Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

A log jam of exams. Back soon to respond to comments and go blog-calling.

Meanwhile, slip over to qarrtsiluni to say nice things about my photograph...

DIDN’T HE RAMBLE?

HUMPHREY LYTTELTON 1921 - 2008

Traditionally, the marching bands at New Orleans funerals would precede the cortège playing Didn’t He Ramble? As a pioneer of the British New Orleans revival of the early ‘50s, and a jazz trumpeter of world renown, Humphrey Lyttelton must have played it countless times in clubs and concert halls.

But in an almost exclusively English way, Lyttelton was indeed a major league rambler through the highways and byways of the language. Presenter of the anarchic BBC Radio 4 ‘antidote to panel games’ I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue for 36 years, he championed the synthesis of innuendo, dreadful puns and pure surrealism that is such a staple of British humour.  Salting it with a mordant wit that is unique to musicians and the cartoonist’s scathing world view, his regular presence on prime time radio represented so much more than mere entertainment.

Right up until he was admitted to hospital a few days ago for an operation to repair an aortic aneurysm, he continued to play the music that he loved. His deadpan response to a question about his chairing of I’m Sorry... in which he stated that he hadn’t made up his mind whether to make it a full-time commitment and would give it another decade before deciding definitely makes us laugh and simultaneously shed a tear. This was not a man ready for slippers and fireside.

In my more melancholic reflections on gathering age, I would dispel gloom by bringing to mind the likes of Humphrey Lyttelton, hoping that I too might, in great age, know why an old man should be mad. I for one amongst many would have wished him that extra decade and I shall miss him now as a presence of passion undimmed by the years.

Whilst awaiting the lifting of the inspiration embargo on new verse (nothing since January), I've carried on tinkering with old first and second drafts. The Ties That Bind is from 2004.

THE TIES THAT BIND

The morning after you left I drew
the curtains on the seven acre field.

Two hares were bowling through the stubble,
wind-blown, skidding like broken wheels.

They danced and sprung apart and danced again
and then were gone, beyond the tidemark

of the tree line. Then a mob of seagulls
swung downwind from the west, scattered,

gathered again in a brawl of wings and then
were gone, into a bleak neutrality

of towering clouds. Love or combat, the wind
blew them into the world and out again,

these dancers, bound only to the end
of their measures and not beyond.

pic: http://www.andyenglish.com/page/1eji4/Gallery/Birds_and_Beasts.html

I’ve had this post bubbling away for a while. Strictly speaking, it should have preceded the last post so see it now as being by way of a prequel. After this, no more political posturings - for a while at least...

‘DON'T MOURN, ORGANISE!’

(Joe Hill - anarchist & labour organiser)

So much of what has been expressed generally – by distinguished columnists & pundits interviewed on television or by real people in workplace or pub, before, during and within the five years since the invasion of Iraq - has sprung from the same root.  Whether expressed with Churchillian eloquence, street-level sarcasm or through barely articulate anger, it all arises from a sort of weary, jaded, increasingly cynical disgust at the manoeuvrings of politicians.  As we totter precariously through the first decade of the 21st century, whatever faith remained at the end of the 20th in the notion of the honest, unimpeachable statesman seems to have withered away. Scepticism is now so ingrained a reaction to the manoeuvrings of politicians that, if told the time by one of the breed, the automatic reaction would be to check it against the town hall clock.  The noblest practitioners are defined by their last venal act; the basest are seen as setting the new paradigm. Echoing e.e. cummings’ famous pronouncement, the general perception now seems to be that a politician is an arse upon which everything has sat but a man.  And it seems that, as the old folk wisdom has it, no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.

When I was 16 years old we had a mock election at my school.  I stood as the radical left candidate.  Lost in the glamour of a recently read novel about the Spanish Civil War, I invented a Marxist party called the New Left Front and I plastered the walls with dramatic posters built around linocuts of raised fists, red on a black background.  The masses were exhorted to rise up and I advised my fellow students – middle class boys and girls at a rural progressive boarding school – that they had nothing to lose but their chains.  I had the field to myself: my only rivals were a local farmer’s son standing for the Conservatives and a policy of closing down all public footpaths across his dad’s land, and for the Liberal Party a 10-year old stamp collector.

