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A TATTERED COAT IV

2014 - 2015

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To Sue

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JUNE 30 2014

I wish I knew what family meant - Yes, I know the labels, the outward forms, but not its covert inner workings, nor what’s in, nor what’s out. The nuclear family is a useful label, well, it limits things at any rate, it will exclude cousins in theory while practices, and procedures, of this mystery will run their own course. Focus on sons, daughters then, and grandparents are included, so grandchildren must be there, but this is all very well, but it works no more than that, just another constraint to get us through. Is this then the pother, the unmanning, as I looked across the other day above the pizzas, the lugini, the fritti, the statutory gelati, looking at son, and grandchildren, seeing them every two years or so, asking myself why I was in such a state, unable to function, taxis wrongly booked restaurants too, as I was near non-autonomy brought on by I know not what. I still do not know what family means. June 2014

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MADAME

Overtly shaking, overtly shaken, she averred vindication, as if it were a mere excuse, a pretext of assertion serving a bought, lied-for justifying. How the fashioner of celebrity fashions the celebrity victim - already seen has been this charade, being called to witness misdemeanours of her own making, presenting a demure façade with mane reined-in against the grain of her covert self, the witch-hunted, not the true, the under, witch-hunter (‘Stay strong, stay strong’) so little in a wicked world, all of men’s making, a little girl, floundering, lost. The covert, the covert will unknit all this. Have not millions bought faux-innocence? Were she still the girlie-secretary, or a puppet at a check-out, or a faceless call-centre girl, she would have been locked away with her former lover, two caged birds, singing their silenced songs. Now might and media-millions can suborn minds, and warp judgements, softening direction, vindicating perjury only. Truth, as was the sun, was occluded that June day. Bastille Day 2014

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ON DIEPPE SEAFRONT

I got to Dieppe seafront today thinking there might be poetry there: it was there that day, le quartorze but I was deaf to its sound. Nor, that day, could I hear the music of the spheres, nor the quantum world’s uncertainties. Everyday senses need solidities nor can they corral a universe in the head of a pin, so what we see, hear, feel, sense of what is and what is not, these are chasms apart. God, nature, or other blind agency does play at dice with our universe chancing the orderings of the spheres and the music of the stars. This was not vouchsafed to me then on Dieppe seafront on that day. July 14 2014

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THE GREEN MAN STRIDES

People, strangers, will come up to me: ‘Are you all right?’ or ‘Do you need help?’ as I pole-punt across failing to lurch to the other side before the green man turns red. Or drivers will stop, mid-road, and beckon me over as the crossing is too far away. But this private charity patronises in role-reinforcement, bestows a self-promoting glow, a smugness almost on its warmed perpetrators. Words do not mean what they mean any longer: The Ministry of Defence wages offensive wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, while tanks creak at Heathrow - a sop to a daft notion. The private sector is a thing of profit, prey to bids, balance-sheets, zero futures, all those contradictions of the Bourse, while our poor cash-starved NHS lurches from crisis to crisis. As it had no opening for market-forces an artificial market was erected for it, to operate the ‘disciple of the market’, bearing on its back yet one more hare-brained notion. The private drips on the public stone eroding it quite we are left with a wasted ethic - we privatise the public silver so asset-less we lurch through privatising industry, privatising railways, mines, docks, shipping, all this deforming responses to others, collectively, relying only on luck and charity. August 2014

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COMING THROUGH

Each meaningful work is a victory over self: the inconsequentialities of every day life intrude, those mundanities of lavatory paper and buses, banks, coffee shops, wind-blown rain, hospitals, supermarkets, pubs, pain, pushing in newsagents, crowds in post offices, all the detritus the way we live, have to live, now. Then the incoherences of our inner selves, the mistakes, the petty misunderstandings, the gauche remarks, the jokes gone wrong, wincing reminders of past cumbersomenesses, past, yes, but only because in the past, now painfully, pressingly present. Is Yeats, breakfasting with his contradictions all of us in our workyday worlds? Why do I then read autobiographies of writers? To plot, to plumb the creative occurrence, to try to trap their worlds, to tally them with mine. Autobiographies are texts to special pleadings, to selective memories seeking good lights while biographies explain the life of writers but not their meaningful works, their victories over selves. Creative occurrences remain intangible but indubitably there. October 2014

