Short Takes XIX

21/11/13 When launch day draws near

Praise the Solidarity of the Poets! Our slim vols follow each other into the waters, duly launched from their skids like so many jollyboats.

And inescapably a part of my poetry vocation has been to support this observance of poetry in our midst. So I go along, drink my thimble of plonk, buy the book with cash I can ill spare. And I do this because I know closely how each poetry book sale is the veritable crux of the poetry economy. Salman, Bryce, Kate, you doyens of the Litfest signature queues, unlike you, we poets remain unspoiled by mass-sales. So we know the sensation, the intimacy of each sale.

Whaddya think of me book?

I think … mate … it is fair to purchase your book, for every flower is exquisitely different and here, on unlikely soil, might be some slant, some pulse for my good in this art we share. So I buy. I read. I give e-mail response to the author whenever I can do so usefully. And thus do I play my part in the economy-and-community that makes our literature from day to day.

And then the date for my own book-launch draws nigh …

Poet-colleagues, how many prior engagements can the world supply? How hand-on-heart need excuses be (with their déjà vu echolalia) until this, colleagues, my good heart, supplants a tolerance of you with black distrust for all your earnest?

Can’t make the launch but really looking forward to …

Let me not be unjust. A good residue of colleagues will attend one’s own occasion and there’s joy in this, mired slightly by the “bookswop” minefield.

One of mine for this one of yours. Whaddya reckon?

But I’ve got yours; I paid money for it.

Most exquisite is when I need to remind my colleague, Mate! Don’t you remember? I launched your fucking book less than a year ago!

But let me remain real. Wherever vocations make a claim on dollars from their vocation, it is understandably hard for the thinly remunerated to part with cash. And where some extra dollars may have been won from a bookish cover-employment like school-teaching, university lecturing, publisher’s reader, where books may have accrued a nuisance value, then how prudent to resist that $20 to $30 outlay where clutter and drear might be in the offing.

So praise the solidarity of poets. Praise our care for the exactness of words. Praise our fellowship, buoyant on its cocktail of declared sincerity and mauvais sang.

12/1/14 A seizure

A week ago today I woke to find myself in Calvary Hospital, wires and tubes issuing from my body as though it were a building site, Anne and various medical staff inspecting me. It seems I had undergone a seizure. My tongue hurt where, apparently, I had tried to bite off this useful peninsula, so I could not form words with clarity, causing mild irritation. I had aches in my torso where the musculature had “grabbed” and this would not allow me the simplest movement from side to side. I felt no anxiety. Here was the given.

Throughout the day I was tested for this and that; I squeezed hands, had my eyeballs follow a wandering nurse’s finger, recalled my name and the present year, understood too well, alas, the procedural basis of what I was being asked, and felt like Arthur Miller’s salesman, “kinda temporary about myself”, not because of any uncertainty as to my presence, but as a result of seeing the uncertainty of others as they stood about my prostration and tried on me their questions.

Of course here is my frailty and here, maybe, a foreshadowing of my extinction. It arouses in me no dread I can detect. While unwelcome, if I isolate this … what should I call it … seismic effect on my person, my profoundest intimation is that it can be borne lightly because it is entirely natural that it should be borne. Anguish lies in the thought of what hurt I do to darling Anne, and the knowledge that my extinction would make her preferred world less whole by my ceasing to be a part of it. In this sense, an extinction is unjust, and not to be casually braved. On the other hand, who knows what renewal of life my (as I note the everyday of hospital procedures) mundane extinction might occasion for those I am close to and who have given me joy?

26/7/14 In dream an Uncle David

I had an Uncle David, immediate elder of my father’s three brothers. He was a linguist, headmaster, ex-major of the Welsh Guards, deeply civil, kind, gentlemanly in his nature. In contrast to my sometimes irascible father, I never knew this uncle to utter an intemperate word. In my possession is a letter written by my great-grandmother Harriet during the First World War praising this, her second (eight-year-old) grandson’s fineness of temper. David spoke a dozen languages, went ballroom dancing with my aunt each week. His calm temper and ready intellectual interests assisted him to live until he was ninety-eight and, because dream is one of the venues of the afterlife, last night he arrived in one of mine.

In this, he had upset me for some reason. So I socked him efficiently on the jaw, from which he reeled, looking momentarily puzzled. But he appeared to take the blow very tolerantly, which is what I expected from him while, for my own part, I knew I had over-reacted and felt rueful. In this dream Uncle David appeared to be in the tropical kit I had seen in photographs of him as adjutant seconded to a Baluchi regiment during the Second World War. Around us were other people, dark and ill-defined. Then, abruptly, I found myself beside him in the dream and aware he had given me the most hefty kick on the shins. This kick he followed up by a very prompt, efficient and inconspicuous biff to my own jaw. I reeled. Naturally I recognised his violence to be an utterly just recompense for my own earlier violence, the kick being the accrued interest on the account. We shook hands and, with that presiding emotion of fair exchange, I came back to wakefulness …

… to recognise that this dream was telling me something important. In his lifetime I had identified my Uncle David as the impeccable gentleman. But this was too narrow a view, insufficient for aspects of his life I knew but had never thought to reconcile with the temperate, courteous, attentive, cheery man who was my familiar. The kick and biff were recompense for my own obscure violence upon him, but done, not in reptilian reflex, but in a calculation where no action is forgotten and all action has counter-action precisely because all qualities have counter-qualities in order for the universe of a human character to be dynamically whole.

