Tuesday, July 28, 2020

The last of Swindon



Raising the kitchen blind at 0630. The sun's up. The shadow of the cherry tree on the gable wall. The softer shadows.



The unequal pair of rowans, becoming colourful again. Last autumn I made a lot of rowan jelly!






Plants we inherit are never valued like those we plant ourselves, so I don't expect the garden I'm leaving to be much loved. But I've loved making it, and here's a photo to remind me. Let's have a walk round.

Front right, by the recycling boxes, the sage is enjoying a second flurry. When it flowered the first time, it was almost buried under masses of celery and angelica, but that's all gone now.

I've gradually quietened the garden since I decided to leave. All the seeding stems have been cut back, a few pots and baskets have been moved to Frome, the various wild plants that I was nurturing (mainly willowherbs) have been weeded out.

Behind the sage are a group of chuckout pots that came from Laura's garden. These had the usual treasures: meadow cranesbill, purple toadflax, red valerian,  violets, forget-me-nots... And that architectural rush in the trough, ultimately from Moredon, one of my many previous Swindon residences. 

Behind those, you can see the Chinese Holly Fern that was the first thing I planted, nearly 18 months ago. It was a messy sale item and it continued to look messy for the next year or more, but now I'm very happy with it and expect it to improve by the year, if it's allowed to.

Going left from there, a small red and white fuschia in peak flower, and left of that, a patch of miscellaneous growth now dominated by a tall Common Evening-Primrose. Behind it, one of the geraniums I wrote about here:


And behind that, the redcurrant bush, which will produce a lot of berries next year. Also an Italian Alder, a poisoned chalice I suppose but I'll leave it to future tenants to cut it down; and a Lathyrus which has suddenly doubled in size and may even flower.

We've almost finished this indulgent tour. Along the back edge, the cornflower and lungwort (from Laura) which were so successful this spring. In the middle, more of the old pots, erigeron, valerian, geranium...

On the left, a lavender planted this year, whose flowers I've just stayed long enough to see. I won't get to see the Astilbe, which is belatedly in bud. Behind the lavender, but invisible, is a lemon-balm, which is finally looking established and will now, I hope, be impossible to get rid of. Even we flitting tenants have a bit of the colonizing instinct!



Much slower to colour than the rowans, this is the Swedish Whitebeam I could see from my flat when I looked in  the other direction (approximately ESE).


Looking back on this rather isolated time of my life, I'll most remember exploring the many Green Hound's-tongue sites in West Swindon, a journey that began here:



Also, the two albums of songs that I recorded while here:



And, above all, sitting on the faux-leather sofa learning Swedish, the many hours of painstakingly deep-reading the Norrland novel that I'm now translating in full:


And now to clean that bathroom...


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Monday, July 27, 2020

After-Lithe




In these final days of clearing out and cleaning up there was something incongruous about Peter Philpott's new poetry book arriving through the letterbox but my efforts to ignore it were brief and I'm already about halfway through my first read. There's something irresistible and pellucid about PP's projects. This latest one would be the perfect gift for any lover of Dark Age history, Brecht and experimental poetry, and that's definitely ticking my boxes. But beyond that, it also has this breathtaking and seemingly effortless lyrical thinking:

where is there to go?
everything full
utterly green
lie on the lawn
watch the swifts
yip, yip, yip

keep on writing
it all isn't full
everything open
words on the page
swifts are here
quicker than aircraft

what you wrote won't go
fullness comes later
green and open
words in the air
swiftly they dive
beautiful craft

keep saying the same
let fullness hold
foliage at its peak
above us only air
the dancing of swifts
actually this


[Yes, that's a deliberate John Lennon allusion.]

This is the first poem in the book. It's a calendar book, and how can I help placing this opening beside the opening of another beloved volume, Carol Watts' Occasionals?

So sit down with your green tea
as if this was your last day, leave
the ledgers unfinished and overdue,
and tell me what you take with you,
now, the sounds of instruments ringing 
on pavements, a crow mulling over
trails of aeroplanes, everyone out
in the town, and sirens going.
Not enough to take that flickered.
Light and the lift of it. Spiders hang
in mating season, gorged bodies
weighted there, still, not washed out
by the rain, these last three days.
Hydrangeas shoot pale green flowers
at the end of the season as before it.
You could turn it on its head. Think
it does not end here.

(from 23 September 2006)

Carol's book (published in 2011) ran from September to September. Peter's book runs from July to June; or rather, from After-Lithe to Lithe, because he's using the intriguing Anglo-Saxon calendar described by Bede in the fifteenth chapter of his De temporum ratione.


The ingredients and recipe of the book are described with Peter's customary and refreshing candour in his introduction. There's no need to be tight-lipped about it, the life-giving mystery of the writing and the world remains intact. As in this first poem, the fullness that's never full, the air so open yet such a harvest for the shrieking swifts.




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Thursday, July 23, 2020

Sculpture


Je voulus voir si les races vivantes m'offriraient plus de vertus ou moins de malheurs que les races évanouies. Comme je me promenais un jour dans une grande cité, en passant derrière un palais, dans une cour retirée et déserte, j'aperçus une statue qui indiquait du doigt un lieu fameux par un sacrifice. Je fus frappé du silence de ces lieux ; le vent seul gémissait autour du marbre tragique. Des manœuvres étaient couchés avec indifférence au pied de la statue ou taillaient des pierres en sifflant. Je leur demandai ce que signifiait ce monument : les uns purent à peine me le dire, les autres ignoraient la catastrophe qu'il retraçait. Rien ne m'a plus donné la juste mesure des événements de la vie et du peu que nous sommes. Que sont devenus ces personnages qui firent tant de bruit ? Le temps a fait un pas, et la face de la terre a été renouvelée.

