Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

I’m hopping on the Poetry Bus, which is currently taking passengers over at Bug’s Eye View. This poem follows the third of three excellent prompts – the leafless tree.



NIGHT GALE

I part the curtain,
fit my face into
the breach. Trees

moving their shoulders,
sensing trouble in
a gathering wind;

midnight leaves running 
for cover; a black bag
scampering like a

breakaway shadow.
Even moonlight is blown
into glittering rags

that stream from
the empty branches.
All of this called

in a long voice
that has no words
and speaks only of itself.

:::

AUDIO VERSION

NIGHT GALE

pic: http://damselflys.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html

I'm going for a hat trick plus one presentation this week. Starting with a response to the Big Tent Poetry prompt, I've incorporated three of the words wrapped up in the wordle. I'm also catching the Poetry Bus, but this time ingenuity fails me and I can't manage to squeeze this offering within the accommodating parameters of Enchanted Oak's prompt. (Which is, I guess, a little like slipping past the driver and hoping for a free ride!) Finally, I'm going to claim on Writer's Island that my two protagonists are paragons of love and loyalty - a peerless qualification of relationship more in evidence way back when than might be the case today! And finally I'm linking to the excellent One Shot Wednesday, which doesn't require a theme.

...

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!
News now and news then.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams

Arguably, the art of reportage is dwindling. It seems that we must receive all accounts of great events filtered through the bulletins of embedded reporters working to their employer’s agendas, video sequences wrapped up inside emotive musical soundtracks or dramatised docu-dramas shot in dimly-lit faux hand-held style with hectoring voiceovers.  Any sense of the objective truth of what actually happened or its direct impact on the lives of those individuals caught up in the events is made hostage to the highly tendentious ideological schedule of whoever is bringing the news from there to here, be it Fox, Murdoch or the People's Republic of China.

Subjectivity in reportage is inevitable, of course, and in principle it poses no problems. Within a democracy one should be able to access the information medium of one’s choice, so that a Tea Party activist might be represented in print or on screen either as a courageous latter-day Paul Revere whistleblower or a swivel-eyed political knuckle-dragger in cargo pants and a baseball cap. (Although in reality one would hope for something that might be, if a tad less admirable or contemptible, at least a tad more balanced!)

But one has be both motivated and enlightened enough in the first instance to know where to locate the reportage of one’s choice. And an unfortunate dual consequence of the advent of the non-stop data stream has been a.) a diminution in our capacity to absorb information in direct proportion to its constantly increasing quantity, and b.) the need to master the complex processes by which it must be accessed. Whilst this may be due more to the lazy reluctance of the leisure generation to make itself responsible for independent action under pressure rather than some warp-speed evolution of acquired congenital inability, this contention of exponential incapacity does have some value. And as our dependency on pre-digested information, edited, parcelled and cosmeticised for ease of consumption increases, the implications for authentic learning and, ultimately, the getting of wisdom are truly frightening.

Anyone over 40 has some sense of times when the acquisition of knowledge depended on the tree-based technology of book larnin’. But how in simpler times did our beleaguered ancestors receive tidings of doings in the wider world? What provided for weltanschauung during the centuries of mass illiteracy and the iron grip of theocracy?

Well, O best beloveds, before wireless, before telegraph, before newspapers, before the broadsheet declaimed at volume on town square and village green, there was the ballad – the folk song. That battle, this abduction, that press-ganged recruitment, this magical enchantment, that heartbreak would be worked into verse by some anonymous Milton, Bunyan or Tennyson. Then a melody would be derived or devised and, if the gift of universality sat within the words and the tune beguiled, it would be adopted and adapted according to individual need and local context. Whether written onto a broadsheet for the perusal and oral transmission of those who could read, or simply recalled and sung subsequently in the fields during the working day or in the pub during the singer's brief down time, the substantive song would enter the popular consciousness and its survival would be assured.

And now, even in these least of leisurely times when information and interpretation have all of the substance and nourishment of breakfast cereal, these small but perfectly formed receptacles of universal experience and concomitant wisdom retain their value and their relevance. Bucolic settings, sailing ships, red-coated soldiers and witches trapped in elder trees notwithstanding, the old folk ballads speak to us timelessly of betrayal and eternal love, death in battle, the inducements of the material world and the incursion of the metaphysical dimension. News stories once – documentaries sprung from the heat of incident that struck at heart and mind – adopt the mantle of eternal truths now. Nursery rhymes, folk tales, Nashville anthems, traditional songs draped over rock rhythm sections, even digital beats - the old accounts prevail, flourish even, via the electronic media that dominate our lives.

