There’s much to be said for the well-made door. This one, smoked black by time, hangs like
a heavyweight, shuffles through its quarter-turn singing deep of the long years, of the conspiracy
of oak and iron: studs and hinges, chamfered panels, bolts and latch. Speaking too of what
it is to witness, dumb, deaf and blind, the quotidian passage of the unwary child who
swings in passing, left hand yielding to right hand round the circle handle, intimate, even
loving for that moment that she dances out of dimness into brilliant light, every candle in
the hall a celebrant. People turn and smile and turn away and the candles gutter, each
in its turn, sending up a thread of smoke towards the unregarded ceiling high above the
vaulting beams, black with smoke and time. And the door stands ajar, poised in its parabola,
something of the dusk of the outer chamber tainted by the dying light beyond. This until
the old man, remembering the book he left behind, wakes out of dreaming, lifts a burning candle high
and slow, a little circumspect, steps from the waning light into the dark beyond and shuts the door.
June 05, 2013
A second draft of an old poem just rediscovered. Shared with dVerse.
WAKING
Waking to wind and a thin rain anxious at my window, I scan clairvoyant clouds, look for early bearings, a route out of dreaming.
First light wrapped in raindrops and - half heard then gone - the long dream ebbs across stones. Distant traffic mumbles, house-bones crack,
rumours of another nation stirring. Tidal, the postman’s bike comes surfing up my drive. The world slips real fingers through my door.
June 02, 2013
CANCER
It took you half a second to read that single word header. How did it
make you feel? How are you feeling now? The word has instant power and impact,
an immediate resonance and a resounding echo. It evokes more graphically than
virtually any other word in the lexicon of disaster a sense of the extinction
that we all fear most but acknowledge least. Maisie has just looked over my
shoulder at the computer screen. “Cancer?” she queried. “Are you making a poem
about cancer? If you are it would have to be, like, dah-DAH!” Such is the
potency of that short string of letters that even my 7-year-old daughter feels
its heat!
Three years ago I had a prostatectomy. It successfully removed a
moderate cancer. I was told at the time that there was a possibility that some
microscopic cells had been left behind. My latest blood test indicates a slight
but distinct rise in the PSA level and I shall start a month-long course of
radiotherapy in a week. My oncologist has given me an ‘excellent’ prognosis for
the successful elimination of the cells. And in the event of this not
happening, he assures me that the further treatment that I would eventually
need would provide me with ‘many, many, many years ahead’.
And in the news yesterday it was announced that the Archbishop of York
John Sentamu has just had surgery for prostate cancer. Although it hasn’t been
stated, I assume that he has had a prostatectomy and that as a result the
cancer will have been excised. However, the Daily Mirror chose to represent the
announcement as Sentamu commencing a ‘cancer fight’, opening up the stock
terminology that, in their ordering of events, should terminate at some point
with the announcement that ‘John Sentamu has lost his long battle against
cancer’.
From this default media characterisation of cancer in action comes the
public perception. Not from the testimonies of those who are experiencing or
who have experienced cancer, nor from the doctors who are providing treatments
that will hold the cancer in abeyance or who have cured them. Cancer cured or
caught early enough to treat simply doesn’t constitute news.
And neither does its public dismissal do anything for its crucial place
in our existential consciousness as the Great Leveller that will bring down one
in three of us. (Yes, that’s right – you or that vigorous soul just a few steps
behind or ahead of you in the supermarket queue!) In an increasingly secular
age, we need our markers for extinction. We need them so that we might
experience that frisson of vital excitement that immediately precedes our
authentic distress when we are told that someone we know has just been
diagnosed with cancer. (“How awful! But
how much brighter shines my own existence at this moment…”). And we need
them to define and give shape to our small hours terrors. (“If I change my diet – if I stop smoking and I drink less – I shall
sidestep the one-in-three statistic and live forever”).
So until we either return in vast numbers to the comforts of belief in a
divine and benevolent creator or throw in our lot with Sophocles’ Oedipus - Fear? What has a man to do
with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as
we may, from day to day – our need for those
commonplace existential arbiters will prevail and we shall remain in thrall to
them.
No matter how hard I try to sit at peace within each breath and then within the next the push of past the pull of what’s to come conspire and mind and me go spinning off the spot and time and all its tin-can clatter tumbles in and promise of peace to come turns out to be the price I have to pay to start again.
