Flower No More

While passing through London a decade or so ago, in another life, I passed by a brick wall with a blue door in it. A brass plaque which I only barely noticed at first informed me that this was where Dylan Thomas had lived. The late, great Welsh bard has always been one of my favourite poets. Here's something from him; it's the last stanza of his And Death Shall Have No Dominion:

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Some days, I feel like saying, "Where taught a teacher may a teacher no more / Lift his head to the blows of the rain..." — I feel sometimes as if I had been dead for years, lost, mad, dead as nails, with my toes turned up to the daisies and my typewriter keyboard breaking into the light of heaven.

Some days, I miss my classroom intensely. I think, I dream, I hallucinate. Did I ever teach in a classroom? Did I have students who enjoyed the experience? Or was it all something like the good part of the dream before it descends into nightmare?

But death shall have no dominion, and I shall end this short post with another quotation from the word-hoard of that mighty voice:

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

Only Dylan Thomas (and perhaps, Geoffrey Hill) could take the pieces of the Book and make them tell their story in such a different way, but yet as true.

Contextualising Heteroglossic Discourses

Amazing title for a post, for which I have to thank Potash, that most caustic and clever of commentators. I nicked it off the first chapter of his dissertation.

What it really means, of course, is that we take all the wonderfully varied things that different people say about a particular topic and we put them all into some kind of context. It is a rewarding activity; you synthesize stuff, and if you are good, the stuff speaks to you.

By analysing Potash's work, I've come to realise that I am incapable of using that level of discourse in which five-syllable words are routinely bandied about and used in artful ambush of the innocent intellect. He is just too good at it, and I think I need a few more years to catch up — years that I don't have.

But I don't think I need to use five-syllable words. I've come to realise that just as in the stories of primitive societies, great complexity can be found in simple ideas, couched in simple words.

For example, these lines from the great bard of modern Wales:

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true 

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon 

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. 

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

Too beautiful for words, almost. The miracle is that he was able to put all that blood and fire into the water of his voice.

Anonymous Seeds

In my recounting of the days, I realise that I cannot merely number them off as if they were racehorses. Rather, I must insert, here and there, like the raisins in a pudding, a few nuggets of immortal factuality. And so, here is one such.

The plants that I nurture, that I cultivate crudely in lieu of my missing sibling, are most peculiar in their reproductive process. The Orchidaceae (or 'plants that look like testicles') are particular in this respect; they spawn uncountable numbers of minuscule seeds, spore-like in appearance and almost spore-like in their proclivities.

But unlike the spore, that merely seeks water, the seed of the orchid seeks a fungus. Not just any fungus, but one into which in can enter into some sort of carnal connection. For the juxtaposition of orchid seed with mycorrhizal basidiomyceteous fungus will produce a plant, where the seed alone will not.

You see, Nature has played the poor orchid a sad little trick. The seeds of the testiculiform Orchidaceae do not contain endosperm, and hence have no fuel for their green fuse. And, as that bard of Wales once wrote:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer...

The sad orchid must perforce draw upon the vitality of the gross fungus to fuel its future endeavours and its incipient beauty. It is a partnership that one might think is forged in Hell, but no, no, it is forged in Nature, which is (I assure you most seriously) probably worse.

So what can we do to help the orchid along? Why, we can provide artificially natural seed-cultivating media. All it takes is an agar matrix, in which we suspend the sterile (oh, what irony) but tasty extracts of some fleshy sugar-fruit (papaya perhaps, or coconut, or banana, or peach), and voila, we have created that in which the seed can grow!

Poor anonymous seeds! But now, with the medium provided by the deaths of their distant relatives, they can thrive and blossom! And who knows, perhaps some day they too will have their own names, and their own faces...

Lessons And Songs

In front of me is parchment, thick material with old writing on it. Some of it goes back a long way, for we are looking down the wrong end of the telescope, into the cold days of 1980, in a land of mist and rain. In the English class, the poets come and go, speaking of more of Breughel than of Michelangelo.

Our teacher makes us read Dylan Thomas. It is my first introduction to the Voice of Wales. It will not be my last. The poem we are reading is The Hand That Signed The Paper, and it goes like this:

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

It carries a lesson I will bear for the rest of my life. From that day on, I know that the pen is mightier than the sword. My worst enemies will come at me not with might of arms, but along rivers of ink; with penmanship, not pikemanship. And to resist I will need to learn about words as well.

Yet, a sheet of paper has two sides. The defence of vulnerability is the greatest shield of all, for the fully vulnerable is like a cloud; you may pierce it in many places, but you will not hurt it at all. The barrage of words hurled against the invading force is a counter-attack, not a defence. You cannot make a bow a defensive weapon, no matter how hard you try, no matter what philosophy shapes your action and response.

