The levels

My father is back in hospital after difficulties breathing. Hospital is about 120 miles from here and our car isn't working because the starter motor seems to have packed up but we can always hire a car tomorrow if it comes to that. I did speak to him on the phone while he was still in A & E a couple of hours ago and he sounded quite good, but this is the third dash to hospital in a month.

There is little sense of reality to any of this at one level - the mundane or daily level - and yet it is a reality we are, I think, familiar with at the level of the imagination. It is hard wired into us but so deep we are hardly aware of it except as a faint haunting sensation. Michael Hofmann once wrote a poem in which he said, 'We are fascinated by our own anaesthesia'. Well of course we are, just as we are fascinated by our own adrenalin. It is our fate to be fascinated by our own being, and by being I mean everything: our bodies, our moods, our consciousness, our presence among others. The out-of-body experience is perfectly normal in one sense.

In other words, this critical condition of my father is a strange, almost unwelcome, poetic experience. How terrible it should be so, I myself half think. I am peculiarly alive in one way and almost in a state of somnambulism in another. Meaning? I don't know what any of this means. I don't even understand the concept of meaning. All I know is that words keep putting themselves into a series of obsessive orders, the kind of order I am very familiar with when I write. Breath seeps into language. So I do write, in concentrated flickers. Or translate. And then I snap out of it and consider practicalities. But the practicalities are imponderable. There are hours and then more hours. Maybe weeks. Maybe months. Perhaps even a year. Or two years. Maybe just minutes.

It was the same when C was seriously ill thirty one years ago, Anxiety? Yes. Hope, yes indeed. Desperate hope. But also this odd alien medium, life, that overwhelms, is staggering and miraculous, and through which we move trailing clouds of anaesthesia much as Wordsworth's child trailed clouds of glory.

The poetry of Dennis Bergkamp / poetry and winning

All day with poetry mentee, Nick, up from London. These are long intense sessions and quite tiring by the end for both. We talk about detail but also about ideas, about distinctions between performance and private reading, about range, about poetics and grace. Nick is an Arsenal supporter. He was asked recently what he would be if he weren't a poet? A poet was what he wanted to be, he insisted.

But let's put it another way, I say. If you were forbidden to be a poet but had to choose between being Cesc Fabregas, Thierry Henri, Emanuel Adebayor or Martin Keown which would you be? And this makes sense because there are certain qualities associated with these individuals that can be identified with aesthetic values.

Could we throw in Dennis Bergkamp? he asks.

Certainly, I say. So he could aspire to be the Dennis Bergkamp of poetry.

We could just as easily play the party game where we try to guess which person someone is thinking of by asking questions like: If X were a car which car would X be? Or a city? Or a tree? Or anything. There are qualities in all things we quickly learn to associate with whatever we desire, need, or aspire to.

Good friend Ed, the philosopher, was writing a paper on beauty and goalkeepers. He was talking about beauty in the moment of the great save. I doubted - partly out of mischief - whether one could build a case about beauty entirely predicated on given moments of a competitive sport where the main idea was not to perform acts of beauty but to win. Isn't winning the point of the game?

No, he replied, not necessarily. I go to Arsenal to see beauty, he said.

The question is not so much whether I believe him, though I am tempted to, but whether he would say the same of a QPR match. Ed has been a QPR supporter for many years. I wouldn't, I say to myself, accept the answer that QPR should win by playing beautifully. He would have to maintain that it wouldn't matter if they lost - and kept losing - providing they played beautifully.

But then I am hoping he would stick to his guns and say it didn't matter. In fact I am hoping I myself would say it. Of whatever I cared deeply about.

Márai on smiling

Judit thinks about her husband and his smile

Pass me that photo, let me have another look at him. Yes, that’s what he was like fifteen years ago.

Have I said I wore this picture round my neck a long time? In a small locket, on a lilac ribbon? Do you know why?... Because I had paid for it. I was just a servant then and bought it out of my wages: that was why I looked after it. My husband never knew what a great thing it was when someone like me paid money for something for which there is no pressing need, I mean real money, like the change from my wages or a tip. Later I spent his money as if there were no tomorrow, threw thousands around the way I sent dust flying with my feather duster on mornings when I was still a servant. That was not money to me. But when I bought this photograph my heart was beating fast because I was poor and felt it a sin to spend money on things that were not absolutely essential. That photograph was a sin for me then, mere vanity… I bought it all the same, sneaking a visit to the famous, highly fashionable photographer in the city center, ready to paying the full price without bargaining. The photographer laughed and sold it to me cut price. This was the only sacrifice I ever made for that man.

