THE ENGLISH JOURNEY, '16

[27-3-16](At Weymouth Library, 29th March, transcribing from flight notebook)

In which Billy Boo attempts to read the map as described in ornate Thai characters, ditto the travel times & distances, in the second or two before the screen switches to English. "Local Time at Melbourne 3-27 -- Local Time at Bangkok 11-27". Fair enough. He's already in credit : invited to move out of tight fit threesome to the aisle of a comfortable two. Boo thinks it's because he returned clasped hands greeting with hostesses on the ramp and they misheard his Lao 'sabaidee' for Thai 'sawasdee'. He's belted in, tentatively stretches leg beneath forward seat, glances through the porthole at the cloud plain topped by blue, --imagines lick of first G&T assuredly on its way! As the share passenger's snoring establishes its rhythm, Billy remembers his friends, living & dead, either way not here. The cloud clears, beautiful tracts of land thousands of feet below where Christy is, actually happy down there, stone cottage like Ulli & Celia's place in North Wales, '72, similar embellishments, the attic skylight for example, --Nick Johnson's place in Wiltshire, 90s pied a terre, --& the Abbot in attic heaven, nearer to yoga god than any other, no face, no name, though so many statues in his hermitage one suspects he's not yet run through the argument about idolatry! One of the old crew not yet invoked is Ed. Happens each time Billy flies. Ghost is same kind of disembodiment as flying. Forget about angels, Ed wasnt one. I'll give them turbulence, he swears behind conspiratorial hand as though the weather wore jackboots.....

*

Ed has the flight crew from captain to waiters in mind, not really the elements. All the way to deity via earlier English & later Russian divines, manifestations of magnitude. Ed spittin about pretenders, pretence of authority, supercilious from tie to socks, --purple uniform ultimate slight. Ah, Ed! Ed, mate! how goes it in ghost's Yorkshire heaven? Not there yet, he says, I'm in Purgatory writing poems, sans guide, following my own beaky nose. Hah! Ed, Ed, Ed. Tutoring me yet from beyond the grave, thinks Billy Boo.

*

At Bangkok airport Boo realized that following a straight line got you absolutely nowhere, may as well have been walking in circles. So then he walked around in circles, gauging the world, the non-stop airport world, more 'international' than when first coined (--Inge's daughters crooning 'international' over "Miami Vice", late 80s, --B B 's return to Europe after 12 years exile). Seems to him the Chinese had become the new Americans and everyone else from everywhere else in no way lesser. Each elsewhere a somewhere, similarly worldly-wise, ticket to prove it, legitimate travellers, commuters, no longer exotics of any empire.
But what about Christy, and how come he's let off so easily? Mebbe Billy thinks the boyo might bat him one! (What did Peter Finch say of him once, slightly misapprehending the relation of source to poem?-- "if these are Christy's dreams he must have a head like granite!")

[NOTE :
Re- Ulli & Celia's place, in N Wales, '72 ; from Poem of the Clear Eye

(....)
there is a strangeness surrounds

which our thickest wall cannot evict

(for talisman take anything you find

a coloured slate a star from the constellation

which fills the skylight the vault of Caernarvon)

the foul smell from the town still gets to my nostrils --

Panzer fetch paper! go to

Gethsemane i rise up &

fall down i run till my side aches

i will return to the smoke only to bang the

beafeaters dead in their beds! in my boots

will make mincemeat of

rumours & subterfuge.(...)

(pp34/35; 1972/3; UK & Oz)
[‪In my poem, Ulli has two dogs, Panzer & Perfidy... The scenario is remembered/invented from the visit to Ulli & Celia for the Bangor Poetry Fest or the poetry event Ulli arranged at the Bangor Arts Fest back in '71 or '72... I believe that Jeremy Hilton drove me from Southampton... ah, Snowdonia…]


*

Daily round : walk from Goldy, down road, left at Pottery Lane (note to self : research derivation), through the small housing estate, cross highway at safety island to Radipole Lake foot & cycle path, past the blackberries ringing the lake six months ahead of bloom & harvest, up onto the bridge & into town... Library, Black Dog, pint!

Ed would approve : get a table, snap notebook or loose page onto it, “let’s get it over then!” through gritted teeth, lank hair & lengthening beard the frame for most ambivalent of propositions, --the argument concerning literature, thus “the literary bit”, not so much the sharing of poems but potential for such inflation as snatches poet from universe to be dropped into egotistical slurry (Ed’s favourite quote, Akhmatova’s rooster crowing upon shit-heap) --the “literary”, --snort into handkerchief, begin reading poem, over soon as began, --charmed by his accent & intonations, Bunting-ish but faster, Les Murray-ish too in that dont-take-it-too-seriously / throw-off style --not a style, an attitude --no audience but comrade t’other side of the low table, slosh of pints around & about, raucous fandango, infinitely preferable to bourgeois shush (--when you think of it, the poem cuts through the noise of the world, like sudden silence, the awareness of silence as the world’s hurtle’s suddenly brought to sudden screeching stop)...

