It Wasn’t Meant to Snow that Night

It wasn’t meant to snow that night –

but it did;

and what remains is dim, vague, distinctive

as a pocket-full of snow.

Four characters, two pairs: her, you,

Him, I: each at our own points of exquisite crisis

Each feeling the violent edge of beauty, fancy

Meeting Fate’s appointment like that,

In the night-light of a remote Icelandic refuge hut

For July snow.

Except for the absent moon, it was like a story:

There was trade and exchange

of dreams, anecdotes, feelings;

traveller’s stories and impressions,

the pushing and poking about of

words like ‘nature’ and ‘paradise’

and discussion of what a country is and

what it could be.

Poems were recited, songs sung

Whisky poured, eyes stung

I thought I saw him cry

In the middle of Halldór Laxness

And I wanted to lick the tear from his cheek.

Suddenly the glacier cracked.

And a riffle of dirty ice appeared,

Verse sucked up the smoke from my cigarette

And alighted upon the lips of a white promise.

I heard him say from outside:

Her? She’s just a hick,

came in with the fog from the sea

A changeling, a woman-child –

She means naught to me.

Let the lie ring out until you don’t believe it

Allow me to complicate your mastery.

Grind up lava with ice

Blast together rose-red and black rock

Let tephra ring out against the proud mountainside

And Hildebraught gyrate like a Japanese sea.

Unreal one, re-mystify me:

engage with paradox, this elemental entropy

and how much realer the dream

can be than money, power and your brain;

that strange and solitary dancer.

Sin again. Let the wind singe again,

Change its course, overturn this mini ice-age

What our ancestors whispered about

The coming of winter in the long-awaited spring.

Ache with lust in the temporary snow,

Where the drift, paddle-footed as hounds feet

is the very flag to his song and the

welter of blood in my vomit is like a hand waving at me

Saying do what you want but don’t think twice,

Life is just a dream.

 

Because nothing cuts like the ice.

July 2015

The Wall: A Prose-Poem

Our currency is buried in soil. Rock cleaved to the ground. Our hands pick through striated, warm earth; crusts of rock, the soft clumps of moss and saxifrage, root and earth. Behind us, the crystal tinkling of the brook, ahead the mountain top, striped black and blue, lashed with snow.

We dig for rocky ore in the muck. Our hands are maws: pink, worm-like, blind. They pause to consider a piece of white antler or horn. Horn, wood and bone are all as one here; ebbed down by permafrost and howling winds, cast in fragment-like desolation against the stark, strange mountainside. Behind us, the wall is a beading jaw. We lever and ply rocks out of soft molasses-black ground. Orthodontists popping out teeth. Then we place them into the uneven crown of the wall.

It’s an edifice both fragile and strong: a primitive feat of engineering, a golden cow, a temple, replacing a pig-sty long gone. It’s only time that makes the hazard of rock piled on rock become the certainty of a wall.

Feet up in the Old Farmhouse: A Memory

I was resting in the farmhouse after a hard day’s work on the wall. I had just finished baking a chocolate cake for the group. I was tired but my head was buried in a book: in Carson’s book. Suddenly a line ‘like peacocks stepping into the kitchen of God’, sparked-off a memory that was so luminous that I quickly went to write it down. The memory concerns an evening in Suffolk, where I had been on summer holiday with a school friend. We were returning by foot to her cottage after an evening of good company, by a long, old track by the sea. The night was delicious, spiked with gorse and stars, wild and fragrant. It was cold but we had plenty of layers on. It felt like life had never been so good. 

A Memory: The walk back from Southwold to Walberswick at night.

It was a hard cold winter night. The stars were hard as flint, the air was smoke-fired, full of burnt wood and drifting fog. Because of the darkness and the brightness of the stars, the sky felt like a magnificent tent above our heads.

In was a fen landscape, a water world sliced through by river estuaries, bogs and shallow lakes; filled with glossy moraines. River and canal boats lilted in the tidal waters. I could smell the sea, and hear the silence that sleepy night-filled birds leave behind them.

It was the end of the summer – the promise of autumn awaited. We were at the tremulous edge of something. The hip-flask passed between pinking cold fingertips.

We carried on walking along the flat salt-marsh, past silhouettes of low scrubby trees cowed against hedgerows and dry stone walls. Fields without cattle. I remember the sensation of feeling at that moment that apart from us, no one else existed in the entire universe. I remember the fuzzy orange tips of cigarettes and the sound of three pairs of feet grinding lightly into the night. Go softly, tread softly.

