No sooner had he performed the Ritual of the Word than an Imperial Edict expunged the Ritual Word. The Ritual Word was never spoken again.
Wednesday 28 August 2024
Friday 16 August 2024
Vignette 1: Twenty-five words.
Sunday 11 August 2024
Harvest.
Hope lives on air.
The empty hay barn,
stacked with raw sky.
Sunday 14 July 2024
Frog Regnant London NW3
To an English person it seemed like a sign that augured ill.
So, on my way to buy a tea-strainer and a new canister of loose Earl Grey tea, I visited a friend who lives near Hampstead Heath to seek consolation.
He had just finished constructing a small garden pond, and had added a well-chosen variety of water-plants. He was wearing his white cotton ducks and when he rose from kneeling I saw his knees were streaked with green. (‘Plantation Order,’ he muttered obscurely.) He stood awhile admiring his handiwork and then remarked, ‘All it needs now is a tame frog.’
Without thinking, I said, ‘I’ll get you a frog. Really.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘that’ll put you to too much trouble. I've already telephoned the closest likely source, and they don’t stock frogs. Or toads. Only fishes. There’s been a run on lampreys for some reason.’
I thought of Harrods, then put aside my offer for the time being.
After buying the tea-strainer, I decided to take a walk on the Heath. It was uninspiring just there, featureless, with no trees, no cover of any sort, and no water in sight. Nothing but an expanse of dried up grass. Yet in the distance were to be seen familiar figures, seemingly dancing an impromptu reel-of-four, whooping with insuppressible elation.
I recognised the quartet . . . the HamIntern . . . perhaps the reddest of the Red Hampstead-Highgate-Camden nexus . . . W. B. Choriambes, the eminent Marxist historian, the two Balmidin brothers, trendiest of politicos, and Luis Tinctorial, deep-dyed Russophile and Soviet ideologue and translator of propagandist tracts for the Progress Publishing House, Moscow. (Classics of state orthodoxy: Journey to Forever, A Time of Wonders, and Stalin: One Perfect Man.)
The last time I’d observed this NW3 cabal was May 1st when they were knelt at the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery, hands joined in worship. On that occasion they had then sung the Internationale, their voices raised with a quavering emotion that only compounded their portentousness. (The absence from their devotions of Mr Berny Joyce – the Marxist maverick and demagogue, beloved of the Many-Headed – who leads astray the High-Net-Worth citizenry of Islington, was not entirely unforeseen.)
I shuddered at the recollection and looked away.
North London’s gambolling Marxists would drive any properly brought up person to shield their eyes against their excesses.
The fashionable vulgarity of gestural triumphalism, such as punching the air and whooping, is simply beyond the pale, in my view.
So I looked down, and there at my feet squatted a little frog. It sprang away, but I caught it by dropping my handkerchief over it. The tea-strainer with the handkerchief stretched across the rim was exactly right for a frog carrier.
Certainly, my friend gave me several odd glances when I returned, but he was very happy to accept the frog.
‘What is his name?’ he asked.
I gazed at the little creature, so noble yet so powerless.
Tuesday 25 June 2024
Ancient Greece has Elegant Variations for the Beast with Two Backs.
bed with
bedded
begot on her
caught at last and got with child
[with whom] he companied
couple with
courted by
covered her
do as he pleased with her
enjoyed each other
tried to force her
[woman is] no more than an inert furrow
[in which] the husbandsman plants his seed
[with whom] he lay for nine nights
lay together
forced her to lie with him
forcibly married
mounted
on whom he begot
outrage her
taken to wife
took his pleasure (cf. verb pleasure)
touched her to some purpose
trod her triumphantly (Zeus in guise of swan)
ravished her
violated her
violent love made to her
had his will of
yielded to embraces
*Sonnet VI (Fatal Interview, sonnet sequence 1931) by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Post scriptum August 4 2024 : The obituary appeared this month of the Surrealist artist/magician/wildman, Salford-born Tony Shiels, who once exhibited in St Ives a work called The Two-Backed Beast constructed from a piano strapped to a harmonium, which he doused with turpentine and set alight . . . at once a simile and a metaphor for consummation, if my reading of his vision is correct.
Sunday 23 June 2024
The Virtue of Poverty
Photo: Derekskey Flickr Creative Commons
حضرةالمحترم
Respected Sir (1975)
by
Naguib Mahfouz
(Nobel Prize in Literature 1988)
Friday 24 May 2024
1967. The Operative Word.
We met in the park
It was one of those nights
The small building was more than
quaintly ornamental
I am a bird
he said
and
I am bait
how
dutifully I answered
And the operative word?
Jail
we said together
Then I read him
his rights
I was in blue
and he wore leather
Catherine Eisner
See also:
clearly intended for the dark.