And to illustrate the point, just below, carried by the pixels that animate your screen, you'll find the lyric of one such song, The Dark-Eyed Sailor. This classic tale of unswerving loyalty in love and the rewards of constancy is probably of Irish origin, but it has been found by folksong collectors widely distributed across Britain.

Then, just beneath it is an audio file of Steeleye Span performing the ballad, followed in turn by my own adaptation, first in text and then as a podcast. I've wrested the story from its formal iambic quatrameter and stylised narrative form and rendered it into a form of reportage related in the present tense, but without the interposition of the narrator. The aim here has been to attempt to reverse the conventional equation, moving from the timeless universal fable to the immediate and specific experience.

THE DARK EYED SAILOR

As I roved out one evening fair
It being the summertime to take the air
I spied a sailor and a lady gay
And I stood to listen
And I stood to listen to hear what they would say.

He said, "Fair lady, why do you roam
For the day is spent and the night is on?"
She heaved a sigh while the tears did roll.
"For my dark-eyed sailor,
For my dark-eyed sailor, so young and stout and bold.

"'Tis seven long years since he left this land
A ring he took from off his lily-white hand
One half of the ring is still here with me
But the other's rolling
But the other's rolling at the bottom of the sea."

He said, "You may drive him out of your mind.
Some other young man you will surely find.
Love turns aside and soon cold has grown,
Like the winter's morning,
Like the winter's morning, the hills are white with snow."

She said, "I'll never forsake my dear,
Although we're parted this many a year.
Genteel he was and a rake like you
To induce a maiden
To induce a maiden to slight the jacket blue."

One half of the ring did young William show.
She ran distracted in grief and woe,
Saying, "William, William, I have gold in store
For my dark-eyed sailor,
For my dark-eyed sailor has proved his honour long."

And there is a cottage by yonder lea;
This couple's married and does agree.
So maids be loyal when your love's at sea
For a cloudy morning,
For a cloudy morning brings in a sunny day.

01 Dark Eyed Sailor

:::

The Dark-Eyed Sailor

Four doves rising
up over the ash-pit,
silver on the face of night. 
Wings applauding, down drifting.
Butter yellow, the new moon
riding high
with the old moon in her hair.

In the valley,
through thin light like mist,
the maiden returning through the water meadow,
lantern swinging.
All tears are dried to dust;
her gaze is fixed on the dim hedge line;
her heart is shut tight as a beech nut.

But she fingers the chain around her neck;
always her fingers stray to the chain and its burden,
the half-ring, the broken silver band,
plain but for William’s name engraved within.
Tonight the moon will touch it too.

And William, near the lane’s end,
slips the kitbag down.
An owl quavers in the churchyard yew.
This far inland no seagulls cry,
no salt to season the breeze,
no slow breathing tides to lift
or still the heart.

William’s head is cocked,
reading the currents.
His dark eyes catch the moon’s gold splinters,
and his fingers read the silver chain
like a rosary, walking the links
to the beat of her name
within the half-ring hanging.

Her feet on cinders and pebbles.
The cough of the five-bar gate
as she steps into the lane.
Grey eyes unfocussed now:
sixty downhill paces yet,
the scent of honeysuckle,
four bean rows and then the cottage door.

Her hand to her throat:
a piece of the night becomes smoke, twists
and becomes a man.
Even in the moon’s thin honey-light,
his eyes are dark and his jacket’s blue.
And his voice is as quiet as leaf on leaf:

“Why do you roam so late, my maid? Day’s passed,
night’s on”.
And he smiles, a white sickle blade
trimming back time.
Her hand to her throat. Seven years blooming
like a poisoned flower, hot, bright and blood-red.

Glancing, then looking down, she murmurs
her catechism: “So young and stout and bold,
 my sailor, his dark eyes, the ring he took from his hand,
this half is hung between my breasts
while the other rolls at the bottom of the sea”.

The reaphook moon that harvests the stars;
the sickle smile that cuts to the heart.
He seems to say in a voice out a dream:
“Oh, drive him from your heart.
Young men abound and love freezes hard with time”.
She whispers, “I’ll never forsake my dear”
and half-turns to go.