Rosie brings in the last dandelion, carrying it closed in a chalice of hands like
a sacrament. Stock still, she passes a slow thumb around its bright corolla.
It lifts its head. We are charged with its accommodation. It lolls loud, a solo voice
in a wine glass. By morning its royalty is spent. The crown is sweated hair, the stem a bled
vein. Rosie cups its scrap length, lifting it to me on a tear for aid or explanation.
But what can I tell you about time that I would have you know so soon?
May 14, 2013
It's not that age brings childhood back again. Age merely shows what children we remain. GOETHE
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age. SOPHIA LOREN
A woman tells her doctor, 'I've got a bad back.' The doctor says, 'It's old age.' The woman says, 'I want a second opinion.' The doctor says: 'Okay - you're ugly as well.' TOMMY COOPER
We have an excellent lunch with A at Père Michel in Bathurst
Street in Bayswater – G, R and my cousin L, all of us in our 60s, all of us
peering down that narrowing chronological corridor before us with a mixture of
resentment and trepidation. A has negotiated the greater part of the corridor
already: he’s 91 today and he sits beside me, never a tall man, shrunken now
and slow in his movements. But his light blue eyes are bright and the slow burr
of his voice is as clear and penetrating as ever. This meal is his treat and he
takes pleasure in the company of these his friends, who are his family in all
but blood. He lived with my mother, my father and I for most of my life, an
uncle, an older brother, a some-time surrogate parent, and now in great age he
remains my sole surviving older relative.
As
I ride the tube and the train back home, my thoughts keep returning to my own
ageing – to the prospects for one who has managed the first three-score and
then some without really touching the sides, but now has rather less territory
to cover for the remaining part of the journey. The breezy assumption that
mortality was a condition to which others were subject but which was likely to
pass me by was extinguished by cancer three years ago. For all my day-to-day
energy and in spite of a strong conviction that I’m more in command of my
creative faculties than at any other time in my life, I’m afflicted now by a
sense of fragility. I position myself in front of the morning mirror and see a
robust enough shape looking back. I can stand up straight and stretch sinews
that still seem to tie the bones together efficiently enough. Weight loss
following a diet has restored something of the triangular over the pear-shaped.
Defective distance glasses help to blur the lines and neutralise the signs of
wear and tear. Additionally I can breathe deep without feeling dizzy; I can
bend my knees without firing off a cartilage fusillade; I can lift my 16-kilo
weights 30 times without going cross-eyed and bloodshot. But in between these
demonstrations of continuing vitality the tinnitus hum of anxiety is constant.
As the triumphant Roman emperor had his appointed servant standing behind him
in the parading chariot to whisper through the roar of the mob, “Remember you
are mortal”, so a continuous voice provides me with the same reminder. Even as
my substance and strength lifts me out of this chair, through the door and into
the garden, that underlying frailty travels with me. I’m not, it seems, what
once I was and soon I shan’t be as I am now.
A
kind of everyday madness, this. At the very time when some degree of
existential stillness should be attainable, those moments within which a breath
or two of serenity might be found are spilling like water. What to do? The
answer to that question, like the free beer in the pub, will be provided
tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow…
<:>
In
the meantime, here are some reflections on ageing free of self-pity and despair.
[1.]
When interviewed on his 70th birthday by fellow oldie Michael
Parkinson, Michael Caine was asked whether any half-decent case could be made
for the ageing process. Without any
hesitation he declared that the very good thing about ageing is that it places
you in a territory where you are no longer presented with alternatives. In youth and middle age, he said (and
here I’m paraphrasing), there is a sense of an indeterminate future within
which you might, at some juncture, make those final, life enhancing
changes. In old age that option is
no longer available and you have only the opportunity to be cheerful or to give
up. Before the onset of old age
people treat life as a sort of rehearsal for something yet to come. Grinning, Caine said: “I tell them - this is it!”
Another point that he made was in
reference to some research that he did for a part at one time. He was reading some material on
abnormal psychology and he came across the assertion that when we falter in the
face of adversity then we are in most danger of becoming in the moment of
weakness that which we fear most. This simple truism – elusive maybe because of
the somewhat specialised context within which it would normally be found –
struck him forcibly and he made the decision to effect change within himself
accordingly. Being able to look
back on that moment of realisation and to recognise the benefits that accrued
from taking positive action from it was a function only possible in age.