Ask: Has my brother been in today? We were in the other day, he had a tomato juice... No, she says, dont think so... The Abbot & bro --two Abbots! --like Jack & Warnie, the Louises, or James & Stanislaus with whom BB once caned his younger for perceived deficit in fraternal support, but what would a teenager know... and too much water under bridge now...



*

All change. Traditional bar's gone. The regulars also unless sculking in the WASHROOM (white lettering on pale green board). The lacquered black of counter, tables, chairs has been replaced by grey & green throughout! What is this snack-bar, b& b, holiday-camp, light & bright in aid of? 
We've only been gone a year --perhaps longer because didnt we go to the Swan (the Abbot & bro) around the corner from St Nicholas's Church last time? I'll lay bets no change there.
 Ringwood Breweries' Boon Doggle's the strongest, 4.2... Innocents must understand we're on about the taste, which means a quality that tests the palate, resists it --on a continuum, then, with Frank Prince's teaching about same, --Robert Bridges, he said, ho-hum poetry aside, well worth my while to consider his thoughts on poetics... The point about form, Frank says, is that it stops one going on & on aimlessly... it resists that natural laziness, licentiousness etc...
[Ilchester Arms, Abbotsbury, 7th April, '16]

*

[April 22, '16]

It was great meeting up with John Phillips in St Ives a few days ago... went around to his place with Kelvin Bowers my old amigo from the £10 assisted passage on the Fairsky to Melbourne, FIFTY YEARS AGO on the 26 April, '66 !!! It's due to chance meeting on the coastal path between John & Kel that I've once more caught up with Kelvin, outa sight since '03. In the conversation with John, several mutual friends featured including Clive Faust & David Miller... Nice listening to John & Kel discussing the St Ives painters up on the wall including Mathew Lanyon --the fathers & sons conversation, apropos of which the catalogue of the Karl Weschke show, on in London presently, which Lucas Weschke had given me in Weymouth, also spiced the chat. If only I was in St Ives on May 16th as well for the poetry festival when John gives a reading!



*
 
[April 25, '16] ·

(Re- Jenni Kerr's Facebook post of actors celebrating Shakespeare anniversary, particularly HRH who finished it beautifully!) Great meeting again y'day with David Caddy at The Dolphin, Blandford Forum, our very own local... ordered our pint and our shiraz, and got the ball rolling saying : "Apart from what's in the latest issue of Tears In The Fence, if I asked you "what's the news?" what would you answer?" David hardly considered the question --well, he said, SHAKESPEARE, the 400th anniversary of course! And so we drank to him, Shakespeare all the way...



*


 Karl Weschke’s View of Kenydjack (1962; reproduced in the Tate book of the St Ives scene, 1939-64) utterly different to the Sunday painting seen at the Penwith gallery of which the probably accurate sketching is vacant compared with KW’s monolithised brown tiered landscape, so deep & occupied. Could say ‘preoccupied’ but substantial or dense oughtnt imply brooding, since for all the ‘psychological’, ‘expressionist’, ‘existential’ persona there is always painting’s natural presence and nature always present as matter & sentiment...
[St Ives, Kel & Dooze’s house, 18 April, 16]

*

Every time (how many times?) the bus swings around Portesham through to Abbotsbury & beyond (today Bridport again), see St Catherine’s Chapel on the hill. And in Abbotsbury, out the bus window, there it is leftwards over & between the houses, farms. And leaving Abbotsbury, the chapel behind one on its mount, sheep in the green fields like a canopy beneath. And startlingly distinct, on top, along slow hill climb, Chessil & the Channel over the leftside rolls of green (their rolls eventually into the sea).

What is ‘familiarity’? --the first blessing of repetition one presumes, no story but imperceptibly the rise of feeling, full swell of which is Poem, Song, this Painting...

[21 April, ‘16; Weymouth to Bridport, Dorset]
 

*
English Journey, ‘16 [from the diary]

Friday 22/4/16
 
9-05 am. (late) Weymouth --> Yeovil -->Glastonbury

Hurrying up Goldcroft aggravated the leg/thigh strain. Hopefully walk it out. Shld have applied some Deep Heat beforehand.
Rain, not heavy but from drizzle to light. If raining i wont attempt to climb the Tor.