If you will build a city on a hill, and hedge it around with the engines of defence, those who seek entry may hurt themselves. A city on a hill cannot be hid. Should you then eschew defence? No, but you may post a sign here and there: this is a friendly city, but do not seek to invade or invest, for we are a power under orders from Authority. And yet, there will still be accidents. You may make reparation, but there will always be bitterness. This I have learnt as well.

I too have been hurt before. But there is one precious thing I have learnt, a third lesson. The attempt to bear no ill-will is nothing unless you bear good-will. It is hard to attempt it; it is also hard to believe in it. But after 1981, when she told me what was right but hurt me anyway, I learnt that it is always for the best. You must not hate and you must ensure you do not seem to hate; you cannot completely love, when it is not returned; you just get on with it, for you are you.

And yet, who are you? How do you know? It is the reason we are told to consider ourselves with sober judgement – for Romans 12:3 is as important as the previous two verses, if not more so. It introduces the rest of the chapter, verses 4-21, the evaluative canon with which each of us can judge ourselves and not impose the wrong kind of judgement on others.

For in the end, while there is an objective truth, we are commanded to discretion and sober judgement from a subjective viewpoint. How else can it be, when we do not know except through a glass darkly? Wisdom requires that we discern, describe, distill – and on occasion, dispel, destroy, despair. We seek to approach the objectively true, but there is only one singularity, one point from which all things are objective, and that is God's perspective from infinity and eternity.

From this, I have learnt a fourth lesson: I will always bear faith with my friends, but it may not be the faith my friends desire. I will not abandon them even if they think I have. And I may not act even when they feel I should, because it is a matter of my own judgement, flawed or not. Inevitably, I will lose most of my friends. We all will. Yet, this is the way God treats us too; He will abandon us if we deny him, but He does not abandon us for lack of belief. In times like this, I read II Timothy 2 again and again; it comforts and warns me, as all scripture does.

So here we are. We see subjectively, but judge as best we can. And where our judgement fails, we will suffer for it. But only for a while; for in the end, all things are made new, all things are made clean. At the end, we will rise, we shall be changed, we shall be made incorruptible. There are no tears beyond the end of things.

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I was at a wedding this weekend. Rather oddly, I felt, the wedding ended with an arrangement of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Pie Jesu, which is a conflation of the traditional Requiem's Pie Jesu and its Agnus Dei. One doesn't normally think of a requiem as wedding music. And yet, thinking of the god-daughter and listening...

Pie Jesu,
Qui tollis peccata mundi,
Dona eis requiem;
Agnus Dei,
Dona eis requiem
Sempiternam.

I felt my weariness lifted as I heard the venerable words and translated them: "Merciful Jesus, who takes away the sins of the world, grant them rest; Lamb of God, grant them rest eternal." She who sang had a voice sufficiently beautiful for the task, sweet and deep enough to bring out the sweetness of the truth in those words. What I like about the Lloyd Webber arrangement is the deliberate way in which the seven syllables of the third and fifth lines pace out the idea of a deliberate grace. And I remembered 'sempiternam' in particular from ancient Latin lessons; it is a hybrid of 'semper', which is 'always', and 'aeternam', which is 'forever'. Always and forever, O Lord, grant us rest.

It is my wish for a troubled world, and the people of that world. It has always been my wish, above all human strivings, ambitions and desires. Kyrie eleison!

Split II

And now I see, as if with blinding sight, what this poem really means. It must be about schizophrenia.

When I quote Dylan, last bard of Wales, these days, everyone thinks I mean Bob Dylan.

But death shall have no dominion.

An old classmate of mine died yesterday. At such times, we remember everything.

In Taberna

I have been a fan of Carl Orff since I first heard his grand cycle of mediaeval Latin drinking songs set to music, Carmina Burana. This dramatic musical production is named after an eponymous collection of mediaeval drinking songs (about 200 of them!) which was put together over the years by the amoral scholars of central and western Europe as they wandered from town to town. Some are still familiar tunes. Who can forget the opening and closing song in Orff's version, O Fortuna, for example?

But why did this come to mind on a balmy Saturday night? Well, because Saturday to me is both the Old Testament Sabbath as well as a night for gastronomy, astronomy and oenology. And when a night is all these things and more, one suddenly notices unusual connections. As they say, "In vino, veritas." In wine, (there is) truth. Yes, indeed. I was looking up from a 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon when it hit me. (No, not the wine, the thought.)

The word 'tabernacle' and the word 'tavern' are directly related. In fact, 'tabernacle' means 'a small tavern' in Latin. I knew these things all along, but the two words had never juxtaposed themselves in my mind for all the years of my life. How... odd. As is the case with such incidents, you "see with blinding sight" as old Dylan used to say, and you ask yourself (should you be of religious persuasion) why on earth God is showing you such a thing.

