5 October 2011

(“Half-hanged Mary” was Mary Webster, who was accused of witchcraft in the 1680s in a Puritan town in Massachusetts and hanged from a tree – where according to one of the several surviving accounts, she was left all night. It is known that when she was cut down she was still alive, since she lived for another fourteen years.”)

 —————————————————————————————————

7 p.m.

Rumour was loose in the air,
hunting for some neck to land on.
I was milking the cow,
the barn door open to the sunset.

I didn’t feel the aimed word hit
and go in like a soft bullet.
I didn’t feel the smashed flesh
closing over it like water
over a thrown stone.

I was hanged for living alone,
for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin.
tattered skirts, few buttons,
a weedy farm in my own name,
and a surefire cure for warts;

Oh yes, and breasts,
and a sweet pea hidden in my body.
Whenever there’s talk of demons
these come in handy.

8 p.m.

The rope was an improvisation.
With time they’d have thought of axes.

Up I go like a windfall in reverse,
a blackened apple stuck back onto the tree.

Trussed hands, rag in my mouth,
a flag raised to salute the moon,

old bone-faced goddess, old original,
who once took blood in return for food.

The men of the town stalk homeward,
excited by their show of hate,

their own evil turned inside out like a glove,
and me wearing it.

9 p.m.

The bonnets came to stare,
the dark skirts also,
the upturned faces between,
mouths closed so tight they’re lipless.
I can see down into their eyeholes
and nostrils. I can see their fear.

You were my friend, you too.
I cured your baby, Mrs.,
and flushed yours out of you,
Non-wife, to save your life.

Help me down? You don’t dare.
I might rub off on you,
like soot or gossip. Birds
of a feather burn together,
though as a rule ravens are singular.

In a gathering like this one
the safe place is the background,
pretending you can’t dance,
the safe stance pointing finger.

I understand. You can’t spare
anything, a hand, a piece of bread, a shawl
against the cold,
a good word. Lord
knows there isn’t much
to go around. You need it all.

10 p.m.

Well God, now that I’m up here
with maybe some time to kill
away from the daily
fingerwork, legwork, work
at the hen level,
we can continue our quarrel,
the one about free will.

Is it my choice that I’m dangling
like a turkey’s wattle from this
more than indifferent tree?
If Nature is Your alphabet,
what letter is this rope?

Does my twisting body spell out Grace?
I hurt, therefore I am.
Faith, Charity and Hope
are three dead angels
falling like meteors or
burning owls across
the profound black sky of Your face.

12 midnight

My throat is taut against the rope
choking of words air;
I’m reduced to knotted muscle.
Blood bulges in my skull,
my clenched teeth hold it in;
I bite down on despair.

Death sits on my shoulder like a crow
waiting for my squeezed beet
of a heart to burst
so he can eat my eyes

or like a judge
muttering about sluts and punishment
and licking his lips

or like a dark angel
insidious in his glossy feathers
whispering to me to be easy
on myself. To breathe out finally.
Trust me, he says, caressing
me. Why suffer?

A temptation, to sink down
into these definitions.
To become a martyr in reverse,
or food, or trash.

To give up my own words for myself,
my own refusals.
To give up knowing.
To give up pain.
To let go.

2 a.m.

Out of my mouth is coming, at some
distance from me, a thin gnawing sound
which you could confuse with prayer except that
praying in not constrained.

Or is it, Lord?
Maybe it’s more like being strangled
than I once thought. Maybe it’s
a gasp for air, prayer.
Did those men at Pentecost
want flames to shoot out of their heads?
Did they ask to be tossed
on the ground, gabbling like holy poultry,
eyeballs bulging?

As mine are, as mine are.
There is only one prayer; is it not
the knees in the cean nightgown
on the hooked rug,
I want this, I want that.
Oh far beyond.
Call it Please. Call it Mercy.
Call it Not yet, not yet,
as Heaven threatens to explode
inwards in fire and shredded flesh and the angels caw.

3 a.m.

wind seethes in the leaves around
me the trees exude night
birds night birds yell inside
my ears like stabbed hearts my heart
stutters in my fluttering cloth
body I dangle with strength
going out of me the wind seethes
in my body tattering
the words I clench
my fists hold No
talisman or silver disc my lungs
flail as if drowning I call
on you as witness I did
no crime I will not
acknowledge leaves and wind
hold on to me
I will not give in

6 a.m.

Sun comes up, huge and blaring,
no longer a simile for God.
Wrong address. I’ve been out there.

Time is relative, let me tell you
I have lived a millennium.

