Christmas

A better Christmas than I could have dared to imagine, or hoped to have had.

For the will of God will never lead you where the grace of God cannot keep you.

Duino Elegies

The First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
__________________

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for—that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes—the springtimes needed you.
Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved?
(Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal.
Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.
Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; remember: the hero lives on;
even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.
But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back into herself,
as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time.
Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough
so that any girl deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring,
objectless love and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her?"
Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow more fruitful for us?
Isn't it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and,
quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,
so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself.
For there is no place where we can remain.

...

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future;
no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to leave even one's own first name behind,
forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires.
Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which
they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.
The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever,
and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

The Serenity Prayer

by Reinhold Niebuhr
__________________

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
If I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.

Amen.
_______

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars.
The deeper the grief, the closer is God."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Comfort

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins.

A voice of one calling:
"In the desert prepare
the way for the Lord;
make straight in the wilderness
a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.

And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all mankind together will see it.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken."

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
or weighed the mountains on the scales
and the hills in a balance?

To whom, then, will you compare God?
What image will you compare him to?

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?

"To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?" says the Holy One.

Lift your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one,
and calls them each by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.

He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.

Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
___________________
Isaiah 40

The comfort Christianity provides to the troubled modern man lies not only in the breathtaking promise of eternal life and perfect bliss for the believer at the end of time and all earthly things, but also in the rousing sensation of gratitude for the here and the now, through the poignant reminder that there exists a single reason for contentment that renders all other dissatisfactions hollow and worthless. In times of tribulation, agony and intense suffering, Christianity teaches us not to be sorrowful but to be grateful; this is the sudden astonishment of joy Christ bequeaths to his follower in his moment of misery.

Identity and Violence

In his book "Identity and Violence", Amartya Sen describes the dangers of identity-affiliation, arguing that the politics of global confrontation is the corollary of religious and cultural divisions in the world. He declares that "underlying this line of thinking is the odd presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorized according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning", and this false but commonly-held notion is in fact irreconcilable with the less discussed but much more plausible notion that we are "diversely different".

In a nutshell, Sen argues that we have "inescapably plural identities", and that the hope of harmony in the contemporary world lies to a great extent in a clearer understanding of the pluralities of human identity, and in the appreciation that they cut across each other and work against a sharp separation along one single hardened line of impenetrable division. This line of divisive identities, Sen concludes, tends to "crowd out...any consideration of other, less confrontational features of the people on the opposite side of the breach, including, among other things, their shared membership of the human race."

Sen's ideas about identity and violence are fascinating and uniquely paradigmatic, but I find it difficult to concur with the notion that the removal of classificatory priority that "[places] people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes" will lead to the end of the cultivated violence associated with identity conflicts. He makes reference to numerous examples of such conflicts, including the situations in Rwanda and the Congo, the aggressive Sudanese Islamic identity, and Israel and Palestine, all of which "continue to experience the fury of dichotomized identities ready to inflict hateful penalties on the other side".

Sen states, quite reasonably, that the same person can be, without any contradiction, "an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist...a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a non-religious lifestyle...", and any of these categories can influence and be used to describe this person. This list of characteristics seems to me to be manifestly carefully chosen. Central to what I think is flawed about Sen's argument is the presumption that religion is just another category that can "move and engage" a person, inasmuch as a shared occupation such as carpentry or a common interest such as fishing can. Religion is powerful and influential on the human psyche and on human life in a way that requires little elaboration, not least of all because it makes authoritative decisions in so many other classifications, or identity-affiliations, that a person may belong to. A deep believer in the Islamic, Christian or Buddhist doctrine, may naturally have to be classified in a huge number of other distinct categories apart from religion, by sheer virtue of his faith — as a vegetarian, a conservative, an anti-abortionist, an ardent opponent of euthanasia, the death penalty, stem cell research, in vitro fertilisation, homosexual marriage etc. All these are categorisations that ostensibly can have great import on a person's decisions, and significantly impact his life. Religion subsumes so many other classifications under its doctrinal wing, and it would be simplistic to treat it as merely another membership category.

