Being Nowhere and Somewhere

So Assad continues to murder his own people, the man under Donald Trump’s toupee asserts that Obama is hiding the fact that he was not born in America and a man swims out into the Thames to disrupt the Oxford versus Cambridge boat race. This seems the default position of the planet, mad and mad and mad. But all of these acts have an agenda , hidden or otherwise, showing that madness is a term only used by those who do not grasp the benefits such acts can accrue. Assad gains ground before a potentially damaging ceasefire, Trump gets publicity for his TV show and plays to the Republican paranoia, and the swimmer gets a lot of air time for himself and a cause.

I often think the world is going to hell in a hand-cart and that we, as a species, are doomed to expunge ourselves in some gradual or spectacular way and leave the planet to keep turning and mend itself in any way it can. Yet such a feeling is of course defeatist and ignores all the good things our species can do and there are some good things you just have to look hard enough. Individuals can be kind, thoughtful, willing to help, some even sacrifice their own well being for the well-being of others. We may produce Mozart, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, the small pox vaccine etc but the small things may be the most important. I saw a man yesterday run after someone who had dropped a ten pound note, a young girl pushing what looked like an elderly relative in her wheelchair and laughing with her about something, the man in the corner shop letting a young man use his mobile because his had run out of money and he needed to phone someone to say he would be late.

Ok tiny things, small unimportant events, in great danger of becoming that twee ‘pay it forward’ scenario but on the whole I keep the faith that most people would rather do good than harm on a personal level and that all that needs to happen is that this feeling get translated to the bigger picture. Why am I pontificating about all this, because I have joined the Nowhereisland Community and I am thinking about how a new nation should be formed, what values it should hold as worthwhile. This is especially important when children get to think about those things in a way that grabs their attention and this project seems to be doing just that.

At present the American writer and poet Ben Morris is this week’s resident thinker and proposes that the constitution of Nowhwereisland should include a demand that islanders should have multiple careers, a state he describes as being Occupational Polyglots.

I qualify as being an occupational polyglot, even more so, if we factor in being a mother and a carer of elderly relatives. If the view from where you stand involves several points in the landscape it does make for a more rounded perception of where we are. I think one point I would make however is that perhaps occupation does not have to involve monetary exchange. I know many poets who would say they are poets but make no money from it and in fact the flow of money may well go the other way. I make my living by doing something can sometimes be equated with I live by making something such as poems, books, images, a community organisation of some kind.

Is someone in receipt of disability benefits for instance precluded from seeing themselves as having an occupation as a poet, writer, artist, web designer, carer? Their occupation is not being disabled but that defines how they are paid and often relegates anything else they do to a ‘hobby’ as the potential for some occupation being paid for will effect their benefit.

How we occupy ourselves surely is an occupation but I understand in pure economic terms it cannot be classed as such but with a new nation perhaps volunteering, producing beautiful art which makes you no income, should still be an occupation. When that space on the form says occupation, I am always tempted to write simply ‘YES' as I am more than occupied. I have a paid occupation but much else of what I do is just as important and feels like a career and not a hobby. Are only those whose income is solely from writing, art, etc, able to say this is their occupation? Most poets I know actually make their living from teaching creative writing, editing etc and not from the poetry itself but they would still say they are poets on a visa request form. I never actually write poet or writer as my occupation, am I doing myself down by just writing what constitutes the source of my income. I could of course put textual and conceptual imagineer and see what happens.

Anatomy of an Obsession

This post is I suppose about the anatomy of an obsession, how it mutters in the brain until something is written and then the noise manages to subside to the sound of heavy breathing somewhere at the back of the mind. For over twelve years I have been slightly obsessed with the artist Goya and in particular his Black Paintings and now I am busy thinking about Goya again as my sequence about his Black Paintings is going to be published by Gatehouse Press in the summer accompanied by drawings by the artist Tom De Freston.
Goya was a man who lived in two minds, official court painter and a creator of drawings and etchings that showed the dark side of war, the Inquisition, the corrupting nature of power. He feared poverty; keeping careful track of monies owed him, writing letters to remind the royal court of his pension payments whilst spending his final years in France for fear of retribution by the king and government. In his seventies after the death of his wife he lived with his mistress Leocadia Weiss, forty years younger than himself and a known supporter of the liberal cause, who had a child Rosaria who was probably his illegitimate daughter.

