Thinking over what I wrote about the late Clive James this morning, I began searching for a recent edition of his collected poems. He has written a lot of stuff ( including an original translation of Dante's 'The Inferno'!) and as I waded through one impressive tome after another, I came across Somewhere Becoming Rain, a volume of his writings about Philip Larkin. Readers of this blog (surely none -ed.) will know that Larkin is my favourite poet, someone I return to over and over again, so I bought the book online and look forward muchly to its arrival.

You know how 'way leads onto way', at least for me, so soon after these musings my mind was racing back to Yorkshire in 1990. I had just arrived in the delightful medieval town of York with a busload of Australian students (long story!) and was free to roam its precincts for a few hours. Having come into the UK via Hull, I was twitching to get my hands on one book, 'The Collected Poems' of Philip Larkin. I say twitching because Larkin had been a university librarian in Hull and my requests for a 'small diversion' via said campus were most rudely denied.

Entering a bookshop on or near The Shambles, I rushed to the poetry section and found a couple of volumes of 'The Collected Poems' sitting neatly on the shelves. It was an expensive outlay but I bought a copy on the spot, then decamped to York Minster, where I read "Church Going" in one of the crypts of that colossal pile. Eccentric, geeky? - you decide!

Larkin has had some bad press in recent decades, mainly because he liked Mrs Thatcher and was found with a box of old porn magazines under his bed. Somehow this makes him less than a great poet in certain quarters. The same feeble analysis has been brought to bear on any writer, artist or actor who has dared to transgress some ludicrous arbitrary standard set up by gate-keeping po-mo dullards. I would rather have my soul sucked from my living body by a dementor than endure an hour of their prattlings on some forlorn campus.

But I digress. James on Larkin sounds to me like a delicious and irresistible attraction and I hope the book wings its way here soon. Meanwhile, consider this wonderful poem by PL, composed in the early 1950's. It is full of the kind of subdued wonder, yearning and regret that Larkin makes his own, so often.

Maiden Name

Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it, scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two,
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since your past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laiden.

The passing of Clive James, after a long fight with leukemia, leaves the world short of yet one more erudite, witty and very smart human being. James was a wordsmith par excellence, as handy with an essay as a poem, a memoir as a monologue. Despite emigrating to the UK at age 21, he never appeared to lose his accent or his irreverence, though he might have done just as well without them. He was a member of that post-war wave of cultural exports for whom Australia (at that time) was too small and too parochial to blossom in. Much has changed here though few of them ever returned.

I found a poem this morning that typifies James capacity to write well-formed verse, but which takes as its subject something quite whimsical. And rather characteristically, it is not a little subversive in outlook.

Diamond Pens of the Bus Vandals

Where do bus vandals get their diamond pens
That fill each upstairs window with a cloud
Of shuffled etchings? Patience does them proud.
Think of Spinoza when he ground a lens.

A fog in London used to be outside
The bus, which had to crawl until it cleared.
Now it’s as if the world had disappeared
In shining smoke however far you ride.

You could call this a breakthrough, of a sort.
These storms of brilliance, light as the new dark,
Disturb and question like a pickled shark:
Conceptual art free from the bonds of thought,

Raw talent rampant. New York subway cars
Once left poor Jackson Pollock looking tame.
Some of the doodlers sprayed their way to fame:
A dazzled Norman Mailer called them stars.

And wasn’t Michelangelo, deep down,
Compelled to sling paint by an empty space,
Some ceiling he could thoroughly deface?
The same for Raphael. When those boys hit town

Few of its walls were safe. One cave in France
Has borne for almost forty thousand years
Pictures of bison and small men with spears --
Blank surfaces have never stood a chance

​Against the human impulse to express
The self. All those initials on the glass
Remind you, as you clutch your Freedom Pass,
It’s a long journey from the wilderness.

2006.

Vale Clive James

When you think of a Victorian Christmas some common images come to mind. It is impossible not to think about Dicken's A Christmas Carol on the one hand, with it's morality tale of greed and redemption. On the other hand, it is also easy to picture the origins of many traditions that are still with us, such as the hot Christmas dinner, the games, the carols, the decorations and Christmas cards.

