Shamelessly Repeated Michael Donaghy Anec(yawn)dote

I am in Ireland, dossing around, and will resume posting properly on Monday. In the meantime though, further thoughts on Micheal Donaghy, who would appear to be going through an Elvis impersonator phase in the above picture.

Something Understood

I hear you
listen.

My Philosophy of Life

Everyone should have a philosophy of life, and this is mine. It is based on thinking about doing something then not doing it, for no reason. I have a brilliant idea for a novel, so I don’t write it. Someone is attractive and intelligent, and I think: how nice it would be to sleep with that person, and then I think: no it wouldn’t, I would hate that. I think: I should live somewhere I like, not where I do, and then I think: no I shouldn’t, I should stay where I am, not because it gives me pleasure but just because. I’m here now and why change that. I reject the human will, in other words, but in a way that aims to exclude any sense of sacrifice or self-denial. The flipside of this philosophy is that when you (which is to say I) actually do something it can’t be because you wanted to, but because it happened when you weren’t looking, behind your back, or that’s what you have to tell yourself. In this way your life can become one long glorious empty accident. And this is my philosophy of life.

St Catherine of Siena

Catherine never saw
without wanting to kiss

a leper’s sore,
she whose flesh

throve on something
so like fresh air

(body of Christ),
any more

was already as much
as she could bear.

To the pure in heart
all is pure.

We are not ourselves.
We are His vessels.

The dead saint’s head
the faithful sever

turns to a bagful
of rose petals.

I the leper am healed
of my evil.

Now heal me as fast
of your cure.

St Lucy

Accept the gouged-out
orbs Lucy

proffers, glassily
facing you down.

Nothing to see here,
say the empty sockets

already passing on.
Shrinking horrorstruck

from your gaze
there was nowhere to look

but into your eyes.

Oblivia (cont.)

The faded tattoos of the old
native man in the market,

the scratch-mark filigree
of lines round his wife’s eyes.

I am lingering in the bookshop
over A Short History
of the Flags of Landlocked Nations

and Travels with a Capybara,
a volume of humorous verse

by the celebrated author
of The Capybara and I.

The loose-hanging bandanna
round the neck of a young campesino,

the fly swatted away
by a secret policeman
watching me from across the street.

My last appearance
in The Oblivian Monthly Review,

an ode to the motorcycle side-car,
has generated a lively correspondence:

‘Your upstart bard, besotted
with the Judaeo-Masonic
dross of a decadent Europe...’

Death to comma-shirking
free-verse Bolshevist
enemies of the people!

The pompom rear ends
of a clutch of alpacas prancing
down the street,

a mouse tail’s spaghetti
vanishing between the teeth
of the bookshop cat.

Swat!, goes the policeman’s
paper, rattling his coffee cup

and sending the fly out
dawdlingly through
the nearest dirty window.

Chronicles of Oblivia, pt 1

Rodent-infested altiplanos
of the commonweal,
monotonous and breath-taking!

The keels of our warships
lick at their salt-basins
and tomorrow, we say, the Pacific
will wash the dirt from our feet.

I naturalize the word
enclaustramiento in English,
the straitjacket of the open
plains and no horizon in sight.

O patria mia:
for proof of agreeableness
see national anthem, stanzas
one through four and six through eight.

O patria mia:
bought and sold for the price
of a few copper mines
and Indian trinkets,

a retired maestro
of our border skirmishes
wiping the blood
from his moustache

this fine morning
over a madeleine
in the Café Excrucior.

The ten réis coin
he presses into the waiter’s hand
is adorned with the national flatfish,

goggle-eyed and delicious.
Where there is salt is no water
and where there is water no salt.

The tide’s roar rises
to deafening on my ear-drum
but my boots stay dry.

Here's Looking at You

after Henri Michaux

Those who see me coming.
Me too, I’m onto them.
One day the cold will speak.
The cold will push the door open on Nothing.
And then, my hearties? What then?
Backsides to the wind, still swaggering,
bloated with others’ voices and the lungs of the age,
I see the whole pack of you under one cover.
Hard at work? The palm tree shakes its arms.

And you combatants, soldiers of good heart, sold and unpaid.
Your glorious cause is beneath you. It’ll be cold
in history’s corridors.
How cold it is!
I see you be-aproned, and oh what a sight!
I see Christ too, and why not?
As he was two millennia back.
His beauty fading already.
His face gnawed by the kisses of Christians to come.
So are we still on for selling those seats in heaven?
I’m off then all, goodbye, my foot’s on the escalator already.
Slán!