His series of etchings the Disasters of War are graphic portrayals that warfare was a bloody, terrible thing and that the aftermath of famine and hunger were equally terrible. He did not turn his face away from these realities and in so doing he is seen by many as the first true war artist. His support of the liberal cause in Spain and his lampooning of the church made him a candidate for reprisals by both state and church yet he painted Ferdinand VII on his return to power after he had suppressed the brief flowering of the liberal constitution in Spain. This was the same king who beefed up the powers of the Inquisition which was a secret police that anyone could denounce people to, especially those who might be at odds with the state and church.

Goya was called before the Inquisition and a report of his behaviour during the Napoleonic occupation and his known sympathies with liberals was drawn up. He stood before a secret tribunal of the Inquisition charged with gross corruption and indecency for painting the Naked Maja. This nude was not ‘disguised’ as some goddess or myth, she was painted as a real woman gazing, unashamed, into the face of the observer and the artist. No one knows what was said at that secret hearing. Goya, who had completely lost his hearing in his forties, would have stood in silence and have been unable to hear the charges made against him. Their questions would have been written down so he could read them.

However Goya knew how to look, how to really look, at faces, his work bares testimony to that. What he saw in their faces must have frightened him enough to make him decide that staying in Madrid was not a viable option. Soon afterwards Goya bought a small house and estate out of town and retired there with his mistress and his child. The tribunal and the power of both the King and the church were not to be toyed with. As an old man he knew he was no match for the King who set about a series of bloody reprisals against all those liberals that had opposed his return to power. Typhus was also ravaging the city and life in the country would have seemed the best way for him to continue his work .

In his house, aptly named by a previous resident, Quinta del Sordo,(House of the Deaf Man), Goya fell ill , probably with the typhus, and nearly died. He painted a portrait of himself and the doctor who managed to get him through this illness by way of thanks. So, old, deaf, weakened by illness, still in fear of the authorities and still tormented by the ravages that bloody war and civil turmoil had wrought upon Spain,Goya set about painting the walls of his house.

Fourteen paintings for himself, fourteen images that seemed to come from something he could not come to terms with or ignore. These paintings were painted on a thin layer of plaster on top of adobe brick. Not the best of preparation for posterity and Goya would have known that. These paintings were not commissioned, not for sale, not created for any other purpose than to be the outpourings of something that gnawed in his brain like a rat. X Rays have revealed that he may have painted them over the top of lovely landscapes of the countryside and joyful scenes of peasants dancing.

They only survive now because of extraordinary coincidence and the skill of the conservator who managed to lift them from the walls in the late 19th Century and put them onto canvas so they could be transferred to The Prado, where they remain. These paintings allow us to become a peeping Tom staring directly into the head of the artist, who some regard as the bridge between Romanticism and modern art,the last of the Great Masters.

Who knows, Goya may be appalled that these paintings still exist, that they are publicly displayed, as this was never his intention. Those that visited his villa and dined with him may have found it uncomfortable to have the image of Saturn devouring the body of his child staring down at them, or Judith swinging the head of Holifernes. Goya may have liked the idea of discomforting his visitors. There were devil goats, witches, monstrous old men and women, men up to their knees in mud hitting each other with cudgels, a scarlet woman on a flying carpet with a terrified man flying toward a citadel on a cliff above the guns of men below, strange religious processions in which the people had surreal distorted faces, a small dog struggling to swim uphill, only his head showing above the ditch dirty water. These images are not exactly the work anyone would choose to decorate their walls with, they are dark, disturbing, nightmarish and some display a dark kind of humour..