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WHY NOW

Life ebbs with the passing of the light to zed, that nil of the dying year, the leaves of the peonies rust before me, hydrangeas, too, sickly green to russet-hued, mists stratifies the trees reaching away, petrifying their autumn finery, those trees that will, must, decay and fall under the sun’s waning warmth. None of these say much for Autumn’s store - nor does that umber, full-breasted beauty, toting her baskets of plenty away from machine-winnowed granaries; nor do harvest festivals that flaunt canned goods and air-freighted produce, as commerce legislates our seasons now. These tell us nothing of humanity. Autumn carries no promises unlike the songs of spring. Where can be autumn’s music as shrivelled now is Pomona’s fruit under stretched cling-film in plastic trays - commerce snooking at the year’s turnings - while traffic throttles our towns plumping pollution in its train. Now out of nature’s clock, what is left for us who crawl, lurch towards that dark. bent, shaking, stumbling, gap-toothed - that is how the young see us - harbingers of our own endings? These outmoded modes of sham melancholy enthrall me not, no not now.

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This is why I write, why I have to write, for commerce-threatened humanity’s sake, for in my store are further crops. It is on me now to sing autumn’s songs. Ripeness is … after all … all. October 2014

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HOUSE

Do we search to be seen, to be noted, seeking significance in the eyes of others, justifying the occupation of our spaces? Some through fashion, trends or glamour photography, make-up, celebrity status, attention in camera poses, or by playing parts on apron stages, and in everyday life’s theatre, by making more money than others - so doing down fellow beings - ambition, getting on achieving, so others cannot, or by buying one’s own home, seeking a secureness in occupation. in occupations, professions until smug self-satisfaction is attained ostentatiously. There must be more to ‘it’ than this: There should be more to ‘it’ than this! Only by going back to life’s building blocks, recreating a big bang in our own heads, accepting the compulsion of that gigantic accident until we stand naked in our selves without the support of God or Man, education, family, love even. Only then shall we rebuild a fitting house. November 2014

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A LIFE CHANCE They should, somehow, have been together: roughly the same age, the same sort of clothing, a seemingly shared background, He outside, unlocking his bike, She inside, at the cold food unit, He swinging into the saddle, with only a cursory glance through the window, She choosing her sandwich, weight borne on one leg. He pedalled off, up the street, She joined the queue at the till, paid, sat down with her food and coffee. Had their eyes met through the glass, would the age-old story been replayed, the like-story across the reaches of time, alike, yet not like, old and new, or would, with eyes not meeting, they have gone their diverging ways, as now? In Caffe Nero, Bond Street, Brighton November 2014

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ALL AUTHORS NOW

Our selves are our novels we write across the span of our lives, not so much as authors as publishers of our own presenting. Flailing images of the visual press in, teem overwhelmingly visual, until our hard-pressed minds begin to grasp, to organise, to set in order so we do not explode with one spontaneous lurch, but come to place it all recognising the familiar, to see, in short, the world about us as unthreatening, ordinary. mundane even, and we breathe sighs of relief. But what then? What do new take from all these images but a great ordering so we do not implode but go out active into the world, pressing ourselves on others being this, being that to all men, and to all women too, publishing ourselves as we author ourselves. November 2014

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PICS

Photographs are lying things (family albums worst of all) daring the innocent viewer how to read visual signs, how to tell what is going on. Wafers of a reality in fractions of a second (‘I didn’t really look like that, did I?’) a reality, not reality, as reality is unedged, unchosen, unframed. A myriad then of realities, ephemeral now, on mobiles, on discs, not even in albums, so many grains of sand, infinitely divisible, until all these particles of the perceived, the view-found, these scatterings of subjectivities, obeying some uncertain law fuse in to an objectivity through accidental occurrences, as no one photograph can. December 2014