The Classes : Passenger / “My daughter’s studying in Glasgow; when she comes down to Durdle Door it soothes her spirit...”
Driver / “Oh yeah; well anywhere’s better than Blackpool heh heh heh...”
Passenger / “You drive so well; I admire your instincts!”
Driver / “I drove lorries before, buses are much smaller. Driving 800 miles up & back soon teaches you how to drive... A spot of rain, though, and the whole road comes to a stop...”

Thinking of Paul Blackburn -- mentioned him to B. last night, how I’ve picked up his poems each visit to Goldcroft over the years. There’s a Blackburn poem for Pete Spence in the Buckmaster section of my  forthcoming book. P B’s the kind of American I have in mind re- intractably American & not easily ‘Anglo-American’ or ‘British/American’ as I wrote to Colin Still last night. Were we American poets after all? i asked B some months ago, phone from Melbourne, repeated in email to Colin. He tells me about all the docos he’s made on the American  poets (wch he’s offered to send me). I say that my forthcoming book of poems is partly ‘Neo-Georgian’, partly ‘New American Poetry’!

--> Yeovil... Heavier rain. Great countryside. Stone houses stretches of wall fields & meadows...

Stratton

Crewkerne

Rich country -- fallow, ploughed, strips of woods, dividing stands, --the rain enhances the lushness -- Wonderful expanse of undulating ploughed fields -- Motorway runs between these huge sails, wings, of land -- Somerset’s version of Big Country --

Beautiful dip in the landscape, --trees, fields, cows --

After earlier wet am dry again in the coach -- thank goodness for modern technology! --

Woods then village, car-sales...


Lakegate lane

Yeovil -->

i.m. John Riley, 1937- d. October 27/8, 1978 and John Anderson, 1948-d. October 28,1997

from A MILE FROM POETRY, #27

Midnight Interrogation

(A review of John Riley's

Ways of Approaching)

the feet of the old begetters make your dozen

jump : the new images observe each other

a tickle it is the freer the line the

more wilful the stirrings : no 

one halts the caravan with such

avarice as you

you would tell the first inhabitants get

out & walk if their promenade across

the mind's peace the ash-woods the

cleared fields made parade of

Oh tis Autumn or

this view Lady & you

& by the same token would

deliver you to the dreadings of your

perennial night-walk on a platter the

lines of doomed auxiliaries felling the 

after-dinner song & 

the scents of mint & nasturtiums at the

poem's centre nothing to

the nothing at your centre the

flight of love's victims the

collision of affectations & easy

procedures with love's caravan : the nothing

of which you write it's

nothing you say secured on the

base-line of an empathy with the beautiful gardens & a

native lad running his kite 

[1974]

oOo

from THE GOLDEN LAUGHTER

The Last Sulk

(acausal parallelism : ) train stopped. the (unmistakable)

river bird preens its leg of our conjunction. never 

ending city reducing vitality trailing out

along the line. mile upon mile. so what "a tennis court"

but suddenly a silver generator's just fine. John Anderson'

s the poet who explodes our "white ibis". relegated*

to a footnote is simply not what we will be. what will

he be? what will we be? Last Quill & Restaurant. 

i'm looking forward to the great blank news.

the next decade is requisitioned. whether singing 

or tilling it's our first chosen beginning.

her hair or land-mist & rivulet

red lines in my fingers. he said/she said

kiss me. almost did. provided for in day-dream.

their fare's a kind of Zion. two birds on that pond.

more mist in the eucalypts of the valley.

sunshine on rising mist & smoke-stack's

grey climb. HITLER'S WAR i'm languorous

demurring "mine". its hill profusion &

dimpled plain. & trapped fog again.

i cant help thinking Our Power Was Thrown Away.

green so swiftly purple (verdigris). i'd settled

for nothing tending the abscess my fingers

trailing through air instead of their red hair.

A NIGHTMARE. tunnel through granite. then

smooth curve of river & never-a-care.

hard to proceed from there. i hanker after

rank lines. that buggerizing jalopy the

rhyme & style. resting motors on the highway

not one car to pace the train. 

think no more.

deny upbringing's cadence.

