flows down, in a purple stream
And the Sun refuses to shine
And every star shall disappear
Yes, freedom shall be mine

Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel?
Deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel?
Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel?
And why not every man?

- traditional African-American spiritual

Photo: from the Times Online Stan Honda/AFP/Getty

The Day of the Dead

2008-10-31T12:00:00.010Z

Calaveras

Here comes the water

down the slope,

and my skull

is getting wet.

Death, a skinny skeleton

neither fat nor skinny.

A homemade skeleton

stuck together with wax.

-Traditional

For my own Halloween poem see here .

Behind the modern celebration of Halloween lies an ancient tradition of honour and remembrance of the dead. The Christian feast of 'All Hallows' or 'All Saints' falls on the first of November, thus 'All Hallows' Eve' was contracted to 'Halloween'. When Spanish missionaries brought the Christian faith to Mexico, they found a fully developed cult of ancestor worship centring around the rituals that bound the living to the dead. Gradually, these ancient rituals were subsumed into the new faith of the Mexican Christians, where they now live comfortably together like two loving sisters. To the native Aztec people 'life was a dream', and only in death did one fully enter into life. This is not so far from the Biblical 'in the midst of life we are in death.'

All the earth is a grave and nothing escapes it,

nothing is so perfect that it does not descend to its tomb

Rivers, rivulets, fountains and waters flow,

but never return to their joyful beginnings;

anxiously they hasten on the vast realms of the rain god.

As they widen their banks,

they also fashion the sad urn of their burial.

-from Romances de los Senores #38,
translated by John Curl

To the Aztecs poetry, known as 'flower and song', played a vital part in the ritual that linked the two worlds. One of the greatest of the Aztec poets was Hungry Coyote or Nezahualcoytl, King of Texcoco (1431-72). In this poem he foresees the destruction of his entire people.

The sweet-voiced quetzal there, ruling the earth,

has intoxicated my soul.

I am like the quetzal bird,

I am created in the one and only God;

I sing sweet songs among the flowers;

I chant songs and rejoice in my heart.

The fuming dewdrops from the flowers in the fields
intoxicate my soul.

I grieve to myself that ever this dwelling on earth should end.

I foresaw, being a Mexican, that our rule
began to be destroyed,

I went forth weeping that it was to bow down
and to be destroyed.

Let me not be angry that the grandeur of Mexico
is to be destroyed.

The smoking stars gather against it:

the one who cares for flowers is about to be destroyed.

He who cared for books wept,

he wept for the beginning of the destruction.

-trans. John Curl

In these traditional Aztec songs, one hears the common lament - that life on earth is short, that lovers must part, but one hears also a deep, spiritual yearning for something beyond the grave.

Where, O my heart, is the place of life?

Where is my true home?

Where my true dwelling place?

I suffer, here upon Earth.

-Aztec Song

Our house on earth

we do not inhabit

only borrow it

briefly

Be splendid, Princess!

here only

our heart sings

briefly, briefly

lent to one another

earth is not our last home;

take these flowers

Be splendid, Princess!

- traditional

Nowadays it is unfashionable to put in a word for the Christian missionaries who brought the light of the faith to the native peoples of the Americas. But they did their best to protect them from the brutal excesses of the conquistadores, often coming into sharp conflict with the secular authorities. The people themselves embraced the beautiful truth with fervour, and have on the whole remained more faithful than their erstwhile messengers. What a relief it must have been, to hear that the love of God does indeed extend beyond the grave, that we shall see one another again, in the sweet by-and by. And that Kingdom shall have no end.

Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death,

from whose embrace no living person can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin!

Happy those she finds doing your most holy will.

The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give thanks, and serve him with great humility.

- Canticle of the Sun , St. Francis of Assisi

There's a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar;
For the Father waits over the way
To prepare us a dwelling place there.

In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

We shall sing on that beautiful shore
The melodious songs of the blessed;
And our spirits shall sorrow no more,
Not a sigh for the blessing of rest.

In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

To our bountiful Father above,
We will offer our tribute of praise
For the glorious gift of His love
And the blessings that hallow our days.

In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.
- Sanford Fillmore Bennett (1836-1898)

There's a nice little story behind this song.

Pictures: Frida's Sacred Heart and Thorned Rose, Teresa Lucero, Angel from a fresco by Giotto di Bondone (c.1267-1337)

Nelly Sachs – 'Show us the sun slowly...'

2008-10-24T12:00:00.002+01:00

In the unimaginable aftershock of the Second World War the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno made the famous statement, ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.’ It was Nelly Sachs , more than anyone else, who showed that it was not only possible, it was necessary. Why were so many of Germany’s most important twentieth century poets women, and most of them Jewish women at that? Perhaps it has something to do with the descent of Germany into a maelstrom of militarism and hatred, a country where women are not at home. And then the Jewish women were doubly outsiders, cut off by their Jewish identity as well as by their sex from the whole hideous adventure. Outsiders then, but insiders too because the German language was also theirs, the language of Goethe and Schiller, of moonlight and nightingales, the razor sharp wit of Heinrich Heine (another Jew, to be sure) and the intoxicating Romantik of Ludwig Tieck. The Nazis took this language and twisted it to their own purposes - for many Germans after the war, it seemed now irredeemable.