Brueghel's Proverbs

Before roasting a fart first you must catch it.
The deaf man applauds the hurdy-gurdy too.
If the sheep-fancier spurns your sheep
his heart is elsewhere. Where there is heart
there is pancreas. No one hates an idiot
like the village’s second stupidest man.
It is quicker to beat your husband than walk
to the next town and write him a letter. Envy
the bathing sow on the day it rains dung.
The bishop shuts his mouth and sits on it.
The gangrenous leg knows good hacksaw work
when it feels it. The rattrap feels it ought
to apologise for the baker’s mouldy cheese.
When your pigs fly they’re not coming back.
Two can shit through the same hole as cheaply as one.
The wooden spoon does not match the shape
of your backside for nothing. The condemned man’s
vomit has a lucky escape. The hangman combs
his hair before putting his hood on. The gravedigger
will not be taking out ads. The old buffoon
has always got some proverb or other to hand.

Parachute Knickers

Q: Can I ask, did you paint your legs in the war?
Joyce Hewick: Yes.
Q: I thought so, go on tell me what with.
JH: Oxo or tea.
Muriel Berzins: Gravy browning with a pencil line up the back, you’d stand on the table and a girl would put a pencil line down your leg.
Q: Did you ever (sic) any parachute silk knickers or anything?
JH: Oh yes, yellow they were, bright yellow.
Q: How did you get hold of the parachute silk?
JH: Oh, I’d better not say.

Found in Time on My Hands: Memories of Hedon.

Hall of Mirrors

The closer I get to myself the more I shrink.
You loom larger and larger walking away.

Leporine Lore, Loping and Lolloping

The hare, call him scotart,
big-fellow, bouchart,
the O'Hare, the jumper,
the rascal, the racer.
The wimount, the messer,
the skidaddler, the nibbler,
the ill-met, the slabber...

(from Seamus Heaney’s version of the Middle English poem, ‘The Names of the Hare’)

Myles na gCopaleen once suggested that a Tomb of the Unknown Gurrier could be erected on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, and watching the flatlands of the Humber estuary flash past from a train window the other day I thought of the equal desirability of a Tomb of the Unknown Giorria (giorria = Irish for hare). There they were, in white-arsed profusion, loping and lolloping round the fields, even if I didn’t quite get to see any boxing (above fine photo of which found here).

Peter Didsbury once told me of his desire to edit an anthology of poems about hares. He was describing his hare fixation to someone in Sweden once, when a hare stepped out in front of him, in the snow on the city street. Didsbury readers will remember the reference to Cowper’s hares (Tiney, Puss and Bess) in ‘Eikon Basilike’, while ‘Hare’s Run’ (also from The Classical Farm) collates some toothsome leporine lore: ‘Hare ran on mountain, /disclosed the boundless accidental /graces of his running.’

In between gazing out the train window I was reading R.F. Langley’s (highly recommended) Journals, in which I find the following:

Hares play. They leap up. Leaping up in the essence of opening. ‘Open’ and ‘up’ are the same word. Intuition is a hare. It brings its transformations, making the rationally impossible happen, startling in its appearance. John Layard said so. These did seem large, ready to unleash themselves if it seemed to them the thing to do, touched up bravely with black and white, and truly remarkable for length of back leg. They are supposed to enjoy being hunted, even if there could scarcely be a more obvious piece of wishful thinking. These were flaunting themselves while pretending not to see us, as the four of us walked up the middle of the field, talking.

{Ends}

And then ponder Yeats’s ‘Memory’, with its serendipitous exploitation of the fact that a hare’s lair is called a form:

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

But why ‘cannot but’? It would be understandable if the grass couldn’t keep these transient forms, but the fact that it does somehow makes ‘charm’ and ‘face’ all the more poignant, in a very Yeatsian way.

I for one would stump up cash in advance for an anthology of poems about hares. And how better to pay it for than in Yeatsian Free State Irish thrupenny bits, like these:

Why It's Not Called Prose in Motion

I Lost My Frog

Gallery crowd

Goanna Dreaming

The Antarctic Poetry School

Historically, the absence
of even one writer

has been the least
of the Antarctic School’s worries.

Is its hallmark cool tone
sustainable in today’s climate?

I suspect not, though
the Old Antarctic

for ‘burning zeal’ is ‘thin ice,
beware’ and ‘splash, ha ha’.

Most traditional verse forms
are too complex to have been ever attempted.

Prizes are often awarded
but their recipients seldom informed.