That is until my mate Andy B. decided to stand as an anarchist protest candidate.  His strategy was simple: he went around the hustings with a handful of leaflets from the London Federation of Anarchists and tried to dissuade anyone from voting at all.  The deal was that if you were won over you simply lodged an anti-vote on the voting slip and, in the event of a majority, presumably all government would be dissolved by the will of the people.  In the end I won the election by a healthy margin – more by virtue of my opponents’ ineptitude than by any politicking skills on my part.  Andy got only a handful of protest votes, most of them from the spotty rebels who smoked in the bushes by day and tried to climb through the girls’ dormitory windows by night.

And from me.  I was totally convinced.  Via an authentic Damascene conversion I was overwhelmed by the absolute honesty of it all.  The inevitability of personal corruption in direct proportion to the amount of power vested in the individual politician; the cruelty, illogic and inefficiency of capitalism; the automatic consequence of militarism and war as a final process of international relations; the tyranny and gigantism of the nation state; the institutionalisation of all social bodies; the principle of the centralisation of all executive authority…

And during the many years since then I have returned constantly to the writings of Peter Kroptokin, Alexander Bakunin, Leo Tolstoy, Paul Goodman, Lewis Mumford, A.S. Neill, Noam Chomsky.  When I have voted in elections, argued for specific national policies, accepted the hierarchical structures of the educational system within which I have taught, I have felt a deep unease, a sense more of ducking a responsibility rather than of fulfilling one.  As a result of my own education and my subsequent teaching career, I have been part of significantly self-regulating communities for most of my life.  I have witnessed again and again the common sense and compassion that informs decision-making processes and social action within such communities where fear and imposed authority are absent.  I have participated in informal school meetings and formal School Councils within which young people of all ages have given the lie to the darkness and chaos of Lord of the Flies.

And so, in the face of all the apparent evidence of humanity’s fundamental shortcomings, from local selfishness and mendacity to rapacious greed & exploitation on a global scale, I return constantly to the firm understanding that reconciliation, generosity, self-sacrifice, love are also called ‘human nature’.  When locally and globally, nothing seems clearer than that our systems, sacred & profane, are failing us utterly, we have to seek out alternatives.  Enough of the naïve idealism that insists that only the might of state and church can sustain & nurture us!  It’s time to get hard-headed & practical…

There might be something of a break in transmission for a while. This PowerBook appears to have an intermittent power fault: the batteries keep discharging at an alarming rate and, when on  mains power,  the charge is irregular. Sadly, we have no recourse to the MacBook: the battery pack blew up!

Off to PC World soonest for a replacement mains lead and on the 'phone to a friendly Genius at Apple in Regents Street re. the MacBook.

Life without the Internet: the blood runs cold..!

LEAVING THE LEFT

For the nascent rebel between the wars, it was so much easier: mass unemployment, a shooting war against fascism, a Soviet Union, which, when caught by the light at a certain angle, might still be seen as a brave experiment, and a fully fledged class struggle complete with a noble proletariat and an effete ruling class. Anyone with half a mind and half a heart followed la bandiera rossa.

But for the noble prole, the reality was closer to the bone. The practical manifestation of class division and capitalism red in tooth and claw was starkly evident in the slums that scarred every major city.  Avenues upon which to escape from poverty and servitude were few and sparsely populated. Aspirations to social or financial betterment were dream scenarios fostered by the burgeoning film and advertising industries.

For the second time in one century the universal trauma of a global conflict wrought profound social, political and cultural change. Following the revelations of the Moscow Trials and the further excesses of Stalinism and of the Holocaust the nihilistic cynicism at the heart of the two great doctrinaire ideologies, Communism and Fascism, was exposed and their popular powerbase dissolved. The immediate post war years saw a reorientation on the Left with increased factionalism within its revolutionary wing and a broadening of belief and function within social democracy. In Britain the Labour Party absorbed over time a substantial number of previously zealous Marxists whose allegiance was now to a more evolutionary, consensus view of Socialism. The ideological journey for some of these erstwhile activists was, however, significantly more extreme, involving not only a complete recantation of previous belief but an enthusiastic embracing of its polar opposite.

A few days ago one of our leading playwrights, David Edgar, wrote a fascinating account in The Guardian of this and subsequent schisms within the far Left. Seeking to account for the recurring phenomenon of political poachers turning into gamekeepers almost overnight (which he describes as the politics of defection), he makes particular reference to the post-1968 era. It was, he relates, a disorientating time during which, as the ‘70s progressed through ideological disillusionment and despair, many key figures of ‘the revolution’ on both sides of the Atlantic crossed the intervening territory between left and right in a few mighty strides. He cites in the United States Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, David Horowitz and P.J. O’Rourke and in Britain Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and current Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling.