I wished to see if the living races would offer me more virtues or less misfortunes than the vanished ones. As I was strolling one day through a great city, while passing behind a palace, in a secluded and deserted courtyard, I noticed a statue that indicated with its finger a place famous for a sacrifice. I was struck by the silence of the surroundings; only the wind moaned around the tragic marble. Some labourers were lying indifferently at the base of the statue, chipping stones and whistling. I asked them what this monument signified: some could hardly tell me, others had not heard of the catastrophe it recorded. Nothing has given me a juster measure of the events of life and of the little that we are. What has become of these personages who made so much noise? Time takes just a step, and the face of the earth has been renewed.

(from Chateaubriand's René (1802). Complete text: https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9 .)

A note in my copy says:

A Londres, derrière White-Hall, la statue de Charles II.

In fact, Chateaubriand must have seen the 1686 statue of James II by Peter Van Dievoet and Laurence Vandermeulen (workshop of Grinling Gibbons), now outside the National Gallery but then in the Pebble Court just off the Privy Gardens of the Palace of Whitehall. We can imagine his fictional narrator René as having seen it a few years before his arrival in Louisiana in 1725 (this date comes from the earlier story Atala).

The monarch, in classical garb, originally carried a baton in his right hand. The baton was still there in 1790, then disappeared for a few years (if early 19th-century engravings can be trusted), then reappeared and now seems to be lost for good. But with or without baton, James does seem to be pointing to the ground (a gesture that puzzled some critics at the time).


[Image source: Wikipedia .]

Chateaubriand drew the conclusion that the statue was indicating the place where James's father had been "sacrificed" in 1649. Which was indeed at Whitehall, outside the Banqueting House.

I'm not sure if anyone else thought this, or whether Chateaubriand had transferred the idea from another statue that is very definitely a pointing finger, metaphorically speaking.

This is the equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross. Horse and rider were positioned to look towards Whitehall, as if triumphing over the rider's future fate.

Yet the statue dates from Charles I's own lifetime. It was made by Hubert Le Sueur in 1630-33 for Richard Weston , Lord High Treasurer, for his house in Roehampton, Surrey. During the Commonwealth the statue was supposed to have been melted down, but someone was canny enough to deceive the authorities. After the restoration it was purchased by Charles II and placed in its current significant position, on an elevated plinth.




[Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/locosteve/42239649752 . Photo by Loco Steve.]

I was so sensitively aware, indeed, of being younger than I could have wished, that for some time I could not make up my mind to pass her at all, under the ignoble circumstances of the case; but, hearing her there with a broom, stood peeping out of window at King Charles on horseback, surrounded by a maze of hackney-coaches, and looking anything but regal in a drizzling rain and a dark-brown fog ...

(David Copperfield, Ch. 20: young David shy of the chambermaid at the Golden Cross Inn.)


Apart from its motion towards Whitehall, the statue's placement in Charing Cross had additional meaning. It was here that eight of the regicides were executed in 1660, six months after Charles II's return.

And monumental sculpture was itself a statement. In 1643 the Parliamentarians had passed the Bill "An Ordinance for the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry", which led to the destruction, four years later, of the medieval Eleanor Cross that gave Charing Cross its name.

Public sculpture, then as now, was highly contested. For Chateaubriand, Romantic, Royalist and Catholic, the destruction, decay and neglect of old sculptures could only be a subject for melancholy.

Quelquefois une haute colonne se montrait seule debout dans un désert, comme une grande pensée s'élève, par intervalles, dans une âme que le temps et le malheur ont dévastée.



Shelley, sixteen years later, didn't see it quite the same way.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

For I take "Ozymandias" to be a revolutionary poem.

The difficult 8th line provokes the question, whose hand and whose heart? The two most common interpretations are A. The hand and heart are both Ozymandias'. B. The hand is the sculptor's and the heart is Ozymandias'. I take A to be impossible, as it requires "them" to mean the tyrant's subjects, but the poem has not mentioned the subjects. B is possible, taking "them" to mean Ozymandias' passions; but it's awkward to have the first half of the line talk about the sculptor and the second half about Ozymandias. And to say that the sculptor's delineation survives his and Ozymandias' lives is to say what is hardly very remarkable.

The remarkable thing, evidently, is that the sculptor's delineation survives even the destruction of the colossus. So my theory (though surely I'm not the first to think it) is that line 8 refers to the unnamed agent of the destruction. It's this agent's hand that mocks "them" (meaning the "lifeless things", the fragments of the colossus); it's this agent's heart that is fed by the act of demolition.

And who was this agent? Shelley is being obliquely discreet. Perhaps, with reference to Prometheus Unbound, we might call it Demogorgon.  As in that poem, it's possible to conceive the nemesis of tyranny as simply the grand passage of Time or the processes of Nature. But it's also possible, as Paul Foot argued in Red Shelley, to conceive Demogorgon as the spirit of revolution, and the poem as a call to action.

The Younger Memnon (Ramesses II) in the British Museum

[Image source: Wikipedia . This is the colossal figure, then being transported to Britain, that inspired the composition of "Ozymandias". Shelley had heard about it but he never saw it.]

[Since writing this, I've come to question my own reading. The little word "yet", in line 7, could perhaps take the weight of remarkableness. And I sense a pejorative tone in "the heart that fed", perhaps more appropriate to the original tyrant than the later agent of demolition.]

Meaning wears constantly away; nothing on this earth is supposed to last forever, the process of change is what allows new life to be lived. A statue, like the mortal it figures, has decay encoded in it. Now and then people want change so badly that they smash the plates.

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Tuesday, July 21, 2020

flitting post with insects and trees

Day Lily (Hemerocallis variety) in Laura's garden

The cuckoo

Sweet and solved by no-one
is the cuckoo riddle:
how from such a little horn of feathers
can those wide-stretched notes roll forth?

Just now I heard his ringing,
in the newly-washed birch grove,
but his call is most beautiful when it comes
from the Vale of Eternity,
from the grown-together trees'
one crown.

The woodcutter's ascension

Laid on the block:
"Kinsfolk I have none,
but for this curly-birch stump."
The lopped head, rolling away:
"New-split alder wood is red too."
On the passage, to the ferryman:
"You need to rub the boat with tar,
not with red lead and oil-paint."
To the angels: "With respect,
you look like wood pigeons."

