Labour Day

As T S Eliot puts it,

The lot of man is ceaseless labour,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

Since the last time I posted here, two years have passed. In that period, I've entered an enterprise, missed two St David's Days, taught countless classes (by which I mean I haven't counted them) in literature, history, and hard sciences. I have read many books, wearied of many writers, and settled into a life of comfortable obscurity—only to be unsettled by various events.

I have walked as much as ever, but covered more ground. Whereas in the past I walked the same blocks, the same corridors, again and again in each interminable day for twelve years, I have been walking the streets and the drains, the hills and the hawker-stalls, and the small corners of the wide earth for almost a decade since.

Time wounds all heels, as an old saying goes. Your sole is hardened by much beating against the ground, like wheat threshed to remove chaff, or iron pounded in a flame.

And here it is Labour Day, and the idea of retirement irks me. After all, it was an idea invented by the Iron Chancellor, Bismarck of relatively ancient fame: he decided it would be good to support the infirm and insane in their old age. He excluded those still fit for work, which for the largest span of human history has been the norm. My forefathers trod their winepresses till they could tread no more, and I dearly wish to do the same. When a person will no longer work, there is no need for that person to eat.

But that state is, God willing, decades hence. And even if not, I'm happy to go when properly gone. For now, I'll just think my thoughts and measure out my life in coffee spoons.

Chorus from a Little Red Dot

They slash, they burn
They farm the peat
And then repeat
The cycle turns
Over the days
They make a haze

What have we learnt across the centuries?
That prosperity can be poison
Distilled by exploitation?

No, that is not what we have come to know:
Our forefathers worked by sweat and toil,
But we by unconfessed guile.

How do city-states fatten in their years?
Gold comes from ash and blood and tears.

They slash, they burn
They farm the peat
And then repeat
The cycle turns
Over the days
They make a haze

Here in Atlantis the crying and blame
Have begun—perverse incense—to rise,
As once did in Tyre's skies.

We claim we are poor because we seek wealth.
But we are not farming barren soil,
Do not need to sweat at all.

Why do city-states anger at their kings?
We vote for them to give us things.

They slash, they burn
They farm the peat
And then repeat
The cycle turns
Over the days
They make a haze

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With apologies to il miglior fabbro, for this comes from a rock that is waste land.

Sunday Meditation

My Sunday meditation was also taken from T S Eliot's The Rock:

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?

Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.

It all reminds me of Atlantis, and what it was meant to be, and what it is.

Again, the Rock

Thomas the Eliot, if not several Stearns a rhymer, once wrote these which I cannot and wish not ever to forget.

The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
The men you are in these times deride
What has been done of good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.
Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.
The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.
I will show you the things that are not being done,
And some of the things that were long ago done,
That you may take heart, Make perfect your will.
Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.

Hope in the Waste Land

Today I find myself unable to get the cogitative cogs working. The mechanism of the mind is rather bogged down in the morass of malaise, despite a good ham sandwich, wholegrain cereal with maple syrup and pecans, and strong coffee. And so I turn to T. S. Eliot.

Thomas Stearns Eliot will always be remembered for his long and symbol-laden exegesis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, The Waste Land. But despite his many entropic writings and the sense of ruin, of disorder, and general hand-wringing at the state of the cosmos that many readers sense, he was also capable of steely hope and vigorous faith.

In his Choruses from 'The Rock', Eliot crafted many memorable lines about faith in the urban wasteland, the wasteland of human aspirations and dry communities. It is to these lines I turn when the world seems too burdensome. Have a taste:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Against the night-blindness of the daily Christian, the world-weariness and the stench of stupidity, there are few defences. For we who believe, the ultimate bulwark is the complex and sometimes unyielding mass of the Scriptures. But occasionally, a poet sheds light into the Waste Land; occasionally a watchman peers alertly into the gloom.

Today I find myself inspired to think and to write, and to do it this time in memory of yet another of those guardians of the waste, the late William Fitzjames Oldham, who was with us from 17 December 1854 to 27 March 1937, before he walked joyfully into that good light.

The Rock

I first encountered The Rock when I was researching a short workshop on urban poetry. It seemed an unlikely basis for further adventures at first: the poem can appear to be a sort of mixture of Greek tragedy and archaic Christian theology dressed up to look like a modern hybrid of Blake and Auden.

