There are nights when the trees seem to whisper your name,
cautioning you against the wind’s knife edge.
“What have I done,” you ask, “to merit this?”
The soft fall of burnt brown leaves weeps over your woodland grave.
You will walk these woods no more, save on a frosty night
when deer shiver beneath naked trees and the moonbeam’s icy blade.
Comment:
Poems arrive, as silent as the deer that troop through my garden. Some times they hurry past, and catch them if you can. Sometimes, they stay, wait, nibble at an overhanging branch. Just when you think you can reach out and grasp them, they sense the bark of a dog, the sigh of the wind through leafless trees. You blink, and they have gone.
Was your camera ready? Was your note book open, your pen in your hand? Or did they flit away like dreams in the morning when the sun comes into the bedroom and sparks diamond fires from the lashes that guard your eyes?
Don Quixote begins his discourse on the Golden Age (DQI, XI/11) with these words: “Happy the age and happy the times on which the ancients bestowed the name of golden, not because gold, which in this iron age of ours is rated so highly, was attainable without labour in those fortunate times, but rather because the people of those days did not know those two words thine and mine. In that blessed age all things were held in common.”
Several things of note. First, the length of the sentences. Remember we are reading about a society in which the majority of people were still illiterate, knowing neither how to read nor to write. Earlier, in the same chapter, when Don Quixote describes his role as a knight errant, we read that “The goatherds did not understand this gibberish about squires and knights errant, but just watched in silence …”
Don Quixote goes on to describe the perfect pastoral life in the course of which nymphs and shepherds could go about their daily lives living in peace, love, and justice, and aways at one with the land. It is interesting to read about this idealistic and escapist pastoral myth that takes place in a land overflowing with milk and honey. Now compare it with the reality of the illiterate goatherds who slaughter and consume their own goats, devour dried, wrinkled acorns, and eat rock hard, age-old cheese.
Compare it too with the reality of the current age of iron, as described by Don Quixote who says “But now, in tis detestable age of ours, no maiden is safe even though she be hidden in the centre of another Cretan labyrinth; for even there, through some chink or through the air, by dint of its accursed persistence, the plague of love gets in and brings them to the ruin despite their seclusion.” Is Don Quixote’s description of this detestable age any more real than his description of the Golden Age? Whether it is or isn’t, Eon Quixote uses the contrast between the two worlds, past and present, for his own ends. I quote “Therefore, as times rolled on and wickedness increased, the order of knights errant was founded for their protection, to defend maidens, relieve widows, and succour the orphans and the needy.”
We should also mention the illusion of the Don Quixote’s literary pastoral in which “all was peace then, all amity, and all concord” and the reality of the harsh life led by these real goatherds.
Reality and illusion is a common theme as we move from the Renaissance towards the Baroque. For those of us who follow Spanish Art, we have only to look at Velásquez’s paintings to understand the difference between the ugliness of the court dwarves and the beauty of the royalty they entertain. In his painting The Topers, for example, Velásquez shows the reality of the country folk. In Vulcan’s Forge he presents us with the workmen who labour around the furnace contrasting them with the god Apollo who addresses them from within a golden light.
We will meet the pastoral myth on many occasions in Don Quixote I & II, for our adventurer meets with many suffering lovers who escape, or try to escape, their sufferings by fleeing to the countryside to live an idyllic life free from the stress of their supposed multiple love and relationship problems. The pastoral – escapist literary, it is, describing a perfect world that never existed. A suitable follow-up to Past Glories Restored #10 in this sequence of ours. Can such Edenic innocence ever be re-created in contemporary society, Don Quixote’s or our own? A leading question and one that readers must answer for themselves.
In Wales and in the Welsh language, we have a wonderful word to describe that longing for the Golden Age that is long past and unrecoverable. Hiraeth – a spiritual longing for a home that maybe never existed. Nostalgia for ancient places and times to which we can never return. It is the echo of the lost places of our soul’s past and our grief for them and their loss. It is in the wind, the rocks, the bays of the Gower coast, and the waves of the sea. It is nowhere and yet it is ubiquitous.
