Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

THE NINE-YEAR STRETCH

Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages is 9-years old today. I coaxed the clunky machinery of that primitive yet complex Salon Blogs software into life when the weblog represented internet zeitgeist. And I sit here now, utilising this sophisticated and flexible Typepad platform at a time in which other swifter, simpler social media have rendered the weblog a staid and ponderous institution.

In the past year or two, my relationship with blogging, and thus with this blog, has evolved significantly. At the outset my participation in the process was driven by the writer’s prime dual impulse: to create in language and to communicate the product as widely as possible. Whilst the first component remains active - the writing simply happens, presumably because it must - the second has pretty much atrophied. What I write and how I write it have never attracted a broad constituency of readers and any hopeful evangelism has, I’m relieved to say, finally passed.

As for those that have become regular readers and contributors, I value their presence very highly. A number have become friends and party to a relationship beyond the immediate context of the blog. All share a commonality of interests, or at least territories that are contiguous, so the creative momentum behind the Patteran Pages continues, even if posts are scarcer and visits to fellow blogs correspondingly fewer.

So I reckon I’ll make the decade and I hope very much that it will be in the company of those of you reading this from my feeds or direct from the Pages now. This blog will always be my main accommodation, even if for immediacy of interaction Facebook (with the reservations that many of us share) draws me in. A cautious excelsior, then, as this unpromising year unfolds.

Another first draft. Sharing with The Mag and trying to justify the prompt by substituting a car for the bike and a tree for a 'phone booth!

LEAVES

I’m bowling too fast around these rainy lanes,
as if this brief journey mattered only for
the red hearth left behind and the stove
and curtain shelter at the other end. Point

of departure, point of arrival and flickering
in between, the doppler shift of smeared
light and the four-wheel chorus crooning
the same old song of the road. Too easy

here and then here to race beneath these
leaning thickets, past these empty gateways,
up above these vertigoes of sheer perspective
rolling out to a mystery tree-line, beyond which

may lie hope of a steadier light or nothing
of light at all. Then, drawn by the flare, I stop
beneath a maple. High above me spreads a
shredded ceiling, all on fire in lithium red.

Each of these leaves is dying. Phloem choked;
a cork skin sealing the stalk from the green sap.
All around amongst the roots and husks,
the ruby tendrils close towards their centre,

each anticipating dust. But all this crowding
heat and light above, these burning leaves all
tipped towards their memory of where the sun
last shone. As I drive away, I’m seeing clearer,

breathing deeper. Sunsets, embers, blood and
leaves the moment before they fall bloom
crimson even as they pass. My heart, your heart
will beat in concert up to the last heartbeat.

A second draft.

VALENTINE

I tell you that I love you quite a lot.
On impulse, provocation, in response
to some bright word or deed.

But when you ask how much, I raise
my hands, palm paralleling palm, like
the cartoon angler drifting space

between implausible and not enough
by half. Because this weary clutch
of words, this fumbled mime

of airy imprecision, were sung
and danced into oblivion long before
we creatures straightened up,

shaved off our beards, plaited
tresses and became philosophers
of love. So I guess we’ll have to settle

for that semi-turn to face each other
passing on the stairs,
 or the tendency
to lean together on the sofa when

the wind blows hard and the stove
is burning bright, right here at
the centre of the known world.

A first draft. Poets United no. 88

VALENTINE

I tell you that I love you
quite a lot. On impulse,
provocation, in response to
some bright word or deed.

But when you ask how much
I raise my hands, palm
paralleling palm, like the
cartoon angler drifting space

between implausible and not
enough by half. Because this
weary clutch of words, this
fumbled mime of airy imprecision,

they were sung and danced into
oblivion long before we creatures
straightened up, shaved off
our beards, plaited tresses and

became philosophers of love.
So I guess we’ll have to settle
for the odd half turn to face
each other passing on the stairs,

or the tendency to lean together
on the sofa when the stove
is burning high and there’s
clearly nothing else to do.

A tentative first draft. Metaphysics, science or imagination? dVerse: Poetry and Philosophy.



HINC SPES EFFULGET

Whether to identify the stars as
the finest of dust flung far and wide,
or to speak of their intolerable heat
and distance that must stretch
the elastic skin of your imagining
to tearing point, or to identify
the turning bowl of night as vast
and flawed with tiny holes through
which the light beyond is witnessed.