LOST!  but in which vernacular forest forest

host of heaven. i go home

i see brown rushes

i see broken branches sawn trunks

a by-road's damp patch

pulling red lines from their hair

my fingers curl flail no more the empty air

my fingers couched in the ardent there

* there now gasp!

rapture aside

aspiring on my time

red lines at my throat

[June, '79]

THE DORSET JOURNEY, 2011 : LAO LEG

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[Top, K H at Wattay International Airport, Vientiane; April 8th, '11; second, KH perusing Rasi's photographs at French Centre, Vientiane; third, KH at the Living Museum, Vientiane. Snaps by Cathy O'Brien.]
--------------------------------------------------------------------


PROEM


April 7,'11
Approaching departure. The aisle seat chosen at STA this morning has mysteriously become a window seat. This is OK as long as no one takes the middle of the 3 seats. (I'm praying!)
Neatly attired businessman (from the look of his newspaper, Vietnamese) installed in my aisle seat. Stiff neck installed like a javelin down my right shoulder. I've struggled with it for two weeks and though i enjoyed my sessions with the osteo, it's distressingly present.

*

The flight begins. Suddenly remember i was writing The ABC Book [prose pieces] back in '75, to & fro London. Day-time flight window-seat view revealing plains of cloud -- frozen seas -- glaciers -- fantastic. Discover head-phones. Select 'Western Classical' : Chopin, Mazurka in C Sharp Minor, Op 63 # 3. No such facility 36 years ago. Allowed to be a 29 year old 'student' one enjoyed the modest service -- sometimes, for example, when menu didnt facilitate, cheese sandwiches etc brought by hostess angels.
Can i revive one of the characters of my book back then? Minovlar Ed? -- my hommage to John Riley (he was alive then).

*
Dinner is served! Potato salad thank you! Perceptively the hot meat dish is removed by the hostess. Wine sir? I'd like a red wine too (like my neighbour, the Vietnamese businessman, who fell asleep as he read his newspaper -- would that that was a dream! -- i mean, what sleep wld follow Ho Chi Minh City stock-exchange?) -- Ed says, I never had kids myself but... He's moved --not "to tears" but an absolutely sympathetic amusement. The baby (he's a toddler, son of Indian couple) has the widest brown eyes -- Ed wld talk to him with extended blinks & smiles, on the edge of telepathy -- but the toddler has other thoughts -- I wanted to call him Sachim -- a compliment, madame -- no, thought as much, wldnt know Tendulkar from Boycott -- But, not so fast Ed, --Tendulkar is a national hero, more than --& i loved him too --our Geoffrey, -- especially as a commentator let alone man in boater in South of France, notorious romance? -- someone (Melbourne poet Nick Whittock perhaps) will know.

*
Steal another red wine. Present the G & T plastic cup wch is twice as big as the little glass the first one came in. Chopin's Largo in C Minor through the headphones. Ed says i'm walking on those pompety-poms -- left leg, right leg. But now it's Trois Ecoissaises # 2, G M Op 72 # 4 -- Ah, trippity, trippity. Listen up : he was never a hippy. Who we talkin abaat? (is that Eliot enough for you?) Ed or meself, Christy?

*
Dark -- lights out -- I can see by the light of the tiny screen -- Ah, Fantasie Impromptu in C -- all my life -- whenever i hear it, "all my life" --
Anthony Bourdain's in me now. I want cognac! The perfect nightcap -- & cheese & biscuits -- NOW!

*
What's the difference? Nocturne in E Flat very similar to which track?
Ed's been to the galley -- brandy? -- cognac? -- Cheeky hostess asks wld you like them mixed together? --
Last time i fly so high, Ed thinks whilst smiling enigmatically --

*
Oooh he's got a nerve -- he can hold a note -- Nocturne in C, Op Posthume -- an insult to say 'trill'? --
Thin arms hidden in big jacket -- fingers with long nails poking out of sleeves --
Chopin for a day & a night --

*
But where are we now? Which jet-liner captain's porthole of the Earth?

*
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik -- we've changed (Karajan : Romance) -- The concert's only in my ears -- You can la-la-la to Eine Kleine, but... An adamant Ed : Whatabout Thais? Sacrilege! --

*
Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok

What else but Thai massage -- head & shoulders, 400 baht or $US18. Not the severe work-out of 2009 but recalcitrant muscles required some punishment. Foot massage beside me was in dreamland as the masseuse stroked & kneaded his feet & calves. Clients three times as many women as men, & only one male masseur.

*
Hmong woman in turban-hat & something like a dreadlock marks out her territory, walks around like a rooster or the vainest sentry -- walks in & out of other people's conversations, participates in their hilarity but finally sits by herself, laughing at a joke that's on the rest of the world.
Years pass. Little whore in zebra-stripe one piece, silver heels, lies across two chairs, thighs parted, & the unsuspecting Frenchman, content to watch BBC World News, is suddenly aware of the gesture meant for whomever is sitting where he does. He turns away, drinks from water-bottle. The little whore sits up, looks around, lies down again, peekaboo -- perhaps catch a fallang in Bangkok, albeit at the airport. A touch of Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday in the apparent naturalness of this theatre. She's doin what she's doin & everyone's just getting on with it...