So there was a steeliness in this gentleman, my uncle, where previously I had seen only the soft manners of consideration, the tact of the mediating headmaster, the wide-awake courtesy of the linguist who could discern behind languages the otherness of others. Yet he had also been a Welsh Guardsman, Recruit Gould (PhD Sorbonne) in Sgt Hill’s Drill Squad, 1939. He would have known bayonet practice and the coarseness of a drill sergeant’s humour. So here was dream illumining a larger necessity for me, reminding how necessity makes for a rounded thing, insists on itself even if the conscious mind has no trace of having been curious on this subject of the whole man, my long-lived uncle.

16/10/14 Merry eyes

In the supermarket yesterday a burly fellow passed me, gave some thought, then turned and inquired, “Alan Gould?” and after some hesitation, “Poet?” and after further hesitation, “About 1970?” When they occur, these recognitions delight me.

‘Sounds like me,” I returned, scrutinising the large head to see if I could place him from wayback. He had long hair falling in golden curlicues, moustache, beard and merry eyes. “Were you around ANU at that time?”

“Where?” He was puzzled.

“The university. In 1970?”

He was amused. “Mate!” he informed me, “I was born in 1970,” and retreated to pursue his groceries. “But I keep an eye out for you nevertheless,” he flung back over his shoulder.

“Thank you,” I should have had presence of mind to retort.

27/11/14 Crisp with entity

Let me approach this dream differently from my more straightforward accounts of a dream’s unfolding.

So who are you, Doc? How have you come here in your workaday worsted suit, your thick hair, dark but threaded with silver, your five o’clock shadow about the jowls? Lean man, you so clearly know what you are about as you commence to examine my brother, if it is my brother? Who are you?

Doc, I am here also in order to be examined, a routine medical check, but watch as you listen through stethoscope and pat your patient here and there. There is a plain table, and others are here in this yellow room that does not appear to have a window. These are a woman who is your assistant and whose face remains indistinct, and a man with a dark, fecund beard.

You are finding more and more of concern to you in the examination of my “brother”. Now you have him pressed against the wall, and your head pressed against his chest with such pressure that your face seems to turn purple. You are listening very intently. Who are you?

I decide that I have time to go and have a pee before my turn to be examined. I am confident, Doc, you will find nothing very much wrong with me. But look, as I turn to go, here is your girl assistant taking a mighty swing at me with a sledgehammer! Crash!

“Lucky she missed,” grins the bearded man.

“Or I could end up in London in two halves,” I answer him, going to the door.

“Having fallen straight through,” he calls after me, meaning straight through the diameter of the planet from Oz to UK.

And now I’m awake, Doc, your presence still most distinct, most self-contained in my recollection. By now I know my dream has been a sub-urinary dream, signalling a need to pee in actuality. But Doc, who are you? For you do not seem to be a conglomerate of features taken from my acquaintance nor that virtual acquaintance I bring from television. You are too distinctly yourself. Of course you will have natural causes, particular excitation along the synapses and neurones, and yet you proceed within the context of the dream with the assumption of a provenance that is your own. This is my assumption, as it would be for any Doc I met au naturel. You are here, but you have rounds to make, whether in some actuality or in this virtuality that will have you in and out of the dreams of others. Who are you? Will we meet again? It seems plausible. Doc, you are chimaeric, and yet crisp with entity. Pfui to the neurologists that declare all this to be brain chemistry. They are less real than you.

10/12/14 Squandered

Is it so simple? That if all that has being makes towards some explanation as to why there is Being, then our lives connect with something that might be called an Integrity Of The Whole in the unfolding of Reality, and this Integrity is irrespective of the persistence of our potential to know it.

And if this is not true, then all being is somehow, and yet essentially, squandered?

19/12/14 The latter and the former

What’s the spur to this writing biz? Do we primp and harass our lines or our sentences to attract the eye of some anonymous, contemporary reader? Or rather, do we perform this finessing in order to appease and please some worthy who knocks about in our consciousness from our reading?

If it is the latter, then we find contentment because our painstaking has become a part of the Fellowship of Pains-takers, and if only we can keep that in focus, then writing seems to remain a worthwhile use of our time and to offer the deepest approval of effort.

If it is the former, then do we not waste away in hopes to please exactly that part of thinking-and-feeling most prone to turn away from us in the hope of a more vibrant tonic?

Should I write to please my familiars, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Auden, Campbell, Woolf, Conrad, or those strangers who are my actual readers? Will these strangers be better pleased if I satisfy my chimaeric familiars, those buried men who, as Yeats, taking cue from Lucretius’s atomism, predicted as being thrust “back in the human mind again”?

13/1/15 The three provocative letters

G-O-D is how we exercise our best intelligence and imagining into how Reality is whole.