What is it about madmen like Don Quixote that they find it hard to live in the present and always want to see themselves restore past glories however impossible it is to do so? The search for the beauty and peacefulness of the past is always with us. Many seek the perfection of the Garden of Eden, but wise men know that Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden by an angel with a fiery sword, never to return.
Jorge Manrique (1440-1479) begins his Coplas por la Muerte de su padre with the statement that “a nuestro parescer, cualquier tiempo passado fué mejor.” / It seems to us that any past time was better. Why do poets and madmen always look back to the past, all too often with a view to recreating that which can never be recreated?
François Villon (1431 – 1463?) asks, in his famous refrain to La Ballade des Dames de Jadis – “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!” / Where are last year’s snows! Indeed, the theme of ubi sunt / where is – where are is a constant throughout literature. And where is last year’s snow? Can you tell me? It certainly isn’t in our aquifer. I didn’t even use the snowblower last year. Tell me, where did the snow go? I live in Canada, and we didn’t see it. So where did it go?
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) searched for those lost times in his novel À la recherche du temps perdu. This can be translated directly as In Search of Lost Time. It also occurs, more poetically as Remembrance of Things Past. Unfortunately, the word Remembrance rather cancels out the idea of Search, not to mention the twin ideas of recalling and re-establishing. However, in the case of the madman, Don Quixote, it can be argued that all those meanings are correct. But what exactly does Don Quixote want to restore?
Above all, Don Quixote wishes to restore the lost age of knight errantry. He is besotted by the fantasy tales of these knights errant and believes that he can be one himself and restore their glory with the force of his arm alone. In DQI, II/2, The knight addresses the ‘ladies of easy virtue’ at the inn in these terms: “I beg you, ladies, not to fly, nor to fear any outrage; for it ill fits or suits the order of chivalry which I profess to injure anyone, least of all maidens of such rank as your appearance proclaims you to be.’ His language, which was unintelligible to them, made them laugh more. So, knights errant protect women, especially damsels in trouble, and women of easy virtue. That is one of their most important tasks.
In DQI, IV/4, our knight meets the boy, Andrés, who is being whipped by his master, the farmer. Don Quixote stops the thrashing and makes the man promise to pay the boy the wages that are owed him. The farmer promises to do so, but when Don Quixote leaves, he ties Andrés to a tree and whips him so soundly ‘that he laves him for dead.’ Protect the innocent, then, is another task, one at which Don Quixote fails miserably, as we will see later.
In addition to restoring the high ideals of the ancient order of knights errant, Don Quixote also wishes to keep the words and deeds of the ancient romances / ballads alive, and this he does throughout the book. His constant quoting of passages and deeds from the books of chivalry, those that have driven him mad, serves to keep them alive. As we said earlier, you can burn the individual books, and destroy them, but you cannot destroy the ideas they contain. Don Quixote, in his constant and lively embodiment of those books serves to keep them, and their ideals and ideas, vibrant in the eyes and the minds of the readers.
Cervantes, perhaps a wiser man than many, restructures the theme by rejecting it – no hay pájaros en los nidos de antaño / there are no birds in last year’s nests. However, as we shall see, it doesn’t stop Don Quixote the madman, from searching for the glories of past times and from fighting for them in an effort to restore them.
And don’t forget Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), who perished in WWI – “Ni temps passés ni les amours reviennent / sous le Pont Mirabeau coule la Seine.” “Nor past times nor past loves return / beneath Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine.”
Comment:
We don’t need a comment really except that The Olde Order Changeth Lest One Good Custom Should Corrupt the World. Interpret that as you will. And as Moo says to Ryan in the presence of Don Roger – “Hey, Ryan, look at all those changes in my painting.”
A leaf lies down in a broken corner and fills me with a sudden silence.
I revise our scrimshaw history carving fresh tales on the ivory of new found bones.