The reaphook moon that cradles the stars;
the sickle smile that speaks to the heart;
the half-ring he pinches towards her between
finger and thumb, that carries its own light;
the circle seven years broken,
sealed in the joining now.
...

 

The honeysuckle all but blocks the gateway,
but for memory’s sake he won’t have it trimmed.
And he lifts the hanging beans
and lets them fall, and says into the thin rain:
“Seven years, but still a cloudy morning
brings in a sunny day”.

 

THE DARK-EYED SAILOR - audio file

:::

 

BREATHE IN. NOW BREATHE OUT. NOW BREATHE IN...

The observation is made increasingly that as our dependency on technology increases so our capacity for independent action diminishes.  Less and less, it seems, in areas where choice seems self-evident, do we exercise our individual, autonomous judgement. More and more, it appears, we require, at best, constant confirmation and reassurance. At worse, we simply cannot function without clear leadership and prescriptive direction. Even our most superficial utterances are delivered in the tones of the terminally insecure.  Hear in your head now that little interrogative vocal up-turn tic at the conclusion of each sentence that seems to court approval, agreement, assent in the speech of seven out of ten teenagers in the English-speaking world.

The following are authentic recommendations and directives written on actual product packaging.  Read them and weep. Will it be within our lifetimes that a regular subliminal public service invocation will be slipped in between every 15 seconds of broadcast television reminding us that after breathing out it’s advisable to breathe in again, and then after breathing in..?

Do not use while sleeping.
Sears hair dryer

You could be a winner! No purchase necessary. Details inside.
Bag of Fritos

Use like regular soap.
Dial soap

Serving suggestion: Defrost.
Swann frozen dinner

Fits one head.
Shower cap box

Do not turn upside down.
Bottom of Tesco's Tiramisu dessert box

Product will be hot after heating.
Marks & Spencer bread pudding

Do not iron clothes on body.
Rowenta iron

Do not drive car or operate machinery.
Boot's children's cough medicine

Warning: May cause drowsiness.
Nytol insomnia medication

Warning: Keep out of children.
Korean kitchen knife

For indoor or outdoor use only.
Chinese Christmas lights

Not to be used for the other use.
Japanese food processor

Warning: Contains nuts
Sainsbury's peanuts

Instructions: Open packet, eat nuts.
American Airlines peanut packet

Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands.
Swedish chainsaw

KNIGHT, DEATH AND DEVIL

I’ve just finished reading a remarkable account of the life of Hermann Göring. Using a combination of recorded history and speculative fiction, Ella Leffland’s The Knight, Death and the Devil provides the most challenging and provocative account of the seamless coexistence of decency and evil within one human soul that I have ever encountered. Whilst the mystery of that shocking symbiosis remains unsolved, the plausibility of the phenomenon is terrifyingly real.

As a non-believer, and one whose anarchist principles persist in the wake of several decades of evidence that ‘humanity must perforce prey on itself’, I have no explanation, tortuous or glib, for the presence of evil in the world.  But this accommodation within one man of authentic charm, humour, high intelligence, gallantry, kindness, empathy, love even alongside a capacity for an unmoderated ruthlessness so devastating that it brought about the deaths of millions must contain within its paradoxical syntheses some evidential clues. 

A pathological inability to recognise and thus feel another’s pain; an intellectual poverty so great that mind cannot intercede with emotion; a personality so damaged by systematic cruelty during formative years that no clear sense of moral constituents ever emerges – these deviant states might at least bring us some understanding of the motive forces that provoke the darkest extremes of human behaviour. 

But Göring with his background of social privilege was presented by life-determining choices again and again during his formative years and beyond. And still he selected the path that took him from youthful promise to ignominy at Nuremberg. So our judgement of him must be based on what he chose to become and what actions he performed within that elective condition of humanity.  As must our judgement of all those whom present perception and historical verdict evaluate as evil. 

Signing in with this poem both for the Poetry Bus, ticking over at Keeping Secrets, and for Writer’s Island.



SIMON WIESENTHAL LEAVES MAUTHAUSEN

Simon Wiesenthal leaves Mauthausen.
Is it spring or autumn?  Birds are singing,
lining the wire in the long dawn rain.
Wiesenthal carries the bag the GIs gave him. 
 