Icarus and Buddy Greystone

After reading 73 (excellent) poems about Icarus,
I wish to put in a word for his country cousin,
Buddy Greystone, left behind in the meadow.
I speak also on behalf of a grass tussock,
which enjoys some shade and shelter from the wind.

After reading 73 poems about flight and wings,
I wish to offer my tribute to the footsole,
the downward-aspiring spirit, the art of staying
and of owning one's weight -- like Buddy Greystone
or his sister, the home daughter Miss Sprucebush,
who is dully but forever green.


[Quick translations of more poems by Werner Aspenström from his 1956 collection Poems under the trees (Dikter under träden).]

Curly birch: also known as Masur Birch, Betula pendula var. carelica. The wood, with squiggly rings due to a genetic defect, is valued for decorative wood carving. It's very dense and hard, so I suppose it would also make a fine headsman's block!

Nettle-leaved Bellflower (Campanula trachelium) in deep woodland in West Swindon.

My sister Miranda and her family are at Idrefjäll in Dalarna, making me feel very envious. We should have been walking near Kebne about now. Anyway, here's one of their pics:

From Nipfjället

When I get up each morning at 06:25, I flip on the radio and it's playing the final piece of music from the six-hour "Through the Night" programme. That way I'm fully awake for Radio 3 Breakfast at 06:30. I wander about opening the blinds and greedily relishing the early light.

Through the Night often has more unfamiliar music than the peak-time shows so these first minutes can contain a discovery, and so it was today: Ludvig Norman, one of the many Swedish composers of whom I knew nothing, a contemporary of Frans Berwald. (He also tutored Elfrida Andrée.) The music that took my fancy turned out to be his String Sextet, Op. 18. 

At this point I'd normally embed a YouTube performance, but due to the move I'm now back to posting on my phone and I don't seem to have the embedding option. I'm still sleeping in Swindon, but now sharing the flat with little more than a vacuum cleaner, empty boxes and a kettle. 

When I've moved I'll be in a house with wifi again. I anticipate a 2 hour riot of listening to Ludvig Norman, perhaps even a download of Through the Night. Then I'll remember that there isn't actually any more time in the day to accommodate all these riches, and I'll revert to digital abstinence.






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Monday, July 20, 2020

winter pasture land





In the winter pasture land


around Lady Day
Dalsvallen has woken up
in house sparrow grey
coffee at Karl Gustav's
snow scooter chugging
after the second tug

over Valma
like holes torn
in the winter covering
approaching black billows
as from the underworld

dog-leashes hard stretched
backward glance from Härje
up to Ortkammen
the hoof holes
half filled with drift snow

sudden round stealthy prints
known but not welcome
off to the pines
with blood red throat
the calf of last year
the lynx took in one jump

motor throttled
one quiet minute
were you just thirsty
or did you kill
for the old raven

down towards Råndalen
draw the snow squalls
in a dream-like crane dance
while the cow turns her nose
towards the land of calving




A poem by Bo Lundmark,"I vinterbeteslandet", translated by me from Den sjunde dagen: dikter från glesbygden (1992). A slightly different version of this poem, titled "Vårfrudagstid",  is available online: https://www.tidningenharjedalen.se/artikel/dikt-varfrudagstid

The "winter pasture land" is the wooded lowland area where the reindeer spend the winter, surviving by hoofing up reindeer lichen from under the snow.

Lady Day (Vårfrudag) =  25 March

The reindeer return to the fells in late spring, there to calve and spend the summer living off the upland vegetation. (There are a lot less biting insects up there too.)

In this case the winter pasture land is in the county of Härjedalen, in the valley of the Ljusnan and its tributaries. When the reindeer cow turns her nose, she'll be looking north-west to the mountains of Sånfjället and beyond, perhaps up towards Funäsdalen where Bo Lundmark himself lives.

Härjedalen, an inland county of mostly high ground, with a famously low population, is one of the coldest places you can winter in Sweden. (The temperature is actually even colder in the valleys than on the mountains.)

Bo Lundmark, born in 1944 in Tärnaby, was until his retirement a priest in the mountain areas of Sweden, also a poet and historian of Sami life. Here's an interview (in Swedish) that gives more background: https://www.op.se/artikel/bland-herdarna-uppe-pa-berget . Latterly he was priest for the parishes of Tännäs and Ljusnedal in Härjedalen, where this poem is set.

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Thursday, July 16, 2020

Bexhill-on-Sea



Sea Kale (Crambe maritima). It is a good vegetable and  had become rather rare until harvesting the wild plants was banned, around 100 years ago.

Glaucium flavum (Yellow Horned Poppy)

Glaucium flavum (Yellow Horned Poppy)


Looking west. Eastbourne, with the headland of Beachy Head behind it, in the far distance.


These photos are from strolls on the beach at the eastern end of Bexhill-on-Sea.

*

Ruth Gipps (1921 - 1999), composer, born in Bexhill. (The Radio 3 folk pronounce her surname with a hard G; both English and Swedish are deeply conflicted about pronouncing the letter G.)

A composer whose reputation is now steadily growing. Here's her Seascape, Op. 53, for double wind quintet.





Bexhill's De La Warr Pavilion (1935), by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff,  is one of the most beloved of modernist buildings.

Very near to my sister Annika's house is the SSSI High Woods, containing the only Sessile Oak coppice in Sussex.

For fans of Keane (like Annika and me) the Sovereign Light Café, at the western end of Bexhill, amounts to a sort of shrine.

The oldest known spider's web,140 million years old, was found at Bexhill (preserved in amber).



