Month: November 2023

What are your two favorite things to wear?

Daily writing prompt
What are your two favorite things to wear?
View all responses

What are your two favorite things to wear?

What a strange question. I suppose it merits a strange answer. And the answer is – it depends. You see – I live in Atlantic Canada. Here we have several sayings. One from the Bay of Fundy is – “You don’t like this weather? Hang around five minutes. It will change.”

I had the snow blower prepped for winter a week or so ago. So, what are my two favorite things to wear when snow blowing? Only two? Hat, scarf, water-proof / wind-proof coat, thick gloves, scarf, warm socks, boots that keep out the water and the cold and that have soles that grip into the snow. You mean I have to choose two things from that lot? I just checked the calendar – it’s not April the First, you know.

In summer, when the Fundy Fog rolls in from the sea and wraps scarves of salty mist around the trees, and it becomes so cold, so damp, and so chilly so quickly – what are my two favorite things to wear? I guess you can double-check the list above and eliminate an item or two. But I wouldn’t chuck out too many.

And what about cross-country skiing? As the weather changes, and as you warm up, you need several layers of removable clothing that can be taken off, when you warm up, and placed back on when you hit the shade between the trees and you start to cool down. But only two items? What are you doing to me? And what about the wind-chill factor?

Once, when I walked the picket-line at -35C, we had all been pre-emptively locked out from my former place of employment, we were visited by Flying Pickets from the Northern Part of Canada. They had a saying: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.” You notice they didn’t say anything about two items of clothing. I wonder why not?

So there you have it. Be prepared, I say. It always depends. And remember: “Never mind the weather / As long as we’re together.” Perhaps those two items might just be you and me! But then, we’re not clothing, are we? Not unless we are just rag dolls.

The Seeker

The Seeker

Weaver of words, I wander my weary way
across a field of snow, careful as I go
not to slip and fall into the depths that wait below.

I know them of old, those man-trap mine-shafts
where darkness dwells, hand in hand with despair.
I know only too well the weight of coal dust,
fine and thin, polluting lungs with unfiltered air.

How long will I have the courage and strength
to survive so deep beneath the surface
and to explore those depths at greater length?

Who would now, willingly, plunge, or dig
and delve so deep into the mines underground?
Ony the searcher, the seeker who knows that
in dark pits wondrous gems can still be found.

Comment:
I don’t really know why, but my thoughts are now appearing (more or less) in rhyme and often in sonnets. Well, Milton Acorn’s Jack Pine Sonnets, straggly and wild, like the Jack Pines of Canada’s East Coast. Sometimes I think that this is a new format for me. And then I realize it’s where I started so long ago – a rhyming poet. “In my beginning is my end.” I have indeed returned to my roots. But now they are Jack Pine roots, well settled here in this wonderful Maritime Province of New Brunswick, amid Jack Pine, rock, and winter snow.

Doubts

Doubts

At midnight,
when that dark owl calls,
I sip a bitter wine.

The thoughts I think
are not my thoughts,
how could they ever
be mine?

And yet they are
the thoughts I think,
and round and round
they twine.

They wrap me in
a thousand threads
and none of them
are mine.

Whose are they then,
these thoughts I think?
They do not come from me.

And yet they make me
double think
this person that is me,
and who I am,
and what I am,
and where I’m going to be.

Comment:
I guess that’s what happens when you finish your bottled sunshine (sol embotellado) before going to bed. The painting and the poem match up nicely though, ribbons of dark thought streaming through an empty head. Guessing and double-guessing, thinking and double-thinking, doubting and finding yourself inside that great cloud of unknowing in which you rarely know where you are going. Still, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. Pen-y-Bont, anyone? Or Abertawe, Cas Newydd, Llandeilo, Caerfili, Rhiwbina, Treorci, Trebanog …

Old Wounds

Old Wounds


“The slow wound
deepens with the years
and brings no healing.”

The Minister. R. S. Thomas

How deep time’s wounds
have cut and carved,
not just in flesh and bone,
but in the embers
of that slow-burn fire
 they call the heart.