*
WW2. The propellors of Lao Air are giving the blitzed Englanders another shiver. Third World patch-up is the rare contradiction to contemporary western-style slick. The propellors are like hornets at the edge of my eye, window-side. Plane taxis forever around immense Suvarnabhuni. The little plane shudders like a bomber. Ho Chi Minh trail here we come.
Canals? Paddies? Wonderful waterlogged segmented farmland. Above the clouds. City's radial design. The Infinite City.

*

Vientiane notes

Friday, 8th April, '11
At I:Cat Gallery. Five oclock pm. Cat excuses herself to ride bike to pharmacy 10 minutes away. I'm left 'in charge' of the Gallery. I will take my job very seriously. When we arrived here by taxi from the airport around midday (--wonderful to be met : Catherine waving from upper level window as i looked up instinctively, on my stroll from runway to airport building --i waved, continued walking with red backpack & brown shoulder-bag, suddenly normal as off the train from Melbourne to Bendigo) --fatigued as i was from the flight & the frustrations in transit at Bangkok & again at Vientiane, couldnt resist inspecting everything she had up on the walls not to mention the tables & shelves of publications (books, cards including Bernard [Hemensley]'s Stingy Artist ephemera) --"Somerset Maugham, eat yr heart out!" i exclaimed --perhaps Mr Patrick not Somerset Maugham -- : an art gallery wch has its own integrity (well, art & literature's), but situated here in up-market (?) area of quintessential ex-colony --bustling & post-colonial but not sufficient to alter the basic vibe. Even now, with the home-time traffic --mostly motorbikes, old cars, small trucks-- one's able to take it easy --the warm temperature, the country-town atmosphere.

*

Saturday, 9th April, '11

*
C O'B : The temptation of a breeze... but then it withdrew...
K H : The Church of Latter Day Somerset Maughams...
[Late morning drink at the French bar whose reputation is for dinner but not lunch, tho' the young manager wearing Ramones t-shirt, offered us 'le snack' of crab sandwiches. We declined, explaining that for us snack would be bowl of peanuts to accompany the beer. He was somewhat miffed which we attempted to mollify by enthusing about his non-stop playing of The Doors in the bar!]

*
2pm. At I:Cat. Already a busy day. First stop, the French doctor --but the famous physio, Max, renowned for his sore-spot patches, wasnt there. In Thailand for the weekend. When he returns i'll be in the air again! The very nice Lao doctor gave me her opinion (muscular rather than malignant) but stressed she wasnt a physio. She offered a steroid which i superstitiously declined. She didnt charge me a fee though i offered. Conclusion : suffer until England (and it is pinging!) & consult doctor there.
Visited the "Living Museum"/ temple. Cathy tells me that a colleague recently claimed the normal temple protocols didnt apply, but she contradicted her : this museum still facilitates worship, it's a living museum. When the official at gift table roared at visitors one of whom was flashing her camera, scaring them out of the prayer area beside the magnificent buddha (where i'd awkwardly followed Cathy in her oblations, stiff legged, sore backed, even dropping my candle at the alter), the point was proven!
The only exhibition we saw today was by Lao photographer Rasi, at the French Centre. I thought the images were aerial shots --motorway, landscape, at night from aeroplane window. But Cathy laughed at me : they are lotus plants, without flower, modelled on Monet's water-lillies! Hmmm --of course!