Resentment of the more glamorous
South Georgia School runs high.

Poems break off daily and float
in the general direction of Chile.

Solitaries are demagogues
and demagogues solitaries.

Annual poetry sales, it must
be said, never dip, not a unit.

Penguins are rarely mentioned
for fear of obviousness

though the albatross, where encountered,
is a symbol for penguins,

and the elephant seal
a symbol for the albatross.

The local note
is especially prized

on condition
that nobody strike it.

Another glacier
suicide

goes off to the most
wonderful splash.

Do you have this typeface
in white, please?

There is, between all
local dialects,

one word for snow
and that word is ‘snow’.

Typically Negative Benitez (4-0) Subs Torres (4-0) for a Defender (4-0)

Six Steps to a United Ireland with RIRA/Ruaille Buaille

1. Targeting of pizza delivery boys undermines confidence in convenience food industry.

2. Collapse triggered in pizzeria-servicing Unionist-dominated farming sector.

3. Enfeeblement and starvation of population.

4. Food riots, anarchy, collapse of law and order.

5. Dissident republicans enter power vacuum.

6. United Ireland established

Derek Mahon at Morden Tower

Image found here.

A Memory of Michael Donaghy

Readers of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man may recall a long and rambling joke about a theological debate between the Pope and the chief Rabbi, which ends with the Pope believing he has routed the Rabbi by showing him some bread and wine as a sign of Christ’s forgiveness, while in the other corner the Rabbi explains ‘Then we broke for lunch’. I first heard this joke, and maybe Zadie Smith did too, from Michael Donaghy. The occasion, for me, was after a reading he gave with Roy Fisher in Jean Hartley’s back garden in Victoria Avenue, Hull, in July 2004. In another back garden, Angela Leighton’s this time, Michael explained to me that he had been taken ill recently in the States, and had had his gall bladder removed. Within two months, he died suddenly.

He’d been coming to Hull quite a bit, since I moved here in 2000. The first time I heard him read, before we’d actually met, he explained to the audience that one of the advantages of reciting his work from memory was that no one noticed when he made a mistake – except you David, he added, pointing at me. I’d recently mentioned in a review of Conjure that the Latin at the end of ‘Quease’ (‘Absolvum te’) was wrong. The next time we met he told me he’d changed the line, and showed it to me in the new edition of the book. I seem to remember him having replaced the Latin altogether, but looking the poem up in his just-out Collected Poems I see the phrase now reads ‘Absolvum te [sic].

The jumper outdoors MD is wearing above was borrowed on the day from John Osborne, I believe.

And as I was typing this The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions came through the letter box, a book I’m pleased to see contains MD’s interview with Conor O’Callaghan, first published in Metre in 1997. Given my now well-established role monkeying around on the margins on MD’s texts, I remember puzzling over an extract from this interview we had selected to go on the back of the mag. Charles Olson was a ‘virtuous typist’? How exactly? The word, as I realized just in time, was ‘virtuoso’.

The one signed MD book I have is my copy of Conjure from that first meeting. MD inscribed it ‘Ego te Absolvo!’

Damask-Scene Conversion

Who buys old issues of literary magazines in second-hand shops, I wonder. Myself excepted, that is. That distinctive savour of the compost heap or potting shed drew me irresistibly to a copy of The Dublin Magazine (Autumn/Winter 1966) the other day, as edited by the euphoniously named Rivers Carew. How pleasing, though, to come across not just the first printing of the Mahon poems ‘Exit Molloy’ and ‘Preface to a Love Poem’ (‘This is a way of airing my distraught /Love of your silence. You are the soul of silence’), two uncollected poems by Anthony Glavin and, in among four other poems of his, a Longley inédit, ‘The Centaurs’:

The sergeant, an arrow in his back,
Who crawled, bleeding, up the dusty street,
Who gasped his news of the failed attack,
How on all fours he made his retreat – ...

And then to find, too, an uncollected essay by Eavan Boland titled ‘The Attributes We Seek’ reprimanding Edna Longley’s dismissal of Thomas Kinsella in the previous issue. Boland demurs at Longley’s pejorative characterisation of Kinsella’s imagination as ‘heraldic’, and this being before what I might ill-advisedly call her ‘damask-scene’ conversion to Dundrum feminism, her critical language frets in the shadow of what I presume was the TCD style of the day, i.e. something resembling an Addison editorial, all the way down to the ‘We’ of her title and the heavy hand of this last comma: ‘Once surprise is traduced, and wonder is exchanged for a sort of weary prediction, then those bearings by which each man’s achievement is valued, become illegible.’

