The Thing with Feathers

I have just finished the twenty third rewrite of my book and I feel that it is now ready to go (which will remain the case until I commence the twenty fourth rehash) but I don’t have a publisher and, at my age, see very little prospect of getting one given the kind of drivel I tend to write. Now, I am at a stage in my life when everything about me comes bound with one very simple suffix: ‘for his age’: he’s very fit for his age, he’s quite strong for his age, he’s quite young for his age, he doesn’t smell too bad for his age etc etc, and the positive end of that equation is that I no longer give a flying wosname about things that used to really bother me, e.g. I’ve written a book that no-one outside of the family (who probably couldn’t give a chuff quite frankly, they – rightly – have bigger fish to fry) will ever read. It’s all ok. It’s really ok except…

I know that I have written about this before and I remember that at that time I mentioned that flushed with something as close to excitement as this old body ever encounters I had already started to write a follow up which will be destined to exactly the same fate. This post is, however, not a paean to the sad reality of lost hope, it is about the happy realisation that age provides a welcome super-power, an armour against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune: it means that I have ceased to give a shit! The person for whom such things mattered has long gone. His replacement continues to give everything his best shot, he has hope, he still gets frustrated when his best is not good enough, but he expects nothing from fate in return for his efforts. Kismet has its own games to play.

Does this knowledge make me a better person? I sincerely doubt it although, Lord knows, I realise that there is much room for improvement. I have many faults and I am on first name terms with most of them. It is my conviction that, whatever Pandora allowed herself to believe, it was not Hope that she eventually managed to keep confined within her box, it was Self-Knowledge: just as well if you ask me, because that is one king-sized can of worms. I try to imagine a world full of the self aware: it is a world in which all jokes are at one’s own expense, where all of the poets are Sylvia Plath, all of the songwriters are Leonard Cohen and all of the politicians are Donald Trump. (Most of us when confronted with our own frailties and flaws wonder how to remedy them – politicians wonder how to gain from them.)

And once again the Shield of Age comes to my rescue: I can see my faults very clearly, but I am aware that I am much too long in the tooth to do much about them. I addressed (I hope) most of the more objectionable of them decades ago. The mildly offensive traits have had their corners knocked off in the intervening years and I am left with only the gratingly annoying habits which we will all have to learn to live with.

Outside of the huge, sweeping (and mostly Russian) sagas that I tried (and failed) to read as a youth, most novels are framed within a fairly tight span of time. Characters are defined and, generally fixed, but life is not like that. Real people develop and adapt. Some behaviours may become deeply entrenched and unshakeable (these are the things that – unless they are illegal or deeply unsavoury – they will talk about in your eulogy) but for most of us, our persona is written and rewritten countless times through our allotted span. The person who dies is not the one who was born and hope, like energy, is never lost, it is just transformed. You never know, it could be a best seller. There is always hope…

Hope

by Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

Echoes

Sometimes I begin this thrice weekly little tarradiddle with a title, sometimes with a subject and sometimes with nothing at all. Sometimes I stride with purpose and sometimes I wander with nothing but peanut butter between the ears. Mostly I wander. As I get older it becomes increasingly obvious that there are very few new places to go, all that I seem to be able to do is alter is the route that I take to get there. My mind has become a SatNav which has, in addition to Fastest (slowest), Shortest (any route that passes via a sink estate in which mine is the only car that is not on fire, along an overgrown bridle way and across a twelve foot deep ford) and Eco (via Penzance) has Meander, which takes me from A to B via something that was inadvertently chipped off the Rosetta Stone, for the three miles per journey in which it has a signal. When you realise that there is little left to do that you have not done before, you start to search for new ways to do it. In every nano-second of life, there is an echo of another. There is comfort to be found in the familiar, but too much comfort – like malt whisky and the moral highground – can become disorientating. When destination becomes secondary to journey, it is time to take the bus.

At the time of writing, the post-Christmas/New Year tidy-up is in progress and I am forced to make a number of disconcerting trips up into the attic. Attics, like belfries, are uncomfortable places full of fractured memories and bats: filled with webs, but devoid of spiders. Mine also houses the ancient Christmas tree, a lifetime of baubles, the emergency chairs and a howling gale on the stillest of days. The attic is where the house goes to die, and it is where Christmas spends eleven months of the year.