6
A vixen hunts for my remains.
She digs deep at midnight unearthing the decaying teeth you buried with my borrowed head.
Comment:
None of this makes sense. Why should it? Don’t ask me to explain it to you. Who am I to tell you what to think and what to do? You are not in elementary school now. Teacher is not leaning over you, teaching you how to shape letters with a pen, telling you to color in red, or yellow, or orange.
Learning – tell me what have you learned? Have you learned to think for yourself? Have you learned that life is mysterious, joyful, sad? Do you not know it can also be incredibly dangerous? Fear not the thunder. Rejoice in the rain and snow. Open your eyes to the world around you and be joyous wherever you go.
Meditation
I am the gatherer of words, the weaver of wooly clouds.
I am the sheep dog who shepherds the flock in and out of the field.
I am the corgi who snaps at the heels of cows and pigs, too small to be noticed.
I am the butterfly turned into an eagle who soars into the sky and gazes on the sun with an open eye.
The light fails fast, I hold up shorn stumps of flowers for the night wind to heal.
The pale magnolia bleeds into summer: white petals melting on the lawn like snow.
Sparrow sings an afterlife built of spring branches.
4
Pressed between the pages of my dream: a lingering scent – the death of last year’s delphiniums – the tall tree toppled in the yard – a crab apple flower-
a shard of grass as brittle as a bitter tongue at winter’s beginning.
Comment:
“La poesía se explica sola, si no, no se explica.” Pedro Salinas. Poetry explains itself. If it doesn’t, it can’t be explained.
This quote suggests that the poem is a self-contained entity that must be accepted and understood on its own terms. This is particularly true when metaphor rules and feelings and meaning are contained within the poem’s enunciation. In addition, the musicality of words can never be ignored. The rhythm they bear within them speaks for itself.
Show don’t tell – easy advice, but what exactly does it mean? So many people say so many different things. A cliché is always the simplest form of criticism.
“I don’t understand your poem,” Moo tells me. “Neither do I,” I reply, “and I wrote it.”
“I don’t understand your painting,” I tell Moo. “Neither do I,” Moo replies. “And I painted it.”
Words of wisdom.
Breathe deep. Look and listen. Don’t think. Feel.
Hear the smell of color. Touch the emanating light. Taste the dry leaves crackling.
See the words shaping, carving themselves deep into your dream.
Jazz piano: beneath the black and white hammers of ivory keys, old wounds crack open.
A flight of feathered notes: this dead heart sacrificed on the lawn.
I wash fresh stains from my fingers with the garden hose.
2
The evening stretches out a shadow hand.
I feel my heart squeezed like an orange by long, dark fingers.
Somewhere, the whitethroat trills its guillotine of vertical notes.
I flap my hands in the air.
They float there, white butterflies, amputated in sunlight’s net.
Comment:
So, rogermoorepoet.com returns to poetry. Happy days are here again! And Moo is happy too. I need hardly tell you he has been so upset since I started using AI to generate my images for me. Oh dear. He has been very Moo-dy (sic) recently. “But you don’t have a drawing of a clematis,” I told him. “Neither do you,” he replied. “That’s a holly hock.” “At least it’s the right color.” “How about if I find you a purple painting?” He smiled a shy, half smile. “Sure,” I said. “I don’t want to lose the human touch completely.” “I should hope not.”
So he present ed me with this painting. “It’s called u-r-my-sunshine,” his smile lit up the room and we were both happy. Joy to the world – it’s +5C here today and the sun is shining. In my heart. And in Moo’s eyes. We are all glad that joy has not forsaken us!
A group of cloaked figures stands in a dimly lit stone courtyard as they burn ancient scrolls and books in a large central fire.
Image generated by AI
Ryan and Don Roger
5
Book Burnings
In 1492, the Spanish Jews were given the choice of conversion to Catholicism or of being expelled from Spain. Many chose to leave. Those who converted, and remained, were kept under constant supervision. In an effort to stamp out their faith, their books were condemned to the flames by the Spanish Inquisition. A similar burning of the books in Don Quixote’s library occurs in DQI, 6. Is book burning effective? Some people think so. Other people aren’t so sure.