Memory and mind
have also played their part.

Some days, those wounds
don’t ache at all.

But there’s no real healing,
and a moment of madness,
a knife-edged finger nail,
careless, in the dark,
opens them up again
to bleed afresh
and remind us
of the frailty of the flesh.

Comment:
The opening quote, from the Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas, made me aware of so many sad things that have happened in my life. Usually they lie dormant, asleep like an ancient volcano. Occasionally they erupt, and memory’s hot lava breaks through to the surface and spills like blood. Hard as I may try to control those moments, they are, in essence, uncontrollable. The scars itch. I scratch them with sharp finger-nails, and the old wounds open and bleed again.

Magnolia

Magnolia

She stands there, at the garden gate, waiting for me.
I can see the scene, the flower beds, the magnolia
bleeding, in Wales, its soft, spring snow of ivory pearls.

Some fall on her head, crowning her with a beauty
more precious than frankincense or myrrh. Petals
also perch their pure, ermine cape on her shoulders.

She walks towards me, eyes shining, arms open.
Then, the vision fades and she drifts away, leaving me
alone, my face bathed in the tears of her passing.

For pass each other by, we did. Ships in the night,
trains rushing through a tunnel of darkness, bathed,
for an instant, in the constellation of a station’s light.

Now, when I try to go back and to recreate that scene,
I find an empty garden, fallen leaves, and winter’s cold.

Comment:
I have been struck recently by the number of published articles that speak of post-Covid loneliness and the difficulties of re-establishing old friendships that fell by the wayside, let alone establishing new ones. It seems to get harder and harder, as we age, to leave our post-Covid isolation, to get out of our new comfort zones – sometimes so limited and limiting – and to make new friends. As we age, our minds go backwards and we return to earlier days and happier memories. Yet all too often those memories are tinged with the sepia sadness of old photos, from a non-digital age, faded and stained.

Bay of Santander – 1963

Bay of Santander
1963

I stood there
on the sea wall
calling out to the dark
“Help!” “Save me!”

Moon hid her face
behind veiled clouds.
All hope denied
I called out to the tide,

outgoing, to take me
with it, out to sea,
past the island
and the lighthouse,

out to where the waves,
stronger than anything
I ever knew, would thrust
strong fingers under my arms

and lift me up,
then drag me down,
so I could finally rest
in peace, and drown.

Comment:
This painting is called Picking at Scars. Some scars run so deep that they are always there. When they itch, you scratch them, and they bleed afresh. The scar of loneliness is one such scar. Alone, in a foreign land, learning their language, the culture, their customs, feeling not just unaccepted, but unacceptable, and the moon at night shining on a land, a bay, a city, to which you know, deep in your heart, you will never belong. That loneliness walks with me still and, sixty years later, it still leaves me desolate.

Limbo

Limbo

I live with my head in the clouds.
What clouds you ask – Alto-Stratus,
Nimbus, Cumuli-Nimbus?

No, I reply, none of those.
At one level I build cloud castles,
in Spain, as they say in French.

But, at another level,
I find myself lost in the medieval
cloud of unknowing, this mental limbo.

Here, grey mists weave spider-webs
of doubt that glisten with dew, and sparkle
with the two-edged sword of thought.

Here, I feel my life-web tremble
and I realize that I alone can walk
this way and try to understand

how frail threads catch small flies,
how words tell stories, but not the story
of all I know, nor where my world will go.

Comment:
Once more I have linked verbal and visual images. Moo’s painting above – thank you, Moo, – called Limbo, depicts a limbo dancer while my poem expresses the reality of that internal space in which creative spirits sometimes find themselves. It is a sort of Limbo of the mind, in which thoughts appear, dance along the frail threads of the mind’s web, yet never really materialize into formal verse or poetic patterns. This is also the lost world of the dreamer. But remember, the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, because sometimes they make their dreams come true.

Joy of Words

Joy of Words

If the words won’t come, don’t worry.
Sooner or later, they will arrive, driving
down in flurries. Think wind-driven leaves
or the soft white whisper of snaking snow.

