Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

Between 02.00 and 03.00. Arthritis wakes me up and has me downstairs awaiting the effects of the tablet. This, a second draft of the second of two insomnia poems.

INSOMNIA 2

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care. The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath. Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course. Chief nourisher in life's feast.
MACBETH

Night falls. It bellies up to windows, crowds
the house. Da capo – dancing blind again:
stuck in a lift, trapped in a mineshaft,
premature burial. A hood, a mask, a carbon
lens across the eyes. A brush with oblivion,
I mutter, cotton-mouthed and bitter. Sleep
is a secret whispered to everyone else;
I’m kept in the dark.

Then cries from your cradle: birdsong,
catcalls – you have a menagerie in your throat.
I climb the stairs in twos and find you caught
between solstice and equinox with a pulse
beating behind your eyes. I hold you tight
and draw your dream in a heartbeat.
You smile and, turning in my arms once,
you spill sleep like a benediction. The cipher
cracks. Darkness has no name. I slide
between its sheets.

MUTES 1.

The droppings of the falcon are known as ‘mutes’. Since I’ve run out of poems and am producing prose posts at a much reduced rate, those ramblings such as this that do make it to screen shall be known as ‘mutes’ from hereon: small droppings after diligent scrutiny of the landscape below.

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Well, we shared our rag-bag of Americana tunes and songs with a capacity crowd in the tiny saloon bar of the Red Lion on Friday night. Reception was appreciative and we sparked the active interest of a blues promoter and a rep from the annual world music festival Rhythms of the World (which prestigious event is held in Hitchin every summer), both of whom had come to check us out. 

We were a little less enchanted. We’d been playing all afternoon and in the acoustic purity of my sitting room had put together a pleasing set comprising pre-war country blues, post-war Chicago blues, timeless mountain music, guitar rags and arrangements of No Woman, No Cry and I Heard It Through The Grapevine. But the old bugbears of dodgy sound on stage (actually, in inglenook fireplace) made it harder work than we’d anticipated and things only really picked up for us in the second half.

Whenever and wherever it all happens next, sound must be mixed externally and there must be fold-back – both pretty much unknown luxuries when we started out, both pretty much essential for the exacting on-stage standards nowadays.

:::

What is it about Iceland? A population of 320,000 and it manages to produce the most haunting music out of left-field in the whole multicultural polyglot expanse of Europe. This is Icelandic composer Skúli Sverrisson with his Vaktir Þú, featuring Ólöf Arnalds on vocals.

 

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I’m thinking of posting the entirety of The Famous Flower to the Pages, dividing it as best I can into episodes. The Rachels Fenton and Fox have provided very helpful feedback on the first draft, which has informed the second version that I’ve now completed.

:::

Word is that we’re aiming for the end of February for a publication date. for Ancient Lights, which is exciting and alarming in equal measure. I’m struggling for graphics for a cover motif that will reflect the book’s contents whilst satisfying the requirements of book design. As for locating a back cover pic of the author that doesn’t have him looking like a Breughel burgher just after lunch but radiates instead the lissome beauty that lies within, the task has barely started.

:::

SOME DAYS (AND NIGHTS) IN BITS

FRIDAY. Awake at 03.35. Smoky dark. Test my dodgy left eye: still these strange white flashes as I move my head from side to side. With my hair-trigger response to anything that tests my sense of vulnerability, a few moments of paranoia follow. Imminent blindness? I get up and creep downstairs. Wind buffets the house; rain pebbles the windowpanes. I fire up the computer and blue light illuminates the desk. Two-and-a-half hours later Reuben comes barreling down and the day begins to the sound of Manchester United winning 8 – 0 in the wonderful world of Wii.

::

SATURDAY. Listened to Tamsin Little playing The Lark Ascending and then heard her interviewed on Woman’s Hour. She was asked whether she was as moved in the playing as the audience was in the listening. She said how difficult she finds it during the last spiraling passage, which covers the harmonic spectrum of the instrument; how technically demanding is the control of volume and pitch against the emotional impetus of the whole piece. Fascinating, that balance between technical engagement and impassioned involvement. In acting and dance the performer is locked into the assumed role and emotional discharge must wait until after the event.  In music the greater likelihood must be that the performer is at least in part ‘present’ during the act. The greater the need, therefore, for some imposed discipline of detachment.