The Spanish conquest of Mexico, led by Hernán Cortés, concluded on August 13, 1521, when Spanish forces and their native Tlaxcalan allies captured the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and emperor Cuauhtémoc, marking the end of the Aztec Empire and the beginning of Spanish colonial rule. The country was then called New Spain.
Mexico is famous for its codices. These are fan-fold picture histories, drawn on vellum covered with gesso, of tribal conquests, social norms, tables of the gods, in fact a whole cultural and historical record of pre-Hispanic Mexico. The Zouche-Nuttal codex, for example, sets out the conquests of Ocho Venado / Eight Deer, nicknamed Garra de Tigre/ Tiger Claw, a Mixtec warrior, who lived between 1063 and 1115. Five of the Mixtec codices survive. Many, many more were burned. The cover of the Vindobonensis shows the burn marks where some daring person pulled the codex from the flames and saved it. Without such saved codices, we would have much less knowledge of pre-Hispanic Mexico.
Why is this anecdote important? Because prior to the invention of printing, in 1474, manuscripts were written by hand. Yes, some were copied, but many copies were single and unique. Burn the manuscript, destroy the knowledge it contains. Post 1474, with the printing of multiple copies of books, the individual book might be destroyed, but some books would survive from the printing sequence. Apply this to Don Quixote’s library and we note several things. First, Don Quixote’s copies are destroyed. Second, other copies of his books survive elsewhere. In addition, although Don Quixote’s books are burned the ideas in those books survive in the knight’s head and he lives by their rules. Those ideas are spread throughout the history of his adventures to everybody with whom he comes in contact. Conclusion – you can destroy the books. You cannot destroy the ideas that those books contained.
Ray Bradbury, in Farhenheit 451, describes the burning of books in his dystopian novel. 451F incidentally is the temperature at which paper burns. The books are burnt in Bradbury’s world, but the book people survive. The book people are those who memorize their books and are able to quote them from memory and pass them on orally to other people.
And people protect their books. How? By placing them in small rooms within their houses and walling up those rooms so that the books could not be found. This happens in DQI, VI – 6. Don Quixote awakes, goes to find his library, but it has disappeared. The housekeeper swears that a sage enchanter descended on a dragon and the library vanished in a puff of smoke. Don Quixote believes the metatheatrical lie and acts as if it were the truth. He then bemoans the fact that he is pursued by malignant sorcerers. These evil enchanters will pursue him throughout the novel whenever he wakes up from his illusions and is faced by reality. Clearly, the sage enchanters have robbed him of his moment of glory (illusion) and reduced him to sorry (the truth).
Curiously enough, a 16th Century walled-up library was found in a house in Barcarrota, Spain not so long ago. The books were hidden, probably from the Inquisition, so that their owner could escape prosecution. The discovery sheds light on how individuals hid literature from the Inquisition during the 16th century in Spain. It also illustrates how closely Cervantes followed the reality of his times when writing the Quixote.
You can destroy books. But it is very difficult to destroy the ideas they contain. In this fashion, although the burning of that one book ends the life of that particular volume, it rarely ends the life of the ideas contained within its covers. We might not recognize the names of the characters that Don Quixote quotes from his memory of those histories, but many of the people who encounter the knight during his adventures know them and remember them. Amadis of Gaul is never dead, not when his name lives on. The same is true of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. King Arthur is said to fstill be alive and can be seen in the shape of a White Crow, bran gwen, in Welsh. And even Walt Disney knew, and profited from, the legend of the sword in the stone.
We will also see, as we continue our journey, that in the same way that tall oaks grow out of small acorns, large parts of later events found in the Quixote already have their seeds sown in these early chapters. Metatheatre, illusion and reality, authorship and censorship, truth and falsehood, waking events and dream sequences – and that is just the start.