Looking towards Galley Hill. Behind it is Glynde Gap, then Bulverhythe, then St Leonards-on-Sea, then Hastings.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2020

the Tramp Society



There is evidence that Anthony went to the races once, in a boisterous mixed party; a letter has survived from him to 'My dear Miss Dancers': 'Like a man of honour I send you what I owe -- that horrid white and pink which ought never to have won the race!! If the gloves do not fit pray let me know -- & I will procure another pair.' He asked her to thank 'Ellen' for all her kindness; he had 'her flowers blooming on my desk the envy of all the Clerks in the Office -- tell her also that I have still the pin which she wanted, but was not able to purloin.' Yet another young lady, Emma, was, he hoped, 'consoled for the loss of the gingerbread man -- tell her that she should never allow grief for anyone to prey upon her spirits for long. It is very bad for the complexion.' And finally, 'I think Mr G.T. must have been hid in that cupboard yesterday evening -- else Emma would not have been so very angry with me . . .'
   There was also the Tramp Society, which consisted of Anthony, his friend John Merivale (now a law student) and Walter Awdry, who was a Winchester friend of both Anthony's and Tom's. Awdry had been in trouble both at school and at Oxford; Anthony, who loved him, described him as perverse, 'bashful to very fear of a lady's dress' (not like Anthony), 'unable to restrain himself in anything, but with a conscience that was always stinging him' (like Anthony); a loving friend, though very quarrelsome; and perhaps, of all men I have known, the most humorous.'
   The three friends went wandering on foot in the country around London. 'Southampton was the furthest point we ever reached; but Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire were more dear to us.' These were his happiest times, he said. They slept rough, and terrorised villages by the 'loudness of our mirth'; they got into scrapes, played practical jokes on farmers, and pretended to be escaped lunatics. But the fun, wrote Anthony, was the fun of Awdry, 'and would cease to be fun as told by me.'


Some gleams of light in the life of young Anthony Trollope, now (in the late 1830s) a copying clerk at the general Post Office near St. Paul's, and as thoroughly undistinguished in his first job as he had formerly been as a scholar at Harrow and Winchester. This is an extract from Victoria Glendinning's wonderful biography Trollope (1992), pp. 83-84.

Anthony's banter about grief and the complexion was relevant to everyone's experience. Each year pulmonary TB alone accounted for 3,000 deaths per million -- about three times higher than Covid-19 in 2020, as things look currently. And TB was a young adult's disease. Anthony had recently lost two siblings that way, Henry and Emily. They were grieved for, as Anthony's unlovable father was not, but life had to continue. Through all those deaths, and through the financial disorder that her husband bequeathed her, Anthony's remarkable mother blazed on with her late-flowering career as a popular author, evincing a similar stoicism to Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and all the countless unremembered ordinary people who had no choice but to slog through their grief during that era of high mortality. She sustained herself with strong green tea and laudanum.

Anthony's parents' first address was Keppel Street in Bloomsbury. While working as a post office clerk, Anthony's lodgings were near Marylebone. Anthony had grown up in Harrow, Middlesex (location selected by his father to take advantage of free admission to the school for local boys). Later, Frances Trollope found a home at Hadley, just beyond Barnet. Trollope's psychogeography, in short, is oriented around the north-west of what's now Greater London, as confirmed here by his references to Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. It was the opposite quadrant from Dickens', whose London perspective was south-eastern: Kent, the great river, and Essex beyond it. Trollopian London is more genteel (all those clerical connections) and less instinctual, more modern and more open: a place linked by easy transport connections to the other places he knew, like the west country (Barsetshire to be...), and later Ireland.

VG notes that Anthony's hilarious pal Walter Awdry "became a school usher, then a clergyman, and died young and in poverty". (What a never-to-be-written biography must lurk in that sentence.)

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Monday, July 13, 2020

potentially



I'm on the move again, so probably will only manage a few distracted posts over the next few weeks, and this one is the first of them.

*

I'm very slowly feeling my way into reading Tom Raworth's poems with something more than distant and theoretical admiration. I'm influenced, probably much too influenced, by the (what seem to be) pregnant formulae of J.H. Prynne's comments on the back cover of As When, the 2015 Raworth selection chosen by Miles Champion. Here are his first two sentences:

Tom Raworth's mind has from the start been quick as a weasel, moving fast to the nub of the matter with a vivid trace of words on the run and in cool balance across their gathered darts. So adroit are these motions that they leave no residue along the edges or like some cloud above the centre; it's quite hard to implicate an author or presiding opinions because the profile is not blurred by such moody shadows. 

That's an awful lot of metaphors. And some kind of stuck needle with "start", "quick", "fast", "on the run", "darts", "adroit", and so forth. But "vivid trace of words" definitely resonates, and so does the "hard to implicate an author or presiding opinions", at least as a challenge.

For, yes, there's a critical question about modernist projects, but it's also my immediate issue, which I'll baldly express as How autobiographical are Tom Raworth's poems? Because where I am right now, my reading is emphatically "blurred", not indeed by a distinctly implicatable author nor by distinct presiding opinions, but by wondering if the indistinctness really means absence, or was absence ever the intention anyway, or should I even be thinking about this?





air breaks

flowers despair

colours withdraw

heat

abandons me

brain

no longer cares

to serve

words

refuse pattern

loved them

introduced

new friends

now

they desert me 

(from MESSAGE BOTTLE)



this harmless obsession
is all i do

this house without binoculars fades
look into the watch
bombs flash from the place's shadow

still toys i'm out of the game now

(PIETY)



this day i rest by my information
looks good anywhere becomes audible

basil rathbone is one of my favourite actors
i can always read graham greene and joe brainard

(from WELL)



sometimes the subtle night of sleep bores
music remembered places followed to despair
facades no substance aids my mood
i walk more clumsily
plane falls
in flames
o possible beauty          o lady
to trust without power
no end to reach
sun throws smoke shadows brown
across the page
my father was in burma during the war

(from EURODE)



this is where instincts norm
balloon said
unfriendly
i don't care what i watch

so it's been me and unreal
for a while
mapping
was learning how to say it faster

(from I AM SPECIOUS, HERR KOMMANDANT)



I'm thinking too much about the doing of these poems. I'm too clearly seeing " i " as the poet Tom Raworth, addressing a half-real half-imaginary audience of poet-readers. I might guess at opinions, but I certainly sense the shape of a personality (prone to boredom, moody, snappy, humorous); and either he, or I, am a bit wrapped up in the blank paper, the Olympia typewriter, the cigarette ash on his fingertips, and his artistic mission or lack of it.