Most people are pleased to see the back of Christmas by the time it is all packed away, but I find it unbearably sad: Goodwill to all men stashed in an old cardboard box and stacked underneath a moulding set of curtains you never quite got round to hanging three houses ago. There is something very forlorn about the rows of threadbare trees awaiting pre-mulching collection. There is a horrible finality to the departure of the holly and the ivy: peace on earth in a bin bag…

But Spring is just around the corner: a world full of new shoots, new colours, new lives… already the lawn looks like it could do with a mow. The WD40 sits with a rising sense of expectation. It is impossible not to be changed by Spring: the first frost-glistened appearance of snowdrops, the colour-splash of crocus and aconite, the full-on joy of daffodil and tulip, the sudden greening of a beige hemisphere. Hope* in every tree. What’s not to love about a season that heralds falling energy bills, thinner coats and longer days? Perhaps hormones might start to stir – not always a good thing for fifty percent of the species – and loins begin to gird. As one gets older, it becomes frighteningly easy to anticipate bad outcomes and almost impossible to perceive good, but the echoes are always there, you just have to choose to see them…

…oh, and put the postcode in the SatNav very carefully…

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can… Echoes – Pink Floyd

*Hope is the thing with feathers… Emily Dickinson

A Confederacy of Poets in the Gewgaws (The Plan)

Photo by Trust “Tru” Katsande on Unsplash

‘Poetry is indispensable – if only I knew what for.’ Jean Cocteau.

It’s funny how readily random instances, like Saturday evening Hen Parties, can collide. Synchronicity mixes ingredients, throwing them together like a prospective Masterchef contestant, with equally unpredictable results: 49% tastes great, but looks awful; 49% looks great, but tastes awful; 1% both looks and tastes great but is served by a chef having at least one finger swathed in bright blue plaster and encased within a vinyl glove, and 1% consists solely of sliced finger and blood. It would be almost two years ago, and certainly recalled only by those of you of very long memory and very forgiving nature, in an occasional thread of poetry (The Haphazardly Poetical) that I wrote a poem called ‘An Appreciation of Poetry’ (reproduced below) in the realisation that I had none. Or very little, anyway. Outside of Wilfred Owen, Emily Dickinson and John Betjeman – all of whom I love – I have never fared well with any poetry outside of the scattergun genius that was Spike Milligan. It has always felt like a bit of a hole in my soul: something I really should attempt to fill, but frankly can never be bothered.

Yesterday I was reading a piece written by Alan Bennett about the poet Philip Larkin, with whom – like sashimi – I am totally unacquainted. Alan Bennett is a great fan (of the poet, not the raw meat – although I would not presume to pontificate on his attitude towards uncooked protein): such a great fan that he is happy to cast aside Larkin’s overt racism and misogyny as an irrelevance. I realise that this has the potential to close many doors on me, but I am unable to do so. I cannot admire one aspect of a person whilst I despise another*. Most people must, I suspect, have some redeeming features, but are they sufficient to actually redeem them? How saintly would Chris Evans need to be in order to make up for the fact that he is still Chris Evans**? The point is that despite his private opinions, what Larkin wrote for publication – exposed only what he felt would be acceptable to those who knew him only through his work: he laid bare his soul, but only the part of it he wanted the reader to admire***. I think to some degree we all hide – or at best disguise – pieces of ourselves that we fear others will find distasteful: I, myself, will never be seen in public without socks. Most writers will accept that they will be hated by some, but will not be happy to find that the haters hold the majority view, especially when all they have ever done is to read a first draft to their mother. Nobody – except for Mick Hucknall – wants to be Mick Hucknall. Everybody wants to be loved: perhaps viewed as fragile but plucky; best of all to be understood as misunderstood.

The third little thread of my crocheted blanket of fate was accrued yesterday when I stumbled onto a little hard-sleeved collection of poetry anthologies by (in alphabetical order) W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and W. B. Yeats, at the back of a shelf filled with photographs, mugs, microscope, grey felt hat, knitted chimp, shells, fossils, and an empty Marmite jar. Why these particular six scribes had been assembled I do not know, but my hastily constructed plan is to read them all. Not all at once of course, that would be plain foolhardy, but I will as time goes by, let you know how I have progressed in reading them one at a time, although if I’m honest, this entire enterprise may result in nothing more than a short-course monthly footnote e.g. ‘Didn’t get on with Plath’. Certainly it would be as well not to expect an informed critique from me – that will not happen – the ramblings of an ill-informed oaf will not shine any light upon the works of literary giants, perhaps far more upon how wrong an ill-educated old fart can be. Just be assured, I will do it and I will let you know each time I finish a collected nosegay. You may learn about my heart-felt reactions to the collections, or, far more likely, what I was eating whilst I read them. I will consume the poetry, but what will subsequently emerge is anybody’s guess. Auden will be first. Wish me luck – as I do you…

*Not, I now realise, completely true. Spike Milligan himself had, by all accounts, a very questionable attitude to the women in his life (albeit one I was unaware of until relatively recently). I would love to tell you that this knowledge will lessen my opinion of his work, but it will not. Reading his books was, after all, the first thing my wife ever banned me from doing in bed – laughter, apparently is not conducive to sleep. Eating crisps dipped in Marmite – should you be curious – was the second.