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A BLOCKED GATEWAY

The explanation is prosaic, really. A ruined arch, propped by cropped crumbling walls skewed to that arch, keeping the servants out, in even, of a kitchen garden, or so it looks, unkempt, with lank straggling growth, limp, sagging here, there all dusty grey-green without a dusty arch. The weight of dereliction cracks the kernel. The entry is blocked to brave new sites. Is not a gateway a way in, an entry into, a shoehorning. a precursor to what is to come, a difference, a learning even, rearing a new sunshine. Learning’s industrial-complex rises the mediocre to the top and soaring to a new sun is now gone, now … dead. January 2015

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THE SEEDLING

Setting a seed-bed for others to bud, to burgeon, to flower to decay, in its season, even, is a grand human good, positioning the being in the natural, a living element of a universe, a particle of that great panoply, minute in itself, near-unrecordable in our everyday senses, but the necessary building- block in the totality, in that total human cosmos. Persons do not fit-full with legal personae, Nor does ‘home’ fully suit all: ‘mon pays’ or ‘heimat’ are not near me: What’s me to England or England to me that I should die for an ‘it’? How do I, how can I belong to a construct, to the non-natural? I cannot repudiate nature but I can kick against fabrications. All that remains is language - language in which I think, read, write, act, my habitation where I have my being. January 2015

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HOW BANAL CAN YOU GET?

1. Lit Crit (2) Had Frédéric a mobile Flaubert’s novel would have collapsed - He didn’t - It didn’t. 2. Knowledge It often happens the bleeding obvious isn’t. 3. The Economy Free trade isn’t - as below structures secure a piggy-backing on others’ money. 4. Memory as Loss I ‘wrote ‘ it in bed late last night but did not write it down. In the morning I could not remember what I’d written. 5. In Memoriam: Charlie Hebdo The gutter press sucks the milk of distortion from the government’s teat. The considered broadsheets stroke their chins only to produce self-same puerile fudge. We are cudgled into pallid acquiescence

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in the name of SECURITY. So sort of free from coercion, yes. Does that then mean we are free to torture Afghans in Bagram or Iraqis in Abu Ghraib 6. Class A classless society? Here? Now? When the establishment in its clubs closes ranks to protect ‘their’ own: child molesters even. 7. Speech Is it bunarl? Is it baynul? February 2015

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EXTRACTION

We sack the earth to our peril punching holes in its brittle skin, squandering irreplaceable resource so we may gawp at infantile game shows or overlit dance competitions, so we may throttle cities or run our children to schools only walkably away, so we may overheat our homes, so we may air-freight out of season vegetables to our domestic tables or indulge our only too conspicuous consumption by flaunting it over sub-Saharan Africa or the brittle Middle East. Oil is our undoing making unsustainable demands to support industrial capitalist living. Stewardship notions are dead and gone as the extraction industries exhaust the finite to sate our energy greed. We must, somehow, break the manacles of the fossil-fuel nexus - no mean feat this - by staunching the over-consumption of hubristic western/northern humans to cease this arrogant parasitism on our burning planet damaged by human action now. The narrow instrumentalism of an over-weening technology has brought us to this pass where nature’s plenty exist for us alone - not so, not so! A new thinking is required, a new covenant between us and nature is needful now so we may acknowledge and countenance the fragile inter-connectedness of things. February 2015

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MULTIPLICITIES

Any essentiality of being is no more than a chimera. Plurality of construction-selves is a condition of being and an identity constructed through memory, true or false, is merely a social fabrication, whose fate is that of all human-built endeavour: a crumbling to dereliction. We have a being in this world: a gooey amalgam of roles, beliefs, images, language, trapped, as we are, in mind-made myths and metaphors. Artists, with language, or languages, in all their myriad forms can break through this cage, provided they see that the ‘I’ that makes is not the ‘I’ that has its being in that outer mundane world. That ’I’ inhabits different loci on a life continuum, linked, yes, but different. Welcome to multiple-selves! March 2015

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THE KEY TO THE KINGDOM

This world of signs and images batters consciousness: streams of particles of light bombard groping minds. I do not see that leaf before me, no, rather, I am ‘being seen’ by an eyeless ‘it’: bits of light flowing in to me, being a passive, not an active ‘I’. Am I, then, merely reactive or do I play any active part? My mind does that for me, taking this battering of particles making of them a sense … or a nonsense. This process does have an outward form: it lies in my language and if my language is deficient then so is my being. March 2015

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!ARTISTS! SET US FREE!

