Year: 2015

Blow-Up

irlandesuk cinema, film , , , ,

blow_upBlow-Up (1966), was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, and featured David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles and Peter Bowles. There are also appearances by Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, and by Janet Street Porter, and others.

The film is very loosely based on a short story by the Argentinian writer, Julio Cortázar (who makes an uncredited appearance as a homeless person) . His original story, Las babas del diablo [The devil’s drool], describes an incident witnessed on a bridge: a young boy appears to be running towards his mother who has her arms outstretched to greet him. When the observer in the story steps back, however, he notices a man waiting by a car with an open door, and it becomes obvious to him that the scene is one of attempted kidnapping of the boy.

Perception. What we see and what we want to see, in film and in art and in life. Illusion and self-delusion. And from our point of observation, from where we are standing, what information do we have, and is it the correct information, and is it sufficient to make a judgment of the situation we are observing, or the emotions we are experiencing? In film, in art, and in life: how do we arrive at our judgments, how do we assess the honesty of other people’s feelings, their words, their actions when so much is façade and pretence and evasion and deception? Is it all pointless carnival, as the frolicking students (who appear at the beginning and end of the film) would suggest in their seemingly inane mimes? A going through the motions?

The basic narrative goes like this: David Hemmings is taking photos in a park in Charlton when he spots a couple kissing. He takes photos of them. When the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) notices him, she runs after him and demands he hand over the camera. Hemmings refuses but says she can have the photos when he has developed them. Once he does develop them, however, he notices that a fourth person was present at the moment he snapped the couple kissing. By blowing up the exposures, he discovers that there was a man in the bushes with a gun pointed at the presumably illicit lovers. He returns to the scene and discovers the dead body of Redgrave’s lover. Inadvertently Hemmings has captured a murder on camera.

Camera obscura … Michelangelo Antonioni during the filming of L'Avventura (1960).
Michelangelo Antonioni

Perception. What we see and what we want to see, both objectively out in the world, and internally in our emotional lives. Although set in the swinging sixties, a time which on the surface purported to be full of novelty and fun and new-found freedoms, nobody in the film is happy and there are no deep human connections: there is wealth and poverty and demonstrations on the streets of London. The people with money and access to drugs and an incessant party life seem no happier than the men emerging from the doss house at the start of the film. Everything is veneer, false appearances, of little value.

Values. The film presents a critical meditation on the bankrupt spiritual and emotional values of contemporary society and the individual. What is at stake is honesty, that fundamental virtue which according to the 18th century French writer, Voltaire, is the cornerstone of human society. Dishonesty destroys relationships on a personal level and can destroy the very fabric of society.

Insofar as any film can be important, Blow-Up is important, a cinematographic masterpiece. But you have to look beneath the veneer to appreciate it!

Brown Eyes – George Clausen

irlandesuk art, Tate Britain ,
Brown Eyes 1891 Sir George Clausen 1852-1944 Presented by C.N. Luxmoore 1929 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N04484
George Clausen, Brown Eyes (1891) oil on canvas

One of the artists to catch my attention during my recent visit to Tate Britain was George Clausen (1852-1944), an English painter, who was born in London, and was the son of a decorative artist. He studied design in South Kensington from 1867 to 1873 and later went on to Paris to study under two rather traditional artists, William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury. Despite their conservative approach, Clausen would have learnt from them the importance of technical skills. However, while in Paris it was perhaps inevitable at the time that he would also come under the influence of the impressionists who completely rejected the academic style propounded by Clausen’s teachers.

George Clausen’s paintings concentrated on peasant figures and landscapes, though, as with the French impressionists, his real concern came to be the rendering of light in open air settings or in the shady shelter of a barn or stable. His portrait of a young peasant girl, entitled Brown Eyes, painted in oils on canvas in 1891, is an absolute delight. On the one hand it presents a perfect classical triangular composition, in which the girl’s white blouse dominates: however, the girl’s intense expression adds real depth and energy, and one wonders what has caught her attention as she looks out from the canvas over the shoulder of the observer. The field in the background provides a beautiful natural contrast, delicately captured with fine brushstrokes. So don’t delay, get down to Tate Britain and see for yourself the magic of this portrait, which is just one of the many treasures held in the permanent collection.