It is the latter that took my interest, since this year I wanted to find some good quality, older-style Christmas cards, perhaps to send. Soon enough in my search, up popped a lot of Victoriana, much of which had surprising themes. In fact quite a lot of what I saw was bizarre and would likely never be sent these days, except as a joke. I began wondering who these Victorians really were, if not the stodgy moralists that many claimed them to be.

Here are a few examples.



Dead or drunken robins appear as somewhat maudlin subject matter. "May yours be a joyful Christmas" beneath the image of a expired bird strikes me as the kind of card you might send an enemy or a mother-in-law, at the very least. 'Oh yes,do have a jolly Christmas,' it whispers in menacing tones, 'Perhaps it will be your last!' Of course the dead robin might be a reference to Cock Robin, in which case a nefarious sparrow should be lurking, having done the deed with a bow and arrow.

And speaking of lurkers, the cat in the second card awaits the the moment when all three birds are pie-eyed. Talk about spiking the punch with a view to a kill! What a cheery scene!

Birds also feature in this apparent pointer to torch-bearing Brownshirts parading in formation. It is hard to see how 'jollity' might ensue after removing this card from its envelope - more likely, a lingering apprehension.



The 'hearty welcome' in the following seems like a prelude to the unspoken 'but really I hate you'. Who might have sent this one? Perhaps a psychopath.



The intentions of the sender are fairly clear for all to see in the next card, never mind the 'Merry Christmas' beneath the ghastly image of murder and theft. Best to send this one anonymously!



Unfortunately, reprints of these excellent seasonal cards do not appear to be in the offing. I will have to look elsewhere if I want to surprise my friends and family!

It was Hamlet who noted that the times were out of joint. He had good reason to say so. His father had been murdered by his uncle who had then taken his mother to wife. The ghost of his dead father was abroad and making a commotion and he, Hamlet, was expected to do something about it.

Fast forward to the present day and the times seem to be out of joint, again. The certainties that upheld the order of things in the Cold War are gone, leaving us only with a fragmented international polity. Populism is resurgent in many countries and there are populist leaders whose self interest involves undermining the status quo and filling the void with nationalist hot air. Sounds a little bit like the 1930's, don't you think?

Worse still is the untethering of public discourse from evidence-based truths, the ascent of false news and alternate facts and a distressing disregard for the work of scientists. I am tired of presenting arguments to folks who believe outrageous things and whose minds are closed shut by whatever rabbit-hole they have burrowed into.

Yes, deep thinking can be tiresome and challenging. My wife laments that I do too much of it. But truly, I wish more people would take it up.

calm, the lady-beetle pool,
gums have strong arms, it seems-
the sinking moon rising

I read on CNN yesterday that the flat-earth theory (surely bollocks -ed.) is spreading around the world, mainly through social media. At first I took these folks being out to take the piss, as they say. To be contrarian for its own sake, the set the cat amongst the pigeons, this can bring joy to some. They get a rise out of seeing the incredulity that their arguments evoke.

But no, they are deadly serious and have a long list of arguments to bolster their woeful cause. These are similar to the kinds of arguments used by the Moon-landing hoax people (it will come as no surprise that these groups have overlapping membership) and rely heavily upon misrepresentation, feeble reasoning and a healthy dose of conspiracy theorism. There is no point in having a discussion, even at a primary school level, with them. Their minds are closed, they have the truth.

If ever we live in wayward times, this is one of the proofs.

A hot and windy day. A day so dry you want to reach for water every hour. Ice cubes melt hastily as if their constitutions are are insult to the elements. Yes, it's definitely the weather that one might call bushfire weather, though I don't want to say it too loudly. Touching wood, I note the latest notification alert popping up on my phone. Nothing close, nothing pressing, yet.

The State of NSW is beset by blazes as any number of maps will demonstrate. The Blue Mountains is a favourite spot for fire, its towns snaking along ridge-lines and spilling into valleys, making it almost uniquely vulnerable. There is no getting away from backyards that sit square into bushland, whole streets set up like nine pins. Its a fact of life, though when push comes to shove, it seems more like a truth buried deep at the back of the mind, only retrieved when days like this come along.