It was in The Uffizi (sorry!). I sat between those cleaned Botticelli’s crying. The beauty, yes beauty, was staggering - but it wasn’t only that, more the transcendental vision and utter finality, if for that juncture only, of the totality of that massaged experience. Dragged back some twenty-four years now to that encompassing moment, swaddling me for a rebirth, for an awakening, an arousing, dragged, yes, dragged, bucking into some sort of freedom. March 2015

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THE WOOL OVER OUR EYES

It was obvious to any that had eyes to see The haves were having more the have-nots less, the rich getting richer the poor poorer under a numbing regime, widening, always widening that gap to a perilous split. A swaggering arrogance in power has us by the throat while strutting self-adulation cascades through our land. Can it be our lot to be governed again by an oleaginous divisive Cameron and that jumped up Tory pip-squeak Osborne? This always was a sham regime, a coalition only in its name: Tories in unseeing thrall to their dire ideology, inhuman and an affront to all humane decency. Why do we buy into this? A sycophantic media, yes, but does our celeb-struck land blind us to its iniquity? And have we now become the lions led by donkeys? In this land of the blind has it fallen to me now to be its king? No, nor would I want it so. That corrosive power not for me: merely I wish to sit here and warn the generations to come

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if we are deaf to humanity’s voice then we are for the dark. April 2015

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FALSE GODS

No engineered eruptions, nor impacting meteorites, no cloud seeding, nor carbon capturing, no colonising of Mars, no technologies, nor capital their prop (those false gods) can save our planet from ourselves. This blue hanging globe, this earth this demi-paradise, our planet lies open, while warring Gods battle to the death, and sects, their monstrous spawn, protestant, catholic, sunni, shia, wahibi pervert our vision of what is to come. Unless human beings collectively change the unlooked-out tack on which this world of ours heads for that catastrophic reef inevitabling our wreck. Now a third God rears, growth: always growth, always the economy. This cannot be sustained if we continue to burn away our stewardship. Fuels must stay in our earth, not used to fire the chimera of an unsustainable growth. The tocsin sounds. April 2015

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SWADDLING CLOTHES

Flickering in the corner, unwatched, a giant plasma television has a fireball wrapping a seventy truck train of fracked flammable tar-oil destroying it and half a wayside town, toxic plumes piercing a passive sky. Dominoes clack on a table over there, glasses clink behind the bar, a raucous laugh in this corner, an excited babble here, a knot of smokers outside an instant of darkened windows, women talk amongst themselves, men discuss their team’s latest failings. The television continues flickering. Some raise their faces, pausing drink in hand but going back to daily exchanges moved a mere moment. It’s all just too remote not touching consciences. The catering van pulls up passing the sun’s glinting from parked cars. For this business to continue to thrive, deep-set in Sussex countryside, trains must crash and towns burn while we sit here, forks in hand, privileged and anaesthetised. April 2015

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REGENERATION

Nietzsche sang of eternal recurrence - exactly what he meant nobody actually knew, then as now. It must be more than that that every gardener knows (potted peonies dot my patio) or every farmer knowing his time to plant, his time to reap; more than that repetition of no more than the same, again over again. More like a rhythmic fluidity, eternal, modulating, a flowing in nature, a becoming, or so it would appear, - but no inexhaustible eternity - a cyclical springing, seasons regenerating in individual and collective being. Private individual consumption undoes this needful regeneration by marginalising the collective. We need a new collaborative contract, a recurring bargain with our natural world - what we’ve plundered is burnt and gone - to background private convenience for regeneration to root itself anew. ‘Too late, too late,’ shrieks the Petrel! ‘Not too late, not too late,’ responds the Owl. May 2015