But it isn't really that. It's a lot more powerful than that.

In a previous post, I quoted these lines. They reminded me about where my reward for my endeavours really lies, and what form it might take — and what form I should not expect it to take.

I have two more quotes that I will not comment on further:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

Long Journeys (Part II)

The poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot is a lot about long, cold journeyings and the things that one finds on arrival. Sometimes, the arrival is the arrival of one's self within one's self, so to speak; sometimes, the destination is the anti-climax to the journey itself. 'Little Gidding' is the fourth of the Four Quartets he wrote. It is the one that I recommend all visitors to England read, either before or after the visit.

In that poem, the last words are as follow. I couldn't find a shorter excerpt that would convey the beautiful weight of time and humanity conveyed by it all.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

It is stuff like that which makes one despair of ever being a poet. When you read this kind of poetry, there is the sensation that somehow, the deepest root of language has been tapped; the wellsprings of human history and legend are being drawn from and drawn upon.

More important, the sensation of his 'midwinter spring' at Little Gidding is one of having found the destination, that the journey has ended and we await the welcome of the King. It makes one realise one's weariness in the place of the world, and just how long a journeying it can seem.

The 'Midnight' Scam

This is a little piece that's been on my mind (and on my notebook) for a while. I've called it the 'Midnight' scam when perhaps it should actually be called the 'Memory' scam.

I'm sure that a lot of people have heard or seen the musical CATS before; it's one of Andrew Lloyd Webber's greatest hits. The songs in that musical are taken from T S Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. All of them have their genesis in that most peculiar book, except for one. The odd one out is the song 'Memory', which is actually a terribly cut-and-pasted revamp of one of Eliot's other poems, 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night', from Prufrock and Other Observations, a terribly angsty collection about unrequited love and entropy.

The original poems take you through a kaleidoscope of sad lives, through the hours of the day, to midnight and beyond. It is a very depressing collection, but it contains some of Eliot's best images and lines.

I wonder why they purloined this particular poem for the musical. The two are completely different: the poem is mystical, takes us from midnight to four in the morning, and leaves us hanging at knifepoint (to mix a metaphor somewhat); the song is fairly catchy and designed for someone like Elaine Paige to yowl through. I can only conclude that the song was grafted in to give her something to do while she was standing in for Judi Dench.

Halflife

I had dinner last night with some ladies — I have always called them ladies, even when not everyone thought they were — from a long time ago, from almost the very beginning of my official teaching career. Not all of them were there; the weather was full of faraway voices dimmed by the roar of time. They will always remain my very first batch.

I listened to their stories, and their stories of their friends. I see how much was lost, and how much more was gained. I laughed when I realised that my recent students would look at some of them and think the age-difference negligible; by now, the gap is a dozen years, a bridge probably (or improbably) too far.

The bright are still bright, the fire is still hot, the life in them undimmed. I felt a lot younger with them; I was ten years older than they when I taught them and they were only as old as my 'baby' sister. Now they have entered their thirties, and I am wearing the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I am thankful for them, for all they taught me about the craft of life, the craft of building in the wasteland. They always have reminded me of that master of the English word who wrote in his 1934 opus, The Rock:

The lot of man is ceaseless labour,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

It is all half a life away for them; for me it is more like a third of my life, now gone to dust. But the dust remembers, and the dust was once alive, and life was made from dust. I thank God for all the great things He has given me, and among these great things, the memories of being a teacher, of having that privilege of teaching and knowing those I taught.

Georgia

In Georgia, a country which I first visited in 1969, there is a place that is now a smoking ruin. That country, ironically enough, was the birthplace of the Man of Steel, that feckless and ruthless figure who piloted Russia into the torturesome modernity of the Atomic Age.

Through the smoking ruin move the tanks, landcrawling fish of the sort that Oswald Bastable would immediately know and loathe with a bitter hatred and a wondering distaste. Georgia has partly its own folly to blame. But a large part of that is trusting the promises of the West. Like all clever Caucasians, the true ones who live in the Caucasus and its environs, they ought to have known better. The Caucasians have always been crushed between hammer and anvil, divided by fire and sword, fixed by stake and noose.