One final observation, although it is always well-attended, possibly because of its location in Pimlico, Tate Britain is not swamped by crowds in the way that other galleries can be. So if you’re looking for a leisurely, unstressed Sunday afternoon but want to appreciate some true artistic masterpieces, I can highly recommend the venue.

Wild blackberries

irlandesuk poetry ,

blackberries_wildThis week I have been revising a book of poetry that has been 18 months in the writing. Sections of the poem have been read by a very good friend of mine, Paul Taylor. I asked him as he was reading to mark the text wherever he found the lines confusing or simply dull. I am now working my way through the pages, sometimes rewriting passages he has marked as uninteresting or simply cutting them out if they no longer seem relevant to me.

It is always useful to have an editor, someone who can be trusted and whose judgment is based on wide reading and long years of experience. On this page I would like to express my gratitude to Paul for the task he undertook with great enthusiasm and completed with great professionalism. The lines  below, written over a year ago, nevertheless echo a poem submitted to the blog mid-August by Molly Rosenberg. According to Paul Taylor, my short poem is actually a metaphor for love. Who knows?

Wild blackberries

Wild blackberry canes
                   barbed brambles
heavy with fruit
                   thrive on the steep banks
of the railway cutting
                   goodness that grows
innocently
                   out of the soil :
but easy access to them is barred
                   by dense patches of nettles
so the berries gather dust
                   ripen and then fall back
into the undergrowth
                   to be eaten by birds
and by the large colonies of fox families
                   that have pitched their tents
at various stations
                   along the line

John Lyons

Kestrel

irlandesuk Uncategorized , ,

Kestrel2So much of nature is driven by instinct, and no more apparent is this than in species that prey on other species. An ocelot, for example, will hunt in the rainforest for mice, agoutis, monkeys, opossums, armadillos, anteaters, snakes or turtles. But it may also fall victim to a larger predator, a jaguar for example. In one way or another all life feeds on life: organic creatures require organic sustenance! It is a fascinating sight to see a kestrel hovering in the air as it fixes its gaze on a rodent down below, only to plummet seconds later to make the kill.

Instinct, however, is not to be confused with human passion, the passion that can lead to love at first sight (or vice-versa), that can lead to an all-consuming hunger that may override good sense and ignore any social or financial considerations as it homes in on the object of its desire.

Kestrel

The single kestrel
                   that hangs in the air
enthrals the eye
                   the sheer beauty
of it plumage
                   the pin-point accuracy
of its eye
                   the effortless power
in its talons
                   as it seizes its prey
in one fell swoop

Is love
                   any less dead eye
any less ferocious
                   in clinging on
to the object of affection
                   the warm flesh
of the beloved ?

Did Orpheus not descend
                   into the very mouth
of hell
                   to retrieve her ?
Immaculate love
                   wipes the slate
kick-starts a new millennium
                   a re-enactment
of first things
                   first kiss first taste
first immersion
                   in the warm
beating blood and fibre
                   of another

John Lyons

Pablo Neruda – The saddest lines

irlandesuk Chilean literature, poetry ,
young neruda
A young Pablo Neruda

 A couple of years ago, one of my students was in Panama participating in an international tennis tournament. In order for him not to fall behind, we agreed to continue classes over Skype during the period of his absence. One night we studied three love poems by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, one of which I have translated below. When the class was over, I asked Patrick to go down to the hotel lobby and find one of the Spanish-speaking girls who was also taking part in the tournament and to read the poems to her. Always game for anything, Patrick found a Venezuelan girl, Valeria, and read the poems to her. She was extremely moved by the experience. My intention was to show my student that poetry was not written for the academic environment but was intended to be read as a normal everyday activity, and that love poetry could be extremely effective, particularly in the context of relationships with the opposite sex. He certainly got the message and so did Valeria. 

The poem translated below was taken from Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada [Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair] a collection which was first published in 1924 when Neruda was only nineteen. It has since become the Chilean poet’s best known work and has sold more than a million copies and been widely translated. Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

Poem 20

Tonight I could write the saddest lines.

Write, for example: “The night is shattered,
and blue stars shimmer, far away.”

The night wind veers in the sky and sings.