He was reasonably tall, a couple of inches taller than me. His weight was steady. He controlled his body the way he controlled his words and manners. He put on a few pounds in winter, but he lost them again in May and remained at that weight till Christmas. Don’t think for a moment that he dieted. Forget diets. It was just that he treated his body the way he might one of his employees. It was required to work for him.

He treated his eyes and his mouth the same way. His eyes and mouth laughed separately, as and when they were required. They never laughed at the same time… Not the way you did, my precious, so freely, so sweetly, with both eyes and mouth smiling, especially when you truly excelled yourself and sold that ring and came home to me with the good news.

That was something he could never do. I lived with him, I was his wife and, before that, his servant. Needless to say I felt much closer to him as a servant than when I was merely his wife. Even so, I never saw him give a full-hearted laugh the way you do.

He was far more likely to smile. When I met that hunk of a Greek in London, the man who taught me a great many things… don’t go bothering me with what he taught me, I couldn’t tell you everything, we’d be here till dawn… well, the Greek warned me never to laugh in company when in England because that is considered vulgar. I should just smile and keep smiling. I tell you this because I want you to know everything you might find useful sometime.

My husband could smile like nobody’s business. I was so jealous of it sometimes I felt quite sick just thinking about his smile. It was as if he had learned a high art at some mysterious university where the rich go to get their education and smiling is a compulsory subject. He even smiled when he was being cheated. I tried it on with him sometimes. I cheated him and watched… I cheated him in bed and watched to see what he’d do. There were moments when that was dangerous. You never know how someone will react when they're cheated in bed.

The danger was a deathly thrill to me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one day he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed me in the stomach - like a pig at slaughter time. It was only a dream of course: wish-fulfillment. I learned the term from a doctor I consulted for a while because I wanted to be fashionable like the others, because I was rich and could indulge myself with a few psychological problems. The doctor got 50 pengő for an hour’s work. This fee entitled me to lie on a sofa in his surgery and to regale him with my dreams as well as all the rude talk I could muster. There are people who pay to have a woman lie on a sofa and talk filth. But it was I who did the paying, learning terms like repression and wish-fulfillment. I certainly learned a great deal. It wasn’t easy living with the gentry.

But smiling was something I never learned. It seems you need something else for that. Maybe you have to have a history of ancestors smiling before you. I hated it as much as I did the fuss about the nightshirt… I hated their smiles. I cheated my husband in bed by pretending to enjoy it when I didn’t really. I'm sure he knew it, but did he draw a knife and stab me? No, he smiled. He sat in the huge French bed, his hair tousled, his muscles well toned, a man in top condition, smelling faintly of hay. He fixed me with a glassy look and smiled. I wanted to cry at such moments. I was helpless with grief and fury. I am sure that later - when he saw his bombed-out house, or still later when they kicked him out of the factory and expropriated him - he was smiling the same smile in exactly the same way.

It is one of the foulest of human sins, that serene, superior smile. It is the true crime of the rich. It is the one thing that can never be forgiven… Because I can understand people beating or killing each other when they have been hurt. But if they merely smile and say nothing I have no idea what to do with them. Sometimes I felt no punishment was enough for it. There was nothing I, a woman who had clambered out of the ditch to find myself in his life, could do against him. The world could not harm him whatever it did to him, to his wealth, his lands, or to anything that mattered to him…. It was the smile that had to be wiped out. Don’t those famous revolutionaries know this?...

Etta's Week 3: Some poem links and true empowerment

Security... the appearance of too much of which is bad for you...

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New GS on web:

In today's Poetry Daily, the 'Palladio' poem;

Poetry Daily also carries this article about the New and Collected by John Taylor, originally in the new Antioch Review;

As also at Poetry Daily a substantial biog note, though much of that is scattered here and there on this site anyway.

Elsewhere, at Poetry magazine of the Poetry Foundation, this prose piece about walking...


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Etta's Week 2: Verbing rain

I just want make sure you're well fed / I just wanna make love to you.

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First serious daytime rain for a while. On Facebook I started with a pittance of rain. Someone in a heavier shower came out with a nice largesse. The rain having grown heavier here but not yet a downpour I returned with sniggering .

There is something comforting about transferring context. We may well have blustering rain, a drivel of rain, a blather of rain, sharp gusts of rain that is rain on tenterhooks. Rain barrages. Dints of rain, blurts of rain. Alternatively, we could have rain on points, rain that pirouettes in a whirlwind, rain that chirrups like sparrows, rain that shuffles, a boiling of rain, indeed a thorough bollocking of rain.

