Short Takes XV

15/10/03: Poetry and foreign relations

Guests of the Egyptian embassy, we have converged for a bilingual recital of Arabic poetry plus commentary. Here are diplomats from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, immaculately groomed and lotioned, sleek as Brancusi installations with brown necks strangled by spotless collars. Here are local politicians dressed in lumpy dark suits as for a funeral parlour, searching the throng nervously for what reactions might be expected from them at this, of all things, a pan-cultural poetry recital. And here we are. the poets, populous as ever, our motley most heart-rending when it is clear we have made an effort to spruce up.

By contrast, stunning are some of the women. Two seats from my own sits one in scarlet gown, her scimitar eyebrows, wide-open eyes and upright carriage giving her the hauteur of a figure from an Egyptian mural, the dignity of this ruined, alas, by the unwise bravura of her headgear, which is a felt crown with fold-over tentacles like the hat of a medieval jester. I am here to focus you, no other agenda has plausibility, her get-up announces. Who on earth does she belong to?

Then, amid the concourse I spy our evening’s energising spirit, tall, patrician A, anthologist, envoy, bridge-builder between our nation and the Middle Eastern cultures. She is robed in black but for an orange chiffon scarf about her neck, her face long and pale, her eyes shadowed by make-up.

The performances begin. Above all, they are very well organised, but sadly undercharged in their impact, as bilingual performance tends to be. Then at interval A approaches me and, sotto voce, asks what I think of the evening’s entertainment, this “Journey of Poetry through the Middle East”.

“Very hospitable of the embassy to have arranged it,” I reply blandly.

“Yes, yes! But …” and now A quickly scans the room, then lowering her voice further ushers me aside. “I must speak to you privately.”

So we stand apart while she eyes the throng of guests like a schemer in a Jacobean melodrama and, with an envelope placed before her mouth so that I might hear her sidelong remarks while any onlooker can only observe how our confab is blatantly surreptitious, she confides that, incomprehensibly, several important Arab poets have been ignored. Ignored! And free verse! Free verse has been effectively extinguished under all the meter and rhyme we have just heard.

“Poets must be free,” A expostulates from behind her envelope. Indeed, she promises, when her own turn to speak comes round, she is of a mind to be just a little “naughty”. She will trust herself, perhaps, to a little joke. Yes, a little risqué joke. Do I think she should be naughty? Yes, why not, I encourage.

What on earth is prompting this conspiratorial play-acting? The room is full of the Middle East’s ambassadors and their wives, first secretaries, local politicians, literary folk. Has she something confidential to impart? Hardly. Ah, but does she wish to be remarked in the act of imparting confidential matters? This seems likely, for her eyes flicker across the throng and maybe this prompts the odd glance to be directed back our way. But if this is the case, does she wish Alan Gould, local poet, to be identified by these professional observers and interpreters of meetings and manners, as a person to whom confidential matters can be imparted at international gatherings? Will I, by this, be initiated into the mirror-corridors of the intelligencer? A spook for poetry? Heaven knows what the fantasy was. A presses me. “So you do think I should be a bit naughty?”

“Definitely. Hang the expense,” I assure her, whereupon we return through the trellis doors to our auditorium.

And when it comes her turn to recite, her risqué offering turns out to be not so very naughty—no more than to rehearse Robert Frost’s well-exercised quip about free verse and tennis, which appears to endorse rather than wallop the evening’s choice of formal style.

Indeed, with the exception of a thirteenth-century Persian poem about a cloak, the evening’s fare has been interminable and over-explained. But then, as in the days of visiting Soviet poets, poetry is present here more to scent foreign relations than inform them.

The evening ends with two of the embassy’s servants singing a song from Upper Egypt. Now this does have genuine vitality! The two fellows so clearly enjoy their music with its incantatory rise and fall, its reiteration, the two shallow drums pulsing behind their voices. One has a dark Negro head and is dressed in waistcoat and bow-tie. The other is in a long robe of dazzling whiteness with a squashed white hat atop. They release themselves into the trance of the song, and their eyes are liquid.

2/12/12: The provisional

Without God’s presence in how I perceive the World, the experiences of my life form a series. Where I include God in my sense of the World’s presence, my sense of my experiences, while not empowered to find their place in a Whole, is at least alerted to the condition of Wholeness.

While I can think this without getting any further in being confident of the existence of Deity, does it allow me to be a little clearer in the idea that, if value can be attached to Life in anything other than a casual way, the presence of Deity needs vitally to be one of the conditions of that, not the vision, but a workaday pro-vision?

12/12/12: To Byron, on my apprenticeship

Milord, what has gone wrong with our times with respect to the facility with English prosody? I have spent a month niggling at four stanzas of ottava rima while, a mere two centuries ago in your Beppo, Don Juan, and other performances, you nattered wonderfully with this particular stanza-form for hundreds of pages. Between my faltering and your facility hangs a hypothesis, The Bio-verbal one might call it in seeking to explain the ecology of both.

Milord, I note you snuffed it at just that age when, in my own career, meter moved from being a laboured mental construct for me to part of my nervous response to the world. And I recall how you rebuked Trelawney when he praised this facility of yours by insisting that all your poems were the slow meditative work of years, grinding in some mental mill long before they reached the page. Milord, we differ, but grasp this common straw, this watch on what the business of imagining does with us.

5/1/13: A Christian status

I cannot know my own place in how things stand until I can see clearly how I stand in comparison to others.

At the same time, I cannot know this place sufficiently until I see how I might be valued by some viewpoint without being compared.

To approach that, I need to know the sensation of conferring value in addition to how it feels to have value conferred on my own being.