Sen laments the "neglect of the plurality of our affiliations and of the need for choice and reasoning [that] obscures the world in which we live", arguing that "many of the conflicts and barbarities of the world are sustained through the illusion of a unique and choiceless identity". He emphasises the folly of imagining that we have little choice over our identities, labelling this a "conceptual disarray", and concludes that "the prospects of peace in the contemporary world may well lie in the recognition of the plurality of our affiliations and in the use of reasoning as common inhabitants of a wide world... What we need, above all, is a clear-headed understanding of the importance of the freedom that we can have in determining our priorities." Sen's statement makes compelling clear his secularist assumptions, and perhaps reveals also a lack of understanding about the forceful authority behind religion — the belief in an omnipotent God whose word it is a sin to disobey, and whose laws and commandments are the highest authorities and the most transcendent truths. The "freedom that we can have in determining our priorities" must be tempered by religious doctrine, and stilled if it conflicts with divine decree. Followers of faith, once they come to hold their belief, see conservative values as truth, not as choice. The "broad commonality of our shared humanity" must retreat with head bowed, as with all earthly things, once the divine will has been broached. To ask devotees to embrace the glorious "use of reasoning", and the freedom to disregard categories in which they believe the anointed single right answer has been authoritatively chosen by an entity higher than man, is in effect to require them to cast away their original faith in favour of a secularist ideology. Sen's description of the painful illusion of "choiceless singularity" when applied to the religious theme therefore approaches a contradiction in terms.

convalescence

People come and go like visiting doctors; they meet you with smiles, give you hope, feed you a dose of the best medicine, then leave you with advice. And a while later, you fall sick again.

Above All

Above all powers, above all kings
Above all nature and all created things
Above all wisdom
And all the ways of man
You were here
Before the world began.

Above all kingdoms, above all thrones
Above all wonders the world has ever known
Above all wealth
And treasures of the earth
There's no way to measure what You're worth.

Crucified, laid behind a stone
You lived to die, rejected and alone
Like a rose, trampled on the ground
You took the fall, and thought of me
Above all.
______________

Perhaps what strikes me so deeply and uniquely about this song is its last line — how one so mighty, and clearly above all earthly powers and kings, could take the fall for another so clearly unworthy, and consider him above all.

This is what sets God "above all". This is also how imperfect Man is made perfect by God alone.

the infidelity of memory

Between the failure to remember, to reconstruct a face beyond the afterimage of memory, and the failure to forget, to erase the burning intensity of a presence in my mind before it sears into permanence, into a black irreparable void still smouldering angry orange at the edges; in between these failures — hell lies in between.

Love Songs In Age

by Philip Larkin
_____________

She kept her songs, they kept so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter -
So they had waited, till, in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.

On blogging

When blogs begin to degenerate, they start to crumble into a sort of sad incoherence; dismembered snatches of song lyrics, aimless remarks, passionate half-formed ideas, paltry meaningless little secrets find themselves clumsily strung together by a confused mind still spinning from life's brutal banalities.

Nothing reveals empty lives better than such blogs, lives cluttered with events that unfold themselves like the plot descriptions of boring movies no one really wants to watch. These blogs remind me of the windows of apartment blocks at night, each little lighted square clamouring with activity, the messiness of lives banging about within private cubes neatly stacked atop each other.

I used to keep a diary, but I soon found that I was more enamoured about actually penning something down than I was interested in the things about which I was writing. The entire activity began to grow pointless, and more than a little saddeningly solipsist. Still, the need to write things down persists for me.

More blogs than I have cared to read have been written for the reader; this one is for myself, not so much to be read but to have been written.

Only God really matters, after all.

Here's a little poem I wrote just for fun, not so old but rather distant already:

Friday Night
____________

I sit in a movie theatre
watching
the tumble of popcorn from careless fingers
the sizzling of fresh Coke
shaken, not stirred
and the tremble of sound effects through the seats.
the way the light ripples through the darkness
peeks between the intimacy of shadows
and paints the angle of a reclining arm
on a shoulder soft with familiarity, and
the accuracy of fingers finding each other
and weaving in the shadows, made daring
by the dark.