It's not really what I want to see.

But I like "NOW THE PINK STRIPES" and some of the other early poems.





NOW THE PINK STRIPES


now the pink stripes, the books, the clothes you wear
in the eaves of houses i ask whose land it is

an orange the size of a melon rolling slowly across the field
where i sit at the centre in an upright coffin of five panes of glass

there is no air               the sun shines
and under me you've planted a quick growing cactus









I'll keep reading!




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Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Diomedes

Coin showing forepart of a wolf in relief. Argos, c. 465-430 BCE

This is a coin my dad acquired recently. I'm not sure if it's a tri-obol or a hemi-drachma or both. The value seems to be determined by how much of the wolf you can see. So I'll call it a tri-wolf.

It's quite a thought. This coin may well have been in existence at the time of the first performance of Aeschylus' Oresteia (458 BCE), and almost certainly by the time Euripides wrote the Medea (431 BCE).

It made me think about the city of Argos in Greek mythology. An important place, but seemingly its mythology was not such attractive material for the tragedians as the gruesome chronicles of Mycenae and Thebes. 

Among the early heroes of Argos, Perseus stands out. Euripides wrote three lost plays that relate to him: Danae, Dictys and especially Andromeda. Another king, Adrastus, and his son-in-law Tydeus, are off-stage presences in two plays that do survive: Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes and Euripides' Phoenician Women.  The Virgilian tag "dulcis moriens reminiscitur Argos" (and dying he remembers sweet Argos) is much more famous than the minor character it refers to,  Antores in Aeneid, Book X.

It's Adrastus' successor, his grandson Diomedes, that most of us think of as the quintessential king of Argos. This is the Diomedes who was a Greek leader in the expedition against Troy and is such a memorable figure in the first half of the Iliad.

The men of Argos, again, and those who held the walls of Tiryns, with Hermione, and Asine upon the gulf; Troezene, Eionae, and the vineyard lands of Epidaurus; the Achaean youths, moreover, who came from Aegina and Mases; these were led by Diomed of the loud battle-cry, and Sthenelus son of famed Capaneus. With them in command was Euryalus, son of king Mecisteus, son of Talaus; but Diomed was chief over them all. With these there came eighty ships.

(from the Iliad, Book II, translated by Samuel Butler)

He was always my favourite of the Greek heroes when I was a boy. His image seemed uncomplicated and pleasing. Though we don't see him doing much except slaughtering large numbers of Trojans, Homer somehow contrives to make us love him. His reckless courage is second to none. Yet he lacks Achilles' petulance, Menelaus' jealousy, Agamemnon's high-handedness, Odysseus' absence of principle. Without any particular stake in the Greek expedition, Diomedes is reliably loyal, makes no enemies on his own side, and seems to give sound advice. A practical man, someone you'd want on your team.

[Agamemnon] then left them and went on to others. Presently he saw the son of Tydeus, noble Diomed, standing by his chariot and horses, with Sthenelus the son of Capaneus beside him; whereon he began to upbraid him. "Son of Tydeus," he said, "why stand you cowering here upon the brink of battle? Tydeus did not shrink thus, but was ever ahead of his men when leading them on against the foe- so, at least, say they that saw him in battle. . . . Tydeus slew every man of them, save only Maeon, whom he let go in obedience to heaven's omens. Such was Tydeus of Aetolia. His son can talk more glibly, but he cannot fight as his father did."
  Diomed made no answer, for he was shamed by the rebuke of Agamemnon; but the son of Capaneus took up his words and said, "Son of Atreus, tell no lies, for you can speak truth if you will. We boast ourselves as even better men than our fathers; we took seven-gated Thebes, though the wall was stronger and our men were fewer in number, for we trusted in the omens of the gods and in the help of Jove, whereas they perished through their own sheer folly; hold not, then, our fathers in like honour with us."
  Diomed looked sternly at him and said, "Hold your peace, my friend, as I bid you. It is not amiss that Agamemnon should urge the Achaeans forward, for the glory will be his if we take the city, and his the shame if we are vanquished. Therefore let us acquit ourselves with valour."
  As he spoke he sprang from his chariot, and his armour rang so fiercely about his body that even a brave man might well have been scared to hear it.

(from the Iliad, Book IV, in Samuel Butler's translation. This passage is discussed in detail in Ch 1 of Barker, Elton T. E., and Joel P. Christensen. 2019. Homer's Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts. Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.


The tragedians preserved Diomedes' unblemished image, because for the most part they took no interest in him.  He had done nothing very dreadful, and nothing very dreadful had happened to him.

True, he appears in Rhesus, a peculiar play traditionally (but surely incorrectly) assigned to Euripides.

Rhesus does what no other Greek tragedy does: it takes a bit of Homer (Iliad, Book X) and makes a play out of it. The result is exciting, but it's more like a serial episode in an adventure story than a tragedy. The whole play takes place at night. Diomedes is typically imperturbable, bloodthirsty, a seeker of honour but without personal ego; the perfect soldier.

Here's an extract from the 2010 translation by George Theodoridis:


Enter Odysseus and Diomedes, furtively, guardedly. Both have their swords drawn.

They have just killed Dolon so they are carrying some “spoils.” Possibly Dolon’s wolf skin and sword, shield, belt, etc.

Suddenly a sound of chains clashing against other metal is heard within.

Odysseus  Diomedes, what was that noise?
Was that a clash of swords my ears picked up or was it something unimportant?

Diomedes  Nothing important, Odysseus.
Some horse’s harness hit against the rails of a chariot.
It got me frightened as well at first, but then I figured out what it was.
No, just the noise of a harness.

Odysseus  Right…
Careful you don’t bump onto any guards in the dark.

Diomedes  I always walk carefully.

Odysseus  But what if you do? What if you wake someone up, do you know the watchword they use?