Seeing Mahon’s ‘Preface to a Love Poem’ again though reminded me of Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence, and a letter she quotes on the subject of silence from her friend Janet Batsleer:

Silence is the place of death, of nothingness. In fact there is no silence without speech. There is no silence without the act of silencing, some one having been shut up, put bang to rights, gagged, told to hold their tongue, had their tongue cut out, had the cat get their tongue, lost their voice. Silence is oppression and speech, language, spoken or written, is freedom. (...)

All the social movements of oppressed people in the second part of the twentieth century have claimed ‘coming to language’ and ‘coming to voice’ as necessary to their politics... In the beginning was the Word... Silence is oppression. It is ‘the word’ that is the beginning of freedom. All silence is waiting to be broken.

{Ends}

Which is, I have to say, the biggest pile of tripe I’ve read since the last biggest pile of tripe I’ve read. To restore silence is the role of objects, said Molloy. Literature is the word that speaks and stays silent. Whereof man cannot speak, the silence thereof one noisily celebrates.

Janet Batsleer obviously isn’t one of those people who read back issues of literary magazines, in other words (I mean, you should see the rest of the issue of the Dublin Magazine I’m talking about here). Now there are cloisters whose calm will not be violated any time soon. Or as Michael Longley says of the weasel and the ferret elsewhere in my mouldy new purchase:

I can tell how softly their footsteps go -
Their footsteps borrow silence from the snow.

Random Cumbria

Vera the Lappet-Faced Vulture and Her Walk of Death

Moles on a Barbed-Wire Fence, Near Cowgill, Yorkshire Dales

Cohenism

I don’t often comment on politics, given the unremarkableness of my views thereon, but seeing Nick Cohen give a favourable review to a piece of absolute hokum and horse manure called Liberal Fascism by neocon nobody Jonah Goldberg, I’d like to name a syndrome after him, Cohenism. Goldberg believes that modern liberalism derives not from the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, but from, of all things, fascism. His sum evidence for this fact appears to be one random idiotic remark by H.G. Wells calling for ‘liberal Fascisti, enlightened Nazis’, and a belief that liberals, like Nazis, want to use the state to take over our lives, ergo liberals are Nazis. Cohen’s review of this garbage is here, and a more properly sceptical review is here.

Nick Cohen, I despise you for peddling this garbage. You are a man in denial. You were once on the left, and have now shifted to the right. This is not in itself an unusual phenomenon. You believe you are engaged in some kind of crusade to flush out the Hamas-supporting nutcases who are giving the humane left a bad name. But as your rush of enthusiasm for the slimeball Goldberg demonstrates fairly crudely, to everyone but you, you are doing no such thing. You are simply confirming that your politics are now those of the lumpen Tory right and the Daily Mail, to which paper and its moron readers I suggest you sod off at the earliest opportunity. And given the prevalence of this condition, as anyone still reading British newspapers will know, I thought you might as well give your name to it. Cohenism. You are a disgrace and an embarrassment. I sentence you to a date with Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin as your punishment and cure.

I now revert to my previous slumbering political apathy.

Thought is a Vector

In the course of his memoir, The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands applies his theory of ‘externalism’ to a pet wolf he kept called Brenin. Rowlands believes that mental processes happen not just in the head, but are embedded in our surroundings. Thoughts are a vector, generated not just by the thinker but the object of contemplation too: ‘there are certain thoughts that can emerge only in the space between a wolf and a man.’ Tim Robinson thinks in, with and through the landscapes he describes. Taking his maps, the two volumes of The Stones of Aran, his other essays and fiction, and now this trilogy as one unified whole (and they seem to me to benefit from being read as such), these separate units add up to perhaps the single most impressive writing project undertaken in Ireland in the last several decades.

{Snip}

For my attempt to back this statement up, I refer the curious to a review I have of Tim Robinson’s Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness (and from which I’m quoting here) in the new issue of The Stinging Fly.

A Life Asleep

‘The creature in all the world most to be envied is Patricia Maguire of Chicago. She sleeps since 1931, her stupor lightens briefly at meal times, she is massaged daily, her fanmail is composed mostly of proposals of marriage’ (Beckett to Mary Manning Howe, 18 January 1937).