Adolescence. Alcohol fumes, whisky sluicing down the throat and warming the stomach. Good friends. Sex: pale lambent as a bonfire. That summer was a beginning and an ending. The end of innocence and a leap towards adulthood or a new kind of life. But still the sensation of invincibility and security of knowing that nothing could touch the utterly beautiful pact of faith that existed between her and I, was a kind of bridge vaulting me towards the sky and the glittering stars themselves.

Erik the Green

Erikshuis. An inheritance,

weighed out in banana leaves and bark.

The mad offspring of one man’s dream. 

A funeral bequest: a bouquet of paintings,

the paddled folds of linen curtains,

home-spun, hard won.

And what about the neighbours?

Can you measure love in churches?

In the gradient of a single block of

Marble? You talk about inheritance –

this garden is an inheritance of winter-dreams,

of passion flowers and rhododendrons –

it is an inheritance of leaves.

So what about the botanics of time?

The biology of age?

The way some people grow stronger

And more beautiful with years like trees?

What about the angelica or the hellebores?

Forever green – full of hope for Swedish summers.

There is hardship in this shuttling

Between sun and ice and rain.

But to love through it all and create,

Create an inheritance,

Plastered and weighed

in baking trays and the tender husbandry

Of flower and leaf?

Once-silent valley,

Even the paper boy adored you.

You were one man’s dream.

A labour and a vision of love:

To grow bananas: sexy, yellow, strange,

in a land of searing brightness

and enduring cold.

Erik, not Red Erik

but Erik the Green.

Wales: Making a Decision

The Train from Aberystwyth to Wolverhampton, 19.30

I think that I have been travelling today almost non-stop for seven hours. Now I face another seven hours back. I have been curling and snaking along rail tracks – a passage eased by drizzling rain and a sky smeared with green mist. I have bypassed a border into Wales, leaving a landscape crisscrossed by electricity pylons and half-empty canals behind me; it was the post-industrial landscape of the English Midlands. Now I have entered another kind of geography, what the property agent I met in Aberystwyth described as an accredited Unesco ‘Biosphere’ region.  I do not know exactly what Unesco means by ‘biosphere’ in this context – but I understand the urge to protect this area; to delimit it as somehow special, and to attempt to give it a label. That’s because there is a quality about the stretch of coastline scrolling along the edge of the Irish Sea with its backdrop of low mountain summits that is very unique indeed. It is special: a ‘sphere’ or aura of beauty clings to it. Do you know how to say ‘beauty’ in Welsh? I read the word on the right hand side of a bilingual Boots pharmacy. It’s Hardffych.

There is something ‘hard’ about beauty. It is difficult to resist. And so, in a word, has it all been. It is difficult to resist the prospect of living in this area, difficult to resist the prospect of that cosy two-bedroom apartment high in the loft of a former Victorian holiday guesthouse with bay windows overlooking the sea. As I stood on the Aberystwyth town pier I watched a vast congress of migratory birds swirling about in the twilit sky. There were like a swarm of black bees: contracting, expanding and bending into the most incredible shapes imaginable. At one point the cluster of house martins split off into two scintillating black blobs that flattened into hemispheres and turned about each other in perfect disc-shaped formations like two rings spinning about on an invisible axis that only they could see.  Behind them the lights of the Aberystywth  pier arcade winked at me. The horizon line stained pastel blue into pink. It was sundown.

It is also the existence of the nearby Barmouth sea estuary that has turned this area into a famous beauty spot. The estuary – a mighty sea-limb creeping inland – is so glorious a natural landmark that it has inspired the imagination of great writers like Sebald, who normally tread in far different climes. Since that momentous spring cycling trip last year I felt an urge, almost incomparable to what I felt anywhere else, to rest here. It was more than tranquillity that drew me to the environs of Barmouth Bay or the North Sea Estuary, so wild and troublesome to locals. It could have been the lure of distant mountains or the words of that kind English camper we met by Snowdon, speaking of the nearby Mt Cader Idris as one of the last real wildernesses left in the UK, but I think it was the beauty of the estuary itself – so savage and undefinable, yet so serene and peaceful. There were moments cycling beside it that I felt I wanted to spend all the years of my life  living beside it. Never in my life before – except perhaps in one part of the Annapurnas, have I seen nature express itself so harmoniously, formally, so well in each part. It was the vastness and profundity of nature I experienced there that struck me – that took my breath away.