There is a moment when all sounds cease
and you can be at one with your inner self,
there, where summer sunshine twinkles
and soft rains bring forth clarity and joy.

What are words anyway, but soap bubbles
emerging from an iron ring to rise in
child-hood’s skies, soaring, dying, around
the cloudy thrones of sun-kissed clouds.

We, their so-called creators, are left below,
building cotton-wool castles spun from air.

Comment:

The painting, animales de fondo, comes from a book by Juan Ramon Jimenez in which he describes human beings as ‘animals living at the bottom of an ocean of air’. I have tried to capture the concept both verbally and visually.

Who is the most famous or infamous person you have ever met?

Daily writing prompt
Who is the most famous or infamous person you have ever met?
View all responses

Who is the most famous or infamous person you have ever met?

First, some definitions. What exactly does ‘met’ mean? I met you yesterday, for example. How long was the meeting? A nod and a passing of ships in the night? A stop and a handshake and a brief conversation? Or a genuine meeting of minds when people know each other reasonably well and can be considered ‘friends’? Infamous – that is relatively simple. Meanings, in my quick check, include – well known for some bad quality or deed, eg an infamous war criminal. Well, I have certainly never met any of those, not that I am aware of anyway. What does famous mean? Here’s one definition – famous implies little more than the fact of being, sometimes briefly, widely and popularly known. How wide is widely? How popular is popularly? Never mind. Let’s give it a go.

Brief encounters – I met several famous people briefly. Gento, from Santander, the Real Madrid soccer player and possibly the best winger of his time. John Charles, the Welsh soccer player, born in Swansea, and a good friend of my father. I met him once, briefly, in a Cardiff Street and my father presented me to him. Federico Bahamontes, the first Spanish cyclist to win the Tour de France. I met him, very briefly indeed, outside his bicycle shop in Toledo.

Longer encounters – these include the Spanish poet, Jose Hierro, who taught me Spanish, over three summers, in Santander at the UIMP. I also met Jose Manuel Blecua at that university and he introduced me to the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. At the University of Toronto I had the good fortune to take courses from Erich von Richthofen, Geoffrey Stagg, Keith Ellis, J. H. Parker, and Diego Marin, each of them famous in their own way, with excellent academic reputations and publications. At Bristol University, I briefly met Jorge Luis Borges, whom I met again at the U. of T. a couple of years later. Academia and literature formed a happy blend in which to meet people who were famous within their own fields.

The same is true of the sporting life. While enjoying Cross-country running at Bristol University and while running for Bristol Athletic Club, I met Martin Hyman, Basil Heatley, Eddie Strong, John Boulter, and several other athletes of international renown. The same thing with rugby. Names that I can drop include Don Rutherford, Full Back for England and the British Lions, with whom I took a coaching course at Bisham Abbey. Welsh rugby personalities that spring to mind include Ray Williams, Billy Hullin, ‘Buck Rogers’, and several other luminaries of whom Alun Priday, Dai Watkins, and Elwyn Williams spring to mind.

But does any of this matter? I remember going to a poetry reading in Avila, Spain. This is what happened after the reading.

After the Reading

Many names were dropped and lay scattered on the floor.
Some of them broke. Others bounced back to their feet
and walked around stiffly, smiling unhappily.

Sugar and saccharine, unnamable sweetness, honeydew melon,
all lay on the ground, with empty shells, hollow metaphors,
accumulated clichés, vague imagery, the blanched bones of poets
that once wore life’s armour of grammar and blood.

When the cleaner came, she summoned a broom
and it swept away the remains:
dust without love, cigarettes butts and smoke,
nothing and nothingness, emptiness, empty nests, shadows of dreams,
living words, dead, now lying in a common grave.

The meaning of meaning – meeting and knowing, famous and infamous, names pulled from a hat like a rabbit and then dropped to the ground where they prick up their ears and scamper away. Yes, I have (briefly) met several famous people. But I know only a few really well. Sometimes, I wonder if I ever really met them, or knew them, and then I ask myself, did any of them know me, or remember me at all? Maybe that should be the larger question!