::

SUNDAY. A thick white rime across the fields all day. A methane blue sky, melding into that unlikely compound of copper and pearl at dusk. Two red kites swinging low over the garden and then loping off across those crystalline fields.

::

MONDAY. Awake at 01.20 with agonisingly sharp arthritis in my right big toe. It returns every few months with (thus far) periods of complete remission in between. I’m not bad with pain usually, but this is something else. I swallow a dicloflex and get up, hoping for some relief within an hour or two. 03.18 and I’m still at the keyboard. Tired and fed up, but philosophical. I must go with Yeats:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clasp its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

::

And so, at 03.30, to bed.

This is a re-formatted second draft of a poem from seven years ago. Its reference points are likely to be be familiar only to Brits over 50 or those with a keen interest in the socio-cultural scene in the UK during the immediate post-war decade. So for the rest of you...

Start-rite made shoes of devastatingly unfashionable practicality for kids. Like footwear with magical properties out of a fairy tale, donning them trapped one securely and inescapably within the anonymity of childhood. Becoming a credible pirate, cowboy or infantryman whilst wearing a pair of Start-rites demanded an imagination of transcendent power.

Similarly cursed were the corset-like liberty bodices and Chilprufe vests that all children wore against the un-centrally heated cold. In summer, the Aertex shirt provided a measure of ventilation - assuming that one's mother had decided that the weather was clement enough to permit the casting off of the winter lining. All three were the perfect (and almost literal) embodiment of the purely utilitarian garment.

As a child, clad in my livery of infancy, I would stare up at the huge Start-rite billboards with their tiny pilgrims stumping confidently towards the place where the clouds touch the land and I'd wonder what they might find there.



VANISHING POINT

Those Start-rite kids. A tam o’ shantered boy,
a bobble-hatted girl, both austerity booted
and utility wrapped against the winter of the world.

I used to wonder where they were bound. Somewhere
far away, so swaddled and determined. I bet they had
their gloves on long elastic through each sleeve.

I bet they had their Chilprufe vests, their Aertex shirts
buttoned up across their breakfasts. Bet they had
hope in their hearts, dreams unconsumed by fire or water,

as each set sensible foot on the long, straight highway,
fringed with bedtime story trees. So much is promised us
in a hurting world between here and the vanishing point.

Book those 'plane tickets now, my continental and transatlantic friends. Those of you in the UK, you'll have to dig even deeper to manage your train fares!

DJ IN PRINT!

I'm delighted to announce that Phoenicia Publishing of Montreal are to publish a book of my poems later this year. It will be called Ancient Lights and will feature some 65 poems. As you can see from the Phoenicia website, production values are very high, both in terms of the choice of material and the design and making of the books. I feel privileged to have had a manuscript accepted by Phoenicia. A very happy haven after so long!

When the practicalities are sorted out - cover design, publication date, marketing details and the like - I'll post again. However, whilst not short on ego and hubris, I've always found the bells and whistles approach to self-publicising difficult to manage. (Why become a bass player when everyone else wants to be a lead guitarist?) So I'll apologise in advance for the popping up in unexpected places and the subsequent sleeve-tugging that will go on around publication time.

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Here's an old poem that I wrote way back and have just re-discovered and re-jigged.



TELESCOPE

Space-crazy, we bought a telescope
and hugged it home.
Soon it was nosy,
probing a foam
of clouds, a splash of birds,
a watercolour sun.

That night we danced attendance
on the stars,
waited by the window
as the fading scars
of a bloody sunset
healed away.

We scoured the thicket darkness
of the sky,
breath on a tether.
Our elastic eye
scrutinised but
just found holes.

Then we caught a corner
of the moon.
Too bold and brazen,
a monochrome cartoon
for kids and madmen.
We withdrew, appalled.

Day broke clear, and, cautious,
set to run,
we scanned the heavens.
Buttery sun
clogged the treeline, gold
in sulphur blue.

Space-shy, we tipped the telescope,
swept a new prospect –
suburban hedges, geometric lawns.
Pioneers, we cross-checked
the garden constellations
with the galaxy next door.