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COMING

Inchoate images swirl coalesce, fall away - so many wind-blown clouds across a slate-grey sea - or a brown fog layering itself over indistinct distant trees - a dark amniotic fluid, an opaque backdrop from which lurches a rough-hewn being. No quick fire-flicker penetrates here, fanfaring fertilisation, no Gabriel, finger-pointing, no fury, nor mire nor torment, no Apollo astride a dolphin’s back. More a sightless embryo, reluctant to be born, groping its way to light of day, groping its way to making it clear, attaining its dominion. May 2015

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TRANSIENCE I sit outside a café in the sun noting the qualities of passing people: truculent teen girls quivering on puberty’s sill testing their selves in uplift bras; ambling shoppers, not buying, idly passing time; unthinking mums with buggies. pushing, baby-besotted, there and here seeming uncaring; careworn breadwinners affecting hustle, tap-tap-tapping for online openings, swiping smart phone calendars, wielding their tablets, so many small arms, missing chances to make money, to be feted entrepreneurs; delivery men with a problem cabinet, wedged on shop steps, half-on half-off its plastic shrouded palette; street vendors, trying too hard to push shoddy wares; shop-owners, strutting in self-importance, looking down noses at those poor no-hopers; the crack and rasp of skateboarders; taxis inching through, drivers resenting people in ‘their’ road. I cannot see the ties that bind, loosely, yes/no, all this as a together. The jostlers do stop, I hope, to reflect hard as it is in this mammon-precinct, where harsh economics holds dominion, blocking questions of ageing, of death, of identity, of purpose, of value. Only transience can suffice in this teeming glut of a city. And when all is said and done, I am the lucky one to sit here on the sun. June 2015

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POEMS

Poetry goes a progress through paradox: trickery/sincerity device-ridden/honest attachment/detachment conviction/flippancy the formal/the fake the banal/the sublime: unheard melodies of Keats, Yeats’s lofty sonorities, Browning’s clatter, Pound heaving out the pentameter, all those hordes of self-contradicting poets. Poems are like peonies: inter-folded, transient, recurrent, gaudy globes gaining all the glory, bottle-green trefoils below ignored, bowing to the sun; the soil base, so far below those hubristic heads, is not in verse’s catalogue. Those over-reaching heads, those flashy superstructures, top-heavy, too far from soil-bound roots, seduce. And for all this? - The language is its own form drawing attention to itself, asking important questions, making important statements, paradoxically. June 2015 #

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MEDDLING

A pot plant from a supermarket is what I bought then, two and a half years ago now, a closed-off, confining day in February, a red, red rose - yes, I know, I know - to spring on the table at the meal - yes, I know, I know! When it had done what it should, I set it in my patio in the raised flower-bed bit, intermittently watching it grow, and grow it did, but oddly, distortedly. The first year it budded well, it bloomed well, still small though, and stunted. The second year lopsided it grew in two frail buds as if trying to regain its natural essence, its rightful shape: right-side hugging the soil, left-side over-reaching in leaf and bud. Perhaps in its third year will it have reverted to a natural self and overcome profit-stunting meddle? I doubt it. as all this happened too long ago. June 2015

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A WEDDING IN JULY

Hollowed-out rituals rule the roost crowing over a register office - So … a bland room in a motel, stacking chairs, backs festooned with love-knots, in clear plastic, riven by an aisle, aping pews, a cloth-shrouded table aping a high-altar, a vase of whited lilies to the right, the bride’s side, seemingly, a whited bird-cage on the left, for the groom, seemingly, yes, a bird-cage of all things, a cage. Should the intense privacy of love be played out in public vows before a clucking audience? What has love to do with that, or that to do with love? More like control through numbers. And yet, and yet … This is my daughter’s wedding-day. Her hard-fought, hard-won her-day, past demons faced down, placed. Gowned in white, ‘Radiant she looked‘, some said. ‘Blissfully happy‘, others. How then can I, through silent tears, begrudge her her her-day? July 2015

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A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE?