These images and Goya’s later life have fascinated me for well over twelve years and now I am getting to a point when I can somehow express that strange obsession and share it with others. Working with a painter seems so appropriate and right, Tom's response to the paintings, Goya, and the poems, make this project a meaningful exercise in examining how art and poetry individually can work together to make a different whole.

Perhaps it is in the nature of slight obsession that modern parallels between these paintings and Goya’s later life seem to keep appearing, only a while back there was a cartoon in the Bristish Press using the Black painting of Saturn Devouring his Children as a template but it was entitled Assad Devouring his Children. The constant back and forth of armies across Spain, the years of to and fro between so called liberators, liberal more democratic causes and a repressive entrenched regime intent on using religion as a means of control doesn’t seem too far away from the Middle East and Afghanistan now.

The Peninsular War and its aftermath killed thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilians, caused famine and disease and throughout it all Goya kept painting, who ever was in power at the time could whistle and he would come and paint for them and yet he painted the Duke of Wellington complete with all his medals and regalia whilst also drawing a lampoon of him as a strutting peacock. He may not have been a nice man or even a kind man but he was complicated and I think a genius so that may cut him a bit of slack.

As a political exile in France in his eighties he would wander the streets of Bordeaux sketching ordinary people, drawing freaks in local carnivals. Totally deaf and wearing three pairs of spectacles, one upon the other, as his sight was so poor he was still driven to capture images.One of his last drawings was of an old man on a swing which was maybe lampooning the French portrait style of Watteau and others who favoured placing women on a swing to paint them. However sometimes I wonder whether this is another little portrait of the old Goya who swung back and forth between life and death, between rich paymasters and a liberal cause, shadow and light. During his life Goya said three things which reasonate with me.

'First be a magnificent artist and then you can do whatever, but the art must be first.'

'Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.'

'Always lines, never forms! But where do they find these lines in Nature! For my part I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.'



Consumed
After the Black Painting ‘Saturn Devouring his Son’ by Goya

In the dining room I have finished the grasping hands,
the air is thick with the smell and even my deaf ears
can detect the high notes of putrefaction that coat the wall.
The eyes bother me, the necessity for a shade of white,
too desperate for my palette makes the mixing of paint
another exercise in the toxic arts. The lead has stoppered
the jug of my brain enough to make the chemistry risky.
I have studied the priest in the inn eating a leg of lamb
to get the right degree of lean into the meat of the body.
The half erect penis may cause guests a little trouble.

All this power must be underlined by a sexual thrill,
besides this hard-on is only for private consumption.
Flesh that springs from our own loins is sweetest,
tender with all the hopes we baste them with.
What does he taste, this father; ripeness of muscle,
juices of a heart yet to feel the treacherous moment?
Is it salted with tears, the most ancient preservation?
Death is easily spat out but you need a strong stomach
when it comes to swallowing the whole corpus of love.
If I stop for lunch, the paint will congeal like blood.

My status is Facebook and the Spiritual Poem

A Facebook Status

Why oh why oh why, is it so difficult to find tights that fit comfortably? I am neither excessively fat nor tall. Who do they make tights for anyway?

My response

Ladies step away from the counter and let an expert on finding tights that fit get through. The motto one size fits all was scribed by a skinny person of restricted growth. If you purchase Xl or XXL tights the length versus width dilemma prevails. They may come up to your chin but they are also so wide they would give Norah Batty a run for her money. Alternatively they are not too saggy but the crutch comes up to your knees. Tights were developed to meet the needs of the sixties, a mini skirt or hot pants with stockings was not seen as cool then (although now I am sure you could get away with it and do as a fashion statement providing you are under 25 or Lady Gaga).

Stockings had their own small agonies a suspender belt can leave huge welts around the hips that Torquemada would find satisfying on a heretic and if the suspenders are not long enough or the stockings too short you have every chance of having to walk like Quasimodo. I became used to stretching up to get something off a shelf in a shop accompanied by the painful ping as a suspender gave way under the strain and hit your thigh with all the recoil of an industrial strength catapult.