Man and Hound

Son of a Gun

As I continue to stalk the Far Ings bittern, just across the river from here, I am fascinated to learn from the RSPB site that the UK bittern population is estimated at just 75 nesting pairs. I tramp around the estuary suspecting the bittern is there, and perhaps it is, never showing itself, and think of Schrödinger’s cat in the box, both there and not there, alive and dead at the same time. I think of the Monty Python sketch on the importance of not being seen (no random explosions in Far Ings yet, though I look forward to hearing some booming). I think of ‘An Bonnán Buí’ by that son of a gun Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna (best. poet’s. name. ever.):

A bhonnán bhuí, is é mo léan do luí,
Is do chnámha sínte tar éis do ghrinn,
Is chan easba bidh ach díobháil dí
a d'fhág i do luí thú ar chúl do chinn.
Is measa liom féin ná scrios na Traoi
Tú bheith i do luí ar leaca lom',
Is nach ndearna tú díth ná dolaidh sa tír,
Is nárbh fhearra leat fíon ná uisce poll...

Or in the English of that man who ‘shall not hear the bittern cry’ (after 1916), Thomas MacDonagh:

The yellow bittern that never broke out
In a drinking bout, might as well have drunk;
His bones are thrown on a naked stone
Where he lived alone like a hermit monk.
O yellow bittern! I pity your lot,
Though they say that a sot like myself is curst -
I was sober a while, but I'll drink and be wise
For I fear I should die in the end of thirst.

{Ends}

Far Ings bittern, show yourself.

Or maybe not.

Routine World-Class Win and LIverpool Dare to Dream of Beating Stoke, Hull, Fulham etc

Boniments, chiroplatonic, obstipation, eviration, mumper, polypus, gantelope, sinciput

The bad news, or do I mean good news, is that I can’t possibly respond to Beckett’s letters in fewer than 5000 words or so, an occasion of wordshed that should present itself sooner or later. But in the meantime, some notes. It was Beckett’s Normalien friend Jean Beaufret who coined the phrase ‘black diamonds (of pessimism)’, much beloved of Belacqua, and even a cursory first dip in the bran-pan of the Letters 1929-1940 dredges up coruscating (on thin ice) examples in richly abject abundance:

I met Michael Farrell and he destroyed me with an endless disparaging hyperbole on his own bland suspension between the vulgarities of great talent and the roots in the anus of genius now & then. The little tubercular tot in the cot buttons across its double-brested pilche [for double-breasted pilch], the little cheeks meet on the inside, the accumulated wisdom of the world unites the little lips like a zip fastener, and Mr Farrell is glad he is a doctor.

{Ends}

That would be Michael Farrell, author of Thy Tears Might Cease.

Or this, like the last addressed to MacGreevy, McGreevy rather (the a had yet to exfoliate), on Cézanne:

What a relief the Mont Ste. Victoire after all the anthropomorphised landscape – van Goyen, Avercamp, the Ruysdaels, Hobbema, even Claude, Wilson & Crome Yellow Esq., or paranthropomorphised by Watteau so that the Débarquement seems an illustration of ‘poursuivre ta pente pourvu qu’elle soit en montant’, or hyperanthropomorphised by Rubens – Tellus in record travail, or castrated by Corot; after all the landscape ‘promoted’ to the emotions of the hiker, postulated as concerned with the hiker (what an impertinence, worse than Aesop & the animals), alive the way a lap or a fist (Rosa) is alive.

{Ends}

Baby anthrax, chancres or fistulae, few are the epidermal ailments unknown to Belacqua or the young Beckett, and as that last example will have reminded you few are the early letters not pock-marked or at least pebble-dashed with a sprinkling of Gallicisms, a German, Italian, Latin or some other sanies of loutish learning (‘boniments, chiroplatonic, obstipation, eviration, mumper, polypus, gantelope, sinciput...’, protests John Walsh in The Independent.)

And then there are back passages, always with the back passages, Beckett’s long hard days at the orifice. Would Michael Roberts ‘care to a appoint a time do you think for me to bend over. Poets bottoms’ are so very much the same’ (Roberts had sent George Reavey a somewhat baffled response to Beckett’s poetry). Jacob Bronowski is ‘using three turds from my central laboratory’ in The European Caravan. SB must try & arrange ‘a proper booze before I return [to Dublin] – like a constipated Eurydice to the shades of shit.’ His critical intelligence is ‘blafard, gritty lilke the Civic Guard’s anus’ (compare the unfinished joke in Godot about the Englishman in the brothel who asks for a boy, to which the madam replies, ‘I’m getting a policeman’; ‘Oh no, please, they’re too gritty’). His poems are ‘carmina quae legunt cacantes’, songs to be read at stool. But it’s not all backsides, as the spermatic obsession bobs up too with the regularity of a haunted damp patch. Two poems ‘came together one on top of the other, a double-yoked orgasm in months of aspermatic nights & days’, Perugino’s Christ is ‘a lovely cheery Xist full of sperm’, and in the simply marvellous letter of 18 October 1932 to McGreevy, ‘I’m in mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.’