So that "blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay" [note: I'm sure he meant 'extravagantly cheerful' here], I think. Sometimes, wrapped in the concerns of the world, the flesh and the Devil, we fail to remember that the general will of God is seldom shown explicitly (i.e. in the form, "this is the will of God...") in the Good Book. And one very explicit statement of that will is found here – it tells us to "be joyful always".

And perhaps, that is why I sit here, looking into a small glass of pale yellow fluid, and think, "This too is the fruit of the vine."

The Greater Trumps: (26) The Sun

It is an open land, and ever a beautiful one. Nothing hides here; the roads are free and children play without fear - on horseback or afoot. It is always high summer here. And above all things glows the warm and welcoming Sun, triumphant.

Where the Moon is the subversive and deceptive side of creativity, the Sun is creativity brought into the open and made concrete. It is the presiding eminence that watches over a heady blend of fire, wine and song - the fruits of alchemy that come from substance, flux, and mind. Perhaps the only negative side to this image is the fact that it is always the same - it holds no surprises, and therein may lie the seeds of Stasis, rather than Triumph.

In some of the older images, there are other stories - of the Sun burning up the Earth in its enthusiasm, of Phaethon's chariot burning the lands of Africa, of Icarus and his melting wings - which serve as warnings to those who would worship the Sun alone. Perhaps, it is best to let the Sun be, to welcome it in all its guises and not attempt to be its master or come too close to it.

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Probably many of us who grew up in those messy decades of the 1960s and 1970s will remember where these two verses come from:

Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun,
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right

Little darling, the smiles returning to the faces
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun,
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right

While, as always, my favourite poet of the Welsh Renaissance had his own cautionary note, embedded in that famed villanelle:

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

The Sun, source as it is of all that keeps our world running, beacon as it is of the days and seasons, should not be worshipped. But it is always obvious why men might worship him - for the Sun is a power which simply cannot be ignored.

The Greater Trumps: (25) The Moon

Above all things beams the Moon. No innocent face this, but a face both wise and winsome, half in darkness and half in light. Twin pillars frame a gateway beneath it, and a river, its tide both rising and falling, runs through it. At the edge of vision, wolves howl, and odd creatures respond in their own peculiar ways. Everything is secret, and yet everything is seen; everything is possible, and yet everything seems impossible. This is the secret of the White Goddess.

Whether Selene, Diana, or Artemis, the moon in its phases has often been a symbol of fortune and of womanhood. But it would be unwise to see it as unrestrained and random fortune. Rather, just as womanhood is the source of birth, and the moon goes through both waxing and waning phases, the moon is generative and cyclical. You can ride it towards insanity or genius. In this light, the Moon therefore stands for Delusion (Deception?) or the creative productivity of the unfettered Mind.

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When I think of the Moon, I am irresistably drawn to the nightmare quality of Robert Graves's scholarship. In his odd anthropological opus, The White Goddess, he sculpts an image of mankind's religious history that is unsettling, and perhaps a little deranged. But oddly enough, I am drawn also to Khonsu, the Egyptian power of the Moon. Unusually, he is male, a god of knowledge and time. He was also a power of healing, and of madness. I think of Khonsu because, quite often, people tend to think of men as sane, stable and boring - hysteria, for example, comes from the Greek hystera, which means womb. But Khonsu shows that a male power can be pretty odd too.

Dylan Thomas was one for the odd visions. Here he is, in an excerpt from I See The Boys Of Summer:

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon - and midnight as she blows.

It's hard to imagine that he could say more about the moon. But he did. You'll have to see for yourself.

Daylight

Quick edit: I must thank every one of you who has shown appreciation, requested intercession, given thanks, wished for blessings upon me, expressed satisfaction, raised expectations etc. You, and the unnamed many others who have suffered me to teach them anything at all, in any way at all, are the reason for whatever gift I have and my use of that gift.

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Three things have come to me; four things have inspired me.

The first is of a rhyme written by a person who in all innocence flatters me, and to this I make reply:

Not fire nor earthquake nor wind in the night,
The ravens' King speaks in both silence and light;
The Master of men is the alchemist's sight,
True Lord of wisdom and my intellect's might.

The second is from the difficult creed of my professional life, taken from the thirty-second chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah:

2 Each man will be like a shelter from the wind
and a refuge from the storm,
like streams of water in the desert
and the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

The third is in reflection upon some words of that great bard of Cymru, Dylan Thomas:

I have sworn that my words will fork lightning;
I have chosen to walk upon water;
I desire to be light on a hill
Before the end comes,
Before I must leave.

And the fourth is in my heart, and there it stays.