I would like to say my hair turned white
overnight, but it didn’t.
Instead it was my heart:
bleached out like meat in water.

Also, I’m about three inches taller.
This is what happens when you drift in space
listening to the gospel
of the red-hot stars.
Pinpoints of infinity riddle my brain,
a revelation of deafness.

At the end of my rope
I testify to silence.
Don’t say I’m not grateful.

Most will have only one death.
I will have two.

8 a.m.

When they come to harvest my corpse
(open your mouth,  close your eyes)
cut my body from the rope,
surprise, surprise:
I was still alive.

Tough luck, folks,
I know the law:
you can’t execute me twice
for the same thing. How nice.

I fell to the clover, breathed it in.
and bared my teeth at them
in a filthy grin.
You can imagine how that went over.

Now I only need to look
out at them through my sky-blue eyes.
They see their own ill will
staring them in the forehead
and turn tail.

Before, I was not a witch.
But now I am one.

Later

My body of skin waxes and wanes
around my true body,
a tender nimbus.
I skitter over paths and fields
mumbling to myself like crazy,
mouth full of juicy adjectives
and purple berries.
The townsfolk dive headfirst into the bushes
to get out of my way.

My first death orbits in my head,
an ambiguous nimbus,
medallion of my ordeal.
No one crosses that circle.

Having been hanged for something
I never said,
I can now say anything I can say.

Holiness gleams on my dirty fingers,
I eat flowers and dung,
two forms of the same thing, I eat mice
and give thanks, blasphemies
gleam and burst in my wake
like lovely bubbles.
I speak in tongues,
my audience is owls.

My audience is God
because who the hell else could understand me?
Who else has been dead twice?

The words boil out of me,
coil after coil of sinuous possibility.
The cosmos unravels from my mouth,
all fullness, all vacancy.

—————————————————————————————————

from Morning In The Burned House
by Margaret Atwood
McClelland & Stewart Inc. 1995
ISBN 0-7710-0830-9

18 September 2011  •  3 notes

“On that day, after we had left our viewing point on the promenade to stroll through the inner city, Austerlitz spoke at length about the marks of pain which, as he said when we were sitting in the Glove Market later that afternoon, tired from our wandering through the city, he could never quite shake off thoughts of the agony of leave-taking and the fear of foreign places, although such ideas were not part of the architectural history proper. Yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity. The construction of fortifications, for instance – and Antwerp was an outstanding example of the craft – clearly showed how we feel obliged to keep surrounding ourselves with defences, built in successive phases as a precaution against any incursion by enemy powers, until the idea of concentric rings making their way steadily outward comes up against its natural limits. If we study the development of fortifications from Floriani, da Capri and San Micheli, by way of Rusenstein, Burgsdorff, Coehoorn and Klengel, and so to Vauban and Montalembert, it is amazing, said Austerlitz, to see the persistence with which generations of masters of the art of military architecture, for all their undoubtedly outstanding gifts, clung to what we can easily see today was a fundamentally wrong-headed idea: the notion that by designing an ideal tracé with blunt bastions and ravelins projecting well beyond it, allowing the cannon of the fortress to cover the entire operational area outside the walls, you could make a city as secure as anything in the world can ever be. No one today, said Austerlitz, has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications, of the fantastic nature of the geometric, trigonomic and logistical calculations they record, of the inflated excesses of the professional vocabulary of fortifications and siegecraft, no one now understands its simplest terms, escarpe and courtine, faussebraie, réduit and glacis, yet even from our present standpoint we can see that towards the end of the seventeenth century the star-shaped dodecagon behind trenches