He attributes to many of them what he calls Kronstadt moments (‘Kronstadt’ referring to the brutal Bolshevik suppression of a post-revolutionary sailors’ revolt in the St Petersburg port of the same name.) These ‘moments’ have two principle causes, he believes. In the first instance individuals were motivated by their experience of far-left organisations: their authoritarianism and manipulation, their contempt for allies as "useful idiots", their insistence that the end justifies the means and that deceit is a class duty, their refusal to take anything anyone else says at face value (dismissing disagreement as cowardice or class treachery) and, most of all, their dismissal as "bourgeois" of the very ideals that draw people to the left in the first place. He quotes poet and socialist activist of the ‘30s and ‘40s Stephen Spender: (T)he communist, having joined the party, has to castrate himself of the reasons which made him one.

But a Kronstadt moment may well arise from another source, a species of purblind naivety. Hard enough to be fooled by the party, he writes; even harder to accept that you deluded yourself into believing that the poor are, by virtue of their poverty, uniquely saintly or strong. No surprise that this realisation turns into a sense of personal betrayal, which turns outwards into blame. (And for ‘poor’, of course, read ‘black’ or ‘female’.) This appalled realisation, this sense of betrayal compounding an antithetical reaction to the Left’s authoritarianism and manipulation might well help to account for the magnitude of spectrum shift managed by some of the renegades. Emancipatory ideals were what drew them to Socialism in the first place – a vision of a just world within a new social structure - and the stifling of the ideals by the Left’s suffocating orthodoxy and the evaporation of the romantic vision in the face of banal reality unravelled dreams and broke hearts.

David Edgar quotes Robert Frost: I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old. Somehow I seem to have avoided a Kronstadt moment in those turbulent decades since 1968.  My Left always eschewed dogma and the dead hand of prescriptive orthodoxy. Whilst on the demos of the ‘60s others were marching grim faced and shoulder-to-shoulder beneath the hammer-and-sickle with the Trots, I was running wild beneath the black flags of the anarchists. Too middle class to do much more than bellow surreal slogans at sceptical onlookers, we proclaimed D.H. Lawrence’s ethic of making a revolution for fun. For us the notion of revolutionary process and product were indissoluble. And since we wanted a world in which love was the law, the cynical adherence to the contradictory principle of ends justifying means was incomprehensible. As for being driven forward by a touching faith in a noble proletariat waiting for the watch fires to go up before seizing the means of production, we knew all along that anarchism was a bottom-to-top hearts and mind job.

So whilst I might have woken up one morning to the realisation that love and fellowship were not immediately at hand and the bad capitalists were still kings of the castle, no Kronstadt moment laid me low. Wishy-washy, unstructured, unscientific, naïve and millennial, yes. But I’ve always favoured Emma Goldman – If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution – over Lenin – It is true that liberty is precious: so precious that it must be rationed. So I’m staying put over here.
...

NO HOME BUT THE STRUGGLE

You tread the edge
of this bright world
gingerly, unsteadily as if
for you it lay in shadows.

Old red heat grown dull
in the world still glows
in you: a bust of Uncle Joe
watches you dine

(cold commons in the kitchen
with the morning news)
and that photograph in passe-partout –
the comrades in the trenches

outside Burgos, 1936, all fags
and grins and black and white
bandannas.  The flat’s upstairs –
steeper every month – above

an Asian supermarket.  Great confusion
yesterday when you asked
in early morning stupor
(stunned by a dream of Ronnie Gold

drunk in an alley after Cable Street)
for the Daily Herald.
Consternation too when leaning
on stick and counter you recalled

young Harry Patchett who,
in September ’39, sung The Internationale
to his passengers as he clipped
their tickets on the 131

to Dalston Junction.  Poor Salim –
too polite to interrupt – smiling
towards the shelves of catfood
planning reorientation round

a centralised display. Competition’s fierce
with Tesco by the roundabout.
Belts to be tightened, profits trimmed
this fiscal year.  Family first,

family first. And yes, they took
your family first: both grandparents
left the ghetto in a lorry –
Lodz had become too crowded

and they needed workers
somewhere east of the city.
Three years on you knew
the truth.  You stood outside

The Greyhound by Whitechapel
Underground, the letter in your hand,
and wept without a sound;
wept not just for a photograph

of Papi and Baba, stiff and grim
in some Carpathian valley,
but for a sea that parted
once again, a different sea

a red, unfathomable tide in flood,
now and forever. And you wept without
a sound, even as Whitechapel fell
about your ears in 1944.