*
Sunday, 10th April, '11

Sitting up in bed within the mosquito net pyramid (remembered from my '09 stay). Two comfortable nights so far except last night for maybe an hour, awoken by the loud drone & roar of --what? --low flying aeroplane? trucks? I imagined army trucks racing through Si Meung, which is Cathy's district, to the airport or the border --a war or coup or crack-down! --perhaps inspired by conversation with Cathy's German friend, writer & photographer Martina Sylvia Khamphasith, about the world political situation and her estimation of Laos "open hand" strategy --taking something from everybody so that nobody takes precedence thus keeping them all at bay.
Not long after we'd returned from morning walk, yesterday, in search of galleries, none of which were open just like '09, including what used to be Mr Patrick's gallery, now even more of a joke than it was becoming then (says Cath) --we'd sat down at I:Cat for a little peck of bread, olives, fetta, the large pot of Vegemite i'd brought her from Melbourne, & the inevitable pot of tea, when we had a visitor. Second of the day --Cath's gallery is open between 4 & 6 this weekend, as it was on Friday --(first visitor was Kate who'd picked book up from Collected Works for Cathy a year ago) -- Martina, who stayed for the rest of the day.
They had their photos (haiku-photos for postcards) to discuss, and Cat showed her the new phone recently purchased in Bangkok. Martina wanted our photo then modeled Cat's blue sun hat -- G & T, snack, photos & laughter.
We decided on Martina's recommendation to eat at French place she knew well. Lao & S.E. Asian has been her daily fare for twenty years so European at every other opportunity! Villa-style --veranda, where we sat, + inside restaurant. Pleasant if not sensual humidity; sandles, t-shirt, three-quarter pants; palms, bamboo, cigars : introduction to the Indo-Chinese novella... Cathy & Martina ordered pumpkin & cheese souffle respectively; i had mushroom & garlic pasta. We shared 2 tall bottles of Beer Lao. Gregarious & voluble French, British, Indian, Lao diners around us. Teachers, families, NGOs. Beautiful service from local kids learning the haute-cuisine restaurant ropes.
On long walk back to Si Meung --more or less in straight line with the French consulate dominating the streetscape, Cathy darting in & out of illumination & darkness with her camera like a rudder or persicope while Martina & i walked slowly beneath the rain trees. I asked Martina if she thought she'd ever return to Europe. She described the same dilemma as i've experienced : one could never afford such a lifestyle back home, not in Europe, not in England. Although Oz far dearer than S E Asia, it's also cheaper than Northern Europe. And Cathy confirms it for Laos vis-a-vis Australia : on less pay than a beginner Australian teacher she can afford her palatial apartment-gallery in Vientiane which would be impossible in Melbourne. Are we fortunate or doomed?!

*
Monday, 11th April, '11

Cat & i had recouperative day yesterday on eve of journey to Europe. One outing & that was to Qung's around the corner for a late lunch (declined invitation for breakfast there with Mai & friends, whom i first met here in '09 & saw last night at the French restaurant). Cathy's well known there of course. The old owner, "J.B.", Vietnamese, sat with us, told us his life story & also a prophecy perhaps from our lady of Lourdes --the Earth will almost be destroyed by another planet in 2013. Other elements of the prophecy have already ensued, e.g. catastrophes, wars, diseases. A complex man tho' perhaps similar contradictions are the rule here. In '09, Cathy showed me the free school he had for local kids, at the back of the laneway cafe, which he's given up now. He hasnt been well --heart did he say? Worked for the Americans, & the British (& the French?), speaks five languages in addition to ("my native tongue") Vietnamese. Invaluable.
Superb food. I had noodles & veg; Cathy, the sticky-rice she adores & veg. Shared. Another tall bottle of Beer Lao, two glasses. Changed places around little table --J.B. brought us special chairs --Cat didnt want the full blast of air from fan but no worries for me! In fact, the temp. around 30C throughout my stay has been perfect. I experienced the heat once, the day of the visit to the Living Museum/Temple (Wat Phrokeo) --the sudden sting after hours of exposure. But next day i didnt show any sign of burning, though yesterday i had less energy (pun : burnt out). Dragged myself around. Content to be in the I:Cat gallery most of the day.
*

Bangkok

Pleasant flight in the little plane from Vientiane. Apparently Australian Embassy would once advise against travelling on Air Lao. But it's OK now, Cathy adds. Hostess forgot my breakfast box & obviously didnt hear or rejected my request for cup of tea. Very Lao.
We werent confident of finding a tuk-tuk so early in the morning but there they were --walked around the corner from I:Cat, past the temple (the first Cathy took me to in June '09). Brief exchange with workers she knew then a tuk tuk found us. Cat bargains dramatically --the fare is agreed. A long drive to the Airport. Early morning Vientiane --many people walking, exercising --unheard of a few years ago Cat says --health-conscious Western model (or Chinese?) amusing to us obviously in need of same!
No one in the airport concourse --graciously received & ushered through the immigration & embarkation controls --kop jai & Happy New Year! --Pi Mi Lao has begun --everyone in good mood. Before we left I:Cat the monks walked past on their alms trail. Auspicious.