[2.] A joke told to me by a Jewish friend:
An elderly couple had dinner
at another couple's house and, after the meal, the wives dutifully cleared the
table and withdrew to the kitchen. The two elderly gentlemen leaned back in
their chairs & lit cigars.
Blowing a plume of blue smoke towards the ceiling, the guest said to his
host: "Last night we went out to a new restaurant. It was absolutely splendid. Can’t
recommend it highly enough".
The host asked: "What's
the name of the restaurant?"
The first man opens his mouth
to reply, then knits his brow in obvious concentration, finally asking his
companion:
"Sammy, what’s the name
of that red flower you give to someone you love?"
"A carnation?" his
friend suggested.
"No, no. The other
one," the man responded testily.
"The poppy?"
"No, no, no,"
growled the man. "You know - the one that’s red and has thorns."
"Oh, you mean a
rose", his friend laughed.
"Yes, that’s it, that’s
it! Thank you!" the first man cried. He turned toward the kitchen and
yelled: "Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?”
[3.] A sobering truth:
There is more money being
spent on breast implants and Viagra than Alzheimer's research. This means that
by 2020, there should be a large elderly population with perky boobs and huge
erections and absolutely no recollection of how to utilise them.
At this time when the early light honeys the window’s edge, we all wear spring
in our own fashion. You dye the silver out of your hair, trim it so the curls
twist like rising ferns and pushing your fingers deep, you shake it into the morning.
The kids swing on the gate, riding its parabola like notes glued to a stave.
And heads thrown back they shout at the sky, a calling-on song to the life to come.
I hold spring like a candle by an open door, my hand cupped around the flame.
*For reasons unknown, the Mag pic won't upload so I've had to substitute another.
April 28, 2013
My original tagline for the Patteran Pages ran thus: A patteran is a coded configuration of leaves, sticks and stones left at the roadside by Gypsies to communicate with each other. This is my digital version, left for any passers-by... It was pretty much the first message that I launched into what was then a very sparsely populated blogosphere and it carried with it a sense of the tentative, the hesitant – an overture proffered more in hope than expectation. I couldn’t have anticipated the sheer speed and magnitude of the coalescence of bloggers around common interests and the mutual babble that came about during the following few years. Nor could I have imagined that ten years on I would count a number of those early pilgrims amongst my closer friends.
Circles turn; ends become beginnings. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill. I find that once again, in a sparsely populated corner of the blogosphere, I’m proffering that tagline tentatively, a little hesitantly. Who’s left? Is that an echo or another voice?
<:>
Sweeping rain after a tentative, almost embarrassed two-day spring episode. Rain and cold: default British weather all the year round.
<:>
In a day or two I shall announce to a breathlessly waiting public – well. a couple of faithful friends, a security guard, the barman and a cat that’s just sauntered in from a crowded street – a publishing venture that’s had my attention for several months now. So don’t touch that dial!
<:>
Here’s Maisie looking very pleased with herself in mid-‘cello practice at her grandparents’ house. She’s 7 in a couple of weeks. As a second-time-around parent, I’m so conscious of how swiftly the world moves to claim our children. We’re very fortunate to be able to send her (and Reuben and Rosie too) to a school that is as determined as ever to fight a rearguard action against those who would transform education from ongoing process to end-on product.
<:>
As a child the notion of a telephone being lost or stolen would have been laughable. Ours sat four-square on its dad-made shelf, fat, black and Bakelite with its plaited cord lashing it to the wall and thence to the outside world. Disposing of it effectively would have entailed dropping it down a deep well or carrying it away on the back of a small lorry.
Losing a phone today is a piece of piss. All you have to do is ensure that it’s inside a jacket pocket without a padlock securing the flap and gravity will do the rest. And of course, with it will go the stack of mock-croc photo albums and the spiral-bound address book. As happened to me on Friday.
<:>
And here’s a view across Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall taken on a winter’s afternoon. Photoshop CS6 has done the rest.
Each one has, in perfect symmetry, paired buttocks, smooth, undimpled, gently curved. So, gender notwithstanding, there’s something here for the most exacting student of anatomy.
Now look further; check the contours of those cheeks – a face, half turned away – the blush of early passion jumped, roseate and downy. Or the rubicund shine of passion unconsumed in age.