And you’re weeping now
with a squeezy bottle of
Domestos in your hand,
weeping for another world

that never really wobbled
out of night and into dawn:
Uncle Joe, the Catalonian comrades,
Harry Patchett, Ronnie Gold,

the red blood of the Party
beating deep and strong,
all gone, all gone to ashes. 
Salim looks around for his mother.

What to do?  He seems always
so sad, this solitary pensioner
who drops his coins, forgets
to pay his bills.  “And where”,

his angry mother whispers,
“are his sons?  Do they
not care that he’s shaving
in cold water?  What

of his church?  Can they not
take him in?” They help him
to the door. He smells of piss.
They shake their heads

and lock up for the night.
Such times with fortune hostage
to the flagship enterprises. What
a world, such changes, revolution

turning on a dollar dropped.
Solly under a street light,
sodium shadows falling long
and ragged over the paving stones,

the unbending curb.  What
a world, unchanging, changed.
Solly treads the edge
of this dark world unsteadily.

Cable Street: An East London street in which in 1936 an epic battle was fought by Jews, Socialists, Communists & anti-fascists against Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts – the British Union of Fascists - who were attempting to march through the Jewish quarter of the East End.

The Daily Herald: A left-wing newspaper, long defunct.

Whitechapel Underground: A subway station in the heart of the East End, in an area subject to massive bomb damage.

...

In some ways, it’s something of a favourite. I write very few narrative poems, but this one preoccupied me a good deal when I was putting it together.  The composing of the storyline & the need for contextual research gave the process something of the objectifying characteristics of biographical or historical writing.

I had very much in mind an old man I saw in a small Asian-run supermarket in Twickenham (a rather classy suburb of London bordering the River Thames).  He wore a tarnished hammer-&-sickle badge in the lapel of his shapeless mackintosh.  I remembered seeing spry veterans of the Spanish Civil War displaying them next to their CND (ban-the-bomb) badges when, as an adolescent, I took part in the anti-nuclear Aldermaston Marches each Easter.

I’ve done a little more work yet on No Home, revising a couple of stanzas and slightly altering some historical references.

 FISHING FOR EELS

Greenbank Studio is tucked into the corner of a domestic dwelling in a Luton side street. For all its anachronistic and slightly shambolic appearance, it houses a 16-track digital desk and is run by the very laid back but highly efficient Doogie, who's been at his trade for 25 years.

We squeezed ourselves into the wood-lined studio space and got to work. Within our five-hour session we produced the planned three tracks and managed to get one mix done on the spot. With only two rehearsals to prepare the ground, a live recording with only one overdub and one take per track, the results are a tad shaky, to say the least. But we're hopeful that the creaks and squeaks won't be too apparent in the highly compressed versions that will eventually be uploaded to the Fishing For Eels blog when we go touting for business.

So here's All Things Are Quite Silent making its tentative debut on the Patteran Pages. For the sake of honesty and plain dealing, those responsible are as follows:
Kim Denyer - vocals, Emma Semple - violin and viola, Olly Dowlen - 12-string guitar, Dave Gouldstone - soprano sax, Dick Jones - bass guitar, Chris Johnson - drums.

All Things Are Quite Silent

FUN & PROFIT

A middle aged Irish drummer I played with on the workingmen’s club circuit some 30 years ago had a maxim that defined his engagement with music precisely.  ‘Forget art’, he used to say. ‘Fun and profit, that’s the key. They go together like a horse and carriage’.  At the time I had persuaded myself that playing two 45 minute sets of the hokiest country-and-western & the most hackneyed rock’n’roll either side of the bingo and raffle for half-decent money was paying dues. At the weekends it was the real deal: long hours spent rehearsing with my fellow artists, wreathed in smoke, weaving sub-Yeatsian lyrics around the most perverse chord sequences we could devise.