I sit in a movie theatre
and feel nothing but regret
as James Bond saves the world with girl in hand,
bravery personified,
and the credits roll.
the lights come on
and my failure is glaring—
the timid slowness of my fingers,
still two inches from your hand.
_____________

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
- Edna St Vincent Millay

But I'm glad he now leads the free world anyway. Though I had a bad week and I hope he makes everyone's lives better. Yes he can.

De Profundis

I continue to be fascinated by Oscar Wilde and his aesthetic credo; how it irrevocably and irresistibly colours his perception of life, death, art, man and God.
__________________

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . .

When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, - waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.

It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. . .

I had said of Christ that he ranks with the poets. That is true. Shelley and Sophocles are of his company. But his entire life also is the most wonderful of poems. For 'pity and terror' there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and Pelops' line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain. Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer simplicity of pathos wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic effect, can be said to equal or even approach the last act of Christ's passion. The little supper with his companions, one of whom has already sold him for a price; the anguish in the quiet moon-lit garden; the false friend coming close to him so as to betray him with a kiss; the friend who still believed in him, and on whom as on a rock he had hoped to build a house of refuge for Man, denying him as the bird cried to the dawn; his own utter loneliness, his submission, his acceptance of everything; and along with it all such scenes as the high priest of orthodoxy rending his raiment in wrath, and the magistrate of civil justice calling for water in the vain hope of cleansing himself of that stain of innocent blood that makes him the scarlet figure of history; the coronation ceremony of sorrow, one of the most wonderful things in the whole of recorded time; the crucifixion of the Innocent One before the eyes of his mother and of the disciple whom he loved; the soldiers gambling and throwing dice for his clothes; the terrible death by which he gave the world its most eternal symbol; and his final burial in the tomb of the rich man, his body swathed in Egyptian linen with costly spices and perfumes as though he had been a king's son. When one contemplates all this from the point of view of art alone one cannot but be grateful that the supreme office of the Church should be the playing of the tragedy without the shedding of blood: the mystical presentation, by means of dialogue and costume and gesture even, of the Passion of her Lord; and it is always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate survival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor answering the priest at Mass. . .

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

"Approved by Barack Obama. Paid for by Obama for America."

Barack Obama doesn't need any more people to endorse him, especially a non-American, but I have to say, this 30-minute infomercial is amazing--well-delivered as always and frankly quite unimpeachable:

living, in a way

One of the few things that still hold meaning for me now are words--words, the stuff of argument, the little gleaming beads we try to string together to weave unbroken strands of meaning in our lives, those tiny carriages linked witlessly together in trains of thought, trundling aimlessly in no direction--words, falling silently and implacably into place, one after another, in the deliberate, hopeful fashion of the hopelessly lost.

Nowadays everybody I come across seems to be familiar in some indefinable way; a stereotype, a half-forgotten habit, a recognisable tilt of the shoulders, ripple of hair. When memories walk past me laughing and smiling and joking to themselves on the streets, and I turn back to stare in disbelief, time and distance and age and circumstance contrive to halt me from across an insuperable inch of pavement. My only recourse is to sit down sometimes, usually at night, stringing together mismatched words that bounce and skitter in the shadows across my page.

The Seven Sorrows

by Ted Hughes
___________

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

If You Forget Me

by Pablo Neruda
_____________

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips
to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
_________________

Neruda: "Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long."

since the majority of me

by Philip Larkin

Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forwith, and we
Divide. And sure of what to do

We disinfect new blocks of days
For our majorities to rent
With unshared friends and unwalked ways,
But silence too is eloquent:

A silence of minorities
That, unopposed at last, return
Each night with cancelled promises
They want renewed. They never learn.
_____________

Larkin's poems are frosty, delicate things. They are inspired by the chilly incipience of understanding, the cold clarity that comes with age. They are kept from freezing by the heat of remembrance.

There is a distinct memory that arises every so often, untrammeled by time. I did not discover its significance until I turned it round and round in my mind and realised I could not have asked for anything more in that moment; I would have given up anything for it but it was given to me freely, as all surprises, gifts and truly good things are.

Just had a good laugh when the Formula One television commentator referred to the amount of "autumn leaves" littering the track.

Clearly the winds of westernisation have effected seasonal change in Singapore as well.

The deepest remembrances of all are the quiet ones, the moments of stillness that linger after the laughter and the tears, placid and silent and immovable as rocks on a riverbed. The unspoken understandings through looks exchanged between the spaces of a crowd, the feeling of eyes and the grasp of a gaze through the veil of passers-by, seconds of the past stretched into eternity by memory.

In the proximity of a breath, the eager uncertainty of fingertips, the matching of footsteps between puddles, the unexpected coalescing of a moment in the rain with a single umbrella and a distance to walk, a place to find; all these fall into place as memories uneroded by time, the shared realisation of possibilities and their gentle relegation to the sigh of the drifting rain, as opportunities out of time and place, less suited to reality than to memory, the material of dreams and sudden dazes in the day.

Memories--the footprints you left all over my past, that I find myself continually retracing today, and that stretch out as far as I can see in the direction of the future.

hello

are you cold?
i can't see you
but do you see what i see
hear what i hear
feel what i feel
in the mirror?

i live in a garden
and i water the vines
that wind around me.
water drips from my
fingertips
and still they twine
and climb and wind
and freeze me
into a strange hedge
a stranger whom
i do not know
but i think i am.

i am an observer
watching the interrogation
from next door
through a one-way mirror.
the prisoner stands by the wall
he does not know he is watched.
yet it is a mirror
he stares into.
and then when he bends
i bend too.

so. in my mirror
feel what i feel
hear what i hear
but do you see what i see
i can't see you
are you cold?

The Selfish Giant

Everybody knows about Oscar Wilde the aesthete, the dandy, the smirking connoisseur of pleasure and art, the charming literary genius hostile to all social conventions and yet dangerously charismatic. This side of him is on sparkling display in his most famous plays: The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windemere's Fan, An Ideal Husband. It is clearly how Wilde wanted the world to see him, and these plays contain Wildean witticisms at their best.

But his short stories intrigue me; they not only make for fascinating reading, but also seem to illustrate a curious religiousity alien to his plays, almost antithetical to his image. Here's one of his tales that I like in particular:

The Selfish Giant
______________

Every afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant's garden.

It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to stop their games in order to listen to them. "How happy we are here!" they cried to each other.

One day the Giant came back. He had been to visit his friend the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle. When he arrived he saw the children playing in the garden.

"What are you doing here?" he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away. "My own garden is my own garden," said the Giant; "any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself." So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board.

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

He was a very selfish Giant. The poor children had now nowhere to play. They tried to play on the road, but the road was very dusty and full of hard stones, and they did not like it. They used to wander round the high wall when their lessons were over, and talk about the beautiful garden inside. "How happy we were there," they said to each other.

Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. "Spring has forgotten this garden," they cried, "so we will live here all the year round." The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. "This is a delightful spot," he said, "we must ask the Hail on a visit." So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.

"I cannot understand why the Spring is so late in coming," said the Selfish Giant, as he sat at the window and looked out at his cold white garden; "I hope there will be a change in the weather." But the Spring never came, nor the Summer. The Autumn gave golden fruit to every garden, but to the Giant's garden she gave none. "He is too selfish," she said. So it was always Winter there, and the North Wind, and the Hail, and the Frost, and the Snow danced about through the trees.

One morning the Giant was lying awake in bed when he heard some lovely music. It sounded so sweet to his ears that he thought it must be the King's musicians passing by. It was really only a little linnet singing outside his window, but it was so long since he had heard a bird sing in his garden that it seemed to him to be the most beautiful music in the world. Then the Hail stopped dancing over his head, and the North Wind ceased roaring, and a delicious perfume came to him through the open casement. "I believe the Spring has come at last," said the Giant; and he jumped out of bed and looked out.