Now then, in some pretence at factuality, some new things we learn about Beckett’s poems, as it is very much Beckett the poet who effectively dominates this volume.

Some cancelled lines from ‘Serena III’, as originally sent to McGreevy:

on Misery Hill brand-new pale livid
oh a most ferocious West African baboon’s
swoon on the lil puce
house of prayer

There is also, much later, an alternative ending to ‘Ascension’:

en reçoit-il une colombe
aussi souvent que moi

A reference in a letter to Nuala Costello to ‘your brother the fly’ is, I suppose, a source for the paragraph of ‘Serena I’, with the indomitable apparatus nodding off for once (more on this in a minute).

Equally, the ‘feet in marmalade’ in the same letter can be compared to the ‘heart in marmalade’ of ‘Enueg II’. The phrase comes from a saying of Pelorson’s mother, was it, ‘les pieds en compote’?

The following extract from a George Reavey poem in French (letter of 23 June 1935) might give fresh impetus to any academic woodworm looking around its native research library for a fresh angle on Irish poetry of the 1930s, since Eluardian inflections notwithstanding its affinities with SB’s own imminent French poetry are unmistakable:

Femmes si réelles votre réalité n’est pas sûre
quant à ce qui est des caresses
signes d’adieu d’étoiles mourantes
apposition des mains mésintelligence
des lèvres et des yeux
l’enchaînement de certains moments
et l’inconséquence de la plupart

Speaking of the 1930s, Beckett’s comments on Devlin’s poetry in 1937 might give at least a few sectaries of Irish poetic modernism pause before the next rehash of the Irish MacSpaunday argument: ‘The Bacchanal I find very very bad, the worst kind of Whitman-Kipling-aling piétinement sur place (...) the process is one of working up the perceived, when it is not a screen for the failure to perceive (...) When he gets metaphysical it is awful.’

And speaking of Beckett’s Normalien friends, as I was doing at the start, a small update to the exhaustively exhausting apparatus: Georges Pelorson (b. 1909), later Belmont, after his wrong-way wartime jump, and author of the Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe – died last December.

And still on the apparatus, I naturally gravitated straight to every reference of my native Co. Wicklow, registering a particular thrill at the obsessiveness of Beckett’s ramblings up over Glencullen, Glencree and down into Enniskerry, whose Powerscourt Arms he frequents thirstily, but when a hilarious account of ‘our old bitch’ getting into a ‘profound coït’ (laying rather than lying doggo, in other words) is followed by a trip a ‘dog abortionist on the upper Dargle Road (...) to have her washed out’, and a note informs us that ‘the one vet listed up Dargle Road, Bray’, is Miss Hilda Bisset’, I’m sorry, quiveringly proud Brayman though I am (and my brother John plays or has played in a football team called Werder Braymen), sorry, where was I, but there is also a Dargle Road in Deansgrange, which, being considerably closer to Foxrock than Bray, I’m assuming is the Dargle Road in question.

If right about this I presume the edition will now be recalled and pulped. For which many apologies to all and sundry.

On the Suspicion of Elegy as an Exercise in Displaced Self-Gratification

good grief

Domestic Incident

A giant rabbit has taken to sitting in my front room, ears brushing the ceiling, the lettuce it steals from my fridge tiny and ridiculous in its huge mouth; the red of its eyes some photographic mishap writ large, its leavings in gravelly cairns on the carpet. He and I eye each other awaiting developments, unsure what happens next. Some boy’s birthday party when I was young, I remember, the boy had rabbits, I always wanted a rabbit… ‘And now you’ve got one!’ you tell me and laugh.

Johannes Bobrowski, Bloodrain (my translation)

Primed for flight
overhead,
windblown,
released to the sky,
the blossoms
drown,

fallen
the colour of dust
with spilt water.
Your hair is like grass.

Take my blood-
and water-dividing
breath,

new eyelids
until tomorrow.

The Postman Cometh

Beckett fact no. 95.

Hark, they have arrived. Beckett’s letters that is, minuscule margins, shiny paper and all, the latter adding a certain piquancy to Beckett’s wisecrack to MacGreevy (reproduced therein) about the sheet of glass in front of the Perugino Pietà in the National Gallery, Dublin, ‘so that one is obliged to take cognisance of it progressively, square inch by square inch.’ Before I launch into the book though, ten post-related Beckett texts.