Yes, things could get ugly, fast. A change of wind is due this evening which will cool the air, though maybe at the expense of containing fires. As I write a fire truck roars down the street. Wither?

"No, you cannot come here
this is no time for a tryst,
Ash is falling from the sky
and birds don't sing
I have packed my wedding dress
and my mother's candle sticks

Don't you watch the news?
The State's on fire,
The highway's cut every second day.
We're sitting here
Writing wills and lists
and memoirs that might be our last."

from Bushfire, by Kate Llewellyn


Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

I should have further added, since it is of enduring importance, that today is Armistice Day. That dreadful conflict in Europe was a precursor to the next awful conflict in Europe, the latter being even more world-wide. That war led in turn to the post-war outcomes that ushered in the Cold War. And on it goes.

The Great War was perhaps the worst of all though, fought largely in trenches, conditions that destroyed the souls of men and brutalised the world thereafter. By any standard, it was incomprehensible.



Lest We Forget.

You would have to have been hiding in a log, or maybe practising asceticism, to have not heard or seen that we are well and truly in bushfire season. The drought, warmer than average temperatures and strong winds have combined to make November one of the worst opening periods in a long while, with potentially greater hazard ahead.

You never know really just when or where or even how a fire might suddenly threaten you - they can appear out of no-where and travel at great speed. They create their own micro-climate as they go, making predictions often impossible.

Tomorrow is gazetted as a catastrophic alert for fire in Sydney, the Hunter and the Central Tablelands. A catastrophe exceeds an extreme episode, apparently, and creates circumstances in which property and life are at a great risk. Hazelbrook and the Blue Mountains are within this triangle of death and neighbouring Woodford had a foretaste of what might soon come only a few days ago.

There is no point in dwelling on these matters. Fire is a part of the Australian landscape and has been so for thousands of years. Living in this national park is a risk, as it is a joy. NSW has already taken a battering as the following photo from a mid-north coast town of Harrington shows. Dante, had he seen it, might have written such a ghastly image into his great work, The Divine Comedy, as prose.



Addendum:

The photo below was taken on Friday in Woodford. The actual spot is a mere 900 metres from my house in Hazelbrook, but the wind was blowing from the west, so there was no risk to us. My point is this - you can never know where fire might strike, nor the exact circumstances of its path and progress. A wind from the east would have completely changed the outcome. My heartfelt thanks to this brave RFS volunteer.

big November sky
blue, but for a tea-stained cloud-
bushfire!

summer's baying wind
cannot shake the creases
from his beige jacket

The pursuit of happiness is not a modern phenomenon. But its present-day iteration has become almost pathological, with any number of attractions, distractions and lifestyles promoted as happiness-inducing. Alas, such happiness that is derived is often fleeting, followed, often as not, by boredom, dissatisfaction and a search for the next hit.

This comes about in part from a misunderstanding of how happiness arises or even what it is. A modern motion is that happiness is a goal in itself, to be sought after as often as possible. This is a fundamentally flawed view, for it is rare that such a goal can be achieved (happiness being an abstraction) and it sets folks up for one failure after another.

Simply put, happiness for the most part is a bi-product of pursuing meaningful goals in life. It arises as we engage with pursuits that give us purpose and a worthwhile sense of self. Sometimes it almost creeps up on us, slipping ghost-like into our bodies as we go about our day.

The current Dalai Lama noted, “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” That is wise advice. I would add that those "actions" are considered actions, ones that engage an individual intentionally with the world.

I have said before that consumer capitalism is a poison and a significant part of the problem. Any system that tells you that happiness is derived from spending, then more spending, in order to acquire more and more stuff, is morally corrupt, because it is consciously propagating a lie.

In his letter to Timothy, Paul famously said that "the love of money is the root of all evil" It is a problem for all ages but especially the present, where money and its allies are very nearly an obsession. The deeper the obsession, the greater the dissatisfaction.

I cannot fathom the paradox.