Marooned on the lonely archipelago that was mid-‘70s progressive rock music, it never crossed my mind that rehearsing interminably for gigs that never materialised somewhat negated the point of the exercise.  It wasn’t until the punks came along & wrecked the whole effete middle class tea party that I saw the light and and joined Dangerous Rhythm, a funky little band playing ‘40s to ’60s R&B and ska. Suddenly the equation reversed itself and it was a case of panicky Friday rehearsal for Saturday’s gig, with half the number’s improvised on stage behind the singer’s frantic semaphore.

For the first time since I started playing 10 years earlier, when all you had to do to get a gig was wear a caftan and a pair of Jim McGuinn shades, I was not only having a blinder of a time, I was also going home with folding money in my pocket. Suddenly Johnny Riordan’s little maxim made perfect sense and I embraced the new protocol happily - and for keeps.

The last very satisfactory synthesis of the fun and profit principle was through the band that Emma started at St. Chris some 14 years ago.  Known simply as ‘the ceilidh band’, it operated at first just as a once-a-week recreational activity for a handful of students and teachers, providing the opportunity to play Irish, Scottish & English country dance music for an hour or two.  Within a very short time the relative skills of the kids & the musical experience of the adults had us taking bookings, initially locally but increasingly further afield.  The setting up of a website and the placing of the band’s name – now Fishing for Eels (after a well-known Irish jig) – with a couple of agencies began to offer us more work than we were in a position to take, all of it fun, all of it very profitable.

Whilst tackling this not unwelcome problem Reuben was born and, with regrets but a clear sense of reordered priorities, we garaged the band. During the past five years Emma’s fiddle has remained pretty much untouched in its case beneath the dining table.  I’ve played for a handful of school functions, but otherwise it’s just been knuckle-oiling exercises, playing along with CDs. Minimum fun, negative profit.

But with R, R and M now happy to have us out of their hair for the odd evening, we’re in the process of reviving the band around its adult core.  The aim is to try to bring about a situation again in which we have to turn down gig offers. To that end, we’re recording in a local studio this weekend. We’re hoping to get three numbers down – a linked pair of Irish tunes, The Doreyman’s Lament and Trip To Sligo, an English traditional song, All Things Are Quite Silent (which we only learned last night), and a quirky ska version of a Blowzabella dance tune by Chris Gunstone, The Man In The Brown Hat. These will then be uploaded to the nascent Fishing for Eels blog and I’ll get busy schmoozing around the various folk sites for links.

And if we’re successful with the overall game plan then we’ll have no difficulty at all in maintaining that most essential of performance relationships, fun and profit.

SOMETHING TO DECLARE

A comment by Jean in response to my post about anticipated problems with my sarcoidosis condition got me thinking. I hope she won’t mind my reproducing it here so that I can provide some kind of response. 

Dick, I'm sorry to hear this: both your health concerns and the decision to put the blog on hold. I send you all my best wishes for the health issues. But I also want to say: I wonder why you're doing this? Because you need more time and space and fewer commitments for a while as you deal with a difficult time? Fine. But if it is at all because you hesitate to share distress or sadness, I wish you wouldn't hesitate - I think that writers who do so give us all a great gift, expressing experiences shared by all at some time or other, but which only a few can adequately convey. The creative source, the words: this is, after all, something that, wonderfully, doesn't necessarily require full physical health, isn't it?

I’m not by nature one to bear all publicly. Frank confession, dramatic revelation and trumpet-blowing are not front line features here. Cosmopolitan I may try to be; English I remain! And fortunately one of the beauties of blogging is in the delicate balance that one can maintain between self-presentation and the cerebral.

But whatever the nature of that balance, a sense of common cause and fellow feeling is what motivates the interaction between bloggers. There will be, at the least, a seepage of data from even the most tight-lipped of writers and with those a little more ready to transmit the odd signal or two, much will go inferred by a reader on the same general wavelength.

In her comment on my post anticipating grim times ahead on medication, Jean hoped that I wasn’t hesitating to share distress or sadness because writers who are ready to communicate something of their pain are expressing experiences shared by all at some time or another, but which only a few can adequately convey. And it’s a point well made and well taken: bulletins from those at full stretch - whether sinking Lethewards through melancholia and hemlock, commentating on the inability to accommodate bereavement, or recording with dignity and restraint the ravages of terminal illness – are a staple of world literature. They constitute a major contribution both to our awareness of the commonality of suffering and our understanding of the human condition.   