Tonight I could write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How not to have loved her big staring eyes.

Tonight I could write the saddest lines.
To think I do not have her. To feel I’ve lost her.

To hear the inmense night, more immense without her.
And that line settles upon the soul as dew upon the grass.

What does it matter that my love could not retain her.
The night is full of stars and she’s not with me.

That’s all. Far away someone is singing. Far away.
My soul is not content to have lost her.

As though to bring her close my eyes look for her.
My heart looks for her, and she’s not with me.

The same night chills the same trees with frost.
We, the ones we were then, are not the same.

I don’t love her, it’s true, but how I loved her.
I sought the wind to carry my voice to her ear.

Someone elses’s. She’ll belong to another. Like before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, it’s true, but maybe I do.
Love’s so short, and the memory so long to fade.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
My soul is not content to have lost her.

Though this may be the last pain she causes me,
and these the last lines that I write.

Translation by John Lyons

Postscript: When teaching this particular poem in class I would often link it to a Bob Dylan song “Most of the time” which can be heard on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQbr4ISrjII. There are also excellent cover versions by Sophie Zelmani https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts6gZFEiMkM and Bettye Lavette https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Q5Mrokqfc. Enjoy!

Language in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

irlandesuk Gothic literature, Irish literature , , , , , ,
stoker
Bram Stoker

In the story of Jonah and Anna-Belle, I introduced someone called Dr Van Helsing. As I explained at the time, this character was based on the Dr Abraham Van Helsing, who is a major protagonist in the novel, Dracula, written by the Irish writer, Bram Stoker, and originally published in 1897. One should not underestimate the influence of this inspired and seminal work of Gothic fiction. An important element of Stoker’s story is psychiatry, and the lunatic asylum in Whitby where Dr John Seward, one of Dr Van Helsing’s former pupils, treats a patient called Renfield, a mad man under the control of Count Dracula. Renfield’s consumption of flies and spiders is itself a parody of vampirism.

In Samuel Beckett’s first novel Murphy, published in 1938, the eponymous hero is employed for a brief period in the Bedlam asylum where he strikes up a friendship with one of the maddest residents. Beckett’s novel also parodies horoscopes, and in my story of Jonah and Anna-Belle I sought to bring the two elements together in a similar manner. I was further inspired by a real daily horoscope I read for my own birth sign which alluded to vampirism, and advised me to be on my guard. This explains the insanity. Not my own, as one reader cheekily suggested, but fictional.

However, the point of this post is really to give an example of the defective grasp of the English language that Stoker bestows on the Dutch Dr Van Helsing, all part of the fun: after all, Stoker gives the doctor his own name, Abraham. Those who have not read the original text of this classic are really missing out on a comic masterpiece.

In the extract below, Dr Van Helsing is describing, in a memorandum to John Seward, the trip he made in the company of Mina Murray, Jonathan Harker’s fiancée, to Count Dracula’s castle in Transylvania. I attempted to capture something of the flavour of this language in the diction of my own Dr Van Helsing.

So we came down this road; when we meet other ways—not always were we sure that they were roads at all, for they be neglect and light snow have fallen—the horses know and they only. I give rein to them, and they go on so patient. By-and-by we find all the things which Jonathan have note in that wonderful diary of him. Then we go on for long, long hours and hours. At the first, I tell Madam Mina to sleep; she try, and she succeed. She sleep all the time; till at the last, I feel myself to suspicious grow, and attempt to wake her. But she sleep on, and I may not wake her though I try. I do not wish to try too hard lest I harm her; for I know that she have suffer much, and sleep at times be all-in-all to her. I think I drowse myself, for all of sudden I feel guilt, as though I have done something; I find myself bolt up, with the reins in my hand, and the good horses go along jog, jog, just as ever. I look down and find Madam Mina still sleep. It is now not far off sunset time, and over the snow the light of the sun flow in big yellow flood, so that we throw great long shadow on where the mountain rise so steep. For we are going up, and up; and all is oh! so wild and rocky, as though it were the end of the world.