Watching sparrows looks, on the face of it, a pretty fruitless task - they hop, chirp, feed, flutter, just being dull sparrows, all rather ordinary, really. Except … the splay-legged bouncing of theirs can cover more than two feet with no apparent end to see, ignoring the food on the patio floor. They will hover against walls, windows, hitting the panes every now and then as if they weren’t there. They spring into bordering bushes from firm fork to firm fork then to a thin outer branch, playing to fro in an unstable breeze, delighting in sheer movement, not for preservation’s sake, but for its own joy in living, indomitable. Coming for water the other day in my rain-water tub one fell and drowned. August 2015

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UNCOMMON HUMANITY

Cocooned through the family, we slide unfeeling through our days absorbed in the immediacy of the near-blood. I cannot recognise my country anymore - some sort of society exists with, on the face of it, it would seem, some sort of cohesion achieved by polite mechanical smiles, that mere masking of deep meanness, a lack of compassion for those unfortunates in our daily lives as well as in our world in this summer of shoving crowds, of dire acquisitiveness, in this summer of deprivation, economic or otherwise, of refugees seeking peace, or at lowest an absence of brutality, in this summer of intolerance, or glee in catching on mobile phones illegals scrambling out of cars on a people-running transporter with a triumphant ‘Gotchya, mate!’ This is merely parroting mean-minded MPs and their sycophantic media with its constant drip-drip of hate, spite, hysteria, threats, fear, cascading through our social selves, failing to notice how those others next to us, our neighbours are distressed, dispossessed, disadvantaged, as well as those walking across continents, or drowning in seas of death, to find food, shelter, peace, compassion, human warmth not polite mechanical smiles. August 21 2015

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WELCOME

We greet them with walls and wire - bad-come, not well-come, at all. Walls can be breached and wire cut: the walls of intolerance cannot be breached nor the razor-wires of bigotry cut. The fault, dear Europe, lies in our selves that we are compassionless. Nationhood blinds our leaders while those who can see can see through outworn notions that lead to suffocation in vans and drowning in seas of death. No Federation is permissible - not even under your breath - as ‘F’ slices across nation states, no debate allowed, only loose, useless, linkings obtain. What does Europe fear from itself? How can our Europe create a humane, unified response to death, displacement, human suffering on such a scale without itself being unified? September 2015

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NESTOR?

A moth died on that crossing: the deck was rain-and spray-wet, the wind flipped a moth onto its back, with drenched wings it could not last, whatever its struggling. Where on earth can I go with this? What warnings are there there? Wind-riding terns may revel, not that poor upturned moth wind-blown to a spray-drenched death? The answer lies in the verse also … September 2015

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A MORNING IN JANUARY 1957

A dank day in winter made drearier by a fenland fog creeping in from north-east but it glistened window-glass, ironwork, biscuit-coloured stonework too, little shards of light, here and there glinting. I’d come back from the East Road, seen the poor automata in their shapeless belted macs, biscuit-coloured, shuffling passively, stolidly, to their places of work. At Parker’s Piece, in a group, raucous undergraduates, plunged past on their bikes. I saw privilege at work now while I’d seen its absence a few moments before; I too belonged to that privileged world. All I did then was to decide, on that dank January morning, to bring privilege to needful others. My troubles were only just beginning and have remained. September 2015

A POSTCARD FROM BRIGHTON

Project Blair is dead and gone, as Labour’s found its soul again. September 29 2015

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DESENSITISING

Marketing makes modern myths: the pursuit of happiness lies in our purchasing powers - happiness is a woman, smiling, wearing comfort socks. This is shallow, too realisable, too resistible, its bite too overt. More insidious is the covert, less patent, more corrosive, drip, drip, drip, a weak acid imperceptibly wearing away our resistance, our will, eating into activism, duty even, eating into our regard for the other until we come to ingest what is all pervasive around us, making it our own; so our perceptions, beliefs utterances, merely parroting what we are fed are macabre mouthpieces. We lack the tools to crack the iconographic codes that corrode needful defiance. November 2015