had finally crystallised, out of the various available systems, as the preferred ground-plan: a kind of ideal typical pattern derived from the Golden Section, which indeed, as study of the intricately sketched plans of such fortified complexes as those of Coevorden, Neuf-Briasch and Saarlouis will show, immediately strikes the layman as an emblem both of absolute power and of the ingenuity of the engineers put to the service of that power. In the practice of warfare however, the star-shaped fortresses which were being built and improved everywhere during the eighteenth century did not answer this purpose, for intent as everyone was on that pattern, it had been forgotten that the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy forces, and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive, so that you might find yourself in a place fortified in every possible way, watching helplessly as enemy troops, moving on to their own choice of terrain elsewhere, simply ignored their adversaries fortresses, which had become positive arsenals of weaponry, bristling with canon and overcrowded with men. The frequent result, said Austerlitz, of resorting to measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency towards paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it, not to mention the fact that the architectural plans for the fortifications became increasingly complex, the time it took to build them increased as well, and with the probability that as soon as they were finished, if not before, they would have been overtaken by further developments, both in artillery and in strategic planning, which took account of the growing realization that everything was decided in movement, not in a state of rest. And if the defensive power of a fortress really was put to the test, then as a rule, and after the squandering of enormous quantities of war material, the outcome remained more or less undecided. There could not be a clearer illustration of this anywhere, said Austerlitz, than here in Antwerp, where in 1832, as haggling over parts of Belgian territory went on even after the new kingdom had been founded, the citadel, built by Pacciolo and further fortified with a ring of outworks by the Duke of Wellington, was besieged for three weeks by a French army of fifty thousand men. In mid-December, from their base in the fort of Montebello which they had already taken, the French succeeded in storming the half-ruined outwork of the St Laurent lunette and advancing to a position immediately beneath the walls with their breaching batteries. The siege of Antwerp which was unsurpassed in the history of warfare, at least for some four years, both in terms of expenditure and vehemence, said Austerlitz, reached its memorable culmination when some seventy thousand thousand-pound shells were fired at the citadel from huge mortars invented by Colonel Pairhans, destroying everything without trace except for a couple of casemates. The old Dutch general Baron de Chassé, commander of the pile of rubble which was all that remained of the fortress, had already had the mines laid to blow himself up, along with that monument to his loyalty and heroic courage, when word from his king with permission to surrender reached him just in time. Although the whole insanity of fortification and siegecraft was clearly revealed in the taking of Antwerp, said Austerlitz, the only conclusion that anyone drew from it, incredibly, was that the defences surrounding the city must be rebuilt even more strongly than before, and moved further out. In 1859, accordingly, the old citadel and most of the outer forts were levelled and work began on the construction of a new enceinte ten miles long, with eight forts situated over half and hour’s march away from it, a project which proved inadequate after less than twenty years because of the longer range of guns and the increasingly destructive power of explosives, so that, in obedience to the same logic, construction now began on yet another ring of fifteen heavily fortified outworks six to nine miles away from the enceinte. During the thirty years or more it took to build this complex the question arose, as was only expected, said Austerlitz, of whether the expansion of Antwerp beyond the old city boundaries through its rapid industrial and commercial development did not mean that the line of forts ought to be moved out yet another three miles further out, which would actually make it over thirty miles long, bringing it within sight of the outskirts of Mechelen, with the result that the entire Belgian army would have been insufficient to garrison the fortifications. So, said Austelitz, they just went on working to complete the system already under construction, although they knew it was now far from being able to meet the actual requirements. The last link in the chain was the fortress of Breendonk, said Austerlitz, a fort completed just before the outbreak of the First World War in which, within a few months, it proved completely useless for the defence of the city and the country. Such complexes of fortifications, said Austerlitz, concluding his remarks that day in the Antwerp Glove Market as he rose from the table and slung his rucksack over his shoulder, show us how, unlike birds, for instance, who keep building the same nest over thousands of years, we tend to forge ahead with our projects far beyond any reasonable bounds.”

from Austerlitz
by W. G. Sebald
translated from German by Anthea Bell
Hamish Hamilton 2001
ISBN 0-241-14125-7

25 August 2011  •  10 notes

“but suddenly I’m not so easily led,
let the winds blow right over your head,
I’m in the mood for stories,
so let the the days grow old”

24 June 2011  •  3 notes

to talk about art so as to get closer to the soul of art; to stealthfully sneak up on art rather than have art leave like the nite; to make a cosy manure for, rather than cut off it’s roots and have it shrivel and die, we need a specific poetic langwige which flys but nether-the-less remains simple, grounded and true. for this new langwidge we need the dream world of the poets but our kyte must also remain earth bound, tied to a boulder, or a great rock that lies beside a butiful stream, or waterfall, or cliff bound coast. With this ‘poetic groundedness’ we can then dare to uncover the essence of art… all the while we must shun the cold critics eye, which will only statle and kill art… yes, the icy formality of the critic is of no use to us who dare to live art, a mind langwidge engaged in a dry dialouge with itself but not the soul of art. we are not to suck arts blud like a vampire, nor squeese the life essence out of art to make a serum: there is nothing to be gained by de-skying art, as if a hawk, then nailing its mortal guts to a board to see the mecanism by which it flys: to re-stuff the corpse and display it in a glass box for the angry joy of feeling command over the untaimed spirit! - no, we are outdoorsmen, observers of god and art in full flight! blured, out of focus, but alive and free! is it male or female? could it be an eagle or a mere sparrow? to not know is what pleases us, the mystry is not poison but life to us. and so to breath life even into a picture; to enjoy subtlties and confusions in abundence, in keeping with the creator; to enjoy life for its infinite possibilitys and glorious limitations; to spend a moment with ourselves in reverie, taking in the play of lite and shadow then move on along the cliftops, the viewer and the viewed intwined in one great vista of god. so we are inriched, amazed and careless of art and life. and then to come across a blade of grass with the same wonder, incredulity and carelessness and know that it is good and all gods werk.

