We, in our perfectly civilised discussions

    tend among our

    peers suddenly

    to turn to piz-

    za

   it is no respecter

   of hours, pizza, a

   demonically versa-

   tile distracter in

   its many parts and

   guises

   and how their melt

   resists resistance

   is not merely aro-

   matically indicat-

   ed

   in the way one can

   understand brioche

Eddie Redmayne

  in the play by

  John Logan

Saturday commute xciv: one's own chariot

  On the path to the water, I found an ugly weed

  growing between rocks. The wind was stroking it,

  saying, 'My weed, my weed.' Its solid,

  hairy body rose up, with big silver leaves

  that rubbed off on me, like sex. At first,

  I thought it was a lamb's ear, but it wasn't.

  I'm not a member of the ugly school,

  but I circled around it and looked a lot,

  which is to say, I was just being, and it seemed to me -

  in a higher sense - to represent the sanity of living.

  It was twilight. Planets were gathering.

  'Mr Weed,' I said, 'I'm competitive,

  I'm afraid, I'm isolated, I'm bright.

  Can you tell me how to survive?'

            

Henri Cole

Pierce the Skin

  Selected Poems 1982 - 2007

  My Weed

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010©

Of all days

         What is the late November doing

         With the disturbance of the spring

         And creatures of the summer heat,

         And snowdrops writhing under feet

         And hollyhocks that aim too high

         Red into grey and tumble down

         Late roses filled with early snow?

          .. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to ..?

.. There is, it seems to
us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.

T.S. Eliot

Four Quartets

  East Coker

  [fragments]

Harcourt, Brace, 1943©

Steppes song

It's not just that a lot of people believed in the system even after they were repressed in the Soviet Union. It is that, in general, those who were pun-
ished were quite sure there had been some kind of mistake. 

And if that is what you think, it can only be because you hold the system itself to be fundamentally sound. You are the victim of a judicial mistake, whereas your fellow prisoners are surely criminals. You see your own case as exceptional, and that seems to rescue the victims of the universal system.

.. the experience of communism leaves its intellectual survivors peculiarly preoccupied with their own beliefs -  more than they are with the crimes themselves: in retrospect, it is the delusory allegiance which accounts for their trauma, more than anything they have suffered at the hands of their jailors. The title of Annie Kriegel's memoir, What I Thought I Understood, nicely captures it. It is the sense of reiterated self-interrogation: did I misunderstand it?

.. most were arrested in the middle of the night, individual-

ly. This left them and their families in no position to under-

stand what had happened .. that terrifying grayness, indefinite uncertainty, remains part of the landscape of memory ..

Tony Judt

Timothy Snyder

Thinking the Twentieth Century

op. cit.

Prairie oilcloth blues

As if wearing Werther.

I was listening to a con-

cert version of Tom Pet-

ty's I won't back down, 

and heard the audience 

whistle for a defiant 

guitar pick in that bal-

lad of redneck indigna-

tion; it was exactly how 

Gustavo Santaolalla open-

ed the film of Brokeback 

Mountain.

There is being isolated,

and there is feeling iso-

lated; islanded. Pride 

and contempt will sound:
who would sing of fear?

Muss es sein?

I wonder if we might be cutting off the fascists from real continuities in European thought. The idea that one's nation is not the people living in the country but rather those who speak a language, or associate with a tradition, or worship in a certain church, derives quite directly from the Romantics .. the intonations of the latter appear naïve and somehow harmless to us when read today, but nevertheless, there does seem to be a continuity .. between Fichte and Herder and fascists a century later.

Tony Judt

Timothy Snyder

Thinking the Twentieth Century

op. cit.

Tuesday in our field ii

The fascists were able to have their way in early experiments with the welfare state because they were unencumbered by the Marxist disagreements about reform versus revolution, unconcerned by orthodoxies of any kind. And so they were free to say: perhaps we should plan, the Soviets do it, it seems to work; or, perhaps we should steal from the Jews and redistribute, that seems practical.

To do them justice, there was also a more sophis-
ticated consideration: why don't we instrumen-
talize the state to plan and impose economic policies, rather than go through the tedious mech-
anisms of parliamentary politics. In the fu-
ture, let us simply pronounce the policy, rather than seek support for it.


































Tony Judt
Timothy Snyder
Thinking the Twentieth Century
Penguin, 2012©

Tuesday in our field

I am not left-handed,

and my trousers don't

fall; but I've posted

this cropping before,

and readers liked it.

Is this portrait rec-

ognisable to you; was

it taken of you, when

no one saw it happen?

Did a companion chase

what you threw, or is

this heroic, easy arc

also a clasp for you?

Were the sage piquant

that day, or were the

breezes full of salt?

The field fairly hums

to us, of who we are.

We note the stallion,

snorting in the mead-

ow dawn, depicting a-

romatics he absorbed,

and emanated; but who

would write the pleas-

ure in the swiping of

it all? Yet we gather

a subjective harvest. 

I think this is cool:

that a face should be

first to draw the bal-

sam of the setting of

our thirst, and speak

of restoration in our

unenvisioned escapade.

Morning watch

     Some guys

     really do

     come just

     for a cof-

     fee. Some

     poetry is

     not about

     them; but

     not much.

Gaps and walls and needs to know

    How was your time

    last night?

    Fine.

    Who'd you see?

    No one you know.

Every dawn that follows Saturday rises with such a filial, incompetent question. What cherishes incompetence before inherent hunger?

We are getting answers now, that lift false tissue, not just from history, but from the protected mind.

         The problem with divorcing vengeance from its wid-
         er context is that it makes it impossible to under-
         stand why people acted the way they did in the af-
         termath of the war. From a modern, political point 
         of view it also creates a competition over victim-
         hood.. Sooner or later the arguments tend to break 
         down along national or political lines.

  

  They stood in the street
  not looking at one anoth-
  er.

  'Why did you ask that ques-
  tion, the question about 
  her father?'

  Sometimes Leclerc seemed
  neither to hear nor to
  feel; he drifted away,
  listening for a sound,
  like a man who having
  learnt the steps had 
  been deprived of the mu-
  sic; this mood read like 
  a deep sadness, like the
  bewilderment of a man be-
  trayed.

  'I don't want anyone to
  know.' 

Ian Buruma

Year Zero

  A History of 1945

Penguin Press, 2013©

(i) Keith Lowe

Savage Continent

  Europe in the After-

  math of Word War II

St Martin's Press, 2012©

Picador, 2013©

(ii) John Le Carré
The Looking Glass War
1965
Penguin Books, 2012©