This moral vibrancy emerges in human nature as naturally as any other part of our speciation. I should love my neighbour as myself. In many instances I cannot; my neighbour can be un-neighbourly, my self ditto. But I do learn where I might be once this precept has been put inescapably before me.

10/4/13: The transference

My tree-lopping mate, P, has updated his IT, so now has a superfluous iMac. IMacs! The sorcery of Gandalf and the aesthetics of Brancusi. P’s is five years younger than my own old model, which poignantly has kept its chic appearance through a gradual mental decline. Yes please, I said, when P offered the newer gadget, for it has a screen with an area sufficient to need surveyor and theodolite.

“But let me pay you something for this marvel,” I tried. Nah, but I could refurbish the topsail schooner ship-model I sold him for $1000 in 1989. Sure, mate.

O, but back then my modelling skills were unspeakably coarse (on a par with Norman Lindsay’s ship-modelling). The ship, built from a standard two-masted topsail schooner plan, had been named Helgi Magri after my Icelandic ancestor.

I collected my new screen, resumed possession of the old ship. Quickly I saw this dear vessel (all ship-models remain lifelong darlings to their makers) needed to be gutted, rebuilt and re-rigged with the skills I have gathered during the last decades. Shameful to aim at less for her.

So I gutted until the hull was a shell, aware the destruction of each minute entails a month’s worth of future micro-restoration. Hulk—saddest word you can apply to a work of human hands creaturely as a sea-going vessel. Now I shall refurbish. I shall install a new beam-shelf and deck-beams, new deck-planking from a suitable Australian timber that will present a sea-worn facsimile. These planks will be joggled into the margin plank fore-and-aft until they resemble a pattern of marquetry. Already I will have fitted new waterways and scuppers, relocated hawse holes and pinrails, amputated the present “cruiser” stern to replace it with a transom that will accommodate two derricks for a stern lifeboat. I shall discard the old, ridiculous deckhouses in favour of half-sunk accommodations with proper coachwork, ditto for the half-round companions to the crew-quarters for’ard. Helgi Magri will have a new cargo-winch/boom-crutch, a new binnacle improvised from brass scrap complete with gimbals in bright red (port) and green (starboard), made from fake pearls salvaged from one of Anne’s necklaces.

Thus from my head and delectably, I bring the shipwright vocabulary to my fret saw, files and pin-drills in anticipation of the work I will do to earn my iMac. How peculiar can the cover-employments towards a livelihood in poetry get? And all my work will recompense P for his superfluous gadget many times over. But can a ship-modeller have ease of conscience when he knows an imperfect opus has proceeded from his workbench? Absolutely not. Naturally I will go back to the Harold A. Underhill plans in this, my second go at the Harold A. Underhill standard.

My bench saw buzzes and the new deck-timbers (one-eighth by three-sixteenths) peel away. What is the wood-scent here? Celery top? Tassie oak? From the gutting there is old lacquer in the nostril, a burnish of red cedar from original timbers.

6/5/13: Elizabethan Serenade

I am not a Royalist. But I am, and fiercely, a constitutional monarchist, and this conflicts with the larrikin republicanism of those folk with whom, otherwise, I usually find common values of social justice. So I must contest in my head what has egalitarian appeal with how I feel my allegiance to the crown keeps me loyal to an idea I value, a dynamic between liberty and cultural cohesion that has unfolded over five centuries. And yet, sensitive as I know I am whenever sneers get directed at my intellectual independence, how blithely I might dismiss that derision in favour of the veritable devotion entailed in being a Royalist, in being a runaway enthusiast.

How so? When it comes to allegiance, the music will always disarm the wrangling, whether dialogue or soliloquy. If I listen, say, to Ronald Binge’s popular piece Elizabethan Serenade, find myself taken in by the enchantment of its sunny calm and continuity, the brilliance of its pitch in accessible melody, then I am ushered into a condition-of-being so much more entirely than anything the republican lobbyists and newspaper detractors can subvert in me when they appeal to the practical or nationalistic parts of my sympathy.

How do I know when a part of our constitutional fabric has a deep accord in my being? Not when some deadness finds a moribund litany for it—“God Save the Queen”, for all I welcome the idea. It is when the music, light and popular as Binge’s piece undoubtedly is, succeeds in locating the exactness and delicacy of the ground-note of what actually has unfolded for the essential character of the Elizabethan sovereignty. Here was the exact welcoming note for 1953, and its resilient, upbeat note has proved diamond, I reckon. Where does this leave me? Left and royalist.

17/5/13: As it wears

Of course! Each new evidence of free verse, like a graffito, has some trivial necessity claimant upon our tolerance.

And yet how pre-emptive is the distrust this ad-lib arouses in us. Here is sloth, we sergeants in the biz assess the new intake. Here, riff-raff spawned from the dementia of that old disciplinarian who insisted the basis of decent art should at least include the rigour a joiner brings to dressing timber, or the preparatory maths an engineer brings to the physics of his bridge, here is incompetence masquerading as the sensitive or the exquisite-clever. Here is that lightning opportunism in the more enervated intervals of “self” expression. Here is Dr Avid Wannabe turning art into a power-game again, breeding arrogance and evasions.

You may dismiss the squad, sergeant.

2/9/13: Returning from a night walk

How to charm one’s love? Find just that part of wit that might have caused her mum or dad to laugh outright.

6/9/13: Dennis sums it up

Given its broad sympathy, our Friday Table O’ Knowledge at Tilley’s was not so very animated about tomorrow’s election overcast. But Dennis—stalwart Laborite—caught our mood and, with it, this hope for the well-being of democracy.

“I don’t care who wins tomorrow, so long as the polls lose.”