Now it is dark and the apparitions of that late afternoon are shielded from my sight – rebuffed by the strange reflection of train windows.

I can only see myself.

A number of huge decisions rest on me now – their implications are so numerous and impossible to guess at that I feel that I am looking out to sea. I am a bubble, light as air, exhilarated, scared.

Underlying it all, I realise, underlying all the logistical and formal cause and effect relationships – the dilemma is a humorously human one. Love. It is strange to think, but also somehow inevitable, that the tallest mountain I must cross before I can decide the shape of the next three years is a romantic one. It is a mountain that has grown – for mountains grow – almost without me seeing it or meaning it to. Our defences erode like coastline – it is part of the universal human condition. The broken, tattered membrane of my heart, so damaged by the despoliation of last year was healed. Now things are once more unravelling, and I have to ask myself whether I arrived in Ghent with a broken heart and will also leave with one.

Love is also a responsibility. I realise that now. The one who is immune to the repsonisbility that life bears, must also be immune to love. To love is to bequeath, to ‘troth’, and that is an exchange. The responsibility of someone else’s heart is actually one of the most profound responsibilities human nature can know.

I know a very difficult and sad conversation must come – but funnily enough, my lack of battery charger is preventing this. Are the gods laughing at me? I must ask him. If the answer is no then I will go to Iceland, and disappear once more across another sea.

Love has taken away my eyes

Love has taken away my eyes. Now all I’ve got is ears.

It all feels familiar and strange: the centre of this small city that I know so well. Each cobbled street, each walkway, each bridge. I know the way that the light falls on different spots of the Grasslei cafés at different times of the day – and where you can sit to enjoy the last full sunshine in Ghent. By now, even the voices of the boat tour guides are familiar to me. Their white pleasure craft slip through Prinsenhof diurnally for matins and vesper services. I feel that I live in a city that has become pure metaphor ; a rich landscape of abstract qualities: textures, sounds, interplays of light. It reminds me of how Freud used the city as a metaphor for the mind. Its intricacies are neural, its landmarks are mental signposts – areas of accumulated power and resistance. I see space here now, more abstractly. Familiarity has given way to understanding, understanding to imagination.

It changes every time I do. The whole city is a mood ring: I feel, it sighs; I love, it loves. Now everything is bright and recrudescent. Spring has come. The light is mellow and muffled. The glassy Leie rustles her silvered skirts, ever-winking, ever-moving. The white-beaked moorhen rocks back and forth and bustles about in the water searching for fragments of food. The walkers strolling across St Michael’s bridge appear and disappear behind the wood-timbered meat market.

Love can change everything. Who said it was like walking on air? I know what they mean. There is a lightness. Your whole body is affected; your understanding of weight and time is affected.  Your awareness of place is affected. Even the bricks and cobblestones feels saturated with him. I feel like I’ve jumped in a rocket and got off in a strange and unknown planet where things are pale and soft. It’s like those sketches that Botticelli made of Paradise. Zero-gravity. Fleecy and soft as cotton buds. A kind of harmony and restfulness pervades everything. A transformation has taken place. The world feels different. A concertina lines every footstep, and a kiss is the natural point of contact: a mooring.

The Guitarist

What stops people on the street? What arrests them more than the cold or the creaky plastic slip of their gloves? What stops the shoppers on their forward march or the families rushing to get home?

Not much. Not love, nor money, nor charity workers. But Lukas can.

I’ve seen him perform magic. Groups gathering around in silent clusters like church worshippers; old men in smart suits and flat-caps pausing for a silent ovation; elegant ladies throwing a condescending coin into his propitious guitar-case. He does not collect money – he collects letters and gold – tokens of love. What did Max say? Great art is the transparency of self.* It is about communication: the communication of the inner world; the projection of it and the willing absorption of it by another. So great art has the same structure as love.

And he is not even technically a guitarist – he is a guitarist with piano-playing hands. So what is it about it his playing that is so undeniably beautiful? It is him. It is the transparency of self. It is not the music that is beautiful, but Lukas.