He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. The birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing. It was a lovely scene, only in one corner it was still winter. It was the farthest corner of the garden, and in it was standing a little boy. He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering all round it, crying bitterly. The poor tree was still quite covered with frost and snow, and the North Wind was blowing and roaring above it. "Climb up! little boy," said the Tree, and it bent its branches down as low as it could; but the boy was too tiny.

And the Giant's heart melted as he looked out. "How selfish I have been!" he said; "now I know why the Spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children's playground for ever and ever." He was really very sorry for what he had done.

So he crept downstairs and opened the front door quite softly, and went out into the garden. But when the children saw him they were so frightened that they all ran away, and the garden became winter again. Only the little boy did not run, for his eyes were so full of tears that he did not see the Giant coming. And the Giant stole up behind him and took him gently in his hand, and put him up into the tree. And the tree broke at once into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it, and the little boy stretched out his two arms and flung them round the Giant's neck, and kissed him. And the other children, when they saw that the Giant was not wicked any longer, came running back, and with them came the Spring. "It is your garden now, little children," said the Giant, and he took a great axe and knocked down the wall. And when the people were going to market at twelve o'clock they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.

All day long they played, and in the evening they came to the Giant to bid him good-bye. "But where is your little companion?" he said: "the boy I put into the tree." The Giant loved him the best because he had kissed him. "We don't know," answered the children; "he has gone away." "You must tell him to be sure and come here to-morrow," said the Giant. But the children said that they did not know where he lived, and had never seen him before; and the Giant felt very sad.

Every afternoon, when school was over, the children came and played with the Giant. But the little boy whom the Giant loved was never seen again. The Giant was very kind to all the children, yet he longed for his first little friend, and often spoke of him. "How I would like to see him!" he used to say. Years went over, and the Giant grew very old and feeble. He could not play about any more, so he sat in a huge armchair, and watched the children at their games, and admired his garden. "I have many beautiful flowers," he said; "but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all."

One winter morning he looked out of his window as he was dressing. He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting. Suddenly he rubbed his eyes in wonder, and looked and looked. It certainly was a marvellous sight. In the farthest corner of the garden was a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were all golden, and silver fruit hung down from them, and underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, "Who hath dared to wound thee?" For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.

"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant; "tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him."

"Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love." "Who art thou?" said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise."

And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.

For whom the Bell Tolls

"Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.

The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member.

And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.

There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is.

The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that this occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.

Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

_____________________
John Donne

From "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" (1623), XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris - "Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die."

Something I found and dragged out from a folder in my computer, written long ago. Written with all the unsubtlety of youth.

A Friend
__________________

when we take photos together
we are never alone
always, you and me
separated by two or three.

when we go on dates and dinners
it is always with the others
with friends and shouts and cheery noises
your laughter amidst many voices.

I worked my way through the sunlit crowd
the implacable distance of people
through photos and functions and countless yearbooks
down queues, in meals, through changing looks.

I have been a patient smiling face,
I have waited madly by the phone
written too many poems, heard too many songs
watched you through the spaces where your library books belong.

I found you finally in the crowd
I reached my hand to turn you round
and you did, but in cheerful agreement
with someone else’s call, and your gaze was distant.

when the albums have ended, and the tapes run out of time
the voices swallowed by distance, and your footsteps too faint
I tread gently through the madding crowd still
looking for your traces, and your footsteps to fill.

I cannot help it, I miss you so much
the delight of your laughter, and the surprise of your touch.

the way of love

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love,
I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not love,
I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,
and though I give my body to be burned and have not love,
it profiteth me nothing.
Love suffereth long and is kind.
Love envieth not.
Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doeth not behave itself unseemly.
Seeketh not her own.
Is not easily provoked.
Thinketh no evil.
Rejoiceth not in inequity, but rejoiceth in the truth.
Bareth all things.
Believeth all things.
Hopeth all things.
Endureth all things.
Love never fails.
But where there be prophecies they shall fail,
whether there be tongues, they shall cease,
whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part,
but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I fought as a child,
but when I became a man I put away childish things.
For now we see though a glass dark plain, but then face to face.
Now I know in part, but then shall I know even also as I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, love - these three,
but the greatest of these is love."