And I think of one great lesson. A country is as great as the dictators it births, and whatever those dictators in turn create will one day return home; if not in body, then in spirit, in some sort of returning doom.

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I think of something else. I shall wear my trousers rolled. Haha. There is shadow under this read Prufrock. Haha. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih.

Furious Intelligence

When I was very young, it irritated me a lot that my relatives would say things like, "You're very smart, you should do better in your studies!" or "You're so clever, how could you do such a stupid thing!" or "You're a genius, why can't you teach other people to be like that!" or "Don't say you didn't do this naughty thing, only you could have done it!"

See, the problem is that terrible spectre of generalised intelligence. If you are good at a few key skills (often cited as "reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic" – three Rs which aren't really all Rs – or the better "comprehension, composition and computation") it is assumed that you are good at all other things, ranging from giving talks to regurgitating facts to criminal activity.

But it's a terribly asymmetric thing, this 'generalised intelligence'. For example, I can always be accused of doing something (say, blogging) as if I were less intelligent, less stylish, less careful with language than I normally show. But someone who is indeed less intelligent or stylish or careful with language could never be accused of blogging like me. The presumption is that you can scale intelligence and other manifestations of skill down, but never up.

To some extent, that is true. But it leads to the idea that to be of outstanding intelligence is to open yourself up to assault from any quarter which can't be bothered to think more deeply into a situation. It is akin to saying, "A crime has been committed, so the instigator must be the most intelligent criminal available, especially since we can't tell whether he was there or not, and there are no traces of him!"

It's called the Macavity Syndrome, and even if it weren't, I would call it that. Macavity's story is told here, but for the benefit of those who might not get there, I have reproduced the source poem by T S Eliot at the end of this post. Essentially, it is the complex of suspicion, paranoia and disregard for evidence that leads people to attribute a crime (or thoughtcrime) to any person who might seem capable even if there is no evidence for it. This is because paranoid metacognition will say at least two things: 1) there is no evidence because the perpetrator is too clever, 2) there is a concealed crime despite the lack of evidence simply because whatever was done was too clever for us to understand.

The pernicious thing about this is that less discerning people will actually believe this. It appeals to the reptilian hindbrain that responds viscerally to fear. Whether there is indeed something to fear is moot – threats, nightmares, vague apprehensions, the unknown, all these things can be there or not; it doesn't matter to the hindbrain. It is the most primitive part of ourselves, and the part most needing control in a higher-level society. I have no doubt that the hindbrain is best in situations of likely violence and immediate danger, but in other situations, it is a poor substitute for considered judgement and reason.

And that is why I feel dire discomfort and even simmering anger when the Macavity Syndrome surfaces. My own hindbrain plays off the fears of my forebrain. My forebrain tries to stay faithful to my mission statement, but wrath and pride threaten to dominate. I feel compromised simply by the fact that my society so readily Macavitises. Ah, me. Alas. But I am no Macavity, and therein lies the rub.

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Macavity: The Mystery Cat

Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw -
For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime - Macavity's not there!

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime - Macavity's not there!
You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air -
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity's not there!

Mcavity's a ginger cat, he's very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;
His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.
He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake;
And when you think he's half asleep, he's always wide awake.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square -
But when a crime's discovered, then Macavity's not there!

He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard's.
And when the larder's looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke's been stifled,
Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair -
Ay, there's the wonder of the thing! Macavity's not there!

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty's gone astray,
Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,
There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair -
But it's useless to investigate - Macavity's not there!
And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:
`It must have been Macavity!' - but he's a mile away.
You'll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs,
Or engaged in doing complicated long-division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
At whatever time the deed took place - MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!
And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Who Can It Be Now?

I was having a meal with the Japanese currency speculator today. La divina principessa was waxing lyrical about the life up in the aerie, and Hyperion joined in soon after. It was, however, a somewhat tragic libretto that unfolded first in her redoubtable harmonics, and then in his gravelly baritone.