1) ‘The Smeraldina’s Billet-Doux’. A love letter, used in both Dream and More Pricks Than Kicks, from Belacqua’s lovelorn German admirer and final wife, transparently (all too transparently for her family) based on Beckett’s German cousin Peggy Sinclair, who died of tuberculosis in 1933.

2) ‘What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland’, announces the narrator of First Love. Elsewhere he comments on his private parts as ‘nothing to write home about’, prompting Christopher Ricks to wonder under what circumstances exactly one does write home, on a postcard or otherwise, about one’s genitals.

3) Could the young Beckett but have brought himself, in France or Germany, to cross this final frontier of epistolary taboo, his missives would have been delivered to Foxrock by Mr. Shannon, the ‘consumptive postman’ of Watt, forever whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy, or alternatively Mr. Thompson, the aphasic postman of Dream.

4) ‘that time in the Post Office all bustle Christmas bustle in off the street when no one was looking out of the cold and rain’ (That Time). No doubt to join the queue for one of those stamps reproduced above.

5) And what else but the eventual possibility of buying stamps adorned with his creator in that very building can have tipped Neary over the edge and prompted his attack on Cuchulain’s buttocks (elles n’existent pas) in the GPO in Murphy. And then, to compound the embarrassment of his run-in with an Irish policeman, Neary is escorted from the building by Wylie in search of a pick-me-up from their friend ‘Cathleen na Hennessy’ only to learn from Mooney’s clock across the street that the curse of holy hour is upon them. Perhaps you’d like a drink while you’re waiting, sir?

6) The more hardcore stamp-collector is referred to Moran’s half of Molloy, in which the detective pauses admiringly over the Togo one mark carmine and Nyassa 1901 ten reis in his son’s collection, before rumbling the little bleeder’s fiendish scheme to bring originals along on their journey in his duplicates book.

7) Cooper’s numerous telegraphs from London to Neary in Dublin, as he variously finds and loses Murphy, topped in their imaginative use of the word ‘stop’ only by Beckett’s own 1983 telegraph to The Times:

EDITOR THE TIMES NEW PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE GRAYS INN ROAD LONDON/WC1 RESOLUTIONS COLON ZERO STOP PERIOD HOPES COLON ZERO STOP BECKETT

8) ‘The last time I laid eyes on him I was on my way to the Post Office to cash an order for back-pay’, B reads from a witness statement on the patient in Rough for Theatre II. Our witness reports in detail the patient’s fascination with the piece of dogshit between his feet. Then: ‘When two hours later I emerged from the Post Office, having cashed my order, he was at the same place and in the same attitude. I sometimes wonder if he is still alive.’

9) French letters sign off with military formality, do they not. Even when they’re as acid as the letter that opens Beckett’s hoax lecture on Jean Du Chas, ‘Le Concentrisme’: ‘Il ne me reste que d’exprimer tous mes regrets que cette noble aspiration ne se soit pas réalisée, et de vous prier, Monsieur, d’agréer ma sympathie et mon plus profond mépris’.

10) ‘... unfinished game of chess with a correspondent in Tasmania...’ (Rough for Theatre II).

Boll Weevilism

Enterprise, Alabama, has the distinction of being the only town in the world to have erected (in 1919) a monument to an agricultural pest, the boll weevil. The weevil destroyed cotton harvests, encouraging farmers to turn to the more profitable peanut instead. Charley Patton recorded a track called ‘Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues’, whose characteristically ellipsis-riddled lyrics Alice Oswald includes in her anthology The Thunder Mutters:

Sees a little boll weevil keeps movin’ in the, Lordie!
You can plant your cotton and you won't get a half a bale, Lordie
Bo weevil, bo weevil, where's your native home? Lordie
‘A-Louisiana raised in Texas, least is where I was bred and born’, Lordie
Well, I saw the bo weevil, Lord, a-circle, Lord, in the air, Lordie
The next time I seed him, Lord, he had his family there, Lordie
Bo weevil left Texas, Lord, he bid me ‘fare ye well’, Lordie

etc.

‘And he made louse for us and delivered us to boll weevils amain’, as we read in Finnegans Wake.