OPEN SECRETS

2012 awaits. One thing seems certain here at the dawn of the year: whatever drafts of joy and fulfilment we might hope to sup during it are going to have to be home brewed.  Any reliance on the usual agencies and the conduits down which their benefices normally flow are likely to be scotched at source. In short, this is shaping up to be a crap year and then some.

But what interests me greatly as the sun rises on the wreckage is just how many of those long-term open secrets will finally be acknowledged as spurious truths, responsible at least in part for our rapid progress towards a self-prepared hell in a self-propelled handcart. Here are three. There are many more.

Let’s start at the top. Capitalism. Is there any serious possibility of a widespread recognition during 2012 that the rottenness at the core was in the seeds from the start? Might intelligent, discerning, observant folk across the world finally accept that capitalism wasn’t an ideology that lost its way? That the reckless vandalism of recent years and its unmediated aftermath of cynical exploitation and continuing injustice are driven by the feral greed that is its fundamental driving force? Could it be that there might be some acceptance on a significant scale that there is no taming the wild beast? Are we ready at last to begin to consider the need for alternative modes of socio-economic organisation?

 Education. The black farce of an examination system based on two sequences of two years-worth of force-fed data culminating in two hours of formalised regurgitation has been exposed once again with the recent scandal of subject information being leaked to schools by exam board officials. Year after year teachers and students step onto the floor for the same ungainly, undignified and fundamentally purposeless dance. The same old steps, the same old music, the same old pretence that this awkward, clumsy push-pull peregrination is anything other than a futile performance, devoid of intrinsic benefit and extrinsic purpose. During 2012 could we not, I wonder, accept that this systematised wastage of four crucial years of potential engagement in authentic learning needs fundamental reassessment?

And once the lid has been wrested from that particular Pandora’s box, maybe during 2012 we could invest some time and energy in a careful analysis of the oxymoronic principle of the large school as a crucible of educational endeavour. Another open secret, this: any community within which any members can’t reasonably learn each other’s names has turned into an institution. Its hierarchies will be pyramidal; its processes will be dictatorial; its operations will be dehumanised and mechanistic. No school should exceed 300 students in number and all should have full access to the determining of the predominant culture and day-to-day functioning. While everything’s up in the air and we’re all contemplating void where hitherto we had been perceiving substance, could we not during 2012 address ourselves to this elemental reassessment as well?

The prison system. If any pretence still prevails that the outcome of custodial sentencing within the current system either educates or punishes those imprisoned towards redemption, might we hope that during 2012 the last fumes of it evaporate? Surely we have to accept that prisons are simply places within which we stack high those who have contravened legal constraints beyond fiscal penalty. And can we not accept finally the incontrovertible fact that their deterrent value is minimal. ‘Prisons’, the great anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin told us, ‘are the universities of crime’. ‘Twas ever thus, ‘twill ever be so. So either we have to shrug it off and build some more, or we have to begin to re-think from basic principles up our entire philosophy and practice of punitive internment. Is there any likelihood during 2012 – a year within which, surely, crime is likely to flourish – of that root and branch reconsideration?

This final paragraph should be the one within which I exhort us all to look ahead with optimism, embracing readily the bracing changes forced upon us by circumstances entirely outside our control down here at the grass-roots. But whilst our immediate crises are not the product of some shared communal malfunction in which somehow all of us share an equality of responsibility, we are at source the authors of our own misfortune. How so? Because our wants, our desires, our ambitions, our vanities, our assumptions have maintained a set of developing priorities and goals through two centuries or more. And through the process of consistently devolving responsibility to sort it all out on our behalf to those to whom we have, largely spuriously, accorded the status of the Great and the Good, we have ensured dereliction and collapse.

So maybe the very best we can hope for in 2012 is a rueful realisation that when the stakes are at the highest and the very best minds, bodies and souls are needed to see us through, we should never, but never, hand power to those who want it most. Indeed, we should always, but always, make room for the reluctant leaders - the humble, the philosophical, the compassionate. Maybe during 2012 we might just begin to turn towards those who, in a world stifling from the blind imperative of limitless growth and gigantism, hold as their enduring priority the welfare of the real person over the abstract notion of The People. 

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Meanwhile, a new business venture for me in 2012. All welcome! (Menu sent in plain brown envelope).