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PRESERVATION

Winter in 1952 or thereabouts riding in my father’s car from Sheffield to York we passed a train near Wakefield its black engine labouring up a grade shooting exhaust high, very high into the air. taking its freight from where it was produced at A to where it was needed at B. Recently I went to a preserved line: another black engine, shooting steam, left as a freight train carrying nothing from nowhere to nowhere. November 2015

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A PATCHWORK: Operational Selves

1. BUT HOW DO YOU REALLY FEEL IN YOURSELF? We spin myths around our selves in whose webs we become trapped. No name reifies this self save a human dishonesty to get us through our days in comfortable, inter-locking beliefs - there can be thus be, after all, no real self. 2. MODUS OPERANDI Why don’t I bump into others on the street? Well, I do lurch along which throws my auto-pilot out. Others, changing course, avoid, but by what sense as they hardly look? Is it because we become aware when others enter our space (Mobiles, mobiles everywhere …)? By what hidden codes do we operate when shopping-laden, unsighted even, all taking place, hushed? When we do, accidentally come into rare contact, a mumbled sort-of apology is the only interaction. Uncanny. 3. PUBLIC On buses, in trains I am expected to behave ‘myself’,

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to sit quietly, or stare out of the window, landscape-, or townscape-spotting. I am not to shout, nor thresh about nor throw myself on the floor. What is this self I follow, whence come these unimaginable canons? Upbringing, I suppose, unwitting at best, until I slot into a role, a groove, an ordained space, socialised into an unwelcome being, a me, not-me. But I dare do none of these, sitting spotting landscapes swaddled in my own cocoon. It’s the same in café’s, more so in upmarket restaurants. I am not to spill my drink nor shower my food with salt but take the knife to the side of the plate, to bring back condiments thus. Nor must I raise my voice nor complain publicly, even when I should. I am the bill-payer: I can adopt any poseur role and get away with it. I belong to interest societies, for this, for that, historical largely., Now what role am I to don here? Am I to control my own space, or my immediate space that is, and become an olympian historian (always distasteful to me, that) or merely sit quietly in meetings nodding polite agreement to the speaker’s beck and call? Nor am I to be too loud when at last I take the floor, not in interrogation or speaking out of turn but to be measured in all things. Little chance of that!

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So should I buy a Kalashnikov or merely coffee spoons. 4. THE ECONOMIC I spend money I do not earn, but am active on my hand-outs. I go shopping in supermarkets, I shop down the road or in the corner shop over the way. I travel: trains, boats, taxis (I have a free bus pass). I visit bookshops and galleries, restaurants, coffee bars, the odd pub; birthdays and Christmases: both cards and presents; on-line, rarely, mail order more often. I engage in that vast exchange of aging coins and crumpled notes for goods, for foodstuffs, for books, cameras, discs, clothes. All the paraphernalia of modern marketing, persuading, persuading me to think of wants as needs until I fall into retail stupor … bemused. 5. FAMILY I have been a son, a brother, an uncle, a cousin, a husband, a father, grandfather, (I hope a better father than husband). Marriage is deadlock, two cannibals consuming each other, while the family itself loaded with economic burdens. the target for marketing gurus and the myth of happiness and all well-being, (until Christmas, that is!)

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breeds despair and mind-diseases, suppressed order becomes disorder, as too much is being asked. Which self does one parade, in front of a child, or a spouse even? 6. LEARNING Creeping dutifully, I went to schools. Kindergarten, preparatory, public, then grammar, then Uni, all the while, wondering what hoops I was pitching myself through or (don’t question! don’t question!) rituals imposed without explication, passages of being understated, followed with no-seeing accepting blindly the authority of my apparent betters until came the realisation of feet of clay even at university. The selves I took on throughout all this were not of my making, mere temporary rites through which I was compelled to crawl. Not so, my dear Sir, not so: learning was, is, accidental: the truly educated are the self-taught. Then I became a lecturer, syllabuses and set-books saw to me: an exam-passing instructor, a brain-washer on a grand scale, until the OU set men free, enabling me to enable again.