**I refer here to the British Radio and TV personality Chris Evans, and not Captain America – whom I certainly would not choose to annoy. If you are at all familiar with the former, you will get the joke. If you are not familiar with the former, I can only point out that if you were, you would.

***‘The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.’ Jean Cocteau (who was, himself, a poet, so Lord knows what he actually meant.)

An Appreciation of Poetry

The gilded art of polished phrase
That punctuated schoolboy days
Where words of love and joy and rage
Lay lifeless on each dog-eared page.

Majestic lines so flatly read
Drummed into every schoolboy head
And arch displays of erudition
Locked in brains by repetition.

Where verses raised in cool élan
Are lost to empty rhyme and scan,
Forget the words, but keep instead
The rhythm sounding in your head.

Observe the faithful paradigm
The rumty-tum of metred rhyme
That void of all emotion drips
Unthinkingly from idle lips.

And then recall a line or two
Of the poem writ by you-know-who
That told a tale of daffodils
And wand’ring over lonely hills.

Who said we should Stop All the Clocks?
And what on earth are Jabberwocks?
Why do I smile when I stumble upon
A Subaltern’s love for J. Hunter Dunn?

‘Come [something] bombs and fall on Slough’
(I must recall that word somehow)
And memorise a verse from Pope
Now… who had feathers – was it Hope?

Chorus: Though I know the lines and it sounds absurd
All I ever learned was a string of words.
My mind is full of couplets I can only half recall,
Which maybe makes them monoplets – if they’re anything at all.

P.S. ‘Hope’ (by Emily Dickinson) ‘is the thing with feathers’.

The Haphazardly Poetical – An Appreciation of Poetry

When I was eleven, I went to grammar school. Until that point, I believed that culture was something you found between a five-year old’s toes. At school they tried to knock some culture into my thick old head, but we were never comfortable bed-fellows, culture and I. I enjoyed some Shakespeare, but seldom until I had seen it acted. On the page it was just a beautiful sounding nonsense. I was introduced to some novels that I love to this day and others that I hated instantly. I learned quite quickly that if I didn’t like a novel within a couple of pages, then I might as well give up there and then. We were never going anywhere, book and I.

And then I was introduced to poetry. We have a chequered history, poetry and I. It makes me feel stupid when I don’t understand it and soulless when I don’t enjoy it. Sometimes I only have to look at it and my eyes start to swim. Sometimes it takes a language that I understand and contorts it into something that makes as much sense to me as Swahili. I have discovered, however, as I get older, that there are poets and poems that I love and, I am always open to discovering more. I have read new poetry on this platform and been both moved and amused by it. I have been sneaking an odd poem or two of my own into this blog, as something of an added extra (like a boil on the end of your nose when you’ve already got the flu) and this is just another one.

I think that some people enjoy them – and that really takes some understanding…

An Appreciation of Poetry
The gilded art of polished phrase
That punctuated schoolboy days
Where words of love and joy and rage
Lay lifeless on each dog-eared page

Majestic lines so flatly read
Drummed into every schoolboy head
And arch displays of erudition
Locked in brains by repetition

Where verses raised in cool élan
Are lost to empty rhyme and scan
Forget the words, but keep instead
The rhythm sounding in your head

Observe the faithful paradigm
The rumty-tum of metred rhyme
That void of all emotion drips
Unthinkingly from idle lips

And then recall a line or two
Of the poem writ by you-know-who
That told a tale of daffodils
And wand’ring over lonely hills

Who said we should Stop All the Clocks?
And what on earth are Jabberwocks?
Why do I smile when I stumble upon
A Subaltern’s love for J. Hunter Dunn?

‘Come [something] bombs and fall on Slough’
(I must recall that word somehow)
And memorise a verse from Pope
Now… who had feathers – was it Hope?

Envoi:

Though I know the lines and it sounds absurd
All I ever learned was a string of words.
My mind is full of couplets I can only half recall,
Which maybe makes them monoplets – if they’re anything at all.

P.S. ‘Hope’ (by Emily Dickinson) is the thing with feathers.

The Haphazardly Poetical – Superman

The Haphazardly Poetical – Flower

The Haphazardly Poetical – ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas