Survivors

The Banks of the Seine

Banks of the Seine

Gnawing at the carcass of an old song,
my mind, a mindless dog, chasing its tail,
turning in circles, snapping at the fragment
of its own flesh, flag-flourished before it,
tournons, tournons, tournons toujours,
as Apollinaire phrased it, on a day
when I went dogless, walking on a mind-leash
before the Parisian bouquinistes who sold,
along the banks of the Seine, such tempting
merchandise, and me, hands in pockets,
penniless, tempted beyond measure,
by words, set out on pages, wondrous,
pages that, hands free, I turned, and turned,
plucking words, here and there, like a sparrow,
or a pigeon, picks at the crumbs thrown away
by pitying tramps, kings, fallen from chariots,
as Eluard wrote, and me, a pauper among riches,
an Oliver Twist, rising from my trance, hands out,
pleading, “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

Comment:
This is a fusion / confusion, if you like, of The Kingston Trio’s song – The Seine – with a quote each from Guillaume Apollinaire – Alcools – and Paul Eluard – Il ne m’est Paris que d’Elsa, and Francisco de Quevedo’s – El Buscon – and a tip of the old chapeau nouveau to R. S. Thomas and Charles Dickens. Fools rush in, I am afraid, where angels fear to tread. Go on. Rush right in. Sort it all out. I double-dog dare you – and thank you for that one, Jude.

Dark

Dark

The lights went out suddenly,
leaving me in the dark.
A cloudy night, not a spark
of starlight to light my way.

My search for candles was slow.
I found them, struck matches,
and sat at the table watching
light catch and flames glow.

A war baby – bombs, blackout
curtains, diminished light, all
are present in my DNA, and yet,
I fear the dark above all.

Like a moth, or a high plane
caught in a searchlight,
I struggle to escape from twin
siren calls: fire and light.

I sat and waited for power
to return. An hour, two hours,
three, four. Then I couldn’t wait
any more. I climbed the steep,
wood hill that led to bed.

At the top of the stairs
a plea for light filled my head
and a plea for the return
of light formed the focus
for long-forgotten prayers.

Comment:
We lost power for 15 hours a couple of weeks ago. One moment we were sitting there, after supper, ruminating quietly, with the lights on. The next, we were sitting in the dark. We found a flashlight – light but no warmth. Then moved on to candles. Candles need matches. When the ingredients were ready, we struck the matches to light the candles. These were the first three we lit.

We are so lucky. Sure, it was an awkward night. But it was only fifteen hours. We talked about the homeless, their poverty, often in the middle of such wealth, the poor who have homes, but who cannot afford to light them or heat them, the innocent victims in war zones, powerless in every sense of the word, deprived of light, heat, water, plumbing, sanitation. Our prayers that night included them as well – all of them.

What are your two favorite things to wear?

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What are your two favorite things to wear?
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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.

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.

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

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

What was your favorite subject in school?

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What was your favorite subject in school?
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What was your favorite subject in school?

I never had one. I hated every school I attended with a passion. I hardly passed an examination during my school days and I remember, in Mathematics, dropping from Level I, to Level II, to Level III. I failed the first exam in Level III and earned this comment on my school report “Now I know why he descended to Level III.” I still have those school reports, incidentally, complete with the signatures of the Masters of my – limited, very limited – universe. How I appreciated Pink Floyd’s The Wall, when I first heard it. “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom, hey, teacher, leave those kids alone. You’re just another brick in the wall.” And yes, I built walls around me, many of them. But I survived.

Another comment from that report: “He has read widely and indiscriminately – I do hope it has done him some good.” That reading included the complete works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, lots of Andre Gide, the theatre of Jean Anouilh – some of which I saw live in Paris -, an immersion in the Existentialist philosophical movement, the complete plays of Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Beaumarchais, a variety of French Poets, including Apollinaire and Jacques Prevert, a selection of Spanish poets, novelists, and playwrights, and a series of modern-(ish) British poets, including John Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, and ‘indiscriminate others’! I wrote a great deal of poetry at that time, some of it in imitation of Francois Villon and Gilbert Chesterton (of whom I read many works as well).

Alas, my enthusiasm was not appreciated, especially as I scorned many of the texts that I was forced to read for my examinations. I should add I also scorned the limited, authoritarian interpretations of them that were forced upon us. The slavish imitation of ‘teacher’s remarks’ gained an A+. Any attempt to think outside the authoritarian boxes built oh so carefully for us, earned an F-.

But, if I had to choose one subject, it would be Myself. Protecting that self, developing that sense of self, growing into myself, understanding myself, and finally, having left those schools, those ideas, and that country far, far behind me, becoming the self that I am – and have always wanted to be. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “I just want to be me.” And I am, thank heavens. And it’s a good job too, for, as Oscar Wilde once said “Everyone else is taken.”

Candles

Candles

Candle-light

Three candles burn at my table.
Outside,
the night wind howls like a dog
and scratches its pelt on my roof.

The wind has torn
branches from the trees
and polished the evening frost
until it sparkles
like eighteenth century silver.

A moth circles and sizzles
in a sacrifice of flame.

I keep my vigil at night’s altar
and place a wrinkled palm
into the candle’s liquid flame.

Put out a candle, put out a child.
Who would put out a dog
on a night like this?

Outside,
playing tag between dark trees,
the wind runs wild.

What’s something you believe everyone should know.

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What’s something you believe everyone should know.
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What’s something you believe everyone should know.

I think everyone should know that the world, as we see it right now, is a very troubled and troubling place. Everyone should also know that there is no so-called “silver bullet”, no single answer that will solve everything with the wave of a magic wand.

These two points are tied in to a third – that the world is filled with smoke and smoke screens. Misinformation, disinformation, manipulation, lies, downright lies, and AI statistics now rule. There is no longer a clear pathway to follow and there is so much downright tribalism and hatred that there are few safe places, save in the middle of a person’s own little tribe that protects while allowing no challenges to whatever truths their authorities present as being true.

Voltaire once persuaded Candide to say that “everything is for the best in the best of all worlds.” Personally, I wish those words were true. It is equally false to say that “everything is for the worst in the worst of all worlds.”

As I type these words, the first snow of winter is falling outside my window. It covers my garden with a thin, white blanket, soft, and fluffy, and wet. All the flaws of my late fall lawn are covered up, tucked away, lie buried beneath that blank sheet on which neither animal, nor beast, nor bird has yet set foot.

I imagine it as a clean page, a fresh beginning, a new start, a moment when the world can change and a new future history can be written starting now. I do not smoke, so pipe dreams are something I have not experienced. Alas, I fear that such a dream is nothing but a pipe-dream, a castle in the clouds, a chateau in Spain, as some say.

“Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, over and over, and over again. Then the snow settles. The winners write their stories on blank pages. The losers all disappear into the mists of time. But those mists contain the ghosts, and the myths, and the fairy-tales, that turn themselves into truths reborn, and the same merciless battles begin again.

Then the snow of memory loss starts to fall and the world is presented with another blank page on which to write. Alas, instead of a new future history, the old stories, the old myths, the old falsehoods emerge once more from the miasma and the world again becomes a very troubled and troubling place, and so it goes on, secula seculorum, for ever and ever, amen.

How much would you pay to go to the moon?

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How much would you pay to go to the moon?
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How much would you pay to go to the moon?

Exactly the same amount that I would pay to visit the Titanic in a Titan – zilch, nada, rien, nothing. Too risky. Not worth it. Too much carbon emission to damage the world around me. It’s only a thin envelope of air up there – pointless damaging it further. We have problems enough anyway.

And how much would it cost to fund a rescue mission if something went wrong? How much did it cost to search for the Titan for five days? I haven’t forgotten Apollo XIII, even if other people have.

No way, my friends, no way. No common or garden human being in his or her right mind would ever get into something like that. I notice you say ‘to go to the moon’. Is it a two way, return ticket, then? Does the lucky traveler also get to come back? Or is it a one way only trip and a journey of no return?

Don’t bother answering those questions. I am quite happy viewing the moon through my bedroom window. I wouldn’t go, even if you offered me a free ticket. Thanks, but no thanks. Not on my watch! I am not moonstruck!

What major historical events do you remember?

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What major historical events do you remember?
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What major historical events do you remember?

Interesting question, but very problematic. How do I define a “historical event”? What exactly do I mean when I say “I remember”? Max Boyce had a lovely song in which the chorus was “I wuz there.” If everybody who says they saw Llanelli defeat New Zealand in 1973 at Stradey Park had been there, there would have been 300,000 people pressed into a ground that held about 15,000. But, as Max Boyce sings, “I wuz there”. Well, in spirit, anyway, and I have seen the film several times. I also remember watching Jim Laker’s 19 wickets in the 1956 cricket Ashes. I watched that match on B&W TV. Does that count as an historical event that I remember?

How about the Battle of Hastings, 1066? In 1966, I ran in a road relay that led from Bristol to Stamford Bridge, where Harold defeated Harald Hadrada, down the main highway to The Trip to Jerusalem, where we stopped for a pint, down to Hastings, where we re-enacted the battle that saw William the Conqueror take the throne. Several of the runners wore Saxon uniforms, a couple even had long, blonde hair. We re-enacted two battles. Does that mean I remember that historical event?

Let us talk about Stonehenge. I first went there when there were no railings, no fences, and when sheep and cows could safely graze. I remember it well. And I remember creatively re-constructing, with my grandfather, the digging of the post-holes, the raising of the stones, the transportation of them, by ship and log rollers, from the Prescelli Mountains in Wales to their current resting place. As Max Boyce says, in my own mind, I was there. I was there too at the destruction of Maiden Castle. The first book I ever bought, age about six, was Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s autobiography, Still Digging. I can still feel that Roman ballista arrow going through the victim’s backbone. Does that count as a memory, as a presence, as a moment of reality?

The Conquest of Granada, the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the later expulsion of the Moors, the Adventures of Don Quixote, the mixing of truth and reality, the questioning of authority, the inquiry into the meaning of meaning, my mother’s sister phoning me after 9-11. “What’s all the fuss about, Roger? There were only three planes. We had them every night, over here, during the London Blitz, for two long years.” What impresses itself upon the human consciousness. How do we remember things and why? The Spanish Armada -there were actually three of them -, the Peninsular wars in Spain, the battles of Trafalgar, Vimeiro, Salamanca… Then we can move on to Vimy Ridge, Ypres – Wipers, as my grandfather called it, his days in the trenches, recounted to me, in the kitchen, day after day, in vivid, lived language that still remains with me. And he would sing – “If you want the whole battalion, I know where they are, they’re hanging on the old barbed wire.” Yes, I was there with my grandfather. I remember it well. The Battle of the Atlantic, the Hunt for the Bismarck, the Battle of Britain – I sat in the cockpit of a Spitfire, a long time ago, during the Battle of Britain celebrations, and I climbed into and walked around the interior of a Lancaster.

Memory and the reconstruction of historic events, some we actually lived, and some we just dreamed of, and some we saw at the movies. What is memory – an actual happening or a creative reconstruct? What is the meaning of meaning? And read Bertrand Russell’s book on the subject before you answer that one. As for me, I was there, standing beside Max Boyce, witnessing the game, though, as he says, “a hundred thousand in the ground, and me and Roj outside.”