I’m afraid I have neither the literary skill nor the forensic objectivity necessary (even at my shallow extreme of the suffering spectrum) for the exercise and, in the event, I would have ducked and run.  However, Jean made me reflect beyond the immediate issue in question and I ended up cataloguing the most fundamental verities that drive my life forward.

...

I FEAR... death through disease or disability. I have now, for the first time in my life, a powerful sense of my mortality. The unquestioned certainty of existential permanence that, for the child, renders time elastic has evaporated. That property of memory in age that has the perception of the passage of 20 years as having been fleeting so that one has perfect recall now of an event in the first year of the first decade ‘as if it were yesterday’ is now a characteristic of my future view. The next two decades will pass in a flash and this moment of writing now here upon this bank and shoal of time may be recalled at its end ‘as if it were yesterday’. I am now acutely conscious of my fragility. With my children around me with all before them, there are times outside the moment when this haunts me.   

I KNOW... that the sun rises and sets and that day is followed by night. I know who I love. I know that they love me. I know that there are certain unimpeachable moral absolutes concerning the sanctity of life from earliest childhood to the very end. I know that death is the final event. I can think of nothing else that I know for sure.

I FEEL... as passionately engaged with the processes of life as ever I did in youth. But whilst I may feel as emotionally committed to those issues and beliefs that activated me when I was younger, I feel them now in balance with a degree of wry circumspection.

I NEED... as much time here as inner health and outer circumstance will permit. I need to be, for as long as is possible, an active agent within the equation of love and mutual dependency that drives family. And besides, there is so much still to be done.

And yet, for all my hopes for future endurance, I need powerfully to disengage myself from both past and future as the principal determinants of present functioning. I need to locate that which will enable me to live fully in the moment, untrammelled by fear of what may lie ahead. Even as it unreels, time itself must lose its potency. I recognise that this breaking of allegiance to the great driving force behind Western existential consciousness requires a falling away, an abandonment, a relinquishing. I need to realise how that can be achieved and sustained.

I WANT... strength and capacity, physical and mental, to carry me through substantially undiminished into great age. I want humour and compassion to direct my actions and reactions up to the end.

THE ACME DO-IT YOURSELF

SHAKESPEAREAN INSULT KIT

To construct a Shakespearean insult, precede your selected noun with at least two of the adjectives in the columns below and then preface it with 'Thou'.

ADJECTIVES

artless / base-court / beetle-headed / boil-brained
bootless / churlish / clay-brained / clouted 
common-kissing / craven / dankish / dizzy-eyed
doghearted / droning / elf-skinned  / flap-mouthed
fly-bitten / fobbing / fool-born / gleeking
goatish / guts-griping / half-faced / hedge-born
impertinent / idle-headed / ill-nurtured / jarring 
knotty-pated / loggerheaded / mammering / mewling
motley-minded / milk-livered / onion-eyed /
plume-plucked  / pottle-deep / pox-marked /
pribbling / puking  puny / qualling 
rank / reeky  / roguish / rump-fed 
ruttish / shard-borne / sheep-biting / surly
swag-bellied / tardy-gaited / tottering / unmuzzled 
unchin-snouted / venomed / villainous 
weather-bitten / weedy / yeasty 

NOUNS

apple-john
barnacle
bladder
boar-pig
bum-bailey
canker-blossom
coxcomb
codpiece
flap-dragon
foot-licker
fustilarian
gudgeon
harpy
hedge-pig
hugger-mugger
lewdster
maggot-pie
malt-worm
mammet
measle
minnow
miscreant
moldwarp
mumble-news
puttock
pumpion
ratsbane
skainsmate
strumpet
whey-face
Wagtail

HOCKENDEN 1950

Lavender. Those
sheets, ice fields.
The counterpane, a tide
of down. The clock’s tongue
tucking in the hours.

Nights, slow moving
tableaux, their music
the click/scrape percussion
of the stairs unbending.
Soft bodies bumping
in the pipes and fires sighing
their coals asleep below.

The house implodes,
self-consuming in
the dark. I mumble
self-preserving charms
inside the slow storm
of soft masonry
and feathers. Sleep
rises like a chorus.

Morning shoots light
through fuzzy desolation.
I stare at the ceiling,
wearing new eyes.
Crows call from the beeches.