And – the span of years aside - if you listen through the breeze, the birdsong, you might hear at the moment of release, the plucked note’s pizzicato, the juice unloosed, the kiss of consummation.
April 03, 2013
A first full draft of a poem that's been on the way for several months. Shared (somewhat tentatively) with dVerse.
GHOSTED
Here’s a strange truth: to me, the passer-by, every house is haunted, ghosted to the core. Windows implacable in slate or honeyed gold in light, doors sealed like pot-lids or promiscuously ajar; the garden paths gone urban sprawl under chicken-wire and bike wheels or clean and green as flushed-out bottles, every street, each lane and avenue, the lone hill lifting its single cottage high, behind the bricks, they’re ghosted all, peopled by wraiths, sluiced and washed in dreams.
This truth has lived with me since childhood. Since I climbed my grandma’s stairs, the Balham flat a sort of mezzanine between the basement and the attic. Down below, the Sextons behind their chocolate-brown front door and up above, Miss Jackson under bird-shat skylights. And in between, a shaft of dusty darkness like a flue up and down which passed a brew of scents and odours, vapour from the days and nights of shapeless strangers.
Through this rich draft, I’d scale the risers, pausing by the banisters to peer into the well in search of phantoms rising through the packed loam of the centuries. Just a bar of light from an opening door or the pattern smudge of diamond tiles, or the scrape of a voice against a voice, and silence. All evidence enough of pickled lives, briny and pungent parodies of my own.
Then I’d climb away, eyes raised towards our butter-yellow light-bulb inside its beaded fringe. And at night in a drift of linen sheets, I’d dream the scratch and shuffle in the walls, those crowding ghosts, ordering their times in alien spaces, angular, ill-lit, a world apart, but through a membrane paper-thin.
So from that time and place, a hoard of ghosts in every house I pass. And if the early mystery has dimmed across the years, eclipsed by the light that language shines, the current flows again and I walk by, a child, my senses charged.
Stones and shells. Each grey disc or pink ellipse is a crashed planet. Driftwood and shards. Dreams tangled up in the mystery script on blown cartons and vagabond bags.
He scuttles, unshelled, under a carillon of seagulls, drunk on salt and ozone. This child who fears clouds and mirrors for the shapes they throw is healed for a day by the moonstruck logic of the tides.
This is the second draft of Touched, shared with dVerse.
TOUCHED
We’re in a hospital lift going up from ground floor to the seventh, just the two of us, strangers and I’m thinking (as you do) what if
the cable breaks and we drop like a stone in a well? How would you reckon the moment at which to jump before the point of impact?
Then, with a jolt, the lift just stops. We look at each other, look away. Too soon yet for that dreadful intimacy that prefigures panic. Now it’s grunts
and chuckles, pantomime impatience and some random button punching. Then comes language, blunt and businesslike. “Right. Now what? Should be an alarm
somewhere or a ‘phone. Let’s see”. But all from me. My partner in misfortune hasn’t moved. Within the ticking silence, he is motionless, head cocked like
someone listening for a distant birdcall or for bells on a breeze. And even as I watch for a flicker, both unfocussed eyes tip back to white and, still without
a word, he drops straight down, within the circle of his standing, like disembodied clothes. My first impulse is just to leave him like some 3-D puddle that I
have to step around as I organise escape or rescue. Two disasters in succession out of a blameless morning seem unfair. But then, as unexpected as the other,
both eyes open, wide and blue and his lips kiss air like a baby blowing bubbles. He’s going to die; we know it, both of us in a simultaneous heartbeat. And I kneel,
like a bad actor genuflecting, and I lean, fingers spread against the tin-can wall and watch the urgent lips trying to mould words out of the unaccommodating air.
I stoop to listen – more, maybe, to read the fragile shapes in flight. “Touch me”, he breathes. “Touch me”. But I hesitate: unlinked, I’m free, like standing water;
once connected, there’s a current drawing me towards another place. But then I cup his cheek as I might a child’s and, on a long unwinding breath, he speaks quite clearly -
“Mummy” – and he doesn’t breathe again. Sometime later, with a jolt, the lift glides upwards, graceful, silent, as if no time had passed for anyone, as if I might step
through those doors, untouched, untouchable, as if the light should shine as brightly evermore, doors open, close again, as if the axis of the world still held as trustworthy and true.
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