*
Here at Suvarnabhum went straightaway to Thai International desk --got our boarding passes and then Cathy had her return flight times (Heathrow to Bangkok) changed. No fuss. She has a certain way & the luck goes with her! The later flight means we have all of next Saturday to get to London from Weymouth-on-the-Nod!
Last night Cath insisted we go to the temple to have the buddha we bought for Bernard [Hemensley] blessed. Initially thought we'd missed the opportunity for a blessing --the temple proper had closed --but then we saw the old monk (large man, abbot-like) sitting in his pavilion to the side of the temple in the forecourt. Cathy knows exactly what to do --exemplary courageous!
She steps up into the small pavilion facing the decorated or covered Buddhas alongside the temple wall. Drops to her knees, bows head, gives the sleeping buddha statue, which we bought at the Living Museum/Temple previous day, to the monk, an old Buddha himself. She makes her request or it is implicit in her actions. He examines the statue, turns it over, then launches into talking/singing chant. Halfway through the ceremony a Lao family joins her, --they pray, make their offering to the monk. He takes their gift, continues chanting over the buddha statue. Cathy comes away happy at task acquitted. She's scrupulous about custom/tradition. Lao convention that artefacts must be blessed to retain significance. My understanding is that the statue is an icon, a reflection of God, a palpable connection to the divine. We feel blessed too for our journey to England. Actually, the wish or prayer I made at the Living Museum (Cathy prompted me) was that our visit to Bernard in his house would be a happy one.

READING JOHN RILEY'S "PROSE PIECES" AGAIN : Remembering him on the thirty-second anniversary of his murder (October 27th, 1978)...

Where does one piece end & another begin? With the exception of the three short series of aphorisms called How To, John Riley's Prose Pieces (Grosseteste Review Books, #14; 1974; Stafforshire, UK) are seamless. A piece begins; the poet (I wont call him anything else) proceeds, & when the writing's finished the text ends. (And this isnt quite self-evident!) It has nothing to do with plot or character, although characters, including the narrator, are easily elicited. It's simply (perhaps 'simply' isnt the right word --simple things are accounted for but it's hardly a simple mind informing the telling) the stop-start style of it, the natural run.
I've always imbued a comment Riley made in his prose work, Correspondences (pub., The Human Constitution, London, 1970), with something like a rationale : " 'Authorship will gradually cease. Future generations ought to set up offices in which every person, at a certain age, should hand in a truthful biography, which could provide material for a real science of human beings, if such were needed.' A certain pondering over that little remark of Strindberg's probably set me to planning this as yet roughly mapped-out series(...) If it were merely an autobiography, none of us would be interested. What engaged my attention is the attempt to make a series of truthful biographies, which, either singly or considered together, may not be without a certain significance. (....)"
I dont think he'd have taken kindly to anything compulsory! 'Offices' & 'at a certain age' --bah! Still, I imagine him embarking with good intentions, but soon enough the statement he was compiling would go skew-whiff --in the name of honesty --a semantic honesty at least & not evasion. Avoidance of narrative cliches would be deliberate.

Against criticism's usual (& often proper) caution that art's product isnt life, I actually hear & see the man in & behind the prose-pieces, if not transparently then lucidly. No stranger, our man, adherent to Russian Orthodoxy, to artefact's palpably divine perspective : why would John Riley abandon his writing, of all things, to materialist one-dimensionality?
Riley is a man by whose thinking he's supposed. His thinking aloud, that is --as though thinking aloud must jump around and thinking in silence be continuous (modern prose vs the Nineteenth Century's).
"If you could set yourself altogether to music, would you? Choose your instruments, your form; take your time, your rhythm." (p24)
Riley's style is unhurried even as he bobs in & out of stories, ideas, like the arch-agent of discontinuity (recall its modishness in the '60s & '70s).
"Deja vu and pre vu : I badly need a theory of time to put this in. Not a circle not an ellipse not an escalation of universes, not not not, but a complexity so precise that it leads by poetic right to that I know about." (p25)

Yorkshire is his rejoinder to anything high-minded. He resorts to Yorkshire to undercut capital 'l' literature and though poems occasionally rise out of the text, a line or two, a verse, his vernacular quips disperse abstraction even as the sound which is the poem speaking. Paradoxically, this is usually the freedom sought by the poet dissatisfied with the occasional --as though Doc Williams hankered after Wallace Stevens or Buk hell-bent on William Bronk!
Prose is where John Riley can be himself --poet keeping tabs on the literally adjacent. It's the frame afforded by ordinary vantage, principally, one feels, the pub. Perfect for hearsay; dictum : "If you could record all the stories round you, and only do it simply enough. Like the man who said to me : 'Ah but the sweetness of the first kiss.' And it was his story." (p23) Relish the hops'-drowze one might dream-write in --slide into pew, surreptitious pen at the ready, and drop into the middle of it.