_______________
1 Corinthians 13
King James Bible

Biblical verses at their finest stand unsurpassed as demonstrations of how the prosody of wisdom runs in perfect natural counterpoint to the rhythms of poetry... It strikes me somehow that words of truth, the lyricism of poetry, and the subject of love are strangely, innately attuned to each other. These verses from Corinthians are a peerless combination of the three.

Growing up is sometimes an unaccountably stale, rancid activity.

It doesn't always entail self-improvement, enlightenment, sudden wisdom or the insights of maturity. Maybe it doesn't even involve change.

What it does involve, however, is aging. Sitting there, getting older, watching the soporific seconds play themselves out on the clock, ticking themselves to death.

It's time for dinner.

I can always find a little comfort during dark times in the simple, cheerful words with which Shakespeare ends his oeuvre, in the closure of The Two Noble Kinsmen:

"O you heavenly charmers,
What things you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh, for what we have, are sorry; still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let's go off
And bear us like the time."

For all the unattainably profound thoughts about humanity and the world that Shakespeare must have had throughout his career, it makes me glad that his last lines are words of comfort and good cheer.

the last poem

This is the last poem, overdue words
ingredients gone sour on the label of a can
words long past their expiry dates
too long embalmed by memory
and pickled by regret
floating like an embryo in a silent goo.
they have tumbled off the caravan
inertia overcome
words eating the dust.

This is where I bury a life:
here lies the doom of a half-formed sentence
a time capsule of an incomplete past
of unfinished thoughts, unfulfilled wishes
some half-forgotten dreams, a fraction of time.
the inheritance of memory, given to the wind
those things that flickered around
the sundial of a life
winding down to the end.

This is the last evening
the sky heavy with the thoughts of the day
when buses ponder at every stop
and men wear eyebags weighed down with words
having a think or two over tea.
the clouds are dark with question marks
and the weatherman's worries condense, and fall.
from you, the trail of a plane like a farewell from the sky
for me, unspoken words and a dampness not yet dry.

This is the last time, this is the end
the resting-place of stories too broken to mend
seeds will not grow when they are six feet under
too deep for tears to reach or hopes to plunder
this is the last poem, a wish too forlorn to rescue
and its last word must belong only to you.

____________________

Too much has been thought and felt, wondered about and imagined, forgotten and realised much too late. It is over, all of it. This is the last poem, at least for a while.

Kierkegaard

Some of my favourite Kierkegaardian lines from Works of Love, certainly worth a read:

"If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing which we cannot see with our eyes, then first and foremost we ought to give up believing in love. If we were to do so and do it out of fear lest we be deceived, would we not then be deceived? We can, of course, be deceived in many ways. We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. We can be deceived by appearances, but we can also be deceived by shrewdness, by the flattering conceit which is absolutely certain it cannot be deceived. Which deception is more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of one who does not see, or that of the person who sees and yet does not see? What is more difficult--to awaken someone who is sleeping or to awaken someone who awake, is dreaming that he is awake? Which is sadder, the sight that promptly and unconditionally moves one to tears, the sight of someone unhappily deceived in love, or the sight that in a certain sense could tempt laughter, the sight of the self-deceived, whose fatuous conceit of not being deceived would indeed be ridiculous and laughable if the ridiculousness of it were not an even stronger expression for horror, since it shows that he is unworthy of tears."

Philosophers who write like that should consider an alternative career as poets.

Love

I walk about all night and fall sick in the day
Days I spend with eyes burnt out and nights with eyes alive
Each evening I will myself to rise and walk
And energy like ether fills me.
I pull on fancy pants and shiny suits
Like a madman in the dark
Lasso my spotted tie on a veinous neck
Snatch my cowboy hat from below my bed and
Fill white leather shoes in a hop. My fevers flee and all
Exhaustion escapes as I hit the midnight pubs
With disco dancing, and bursting music
That fills my soul with sound.
The faces of women I met and loved
Were so many kisses, promises and vows
So many apparitions and light-hearted phantoms
Inspired, interesting, imaginary imps
With ease I willed them disappear with the dawn
In the crazy nights I would do anything for them
In the sober days, nothing.