Then I arouse Madam Mina. This time she wake with not much trouble, and then I try to put her to hypnotic sleep. But she sleep not, being as though I were not. Still I try and try, till all at once I find her and myself in dark; so I look round, and find that the sun have gone down. Madam Mina laugh, and I turn and look at her. She is now quite awake, and look so well as I never saw her since that night at Carfax when we first enter the Count’s house. I am amaze, and not at ease then; but she is so bright and tender and thoughtful for me that I forget all fear. I light a fire, for we have brought supply of wood with us, and she prepare food while I undo the horses and set them, tethered in shelter, to feed. Then when I return to the fire she have my supper ready. I go to help her; but she smile, and tell me that she have eat already—that she was so hungry that she would not wait. I like it not, and I have grave doubts; but I fear to affright her, and so I am silent of it. She help me and I eat alone; and then we wrap in fur and lie beside the fire, and I tell her to sleep while I watch. But presently I forget all of watching; and when I sudden remember that I watch, I find her lying quiet, but awake, and looking at me with so bright eyes. Once, twice more the same occur, and I get much sleep till before morning. When I wake I try to hypnotise her; but alas! though she shut her eyes obedient, she may not sleep. The sun rise up, and up, and up; and then sleep come to her too late, but so heavy that she will not wake. I have to lift her up, and place her sleeping in the carriage when I have harnessed the horses and made all ready. Madam still sleep, and she look in her sleep more healthy and more redder than before. And I like it not. And I am afraid, afraid, afraid!—I am afraid of all things—even to think but I must go on my way. The stake we play for is life and death, or more than these, and we must not flinch.

Jeremy Moon – Call that art?

irlandesuk art, Tate Britain
Untitled [8/71] 1971 Jeremy Moon 1934-1973 Purchased 2006 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T12243
Jeremy Moon Untitled [8/71] (1971) acrylic on canvas

When you walk into Tate Britain you are given a choice as to which rooms you visit. There are hundreds of representational paintings in which the subject of the composition is immediately obvious, a portrait or a landscape, for example, where the artist has attempted to render a likeness, pretty much like our ancestors sought to render the likeness of antelopes and bison and human figures carrying spears on the walls of the cave in Altamira.

So what on earth was Jeremy Moon trying to render when he produced “Untitled [8/71]”? The answer is simple. He was rendering a visual format we are all so familiar with: a grid. We’ve all seen grids a thousand times, probably see them everyday and we take them for granted. Timetables are laid out in grids, many gardens have trellises and if they are lucky will have English roses growing up the trellis making a wonderful combination of geometric and non-geometric forms. Chess boards and so many other board games are based around grids. So in a sense, even Moon’s non-representational paintings actually represent something. The fact that he does not title many of his works, however, indicates that he does not wish to give the observer any preconceptions over and above what is obvious in the paintings, no verbal stimulus that would in some way limit the observer’s perception.

But anyone could paint this, you might say. To which I would retort, “Okay, if you say so. Go ahead and try. And if you really think it’s child play, get a child to reproduce it.” The fact is that tremendous technical skill is required to produce a work such as “Untitled [8/71]”. Perhaps what is disconcerting is that the palette is very restricted, unlike a Cézanne or a Dutch master. The plastic arts can suffer from the same prejudices that affect classical music. If individuals are brought up on a lazy, limited diet to believe that all classical music has to sound like Beethoven, all opera like Verdi, then it can be difficult to appreciate the avant-garde composers. The problem here is not one of ignorance but of education. Real education is essentially about getting human beings to think and feel for themselves so that they trust their consciousness and their emotions. The patina of knowledge acquired in the educational process is just that, a patina: knowledge is not the same as thinking and feeling. Art is the expression of thought and feeling, consciousness applied to an expressive medium. What thoughts or feelings does a portrait, so well executed that it looks like a photograph, stimulate in the observer? Or, why did artists down the years stop painting antelopes or bison on their living room walls? Not that I’m knocking representational painting. If anything, what I find disturbing is how conventional schooling so often fails to provide young people with sufficient opportunity to explore the arts. Hobbyhorse again! “Get down,” says uncle Toby.

Born in 1934, Jeremy Moon was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1973. There is a website dedicated to his work where you can see many of his beautiful paintings http://www.jeremymoon.com/. However, my recommendation is, get along to Tate Britain in Pimlico as soon as you can and see the work in the original.