Gods and monsters jostle here, each
behind his shingle. What can I say
to you above their clamour? Best, maybe,
beneath this implacable black that binds
us all to settle for the tiny holes: that
just on the other side there thrives
a brilliance, godless, inexhaustible,
the sum of all the very best of dreaming.

"When the mode of the music changes, the wall of the city shake..."

 

 

Unreeling before me now is an ancient video I recorded back in the early '90s (info and credits label long since unpeeled and gone) of a BBC 2 TV programme about Woody Guthrie. I'm typing this as an extraordinarily pretty John Mellencamp fronts an acoustic pick-up band singing Woody Guthrie's sardonic classic, Do-Re-Mi. This just after that fiercest of Scottish radicals Dick Gaughan delivered his blistering version of Leon Rosselson's The World Turned Upside Down. The matchless power of song to orchestrate and celebrate belief and commitment!

:::

I'm one battered, cockeyed socialist whose convictions were ratified, consolidated and underpinned rather than dispelled during those dark Thatcherite days of the mid-'80s. The notion that an understanding of  the central dynamic of socialism must derive entirely from a narrow and simplistic characterisation of class and culture in isolation from its deep and broadly spread roots has always stifled the true nature and implications of the ideology.

However, ideology notwithstanding, one thing is certain: if there predominates a class that controls the wealth that the majority produces and if social order is determined by this reality then there exist fundamental inequities and injustices within society. And socialism is the belief system that best accommodates the conviction that it is humanity's drive to cooperate rather than to compete that accounts for the survival, indeed, the flourishing of the species.

My Dad told me one Sunday lunchtime at our middle class dining room table that by the time I was his age I would have made all the compromises that adult pragmatism had forced upon him and that I would see the world through lenses of a very different colour.

Well, he was nearly right: I've made my compromises and I've spent more of my working life inside the tent pissing out rather than on the outside, a radical dissenter, pissing in. But however many issues I've ducked as kids have come into the world needing a house to live in and clothes to wear, the infection of socialism has informed my every perspective. Whether working with Gypsies and Travellers or joining with others in keeping afloat approaches to education and schooling that offer real ideological and practical alternatives, it's been cooperation over competition, community over institution that have inspired me. 

So as we wobble precariously into this second decade of a century that appears to have eschewed ideology of any kind, my convictions, against the supposed counter-intuition of crabbed age, have gained substance. And as the chronic progression of capitalism's stomach cramps becomes more evident by the day, the overwhelming power of an idea whose time really has come seems to me undeniable.

:::

The closest that the broad left has ever got to a defining hymn or anthem  is not that old battle chant, The Red Flag, but rather the song that celebrates the breaching of all frontiers, The Internationale. Here's Billy Bragg at Pete Seeger's 90th birthday, singing the verse that Seeger had him compose. The matchless power of song to orchestrate and celebrate belief and commitment!

 

Taking a liberty again, I'm afraid, and slipping a poem (first draft of a major re-write) into Magpie Tales 103 that doesn't fit the prompt. Apologies to all zealots! It might pass muster for dVerse too. Does it count if I have a small group of Ponge translations awaiting final drafting?



HIGHWIRES

Holding the brown cowls, like honey jars
hot with bees, the linesman filled the wires
with words. We children gazed agog at this
free circus in the air, each one hanging
with him in the wind. When he clambered
hand over hand down the nailed-in steps
and stood four-square, sharing our patch
of grass, whistling as he packed a canvas bag,
he folded away his wings as well. Yet when
the ‘phone bubbled into the stilted prose
of a Sunday afternoon, I swung with him
and his humming once again, hanging from those
singing wires just beneath the invisible stars.

A first draft. Squeezing by virtue of relative abstraction beneath the Kandinsky on Magpie Tales 102.

STORM WARNING

A bruise creeps up our big sky.
A nudge of thunder in the east.
Three pigeons rattle inside the beech
and crash the air. You flinch.
“Will it kill us when it comes?”
you ask. I smile and take your hand.
An immanence for both of us: you
where the rainbow starts to climb, me
where it falls towards that pot of gold.