Sometimes I fall sick and can’t get up
I have to send for the doctor.
When the fever is real there’s no
Imagining it’s imaginary, it will not thus
Go away.

One evening, in the twilight, I couldn’t get up
I willed myself to, but I couldn’t
Each side of the bed was the wrong side, somehow
And I couldn’t chase my fever away.
I coughed my lungs out, but a face was stuck in my throat
My business ties could force nothing out.
Something was upset, but I ate my breakfast with appetite
I walked about all day and fell sick at night.

_______________________

Some things are imagined too easily, others are realised too late.

Ophelia

a poem with reference to Hamlet

Awhile, awhile, down the crooked stile
Where the flowers blossom upon skulls in the ground
And water-weeds are thick on the scalp of the stream
Awhile now, as the world waits for spring
And its sprinkles of rain, that unearth the life
From the winter mausoleum:
Watch the corpses begin to bloom.

Up on the hill a man with a spade
Grave-digger or gardener I cannot tell
Now and then he holds up a skull
Then flings it back into the furrows he’s made
To trough and plow the fertile soil.
These faces he buries, he knows none and yet all
The balding heads, the ivory pall
The common grin beneath the flesh
Are flowerpots now in the soil.

‘The play’s the thing’,
And Hamlet’s questions whispered in the wind
The actor’s lines and a hundred musings
Of what is to be or not to be
They tickle the boughs of the willow tree
Who laughs and promises that the audience leaves
Each with that happy common grin
Of a common happy ending.

The stream is lively, rife with life
The gurgling of worm-fattened fish
Glutted on a feast of kings
The rustle of the willow leaves,
Dirt sighing from a shovel.
But the distant melody of a lovelorn lady
Stops all natural sounds awhile,
Like wonder-wounded hearers
Music rising from the running stream
Dirges to the moon, songs from a dream:

Crowned with weed and flower
Ophelia drifting down the water
The sound of a name,
The kiss of thyme
On her lifting singing scarlet lips,
The flowering of rhyme.
Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies;
Good night, good night.

___________________

This poem reminds me of so many things, written in a time when I was a different person, in different circumstances and a different state of mind.

Some of my favourite verses from Hamlet; none of the befuddling riddles from the protagonist this time, but several illuminating truths in luminous verse from the Player King through whom Shakespeare speaks in pellucid style:

"The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy:
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love...

Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own..."

Hamlet strikes me so frequently as a play within a play, the literal drama involving the Player King and Queen that Hamlet stages for Claudius notwithstanding. Curiously, the personality that is Hamlet himself seems to me to merely be acting in the role of Prince Hamlet, like an actor who has put on Hamlet's shoes for fun. Yet he appears not just to be an actor of himself, but also as the director of the play he stages, wondering "to be or not to be". Like a director calling for the curtains to fall on the close of the play, his last lines in Hamlet ring with a proud finality: "The rest is silence."

The real playwright, of course, is Shakespeare.

in passing

Time comes to me
as the shortening of distances
the regularity of tiles underfoot,
bent by contours of the ground
but locked in place by the scoured
edges of clay.
Time awakens me
with the thinning of my soles
the prickle of my chin in the morning
a cup of tea suddenly empty in my hand
fingernail clippings.

I remember you in passing,
the brush of your shoulder
stubborn with the intractability of attraction
of nods and “good mornings” without goodbyes
the patter of conversation the clatter of our
retreating footsteps.
I remember you in passing
as I tread the tiles of time
but the echoes of your footsteps
in my mind go round and round.

flower

friendship is not
a rose, it is a sunflower
and it must not be watered
with tears, fed by moonlight
or sung to in the shadows.
it needs no promises or paeans
or dirges in the dark
no blood to make its petals proud
or wine to make it flush.
no thorns to warn of its dangers
or careful affection and protection
from the worldly wind or cynical cold.
friendship is built from loyal smiles
not faithful tears, and graced
by compassion, not the crudeness of passion.
friendship is a sunflower
grown to complement green fields
and blue skies, not candlelight or
tenderness or tremblings in the dark.
sunflowers need only sun,
and there is always sun
where sunflowers are found, and
fertile, happy soil.
roses bloom best alone
on envelopes, in pockets, between
gentlemen's teeth, at most in
bouquets of ten or twelve.
sunflowers are unmistakeable, impeccable,
unimpeachably cheerful.
they grow in fields.