Diomedes  Yes, Odysseus, it’s “Phoebus.” Dolon told me.

Odysseus  Look here! Enemy beds. No one in them!

Diomedes  Yes, Dolon told me there’d be no one here.
This is where Hektor sleeps.
My sword is ready for him!

They slowly enter Hektor’s tent, check it out and come out again.

Odysseus  I wonder what it means. Where do you think they might all be? Could they be setting up some ambush for us?

Diomedes  Probably. Cooking up some scheme somewhere, no doubt.

Odysseus  Now that Hektor is on a winning streak, nothing will stop him. He’s become very daring, our Hektor!

Diomedes  So, what do we do now, Odysseus?
The man is clearly not in his tent and so, well, there go our hopes of capturing him.

Odysseus  I think we'd better hurry back to our ships.
This man is being protected by the same god that’s giving him all these victories.
We'd better not go against Fate.

Diomedes  Why don’t we go over and, with these swords, cut off the head of Aeneas? As well as that of Paris, the Trojan I hate the most!

Odysseus  Too dark, Diomedes! Too risky and too difficult to find them. This is their camping ground.

Diomedes  But it’s a shame to go back to the ships without inflicting some pain upon our enemy!


*

Some indeed say that, back in Argos, Diomedes' wife was unfaithful to him (his punishment for wounding Aphrodite in the arm, outside the walls of Troy). This story might have been the foundation for a tragedy. In the lost epic Nostoi, it appears that Diomedes returned safely to Argos. But in other accounts he never succeeded in returning home. Instead, he sailed off to the heel of Italy and founded a new colony (Argyripa in Apulia).


Reverse of the Argos coin: incused with the letter alpha (for "Argos"?) and volute decoration.

Coin from Metapontion showing head of Athene, c. 350 BCE

Diomedes became the object of hero cults in Metapontion (aka Metapontum, Metapontium), as well as Cyprus and other colonies in "Magna Graecia". Perhaps that historic reverence for Diomedes was something Virgil recalled when he gave the warlike Diomedes the unexpected role of peacemaker in the Aeneid.


When Venulus began, the murmuring sound
Was hush'd, and sacred silence reign'd around.
"We have," said he, "perform'd your high command,
And pass'd with peril a long tract of land:
We reach'd the place desir'd; with wonder fill'd,
The Grecian tents and rising tow'rs beheld.
Great Diomede has compass'd round with walls
The city, which Argyripa he calls,
From his own Argos nam'd. We touch'd, with joy,
The royal hand that raz'd unhappy Troy.
When introduc'd, our presents first we bring,
Then crave an instant audience from the king.
His leave obtain'd, our native soil we name,
And tell th' important cause for which we came.
Attentively he heard us, while we spoke;
Then, with soft accents, and a pleasing look,
Made this return: 'Ausonian race, of old
Renown'd for peace, and for an age of gold,
What madness has your alter'd minds possess'd,
To change for war hereditary rest,
Solicit arms unknown, and tempt the sword,
A needless ill your ancestors abhorr'd?
We -- for myself I speak, and all the name
Of Grecians, who to Troy's destruction came,
Omitting those who were in battle slain,
Or borne by rolling Simois to the main --
Not one but suffer'd, and too dearly bought
The prize of honor which in arms he sought;
Some doom'd to death, and some in exile driv'n.
Outcasts, abandon'd by the care of Heav'n;
So worn, so wretched, so despis'd a crew,
As ev'n old Priam might with pity view.
Witness the vessels by Minerva toss'd
In storms; the vengeful Capharean coast;
Th' Euboean rocks! the prince, whose brother led
Our armies to revenge his injur'd bed,
In Egypt lost! Ulysses with his men
Have seen Charybdis and the Cyclops' den.
Why should I name Idomeneus, in vain
Restor'd to scepters, and expell'd again?
Or young Achilles, by his rival slain?
Ev'n he, the King of Men, the foremost name
Of all the Greeks, and most renown'd by fame,
The proud revenger of another's wife,
Yet by his own adult'ress lost his life;
Fell at his threshold; and the spoils of Troy
The foul polluters of his bed enjoy.
The gods have envied me the sweets of life,
My much lov'd country, and my more lov'd wife:
Banish'd from both, I mourn; while in the sky,
Transform'd to birds, my lost companions fly:
Hov'ring about the coasts, they make their moan,
And cuff the cliffs with pinions not their own.
What squalid specters, in the dead of night,
Break my short sleep, and skim before my sight!
I might have promis'd to myself those harms,
Mad as I was, when I, with mortal arms,
Presum'd against immortal pow'rs to move,
And violate with wounds the Queen of Love.
Such arms this hand shall never more employ;
No hate remains with me to ruin'd Troy.
I war not with its dust; nor am I glad
To think of past events, or good or bad.
Your presents I return: whate'er you bring
To buy my friendship, send the Trojan king.
We met in fight; I know him, to my cost:
With what a whirling force his lance he toss'd!
Heav'ns! what a spring was in his arm, to throw!
How high he held his shield, and rose at ev'ry blow!
Had Troy produc'd two more his match in might,
They would have chang'd the fortune of the fight:
Th' invasion of the Greeks had been return'd,
Our empire wasted, and our cities burn'd.
The long defense the Trojan people made,
The war protracted, and the siege delay'd,
Were due to Hector's and this hero's hand:
Both brave alike, and equal in command;
Aeneas, not inferior in the field,
In pious reverence to the gods excell'd.
Make peace, ye Latians, and avoid with care
Th' impending dangers of a fatal war.' . . .


(from Aeneid, Book XI, in John Dryden's translation.)

Reverse of the Metapontion coin, showing an ear of barley

Metapontion, on the gulf of Tarentum, was a colony of Achaea in the Peloponnese


Thus matters stood with Diomedes for the next 1200 years. But then there was a dramatic development.

