Montale, Ashbery, in transit

E andando ned sole que abbaglia
sentire con triste meraviglia
come'è tutta la vita e il suo   travaglio
in questo seguitare una muraglia
che ha in cima occi aguzzi di   bottiglia.


And walking in the dazzling sun,
feel with sad amazement
that all life and its torment
consists in following along a wall
with broken bottle shards embedded in its top

Some departure from the norm
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
The consensus gradually changed; nobody 
Lies about it anymore. Rust dark pouring
Over the body, changing it without decay -
People with too many things on their minds, but we live
In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,
Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness
And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.
How careless.

So l'ora in cui la faccia più impassibile

è traversata da una cruda smorfia:

s'è svelata per poco una pena invisibile.

Ciò non vede la gente nell'affollato corso.

I know the moment when a raw grimace

crosses the most impassive face:

for an instant an invisible pain is revealed.

The people in the crowded street don't see it.

.. Yet in the end each of us

Is seen to have traveled the same distance - it's time

That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,

Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it were

The same as making it happen. You're not sorry,

Of course, especially if this is the way it had to happen,

Yet would like an exacter share, something about time

That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means.

This posting was conceived

in glad memories of times

with Mme Ulli Steltzer,

portraitist of Mann, Einstein,

Oppenheimer, Bruno Walter, 

and me; lady of Princeton
and one's mentor in coffee.

Yes, Ulli. I'm Papa's

complaint with Brahms.

Eugenio Montale

Ossi di Seppia, 1926

Jonathan Galassi, translation

Cuttlefish Bones

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998©

John Ashbery

Saying It to Keep It from Happening

 Houseboat Days

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975©

Ludwig van Beethoven

Op. 73, Adagio un poco mosso

Walter Gieseking, piano

Herbert von Karajan

The Philharmonia Orchestra

EMI, 1952©

Warbling voices

to San Geronimo, par avion

I imagine that we all get used to hearing some repeated epithet which sums up our circumstances.. Quiet is the one which I hear most. The consolatory and healing nature of quietness pours through the scriptures. Be still, be still.. How enchanting it can be when quiet is present. Paul told the over-excited Thessalonians to 'study to be quiet.'

Matins at Wormingford. It is the day when we have to be seen as ministers and stewards of God.. Afterwards, I walk over to the tall memorial to John and Christine Nash under a holly bush and see lichen blurring their names.. Christmases at Bottengoms, me plucking pheasants on the doorstep, Christine preparing the goose, John playing Schubert, the cats hogging the fire, children calling to be hugged.

A shepherd on the radio confessed to the interviewer how much it meant to him to read the lesson.. Some forty of us must have been speaking 'Christmas' - Thanks be to God.. Boys' and girls' and old folks' voices spin through the arches, each reader releasing his consignment like a bird..  

Courtesy Valéry Lorenzo

Afterwards, beneath the bells, I say, 'Well done! Well done!' The readers are quiet, having spoken.

John Nash


Ronald Blythe
Word from Wormingford:
  A Parish Year
Viking, 1997©


Henry Purcell
The Fairy Queen
1692
Sir Roger Norrington
London Classical Players
Schütz Choir of London
EMI, 1994©

Shirtlifter for a cause

Having been roundly upbraided, left and right, for a posting in the previous meridian which I confessed to be tedious, only to find it debated, rather, for prurience, I restored myself by consulting my mentor, Mr Spectator. One reader of that posting accepted my apology for inflicting it on his delicate, though landed gaze, while an urbane fellow  extolled indelicacy as its redeeming attribute, drawing no umbrage from a bourgeois labyrinth which is familiar - exposing me from the first to calumny for guile (which comes hard, from an heir of Odysseus, I may say), and from the second to faint praise.

“A spectator of mankind, rather than as one of the species,” Mr Spectator is infallibly impartial in matters such as divided the readership today; and as one’s betters in society and government, age and cultivation implicitly concur, it is just as well for one to heed his example, or bugger off the page. Shall we glance, then, at our exemplar’s patient invention of one's mode? In his Sir Roger de Coverley papers, he elucidates how one may be a shirtflifter for a cause, where the cause is Reform.

The first and most obvious Reflections which arise in a Man who changes the City for the Country, are upon the different Manners of the people whom he meets with in those two different Scenes of Life. By Manners I do not mean Morals, but Behaviour and Good-Breeding as they show themselves in the Town and in the Country.

And here, in the first place, I must observe a very great Revolution that has happened in this Article of Good Breeding. Several obliging Deferences, Condescensions and Submissions, with many outward Forms and Ceremonies that accompany them, were first of all brought up among the politer Part of Mankind, who lived in Courts and Cities, and distinguished themselves from the Rustick part of the Species (who on all occasions acted bluntly and naturally).