A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor

irlandesuk literature, short stories , ,
Robert-lowell
Robert Lowell

In a letter dated 10 August 1964, the American poet Robert Lowell wrote to his great friend, Elizabeth Bishop, another very distinguished American poet, about the death of Flannery O’Connor. Bishop was living in Brazil at the time.

“Did you read about Flannery O’Connor’s death? I gather she must have died of the bone disease, lupus, that plagued her all these years. It seems such a short time ago that I met her at Yaddo, 23 or 24, always in a blue jean suit, working on the last chapters of Wise Blood, suffering from undiagnosed pains, a face formless at times, then very strong and young and right. She had already really mastered and found her themes and style, knew she wouldn’t marry, would be Southern, shocking and disciplined. In a blunt, disdainful yet somehow very unpretentious and modest way, I think she knew how good she was. I suppose she knew dimly about the future, the pain, the brevity, the peacocks, the life with her mother. She was 38 when she died, and I think always had the character of a commanding, grim, witty child, who knew she was destined to live painfully and in earnest, a hero, rather like a nun or Catholic saint with tough innocence, well able to take on her brief, hardworking, hard, steady, splendid and inconspicuous life. I think the cards seemed heavily stacked against her, and her fates must have felt that they had so thoroughly hemmed her in that they could forget, and all would have happened as planned, but really she did what she had decided on and was less passive and dependent than anyone I can think of.”

In her reply to Lowell, Bishop wrote: “I feel awe in front of that girl’s courage and discipline.

Flannery-O'Connor_1947
Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1935, and was diagnosed with the debilitating disease of lupus in 1951. At the time she was only expected to live for another five years: however, she managed to survive fourteen years and in that period she wrote two novels and dozens of short stories. Her stories are among the very best short fictions written anywhere in the world, and the generosity of Lowell’s appraisal of her character is well-founded. She worked as hard as her illness permitted, and by all accounts she never complained or wallowed in self-pity.

The extract below is taken from the title story of the 1955 collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. If you are unfamiliar with the work of Flannery O’Connor, I would encourage you to find this collection and discover what happens when the family run into The Misfit, and if you are not blown away by her writing, I would suggest that you probably need to lose weight (if you know what I mean)!

A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O’Connor)

THE GRANDMOTHER didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”

Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. “The children have been to Florida before,” the old lady said. “You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee.”

The children’s mother didn’t seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, “If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?” He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.

“She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day,” June Star said without raising her yellow head.

“Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?” the grandmother asked.

“I’d smack his face,” John Wesley said.

“She wouldn’t stay at home for a million bucks,” June Star said. “Afraid she’d miss something. She has to go everywhere we go.”

The last waltz in Buenos Aires

irlandesuk poetry ,
Calle_Florida,_Buenos_Aires
Calle Florida, Buenos Aires

During the ten years I lived in Brazil, I visited Argentina on five occasions, spending at least two weeks in Buenos Aires each time. I loved the city, and I loved the people, the long-suffering people of Argentina, who had endured the most savage and macabre of military dictatorships of all the dictatorships of South America.

Within a few years of returning to democracy in 1983, the country was yet to suffer further at the hands of the dictatorship of international capital, which led ultimately to a virtual overnight devaluation of the country’s currency in 2002 and stripped the value of millions of people’s savings. Despite the terrible years of political and economic attrition, the population remained dignified and proud of its cultural heritage, proud of the tango and of its immensely rich artistic culture and its love affair with books. While it was rare in Brazil to see people on the public transport system reading a book, in Argentina the opposite was true, and in Buenos Aires, at least, there was a bookshop on every street corner.

I wrote the poem below in my hotel room one afternoon and it was inspired more by the crisis in my relationship at the time than by the problems of the Argentinean economy. The hotel, ironically, was called Casa calma (the calm house) but for me it was anything but calm. I knew that that particular visit to the country was going to be my last, certainly, my last with that particular partner.