But this isnt the style of Living In, which is a crafted piece of writing or sets out to be. The "Every holiday I go to my cottage" (p7) paragraphs contrast with those beginning "Every holiday I do not"(p8). The poet-philosopher sounds a little like Rilke or Kafka, whose reverie is located in the actual world from which the narrator is cocooned by desire & despair --desire for the divine or corporeal beloved; despair at his powerlessness &, except for writing, enervation. It contains the existential conundrum, "Who wants to die? Or more accurately, who does not want to die?" Compared to other, no less interesting, pieces it's a construction despite the ad-libs.

The Pig And Whistle Section begins, "And then what we start to do when we have realised all that." (p21) In my mother's Alexandrian family they'd say "and then?" --to induce conversation or to cap it. John Riley's "And then" points also to 'the literature of exhaustion', ca. 1970s, --that is, how to proceed the literary project when it's thought everything's been said --literature after the end of or death of literature.
"And then what we start to do" regales his life as well as his writing (the modern heart laid bare implying no story without bruised & bloodied testament).

Down By the River Side combines all the Riley traits & gambits. The high & the low --thoughts, turn of phrase --standard (even poetic) English & Yorkshire, esoteric & common subjects. As we've appreciated, Yorkshire will always be his stock-in-trade come-uppance.
After the philosophy of the first paragraph ("Always this atheistical 'chance'; which nevertheless alters nothing, salvation or damnation no nearer." (p37)), ships are introduced or, let's say, the sea is. Boats, sailors, flags... "Ships come in and out of the harbour, either under their own power, or towed in by the tug." His registry of ships as evocative as an index of flora, but not a simple list because of the way it commits &, similarly, escapes. Quintessential Riley :
"In Spring rain a seagull cruises with curved-down wing tips. And then the rain clears. The very familiarity of the scene.
Caleyo, Simon, Soviet Mariner, Pelikan, Navigare, Wakenitz, Aramil, Grada westers, Outokumpu, Wega, Tourmaline, Ocean Blue, Harald Bles, Nogat, Valle de Orozco, Madaleine, Jastarnia, Bleikvassli, Poolster. Hasewint, Noblesse, Sota, Emmalies Funk, Ivan Bolotnikov, vaterland, and, I suppose, Dynocontainer I, Dynocontainer II. And certainly the Gribbin head.
This stream is a river big enough to float 3,000 tons.
A forest path through the forest : analogous to setting out to read a history of the Byzantine State, a clean white page, an impetus to restoration." (p38)

Popped into the jump-cut of the narrative is schoolroom & pub slice-of-life.
"You want a good stingy cane and hit 'em across the ballocks. That'll do it. You can hit 'em round the head as much as you like, go all day, break your hand. Get the buggers round the ballocks." (p41)
Often wonder which is the counterpoint : aphoristic musing --"Freedom as a state is creation, which is timeless" --or the one about "a wanked out lad of a painter's mate who'd dropped his bottle of linseed oil"?

John Riley's self-definition isnt over & against nothing, as they say, though figures of nothing might spook him ("memory patterns of almost unsubtle tyranny : an exact repetition of the meaningless." (p40)). He's more gnostic than nihilist ("Our wreckage / is too obvious, the pause between performances too long. / Why else should we speak of that world there / and this one here as if there were a gulf there to be bridged / by senses or ideas? / There is no cure for similes, / or none I know of." (p40)). Good reason there must be for apparent misanthropy --"There are people who wear their bodies comfortably; to be there when needed. And very relaxing they are too for a time. At the other end madness, in various outbreaks or permanencies. There are those denials." (p33)
No disqualification in my mind that these words are from Mary's African Buttenhole Co., a parody, as I recall him impishly confiding, of writing published in a little magazine, (Richard Downing & Andy Wachtel's Sesheta?) possibly by Mary Ferrarri & other New Yorkers. Or for that matter, the nods elsewhere, positively, to Flann O'Brien, Basho, Stevens, Holderlin...

Perhaps all of the pieces turn around the relationship of language to the world's objects & events. Not much doubt attaches to his feelings though plenty to his sense of the living (language) enterprise.

Allow the full circle then : Riley's always the poet writing this prose --the prose, mind you, of thinking aloud, musing, amusing himself, letting himself go just a little off the taut leash. The taught leash? --steeped of course in the language --various languages --Russian, German, French --think only of Riley's unique Mandelshtam & Holderlin versions... How (or did he?) come to rest in English?

"Words are words, man. And a fat belly is a fat belly." (p33)


oOo

[7/11/10 to 10/12/10; cleaned up & typed, 27/01/2011]