‘Rage, rage…’

In 2005 poet David Harsent won the prestigious Forward Prize for his new collection, Legion.  The poems consist ‘of voices in a war zone’ and Harsent reflected interestingly in The Guardian on the effectiveness of poetry in the face of catastrophe.  Whether or not direct experience is the only entitlement for art that deals with extremes such as war, torture, starvation is open to debate, he writes. What of the orchestra in Auschwitz, of Eastern European poetry during the cold war, of Vedran Smailovi playing his ‘cello in the rubble-strewn streets of besieged Sarajevo?  There are those who , I suspect, who would think even art of that sort a betrayal. He goes on: Beyond entitlement lies the thornier issue of effectiveness and beyond that, I suppose, the unanswerable question of what art is for. I think of Akhmatova ‘s famous encounter with the starved woman in the queue outside a Russian jail during the terror. The woman recognised Akhmatova and said: “Can you describe this?”  When Akhmatova said, “I can”, a ghost of a smile passed over the woman’s face; in some small way she was consoled.

Although no poem ever kept a Jew from the gas chamber and no lyric has ever stopped a tank, Harsent hopes that what gets written in extremis might at least hope to alarm & inform. However, the problem as he sees it is not so much one of entitlement or expressive effectiveness, but one of time scale. …Art – especially poetry – is a matter of seepage, of slow accumulation; it doesn’t warn; it laments…and writing a poem (may) be nothing more than spitting in the face of the executioner. For his part, the tendency of art being to react to disaster rather than acting as some kind of preventative force, David Harsent would settle for spitting.

...

A week or two ago I made some revisions to some spitting I did in 1985.

MISERERE

A spectral choir, surpliced
in cast-offs – a Pepsi t-shirt,
print-dress flippant
with daisies – moves across

African sand. Adored at
a distance by cameras,
they falter and stop, grouped
like charcoal scratches on

bright paper. Microphones
on stalks cast skinny shadows,
kissing cracked lips.
Thirty voices rise like

rustling wings, singing the
songs of plenitude from
times before borders. Harmony
drifts in the blue heat,

its lie a palliative: with
art intact, the soul must
thrive, hope must prevail.
We feel your pain,

so beautifully framed.
Then rising through
the specious order of
those thirty voices,

winding up the lattice
they have woven, is
the acid edge of
a baby’s cry. A single

treble, freed from the
sugar bonds of melody,
out of a black hole
in the front of a

bird skull, rising,
rising, wordless –
this is the purest
music of all. It sings

of chaos and the
end of times and,
hearing it, we shrink
back to our roots.

pic from: www.brunijazzart.com/

Well, here we go again...

FUNNY BUSINESS

I’ve never had a lot of time for the world of big business. My father inhabited it and, in fact, he prospered modestly. But I never saw him happier than the day he retired. There has to be something rapacious at the heart of any enterprise whose primary function is to generate limitless wealth for a small number of people unconnected with the production process whilst demonstrating little fundamental regard for the human cost. And the phenomenon of ethical business, we should note, has emerged in reaction to the horrors of excess rather than as constituting some sort of new a priori default mode. It‘s a sort of oxymoronic aberration that, at best, lifts a little of the pressure off the throats of the poor.

But maybe we might find a few scraps of wisdom to carry away from the feeding frenzy to our profit. Consider these three little business world management koans...

LESSON NUMBER ONE

A crow was sitting on a tree, doing nothing all day except rustling beneath his feathers and watching the day pass. A small rabbit saw the crow, and called up to him: "You look so at peace with yourself. Can I also sit like you and do nothing all day long?"

The crow answered: "Sure, why not." So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow, and rested. All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

Management Lesson?

To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.

...

LESSON NUMBER TWO

A turkey was chatting with a bull.

"I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree," sighed the turkey, "but I haven't got the energy."

"Well, why don't you nibble on some of my droppings?" replied the bull. "They're packed with natural nutrients."

The turkey pecked at a lump of dung and then another and found that, indeed, they did give him the stamina to reach, with a little practise, the lowest branch of the tree. The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch. Finally after a fourth night, there he was proudly perched at the top of the tree. Shortly after dawn the turkey was spotted by a farmer who shot him dead.

Management Lesson?

Bullshit might get you to the top, but it won't keep you there.

...