These Forms ... by degrees multiplied and grew troublesome; the modish World found too great a Constraint in them, and have therefore thrown most of them aside. [Presentation], like the __ Religion, was so encumbered with Show and Ceremony, that it stood in need of a Reformation to retrench its Superfluities, and restore it to its natural good Sense and Beauty. 

At present therefore an unconstrained Carriage, and a certain Openness of Behaviour, are the height of Good-breeding. The fashionable World is grown free and easy; our Manners fit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence. In a word, Good-breeding shews itself most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.

If after this we look on the People of Mode in the Country, we find in them the Manners of the Last Age. They have no sooner fetched themselves up to the Fashion of the polite World, but the Town has dropped them, and are nearer to the first State of Nature than to those Refinements which formerly reigned in the Court, and still prevail in the Country.

One may now know a Man that never conversed in the World, by his excess of Good-breeding. A polite Country 'Squire shall make you as many Bows in half an hour, as would serve a Courtier for a Week.. 

In our mobile world, alternations in taste between Town and Country can disorient the bearings of many of us, having no more than one foot in either place, and nothing more than an abyss of chain stores or a big box of wage depressants to join us. Now, as in Mr Spectator's time, the spirit of reform is on the side of the shirtlifter, and one does wish to be welcoming to the future.

As for reform, the natural affections, we must expect, are even likelier than shopping mall architecture to bridge that gap between the two spheres, and this hope must meet with everyone's favour, surely?

Sir Joseph Addison

The Coverley Etiquette, 1712

Addison and Sir Richard Steele,

The Spectator, 1711-1715

The Heritage Press, 1945©

Jeremy Young

Saturday commute viii

We are absolutely and utterly completely not ready for this. We are so off-the-charts unready, that vertigo, which we don't know, threatens to tip us over the ledge of this plastic balustrade and into an Escherite pit of pure, appalling clawing for our purse.

This Wagnerian Venusberg, this dystopian cockpit poured from Fritz Lang, has been created only to strip us and flail us and drain us on some pretext of delight. No one lives here. No dogs walk by on lead, no birds excite the air, no corner lets us take a turn to stop and share a kiss. Who thought of this? Who dreamt this?
What is my answer to my dog, of how this came to stain his day, in obscenely sprawling solicitation? Gary Cooper turns to his mother in Sergeant York, "What are they a-fightin' fer, Ma?" She puts the skateboard to the ground, "I don't rightly know, Son. I don't rightly know." 

And so we arrive at the banquet for the Armistice in the first reel of Warren Beatty's Reds, where Jack Reed is asked to stand up and discuss the meaning of the war. He rises on the dais, says one word, and promptly takes his seat. "Profits."  

Just a place

places, mozartmozart
glad faces, anonymous


Palestrina
Sanctus
Missa Hodie 
  Christus Natus Est, 1575
Martin Baker
Westminster Cathedral Choir
Hyperion, 2003©

The seduction of boys ii

Twenty-four hundred years ago, an 87-year-old man staged a play, on looking right into the eyes of a son of the gods, teaching him to embrace lying about war. The youth obeyed. This was called, tragedy. Those were the days.


Neoptolemus:
I far prefer failure, if it is honest,
to victory earned by treachery.


Odysseus:
You will see as I have that everywhere
it is our words that win, and not our deeds.


What are your orders, apart from telling lies?

To take him by trickery, however deceitful.


And you do not find such lying disgusting?


You will be called wise because of your trick,
and brave for the sack of Troy.


Then let it be so. I will do what you order,
putting aside my sense of shame.






Sophocles
Philoctetes
409 BC
Gregory McNamee, translation
Copper Canyon Press, 1986©

D'you come here often?

There it is. Dixie and its satrapies, throttling the nation again today, in eternal schadenfreude. The New York Times portrays the failure of a bill in the Senate of the United States, to repeal the discriminatory exclusion of gay men and women from the nation's service. Not, need it be said, by a failure of majority will, as if that should be enough to perpetuate discrimination. No. By the exercise of arcane institutional privilege, not even contemplated in the Constitution.

If you live where these red pustules defile the map, this is how you are being represented. By three dozen pimples in an insufferably constant pattern on this country's copious ass. Is this the government you inherited, paid for, voted for, gave children for, and suffered for? 


It's the one you're being given, by sharecropping sectarian stalking horses of plutocracy. But such a state needs its young to die unnatural deaths, in wars it daren't end. If not today, then when the beast is bled enough, it may begin to live.

Who shall sew the first button?

A crisis in conditioning of the young has reached the attention of even the President's wife. All about us, their upper trouser button is simply a bridge too far. A notorious proclivity for games and revels is rightly coming under scrutiny in our media, ever enthralled by any fluttering of tanlines.
Fashion, however, seems not to be wholly blameless in the ascendancy of the descending demarcation. The appalling lengths to which the young will go, to imitate each other's entitlement to this affectation, exposes a tendency upon which our schoolmarms have always been alert to pounce, with hatpin rampant. Hopefully, this entry can help to gather that furore.