Somewhere near the city of Tours and some time before 1173 CE, Benoît de Sainte-Maure composed his 30,000-line poem Le Roman de Troie. He drew on Dares Phrygius, a Trojan priest -- who "Fu de Troie norriz e nez" (Prologue l. 95) -- and Dictys Cretensis, a Greek serving under Idomeneus, who left a war diary. (As for Homer, "clers merveillos / Et sages e esciëntos" though he was, he'd lived a hundred years after these events, and had introduced foolish stories of the gods fighting on each side.) 

Benoît also added some material of his own, in particular the tragic courtly-love-gone-wrong story of Troilus, Briseida and her smooth seducer Diomedes. The story passed via Boccaccio (who renamed its heroine Criseida) to Chaucer, then Henryson, then Shakespeare, then Dryden.

Here's how Chaucer's poem continues from the point when Troilus has to part from Criseide (because of a hostage exchange); Diomede is here to escort her to the Greek camp.


               With that his courser torned he a-boute
               With face pale, and un-to Diomede
               No word he spak, ne noon of al his route;
               Of which the sone of Tydeus took hede,
               As he that coude more than the crede
               In swich a craft, and by the reyne hir hente; 
               And Troilus to Troye homwarde he wente.

               This Diomede, that ladde hir by the brydel,
               Whan that he saw the folk of Troye aweye,
               Thoughte, `Al my labour shal not been on ydel,
               If that I may, for somwhat shal I seye, 
               For at the worste it may yet shorte our weye.
               I have herd seyd, eek tymes twyes twelve,
               "He is a fool that wol for-yete him-selve."'

               But natheles this thoughte he wel ynough,
               `That certaynly I am aboute nought, 
               If that I speke of love, or make it tough;
               For douteles, if she have in hir thought
               Him that I gesse, he may not been y-brought
               So sone awey; but I shal finde a mene,
               That she not wite as yet shal what I mene.' 

               This Diomede, as he that coude his good,
               Whan this was doon, gan fallen forth in speche
               Of this and that, and asked why she stood
               In swich disese, and gan hir eek biseche,
               That if that he encrese mighte or eche
               With any thing hir ese, that she sholde
               Comaunde it him, and seyde he doon it wolde.

               For trewely he swoor hir, as a knight,
               That ther nas thing with whiche he mighte hir plese,
               That he nolde doon his peyne and al his might
               To doon it, for to doon hir herte an ese.
               And preyede hir, she wolde hir sorwe apese,
               And seyde, `Y-wis, we Grekes con have Ioye
               To honouren yow, as wel as folk of Troye.'

               He seyde eek thus, `I woot, yow thinketh straunge, 
               No wonder is, for it is to yow newe,
               Thaqueintaunce of these Troianis to chaunge,
               For folk of Grece, that ye never knewe.
               But wolde never god but-if as trewe
               A Greek ye shulde among us alle finde 
               As any Troian is, and eek as kinde.

               `And by the cause I swoor yow right, lo, now,
               To been your freend, and helply, to my might,
               And for that more aqueintaunce eek of yow
               Have ich had than another straunger wight,
               So fro this forth, I pray yow, day and night,
               Comaundeth me, how sore that me smerte,
               To doon al that may lyke un-to your herte;

               `And that ye me wolde as your brother trete,
               And taketh not my frendship in despyt; 
               And though your sorwes be for thinges grete,
               Noot I not why, but out of more respyt,
               Myn herte hath for to amende it greet delyt.
               And if I may your harmes not redresse,
               I am right sory for your hevinesse,

               `And though ye Troians with us Grekes wrothe
               Han many a day be, alwey yet, pardee,
               O god of love in sooth we serven bothe.
               And, for the love of god, my lady free,
               Whom so ye hate, as beth not wroth with me.
               For trewely, ther can no wight yow serve,
               That half so looth your wraththe wolde deserve.

               `And nere it that we been so neigh the tente
               Of Calkas, which that seen us bothe may,
               I wolde of this yow telle al myn entente;
               But this enseled til another day.
               Yeve me your hond, I am, and shal ben ay,
               God help me so, whyl that my lyf may dure,
               Your owene aboven every creature.

               `Thus seyde I never er now to womman born;
               For god myn herte as wisly glade so,
               I lovede never womman here-biforn
               As paramours, ne never shal no mo.
               And, for the love of god, beth not my fo;
               Al can I not to yow, my lady dere,
               Compleyne aright, for I am yet to lere.

               `And wondreth not, myn owene lady bright,
               Though that I speke of love to you thus blyve;
               For I have herd or this of many a wight,
               Hath loved thing he never saugh his lyve.
               Eek I am not of power for to stryve
               Ayens the god of love, but him obeye
               I wol alwey, and mercy I yow preye.

               `Ther been so worthy knightes in this place,
               And ye so fair, that everich of hem alle
               Wol peynen him to stonden in your grace.
               But mighte me so fair a grace falle,
               That ye me for your servaunt wolde calle,
               So lowly ne so trewely you serve
               Nil noon of hem, as I shal, til I sterve.'

               Criseide un-to that purpos lyte answerde,
               As she that was with sorwe oppressed so
               That, in effect, she nought his tales herde,
               But here and there, now here a word or two.
               Hir thoughte hir sorwful herte brast a-two.
               For whan she gan hir fader fer aspye,
               Wel neigh doun of hir hors she gan to sye.

               But natheles she thonked Diomede
               Of al his travaile, and his goode chere,
               And that him liste his friendship hir to bede;
               And she accepteth it in good manere,
               And wolde do fayn that is him leef and dere;
               And trusten him she wolde, and wel she mighte,
               As seyde she, and from hir hors she alighte.


(Troilus and Criseyde, Bk V, ll. 85 - 189)


We are much less favourably disposed to this Diomede than to the hero of the Iliad or the patriarch of the Aeneid; and yet I find him credibly the same person, though now seen from a harsher perspective. I still perceive the same intelligence, the same courage; the combination of self-confidence and modesty; the shrewd calculation, the easy friendliness, the ability to contain his feelings. What chance have a forcibly separated Troilus and Criseyde against Diomede's sheer effectiveness?