How do you write about the murder of six million people? How speak of it without appearing to falsify, trivialize, sentimentalize the horror? Like this:

Child

Child

With the burial of your head

seed capsule of dreams

grown heavy

with endless resignation

ready now to sow in another country.

With eyes

turned round to mother earth –

- Child

Nelly Sachs was born in 1891 and grew up in Berlin’s Schöneberg, still one of the prettiest districts of the city today with its well-kept turn-of-the-century apartment blocks, its spacious and elegant Ceciliengärten. The only child of well-to-do parents, she was of a delicate constitution, and was given private lessons at home until the age of twelve. All her life she seems to have been a shy, quiet person, nervous and highly sensitive. She doesn’t seem ever to have had a love affair, but lived quietly with her mother after her father’s death in 1930. Her first book of poems, Legends and Tales, had appeared as early as 1921, a somewhat derivative collection in the neo-romantic style of the day, and she continued to publish her poems quietly in the Berlin newspapers and magazines during the 30’s, developing a following as she grew bolder and more experimental.

While still a schoolgirl she began a correspondence with the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf, and it was this long-distance friendship that was ultimately to save the lives of both mother and daughter. But they left it very late! Perhaps, shut away in her quiet room, Nelly did not understand the full meaning of what was going on around her. Several times she was interrogated by the Gestapo, the family apartment was ransacked by Hitler’s heavies, the S.A., and still they stayed on... Nelly, whose upbringing had been that of the typical assimilated Jewish family, without religious emphasis, began to read Martin Buber’s Tales of Hasidic Life, to ponder the mystical heritage of Judaism as a gift that might help her through troubled times. Only in 1940 did she finally take the decision to leave Germany with her mother – by then Selma Lagerlöf lay on her deathbed, and it was only through the intervention of a well-connected German friend that they were granted visas to enter Sweden. The orders for their deportation had already been issued, but somehow they managed to slip away unnoticed.

Life was hard for the two women alone and in exile. At first Nelly worked as a washerwoman, later she was able to keep her head above water making translations of Swedish poetry into German. Meanwhile her own poetic muse underwent a terrible transformation – gone were the delicate romantic daydreams, in their place, the topography of terror.

O the chimneys

The ingenious houses of death

As Israel’s body dissolved in smoke

Climbed the air...

- From the Houses of Death

Nelly Sachs never went to Auschwitz, she was one of the ‘lucky ones’, the survivors, but the horror of it wounded her sensitive soul to its quick. After the war she was to suffer breakdowns again and again, especially once the death of her mother left her more alone than ever. How strange that this quiet, reclusive woman, who had seen so little of life, could write with such a sure touch of the ultimate horror. Her delicacy of feeling allowed her to enter fully into the experience of the murdered ones, and her great gift allowed her to express that knowledge for all those whose voices were silenced when they disappeared up the chimneys. Also hers were the pain and guilt of the survivor, a guilt that was to result in the death of her great friend, the poet Paul Celan. Celan, author of the magnificent Todesfuge (Death Fugue), perhaps the most famous poem about the holocaust, threw himself into the Seine one day and drowned. In her beautiful poem We, the Saved, Nelly expresses the fragility and fear of those who survived the terror:

Show us the sun slowly

Lead us step by step from star to star

Gently let us learn how to live again.

Or else a bird’s song

Or the filling of a bucket at the well

Could break open our pain so lightly sealed

And wash us away.

- Chorus of the Saved

This sort of thing was not wanted in Germany after the war, and Nelly Sachs continued to live quietly in Sweden, in almost total obscurity. But gradually a new generation of Germans began to ‘discover’ Nelly Sachs. It was perhaps above all the efforts of the young poet Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929) that brought her the fame she deserved. She became a heroine and a role model to an entire generation of post-war German writers, such as Enzensberger and Ingeborg Bachmann. In 1966, on the day of her seventy-fifth birthday, Nelly Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. She gave the money away, half of it to the needy, half to the friend who had arranged to get her out of Germany in 1940.

Translations from the German are by Grace Andreacchi.

The Marburger Forum is a fascinating collection of poems dedicated to Nelly Sachs by other poets including Paul Celan, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Ingeborg Bachmann. A few of her poems in German can be read here. A good selection in English is O the Chimneys.
An extensive site about the Nazi Holocaust is the Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project.

Pictures: Vierwaldstättersee and Sunflowers, Emil Nolde (1867-1956), Illustrations by Rudi Stern for In the Houses of Death ,1946,photo of Nelly Sachs, date unknown.