On Blake

I have contributed a comment to the blog for the Inspired by Blake* festival in Oxford, which begins on 18 January.   This follows a post for A New Map of Wonders last month.

Something that was new to me: early in his career Blake produced engravings for a report documenting the treatment of rebel slaves in Suriname.

* not this one

Image: via Guardian

Sandpiper

Every few months, it seems, I stumble across a poem by Elizabeth Bishop that I had not read before. Here, via Brandon Keim's essay on animal consciousness, is Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

- Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Image: Sanderling, RSPB

The sea mysteries

Like an oyster hides its pearl,

The sea hides its wonder world.

Like a mermaid flicks her tail,
The sea is real and surreal.

Like the heart of the angler fish,
The sea's heart beats in the dead of night,

The sonar's echo of lovers dead and lost,
All the lonely people - lost at sea.

the haunting music of the deep dark sea.

***

All around the wide world,
the sea speaks in many tongues.

In many skins, the sea repeats its lines.
With wide, tide arms, the sea keeps time.

In the great treasure chest below
Are the sea special gifts:

Lantern fish, bristlemouths, hatchetfish,
Plankton, krill, shrimps, copepods, squid.

Pink eggs, razor sharp teeth, transparent shells.
Triple wart sea devil, common black devil fish.

As if the sea imagined its creatures,
dragging the ocean for inspiration,

As if the sea drew a rough sketch,
Then coloured them in:

Black and red creatures of the dark zone.
Fish that flash, fish that turn themselves inside out.

Out of the vivid imagination of the sea,
Crawled the wild and the wonderful,

The gulper eel, the vampire squid from hell,
the kind and the savage, the beautiful and the ugly,

The saints and the martyrs,
The myths and the workers.

Nothing could ever surprise the sea.
The sea is you. The sea is me.

***

Like an oyster hides its pearl,
The sea hides its wonder world.

Like the heart of the angler fish,
The sea's heart beats in the dead of night,

The sonar's echo of lovers dead and lost:

the haunting music of the deep dark sea.

-- Jackie Kay

'After 42 years' by Khaled Mattawa

A Libyan American poet commemorates the overthrow of Kadafi

in 'print' 

read by the author

via Hisham Matar

Resonance

The temple bell stops

But I still hear sound

Coming out of the flowers

-- Basho

Hierophanies

In a recent radio programme [1], Bill Viola quoted from a medieval text, Rules for the Icon Painters:

Work with care on every detail of your icon, as if you were working in front of the Lord, himself.
During work, pray in order to strengthen yourself physically and spiritually; avoid, above all, useless words and keep silence...
...Never forget the joy of spreading icons in the world, the joy of the work or icon-painting, the joy of being in union with the saint whose face you are painting. [2]

Set in a colder climate, Douglas Dunn's Instructions to a Saintly Poet begins:

Write by fire,
By a single taper,
By candlelight
By a fireside
Burning turf, or logs
If wood is plentiful.
Writing by burning light
Banishes pride.
Ink is holy.
Colours are holy,
Keep a dog, or dogs,
To sleep at your feet.
Invest in a warm blanket.
Spend hours outdoors
In all weathers
Alert to your thoughts
And moods of the sea,
All birds and creatures,
All living things
The shapes of the visible
And vernacular
Moods of the sky.

Image: 'Heaven and Earth' (1992)

Footnotes

[1] Episode 67 of A History of the World in 100 Objects: An Icon of the Triumph of Orthodoxy

[2] The injunctions between the dots are:

...Pray in particular to the saint whose face you are painting. Keep your mind from distractions and the saint will be close to you.
When you have to choose a color, stretch out your hand interiorly to the Lord and ask His counsel.
Do not be jealous of your neighbor’s work. His success is your success too.
When your icon is finished, thank God that His mercy has granted you the grace to paint the holy images.
Have your icon blessed by putting it on the altar. Be the first to pray before it, before giving it to others...

'...all the flowers are forms of water...'

Rain Light by W. S. Merwin

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

'The mirage is the traveler's book'

...Just as at nightfall
I say to my two friends
If there has to be a dream
Let it be like us and simple.
For example after two days
The three of us will dine
To fete our dream's premonition
That after two days not one of us will have been lost.

So let's celebrate in the moon's sonata
And make a toast to the lenience of death
Who saw the three of us happy together
And decided to look the other way.

I don't say, far way life is real with its imaginary places.
I say, life here is possible.

-- Mahmoud Darwish, by some oversight read by John Berger on BBC Radio 4 this morning.

(The line breaks are erratic as I haven't read the original, which is in any case only a translation...)

Only to see

I found the poems in the fields

And only wrote them down.

-- John Clare, quoted by Roger Deakin

One path leading to another

Road shining like river uphill after rain.

-- a line found on a slip of paper in Edward Thomas's diary after his death at the battle of Arras. RM

Dark patrons

The Dark Mountain Project may seek neither god nor master, but for secular prophets in its own country could consider D H Lawrence and J G Ballard.

In a short remembrance for Ballard this morning, Iain Sinclair said "our last conversation was about the Westfield Shopping Centre, this amazing reef that brings the cathederal of nonidentity to its perfect apogee".[1]

And here's Lawrence back in 1925 (Morality and the Novel):

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment. As mankind is always struggling in the coils of old relationships, art is always ahead of the 'times', which themselves are always far in the rear of the living moment...[2]

Footnotes

[1] (added 23 April): Chris Petit writes:

Boredom underpins consumerism. It defines leisure (and desire), which collapses into shopping. Boredom invites terror (as its only cure).