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7. HEALTH Hospitals can be fearful sites: things are to happen to our bodies there or to our quaking minds. Changes are to be made sometimes through pain or drugs, usually both. Waiting, waiting, waiting: practices and procedure trump patients. Footfalls, footfalls come and go but not to me, to another bed while I stare at ceilings or tastefully dressed walls in bland magnolia until I could cry at the bland insipidness that washes over me. I have yielded myself to pain and orders and I am not sure that I know why. 8. RELIGION I can leave religion to its shamans, to its peddlers of untruths and blind beliefs: archbishops, popes, ayatollahs, mullahs, all same-brush tarred with their man-made codes, (all old men dressed in frocks) inhuman, fanatical, insane. My religious self, such as it is, adopts humanity, yes, in all its untidy complexity. 9. NUMBERS I have numbers for just about every thing, it seems, about forty-five at a rough count

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and I’m sure I have left some out which are bound to pop up some day and slap my face. How has it come about that I am known by an integer and not by my name? Am I not being reduced, as it were, by numeration, not nomenclature? Is it that our machines demand numbers, not coping with signifying squiggles, but have to have signs of their very own. Have names grown so difficult in a diverse, polyglot world.? I know which I prefer. 10. RESPONDING Seeing unlocks the inner workings of art-works. Seeing: looking at, regarding, contemplating, imagining, interpreting, understanding, making it our own? This last is a heady vehicle to take, leading to ‘reading’ becoming appropriation, cocooning in self a treatment that should be mutual, shared. Pictures need light: natural, artificial, spot, or flood. Do pictures change under light? (Turner, Monet thought they did) Do we see them differently in the different times of day? What realms do we occupy in a two-dimensional art where nothing happens other than the illusion of happening? What leads our eyes to explore, to follow the painterly process or do we adopt in its totality

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the production of an end? What of size, shape of frame or stance, or address to the work? At the ‘Late Turner’ at The Tate I looked at ‘Peace, Burial at Sea’ from below, from a wheelchair: I saw the depth of the impasto of the sea. Would I have seen the near-unfinished wash that is the sky. And when I come to look again has the picture changed Or have I merely not-seen before? I cannot open up the totality of the offered realm without imagination mingling the now and the remote, responding here to several things. Do I not do the same with music, that least descriptive of all the arts and the most inexplicable - does music make the mood or the mood make music music? I respond to significant sound: harmony, disharmony - sometimes with a tingle in the spine - I hear, I re-hear, the not-heard becomes the heard. What do I see in the realms of the novel, human creations or parallel universes? Paintings may make their realms matter, novels make their realms (near-)material. If re-reading notes the not-noticed through imaginary forces, then Flaubert’s realm of Paris, or Tolstoy’s of St. Petersburg shows me how this can be. Artworks become those telling sites where illusion informs, enlarges, overcoming one’s oneself. But ‘You’/’I’ presents then prose writer with deep, deep problems. Where are they and what do they see? Are they not then puppeteers again? Do they disappear from the text,

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or address the reader directly, or more likely indirectly now. Novels of today assume the modernist novel to be a cul-de-sac of its own making, but Joyce’s modernism was his, only his. What are they, these receiving selves, receptive to such human richness. 11. THE WRITING SELF Art-works on my imaginary forces: I visit galleries and museums, I read novels and verse, (theatre- and cinema-going are more difficult now), I listen to music sometimes attentively, sometimes as background and in all these I respond. It is this, responding (muses, no, not muses - they have had their day) that furnishes fruitful stimuli and hinges to understanding. I do not have such authorial problems as my voice is always my voice although it does not know to whom it addresses itself. That damn pre-existing language, that slippery coin of everyday, skews meaning in our worlds, till my voice modulates this. Verse is converse, interactive, invitational: this is how I find things - now how about you? thus making here an elsewhere.

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It is imagination that ties what I write into how I respond. Imagination, and the language it is expressed in leads me, inevitably, to organise, align, marshal orchestrate, to achieve a something, to enlarge myself - so self overcomes self - and all this is a small room at a cluttered table, quilting words into a poem. November/December 2015