you walked toward me, with a flower in hand.
from a distance I could see the joy on your face
but the flowers you brought
were yellow.

remembering

i.
you open your eyes
in some corner of my mind
they are blinding in the darkness.
from some distant memory
too old and vivid for imagination
you open your eyes.

my work swims before me on the page
because you are staring.
don’t you know it’s rude? but
your eyes are too bright,
i can’t stop you from staring
i cannot help it.


ii.
i would like to give you a flower
the petals grasped in my fist
it is still fresh, from where i wrenched it
still scarlet and warm and somewhat wet
i have torn it from a moistness
rather too fertile, somewhat too early
but yearning to be plucked.
still raw with immaturity i have
grasped it, and wrested it
gasping from my chest,
a root of my heart.


iii.
some people you cannot forget.
some people sweep through your life
and pass through you
with the ghost of their hand still warm
in your twitching fingers.
some you cannot bear to think
are not thinking about you.
and others you want to lie beside
within the quietude of grass
in the morning.
for some people you write poems
and with every atom of your fractured will
wish they were lies—
words welded by hopes and hallucinations
with rings and roses and the
pirouette of your pen,
words melting into ink under your gaze.

from some people you walk away
but turn again at twelve paces,
for love is a duel,
and remembrance in the sudden meeting of eyes—
the denial of forgetting
for better or for worse.

______________________

for you.

well-wishes

I have watched the rain shimmer down
into the slow gravity of the well
and listened for the answer of its borrowed voice
the watering of words by growing rain.
it is a voice made eloquent by stillness and silence
by whispered wishes and hidden hopes
a throat filled with echoing ambitions
fed with the fortune of many coins—
of past and present, of dreams and black water
the smile of Narcissus to peering ferns
a ring of promises, made and remade
to have and to hold, in sickness and health
flowers flickered and tossed, love found and lost
secrets and regrets funnelled below
time's iniquities, memory's infidelities
dissolved in opaqueness, blind eye of the well
the weight of words unspoken.
the faces throng the stony circle,
with changing voices they laugh and cry
and throw their noises into the quiet earth
at night they draw buckets of stars
their tears hurled like spears into deceiving waters.
the lovers, old men and ghosts walk by
in the kiss of the well they have drowned too much
sung too loudly and laughed too well
the immolation of a selfless self-lived passion
the smoulder of stars at apogee and perigee.
these walls have been shaped, carved like the wind
by the whispers of men and the sighs of women
rounded by the tumble of Sisyphus' stone
its waters still but changing still
marking with ripples each quiet visitor
the fingerprint of every tear.

the seasons change, time comes and goes
old men are born and babies age
in the morning the women draw water with buckets
in the rain the waters shimmer back down
not old or new, too ageless to tell
a voice drifting in the gravity of the well.

_____________________

About some things I tend to forget frequently and have to relearn every so often.

between the lines

in the gaps between dreams where we lurch and fall
the emptiness of teacups between tilting jugs
within the frozen moments when eyes grow cold
the silence when laughter sputters and dies
between the flight of sentences missing each other
the suffocation between each desperate breath
in the sudden spaces, in the unbearable lightness
in the hesitations and expectations and surprises
the loss of balance between every footfall
love dying under the cracks of your smile
along half-finished highways and spaces for unbuilt buildings
between the regularity of streetlamps, the flicker of the bulb
in the waiting, the stormclouds in the distance
the blindness of blinking eyelids
the death between heartbeats
after the falling of new seeds
before wounds begin to bleed
the clearing of the throat
the pause of the pen
the end.

_______________________

Written rather hastily, recently, about transitions and absurdities and the lost time between beginnings and endings.

Ahh so I finally have my own blog.

Enough of reading about other people's lives, here's my own.