You name it, we have it.

Etta's Week 1

Stormy Weather all over again. Something more up tempo tomorrow

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Reconsidering the scientific adviser versus minister affair, surely the best, most proper defence of the government position is to argue that alcohol and tobacco are indeed likely to have worse effects - and sooner - than cannabis or Ecstasy, but that is no reason to let two more potentially harmful, potentially addictive drugs on the market, however minor. Just because we've got rats it doesn't mean we want mice too. The unstated defence that 'the press will skin us alive if we sound soft on drugs' is not good enough. Nor is it good enough for Channel 4 TV News to bring on the mother of a girl who died from drug abuse to tell us that cannabis is definitely more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco when it is clearly not. Certainly not on the day after a man who tried to take back his girl friend's witch's hat from the drunk group who stole it was murdered by them.

The general device of bringing on weeping mothers tends to conclude any case on TV. See? There is a weeping mother. Case dismissed. You must be wrong. Feel that emotion. What more proof do you need?

On the other hand the professor's comparison of the dangers of cannabis as opposed to the dangers of horse riding is equally nonsense. The most dangerous place for accidents is, apparently, the home. Would scientists therefore advise us to spend our lives outside trotting on horses along some country lane because that is safer than sitting in a chair from which we might possibly rise, trip and break our necks?

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In the meantime, back in Márai...

Here in Rome there are all these wonderful statues and paintings and grand tapestries, like the cast-offs of a lost world, the kind we get in junk shops back home. But maybe all the masterworks of Rome offer just one view of culture. It might be that culture is also what happens when people cook for themselves in their own kitchens exactly the way they cooked for the rich, with butter or oil, with complicated recipes prescribed by the doctor – as if it were not only their teeth and guts that required nourishment but they had to have a special soup for the liver, a different cut of meat for the heart, a particular blend of salads for the gall bladder, and a rare form of pastry with raisins for the pancreas. And having eaten all this they withdraw into solitude so that their mysterious organs of digestion can get on with digesting… That was culture too! I understood it all, full-heartedly approved of it, admired it. It was just their way with nightshirts and pyjamas I failed to understand. I could never reconcile myself to it. Damn the God that invented such things!...

Have patience, I’m about to tell you. After making the bed I had to lay the nightshirt on top of it face down, folding the bottom end of it back and over, spreading the sleeves… See what I mean?... Looked at this way the nightshirt or pyjamas looked faintly Arabic, like some Eastern pilgrim at prayer, stomach to the ground, his arms spread over the sand… Why did they insist on this? I have no idea. Maybe because it’s more convenient that way, because it involves one movement less, because you just need to pull it on from the back and there you are, ready for bed, without having to struggle into it and tire yourself out before going to sleep. But I hated this kind of strategic thinking, absolutely loathed it. I simply couldn’t tolerate this affectation of theirs. My whole nervous system rebelled against it. My hands shook with fury whenever I made their beds, folding and adjusting their nightgowns, pyjama jackets and trousers the way the manservant taught me. Why?...

People are peculiar, you see. They are born that way even when they are not rich. Everyone is annoyed or driven mad by something. Even the poor who tolerate everything for a while, who resign themselves to everything and support the weight of the world with a certain awe and helplessness, accepting whatever comes their way… but there comes a moment, one that came for me each evening when I was making the bed and putting out their nightwear in the required manner. That was the moment I understood that there would come a day when people were no longer willing to put up with the world as it was… I mean individuals as well as nations… someone would scream out loud that they had had enough, that things had to change. And that when this happened people would take to the streets and go on the rampage, smashing and braking things… Though that’s only a form of circus. Revolution, I mean real revolution, is that which has already happened inside people. Don’t stare at me like an idiot, gorgeous.

I might be talking rubbish but not everything runs according to the laws of logic, not everything people say or do has to make sense. Do you think it is rational or logical that I should be lying with you in this bed? Don’t you get it, sweetheart?... Never mind. Just keep your mouth shut and carry on loving me. Our logic makes no sense but here we are.

So that’s the nightshirt business. I loathed this habit of theirs. But eventually I resigned myself to that too. They were so much stronger after all. It is possible to hate superior forms of life just as it is possible to admire them, but you cannot deny them. I grew to hate them. I hated them to the extent that I joined them and became rich myself, wore their clothes, lay down in their beds, started to watch my figure and, eventually, got to taking laxatives before I went to bed, just like the rich. I didn’t hate them because they were rich and I was poor, no, please don’t misunderstand me. It would be nice if someone finally understood the true state of affairs.