These are the compliments that a lover bestows. I realise that; yet through Lukas I am learning and discovering something about art more truthful than anything I discovered in years of reading in libraries. Art should be affective. Affect and effect; they are connected. Beauty. The long phrase. Making people happy. Because Lukas’s musical achievement is one of communication: the spiralling coin signifies contact. Playing on the streets completes him because it is a way of talking to the people around him. His playing is an act of love, an act of social grace, as Auden might say, ‘a mouth’.

*For an opposing view please see my discussion in “The Swing Guitarist”

The Magpie

Lonely and wild, the magpie flies —

Scudding past clouds

And under boughs of trees.

He settles on a branch or fence post

Then dives —

And the taffeta ties

Of his silken body glide

And pull down the curtain of the sky.

Whither do you fly little magpie?

Where do you go and why?

A glancing feather;

The wink of an eye

Then his flight become incendiary:

and fire-lit, explodes into the sky.

March 2015

A Note on Tronies

I discovered a new word last week – it’s an art-historical term, but one which is actually very applicable to modern-day life: it is the phenomenon of the tronie. A tronie is a recording of a silly facial expression. These days, of course,  many people record these on their iphones as ‘selfies’ , post them on Instagram or even message-dissolve them to each other on snap-chat. But three-hundred years ago Rembrandt recorded them on velum, oak panels and copper plates.

What made Rembrandt the king of the tronie? And why did he do them? In The Power of Art Schama writes that Rembrandt was one of the most honest artist auto-biographers of all time and that he recorded observations of himself with more penetration of insight and honesty than any other Protestant painter of the period. We see this detached and curious observation of his own external morphology and the changes that took place over time, in the astonishingly long catalogue raisonée of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. From a swarthy young man, through a precious middle period and on to brow-beaten middle age, Rembrandt appears to us in all the forms he took in his life. Perhaps this meticulous self-documentary explains why Rembrandt has always appealed with such force and strength to art historians and biographers: he gives us such a clear sense of himself.

Of course he didn’t draw the line with self-portraiture. The same morbid curiosity for realism that would find him eventually painting a dissection scene, applied to all those to whom he was close to – especially his young wife Saskia. His impressionistic, beautifully-articulated love affair with the human face finds its highest expressions in some of his graphic nocturnes – portraits he sketched of his wife while she slept. There she is: Saskia, asleep in her bed-box with her face nestled against a plump goose-down cushion. In these drawings, she appears to us with such vivacity and realism – with her upturned, pinched nose and fat cheeks, that for me, this album is a universal expression of the tenderness we exercise towards those whom we love while they sleep.

Anyway, enough Saskia, enough Rembrandt – that is all stuff for the next story. Now I speak of tronies because the mercurial, silly, importunate expressions that Rembrandt records drolly, whimsically, perhaps in a bored or flippant mood, remind me strongly of Lukas – that is, of the Magpie. The Alexandrine-blue eyes, fair hair, wobbly nose – there something about Lukas

which is highly reminiscent of the famous Dutch Golden Era artist.

Moon River

Riding on the edge of a D – full-toned and eloquent, that dips like a sad stream, then blossoms out again into a fan of music. Two drifters off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see. I am full of pity for every other love but this one: what an archetype, what a loaded vase of roses.

Clarity. Arising out of a love-cloud and limb-tangle. The softness of arms brushing, the kisses trapped in teeth. And every sight and sound is mauve and melts into minor chords and suspended half-tones. Everything is the sixth note in the scale or the f# in a c major: secret, suggestive, lingering. And every glistening slate roof tile and red brick glimpsed through my window is another ‘I love you’. Did you know about the etymology of ‘window’? It comes from the Old Norse ‘vindauga’ meaning ‘wind eye’. You can imagine those poor old norse villagers huddled behind clay walls, looking out with terror-filled eyes at the blusterous winds outside.  My eye searches beyond the limit of the bedroom: where the amber street lights fraternise with the cold night air and the night has become so mulberry, I could squash it. The moon is reflected in the river.

Love. Love and purity of heart. The suspended ‘I love you’ rocks the room and fixes everything into a permanent sweetness that can only find metaphors in treats like pralines and smoked teas and cheesy omelettes and the gifting of everything that is beautiful because it is an extension of the love and holds everything together and makes it all cognate.

Erebus, drag me not away from the bedroom, the river room, into the world of dreams. I wish to stay a while in this partial eclipse of soul and body; on the ebbing, bleeding edge of passion. Feeling, for a moment, before I am dragged away from it forever,

This sweetness outside time.