and so a painting is a story we choose to ingage in, or dampen and limit with questions, thorts, concepts and harsh judgments. but like a river, a picture is never the same picture, it is always a fresh journey, and always another story is breaking thru to say hello and be embraced or refused and ignored. a willingness to see the painting rather than mearly look at the painting names us as co-creators. and as we judge and balance the line and flow, so we judge and balance the line and flow of ourselves and the world holds us. sometimes the painting drains us and bores us. and sometimes we are moved to quit staring into this strange mirror and turn away and make our own mark, for are we not equal to any other idiot?! so then we come to see the ‘whys’, the ‘what’s’ and ‘what’s not’ of mark making and become aware of the strange sense of knowing. and we know that what is interesting about painting is the doingness of painting, not the finished picture. and what is interesting about life is the living of life not the study of it.  and we grow familer with this doing of things and find there is no mystery, except mystery.

an old man is sat outside a cottege making marks that he knows well and that please him. adding colour to line, judging the weight of the line, this also pleasing him. he brushes away a fly.

he makes another mark: the familier and known pleasing him, effortlessness pleasing him, unfussyness pleasing him, and the eyes also of the passers by are pleased, or displeased, but most often pleased.

an old man is sat painting. he paints for company and the chance to return to a world quickly vanishing and he speaks that the world in paint to those who do not remember that world and which is so far out of site now that only the blind and the poets can still see it. and that world, which was true but was also a dream, lives in the paint in front of him. and in doing that god thing on the card before him with marks and makings, the old man gives back to the world that which has been lent to him and is also forever passing. are the pictures the old man makes, as if prayers, in recompence for a meal and a life? or is it simply that he despises hands and dreams that are idle? we look and see that mending nets or drawing ships under sail is better than not mending nets or not drawing nets and ship and sail. so to do is better than not to do and to make is better than not to make.

an old man sits and paints with skill unmuded of learning lacking of confusion and full of knowingness and familiarity, so his lines are sure.

an old man sits painting carefully, rending simplicity and complexity, revealing the story of himself: a measure of the serfisticated, the complex and the simple.

Alfred Wallace And The Poetic Langwidge Of Art
by Billy Childish 
2009 Tate Publishing
ISBN 978 1 85437 897 2 

10 May 2011

Such ideas infallibly come to me in places which have more of the past about them than the the present. For instance, if I am walking through a city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

from Austerlitz 
by W. G. Sebald
translated from German by Anthea Bell
Hamish Hamilton 2001
ISBN 0-241-14125-7

4 May 2011  •  1 note

At last you yielded up the album, which,
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich: 
I choke on such nutritious images.

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose -
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby hat

(faintly disturbing, that, in several ways) -
From every side you strike at my control,
Not least through these disquieting chaps who loll
At ease about your earlier days:
Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole.

But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes
Like washing lines, and Hall’s-Distemper boards,

But shows the cat as disinclined, and shades
A chin as doubled when it is, what grace
Your candour thus confers upon her face!
How overwhelmingly persudes
That this is a real girl in a real place,

In every sense empirically true!
Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being over; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we cry
Not only at the exclusion, but because
It leaves us free to cry. We know what was 
Won’t call on us to justify
Our grief, however hard we yowl across 

The gap from eye to page. So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
You, balanced on a bike against a fence;
To wonder if you’d spot the theft
Of this one of you bathing; to condense,

In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and cleaner as the years go by.

from Philip Larkin - The Less Decieved
Faber and Faber ISBN978-0-571-26012-6

first published 1955

4 April 2011

the past ain’t what it used to be.

15 March 2011

His friends bore him to the gate and, in a few minutes, his host, an amiable Etonian of my year, returned to apologize. He, too, was tipsy and his explanations were repetitive and, towards the end, tearful. “The wines were too various,” he said; “it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of the matter. To understand all is to forgive all.”

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

10 March 2011

"The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you."

— Oscar Wilde

22 February 2011