[2] (added 25 April) I had been looking for the short essay on poetry from which this comes:

This is the momentous crisis for mankind, when we have to get back to chaos. So long as the umbrella serves, and poets make slits in it, and the mass of people can be gradually educated up to the vision in the slit: which means they patch it over with a patch that looks just like the vision in the slit; so long as this process can continue, and mankind can be educated up, and thus built in, so long will a civilization continue more or less happily, completing its own painted prison. It is called completing the consciousness.

'Fact'

The fact is, my friend, we matter more than you
A husband, lover, son, friend of ours
Outweighs at least a hundred such of yours
Its a fact of life, my friend, and of death too.

-- from Quatrains for a Primer of our Lives by David Constantine, read at Desert Blues.

See Henry Siegman and others in the LRB. Martin Shaw at oD

On Mars, there is more than one type of ice...

In addition to frozen water, there's also dry ice -- frozen carbon dioxide -- which shapes and reshapes the Martian landscape. Images (from left):

blocks of icy debris, warmed by the sun, tumble down cliffs of the northern ice cap; 

swirling dust devils leave tracks on defrosting dune surfaces in the south; 

as polar ice recedes, the surface erodes in scalloped ridges;

during spring in the north, sand dunes emerge from the blanket of frost;

starburst patterns are created as ice warms into gas and expands, creating channels spreading out radially;

when the gas breaks through the ice, it creates plumes and material is carried downwind.

-- NYT

At Edge, Rodney Brooks speculates on Life (or not) on Mars. Speaking for myself, I would rather it stayed quiet and beautiful there for at least a while longer.

P.S. 15 Jan: NASA says there could be bugs in the rocks.

Futility

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved, - still warm, - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Lyric

Do you think poetry can play any practical or meaningful role in changing minds and hearts on environmental issues? In the past you have conceded that no poem is strong enough to stop a tank, so my question is: can a poem stop an SUV?

I think that one answers itself. What has happened, however, is that environmental issues have to a large extent changed the mind of poetry. Again, it's a question of the level of awareness, the horizon of consciousness within which poet and audience operate. There are those like Gary Snyder and Alice Oswald for whom these matters are an explicit concern, but at this stage nobody can have an uncomplicated Hopkinsian trust in the self-refreshing powers of nature. Yet if Philip Larkin were writing his poem on water nowadays, it would still be in order for him to end on a note of reverence, and "raise in the east / A glass of water / Where any-angled light / Would congregate endlessly". I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job.

-- Seamus Heaney in conversation with Dennis O'Driscoll

Can poetry be a war crime?

And we're not just talking because it's really really bad, as in Sarajevo, quoted by Ed Vulliamy in his profile of Radovan Karadzic:

I hear misfortune's threads
Turned into a beetle as if an old singer
Had been crushed by the silence and become a voice.
The town burns like incense
In the smoke rumbles our consciousness.

Rollo Romig notes that the poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic remembers watching Karadzic on the news at the height of the siege:

'Karadzic spouted such blatant lies that, in a rage, I found a book of his children’s poetry — There Are Miracles, There Are No Miracles — and began ripping it apart...'

[While] the lawyer Jay Surdukowski, argues that Karadzic’s poems could be submitted in court as evidence of war crimes.

Martin Durkin of Great Global Warming Swindle infamy is something of a Karadzic mini-me in that he shares certain psychological traits, including the delusion that there is a conspiracy against him, the willingness to fabricate and perpetrate outrageous lies, and quickness to violent language.

P.S. 27 July: Alexander Hemon notes of the key Karadzic moment "The point of that performance...was the performance itself."

So it's not just me

I am swallowed up. I live for an income of £250 & work all day & often from 9am until 1am. It takes me so long because I fret & fret . . . My self criticism or rather my studied self contempt is now nearly a disease.

-- Edward Thomas in an early letter, quoted by Edna Longley in a reappraisal of his poetry that makes the case that, among other things, he was an ecological poet.

Soundtrack

Here is the text of the poem sung on the hit Where the hell is Matt? (2008)

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

Stream of Life by Rabindranath Tagore

The machines laugh

Occasionally people write to ask this blog to endorse products and ideas. Earlier this week, for example, came a request to be one of many hosts for a 'funky' virtual balloon race in which 'thousands of people' will 'race across the Internet in the hope of winning the ultimate luxury holiday in Ibiza'.

I'm usually one of the last ones to be an impossibly pious environmentalist, but I refused, saying 'I think we should be deploying our ingenuity and creativity to help people be happy where they are or to help those who are not so fortunate, not to encourage high impact luxury consumption that damages the environment.'

Perhaps I've been reading too much poetry like Fuel by R. S. Thomas:

And the machines say, laughing
up what would have been sleeves
in the old days: 'We are at
your service.' 'Take us', we cry,

'to the places that are far off
from yourselves.' And so they do
at a price that is the alloy in
the thought that we can do without them.

Apparently the poet's son was unimpressed: his father would 'drone on to absurd lengths about the evil of refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and other modern devices...to a congregation that didn’t have any of these things and were longing for them.'

A more nuanced discussion of eco-travel is here.

Earth and Moon from Mars

One of a set of photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Oh Tierra, Espérame

Vuélveme oh sol
a mi destino agreste,
lluvia del viejo bosque,
devuélveme el aroma y las espadas
que caían del cielo,
la solitaria paz de pasto y piedra,
la humedad de las márgenes del río,
el olor del alerce,
el viento vivo como un corazón
latiendo entre la huraña muchedumbre
de la gran araucaria.

Tierra, devuélveme tus dones puros,
las torres del silencio que subieron
de la solemnidad de sus raíces:
quiero volver a ser lo que no he sido,
aprender a volver desde tan hondo
que entre todas las cosas naturales
pueda vivir o no vivir: no importa
ser una piedra más, la piedra oscura,
la piedra pura que se lleva el río.