You cannot hide when the black angel comes and knocks on your door.
“Wait a minute,” you say, “While I change my clothes and comb my hair.”
But he is there before you, in the clothes closet, pulling your arm. You move to the bathroom to brush your teeth.
Now,” says the angel.
Your eyes mist over. You know you are there, but you can no longer see your reflection in the mirror.
Comment:
The last poem in the series and Rage, Rageagainst the dying of the light is over and done. Many of you will recognize the title from Dylan Thomas’s poem Do not go gentle into that dark night. I guess the theme itself has become part of the Welsh culture. And now we have exported it to New Brunswick, Canada, and perhaps beyond.
I bought The Black Angel, pictured above, in Avila, Spain. It is a plaster cast of one of the Angels in Roger Van der Leyden’s paintings, if I remember correctly. Here is the angel’s face in close up.
She or he brings a promise of rest and peace, a freedom from earthbound woes and sorrows. She stands on the shelf above the fireplace insert in our sitting room and brings blessings to the house. I look at her every time I light the fire. And she smiles down and blesses me. I think of her as a lady, but her peace and beauty outweigh any formal signs of sex.
As for that reflection in the mirror, well, I don’t have one of me. But her is a photo to reflect upon:
Raining in Avila and puddles in the street. Now you see me, now you don’t. But I am there, holding the camera, and looking down at the water where —- rain has stopped play. The bails have been removed. Old Father Time has gone back to the Pavilion at Lord’s, and the cricket game is over for the day.
“What is this sound?” It is your own death sighing, groaning, growing while you wait for it to devour you.
“What is this feeling” It is the itch of your own skin wrinkling and shrinking, preparing to wrap you in the last clothes you’ll wear.
“What is this taste?” It is the taste of your life, bottled like summer wine once sweet tasting, now turning to vinegar.
“What is this smell?” It is waste and decay, the loss of all you knew and of all that knew you.
“That carriage outside?” It is the dark hearse come to carry you to your everlasting home.
Comment:
Moo thinks that his portrait of me is perfectly good for this poem. He told me not to rage, rage against the accuracy of the portrait, but he did tell me to rage, rage against the lack of paper. Où est le papier, indeed. As for the rest of it, he said it’s the same for everyone, so stop making a fuss about it. “You’ve got one last bottle of mescal on the shelf,” he told me. “I know. I’ve seen it. Just swig it down, worm and all, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”
Oh dear. The worm in the bottle. They used to sell the gusanos in Oaxaca’s mescal street at a price of five for ten pesos. I used to buy a two litre coke bottle, filled with mescal from a barrel, and drop ten worms in it. They made yellow streaks as they descended through the liquid. Sweet dreams when you chewed on that lot – and an end to your worries. El brujo, the witch doctor, told me to stick a marijuana plant in the bottle of mescal and when the leaves turned white to rub the liquid into my arthritic knees. “Which doctor was that?” one of the tourists in my apartment block asked me. But I didn’t tell her. Nor did I do it. A waste of good mescal. And to think I now have one last half bottle left. And one little squirmy, crunchy, chewy worm.
Speaking of chewy, crunchy – I had never eaten chapulines, fried grasshoppers, until I went to Oaxaca. I didn’t like the look of them. At the first party I attended was confronted by the host who demanded I eat some. I told him they were taboo, against my religion. He shrugged. When he, and the other guests lost interest in my presence, I tried a couple. They were delicious. A real delicacy. I loved their crunchy little legs.
I guess one is always afraid of the unknown – the gusano in the mescal, the chapulines on the plate, that first plate of calamares en su tinta – squid in its own ink. I love bara lawr – Welsh laver bread – or Welsh caviar, as Richard Burton used to call it. I also know that people who have never eaten bara lawr won’t go near it – it looks like cow pats – but luckily doesn’t taste like them. Don’t ask me how I know. Some people get over their fear of the unknown, others don’t. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
rogermoorepoet 