LESSON NUMBER THREE

A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold that the bird froze and fell to the ground in the middle of a large field. While it was lying there, a wandering cow came by and dropped some dung on it. When the frozen bird came to, it lay there in the pile of cow dung, relishing the warmth. Within no time it thawed him out completely! He snuggled down as if in his own nest and began to sing for joy. A passing cat heard the birdsong and came over to investigate. Finding the happy bird under the pile of cow dung, the cat dug him out and ate him.

Management Lesson?

•   Not everyone who shits on you is your enemy.
•   Not everyone who gets you out of shit is your friend.
•   And when you're in deep shit, it's best to keep your mouth shut.

Well. Chronic sarcoidosis diagnosed but no treatment prescribed. Something of a curved ball thrown by Dr. W this morning...

I went to the consultation in the sure and certain assumption that the failure of the corticosteroid course six months ago to suppress the sarcoid activity would mean an increased dosage of prednisone this time around.  As outlined below, this seemed an entirely rational assumption and my fears in both the short and longer term were of the debilitating effects of that powerful immunosuppressant.

Equally logical seemed the assumption that my sarcoid was not going to go away, either of its own accord – as happens in about one third of cases – or through the inhibiting effects of prednisone. Certain features of my sarcoid – chronic uveitis in the right eye (increased pressure that, if left untreated, will cause glaucoma) and small lesions called lupus pernio (normally on the face but in my case on the hand) – indicated a high probability of the condition being chronic.

Sarcoid is rarely fatal and exposure to the damaging properties of prednisone would have to be prolonged. But, on the authority of Googled data on sarcoid and corticosteroids largely confirmed by my doctor, the current situation and the application of reason, the immediate prospects looked grim. When I sat down with Dr. W I was ready for the prescription and only needed directions to the nearest pharmacy to get it filled.

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. So spake Benajmin Franklin. Dr. W pronounced that my sarcoid is indeed chronic and that it will be with me until the first of those certainties come to pass. But every current indication is that it’s operating at so low a level of intensity that treatment at present is unnecessary. Regular ACE blood tests every four months or so will ascertain that levels are not rising too much above the 100 mark and even if at some point a prednisone volley is needed, the sarcoid is unlikely to degrade my quality of life.

Nothing is certain. But that prognosis will do for me until I have sound reason to suppose that the situation has changed. It only remains for me to thank all those friends who left such supportive comments in the wake of my attack of spurious self-diagnosis. I feel gratitude for that concern, relief that my sarcoid and I are likely to live together in uneasy truce for a decent time ahead, and considerable embarrassment at my precipitate rush to judgement and subsequent despair.  Nobody likes a crybaby. I promise greater circumspection in the future... 

The blood test I had the Tuesday before last was for my 6-month sarcoidosis checkup. Last November I had a blood test at the conclusion of the corticosteroid treatment. It revealed that the steroids had effectively reduced the activity of the sarcoid from a reading of 98 on the ACE scale (the standard blood reading for sarcoid) to 38 and that, to all intents and purposes, the sarcoid was inactive. I recorded the various alarms and excursions from diagnosis to relief here on the Patteran Pages.

The new blood test results are through and the reading is back up to 98, indicating that the sarcoid is active again and this only six months after treatment. The likelihood is that I'll have to go back on a course of prednesone. The reasonable assumption is that the dosage will be higher and over a longer term. Although I shouldn't speculate prior to seeing my consultant next Wednesday and hearing what she has to say, I do know that either short-term intensive dosage of prednesone or long-term lighter dosage can create immune system problems. A more immediate consideration is the list of side effects that attend the taking of prednesone. I was fortunate in experiencing no side effects at all during my relatively light and diminishing dosage between September and November of last year. I'm not sure that with an increased dosage, maybe administered over a longer period, I'll be as lucky next time around.

I'm in good general health and I have inherited a strong constitution from both parents.   However, I'm 63 years old and that constitution will be increasingly subject to the normal processes of ageing and my particular concern is the effect within that context of prolonged exposure to prednesone. At the least, the current situation seems likely to create a need for changes in regime, although the precise implications of that are unclear. All in all, in the immediate here-and-now, it's not the brightest of pictures and this is a somewhat low point.

Once again, until the picture is clearer and I have some idea as to what the longer term prospects are, I'm going to close the Patteran Pages. It may well be that, with a clearer head and a more phlegmatic mindset, I'll be back soon. Maybe not. Much depends on what emerges from my consultation on Wednesday.

So, apologies for so summary an exit and deep thanks pro tem to all friends for the support past and present.