As I chatted with them, I suddenly became conscious of an overwhelming sense of detachment, as if my umbilical to the world of everyday events was detaching slowly and stealthily. People I had known for more than a decade were falling away, fading from the picture, like those retouched October Parade photographs in the former Soviet Union – almost as if they no longer existed even though they were still walking around the workplace. I could only thank the Highest that I no longer feel like Trotsky in Mexico these days.

Yeats's famous lines are of course in the air. They have been for years now, as we transit the post-millennial epoch. But I still get that frisson of sinister premonition when I read those opening lines:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It is possibly worse than that. We see the heads rolling in the winter of our discontent, in the galling revolution against the right order of things. We see the southward migration of birds, and all the auguries spell troubling times ahead. And we are afflicted with a dull and nagging paranoia: who is the third who walks always beside you? It is indeed Eliot's fear in a handful of dust. Why do these tiny things concern us? Because they strike at the root of our reasons for existing the way we do, the way we hope the world should be – a world and not a waste land; a world enough, and time.

As it is, I sit here in the calming amber light of my reading room and try very hard not to think of that portentous jazz riff, the one that first inspired this evening's post, the one in Men At Work's Who Can It Be Now?

How Should I Presume?

I know this poem very well, have known it very well for a long time. Every bit of it is part of the foundation of my heart, even at the hour of doom or any other hour; even at the hour for tea, for coffee, or for nothing at all.

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

I cannot presume, and I never have. I am always alone in this, as is each who does this task, though mostly not lonely. Adults become old and stale, or tough, or any one of a thousand states of agedness. And yet we too were young, like Phlebas or like you. We no longer live in the same realms; what is life and death and joy or terrible pain to you is not the same for me. But we are human too, and sometimes we have met at the tangential touching of our worlds, mostly to the good, though sometimes to the bad.

And in the dying days of the year, I remember the fallen and the risen, the quick and the dead, the brave and the timorous. I write testimonials; I keep a copy of every one of them just for the distant and unlikely eventuality that someday somebody might want another copy. Though nobody sees it, the seasoned mercenaries of the shadow world are not mercenary enough to take money for lives. We are daft that way.

We do not have to write songs that nobody hears or watch for dangers that nobody sees. It is enough that the songs are sung and the dangers are baulked. It is enough that we make ourselves small and disposable so that we can be forgotten without loss. It is always enough because it has to be; if there were rewards, it might tempt us too much. And yet, we do gain, we do receive, we are rewarded. And it is very sweet although we must learn never to think in anticipation of it.

The year dies. With it, some hopes fade, some faces elope. It will never be the same again, but then it never has been. We learn to live on through the loss. And one more state of age passes. We must forgive each other for what was well-intended but not well-accomplished, for what was well-accomplished but not well-executed, for what was well-executed but not well-intended. We are all faithless to some extent. But God remains true, and to Him we must turn. Alone.

Vox Urbana

Two years ago, I ran a poetry workshop for a bunch of teenagers. By accident, I opened a folder and... here it all is. Or whatever remains of it. I present to you...

A Wilderness of Stone and Steel

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“In the vacant places / We will build with new bricks.” T S Eliot, The Rock (1934)

Landscape:

The urban landscape has features which no other landscape has in abundance – throngs of people, the roar of commerce, the tall houses and great towers of the mighty all jostling side by side with the raggedness of the poor and indifferent, vehicular transport and, everywhere, the condition of humanity (both good and evil) concentrated and distilled into gleaming diamonds. Just as settings highlight diamonds, so too the urban landscape highlights the human spirit.

Language:

Hard, rough-edged words dominate: ‘concrete’, ‘slum’, ‘dirt’. Where the city is lyrical, it is like the flow of traffic along a major artery – and where it is evocative, it is full of smoke, rain, darkness, and hot metal. Urban life is gritty; it is full of lumps, bumps, contractions and contradictions. Stress, shortness of time and breath and space, all cry out beneath the broad sweep of the steel sky. It is here that ‘one’ is the loneliest number; it is also here that all languages become one.

Life:

She looked at me, an old woman; her face was a map of all her days. If you traced the veins back to her heart, you would know all her descendants and their lives. The young man with her was her grandson; his language of choice was not hers and his calling was one she admired, but did not understand. To him, life was stainless steel and antiseptic and translucent plastic which one threw away after use; to her, life was old wood and incense and bright oranges on a cold day.