Smoking, they lounge in groups by their jeeps.
Maidens of war, they see all, know nothing.
Scorched earth, still warm.  Maybe the victors
fired the villages, or the vanquished in retreat.
 
Ah, the villages, where they knew nothing,
where they toiled with their heads down
in the black wind.  Now they group like cattle
lost amongst their cottages, their hayricks burning.
 
Wiesenthal walks in a straight line, one foot
placed with calculated care before the other.
Something like rejoicing trips his heart
as he approaches, step by step, a horizon
 
owned by no one.  He won’t look back.
The wire will bind his dreams until death
and towers will stand four-square at the corners
of every field and garden and voices will crack sleep
 
in countless rooms, strange and familiar. 
Israel will be raised on a raft of bones. “It will
survive me.  Now I must walk in a straight line
for as long as shadows fall”.

Simon Wiesenthal, a controversial figure in Holocaust history, chose to seek justice for murdered Jews by hunting down Nazis who had evaded or escaped capture in the post-war years. His organisation, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, participated in the capture of leading Nazis such as architect of the proposed Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, the Gestapo officer Karl Silberbauer, who arrested Anne Frank, and Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, who was responsible for the torture and death of thousands of women and children at Maideneck camp. Wiesenthal died in 2005. The Centre’s work continues.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. 
Mark Twain

Back already. Something of a false alarm (not for the first time). Yesterday I received the third set of blood test results since my prostatectomy operation in May. The previous two have registered negative, indicating no cancer cell activity. The latest appeared to have shown an elevation above the negative level, implying the presence of PSA (the protein that signals prostate cancer) in the blood stream. I understand now that there is no standardisation of that minimum reading across NHS hospitals and that where one will use <0.01 as the base level (my Cambridge consultant’s hospital), another will state it as <0.1 (my local hospital). I just got <0.1 from the latter and panicked!

In July of last year, I posted a piece about anxiety, outing myself as a compulsive worrier. We all worry, but in some of us anxiety is a persistent and pervasive process with a pathology that can at times threaten the well-being of self and loved ones, however long-suffering and supportive. I see it more as a chronic condition than a simple state of mind and as such it needs to be addressed practically.

Since my diagnosis of cancer in February and the subsequent operation and its aftermath the anxiety – now compounded by genuine concerns - reached unmanageable levels and I sought out counselling. During the past three years, in fact, my anxiety levels, whilst not constant, have at times risen to near-incapacitating levels. And whilst, as an only child, I’m accustomed to self-administering advice, guidance, scolding and downright ordering about, now my capacity to manage alone was seriously compromised. 

I don’t have a lot of faith in counsellors: too many seem either unworldly missionaries wanting, very creditably but ultimately ineffectually, to bring comfort and succour, or souls who, whilst entirely well-intentioned, are themselves troubled and to whom one might justifiably apply the invocation, ‘physician, heal thyself’. However, I’m hopeful that I may have located a counsellor now with some edge. She is authoritative and rigorous; she communicates a sense of engagement with the world; she is professional but personable. In a matter-of-fact but managed way I shall try to locate, confront and accommodate (because we can never hope fully to eradicate) those forces that drive my anxieties.

So for now, as my pal Janey says, onwards and sideways. We, the Anxious – our name is legion for we are many. Maybe you’re one of us. If so, at least draw some comfort from our number and know that you are very far from being alone. 

Friends old and new, I'm going to be on the quiet side for a while. I hope to be back soon. 

WELCOME KITTY GEORGIA!

My daughter Zoe and her partner Russell are now the proud and exhausted parents of Kitty Georgia...

...and I am a proud and elated grandfather!

My response to the November 12th Big Tent Poetry prompt.



HEADS

Midnight chimes. The kids, long since
wrapped around their artefacts – a hairless
doll, an orange bear – and now they whir
and mutter inside their amniotic dreams.

In the milky dark a thin caul of years hoods
each head, a fragile membrane. I watch
and my years beat at the night like great
ravens looking to roost; I feel their wind.

From: 'Heads', written and illustrated by Matthew Van Fleet

NOVEMBER 11th 2010

Armistice Day.  The wearing of poppies. In Flanders fields, the poppies blow/Among the crosses, row on row.  The two-minute silence.  The hushed voice of the radio narrator describing the annual ceremony by the Cenotaph in Whitehall – the ceremony that was instigated in the wake of the First World War during that brief rush of years within which another war was unthinkable. 