Fake News!

Fake News!

A long time ago, wrapped in the stifling chrysalis of academia, a friend of mine tried to flutter her wings by making a joke at a very serious conference. She was delivering a paper on one of my favorite Spanish poets, in which she examined the sundry variants of a sonnet that the poet first wrote in 1603, then re-wrote in 1613, revised again in 1627-28, and revised a couple more times before its final revision in 1643, about two years before his death (1645).

At the end of her paper, she was caught off-balance when faced by an apparently serious question from the audience “Did the poet make any more revisions after 1645?” In an effort at humor, she replied, “Well, actually, no. But when they were carrying his body to the church for the funeral, he popped his head out of the coffin and proclaimed in a loud voice ‘Hell, no, I won’t go. I haven’t finished revising the poem yet.’”

This off-hand academic pseudo-joke was greeted with a babble of excited voices and an elderly fellow scholar clapped his hands, exclaimed “Wonderful!” and, in the ensuing silence, asked her what documentary evidence she had for this astonishing revelation, hitherto unknown to the academic world. If she was off-balance before, she was clearly reeling at this stage: a punch-drunk amateur academic swaying before the hypnotic fists of Dr. Muhamad Ali. She smiled sweetly, said she would produce the proper evidence at the appropriate time, and left the podium.

Later, sharing drinky-poos with the some fellow scholars, I listened to her as she made excuses for her strange sense of humor and I smiled as she explained the situation to them. They were not amused. “You, madam, are an acknowledged expert in your field,” one of them told her. “Your fellow academics trust you and believe you when you make such statements. You must be very careful about what you say.”

Fake news, indeed!

Now I must make an apology on my own behalf. Alas, if you read one of the blog items I posted recently, you might be puzzled by the Gazunda tree. I am forced to admit there is no such thing, to the best of my knowledge, as a Gazunda tree, not in the main square in Oaxaca, nor anywhere else in the world. Of course, when it rains people have been known to go under certain trees to use them as an umbrella and thus to take shelter from the rain, but this is the full extent of the origin of the name: the tourist or the golfer or the walker or whatever goes under (say it fast — Gazunda) the tree when it rains. There is nothing more to the Gazunda tree than that little joke.

And this brings us to a really serious series of questions: how do we know things are true? How do we establish the truth of a statement? Why do we believe some people and not others, some facts and not others? How do we choose between a series of alternate truths all of them presented as factual realities when, in actual fact, not all of them are true? This leads us on to the basic foundations on which our knowledge is built: how do we distinguish between scientifically established facts, and hearsay, and gossip if we are ignorant of basic scientific knowledge and principles?

To this we must add the triple increases that threaten us. These are (1) the increase in the availability of real scientific knowledge that bombards us every day with fresh facts and new information; (2) the increase in sources of information and the easy access to those sources; (3) the fact that many of these sources, far too many in my opinion, present us with a fictional or heavily biased version of a pseudo- or alternate truth. And yes, in light of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we are indeed entitled to question the existence and indeed the very meaning of these words: truth and alternate truths.

Such questioning is present in the writings of some of the early-modern philosophers. This is exemplified in the following passage that comes, I think, from René Descartes:

“There is no earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place and that nonetheless I perceive these things and they seem good to me. And this is the most harrowing possibility of all, that our world is commanded by a deity who deceives humanity and we cannot avoid being misled for there may be systematic deception and then all is lost. And even the most reliable information is dubious, for we may be faced with an evil genius who is deceiving us and then there can be no reassurance in the foundations of our knowledge.”

“There can be no reassurance in the foundations of our knowledge.” These are chilling words and present us with the unfortunate fact that unless we ourselves, each one of us, to the best of our abilities search out the absolute truth about all we hear, say, and do, we are indeed lost and we must wander in the dark with no light to guide us. ‘A sad life this, when beneath the axe, we have no time to check our facts.’