As to the form of the poem, inspiration came from two sources. The concept of ‘the first of the last times’ I borrowed from a poem by an elderly Nicaraguan poet, José Coronel Urtecho, whom I had met some years previously in his home, a few months before his death. The poem was called Panels of Hell, and my translation of that text was commissioned and published by Harold Pinter. The second source was from the catechism lesson I was taught as a child in primary school:

Q. Which are the four last things to be always remembered?

A. The four last things to be always remembered are: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven.

 The Last Waltz

What will be the first of the last things
The first word of the last words
The first day of the last days
The first kiss of the last kisses;
What will be the first breath
Of the last breaths, the first sigh
And the first of the long goodbyes?
Here in Buenos Aires the streets
Are haunted by those who have
Gone before, by those who have walked
These noble streets that fell in recent years
Upon such hard times, a sad dreary elegance
Now clinging to so many crumbling façades.
This clear blue sky and crisp ocean air
Known to Borges, known to Cortázar,
Which weathers the skin in the daily bounty
Of those who survive. This may be the first
Of the last memories, the first taste
Of the last tastes to tantalize my palate
The first of the last loves to be made
In the first of the last beds. And as I wake
And dress in the first of the last clothes
Put on the shoes that may be blessed
To take the first of the last steps,
I recall the sibilance of Emily’s valley-licking train,
A vector of sound in the long speechless distance
A vector of thought, a rugged nugget of words
Condensed around an ecstasy of emotion:
From distance, the sensation of intimacy,
From a silence broken, the tactile meaning of words
Of love, the first of the last words of love,
The first of the last brushes of skin against skin,
Of lip against lip. This is, and always was a merry
Macabre dance, whether upon a lush city stage,
A retarded Calvary or in the empty heart of the pampas:
Our steps are numbered, even as the band is poised
To strike up the very first chords of our very last waltz.

John Lyons

Buenos Aires 31 October 2011

Herman Melville – all cut up

irlandesuk poetry , ,
melville
Herman Melville

In the 1960s, encouraged by the American poet and painter Brion Gysin, William Burroughs began to experiment with a cut-up technique of writing. He would take a page from a novel by Graham Greene, for example, and cut it into four columns A, B, C and D. He would then rearrange the columns in an order such as C, A, D, B. and glue them to a sheet of paper so that he was able to read the text across the lines of the page CADB as though the words had been written in that order. What interested him was to see what new images and combinations were created in this new arrangement of words.

In an interview, Burroughs stated: “Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones.”

Some months ago I tried a variation of this technique. Instead of cutting up pages, I consulted a concordance to the work of the American writer, Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. I searched for usages of the words, ‘bone’, ‘dust’, ‘love’, ‘dream’ and ‘rose’. The text below is a compilation of those references as they occurred in my research.

Dust on the moth’s wing

She was bone of his bone
and his very bones
are as whispering galleries
He laid her bones
upon some treacherous reef
with the bones of the drowned
Not dust to dust but dust to brine
he is dust where he stands
he had dead dust for ancestors
the penalty we pay for being
             what we are—fine dust

Did I dream a snow-white skin
firmament blue eyes :
this beautiful maiden
who thinking no harm
and rapt in a dream was a dream
We dream not ourselves
but the dream dreams within us
How the firefly illuminates its body 
for a beacon to love
Long he cannot be
for love is a fervent flagellant fire
love is all in all—all three : red rose
bright shore and soft heart
             are full of love

Loved one love on
who fell into the very snares of love
Love the living not the dead
great love is sad
             and heaven is love

Dreams dreams golden dreams
: noon dreams are day dreams
Are all our dreams then in vain?
What dream brought you hither Romeo
And sweet Juliet what dream is it
that ails your heart ?
We are but dolls of joy and grief :
breathe grow dream die
             —love not

This earth’s an urn
for flowers not for ashes
Brush your tears from the lilies
and howl in sackcloth and ashes
as thoughts of eternity thicken
Duration is not of the future
but the past : we must build with
the calendar of eternities
Sad rose of all my days : a song sung
             on lips of dust

He’s seized the helm
eternity was in his eyes
Dash of the waves against the bow
and deep the breath of dreaming
Such perils that lie
like a rose among thorns
Her delicate white skin
tinted with a faint rose hue
             like her lips
like rose pearls that once bruised
against my aching skin
             left love stains

Your rose, my sweet
I unfold its petals
and disclose a pearl
yet the full-blown rose
is nearer to withering
than the bud : and Emily asked
             how far is it to hell ?

John Lyons