Bearing in mind the above I now usually go for jeans or trousers with socks or the comfy top pop sock so beloved of the vascularly challenged and at my age I thankfully no longer require the added contraceptive nature of tights especially in confined spaces such as cars and linen cupboards.

Then of course you do find the perfect fitting tights and discover they are made in factories in third world country manned by small under nourished children or they disappear from the shelves because the manufacturer has gone out of business because there is only a small pool of long legged women and possibly transvestites that love his product. And don’t get me started on leggings and the hybrid bastard jeggings.


What has this got to do with life as a poet and writer you ask dear reader and the answer is everything has something to do with your life as a writer and poet.

I have been thinking a lot about Facebook lately and why we use it; in view of its upcoming floatation on the market there has been much said elsewhere. It may be the spawn of the devil, it may waste the users time when they should be out talking to real people, but it also lets ideas be exchanged, projects floated, information can be sought and gained. It can support the Arab Spring, it can bully teenage girls, it can allow people spread across the world to see a new born baby held by its mother, it can tag someone in a photo of a drunken office party in a pose they deeply regret. We give advertisers their data, their demographs, their potential targeted markets, in return they give us a method of communication and a global forum. It is not compulsory, we choose to use it. We may have to be canny about privacy settings and access but it can allow others a tiny window into a life. Hang onto that thought of a window for later.

I have also been putting together a reading of spiritual poems by women poets over the centuries. Spiritual I have taken in a very wide context but I have been struck by how women write about things we may term as spiritual but how few are often represented in some anthologies. I have managed to find two or three anthologies of Spiritual poems by women that have been intriguing reading in their variety and approach. Spirit comes from the Latin root suspire to breathe, and the breath is the backdrop of all poetry, the silences as much as the words; the full stop, the comma, the dash, the moment of the line break , the white space around the stanza , all this is how the poem breathes. So given that perhaps most poems are spiritual but to that perhaps should be added the dimension of depth, how a poet struggles with their existence, or the why of it all. It is a bit of a cliché that all poetry is ultimately about sex and death, you could add that even sex and death as themes lay upon the foundation of why. Why do we strive for sex and love? What is love and death? What is our place or purpose on this small spinning rock? These questions are the life blood of poems that could be termed spiritual dealt with at a macro or micro level.

So now to draw together the threads of the spiritual and Facebook I am posting a poem by Adrienne Rich the wonderful American poet. Her poem might not be seen by some as spiritual but in my book it breathes it. Read it and then apply it to Facebook , some interesting connections are made, remember I told you to hang onto windows.These lines alone especially resonate with me re Facebook.

‘We see each other daily and in segments’

‘Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation--
If not our own, then someone's, anyway.’


The second stanza alone makes me approach Facebook in a new light.

It is, for me, a beautiful poem that demands we look at our own lives, how we take people for granted. That saying good-bye to those we shall see tomorrow places those around us in a different light, enough to make us step back and value them. All around the world at the very moment you are reading this someone, somewhere is saying good-bye to someone they will not see tomorrow but think that they will because they believe life is ordinary like that. Death and leaving are also very ordinary. That thought alone is worth a small breath, a little space to breathe.


Stepping Backward

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire.

You asked me once, and I could give no answer,
How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,
Official treacheries of face and name,
Have out our true identity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still.
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They're luckiest who know they're not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth. And even art
Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville
Or calmed a Mahler's frenzy; you and I
Still look from separate windows every morning
Upon the same white daylight in the square.

And when we come into each other's rooms
Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious,
We hover awkwardly about the threshold
And usually regret the visit later.
Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers--
And once in a while two with the grace of lovers--
Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion
And let each other freely come and go.
Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards
The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,
The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.
The door may open, but the room is altered;
Not the same room we look from night and day.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.

Let us return to imperfection's school.
No longer wandering after Plato's ghost,
Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,
We must at last renounce that ultimate blue
And take a walk in other kinds of weather.
The sourest apple makes its wry announcement
That imperfection has a certain tang.
Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation--
If not our own, then someone's, anyway.