The concept of erecting a monument to something terrible that has indirectly led to the discovery of something much more pleasant is an attractive one. Richard Dawkins can lead a church-building campaign, the ACLU can erect memorials to Strom Thurmond, Ron Silliman can write paeans to Edwin Arlington Robinson. Boll weevilism: the conscientious attainment of a long-coveted goal only to turn away from it in favour of the more interesting failures and miseries it was meant to have swept away. Wittgenstein was always a dab hand at this, whether kicking the atomistic elegance of the Tractatus in the pants and taking off to rural Austria for a protracted sulk:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

Or at the start of the Philosophical Investigations:

I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.

And then there’s Gottfriend Benn introducing his Collected Works:

So now these collected works are published, one volume, two hundred pages, how paltry, one would have to be ashamed of it if one were still alive. I would be amazed if anyone were to read it; I feel quite remote from them, I throw them over my shoulder like Deucalion and his stones; maybe their distortions will turn into human beings, but whatever happens, I don’t care for them.

Boll weevilism. Success is a parasite on the worm, failure, that feeds and keeps it alive. It worked for Enterprise, Alabama, and Wittgenstein, and can work for you too.

Staff Benda Bilili

Staff Benda Bilili are a group of largely paraplegic street musicians in Congo. Click the top clip for an introduction, the bottom one for a dance number.

Day of the Hrabalment

Starting Czech lessons, as I am and with a relation of Milan Kundera no less!, I am reminded of Evan Rail’s poem ‘Wanderings in Czech’. Evan, as your residual part-co-copyright holder (Tsunami, Metre Editions, 2004), I order you to contact me and nominate your fee for the reproduction of the following:

What does ‘zmrzlina’ mean?
It means ice cream.

What is wrong with this word?
It is neither cold nor sweet.

What does ‘slečno’ mean?
It is used to address a young woman,
like ‘miss’ or ‘mademoiselle’.

What is wrong with this word?
It is ugly.

What does ‘krk’ mean?
It is the word for throat.

What is wrong with this word?
It has no discernible vowel.

[Ends]

Image is of Bohumil Hrabal on some Postřižinské beer bottles, in honour of Evan’s expertise in the field of Czech beer (the beer is named for one of Hrabal’s novels, and is produced in Nymburk, where Hrabal grew up as stepson of the brewery manager.)

Out Now

The first volume of Beckett’s letters is now available, physically extant, OUT. I’m manning my letter box as I type, with drunkenly voluminous updates to follow.

Jean Martin, 1922-2009

Prayer

While I continue to steam out a bad head cold I have at the moment, allow me to divert you with a prayer from Antonin Artaud.

O for skulls of burning coal
singed by lightning from on high,
and you, lucid one, to keep us real
and sanitize us when you stop by.

Deliver us afresh to skies
of within whose chasms fall like showers;
shoot us through with dizzy surprise
where your nails plant their aching fires.

Feed us, give us this day our daily
intersidereal kerfuffle.
With lava of stars for blood, shall I
need anything more for my survival?

Cut us loose. Separate us with
your hands of burning coal that showed
the way to where one dies beyond death,
out there on the burning road.

Make our brains stagger at the heart
of the self-knowing they inter.
Let the ravishing of our minds start
with the claws of the new whirlpool we enter.

Sadly

Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum

While Licinius pursued with his army, the fugitive tyrant retreated, and again occupied the passes of mount Taurus; and there, by erecting parapets and towers, attempted to stop the march of Licinius. But the victorious troops, by an attack made on the right, broke through all obstacles, and Daia at length fled to Tarsus. There, being hard pressed both by sea and land, he despaired of finding any place for refuge; and in the anguish and dismay of his mind, he sought death as the only remedy of those calamities that God had heaped on him. But first he gorged himself with food, and large draughts of wine, as those are wont who believe that they eat and drink for the last time; and so he swallowed poison. However, the force of the poison, repelled by his full stomach, could not immediately operate, but it produced a grievous disease, resembling the pestilence; and his life was prolonged only that his sufferings might be more severe. And now the poison began to rage, and to burn up everything within him, so that he was driven to distraction with the intolerable pain; and during a fit of frenzy, which lasted four days, he gathered handfuls of earth, and greedily devoured it. Having undergone various and excruciating torments, he dashed his forehead against the wall, and his eyes started out of their sockets. And now, become blind, he imagined that he saw God, with His servants arrayed in white robes, sitting in judgment on him. He roared out as men on the rack are wont, and exclaimed that not he, but others, were guilty. In the end, as if he had been racked into confession, he acknowledged his own guilt, and lamentably implored Christ to have mercy upon him. Then, amidst groans, like those of one burnt alive, did he breathe out his guilty soul in the most horrible kind of death.