Newspapers and parliaments are constantly on about this now. Even the movies are full of it, or so I understood watching the newsreel the other day. Everyone is talking about it. I wonder what has got into people?...I can’t imagine it’s good for people to be talking so broadly, so generally, so much, about rich and poor, about Russians and Americans. I don’t understand that. They even say there is bound to be a great revolution and the Russians will come out on top, as well as the poor, by and large. But a very refined man once told me in a bar – a South American I think, a drug dealer, went the whisper, whose very false teeth contained a stash of heroin – that that was not how it was, that it would be the Americans who win out in the end because they had more money.

I thought a good deal about this. The saxophonist said the same thing. He said the Americans would drill a great hole in the ground and pack it with atom bombs, and then this little guy in glasses, the man who was currently the president over the ocean, would get down on his hands and knees carrying a burning match, crawl over to the hole, light the fuse of the atom bomb and then whoosh, the whole caboodle goes up. It seems a load of nonsense at first. But I can’t bring myself to laugh any more at such nonsense. I have seen a great deal that seemed just as ridiculous but soon became reality. Yes, my experience is that, generally, the more stupid the idea the surer you can be that one day it will be realized.

I’ll never forget the gossip in Budapest at the latter end of the war… One day, for example, the Germans ranged cannon along the embankment on the Buda side of the city… Enormous cannons they were, properly dug in by bridgeheads. They broke up the pavements and placed machine gun nests all the way along the lovely chestnut-lined shore. People looked at them anxiously but there were a few wise guys who declared there would not be a siege of Budapest because all those terrifying weapons, the heavy artillery by the bridges, the bundles of explosives on the bridges themselves, were all a confidence trick. It was a trick to pull the wool over the Russians’ eyes. They didn’t really want a battle… that’s what they were saying. But it was no trick, at least it did not fool the Russians. The Russians arrived at the river one day and shot everything to pieces, including the cannons. That’s why I don’t know whether what the South American said will come true, but I have a certain feeling that in the end it will be exactly as he said if only because it sounded so ridiculous at first hearing.

I also thought a lot about what the very refined man said about how the Americans would take the decisive step because they were rich. The rich – now there is something I do understand. My experience was that you had to be very careful with the rich because they are extraordinarily crafty. They possess enormous resilience… though heaven alone knows where the resilience comes from. One thing is certain – they are subtle and it is never easy dealing with them. What I said about their nightshirts is evidence of that. People you prepare nightshirts for the way I was told to prepare them are not ordinary people. Such people know exactly what they want, day and night, and it is as well for a poor man to cross himself when coming into their presence. I can’t emphasize enough that I mean only the genuinely rich, not those who just happen to have money. Those are less dangerous. They flash their money around the way a child blows bubbles. And it all ends as it does with soap bubbles: the money just pops in their hands.

Sunday Night is... Early November

Doesn't get any earlier than the 1st. Miranda Lee Richards. Sounds and looks sixties, the hair, the fur coat, the dress, the skirt the black and white, the op-art here and there, the cheapness of the video. The song itself. Nice straight song oddly dropping out of the sky.

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Meanwhile back in government world, scientists resign because having been told to form an informed scientific opinion they have been told it's the wrong opinion. What was it Cecil B. De Mille is supposed to have asked people: "Tell me, how did you love my picture?"

In case anyone should ask I can remember the sixties perfectly clearly so I can't have been there. Nor indeed was I. Not properly. I think my experiences with cannabis were extremely restricted. I wasn't really interested. I very much like whisky (and whiskey) but have no difficulty believing that alcohol is more harmful than cannabis, never mind tobacco. And yes, I smoked cigarettes too but never in any great quantity. I suppose I neglected cannabis principally because it seemed the thing to do. I have always hated doing the things it is the thing to do.

Alan Johnson looks like the manager of a League 1 football team. It could have been worse. It could have been League 2.

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And since it was this day in 1611 that the great Shake-scene's The Tempest was first performed, and because there isn't a decent version of excerpts from the play on YouTube, (the BBC production in 1980 was worse than pedestrian), and because the wind was blowing and the rain driving all this morning, and because I have already had the magnificent Lena Horne version of 'Stormy Weather', and because the elderly Elizabeth Welch sang the song in Derek Jarman's hit-and-miss camp film version of the play, I hereby end this brief commemoration with Welch doing her stuff.



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And Stormy Weather also puts me in mind of the great Etta James. Next week is Etta James week, one for each day.