At that time, for believer and unbeliever alike, the ceremony had a point and a purpose.  In the immediate aftermath of war, the attempt somehow to accommodate the unspeakable, to deal with the shame of what had been unleashed, had an overwhelming significance.  It afforded at the least a sense of communion amongst those who had returned and it provided an opportunity for witness to those who had remained behind.  Together the survivors and the onlookers could attempt some sort of expiation and pledge themselves, whether before their God or simply in their own hearts, never to permit the might and hubris of nation states to prey on their own millions again.

Today, in search of its relevance, value or purpose between or beyond the triumphantly national and the poignantly personal, I listened to part of the ceremony.  The shuffling of feet, the barking of sergeant-majors, the tinny rattling of snare drums, the martial flare of trumpets, all wrapped in that eerie, distancing echo that marks such occasions.   Everywhere one could sense a pride being taken in the military precision of it all – men and women drilled to perfection, driven along, rank by rank, by the old tunes that once had accompanied their regiments into battle.  And then the unctuous tones of a clergyman filling Whitehall: “To give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to feel the wounds…”, the very words that so many times in recent history importuned farm, factory and office workers, teachers, doctors, lawyers to take up arms and go wherever, in its wisdom, their nation chose to send them. 

I switched off.  I knew that waiting in line were the veterans of what are now the wars of two centuries and that when the stamping, shouting and brass band blaring had declared the tone, the long lines of them would file past the Cenotaph.  Old men with brilliantined hair and neatly razored moustaches, British Legion berets at the regulation angle, would march as best they could, the square bashing of the Second World War and the Korean War remembered every bit as vividly as the faces of their fallen friends. Following them, middle aged family men, veterans of the Falkland War. And young soldiers, currently serving, recently returned from the long and inglorious aftermath of the Iraq invasion and the current unresolved and bloody skirmishes in Afghanistan, plans for their future conflicts already unfolding in small offices in Downing Street and Washington. They would march briskly, their training concealing what must have been in the hearts and minds of so many of them.

The Armistice Day parade has been held annually since 1921.  How acutely those first veterans marching past the Cenotaph must have willed an end to the madness that took so many of their comrades.  And yet within 18 years their sons were following the same ‘long, long trail’ that they themselves had taken in 1914.  And now, in 2010, 89 years on, still we wrap our mourning and our solemn dedication to the elimination of warfare in the trappings of militarism, the hypocrisy of the Church and the cant of the politicians. 

There is nothing more moving than the account given by the private soldier who remembers the insanity of the Battle of the Somme or the bloody farce of the Dardanelles as if they had happened yesterday.  Last year the extraordinary Great War veteran Henry Allingham died at the age of 113 Whatever sense of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori might have gathered him up so long ago, all he focussed in his final years was the memory of his fallen comrades and the waste, the awful waste of it all. "War's stupid”, he said. “Nobody wins. You might as well talk first; you have to talk last anyway."

In 80 years time will there still be the march past the Cenotaph and the unctuous voice of the priest exhorting us ‘to give and not count the cost’ while the trumpets blast and the boots stamp in unison?  If so, then presumably the last few survivors of the Afghanistan war – a conflict likely to be glimpsed by posterity as just a spark within the long conflagration of wars during the intervening years – will remember only their fallen comrades and the awful waste of it all.

              HENRY ALLINGHAM

11.11: SILENCE

11.00. The empty
gun salutes. I watch
myself in the blank

screen staring back
across a silent keyboard.
Information rests. Pixels

sleep. Nothing crosses
the neural web. This
is the eleventh hour

and, in the pair of minutes
that it takes a platoon
to clear a parapet,

the walls dissolve
and nailed boots
are kicking mud

across the electronic
frontier. Nothing here
has changed: the smell

of mould, black shag
tobacco, sweat. There’s rum
in a mug, a scratched

recording of some long-
forgotten operetta, smoke
from a cooking fire.

And then the shriek
of the dawn barrage,
the trailing chains

of the novice blind;
the letters that
limp home behind

the telegrams; the promises
that stitch the shrouds
and with them go

beneath the earth.
Those graves,
their poppy harvest.

11.02. Maybe somewhere
a bugle calls. Here
the pixels crack

and fidget into
bright new words
across a haunted page.