So I come back to saying this good-by,
A sort of ceremony of my own,
This stepping backward for another glance.
Perhaps you'll say we need no ceremony,
Because we know each other, crack and flaw,
Like two irregular stones that fit together.
Yet still good-by, because we live by inches
And only sometimes see the full dimension.
Your stature's one I want to memorize--
Your whole level of being, to impose
On any other comers, man or woman.
I'd ask them that they carry what they are
With your particular bearing, as you wear
The flaws that make you both yourself and human.


Adrienne Rich

Gazing at Stars, Schrodinger's Cat and Nanomagnetics

So where did January almost go to, same place as Christmas and New Year I expect, same place as that other sock, the biro kept by the phone for messages,that fuse you could have sworn was in the corner of the kitchen drawer for that moment when the kettle plug pops, the same place as that New Year promise 2011 that you can’t even remember now but which at the time you really believed you would keep, the same place as the full stop in this sentence , but then oh no here it comes, glory be there is something finite in this fleeting, constantly moving, fey yet at the same time precise universe.

Perhaps you can see that I am just recovery from Stargazing Live on the TV. I love the way they tacked Live on the end to ensure everyone knows that Professor Brian Cox, the rock and roll, cool astro-physicist will be speaking without the intervention of an editor and some things may be less than exciting if it gets cloudy. I was rather disappointed for the Exmoor Village that consented to put all their lights out so the stars could be seen more clearly in all their glory and alas it rained and the cloud cover was so low even small children were ducking to avoid cumuli concussion.

I like science programmes, I like trying to get my head around concepts that are so huge I need someone to reduce them to the size of an orange orbiting a grape or should that be vice versa? In Cambridge next week I have been invited to an event at Cavendish Laboratory ( home of the split atom) which promises to tick all my boxes for bite sized pieces of fruity knowledge.

It is a competition akin I feel to a slam poetry event but here those involved in physics research of all kinds have three minutes to explain their research in a cogent and hopefully entertaining way and be voted on by a panel of judges, I presume mainly on delivery and content but also maybe on the wow factor.

Having seen some of the research topics I am looking forward to seeing if I understand anything. Some of the research projects up for 3 minute explanation are I gather

Measuring the Evolution of the Universe,
High force magnetic levitation using superconducting bulks,
Making solar cells better with Buddhist singing bowls,
Simulating planet formation,
Extreme Engineering: Nanopillar Lasers
CP violation in D(s)->KS0h decays,
Electrodeposition of Copper Nanowire Interconnects,
Controlling and Understanding DNA Transport with Optical Tweezers
Bacteria and the immune system in the human gut
Plastic Electronics
Multi-target ADSR: an innovative concept for a safer nuclear energy production Nanomagnetics
Mobile Human Monitoring
The Beauty of Bottoms


Personally I think the Beauty of Bottoms may just be a catchy title to hide something quite technical involving probes of some kind and the Solar cells and Buddhist singing bowls may be a bum steer as to what the actual research is. However I will be there trying to grasp with my little grey cells the magnitude of man’s capacity for exploring what is already out there and what could be out there. I am waiting to see if someone can come up with an app that gives you the dummy's guide to the explanation of everything. Some would say that already exists and is called an encyclopaedia or wikipedia or the internet in general.

One day we may all be chipped with a small interface with the internet and global wi-fi cover and speeds with be increased to the point where we can be walking around knowing everything almost instantly and then the intelligent will be all of us but the really intelligent will be those with the capacity to use that knowledge well and what well means will still be in the realms of social philosophy and politics …..but wait a minute we are probably there now , only a tiny step from the iphone3 to a chip in the head..

And finally in anticipation of this up coming evening here is a poem by Peter Howard, physicist and poet, a sestina no less, about , Schrodinger's cat, his hypothetical cat in the hypothetical box.

Some Flash Poetry pieces also by Peter can be found here, as we are in the area of technology , science and poetry. I particularly recommend Smoke. You have to have flash on your computer and be prepared to click on the poems and make things happen.