Love:

They passed each other by, they passed by each other every day. He was a man of the briefcase, she was a lady of the towers. They rode in parallel elevators to the 57th floor. They lunched in adjacent restaurants. They were equally kind, equally ignorant of genuine suffering, equally devoted to the urban sprawl. They would have loved, their love would have resounded throughout all generations. But they never met, and love, hovering and waiting, was disappointed.

-----

What is the vocabulary of urban poetry?

Urban poetry is the combined voice of buildings, industry, and people. Traffic roars and the people move in tides across the city and back again, from sunrise to sunset and beyond.

How does a building speak? If it did, what would it say? What are the songs of machines, roads, and streetlights? What rough music does the daily grind of the workplace produce?

Urban poetry, the vox urbana, attempts to see into the spirit of the city. It evokes every passion of stone and the grittiness of tar, all ruthlessly exposed by the white glare of old lamps and the blue flash of MRT safety lights.

And most of all, it is the voice of faceless humanity, brought together by the forces of economic necessity and historical destiny to perform roles which nobody fully understands.

The vocabulary of urban poetry is therefore the language of city people, the sounds of traffic and machinery, dirt, steel, and windows. It creates lines like:

In restless dreams I walked alone
On narrow streets of cobbled stone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence…”

Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence

Fear Is The Key

One of the most interesting verses in the Bible, in the context of fear (and in particular, the fear of God), is Psalm 130:4. It says that God is feared because there is forgiveness with Him.

That's interesting because of what is implied. In almost all texts of that era, gods are feared because they are mighty, vengeful, violent and final in their judgement. There are parts of the Bible which say such things about the God of Israel as well. But this particular chapter stands out because of its novel description of fear. The chapter is all about redemption and hope in the promise of unfailing love. And therefore are You feared.

My father often says, if there's a therefore, ask yourself what it is there for.

It is there because the writer feels that some kind of logic (theologic?) makes fear consistent with the idea that God is forgiving and unfailing in His ability to love. At first glance, this seems rather unlikely to us. Most of us think of love and forgiveness as things which no normal person would fear. But I think I have an answer.

My answer to the riddle is this: people fear what they do not understand, people fear absolutes, people fear things greater than they are in any respect. Take something as mundane as a classical singer. A person who finds himself standing next to a world-class tenor would feel apprehensive about singing anything, even in a karaoke lounge. And it need not be such a large gap in proficiency, competency, acuity, capacity, or virtue. Even a small gap, perceived as large enough, causes apprehension. What more an infinitely large gap?

A God who can forgive anything should He so desire shows such a gap in one aspect. That one aspect alone is enough to inspire fear in a person who can apprehend the existence of such a gap. It is equivalent to an ant recognizing in a sudden enlightening moment how much bigger a rhino is, and how easy it is for that rhino to accidentally or deliberately crush any number of ants.

It was in such a moment that I realised how much a person who is not afraid of being vulnerable can paradoxically be a threat to another person. People who have no fear are feared by those who rely on fear; as Nimzovich said, "The threat of execution is more powerful than the execution of threat." And the odd thing is that if you love someone very much, or if you are loved very much, there will (since we are all human and imperfect) be some episodes of intense fear. Yes, perfect love casts out fear, but in all of common humanity there is no such thing to be found.

Fear is the key. It is not death that is the final frontier, but fear.

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There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T S Eliot, The Waste Land, 25-30

The Greater Trumps: (19) Death

Death rides, armoured in black steel, against the white fire of the rising sun. Somehow resplendent in his fuliginous robes, the gaunt figure on a pale horse strikes fear into every watching soul. In long and skilful hands, Death wields a scythe; he sometimes bears a flag unfurling to reveal a single silver rose. It is almost too obvious a symbol. Yet, near the hooves of his charger, a small child plays, fearless and unmoved by the grim sight above.

The image here is one of Transformation, from one state to another of almost-equal potential. Death is the facilitator here, a catalyst which shifts the nature of the landscape, from the familiar to the unknown, from one perspective to another; and of course, Death walks the thin line, the boundary or terminus between Life and what lies beyond it. Yet, Death is also Change, the progression from one state to another quite different - from night to day as the sun rises, from darkness to light, from childhood to maturity. Death is the harbinger of the new.

