August is another song I know
that reminds me of the burning bridge
I’m on. It says there’s no way home
but the places I’ve yet to go.
It says I am alone in a way that shows
how good life is, like sunlight on a table
when hope is somewhere near.
From the translation by Bent Sørensen
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,
The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
Just heard Fay and Bea Ballard on Radio 4 announcing that their father's archive of notebooks, manuscripts, school reports and photographs is to be saved at the British Library in line with his wishes. Great news. There's a small selection of images at the BBC website showing the kind of thing that's going to be saved, including the page from the Crash manuscript above which holds so much jouissance for me it's hard to describe. I think it's just one of those ur-texts that you carry around with you, so formative and unreal somehow, that to see it in this rudimentary state creates a whole chain of impossible associations. There's always a slippage between the implied authorial figure and the actual figure himself, but this is heightened with Ballard somehow - perhaps it's just something as simple as him being sequestered away in the damp Surrey suburbs, raising a small family by himself whilst writing this exploratory, diseased fiction. A simple gap in understanding you would think, but such a gap - what was going on in there? Whatever the reason, to see a small piece of this hidden process made concrete is quite something. Amazing stuff.
I've been looking for a book like Electric Eden for a while now - one that covered the odd strain of mysticism and melancholy that runs through British history and culture, be it in Blake, Stevie Smith, Coil or Talk Talk. So to hear that just such a tome was imminent, and written by none other than Rob Young was quite something. It should be out this August but for the moment there's a great website with a whole bunch of links to follow - from Richard Jeffries to John Clare (both visionary writers and then some) and beyond...
From a magician’s midnight sleeve
the radio-singers
distribute all their love-songs
over the dew-wet lawns.
And like a fortune-teller’s
their marrow-piercing guesses are whatever you believe.
But on the Navy Yard aerial I find
better witnesses
for love on summer nights.
Five remote lights
keep their nests there; Phoenixes
burn quietly, where the dew cannot climb.
How convenient it would be sometimes to off consciousness and carry on with ordinary behaviour. Imagine flicking a switch on difficult days and flipping into oblivion, knowing that your body will continue going about its normal business. No one would notice. A pre-programmed wake up would return you to sentience in time for a film or the football. Controlled automatism might be preferable to periods of physical or emotional discomfort, or sheer boredom. If everyone had a consciousness switch then the world, most of the time, would be teeming with zombies. Perhaps it already is.
Paul Broks - Into The Silent Land
I'm undecided as to whether context thickens our experience of art, or detracts - whether the burden of history and biography drains something from the simple alchemy of recognition and reception. Does the background lend more weight, or does it overburden us? Charlotte Delbo was arrested in Paris in 1942, along with her husband George Dudach, for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. After a permitted farwell, Dudach was shot by firing squad. Delbo spent the war in various camps, including a long spell in Auschwitz. She survived the war and wrote about her experiences in Auschwitz and After, from which the poem below is taken.
I used to call him my young tree
he was as handsome as a pine
the first time I saw him
his skin was so soft
the first time I held him
and all the other times
so soft
that thinking of it today
is like not feeling one's mouth
I used to call him my young tree
smooth and straight
when I held him against me
I thought of the wind
of a birch or an ash
when he held me in his arms
I no longer thought of anything.
When the air is thick and the sky overcast, we need not walk so far. We give our attention to nearer objects, being less distracted from them. I take occasion to explore some near wood which my walks commonly overshoot.
What a difference it makes between two ravines in other respects exactly similar that in the one there is a stream which drains it, while the other is dry!
I see nowadays in various places the scattered feathers of robins, etc., where some hawk or beast of prey has torn them to pieces.
I step over the slip-noose which some woodling has just set. How long since men set snares for partridges and rabbits?
Ah, my friends, I know you better than you think, and love you better, too. The day after never, we will have an explanation.
Henry David Thoreau
Damn the snow.
Its senseless beauty
pours a hard light
through the hemlock.
Thelonious is dead. Winter
drifts in the hourglass;
notes pour from the brain cup.
Damn the alley cat
wailing a muted dirge
off Lenox Ave.
Thelonious is dead.
Tonight’s a lazy rhapsody of shadows
swaying to blue vertigo
& metaphysical funk.
Black trees in the wind.
Crepuscule with Nelly
plays inside the bowed head.
“Dig the Man Ray of piano!”
O Satisfaction,
hot fingers blur
on those white rib keys.
Coming on the Hudson.
Monk’s Dream.
The ghost of bebop
from 52nd Street,
footprints in the snow.
Damn February.
Let’s go to Minton’s
& play “modern malice”
till daybreak. Lord,
there’s Thelonious
wearing that old funky hat
pulled down over his eyes.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms)... Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misinformed, an infinite realm of non-truths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.
Milan Kundera, The Curtain