*

Apparently Diomedes was the favourite Greek hero of the composer Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. The music of his large-scale opera Diomedes oder die triumphierende Unschuld (Diomedes, or Innocence Triumphant), performed at Bayreuth in November 1718, is unfortunately lost, except for five of its seventy-plus arias. Far the best known is Bist du bei mir (long thought to be by Bach; it was transcribed for soprano in his wife Anna Magdalena's notebook: she was an accomplished singer). According to the surviving Bayreuth libretto, the aria was originally sung by Diomedes in Act III Scene 8.


Bist du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden
zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh.
Ach, wie vergnügt wär so mein Ende,
es drückten deine schönen Hände
mir die getreuen Augen zu.

If you are with me, then I will go gladly
    unto [my] death and to my rest.
Ah, how pleasing were my end,
if your dear hands then
shut my faithful eyes!


(The words were probably Stölzel's own. I wish I could find some account of this libretto online but so far I can't, so the only thing I know about the plot is the names of three other characters: Mosthenes, Copele and Desania.)

"Bist du bei mir", sung by Laura Heimes:




On Shakespeare's (and Dryden's) Troilus and Cressida:















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Tuesday, July 07, 2020

At Wivex

Some time around 1950, Eva (later, my mum) got onto the bus outside her house in Fridhemsgatan to travel the short distance into central Sundsvall.  On the bus, to her astonishment, was a black man, the first she had ever seen. He was tall and well-dressed. He was a musician, he was carrying a trumpet in its case.

They were heading for the same place, of course; Wivex, the dance hall (danspalats) in Sundsvall town centre. Eva was starstruck. Later, while he was playing, she stood right next to the stage. I would have married him instantly, she reminisced last week. No doubt there were plenty of other Sundsvall girls who were thinking the same.

(A little later, my mum became a big fan of Sammy Davis, Jr.)




In Wivex, Sundsvall. Photo from 1951.
[Image source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/021015971387/ungdomstraff-pa-wivex-med-dans-och-umgange . The photo is in Sundsvall Museum.]

In Wivex, Sundsvall. Photo from 1954

[Image source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/011015443785/reportagebilder-fran-danspalatset-wivex-i-sundsvall . The photo is in Sundsvall Museum.]

Danspalatset Wivex opened in 1941 and ran until 1979. The illuminated sign at 16 Torggatan still lives on. (It's currently a hair salon, Salong Wivex.)

The dance hall was a place for singles to meet. Eva once spotted the husband of a distant relation among the Wivex crowd. That was not OK. She considered him a shady customer after that.


Outside Wivex, Sundsvall. Photo from 1959.

*



Springtime for two fingers


Amazing number of violins
that lay hidden under the snow!
Now the black cases are open.
The lemon butterfly fine-tunes
its wings. The swallow
up-dives from the lake.

The long silver strings
stretched between the mountain and the valley
start to vibrate.
Everything imitates everything.
The eaves of the roof imitate
the tree sparrow's chip chip.
What does Plato say about the frog?
That she imitates the purling stream!

I enrol in the school of nature.
Turn my score to face its master:
the origin of all music.


My translation of Våretyd för två fingrar by Werner Aspenström, from his 1956 collection Dikter under träden (Poems under the trees). Werner Aspenström (1918 - 1997) was born in Norrbärke in Dalarna.

Two more poems by Werner Aspenström: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/05/werner-aspenstrom.html .]

*

This poem was made into a song by the Gävle composer Bo Linde (1933 - 1970), appropriately with a two-finger piano accompaniment. (Fjorton sånger om våren, för sopran och piano, op. 40.)



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Friday, July 03, 2020

this place is the home of my children

Nothing original today, today's post comes from the Radio 3 Friday Poem, which was Grenadan poet Merle Collins' "Seduction", about the black diaspora experience of "seductive dying" in the grey UK,  dreaming of the brightness of the Caribbean, but over twenty years increasingly getting used to, getting attached to, the new home, the place of her family:

Twenty years, she said,
in this cold confinement
and every winter I am packing
to leave   . . .

. . .  But that's changing
this place is the home of my children
so the picture is shifting again


And the phrase, to "linger longer", becomes a kind of lulling refrain. Even the British winters start to feel comfortably familiar. And yet the speaker's voice falls silent through this erosion of her heart's dreams. Does her silent endurance contribute in some way to the idealism of her sisters, maybe by building a steady platform, a confidence for others? Does it nevertheless harm the one who accepts her silence?

*

"Dream" and "speak" are political words. Here's most of the title poem from her first collection, Because the Dawn Breaks (1985):


Because the Dawn Breaks

We speak because
When the rain falls in the mountains
The river slowly swells
Comes tumbling down
Over boulders
Across roads
Crumbling bridges
that would hold their power
against its force
We speak because we dream

We speak for the same reason
that the thunder frightens the child
that the lightning startles the tree

We do not speak to defy your tenets . . .
or to tumble your towers of Babel . . .

We speak because we dream
because our dreams
are not sitting in pigpens
in any other body's backyard
not of catching crumbs from tables
not of crawling forever
along the everlasting ant-line
to veer away in quick detour
when the elephant's foot crashes down   . . .
. . . not of striving forever
to catch the image of your Gods
within our creation

[Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00086495.1989.11829443?journalCode=rcbq20 .]

*

And one more poem, again with a few lines removed in order to respect copyright, but you can read the whole thing if you follow the link.


Multiculture Abroad


They want me to write a poem
a poem like the natives write
about sand and sea and sunshine
and exotica like that.

They want me to speak a poem
a poem like they say West Indians speak
about rice and peas and carnivals and mango trees
and multicultural things like that.

 . . .

They want me to write a poem
a poem that would prove how multi culture is
and it makes me think about living here and
writing there and migratory stuff like that


[Source: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/multiculture-abroad/ .]



Merle Collins

[Image source: https://www.bigdrumnation.com/2020/01/26/grenada-at-46/ . A wide-ranging interview discussing Grenada's history and its future.]

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