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It's odd how often one returns to T S Eliot. And yet, he was one of the great prophets of the Age of Decay - so perhaps we should not be surprised. In his Dans le Restaurant, and again in his magnum opus, The Waste Land, Eliot returns to the theme of Death as transformation.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passes the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

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Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,
Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,
Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d’étain:
Un courant de sous-mer l’emporta très loin,
Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure.
Figurez-vous donc, c’était un sort pénible,
Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille.

Death transforms us all; the death of self and the resultant transformation, while still in this flesh, may be one for the better.

Interlude 4: Self-Portraits

It is the curse of the man of books that when he tries to find words to express himself, he knows that many have expressed his sentiments with purer lines and better turns of phrase. Yet, there is a challenge in that which tempers the iridium-tipped quill and in the end makes it limn an image better.

But here is Browning first, from Andrea del Sarto, called the Faultless Painter:

I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame
Or their praise either. Somebody remarks
Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,
His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,
Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-gray
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
Our head would have o’erlooked the world!” No doubt.

It is very close to a sketch of myself, or at least the part that interfaces with my work. It has a self-mocking irony that comes with being confident. Such confidence is not the confidence of success, but the belief that failure diminishes the self by very little if at all - the glorious attempt or the truth of self are, either one, sufficient. And having made myself uneasy by the recollection, let us move on to Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

This is the other side of me, the part that interfaces with the world. It has no irony at all; it is genuine self-deprecation, not of false humility, but of consciousness of role. I am no Hamlet, no great Dane. But I make good filler, and I write reports and documents that augment the presence and capability of my superiors. Perhaps the greatest unease is evoked by Ted Hughes, though. Here is an excerpt from his tragic poem, Wolfwatching:

But all the time
The awful thing is happening: the iron inheritance,
The incredible rich will, torn up
In neurotic boredom and eaten,
Now indigestible. All that restlessness
And lifting of ears, and aiming, and re-aiming
Of nose, is like a trembling
Of nervous breakdown, afflicted by voices.
Is he hearing the deer? Is he listening
To gossip of non-existent forest? Pestered
By the hour-glass panic of lemmings
Dwindling out of reach? He's run a long way
Now to find nothing and be patient.
Patience is suffocating in all those folds
Of deep fur. The fairy tales
Grow stale all around him
And go back into pebbles.

Sometimes, this too is part of me. It is an itch I can't scratch. And so, as we stagger towards completion and the end of all things, I pray a lot that the journey will feel worthwhile - for while intellect accepts worth as abstraction, emotion demands value as instantiation.

The Greater Trumps: (18) The Hanged Man

There is a mighty cross in a still place. A man (a Fool?) dangles from it by one foot, with his other ankle tucked behind the suspended knee. On his face is a look of utter calm, total peace. Sometimes, his arms are folded, sometimes they dangle. His pockets are emptying themselves of coins and the other debris one normally finds in pockets. Some of the fallen pieces have begun to form words on the ground, but none of them are readable as yet.

The Hanged Man will depend from his cross for nine days. On the ninth day, he will find Wisdom, say the old myths. Some say he will be harvested, like John Barleycorn. Some say he will gain the knowledge of the future, like Odin on Yggdrasil. Whatever it is, the enlightenment of the Hanged Man is the reason for his odd position, suspended between heaven and earth. With his suspension, he loses his cares and his coins, and comes to be at rest.

This image symbolises Sacrifice - the surrender of all earthly attachments and perspectives. It also symbolises Insight, for the Hanged Man sees himself endlessly, at the centre of the universe for a brief instant before he falls into the sea of knowledge.

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The Hanged Man has always been at or near the centre of the Greater Trumps. I think of this image a lot - the 'surrender that leads to serenity' is what comes to my mind. Yet the Hanged Man isn't hanging there to escape, or to have fun. He is hanging there in order to gain knowledge from the loss of his material attachments. It's hard work.

Here's something from one of my favourite poems, T S Eliot's The Waste Land:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Why was the Hanged Man not found? The answer is clear - in a wasteland, there is no wisdom to be had, even with sacrifice.